Presidential House Visit: The Taft Birthplace

I consider myself a trivia collector. I like picking up a quick fact here and there, broadening my knowledge base, but not necessarily deepening it. Visiting the Taft Birthplace in Cincinnati clearly illustrated the drawbacks of that kind of thinking.

If you’re anything like me, when you think of William Howard Taft, you think of bathtubs. Specifically, you think of the incident in which the over 300 pound Taft got stuck in the White House Tub and had to be lifted out. I never cared to learn much more about Taft, which is a shame because he is so much more than That Guy I Heard Was Too Fat For the Tub.

Namely, he held more government positions than I would have thought humanly possible. He was an Internal Revenue Collector, Solicitor General, Governor General of the Phillippines, Secretary of War, Vice President, President, Professor of Law at Yale, and finally, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  

Taft may not have been able to accomplish all this had he not been superbly politically connected. His father, Alphonso Taft (who was added to my list of people with awesome names), was the founder of the Ohio Republican Party and a Yale graduate. He sent his son William to his alma mater, and his connections helped his son obtain his first political positions. But the park ranger who gave our tour was quick to point out Taft earned his way up to the top of American politics. He was an extremely capable administrator who worked diligently at his many posts. He took his duties very seriously, and approached everything with careful competence.

But there’s no denying that Taft grew up in a wealthy household. Alphonso moved his first family into a new house in an attempt to save his wife and son from disease, but to no avail. Later, he added on to the house while commuting back and forth from Boston. By the time he finished the addition on the house, he felt ready to propose to a young lady he met in Boston, Delia Torrey. She flatly refused him, saying she was not ready to marry, but he did not want to return to Cincinnati wifeless. So he proposed marriage to her older sister Louisa, who accepted him. This strange arrangement apparently worked well, since Delia came to Ohio to birth all of Louisa’s children.

Louisa decorated her new mansion with a mixture of opulence and frugality. Her house was designed to impress with large drapes and a gorgeous piano, but the prized pieces were the marble fireplaces which apparently made her neighbors green with envy. Little did they know the fireplaces weren’t marble at all, but painted metal.

Another fireplace in the house gave the greatest insight into Taft’s character. Alphonso’s parents lived in the house with the family, and Taft’s grandfather took a great interest in the boy’s development. He would read to him from Aesop’s Fables, and after every fable he would have a tile made illustrating the lesson, then use the tiles to decorate the fireplace. Taft’s favorite fable was “The Tortoise and the Hare” with its moral of “slow and steady wins the race.” Taft lived that way, steadily working his way to his dream job, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Much as it bothers me that people only remember Taft and the bathtub, I don’t think he would have minded. He was a big enough person that it wouldn’t bother him.