WORLD WAR AND MUNICIPAL CONQUEST
BY THE TIME MAYOR PRESTON staged his confrontation with the police commissioners, the country was waging war in Europe, and Baltimore’s moral climate became the business of the federal government. The secretary of war, Newton Baker, wrote to the mayor requesting that no illicit diversions should tempt the recruits in military training camps around the city, especially amusements likely to spread sexually transmitted diseases. Baltimore’s recent efforts to suppress vice and preserve the Sabbath undoubtedly figured in Preston’s confident assurance “that there is not a house of prostitution in Baltimore.” Local liquor laws, he added, included a prohibition against the sale of alcoholic liquors to sailors or soldiers in uniform.1
Half a century earlier, the Civil War had divided Baltimore. Its politicians had responded by trying, in vain, to isolate local politics from national politics. This war was clearly different. It would eventually sweep the city into a national mobilization that, according to Sherry Olson, “diminished Baltimorean identity.”2 But, initially, the city’s politicians were reluctant to take sides in the European conflict. In mid-1915, Mayor Preston joined William Howard Taft’s “League of Peace.” In Preston’s view, “the jingoe [sic] of today is the worst enemy of our country . . . Let us tend to our own business.” He supported Henry Ford’s ill-conceived mission to end the war by international mediation, and he declined an invitation to become a vice-president of the Maryland League for National Defense because he was “unwilling . . . to join in the hysteria of the present time toward military armament.” Only one month before President Wilson urged Congress to declare war, Preston was still against universal military training and “opposed to war or militarism in the United States, Germany, France, England, or anywhere.”3
Neutrality was not just a matter of international relations. Baltimore had a significant population of German immigrants and German Americans, and the city’s ideological and ethnic schisms provided the raw material for civil disorder. A meeting of pacifists in April 1917 triggered a riot when attacked by a mob of young men ready to join the Allies in the trenches.4
Once the United States entered the war, Preston’s most immediate concern was to keep peace at home. He urged Baltimoreans to do what they could “to prevent any disorder and to preserve the fair name of our beloved city.” The president and Congress had declared war against Germany, and the time had passed “for any American citizen to discuss the subject.” “The place to fight,” he continued, “is in the Army of the United States . . . and not in our homes or streets or public gathering places.” There was no room in the city “for anyone who wants to take sides with the German Imperial government.” Baltimoreans of “German birth or descent, who are loyal to our country and the Stars and Stripes . . . may feel secure from any harm or injury . . . from citizens of other lineage.”5
Between 1914 and 1917, the local German press energetically backed the Central Powers and predicted their victory. But a week after America’s declaration of war, the German-language Baltimore Correspondent published a statement in English above its masthead affirming its status as an American newspaper. Its turn toward patriotic Americanism failed to save it. After 77 years of publication, the paper went out of business in 1918. Clubs, churches, and other German organizations dissolved. Two months before the armistice, the Baltimore City Council voted to change the name of a major downtown thoroughfare from German Street to Redwood Street, named after the first Maryland officer to be killed in France.6
BALTIMORE’S BATTLE PLANS
The municipal side effects of total war did not distract Preston from his continuing campaign to increase the city’s autonomy and territory. A constitutional amendment granting a modest increase in home rule was introduced by Baltimore legislators in 1914 and approved by the voters in 1915. It allowed Baltimore and Maryland’s 23 counties to amend their charters without seeking state approval, so long as they did not extend their powers beyond those granted by the legislature. Since the amendment added nothing to municipal authority, neither the mayor nor the city solicitor, Steven S. Field, regarded it as a significant opportunity to enhance city government.7
