WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT . 1909-1913

Distinguished jurist, effective administrator, but poor politician, William Howard Taft was caught in the battles between progressives and conservatives and got scant credit for the achievements of his administration.

Born on September 15, 1857, the son of a distinguished Cincinnati judge, Taft graduated from Yale, and returned to Ohio to study and practice law. He rose in politics through Republican judiciary appointments by his own competence and also, as he once wrote facetiously, because he always had his "plate the right side up when offices were falling."

Taft preferred law to politics, and he aspired to be a member of the Supreme Court. His route to the White House was via administrative posts. President McKinley sent him to the Philippines in 1900 as chief civil administrator. Sympathetic toward the Filipinos, he improved the economy, built roads and schools, and gave the people at least some participation in government. President Roosevelt made him secretary of war in 1907, and the Republican Convention nominated him the next year.

Taft disliked the campaign, but pledged his fealty to the Roosevelt program. Progressives were pleased with Taft's election. "Roosevelt has cut enough hay," they said; "Taft is the man to put it into the barn." Conservatives were delighted to be rid of Roosevelt - the "mad messiah." Taft recognized, too, that his techniques would differ from those of his predecessor. Unlike Roosevelt, he did not believe in the stretching of presidential powers.

By defending the Payne-Aldrich Act, which unexpectedly continued high tariff rates, Taft alienated many liberal Republicans who later formed the Progressive Party. He further antagonized progressives by upholding his secretary of the interior, accused of failing to carry out Roosevelt’s conservation policies. In the angry Progressive onslaught against him, little attention was paid to the fact that his administration initiated 80 antitrust suits and that Congress submitted to the states amendments for a federal income tax and the direct election of senators. A postal savings system was established, and the Interstate Commerce Commission was directed to set railroad rates.

In 1912, when the Republicans re-nominated Taft, Roosevelt bolted the party to lead the Progressives, thus guaranteeing the election of Woodrow Wilson. Taft, free of the presidency, served as professor of law at Yale until President Harding made him chief justice of the United States, a position he held until just before his death in 1930. To Taft, the appointment was his greatest honor; he wrote: "I don't remember that I ever was President."

WOODROW WILSON . 1913-1921

Like Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson saw himself as the personal representative of the people. "No one but the President," he said, "seems to be expected ... to look out for the general interests of the country."

Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia. His father was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, during the Civil War and a professor in the city of Columbia, South Carolina during Reconstruction, so young Woodrow had seen the frightfulness of war. After graduating from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and the University of Virginia Law School, Wilson earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and entered upon an academic career. He advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.

After becoming governor of New Jersey in 1910, he was nominated for president at the 1912 Democratic Convention. Wilson won the campaign on a program called the New Freedom, which stressed individualism and states' rights. As president, he passed major pieces of legislation through Congress. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices.

More legislation came in 1916. One law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. By virtue of this legislation and the slogan "he kept us out of war," Wilson narrowly won re-election. But after the election, Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2, 1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany to make the world "safe for democracy."

Massive American effort slowly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. After the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate. The president, against the warnings of his doctors, had made a national tour to mobilize public sentiment for the treaty. Exhausted, he suffered a stroke and nearly died. Tenderly nursed by his wife, he lived until 1924.