Two Of Cincinnati’s Wealthiest Women Battled Over Who Would Honor A Very Dead Man
The pillars of Cincinnati society shook in 1910 as two very wealthy and very much respected women tussled over a man neither had ever met. The man in question was Abraham Lincoln, and he had been dead for 45 years.
It was Eleanora Alms, or, as she was called in those days, Mrs. Frederick H. Alms, who first stirred the kerfuffle. Eleanora Cors Unzicker Alms was born in 1846 to Joseph and Margaret Unzicker. Her father was a very popular and successful doctor. Eleanora married Frederick Alms in 1870. Alms founded the very successful Alms & Doepke department in partnership with a brother and a cousin. When Frederick died in 1898, his entire estate, valued at $662,000, passed to Eleanora. In today’s dollars, that’s a bit more than $26 million. Eleanora moved into the Alms Hotel, another of her late husband’s successes, and lived there for the remaining 23 years of her widowhood.
Cincinnati got a sense of Eleanora’s generosity when she offered to give the City of Cincinnati $100,000 to install a statue of Abraham Lincoln on the centenary of his birth and to honor Cincinnati’s Union veterans, including her husband. She convened a committee to identify a sculptor who would fulfill the commission. Chairing the committee was Harry Probasco, who continually denied that he was Mrs. Alms’ attorney despite repeatedly performing legal tasks for her. The other members, chosen by Probasco, were William W. Taylor, president of Rookwood Pottery and president of the Cincinnati Municipal Art League; Rabbi Louis Grossmann of the Plum Street Temple; architect Alfred Oscar Elzner and Charles Phelps Taft, owner of the Cincinnati Times-Star, the city’s leading newspaper at that time.
The committee quickly narrowed their search to two potential recipients of the Lincoln commission. One was Gutzon Borglum, who had already created a massive bust of Lincoln still displayed at the U.S. Capitol. The other was George Grey Barnard whose work to-date had primarily dealt with allegorical subjects. Probasco informed the committee that Mrs. Alms was leaning toward Borglum, but the rest of the committee favored Barnard.
Leading the opposition to Borglum was Charles Taft, and it was assumed he was following his wife’s preference. Although Mr. Taft had quite a stellar résumé himself, and although he had been raised in comfort by his father, attorney Alphonso Taft, the real money in the Taft household derived from Mrs. Taft’s father. David Sinton amassed substantial wealth from investments in transportation, strategic metals, utilities and amusements. On Mr. Sinton’s death in 1900, all that money settled upon his daughter, Anna Sinton, and her husband, Charles Taft.
Anna Sinton, known as Annie, in 1873 married Charles Taft in a ceremony performed at the Sinton family home on Pike Street. We now know that house as the Taft Museum. As the only surviving child of David Sinton, Annie inherited something like $20 million, roughly equivalent to around $800 million in today’s dollars. She became, without question, the wealthiest woman in Ohio.
Flush with cash, Annie and Charles commenced an aesthetic buying spree, amassing one of the largest collections of fine art, mostly European old masters, in private hands. It was on her buying excursions to New York that Annie likely made the acquaintance of a rising star in the American sculpture community, George Grey Barnard. Although Charles Taft held the seat, and the vote, on the Cincinnati Lincoln monument commission, it was understood that he served as Annie’s proxy. The Cincinnati Post [19 December 1910] made it very clear who was running the show:
“Abraham Lincoln, who, during life was the embodiment of the proletarian, moneyless ideal, is today the central figure of an art controversy between two of Cincinnati’s richest women who are anxious to honor him. Mrs. Frederick Alms two years ago conceived the idea of giving to the city a monument of Lincoln in memory of her husband, a veteran of the Civil War and one of Cincinnati’s merchant princes. Mrs. Charles P. Taft, heiress of the Sinton estate, now also offers to give a statue of Lincoln worth $100,000 to the city.”
In addition to having his wife’s money on his side, Charles Taft also had the city administration behind him. Taft was deeply involved in Cincinnati’s local politics at a time when George “Boss” Cox ruled the city like a private fiefdom. Taft’s Times-Star supported Cox so overtly that the scrappy upstart Cincinnati Post regularly lambasted Taft as nothing more than Cox’s stooge. Taft might have been a minion, but he was loyal to the man who held the reins and he could pull a few himself. The other members of the committee certainly knew who had the clout and the cash and voted along with the Tafts in support of Barnard, to the dismay of attorney Henry Probasco, the titular chairman of the committee. Probasco told the Cincinnati Post [7 December 1910]:
“Mrs. Frederick Alms, who, in memory of her late husband, donated the $100,000 which is to pay for this statue, is very much disappointed and dissatisfied over the selection of Barnard.”
Mrs. Alms was so disappointed in the committee’s preference that she took to her bed, but not before withdrawing her offer to the city. Mrs. Taft quickly stepped up and offered to replace the $100,000 from her own piggy bank, so long as Barnard created the sculpture.
With $100,000 on the line, the prospective artists themselves took up arms. Borglum was so incensed by the Taft’s preference for Barnard that he came to Cincinnati personally to accuse the Tafts of “the grand larceny” of Mr. Alm’s original idea and in selecting a sculptor who was “crassly out of taste” and “improper.” Borglum’s remarks made the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “Borglum Attacks Tafts.”
For his part, Barnard decided that his Lincoln would be the most important sculpture in Cincinnati, and therefore required a very special location. Barnard recommended scrapping the Genius of Waters and putting his Lincoln on Fountain Square. He told the Post [6 December 1910]:
“It is a beautiful object and may have an interesting history, but it is only a fountain – not a vital thing, and in a hundred years it will be forgotten, while the memorial of Abraham Lincoln, as great as it will be, would live forever in the daily life of every person who passed through Fountain Square.”
Barnard took his sweet time on the Lincoln commission. It was unveiled at Lytle Park in 1917, not on Fountain Square and not even at his second choice, Eden Park. Although much beloved today, the statue was quite controversial in its day. The New York Times [26 August 1917] editorialized:
“In his statue of Lincoln he was governed by a perverse spirit. Barnard’s Lincoln is not only plain, but grotesque. We doubt the accuracy of the portrait.”
There seems to be no record of Mrs. Alms gloating while reading the reviews. For her part, she gave the city Alms Park, a new wing for the Cincinnati Art Museum, a building for the art programs at the University of Cincinnati and a charitable fund, the Eleanora C. U. Alms Trust, the interest from which still supports projects in Cincinnati to this day.