Preston was more immediately concerned about the state constitution than the city’s charter. In 1915, he proposed a constitutional convention to address the state government’s financial problems. Preston charged that a succession of state deficits might be brought to an end if Maryland adopted a centralized budget process that matched expenditures to expected revenues, instead of the “harum-scarum way we have been passing appropriation measures . . . no one knowing exactly where the money is to come from.” He recommended the creation of a “board of control” to prepare state budgets, much as the city’s board of estimates proposed annual budgets to the city council.8
The mayor’s call for a convention roused opposition that had little to do with budgets, stemming instead from suburban anxieties about municipal expansion. A newspaper in Towson, just north of the city line, charged that the city hoped to gain through a constitutional convention what it could not get from the state legislature: “a larger representation in Annapolis, a larger proportion of State taxes, and freedom from control by the State Government, and incidentally the privilege of enlarging its boundaries from time to time without the consent of the persons in the annexed territory.”9
Strong support for the mayor came from a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, US Senator Blair Lee. Lee endorsed not only the constitutional convention but Preston’s proposal for state budgetary reform and extension of Baltimore’s boundaries. Lee, however, was defeated in the Democratic primary, and the party convention was silent on a new state constitution. It did pass a resolution favoring Baltimore’s annexation of suburban territory. The measure was the work of Frank Furst, a popular elder statesman in Democratic politics.10
Furst, a German immigrant, had risen from obscurity to wealth, prominence, and local renown. A longtime friend of both Arthur Gorman and Freeman Rasin, he had often been singled out as a favored prospect for public office—at least once for the governorship—but never campaigned for any office more elevated than delegate to national Democratic conventions. Furst was the superintendent of grain elevators for the Northern Central Railroad, and after retiring from the railroad started a dredging business that won contracts to maintain the depth of Baltimore’s harbor and eventually grew into the Arundel Corporation, a company that worked on canals and ship channels around the world and expanded into the sand and gravel business. Furst also had extensive landholdings in Curtis Bay, a mixed residential and industrial tract on the waterfront southwest of Baltimore and just outside the city limits in Anne Arundel County. It was an area to which Baltimore had long banished “undesirable” land uses—gambling houses that sold liquor on Sundays, chemical and fertilizer plants, and a “pest house” for victims of an 1871 smallpox epidemic. After 1900, black migrants from the South who were unable to find housing in Baltimore landed in nearby Fairfield. Under Furst’s annexation plan, all this would become part of the city.11
It was said that “no other man in the State” was “so well known personally as Mr. Furst,” and no other man numbered “so many acquaintances and friends among all sorts and conditions of men.” Though not an officeholder, he helped his friends win offices. In 1915, he chaired the gubernatorial campaign committee for Emerson Harrington, the Democratic state comptroller who defeated Preston’s candidate Blair Lee in the party’s primary. Harrington had run almost as much against Preston as against Lee. He warned Maryland’s Democratic voters that a Lee victory might mean that the state would be “run from City Hall,” and he came out against annexation for Baltimore, winning the support of voters in Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, which he carried by substantial margins.12 He also carried the city, though more narrowly, perhaps because his campaign manager was so popular there. He went on to win a narrow victory in the general election against Republican governor Goldsborough. According to the Sun, Furst had “antagonized some of his closest friends by refusing to go with the city machine in the primary” in support of Blair Lee. But the antagonism faded because the “Democratic party understands very well that it owes its escape from defeat in the November election to [Furst’s] straightforward and honest attitude and his uncompromising independence.”13
Mayor James H. Preston, a product of the city’s Democratic machine. He proved unexpectedly innovative in his approach to extending Baltimore’s boundaries and made unexpected allies among the Protestant clergy.
