Social Reform and Socialist Mayors
Community development, because of its determination to advantage the “common man” (especially the least fortunate of society and, in these years, the immigrant, focused on neighborhoods and were not actively involved in citywide matters—except as they related to the neighborhood agenda. Social reformers may have been marginally less concerned with structural reforms (charter revisions, forms of government, budgets or even civil service), but they were not opposed to them. The social reform focus was on “people,” often protecting them from business, and it was this thread that gave rise to a generation of charismatic and/or ideological reformers with ambitions to help people citywide.
In the Progressive Era the most important people-based reform was reducing fares on streetcars; lowering gas, electric and water bills to urban residents; and, in an age of temperance, stopping Privatist (actually Puritan) businessman mayors from regulating working-class immigrant moral behavior through aggressive police enforcement. To social reform and socialist mayoral candidates, bad working-class behavior resulted from low wages, bad housing, lack of recreation opportunities and the like. One should attack these conditions instead of trying to enforce anti-gambling, drinking and prostitution (Finegold, 1995, pp. 19–22). After 1910 a brand new phenomenon hit selected cities—socialists were elected in numbers to be mayors and city aldermen. Progressive Era municipal socialists were seldom Marxist, mostly Christian social democrat—Henry George or Herbert Bellamystyle socialists. In 1910 Milwaukee, an exception, elected the “socialist boss” Victor Berger to the House of Representatives, the first of six terms; also elected were Emil Seidel as mayor, and 21 of 35 city aldermen. In 1911 George Lunn, a Protestant minister and Christian socialist, was elected mayor of Schenectady (New York). Minneapolis in 1916 elected Thomas van Lear as mayor, and over the next decade socialists won mayoralty elections in Haverhill (Massachusetts), Lackawanna (New York), Flint (Michigan), Granite City (Illinois) and Butte (Montana). Between 1910 and 1920 an estimated 174 socialists were elected mayor in cities ranging from Berkeley California to Eureka Utah (Weinstein, 1969, p. 116, Table 2).
In practice, American urban socialist policy systems proved little different from structural reformers. They acquired the pejorative label of “sewer socialists.” Sewer socialist or not, socialist mayors of this period “clearly focused on improving the lives of urban people rather than reorganizing or restructuring urban government” (Mohl, 1985, p. 127). They eliminated graft and supported the development of administrative capacity and efficiency using accepted scientific management principles. They constructed well-built parks and sewers, and paid for them with conventional bond issuance rather than soak-the-rich taxation. Milwaukee socialists (who included poet Robert Frost as assistant to the mayor) even established a Bureau of Economy and Efficiency (Finegold, 1995, p. 19).
Social reform and socialist mayors advocated policies that addressed the needs of both the average Joe industrial worker/immigrant and the middle class. They embraced a people-oriented ED, deeply uncomfortable with monopoly capitalists, utilities, railroads, trusts—and streetcar franchises. Social reform mayors, however, were not immune to adopting physical redevelopment (the City Beautiful) to enhance their city’s competitiveness and promote civic pride among all classes. They were, in their way, competing to be the top “city on a hill.”
A cornerstone of their agenda that ensured electoral success was their opposition to local monopolies (electric, water/sewer and streetcar utilities/franchises). During these years electric power was coming on line, and social reform Progressives believed that municipal ownership corrected abuses of monopolistic private utility franchises. Municipal public utilities were approved in communities across the nation. Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kansas, California, Oregon and even Texas and Florida were leaders.5 The municipally owned utility presents an almost perfect expression of the Progressive economic development program in that it protected the community from distortions created by private profit. From our perspective, that’s certainly a way to bypass a HEDO.
Henry George’s 1886 campaign for New York City mayor arguably marked the first instance of a social reform mayor in American urban politics. He lost—and that was that. From that point on wealthy, successful businessmen/professionals entered municipal politics and got elected as mayors on a “social reform” platform. There is a pronounced geographic (Great Lakes) flavor to social reform mayors, laced with distinctive population migration trends (Yankee Diaspora and immigrant Germans-Scandinavians).
