Postcard, William Howard Taft, 1908

Political postcards were very popular in 1908 because of various changes in postal regulations. Two of the most important were lowering the postage cost to a penny and permitting space for both the message and address on one side which made room for a decorative image on the other. This colorful postcard is representative of the hundreds produced for this election.

Republican candidate William Howard Taft had a distinguished career in law and government long before President Theodore Roosevelt identified Taft as his preferred successor. Taft had served as a federal judge, Governor-General of the Philippines, and the first Provisional Governor of Cuba before becoming Roosevelt’s Secretary of War in 1904. In 1908, Taft and his running mate, Representative James Sherman of New York, handed Democratic challenger William Jennings Bryan the worst defeat of his three attempts to win the White House. Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs finished a distant third.