Furst called Mayor Preston and the president of the council’s second branch to a conference at his home on Thanksgiving Day, 1915, to work out the details of the annexation provision that Furst would propose for the Democratic Party platform. Their proposal would extend the city limits in all directions to a distance of five miles from the center of Baltimore. Furst urged Preston to “put aside the hostility which has prevailed between the state people and the city administration,” and he assured the mayor that Governor Harrington was prepared to treat the city fairly. Preston gave Furst full authority to represent the interests of the city on annexation and agreed to support any plan that Furst approved. Unlike the mayor’s earlier borough plan, Furst’s proposal pointedly omitted a provision for a vote on annexation by the residents of areas to be absorbed. The mayor agreed that leaving the decision to the suburbanites would only “mean marching up the hill and marching back down again.”14
The opposition’s response was swift and hard. Less than three weeks after the conference at Furst’s home, the newly formed Anti-Annexation Association of Baltimore County was soliciting funds for a campaign against the city’s expansion. The group sought support not only from residents in the area to be annexed but from Baltimore County residents at large. According to the association, “The extension of the City limits would cut about sixty million dollars . . . off the assessable basis of Baltimore County, and necessarily greatly increase the present county tax rate over the entire County.” The group issued a special appeal to the mostly working-class residents of Canton and Highlandtown, just east of the city, claiming (without evidence) that annexation would triple their tax bills.15
While Furst and Field drafted the city’s annexation bill, the City-Wide Congress was writing one of its own. The chairman of its annexation committee was state senator William J. Ogden, who had earlier promoted his own annexation proposal in opposition to Mayor Preston’s borough plan. He persuaded his committee to proceed with its annexation proposal independently of the mayor. It differed from the plan drafted by Furst and Field in leaving Anne Arundel County intact, an omission that left crucial stretches of waterfront in Curtis Bay outside the city’s jurisdiction. The Ogden committee also required that annexation be approved by a majority of voters in the territory to be annexed.16
ANNEXATION AT LAST
During the 1916 legislative session, the Furst and Ogden annexation bills were referred to the Senate Committee on Judicial Proceedings. Its chairman was Senator Ogden. The mayor and other supporters of the Furst annexation bill were now engaged in a two-front war. They had to overcome resistance to annexation in the counties—Baltimore and Anne Arundel—while trying to defeat the annexation proposal of Ogden and the City-Wide Congress.17
State legislators from districts beyond Baltimore could hardly be expected to support an annexation bill if the city’s own representatives disagreed on what they wanted. Furst rushed to Annapolis to take charge of the negotiations for the proposal that he and Field had designed. He was preceded by Mayor Preston and almost 150 of the city’s businessmen, who boarded a special train for the state capital to promote the Furst bill before the Committee on Judicial Proceedings. Baltimore County congressman J. F. C. Talbott, critic of Mayor Preston’s borough bill, also took off for Annapolis to defeat annexation.18
Furst and Talbott met with Governor Harrington separately, trying to pull him in opposite directions on the annexation issue. But the governor was evasive. According to the Sun, “when the Governor does not want to make up his mind he can sit longer and misunderstand oftener and ask more irrelevant questions than any man in the civilized world.” The governor finally decided that his attachments to Congressman Talbott and Dr. George Wells, the Democratic leader of Anne Arundel County, precluded his endorsement of the Furst annexation plan, even though Furst “did more to nominate and elect the Governor than any other man.” But he would support an annexation bill that gave Baltimore the entire harbor and its waterfront, including the sections currently lying in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties.19
The governor’s response made political sense. The annexation pledge in the Democratic platform had declared the party’s support for “legislation that will secure to the City of Baltimore complete control of the harbor and will best promote the commercial and industrial welfare of the city.” In his appeal to the legislature, Mayor Preston had emphasized the city’s interest in the waterfront. He sought to bring its members to his side by inviting all of them on an inspection tour of the harbor onboard the city’s “ice-boat,” the Ferdinand Latrobe. The trip took place in a driving snowstorm, but the participants seem to have been drawn into some sort of unanimity. They ended the chilly cruise with a rendition of “Maryland, My Maryland,” followed by “The Star-Spangled Banner.”20
Control of the harbor was clearly central to the case for annexation, and a Baltimore delegate, William Purnell Hall, introduced yet another annexation bill that took in the entire harbor but added nothing beyond the city’s North Avenue boundary. The governor embraced Hall’s bill. Furst later brushed it aside as a “counterfeit” and an “insult to the city.” He must have expected more from the governor whose election he had worked so hard to achieve, and he abandoned Annapolis without making any further public statement.21
