Progressive Era

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.

 

The Curious Case of Ohio Policy Systems

Bringing our discussion on Progressive Era policy systems to some sort of a conclusion is not as easy as one might think. First, as predicted there were a number of distinct policy systems that first appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century: socialist mayor, social reform mayors, structural reform city manager and structural reform commission, and who can count the variations of machines systems that really took off in several directions during these years. Each of these policy systems were brought about due to supportive constituencies, and surprise these constituencies are likely to profit from their system. Secondly, most of these policy systems were fairly unstable during these volatile years, although the business-led structural reformers—who smartly anchored their policy system in state legislated charter reforms—would prove to be more durable. The others, though, were very much dependent on future electoral success and the maintenance of their coalition.

 

Perhaps the most interesting observation is that this is an Era characterized by working class involvement in the underlying coalitions of the various policy systems. The early Gilded Age working class and immigrant “involvement” in nineteenth century machine systems was an utilitarian involvement based more on desperation and greed than an involvement meant to express democratic ambitions and aspirations. Instead in the Progressive Age the working class is involving itself and being sought after—or at least taken into account and isolated from involvement. Those policy systems with strong working class involvement (social reform and socialist) in this Era wanted different outputs than the traditional middle and business classes. Street car fares and don’t’ close my saloon on Sundays, neighborhood baths, and for that matter neighborhood almost anything, makes one wonder if working class wanted policy output, including economic development outputs to flow to them as individuals, and to the places in which they lived. This is the people-based economic development that we will speak of in the chapters that follow. Before leaving this thought, however, and knowing how other regions of the nation will respond in future chapters, people-based economic development (and working class-based policy systems) not at all common elsewhere—and find it harder going in some areas of the North and Midwest than others. Perhaps, I am simply reminding the reader that political culture may not have gone away in the Progressive years. More on that later.

 

Before proceeding onto our glorified case studies which offer a more in depth look at individual cities, a quick look at four Ohio Big Cities (Dayton, Akron, Cleveland and Cincinnati) to glimpse into the immediate future and see how well Progressive policy systems endured. First, Dayton did maintain its city manager system over the next generation. In fact, Dayton still holds the city manager policy system firmly in place as I write this paragraph. We already mentioned the allegation that once in place, the working class Socialist Party, a viable competitor in the old system, was effectively killed off in the next decade. A researcher sympathetic to city manager systems, however, also noticed that while city manager rule resulted in few scandals, and rather smooth day to day management, there was no cutting edge initiatives. It was a “go-with-the-flow, keep-up-the-good-work policy system[4]. Maybe this was fine for a stable Big City, but Dayton had serious challenges ahead of it.

 

Cleveland went off in another direction—actually several. In 1916 social reform mayor Nelson Baker left the scene. In that year’s election, voters had turned away another potential social reform mayor (Witt) and elected instead three successive Republican Party career-politician mayors. Party machines were dominant after the near decade and a half of Cleveland social reform mayors. Even more startling was in 1924 the city adopted the necessary charter reform to install, of all things, a city manager system. From the start it was evident that was not a wise decision. The city manager system is supposed to be non partisan, but the leaders of both Party organizations got together, presumably smoking cigars in a smoke-filled room, and agreed to the first city manager (businessman William Hopkins) and a consensual split of future patronage. That was not what Patterson had in mind for a city manager system. In any case the city manager met regularly with the Party leaders and, if one thinks about it, the result was a very powerful city manager who seemed to love controversy and being in the limelight.

Hopkins ruled more in the spirit of a strong, but unelected mayor; the city manager form took on the appearance of being a party organization-based dictatorship. Former social reform mayor, then retired, Nelson Baker commented about it: “I do feel humiliated and ashamed when I think of this city of a million people whose manager is picked by an unseen hand from an invisible place, put in power and kept there, subject to the will of an influence over which the people have no control”.[5] Unsurprisingly, ballot proposals to repeal the manager plan appeared on Clevelander’s ballot in 1927, 1928, and 1929, before being successfully approved in 1931. Each had suffered very narrow vote defeats. In any case, the city manager experience in Cleveland produced a party dictatorship, suggesting strongly that the city manager policy system could produce several variations.

 

That conclusion was further supported by the experience of Akron. In 1920, the rubber capital of the world adopted the city manager system. There too it was evident from the onset that things were rotten in Denmark (actually I’m sure it’s quite nice there). In 1920 the Republican dominated city council selected the Republican-elected mayor as the first city manager. In essence, he was a Republican mayor with a new title, and to outsiders it was hard to tell the difference. Democrats, predictably fared badly in this policy system. The newspaper soon charged that undemocratic party rule strengthened a “small group of special interests [which found it] easier to control one man who had not been elected than several who had”. It later claimed the city manager had “about the same principles as a reformed highwayman and just brains enough to keep out of an imbecile asylum”. The Chamber of Commerce, an original supporter of the city manager plan, did not take a position on the issue when in 1923 the manager form was repealed. It would seem that one cannot simply graft a form of government  onto policy processes augmented by their supportive political cultures and expect a uniform policy system to result. Say it another way, Big Cities and city managers did not seem to go very well together.

 

But then there is Cincinnati. Cox had run a machine in partnership with business structural reformers for a decade a half. Asked to retire by the President of the United States, he did. Several Republican structural reformers and then a Democrat social reform mayor followed in his wake (Cox died shortly after he retired). Four Republican structural reformers were subsequently elected. Then in 1925, a “new” political party, the Charterite, formed to lead the city’s adoption of a city manager form. The Charterite Party was victorious is the following elections and they proved dedicated to stopping in its tracks any party machine that attempted to control the city manager. “Cincinnati reformers ran their own independent slate for city council. Their platform was straightforward: “Business methods in government—freedom from political bosses”. What’s more they continued to win and remain faithful in a succession of future elections. In the middle 1930’s Charterite Charles Taft wrote “There is in this movement [Charterite] in Cincinnati the type of religious conviction which is not fanatical; which is not ecstatic; which is hard-headed, and yet idealistic, a conviction, a faith that local good government is a possibility”[6]. Where were these people in Cleveland and Akron when those cities needed such fine and dedicated leaders? Was it that those cities lacked an equivalently strong and motivated business elite (because that was what controlled Cincinnati)? If so, why?

 

Why is it that four Ohio cities in the same years do such violently different things to their city manager form of government? Why is it that four Ohio cities had such different variations and policy system history over the next generation?

 

[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.

[4] Landrum R. Bolling, City Manager Government in Dayton (Chicago, Public Administration Service, 1940); See also Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 203.

[5] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 203.

[6] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 204.