JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is just a small and short post about an unusual bit/bob from the White House. William Howard Taft to me was Mr. In-Between: he was the president between Roosevelt and Wilson, and he was in there about in between half the bad-ish and half the good-ish presidents, squarely in the middle, I think. He was also Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he was probably a better justice than he was a president, which would put him among the accomplished of his brethren. I remember him mostly for wanting to try to hang on to his chief justice role at least until Herbert Hoover was out of office–he found Hoover to be too liberal for his tastes, memorably referring to the not-Liberal president as “Bolsheviskii”, which has a certain “wow” factor to it. But what I’m drawing your attention to is the pamphlet Conservation of Natural resources–Meeting of Engineers, printed in 1909. The interesting part is that this was transferred out of the White House library on March 3, 1913, Taft’s last full day in office, which makes it sound as though there was a bit of shelf cleaning going on right to the bitter end before Wilson came in, making this a curious tiny bit of ephemera.