BOOM TO BUST
THOUGH THEY MIGHT STAND TOGETHER against Prohibition and for states’ rights, Baltimore’s Democratic politicians were at odds with one another. Sonny Mahon and Frank Kelly, now aging, were still rivals. The two bosses had not spoken to each other in four years when Albert Ritchie made his first run for the governorship in 1919. The campaign and Ritchie’s victory afforded an occasion for a fragile and expedient truce between Democratic factions. By 1920, Mahon and Kelly were sparring again, competing for seats on the Democratic State Central Committee. But Governor Ritchie attempted, through an evenhanded treatment of the bosses and an equitable division of state patronage, to mend the intraparty schism in Baltimore. In 1921, he negotiated an electoral compromise between the two factions. They would support the reelection of Mahonite Howard Jackson as register of wills and Kelly adherent Edward Gross as clerk of the criminal court. By 1923, Ritchie was able to bring the bosses together in support of Howard Jackson, the party’s mayoral candidate.1
Jackson was a bookkeeper. He started an insurance business and was elected to the city council in 1907 from Freeman Rasin’s Seventh Ward, where his sponsor was Robert Padgett.2 He served on the council until 1909, when he was elected register of wills; he remained in that position until Ritchie, Mahon, and Kelly called him to the mayor’s office in 1923. He also had the support of Frank Furst, and the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment rated him “100 percent wet.” Mayor Jackson came to the post peculiarly suited to carry on the city’s crusade against Prohibition. He was a steady adherent of states’ rights and an alcoholic.3
Jackson’s drinking habits do not seem to have interfered with his efficiency as register of wills. He surpassed all previous occupants of the office in his collection of fees. His revenues had to be surrendered to state government, but in 1911 it was estimated that if the city had kept the proceeds of his office, it would have reduced the city property tax by 10 cents.4
One of Jackson’s first projects as mayor was creation of the Commission on Economy and Efficiency, devoted to elimination of waste in municipal operations and reduction of the city’s tax rate.5 Drunk or sober, Jackson’s inner bookkeeper never rested. He instructed the commission to rationalize and centralize the municipality’s accounting and payroll operations. The commission also recommended a less costly telephone system for the city (employing female switchboard operators) and a comprehensive proposal to reorganize all of city government, requiring a referendum to amend the city charter. The plan consolidated about 40 departments into 14. The Charter Revision Commission approved a reorganization ordinance drafted by the city solicitor, Philip Perlman. The centerpiece of the plan—and its most controversial element—was a new Baltimore Department of Public Works that absorbed the functions of the paving commission, the water board, the electrical commission, the harbor board, and the topographical survey commission. It would also be responsible for public buildings, street cleaning, the sewer system, and building inspection. Boards and commissions were to be replaced by administrative executives who were professional engineers.6
Members of the city council were understandably leery of the proposal. The plan for the Department of Public Works would abolish many city jobs; the new department would control hundreds of remaining appointments and millions of dollars in city contracts—the currency of city politics. Deliberations about the reorganization plan dragged on for more than a year while the council introduced amendments to protect the jobs of various political appointees. The influential corporate executives on the Commission on Economy and Efficiency finally weighed in to warn the council that its amendments might undo all their labors. Mayor Jackson was not available to reinforce the commission’s admonition. He had been absent from his office for several days. According to the Sun, “His frequent absences in the last two or three weeks, often for days in succession have caused comment in municipal and political circles.”7
Jackson reappeared to urge passage of the reorganization ordinance, reminding the council that he and council members had won election on a promise to enhance municipal efficiency and reduce taxes. The council capitulated and withdrew or defeated virtually all the amendments that had drawn the criticism of the mayor and his commission.8
CAPITAL AND LABOR
While Jackson struggled to make city government more businesslike, Baltimore’s business community was attempting to do the same within its own sphere. In 1924, the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, the Board of Trade, and the Export and Import Board completed negotiations to consolidate themselves into a single Baltimore Association of Commerce. Its by-laws made the city’s mayor a member of the organization’s board of directors, recognizing the close relationship between the fortunes of the city’s businesses and the success of its public authorities.9
