WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT, twenty-sixth presi dent of the United States, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, September 15, 1857. He was the son of Alphonso Taft by his second wife, Louisa Maria Torrey. Through both parents his ancestry goes back to the Massachusetts Bay colony of the earlier half of the seventeenth century. From his father s line he inherits his interest in scholarship and his love of the law ; from his mother s, probably, his bodily strength and stature, tradition repre senting one of his maternal great-grandfathers as six feet and seven inches tall. Alphonso Taft was an able lawyer and a distinguished public servant. He first attracted national attention when, as judge of the superior court of Cincinnati, he rendered an opinion sustaining the right of the local board of education, in deference to the feelings of the Roman Catholic and Jewish taxpayers, to abolish the reading of the Bible in the common schools. Although this stand, taken at a time when re ligious prejudice was most bitter, undoubtedly cost him the governorship of Ohio, its independence also 153
