William Howard Taft National Historic Site
William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, lived in this comfortable house from his birth in 1857 until he went away to college in 1874. During the years he lived here, he learned to love the law, his first passion, and absorbed the family commitment to the Republican Party and to public service. President Taft’s single term in office was not a pleasant one. Progressive Republicans, including his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt, assailed him as too conservative; Old Guard Republicans saw him as too liberal. Defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Taft happily returned to practicing law. In 1921, he achieved his life-long dream, when President Harding named him chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Taft is the only American to have served both as president and as chief justice. It was about this time that he remarked, “I don’t remember that I was ever president.”
Alphonso Taft, father of the future president, was already a prominent lawyer when he moved his growing family to fashionable Mount Auburn in 1851. The house he bought was a “beautiful, high, airy space,” with a view of the bustling city of Cincinnati and the Ohio River below. He quickly set about modernizing the ten-year old, two-story, Greek Revival, brick building, adding plumbing and a large addition in the rear. After the death of his first wife in 1852, he married Louise Torrey, who became stepmother to the two oldest Taft boys and bore four children of her own, including William Howard. The Taft household was a lively one, full of social activity and intellectual discussion ranging from Dickens to Darwin and from anti-slavery legislation to women’s suffrage. The children grew up with the family traditions of hard work, fair play, and public service. William Howard Taft lived at home until he left to study at Yale College in 1874; four years later, he graduated, second in his class.
Alphonso Taft’s tireless work for the Republican Party paid off in political appointments that took him and his family away from Cincinnati. They lived in Washington, DC between 1876 and 1877, while he served on President Grant’s Cabinet. In 1877, a fire destroyed much of the second floor and roof of the main house. Changes made during the rebuilding included raising the height of the second floor, installing a new roof and cornice, and making substantial alterations to the interior. In the 1880s, Alphonso Taft served as minister to Austria-Hungary and Russia. He rented out the Auburn Avenue house during these years, when his grown children were not there.
William Howard Taft began his studies of law at the Cincinnati Law School in 1878, passing the bar examination two years later. He practiced law in Cincinnati from late 1883 to 1887 and, like his father, became active in Republican politics. His first political appointment was as assistant county prosecutor in 1881. The following year, President Arthur named him district collector of internal revenue. Appointed to a vacancy on the Ohio Superior Court in 1887, Taft retained his seat the following year in the only election he ever ran in, except his election to the presidency ten years later. He held the judgeship until 1890.
Taft served in President Benjamin Harrison’s Justice Department in Washington, DC from 1890 to 1892; during this period, he also got to know Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. He returned to Cincinnati in 1892 as Federal circuit judge. President McKinley promised him the next appointment to the Supreme Court but in 1900 asked him to be chief civil administrator in the Philippines, which the United States acquired in the Spanish-American War. Sympathetic toward the Filipinos, he improved the economy, built roads and schools, and gave the people at least some participation in government. While Taft was in the Philippines, he reluctantly turned down an appointment as Supreme Court justice, because he felt that duty required him to complete the work he had begun in the Philippines.
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Taft secretary of war early in 1904, though he also asked him to handle many special assignments. Again, an appointment to the Supreme Court arose and again Taft deferred to his current responsibilities. In 1908, his family and Roosevelt persuaded him to accept the Republican nomination for president. Taft disliked campaigning, but his conservative judicial style appealed to many voters, and he defeated William Jennings Bryan by more than a million votes.
As he had pledged during the election, Taft continued many progressive policies. He initiated more antitrust suits than did Roosevelt. He was active in conservation, helping save millions of acres of Federal land from public sale. Taft extended the Interstate Commerce Commission’s power to set railroad rates, advocated economy in government, signed campaign reform legislation, reduced patronage appointments, and improved the postal system. His support for the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which kept tariffs on imports high, and his unwillingness to stretch his powers as president, alienated Roosevelt and the progressive wing of his own party, however. When Roosevelt chose to run against him as the candidate of the short-lived Progressive Party, this schism assured the election of Woodrow Wilson.
After he left office in 1913, Taft returned to Yale as a professor of law. In 1921, President Harding named him chief justice of the Supreme Court, which fulfilled his long-cherished ambition. Taft held that position until 1930 and died in Washington, DC a month after he retired.
William Howard Taft National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System, is located at 2038 Auburn Ave., Cincinnati, OH. Click here for the National Register of Historic Places file: text and photos. The site is open seven days a week from 8:00am to 4:00pm. It is closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. Guided tours of the Taft house last 30 minutes and start on the hour and the half hour. The last guided tour of the day is at 3:30pm. Visit the National Park Service William H. Taft National Historic Site website or call 513- 684-3262 ext. 201 for more information. Visitors to the home may also wish to visit the Taft Museum of Art, in the downtown area at 316 Pike St., which has some associations with President Taft but was designated a National Historic Landmark primarily for its architectural significance. The Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts operates it.
Taft’s boyhood home is the subject of an online lesson plan, Growing into Public Service: William Howard Taft's Boyhood Home. The lesson plan has been produced by the National Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places program, which offers a series of online classroom-ready lesson plans on registered historic places. To learn more, visit the Teaching with Historic Places home page.