Mayor Jackson was active in the business executives’ ongoing campaign to bring new companies to Baltimore. The most prominent result of the effort was acquisition of Montgomery Ward’s Eastern Plant. Its construction would cost $2 million (almost $25 million in current dollars). Once completed, it would employ between 1,200 and 1,500 Baltimoreans, with an annual payroll of $1.5 million. The company estimated that it would purchase $3 to $5 million in goods annually from Baltimore merchants and place additional orders with local industries for the manufacture of its “quantity purchases.”10
In 1923 alone, Baltimore added 44 new industrial plants, representing an investment of almost $4.5 million and employing over 2,700 workers. More than $11.5 million was spent during the year on the expansion of existing plants, which added 2,235 jobs.11
Baltimore had come out of the Great War riding a wave of economic expansion. It became a center for the new aircraft industry and recovered some of the ground it had lost to other industrial centers before the war. Bethlehem Steel’s Charles Schwab declared that there was “no place in the United States so susceptible for successful industrial development.” Still, the city of trade and commerce never disappeared beneath the city of industry. Baltimore’s ranking in export-import trade rose along with its status as an industrial powerhouse.12
The transport of coal was essential for the city’s industrial prosperity. Coal yards ringed the harbor. The world’s largest copper refinery, in Canton, was a ravenous consumer of electricity. The Consolidated Gas and Electricity Company depended on coal delivered by rail from Western Maryland to meet the plant’s appetite. Other industries were gas-powered, and that too was a coal by-product. The coke ovens at Sparrows Point consumed mountains of coal, and the methane generated was piped to the local gasworks. Baltimore’s industry, as Sherry Olson points out, was a creature of its “coal-hauling system.” But the system did not belong to Baltimore. Both the B&O and the Pennsylvania Railroads were owned by the Kuhn-Loeb banking group based in New York. The Consolidation Coal Company was controlled by the Rockefellers, who also held the Western Maryland and the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroads. The Baltimore Copper Smelting and Rolling Company had been bought out by the American Smelting and Refining Company in 1907, which, like Baltimore’s oil refineries, was controlled by Rockefeller interests.13 Baltimore might prosper, but it would still be a branch-office town.
While Mayor Jackson cemented his connection with local business, he faced an extended struggle with local labor. Members of unions belonging to the Building Trades Council went on strike against city construction projects in July 1925. The dispute centered on a city charter provision requiring employees who worked for the city (or city contractors) to be paid at “prevailing rates of wages.” The mayor had convened a committee of engineers from the new Department of Public Works to set wages for workers on city projects. Edward Bieretz, business agent of the Building Trades Council, charged that the committee had established “a negative wage rate” lower than the union schedule. The strike idled about 3,000 union members and halted construction on new police and fire department headquarters, repairs at the city’s Bay View Hospital, electrical work at city hall, and the building of six new public schools.14
Work on the projects resumed when the city and the Building Trades Council agreed to submit their dispute to an arbitration committee consisting of representatives of the municipality, the unions, city contractors, and the Public Improvement Commission—a body created to generate support for city loan referenda and to oversee expenditure of the borrowed funds. These four members of the committee were to select an economist to serve with them. They chose William C. Weyforth of the Political Economy Department at Johns Hopkins.15
A Sun editorialist warned Mayor Jackson that it was “a difficult job to outtalk the business agent of a labor organization,” and Edward Bieretz came close to proving it impossible. As business agent for the Building Trades Council, he was the only union man on the Wage Arbitration Commission. For a year and a half he argued tirelessly for the union wage at the commission’s tiresome weekly meetings. Its minutes record a steady stream of Bieretz’s objections, rebuttals, challenges, and points of order.16
Resolution came finally in January 1927, at a meeting where Bieretz was uncharacteristically absent and the mayor unusually unguarded. The city, said Jackson, was fortunate that the Building Trades Council had suspended its strike while the arbitration commission deliberated. The union members continued to work on new buildings for the city’s male high school, Baltimore City College, and one of its two high schools for girls. Construction also continued on the new police headquarters and a municipal office building, and work was soon to begin on the Baltimore Museum of Art. All of these projects were in jeopardy. Mayor Jackson proposed a solution: “There is only one thing to do to prevent a strike in my mind . . . this committee has either got to support me in approving the standard or union rate of wages on City work or I have got to say yes or no to the Building Trades Council and it will either result in my saying yes or in my saying no and that would result in a strike tying up of City work.”17