Examples include Detroit’s Hazen Pingree; nationally renowned Tom Johnson of Cleveland; Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones and Brand Whitlock of Toledo; Edward Dunne of Chicago; and Mark Fagan of Jersey City. Some were one-termers; some stayed around awhile and even got elected to higher office. Others, like NYC’s William Randolph Hearst and Chicago’s Robert Merriam, were “wannabes” who never made it to the mayor’s office. Despite their policy successes social reform mayors could not sustain their working- and middle-class coalitions. Subsequent elections were won by business structural reformers or machines.
Probably the two most famous social reform mayors were Detroit’s Hazen Pingree and Cleveland’s Tom Johnson. Pingree was first on the scene: a wealthy Republican shoe and boot manufacturer, he first won election in 1889 on an anti-municipal corruption platform that stressed opposition to streetcar, telephone, gas and electric utilities. In 1894 he said in a speech:
The most dangerous enemies to good government are not the saloons, the dives, the dens of iniquity and the criminals … [rather most of Detroit’s problems could be] traced to the temptations which are offered to city officials when franchises are sought by wealthy corporations, or contracts are to be let for public works. (Mohl, 1985, p. 123)
The 1893 Panic allowed Pingree to assemble a coalition of working/middle-class and Progressive businessmen that generated sufficient votes for him to be elected three times as mayor and then to go on to the governorship. Once in office, Pingree confronted high unemployment by expanding local welfare and public works programs (building schools, parks and public baths). He developed his “potato patch plan” which turned vacant city-owned lots over to the poor for gardens, and conducted Detroit’s most aggressive annexation period ever. Eventually he won approval for ownership of the municipal light plant. Pingree established his national reputation and spawned a host of future social reform mayors by trying to obtain the three-cent streetcar fare for Detroit’s commuters.
In 1894, to compete with the dominant Citizens Street Railway, Pingree formed a privately owned streetcar—the Detroit Railway Company (DRC)—that charged three cents per ride (not the standard five cents). Laying 60 miles of track, the DRC opened in July 1895. Pingree donned an engineer’s cap and drove the first train up the line. And then his problems began. A new absentee owner from Cleveland bought the Citizens Railway determined to break Pingree’s three-cent fare. The new owner, ironically, had amassed his millions from the invention of (are you ready?) the streetcar fare box. Going to the courts, the new owner was unsuccessful but kept on appealing, saying: “It’s for blood and somebody is going to get skinned and skinned thoroughly … This is a fight for gore, and it will be carried right along to the finish” (Holli, 1973, p. 103). Pingree won the appeal in July 1896.
The absentee owner controlled the only terminal and denied its use to Pingree’s Detroit Railway. The battle in quick order was fought out in the state legislature. Then the Citizen’s Railway owner retired the horses and electrified his line. To pay for this he pushed for a 30-year franchise with a five-cent fare. Pingree vetoed the franchise after the council approved it. A simultaneous battle had been joined pitting the city council against Pingree the mayor. The council imposed the five-cent fare without a franchise extension, and Pingree called for a public boycott. The newspapers supported Pingree, as did thousands of workers. Pingree thundered: “This fight ain’t going to stop until [the Citizens Railway] gets right down on its knees” (Holli, 1973, p. 108).
The Citizens Railway reeled, losing passengers and profits to Pingree’s boycott, which captured national attention. The absentee owner of the Citizens Railway finally capitulated, offering Pingree and the council a proposal for three cents for his fare! The Citizens Railway offer was approved by the council, but allegations of bribery and Pingree’s continued opposition forced the council to reject the Citizens Railway’s proposal. The other Detroit streetcar lines grudgingly reduced their fare to three cents, and the Cleveland owner seemingly was forced to reduce his fare to three cents. With victory in hand Pingree accepted the nomination for governor, won the election and prepared to leave for the state capital—and then the Cleveland absentee owner secretly bought Pingree’s Detroit Railway and raised the three-cent fare to five cents. Getting Pingree out of town and into the governor’s office had been part of the streetcar owner’s secret strategy all along.
Pingree refused to leave, however. For more than a year he held both the governorship and the mayor’s office simultaneously—until the Michigan Supreme Court ousted him from the latter in July 1897.With the merger completed, the five-cent street car fare solidly in place and with a virtual monopoly of key routes, the Citizens Railway had achieved total victory over Pingree. The owner of the Citizens Railway was Tom Johnson, who in two years was to become social reform mayor of Cleveland.