Furst was soon back in the capital for one last thrust. He met again with Governor Harrington, who reportedly told him that, while he could not endorse Furst’s bill, he would not intervene to defeat it. Furst “believed there was still a ray of hope and that he would not quit the fight as long as he could see that ray.” The fight would be a fierce one. Senator Ogden stood firmly behind his own bill and, just after Furst’s return to Annapolis, took the senate floor to deliver a long speech on its behalf. Just offstage, Congressman Talbott likened the annexation of Baltimore County to the German invasion of Belgium.22
In a desperate attempt to win acceptance for annexation, Solicitor Field announced that the city was prepared to amend its bill so that the extension of its boundaries would be submitted to statewide referendum. The change would allow legislators to avoid responsibility for the outcome, but Field justified it as recognition that the issue should be regarded “not as a mere local matter” to be decided by the voters in the territory to be annexed, “but as a statewide matter.” At 4 a.m. on March 31, the advocates of annexation finally broke the opposition’s filibuster and forced a senate vote on their bill, with its new provision for a statewide referendum. The result must have come as a shock. The annexation bill was recommitted to the Committee on Judicial Proceedings by a vote of 14 to 13. Two of Governor Harrington’s adherents from the Eastern Shore had switched sides at the last moment.23
The outcome revived the old Baltimore animus against the government in Annapolis, a vein of rancor that stretched back to the regime of the Lords Baltimore. A bitter editorial in the Sun promised retribution and delivered a scorching attack on the legislature, the state Democratic Party, and Governor Harrington—especially Harrington. “Every consideration of right and fairness should have dictated his support of a proper annexation bill . . . all considerations of political expediency and personal interest urged him in the same direction . . . Yet he sits quietly by while the annexation bill is being done to death by grossly unfair tactics.” The paper also observed that the legislative session had approved a $2.5 million bond issue for highways. Baltimore, with 50 percent of the state’s population generating 70 percent of the state’s tax revenue, would get only 20 percent of the proceeds. Once again, the Annapolis politicians had made Baltimore “the Goat.”24
Frank Furst, though a declared Democratic loyalist, hinted that the party’s violation of its platform pledge to Baltimore might lead the city’s loyal Democrats to mistrust their party in the future—perhaps to renounce it.25 Solicitor Field went a bit further, ridiculing the state Democratic candidates who made campaign promises to be “fair to Baltimore,” only to increase the city’s tax burdens and prevent its expansion. “The only way this city will ever get what it is entitled to is to form a non-partisan league that will put the interest of the city above party and demand justice for Baltimore.”26
Field promptly made good on his suggestion. Days after defeat of the annexation bill, he won approval from the city’s board of estimates to organize a “Greater Baltimore League” to carry on the struggle for city expansion. By the end of April 1916, the league—now called the Greater Baltimore Non-Partisan League—had signed up the East Baltimore Businessmen’s Association, and Field had handed out membership cards at a luncheon of the City Club after giving a speech on annexation.27 Field’s declared intention to appeal for support without regard to party meant that the city solicitor could proselytize and enlist recruits even where Republicans congregated.
Other unlikely allies may have been drawn to the annexation struggle by Mayor Preston’s early stand against Sunday baseball. W. W. Davis, general secretary of the Lord’s Day Alliance, offered to bring in “one preacher from each county and put the organization of annexation up to them.” Preston was wary of the ministers. Some were “tied up with the Anti-Saloon League”—reason enough to “doubt their sincerity”—but Preston wrote that he would be glad to meet with Davis’s “friends any day to talk over the matter” of annexation.28
By the end of August 1917, the league—now called the Non-Partisan Greater Baltimore Extension League—had 10,000 members. Its membership chairman reported that most league members lived in Baltimore, but almost 1,000 had been recruited “in the counties.”29
The City-Wide Congress, however, remained hostile. At its annual meeting in 1916, congress president A. R. L. Dohme charged that his organization’s annexation bill had been dragged down to defeat by the city administration’s bill—“a hodge-podge of the worst possible kind, and behind it, besides, was the game of politics, in which Frank A. Furst played a very prominent part.”30
ROYAL FAMILY FEUDS