Stated in a less roundabout way, either the commission would support the mayor in making the union wage the prevailing wage, or the mayor would do the same unilaterally. The commission issued a resolution in support of the union wage. One city bureaucrat, chief of the Bureau of Buildings in the Department of Public Works, refused to abide by the agreement. Jackson could not be located to respond to this insubordination. He was reported to be in Philadelphia on “personal business.”18
Mayor Jackson’s term ended after the municipal election in May. He was criticized for his drinking and for awarding about a third of the city’s fire insurance coverage to his own firm. He had not indicated that he would seek another term, but Governor Ritchie and Frank Kelly took the decision out of his hands and denied him renomination in 1927. They chose instead one of Kelly’s more promising adherents—William Curran, the son of Irish immigrants, a successful attorney, and a former state senator and city council member. Curran faced no opposition in the primary, but he lost the general election to the resurrected Republican William F. Broening. The restlessness and ambitions of the Kelly and Mahon loyalists may have contributed to Curran’s defeat. The two leaders were aging, and their lieutenants were jockeying uncertainly in preparation for politics without the bosses. They may have seen Curran’s elevation as a threat to their own prospects for leadership when the current leaders were gone.19
There was something else. Curran’s disappointment in 1927 foreshadowed Al Smith’s in the presidential election of 1928. Curran’s Catholicism had divided the electorate. The Sun, in fact, regarded the mayoral race as a local test of Al Smith’s electability. At a Broening rally just days before the mayoral election, a handbill was distributed listing the religious affiliations of all candidates. Only Curran’s faith was printed in upper case: CATHOLIC. In reliably Democratic Northeast Baltimore, all three Democratic candidates for the city council were Roman Catholic. All were defeated. The Sun reported that “religion played a very important role in the election. Mr. Broening polled extremely well in the sections in which anti-Catholicism is regarded as finding its most vigorous expression in politics.” The paper’s editorialist hoped for other explanations of the outcome, but conceded that it might “be due to religious prejudice exerted through a whispering campaign” because Curran was Catholic.20
THE NEW DISORDER
In the year of Smith’s defeat, rival bosses Frank Kelly and John J. Mahon died, and Baltimore entered a new era of political factionalism. The city was a political crazy quilt. The First, Second, and Third Wards in the city’s southeast were Italian, Polish, and Democratic. The Fifth Ward, just to their northwest, was African American, Eastern European Jewish, and usually Republican. Working-class, native-born whites in the Sixth and Seventh Wards were usually Democratic. The Tenth (known as the “Old Irish”) was generally Democratic, but 17 percent of its residents were African American and Republican. The Eighth Ward in East Baltimore and the Fifteenth in West Baltimore held concentrations of the city’s ethnic Germans; they were politically independent. The city’s north central wards—the Ninth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Twenty-Seventh—were home to Baltimore’s most substantial citizens, Gentile and Jewish; many of them were attached to the GOP, but others were ideological Democrats committed to states’ rights, low tariffs, and racial segregation. The Fourteenth and Seventeenth Wards, at the city’s heart, were African American and Republican.21
Baltimore was the politically volatile center of state politics. Its disparate political fragments could realign themselves to produce variable coalitions and political outcomes, and its large population of voters meant that its electoral instability had statewide consequences. Between 1872 and 1948, the city’s presidential vote showed less consistency from one election to the next than any other subdivision in Maryland.22
The presidential election of 1928 marked a striking discontinuity across the state. Al Smith’s Catholicism drove longtime Democrats of the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland into the arms of Herbert Hoover. Baltimoreans moved in the opposite direction, though Hoover managed to win a bare majority in the city. The contest brought a surge in turnout and a reshuffling of party attachments that would solidify under the New Deal.23
After losing to Broening, William Curran abandoned the pursuit of elective office to pursue politics as a factional leader within the local Democratic organization. “I play politics,” he said, “because I like the game. Politics is my golf, my country club.” His political base lay in Southeast Baltimore’s “ethnic” neighborhoods, but Curran no longer lived there. As a successful attorney, he could afford to move his home base to genteel Roland Park.24
