William Howard Taft weight loss is a lesser-known chapter in the life of the only American to serve as both president and chief justice. Remembered popularly for his size while in the White House, Taft later shed significant weight as he led the Supreme Court, a change recently noted by Chief Justice John Roberts while highlighting Taft’s achievements.
***
Born in 1857 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Taft entered public service early. President Benjamin Harrison named him U.S. solicitor general in 1890 at age 32, still the youngest to hold that post. He joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in 1892 and served for eight years. In 1900, President William McKinley appointed him governor-general of the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt later tapped him as secretary of war in 1904.
Taft won the presidency in 1908 but lost in 1912 after Roosevelt’s third-party run split the Republican vote, ushering in Woodrow Wilson. After leaving office, Taft taught at Yale Law School, though his long-held ambition was to become chief justice. While president, he elevated Edward White to chief justice in 1910 and confided to his attorney general that no role appealed to him more. In 1921, after White’s death, President Warren Harding appointed Taft, then 63, to the Court’s top post. Taft relished the job, later quipping that he scarcely remembered having been president.
As chief justice, Taft authored and joined opinions that continue to reverberate. In 1926’s Myers v. United States, the Court recognized presidential removal power over executive officers, an authority heavily cited in last June’s Trump v. Slaughter. In 1925’s Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the justices unanimously protected parental rights by striking down Oregon’s compulsory public-school attendance law, a precedent the Court relied on in March in Mirabelli v. Bonta.
William Howard Taft weight loss and his broader legacy
Taft reshaped the Court institutionally through legislative savvy honed in the executive branch. He successfully urged Congress to pass the Judiciary Act of 1925, which curtailed most mandatory appeals and gave the Court greater control over its docket. When Taft arrived, a multiyear backlog clogged the calendar. The modern system of discretionary review grew from his push for reform.
He also persuaded Congress to fund a dedicated Supreme Court building. For more than a century, the justices met in cramped quarters within the Capitol, most recently the Old Senate Chamber, without proper chambers for individual justices. Taft championed a standalone home for the judiciary across from the Capitol. Although the Court moved into the new building in October 1935, Taft died in 1930 and never saw it completed.
***
So how did Taft slim down? According to a Harvard Health Publishing article by Dr. Howard E. LeWine, Taft struggled with weight throughout his life. He weighed 243 pounds upon graduating from Yale College, then climbed to 314 pounds by 1905 while serving as secretary of war at a height of 5 feet 11 inches.
Seeking help, Taft consulted Dr. Nathaniel Yorke-Davies, a British physician known for treating obesity. Surviving correspondence shows Yorke-Davies advised a regimen of lean meats, limited fish, vegetables, plain salads, avoidance of sugar, and minimal carbohydrates, an early version of today’s low-carb approach. Between December 1905 and April 1906, Taft lost 59 pounds.
The progress did not hold through the presidency. The stresses of office, compounded when his wife suffered a stroke three months into his term, fueled stress eating. Roberts has noted that Taft gained 75 pounds as president. By 1909, a year into his term, he reached 354 pounds and left office in 1913 at roughly 335 to 340 pounds.
His size spawned endless jokes, which Taft often took in stride. A well-circulated quip involved a telegram about a vigorous horseback ride prompting the reply, “How’s the horse?” Tales of bathtub mishaps became part of the lore as well.
Smithsonian Magazine later examined one 1909 incident aboard the steamboat Oleander on the Mississippi River. A 1929 account by writer Lewis Freeman quoted crew members describing how Taft wedged into a tub and needed assistance from aide Archibald Butt, a Secret Service agent, and several state governors to free him. Newspapers subsequently attributed similar episodes to stops in cities across the country.
***
After losing the 1912 election and returning to Yale, Taft revisited the low-carbohydrate plan. The lifestyle shift became more consistent after his 1921 appointment as chief justice. He moved to a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood at 2215 Wyoming Avenue NW and built daily walking into his routine. In fair weather, he walked the roughly 3½ miles to the Capitol’s Old Senate Chamber and back home. Photographs from the era show him striding with cane and hat. When conditions were poor, he took a car but kept to the regimen.
By the summer of 1930, months before his death at age 72, Taft weighed 244 pounds, close to his college weight. His daily walks were so well known that in 1931 officials renamed a Rock Creek span the William Howard Taft Bridge, recognizing the path he regularly crossed between home and work.
Public memory tends to fix on Taft’s presidential years, when he was heaviest and most photographed. The Court had no cameras, so his trimmer figure drew less attention. His walrus mustache also did little to alter the image many held of him.
***
Taft’s experience offers several takeaways. First, health supports effectiveness, particularly in high-stress professions. Second, diet quality matters, echoing Yorke-Davies’s counsel to emphasize vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean protein while limiting refined sugar. Third, routine activity can be folded into daily life, as Taft did by walking to work, taking stairs, and moving regularly during the day. Strength training also helps preserve muscle, though there is no record of Taft lifting weights.
Finally, Taft’s career underscores investing in work that endures. He modernized the Court’s case selection and secured its permanent home, achievements rooted in the legislative skills he developed in a role he did not love. His story suggests that tending to one’s health can sustain the focus required to build institutions that last.