As the annexation controversy subsided, another kind of dispute threatened to fracture the core of the local Democratic machine. Baltimoreans referred to its central figures as the “Royal Family.” Even Mayor Preston was excluded from this inner circle. Its patriarch was John J. “Sonny” Mahon, with a knowledgeable grasp of the entire city’s politics at the ward level. His lieutenants included Daniel “Little Danny” Loden, the commissioner of water rents and taxes, city hall patronage broker, and first among equals in the Nineteenth Ward. Loden endeared himself to Freeman Rasin by shifting his ward from the Republican to the Democratic column. Another member of the Family was Robert “Paving Bob” Padgett, restored to good standing as one of the city’s favored contractors and apparent legatee of Boss Rasin’s Seventh Ward. Finally, there was Frank Kelly. His base was in Southwest Baltimore’s Eighteenth Ward and its United Democratic Club, but his influence often extended into the Sixteenth, and he would eventually contest control of wards across the city. Kelly held court in the backyard of his home at 1100 West Saratoga Street, but he was an obscure presence in the Royal Family. Virtually illiterate and publicity-shy, he stood in Mahon’s shadow, not just because of his educational deficiencies, but because he ran a saloon on the shady side of the law.31
Kelly was clearly dissatisfied with his standing in the Royal Family and dreamed of ruling an independent kingdom of his own, perhaps in the unobtrusive style of Freeman Rasin. One of the first hints that he was turning against the Family came in 1915, when Kelly was rumored to be backing a candidate of his own for city council in the Seventh Ward, in opposition to the incumbent, who was Robert Padgett’s man. Kelly’s candidate won the primary, and his adherents defeated council candidates backed by Mayor Preston in two other wards as well.32
Kelly’s next move came later that year in the gubernatorial primary, when the Mahon machine endorsed Senator Blair Lee. Kelly was at first noncommittal, then announced for Emerson Harrington just a few days before the September primary. Though the move had been a subject of speculation for months, the Sun hyperventilated: it was “the most sensational event of the entire campaign, and one of the most sensational in the political history of Baltimore in decades.” The Mahon forces, however, “lassoed him, threw him, applied the brand again,” and by late evening Kelly told the Sun that he was once again a Mahonite. He did not stay lassoed for long; later the same evening, he told the Baltimore American that stories of his recantation were empty rumors. For almost a year, Kelly had managed to keep politicians guessing about his intentions, and he continued to do so up to the last possible moment, when he issued orders to his ward leaders and precinct workers to turn out their voters for Harrington. Danny Loden pronounced him the “Judas Iscariot of the Democratic organization”—also the Benedict Arnold, the Brutus, and the Catiline. But by helping Harrington to carry Baltimore, Kelly put himself and his friends in line for gubernatorial patronage.33
The local machine’s venture into nonpartisan politics in the cause of annexation had undermined party solidarity. Baltimore’s machine drew closer to local Republican businessmen and “dry” clergymen while distancing itself from the state Democratic Party, which had reneged on its pledge to extend Baltimore’s boundaries. Frank Kelly took advantage of the estrangement between city and state Democrats to form an independent alliance with Governor Harrington and to build his own organization outside the Royal Family circle. On one issue, however, Kelly stood with his former friends. He assembled his adherents in his backyard on an evening in late August 1917 and told them “to line up . . . for the Annexation bill of the Greater Baltimore Extension League.” He may have supported annexation as a matter of policy, or he may have calculated that sentiment for annexation was so powerful in Baltimore that no candidate could survive without endorsing it.34
The day after Kelly’s backyard assembly, 150 Democrats and Republicans gathered for a luncheon meeting at the headquarters of what was now called the Greater Baltimore Nonpartisan Extension League. They were members of the league’s campaign committee, assembled to make plans for the state primary in September and the legislative session that followed, when the city administration would once again present a bill to expand Baltimore’s territory. Mayor Preston reminded his bipartisan audience that annexation was a nonpartisan cause. “The business and well-thinking people of the city and the State are behind it.” He immediately demonstrated the irrelevance of party by launching a fierce attack against fellow Democrat William Purnell Hall, a “traitor” to the city whose “counterfeit” annexation bill had helped to sidetrack the city administration’s proposal during the last session of the General Assembly. His heated denunciation of the Democratic delegate put Preston at odds with his political patron Sonny Mahon, who supported Delegate Hall’s renomination.35
Solicitor Field delivered an impassioned speech warning the league members that if they were defeated again, the next opportunity for annexation might not come along for another generation. It had been almost 30 years, after all, since the 1888 annexation. The meeting’s presiding officer, Republican E. Clay Timanus, praised Democrat Field as “the best informed man in Maryland on the subject of annexation and the man best fitted to represent the league in the next Legislature.” Field had become a candidate in the Democratic primary for the house of delegates so that he could carry the case for annexation to the floor of the General Assembly. He contested the seat occupied by William Purnell Hall.36
RESOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION
