Civic Reform Clubs
The alter-ego of chambers in the early Gilded Age, the “dark side of their force” was undoubtably the civic reform or good government clubs which flourished from the 1870’s and increased in strength through the era. Perhaps, the earliest of these semi-formal elite-based “political clubs” was the Boston Commercial Club founded in 1868. Civic Reform Clubs were founded in city after city from the 1870’s onward, including Philadelphia’s Citizens Reform Association (1871); the Citizens Association of Chicago (1874; the Commercial Club of Chicago (1877); the Baltimore Reform League (1885); the New Orleans Committee of 100 (1885), the Citizens Association of Boston (1887).
These early clubs were populated by “generally wealthy , well-educated business or professional types, men of the Mugwump persuasion were galvanized by the independent Republican movement of the 1872 presidential election and the reform candidacy of Democrat Grover Cleveland [later] in 1884. … Most of the men involved were elitist and patrician in social outlook, Protestant in religion,, and old-stock Anglo-Saxon or Yankee in family background”.[1] While most were certainly members and leaders in their city’s newly forming chambers of commerce, these Mugwump city reformers formed the reform clubs for largely, but not exclusively, political reasons.
Intensely opposed to the new immigrant and ethnic “machines”, and frankly extremely uncomfortable with the social and cultural threat of immigrant newcomers to their sense of what has since been labeled “the American way”. Hofstadter wrote in The Age of Reform[2] “… they found themselves checked, hampered and overridden by the agents of new corporations, the corrupters of legislatures, the buyers of franchises, the allies of political bosses”. The first post-Civil War urban reformers (I’m tempted to use terms like neo-conservatives or “old money”) wasted little time in challenging the immigrants, their machines (and big business) that upset the old order.
The first substantial urban machine of the era was, of course, New York City’s Tweed Ring run out of Tammany Hall. The Tweed Ring offended a number of New Yorkers on many different levels and Thomas Nast cartoons, a constant barrage of New York Times articles, and the Union League Club’s expose report, prompted the calling of a public meeting at Cooper Hall in early September 1871. With the upcoming November elections in mind, a “Committee of Seventy” composed of city business and lots of Mugwumps and led by Samuel Tilden, was formed to put those crooks in jail. The chairman of the Cooper Hall meeting, William F. Havemeyer (a former 1840’s mayor and a Mugwump) stood for mayor and was elected.
His administration, in the midst of a very severe panic or recession, cut drastically public funds for relief programs for the city’s poor. He also stopped infrastructure and public improvement programs which created jobs. He imposed an honest, efficient, free market-oriented, low tax administration (not too dissimilar from that of Herbert Hoover sixty years later). Havemeyer pushed a new city charter through the state legislature which created several independent boards and commissions (which will be discussed shortly), and dispersed key policy-making authority into the Board of Estimate (which controlled budgeting, financing, taxing and bond-issuance).
In so doing, he weakened substantially his own power and that of the New York City mayor’s office. Simultaneously, it weakened the city legislatures dominated by the machine. The policy-making coherence of New York’s City government was badly impaired in the aftermath. Havemeyer’s administration provides a sense of early, Mugwump era, business reform and its confused impact on the city’s policy-making process. Fortunately, for the other Big Cities, they could sit back, watch and learn from New York’s City’s Mugwump experiment. After two years in office, Havemeyer, the Mugwump reformers, the Committee of Seventy were swept out of office. Tilden, who went on to greater glories, was another matter. Tammany, in very short order, minus Tweed who was convicted, jailed and shortly after died, formed a new style-ethnic controlled machine under Irishman ‘Honest John Kelly’ and journeyed forward into its Golden Years.
The Civic Reform Clubs that followed were less “Mugwump” and more sophisticated in their approach to reconstructing the urban policy system. Their membership tended to be more representative of the various wings of their city’s business and professional community. Recognizing the need to strengthen mayoral power as potentially the most effective means to counter the decentralized control of the city legislatures by the machine and its control ward elections. This, of necessity, meant new city charters which could only be granted by the state legislature. The burden imposed by Dillon’s Law, of having to convince the state legislature for every structural and many policy/budget/tax/administration changes, added a new dimension to urban reform: home rule or the delegation by the state legislature of broad and sometimes sweeping authority to the city to change its own government. The quest to obtain municipal home rule legislation from the state legislature reshaped the drive to change municipal governance.
Mohl claims that by 1890 eighty good government associations had been established. These were supplemented by thirty city civil service reform associations, followed in 1881 by the National Civil Service Reform League. Magazine editors such as E. L. Godkin (the Nation) and George William Curtis (Harper’s Weekly) were chairs of such groups[3] entered the fray. By the mid-1880’s, certainly the 1890’s, Gilded Age Mugwumps were only one of many groupings concerned with city governance. The Municipal League eventually took over the reform effort and by the late 1890’s reform had changed character and had evolved into what we will, in Chapter 5, label the “structural reformers”. Structural reformers will prove to be one of the most significant forces in our history of state and sub-state economic development policy. They deserve to be attended to, and described, separately from our present concern with the Gilded Age formation of a municipal policy system.
[1] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit, p. 109. To confuse the reader, Mugwumps were Republicans who voted for Democrats (especially Grover Cleveland). Mugwumps were also usually anti-machine , chiefly from New England and New York, and several, such as Louis Brandeis and the famous cartoonist Thomas Nast became identified with Progressives.
[2] Richard Hofstadter, the Age of Reform (New York City, Knopf, 1955); Mohl, the New City, op. cit. pp. 109-113.
[3] Raymond Mohl, The New City, op. cit, pp. 111-112.
Ron W. Coan 