This sad “traction” affair, however, was not over—it continued while Pingree was governor. In 1899 a set of complex negotiations produced the closest thing to Pingree’s hope to establish a privately owned equivalent to a municipally owned streetcar system. It included a citywide three-cent fare and a 48-year lease which neither city residents nor the Michigan Supreme Court liked. The agreement was tossed out. In the meantime Tom Johnson was elected mayor of Cleveland!
The obvious questions emerge from Johnson’s incredibly fierce resistance to Pingree—and two years later his election as a reform mayor of Cleveland who followed social reform and an anti-streetcar/utility path pioneered by Pingree. Melvin Holli, to whom we are indebted for this fascinating story, argues that Johnson had a sincere change of heart but was motivated by sheer competitiveness that compelled Johnson to fight Pingree unremittingly and implement social reforms unrelentingly (Holli, 1973, pp. 120–24). In any case, Tom Johnson followed in Pingree’s footsteps.
A more or less rogue Democrat and a devotee of Henry George (he was buried next to him in New York City), Johnson’s 1901 election to mayor of Cleveland was owed to the city’s native Protestant business vote. The chamber was a significant power in that first administration, particularly in educational policy, pollution control and building public neighborhood baths. Forming a cabinet of experts as department heads (Bemis, Cooley and Howe, for example), Johnson cleaned up Cleveland’s police and criminal justice system; developed a strong parks and recreation program; and, with chamber support, hired Daniel Burnham—thereby initiating a path-breaking City Beautiful initiative that flirted closely with early urban planning (Hines, 1973). His regime was honest, efficient, supporter of the merit system. Johnson obsessively pursued a three-cent streetcar fare for Cleveland, and did all he could to seize control of the city’s private electricity plants. Like Pingree in Detroit, he was stymied in his efforts to control streetcar fares and acquire control of the electricity facility—in his case by forces led by the Ohio Republican state machine.
While called by journalist Lincoln Steffens the “best mayor of the best city,” Johnson left office frustrated, as did most social reform mayors. But both socialist mayors and social reform mayors, however, demonstrated that community development could operate, with reasonable success, at the citywide level. They did so by constructing a “unity” coalition whose critical member was the working class. The critical issues that brought the working class into the coalition in these years were streetcar and anti-business/utility reforms (lower rates) and what today might be labeled “cultural” initiatives to relax anti-liquor regulation and police activity in their neighborhoods. CD at the city level is necessarily vastly more political and electoral than its neighborhood counterpart. Citywide CD’s true precursor, I believe, was the machine whose votes were stolen by the social reform/socialist mayors.
When CD moved to the citywide level a new set of “players” became active—and a different (hostile) relationship with the HEDOs of ED (franchise utilities and streetcars) took over, and vice versa. While citywide CD certainly stressed its people-focused and anti-business approach, a citywide CD administration assumes some responsibility to the jurisdictional economic base—and its coalition partners. Both almost inevitably require some policy dilution from a pure CD neighborhood-level approach. This is more evident with Johnson than Pingree, but both pursued business-led structural reforms discussed in the last chapter. Pingree’s massive annexation was further evidence in that some urban problems transcend different policy systems. In his first administration Johnson was supported by the chamber, admittedly quite Progressive but still more pro-business than any neighborhood-level CD approach. It seems inescapable that a citywide CD administration would overlap into Privatist agenda and programs— but at a potential cost of disrupting a fragile electoral coalition. The potential for conflict with non-CD institutions and levels of government is high (Pingree’s and Johnson’s struggle with the state legislature and judicial rulings, among others).
Pingree pursued a purer CD people-oriented initiative than Johnson who, in practice, was as much structural reformer as social reformer. Johnson’s successor, Norman Baker, was better at the latter. Social reform mayors are widely regarded as characteristic of the Progressive Era; but the most important social reform mayor of all time, Fiorello La Guardia—three-term mayor of New York (1933–45)—will be discussed in a future chapter. A more modern version, Boston’s Kevin White, will also be considered.
Ron W. Coan 