The city’s annexation bill would face its first test at the state Democratic convention in September 1917. Mayor Preston thought the “question of city extension” would “probably be determined by the platform declarations of the two parties.” The Republicans were likely to endorse the bill proposed by the city. If the Democrats did the same, then the issue would be “removed from the campaign” and the election would be “contested upon issues which divide the two parties, as it should be.” If the Democratic platform fell short on annexation, it would open a schism between Baltimore Democrats and Democrats outside the city limits. Preston was pessimistic about his party’s prospects.37
The Democrats met and delivered what the Sun termed “a mocking denial” of the city’s annexation demand. Backed by Congressman Talbott of Baltimore County and Dr. Wells of Anne Arundel County, the proposal declared the party’s support for annexation, but required that the city’s expansion be approved by the voters in the territory to be annexed—and so virtually ensured the proposal’s rejection. Preston called it a “covert attempt to kill any city extension legislation.” The Republican state convention approved a platform that endorsed the city’s plan.38
The mayor turned against his own party: “We arraign the Democratic State organization . . . as an enemy of the public welfare of the State of Maryland.” Preston was in no mood for restraint. The state Democrats, he said, had won control of Maryland in 1915 “by the votes of Baltimore City, upon a promise to give the city a reasonable and fair extension of its limits, and violated that promise.” They had allied themselves with the politicians of Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties “and with those who fatten upon the law breaking and vice that infests certain sections near the city’s limits.”39
Attached to the mayor’s denunciation are several pages of handwritten notes signed by Preston. They quote a passage from the American Cyclopedia of 1863 citing the provincial assembly’s legislation of 1745 that annexed Jones Town to Baltimore and, in particular, its inclusion of “an express provision that there was nothing in the act recognizing a right to ‘elect delegates to the Assembly as representatives of the town.’ ” Preston underlined the next sentence: “This was the earliest manifestation of the singular jealousy which has ever since been shown in the Legislature by the Maryland County members against the City of Baltimore.”40
Baltimore was not the only city confronting a state legislature in which representation tilted toward rural communities and interests. A few states even controlled municipal police departments. Missouri, for example, took over the St. Louis police department in 1860 and did not return it to municipal control until 2013.41 Since Baltimore was a free-standing unit of government, outside the jurisdiction of any county, it might be expected to enjoy a high degree of autonomy. But instead of being subject to a county’s authority, Baltimore was vulnerable to interference from the more distant state authorities. In addition to the police department, the state controlled the board of police examiners, the board of election supervisors, and the liquor licensing board, and though the mayor and council appointed the members of the park board, the state determined its budget. The office of legislative reference, established by the city in 1906 to do research on pending legislation, was taken over by the state in 1916.42 Preston’s underlined sentence from the Cyclopedia highlighted what was singular about the General Assembly’s “singular jealousy” toward Baltimore: it began long before the town became a city. It was a condition of the town’s existence, part of its civic identity.43
In another setback for the mayor, Delegate Hall defeated Solicitor Field in the Democratic primary. Field attributed his loss to the “unexpected strength of Frank Kelly,” who had backed Hall against the city administration’s champion. Like Kelly, however, Hall had endorsed the administration’s annexation proposal, abandoning the bill he had introduced in the previous session of the legislature and leaving Field’s campaign without a clear line of attack. Proponents of annexation also prevailed in the general election, but it was a curious victory for the city’s Democratic mayor. Two-thirds of Baltimore’s representatives in the house of delegates were now Republicans. Republicans were also within one vote of controlling the state senate.44
Though its opponents tried to prevent a vote, annexation passed the house of delegates by almost two to one, thanks to the Republican members’ unanimous adherence to their platform pledge on the issue. The senate vote was just as lopsided. Governor Harrington delayed signing the bill as long as possible, but after stating his reservations, finally approved it.45 Mayor Preston and his city had won a momentous victory that added 75,000 to 100,000 to its population, doubled its land area, and extended its authority over the waters of the harbor.46
The Democratic Party was a wreck. Frank Furst had seen it coming. He had said little in public during the final round of the annexation fight. After the victory of the annexation bill in the house, but before the vote in the senate, a reporter asked Furst if he might say a few words in support of the cause. “No,” said Furst, “I’ll be damned if I will . . . I’m not going to humiliate myself any further by begging men to do what it is their duty to their party and their State to do . . . If they want to go ahead and wreck their party and ruin all chances of party success they can do it for all I care.”47