Dayton: John Patterson, Socialists, and the Dayton Plan
Dayton did not wander into its adoption of the city manager form of government—it was led there by a series of events and the persistent, generational-long determination of the CEO of Dayton’s largest employer: John Patterson of National Cash Register. Patterson was not a moral reformer; he did not (like Tom Johnson) seek to battle corporate monopolies or to seek justice for the downtrodden. In his words, drawn from a speech made to the Dayton Board of Trade, the purpose in changing the form of government to city manager was to place government administration on a “strict business basis … directed not by partisans, either Republican or Democratic, but by men who are skilled in business management and social science. A city is a great business enterprise whose stockholders are the people … people’s money [should be treated] as a trust fund, to be expended wisely and economically, without waste, and for the benefit of all citizens”[1]. Patterson is a pure business structural reformer.
Patterson commenced his crusade in 1896, long before Staunton or Sumter. After a decade of fruitless effort, Patterson had enough with Dayton’s Gilded Age waste and fragmentation; in 1907 he threatened to move National Cash Register out of the city. He caught the attention of the city council and they addressed some of Patterson’s immediate issues—and Patterson did not carry out his threat. By 1912 Patterson had accelerated his reform efforts and was chair of a chamber charter reform committee. That committee approved a charter reform to adopt the city manager form of government, complete with non partisan election and a five member council elected at large. And then, conveniently, came the March 1913 Dayton Flood. Four hundred died and $100 million dollars of property was destroyed. The mayor, it might be added, took off for drier geographies, and could not be found for several days. Patterson and National Cash Register hit the streets and conducted rescue missions with 300 boats constructed by National Cash Register employees. NCR became the headquarters for the Red Cross and for the National Guard when they finally got to Dayton. A hospital, morgue, and home for the homeless also were established at NCR.
When the council manager charter reform was voted in four months later, it was approved 2-1. By March 1920, 177 cities had adopted the city manager form. Most of these early adoptions “concentrated in the Midwest, South, and California. Michigan led the nation with 23 while the Northeast lagged behind with only 18. Three of the four city manager municipalities of over 100,000 population were in Michigan or Ohio (Dayton, Grand Rapids and Akron)[2].
Once in place, the Dayton Plan (city manager structural reform) exerted a now-forgotten effect on subsequent Dayton politics. Previous to adoption of the Plan, many Daytonians strongly suspected the city, an automotive industrial and manufacturing center with heavy unionized neighborhoods and a largely ineffective Gilded Age policy system, would follow Milwaukee’s lead and elect a Socialist mayor. The two political parties had already formed a fusion party in anticipation of making a united front against the Socialists. But the Flood, Patterson as a local hero, and the quick adoption of non partisan elections and city manager form of government changed the political setting dramatically. In the first election for adoption of the new city charter, a non partisan “Citizens” slate of candidates won all the seats and shut out the Socialists completely. With the non partisan election in place, the Socialists were restricted to victories in their home neighborhoods and were unable to achieve a city-wide majority.
The Socialists would not surrender, however. In 1917, they waged a major election campaign in the primary election (partisan) and outpolled both the Citizen’s fusion party and the Democratic Party—winning almost half the votes cast. In the general election several months later, America had declared war on Germany and entered into World War I. Socialists were linked as the “party of pro-Germanism” that wanted “to see the Kaiser as the emperor of the world. … for every Socialist ballot that is cast at this time becomes a bullet fired at an American soldier”. It was not likely that Socialists would do well under this kind of attack—the timing, with no fault of the own, was incredibly poor. In the election, Socialists won 43% of the vote, failing only in middle class wards. In 1945, Dayton Socialists won 45% of the vote. In 1923, with Socialist Party finances shattered, the Party sold its headquarters office to the Ku Klux Klan; in 1928 socialists garnered less than 10% of the vote.[3] It is argued that the victory of Dayton’s city manager plan crushed the Socialist Party and served as in surmountable barrier to the Socialists ever achieving city-wide victory.
[1] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 121-122.
[2] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit. p. 122.
[3] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit. p. 129.
Ron W. Coan 