Category: History

Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative majority like to cosplay as historians when they write court opinions that determine what rights we get to have and exercise. In August, though, Roberts tried the real thing. He took to the In Pursuit project’s Substack to write a brief history of a man he admires: former president and chief justice, William Howard Taft.

Roberts’ version of Taft is a sober, steady president (1909-1913) to be hailed for his refusal to unduly use executive power. And for Roberts, Chief Justice Taft (1921-1930) is “one of [the nation’s] great Chief Justices” because he started modernizing the Supreme Court by growing the institution’s status and constitutional authority — a project Roberts continues to make his own.

But Roberts’ history of Taft is irresponsibly shoddy; he cherry-picks facts, ignores narratives that don’t fit with his rosy portrait of Taft’s presidency, and he completely omits Taft’s damning record on race relations and civil rights.

In truth, Taft was a white supremacist. He admitted as much on the campaign trail in 1906, when he told Republican voters in North Carolina that Black people were “a class of persons so ignorant” and likened them to the “mental stature” of children.

Taft’s racism was partly opportunistic. In 1908 he was running as the Republican standard-bearer against Democrat William Jennings Bryan to succeed President Theodore Roosevelt. Since Reconstruction, the southern states had voted exclusively for Democrats. But Taft believed he could find a way to “break” the “Solid South” by luring away racist white voters to vote Republican. His preferred tactic was a racist dog-whistle.

And so, while Taft once lamented the arsenal of racist laws that disenfranchised Black Americans throughout the country, he didn’t think Jim Crow discrimination was a very big deal. After all, it was merely “the ignorant colored voter,” he believed, who was being kept away from the polls — downplaying the violence that upheld disenfranchisement. Perhaps things might change, he added, if Black men got smarter and worked harder. For Taft, Black Americans needed to earn the vote and prove to white society that they could be entrusted with that privilege.

Taft’s electoral strategy never panned out. Even though he handily won the 1908 election, the “Solid South” stuck with Democrats. Nonetheless, as president, Taft continued to side with white supremacy.

In 1911, the Ninth Cavalry Regiment of Black troops — the famed “Buffalo Soldiers” — were stationed in San Antonio, where they encountered Jim Crow streetcar laws that mandated segregated seating. The troops refused to obey, destroying the segregation signs and standing up to streetcar conductors who demanded compliance. Democratic congressman and future Vice President John Nance Garner lobbied Taft to punish the U.S. soldiers, and the Taft eagerly complied, dispatching the Buffalo Soldiers to the desert to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border.

President Taft also did nothing to confront the lynching epidemic that claimed roughly 250 Black lives during his presidency. In his first Annual Message to Congress — the forerunner to today’s State of the Union address — Taft explained that he sympathized with those who might choose to become part of the lynch mob. Yes, he conceded, lynchings involved “lawless violence and cruelty.” But Taft excused this, arguing that white people conjured the lynch mob because they were sick and tired of waiting for the ponderous court system to deal with Black people that supposedly broke the law. Faced with this “injustice,” the white lynch mob’s actions were justified, according to Taft.

Taft’s forgiving attitude toward the lynch mob wasn’t just theoretical. On April 20, 1911, a white lynch mob in Livermore, Kentucky murdered a Black pool hall manager named Will Potter inside the local opera house. For the supposed crime of kicking white ruffians out of the pool hall, Potter “was dragged before the footlights and his body riddled with bullets from the guns of an audience of half a hundred determined avengers,” according to the New York Times. Rumor had it that witnesses were charged admission. Those who wanted to be part of the firing squad had to pay extra. When the shooting stopped, “the lights were then extinguished, the curtain lowered, and the mob then filed out.”

The NAACP’s executive committee dispatched a plea to leading government officials, including Taft, demanding action. An NAACP committee even visited Taft to request that he condemn lynching. According to an NAACP internal document dated June 11, 1911, “The President assured the Committee that he could do nothing, that it was a matter to be left to the individual states.”

Taft’s refusal to use executive authority to confront lynching is shocking. However, it is this type of inaction that Chief Justice Roberts believes made Taft a model chief executive. Roberts’ favorable interpretation of the Taft presidency highlights his restraint. “Steady competence, self-restraint, and respect for the other branches were the hallmarks of the Taft Administration,” writes Roberts.

Taft’s contemporaries were less impressed with his presidency.

Taft was one of the few incumbent presidents to lose reelection, somehow coming in third in what should have been a two-way race in the 1912 contest. He’d promised to lower tariffs but ended up raising them, and Taft’s unwavering support for an ultra-conservative Supreme Court all but doomed progressive reforms in areas like labor rights. So dire was Taft’s record that his former mentor, Teddy Roosevelt, came out of retirement to challenge him for the Republican nomination. In the general election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson trounced Roosevelt — running as the Progressive Party candidate — as well as Taft and Socialist Eugene Debs.

Roberts reserves his greatest appreciation for Taft’s contributions as chief justice between 1921 and 1930, which grew the “prestige” and “authority” of the Supreme Court. Namely, Taft pushed passage of the Judiciary Act of 1925, “which gave the Supreme Court control over its own docket,” and oversaw construction of the court’s august building on Capitol Hill.

But what about the Taft Court’s actual decisions? Here Roberts has little to say, but recent scholarship by law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan shows that, at best, Taft and most of his colleagues had a studied disinterest in civil rights. At worst, Taft used his opinion in the 1926 case Myers v. United States to stamp the Supreme Court’s imprimatur on the white supremacist version of the history of Reconstruction.

The case concerned a Reconstruction-era law that prevented President Andrew Johnson from firing federal officers committed to implementing the Reconstruction Acts after the Civil War. For Taft, Reconstruction wasn’t an attempt to use the law to right the wrongs of slavery and legislate equality, but an attempt “to reverse” the Constitution.

Of all his contributions on the bench, this was the decision of which Chief Justice Taft was most proud. Taft’s prized decision was of a piece with an emerging white supremacist revisionist history of the Civil War and Reconstruction seen, for example, in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (1915) and in the explicitly pro-slavery, pro-Confederacy approach to writing American history pioneered by William Dunning and his students, whose work was used to bolster Jim Crow.

So the question, then, is: why did Roberts write this fluffy, mythological history of Taft? Is it because Roberts’ selective historical method ignored Taft’s abysmal record on civil rights and lynching? Or perhaps Roberts has never heard of Taft’s Myers decision.

A less generous answer might be that while Roberts chose to airbrush Taft’s race relations and civil rights story out of his history, the current chief justice knows more than he’s letting on. After all, in cases like Callais v. Louisiana (2026), Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), and Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts led the charge to destroy the single most significant civil rights legislation ever enacted: the Voting Rights Act.

If Taft’s legacy was to retrench the freedoms won during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Roberts’ legacy may one day be recognized as an assault on the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

It doesn’t take much digging in the history of race relations and civil rights to see that Taft’s executive restraint and court stewardship that Roberts so admires served the agenda of perpetuating Jim Crow white supremacy. This is bad history. But perhaps Roberts’ methodological sins of omission tell us exactly why the sitting chief justice sees so much to admire in his predecessor.

Gautham Rao is Associate Professor of History at American University, and author of “White Power: Policing American Slavery.”

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.