Last updated: April 29, 2020
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William Howard Taft National Historic Site and the Public Weal
Remembering those “U.S. citizens in the path of the Taft Birthplace Bulldozer”
As cherished public spaces, our national parks virtually all carry the moral burden of dispossession of resident peoples. These special places came into the public weal at the cost of displacing people who happened to occupy the lands before they were deemed nationally significant. That holds true for the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone, established in 1872 from ceded Indian lands, as it does for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which was cobbled together in the 1920s and 30s from more than a thousand Appalachian mountain farms. It holds true as well for William Howard Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati, Ohio, where a 21-unit apartment building in a predominantly African American neighborhood was razed to make way for historic restoration of the former Taft home. It is well to remember that the legacy of dispossession persists for all those displaced communities even as the public is privileged to enjoy these special places forever after.
Library of Congress
In the case of William Howard Taft National Historic Site, a group of public-spirited preservationists formed the William Howard Taft Memorial Association in the late 1930s, shortly after William Howard Taft’s death, to acquire the former Taft family home and turn it into a memorial site to the 27th president of the United States. Thirty years later, when the preservation group finally succeeded in its goal, it was headed by Charles P. Taft II, youngest son of the former president, a former mayor of Cincinnati, and the most renown member on the Cincinnati City Council. In 1969, the William Howard Taft Memorial Association purchased the property with a view to donating it to the federal government. First, though, it had to acquire and demolish a newer apartment building that crowded the view of the historic home. To that end, it sought condemnation of the building by the city.
NPS Photo
Condemnation is a contentious legal procedure under any circum-stances. Condemning a 21-unit apartment building in the Mount Auburn district of Cincinnati in 1969 was particularly sensitive. Mount Auburn was a different community in 1969 from what it was in Taft’s time. During the 1930s and 40s the stately homes on Auburn Avenue were mostly converted into tenement apartment buildings. Then the com-munity went through more change in the 1960s as many African Americans moved in and many whites moved out. Mount Auburn was 2 percent African American in 1950, 10 percent African American in 1960, and 74 percent African American in 1970. For many African Americans living in Mount Auburn in the year 1969, forced relocation was all too familiar. A few years prior to 1969 they had had to relocate from Cincinnati’s West End to make way for urban redevelopment and the construction of Interstate 75. The relocation of so many residents out of the West End had decimated that community, historically the center of African American cultural life in Cincinnati. From an African American standpoint, the city’s condemnations and forced relocations could readily be viewed as tools of white oppression. No wonder, then, that Mount Auburn community organizers, leaders of a nonprofit called the Mount Auburn Good Housing Foundation, wrote to members of Congress to demand that Congress consider “the needs of U.S. citizens in the path of the Taft Birthplace Bulldozer.”
The Mount Auburn Good Housing Foundation was formed for the purpose of purchasing and rehabilitating apartment houses that were threatened with demolition. Its larger aim was to provide stability to a community racked by rampant crime and studded with rundown apartment buildings owned by absentee landlords. To these community organizers, it appeared that Cincinnati officials viewed Mount Auburn as a “resettlement camp” for those unfortunates being displaced by slum clearance.
Mount Auburn was zoned for Concentrated Code Enforcement, which meant that city inspectors were authorized to make house-to-house inspections to enforce building safety codes. In 1969 the apartment house north of the Taft house failed such an inspection, giving the new owners an excuse to condemn the building and evict the tenants. Ostensibly, the city would provide relocation benefits to each tenement family and help it find a healthier place to live. The Mount Auburn Good Housing Foundation worked to rehabilitate just such dwelling units in order to protect the community from the scourge of eviction and relocation.
NPS Photo
Charles Taft approached the situation of this apartment house from a different perspective – a long view spanning more than twenty years. This long view started with the Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan of 1948, which laid out Cincinnati’s strategy of urban redevelopment for the 1950s and 1960s. The plan aimed at moving large numbers of people out of the inner city to make room for a modern transportation system. The urban planners thought that by providing relocation assistance, the city would be able to redistribute the population according to a rational design. The result would be a mosaic of residential areas of 20,000 to 40,000 people, each one offering services and facilities to meet most daily needs of the area’s inhabitants. The problem with this plan was that Cincinnati was racially segregated and the African American population, being concentrated in the West End, would bear the brunt of the forced relocation program. Through the 1950s, the city government tried to scatter the relocation units around the city to promote racial integration, but the mostly white residential areas fought those initiatives. The forced relocation program stalled as the city concentrated on clearing commercial properties out of the redevelopment zone and leaving the residential properties standing. In the 1960s, time ran out and the city government moved aggressively to clear slum housing to make way for freeway construction. At that point the city’s forced relocation program kicked in, but the white population was still resistant, so the original goal of racial integration devolved into a divide-and-conquer approach to resettlement that targeted one Cincinnati residential area after another to receive thousands of displaced residents from the West End. Starting with Avondale, then Over-the-Rhine, then Mount Adams, and then Mount Auburn, the city acquired large numbers of relocation units and executed the relocations, effectively tipping each area from white to black. African Americans who were forced out of their homes suffered not only the loss of their local community but the pain and stigma of stirring white resentment and prompting “white flight” wherever they relocated to in numbers. Race riots occurred in Avondale in 1967 and 1968. And yet, Cincinnati’s ongoing troubles over race relations notwithstanding, the city government did achieve what it set out to achieve in its Master Plan of 1948: it eliminated much of the residential area in Cincinnati’s West End to make way for the interstate. In this view, forced relocations were a necessary means to advance the public interest.
NPS Photo
Charles Taft used those existing levers of city government to accomplish his goal of clearing the apartment building next to the historic Taft house. A total of sixteen families were forced to give up their dwelling units and accept other housing assignments under the city’s relocation assistance program. Congress and the Department of the Interior gave the city’s action their sanction. NPS Director George B. Hartzog, Jr. balked at it, telling an assistant he wanted “no part of this.” But he finally went along with it when he saw it would happen anyway.
As soon as the apartment was razed and the property became a national historic site, NPS worked to heal bad feelings that lingered around the completed evictions. Site managers reached out to community organizers. NPS worked with the Mount Auburn Community Council on various community-centered projects, especially historic preservation of the Auburn Avenue corridor. For its efforts, William Howard Taft National Historic Site did win acceptance as a federal presence in the Mount Auburn neighborhood. But for many community members, there was no forgetting the fact that this valued public space was created at a cost, and no forgiving the fact that like so much else in American society the cost was borne unequally.
Sources:
Jackson, Eric R. “Why So Many African Americans Have Roots in the West End of Cincinnati,” The Voice of Black Cincinnati at https://thevoiceofblackcincinnati.com/west-end-cincinnati/. Accessed May 21, 2019.
Miller, Zane L., and Bruce Tucker. Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities: Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.
Robson, Britt. “No Middle Ground: The Carl Westmoreland Story,” Cincinnati 16, no.1 (October 1982): 84-101.
U.S. Congress, House. Providing for the Establishment of the William Howard Taft National Historic Site. 91st Cong., 1st sess., Report 91-478, 1969.
William Howard Taft National Historic Site. Central Files. File A3821
The Taft Home: Then and Now
Left image
The Taft Home, c. 1870
Credit: NPS Photo
Right image
The Taft Home, December 2017
Credit: NPS / Tom Engberg