After 1930, Curran’s chief political rival was his fellow Democrat, former mayor and reformed alcoholic Howard W. Jackson. Curran represented ethnic and mostly Catholic Democrats; Jackson’s constituents were primarily old-stock Protestants.25 In 1929, however, the two rivals joined forces in a doomed campaign to oppose Albert Ritchie’s bid for an unprecedented fourth term as Maryland’s governor. But Governor Ritchie, widely regarded as a contender for the presidency, was too popular to stop. Curran and Jackson capitulated. In the Democratic state primary, the original backers of Ritchie squared off against late arrivals to the governor’s cause, and both opposed putative “anti-Ritchie” operatives. Ritchie himself refused to endorse anyone running for state office, to avoid complicating his presidential ambitions with factional entanglements. “Democrats fight among themselves,” noted the Baltimore Observer, “without having any real factions. There are groups but they are loosely knit. It is next to impossible to tell where one group ends and the next one begins . . . The Democratic situation in Baltimore is now more of a mess than it is anything else.”26
For Republican William Broening, the Democratic “mess” created a Republican opportunity. His second tour as mayor began under more auspicious circumstances than his first. In 1919, he had faced lopsided Democratic majorities in both branches of the city council. In 1927, the unicameral council was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and one dissident Democrat occasionally voted with the Republicans.27 This time Broening built an agenda of his own instead of carrying out the plans of his Democratic predecessor.
His aims were modest. One of his early priorities was a new city dog pound. Movie star and dog lover George Arliss, while in Baltimore for a theater engagement in 1919, had pronounced the pound “the worst I have ever seen in this country or in England.” The existing dog shelter was run for the city under contract by the Baltimore Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at a facility near Franklin Street and Calverton Avenue in West Baltimore, but for several years the society had sought to build a new pound at a different location.28
In 1928, the SPCA announced that it planned to build a new shelter on land adjacent to Roosevelt Park. The society had acquired the site several years earlier, but the plan had been rejected by Mayor Jackson because the project aroused such vehement protest among nearby residents of Hampden and Woodberry. The society apparently hoped that the new city administration would view its project more favorably. But Broening signed an ordinance authorizing condemnation and purchase of the SPCA’s land as a city park, preempting the society’s plans for a dog shelter. The city budget, however, held no funds to cover the acquisition. And there was an additional complication. Only the park board could make decisions about the purchase of parkland, and the board’s chairman announced that it had no interest in acquiring the property.29
The SPCA’s agreement with the city was scheduled to expire in 1929, and Broening announced that the city would invite competitive bids for the animal shelter contract. He allowed, perhaps unwisely, that he would not object to “the ‘proper use’ of dogs in medical colleges for scientific investigation if a humane method of killing them was employed.”30 A torrent of mail rained down on city hall, fearful that stray dogs and cats might suffer painful experimentation before humane death. Broening drafted a form letter explaining his position.31
The mayor then floated another plan for the dog pound. It would dispense with contractors. The municipal government would operate its own dog shelter at a site near Back River outside the city limits. The city had already imposed its sewage-treatment plant on the area’s residents, and they now rose up in fury against this new indignity. Led by the pastor of the neighborhood’s Lutheran church, the Back River community threatened litigation. The clergyman denounced the decisions that had made Back River “a rubbish pile for Baltimore city,” and threatened that his community would protest “violently” against the dog pound. The city decided to drop the Back River option.32
Its next proposal called for a temporary shelter not far from the original site of the SPCA dog pound in West Baltimore. The contract to operate the shelter was awarded to E. T. Forman, who operated a garbage-hauling company. But the new shelter would be adjacent to the House of the Good Shepherd, which housed a community of cloistered nuns and about 100 African American children. In a letter to Mayor Broening, the institution’s attorney complained that it would be “difficult, if not impossible, for the Sisters or inmates to secure their proper rest during the night and they would be constantly harassed by the howling of the dogs during their religious services and periods of study.” The mayor admitted that he was weary and did not know what would be done about the shelter.33
Forman surrendered his contract, which once again became the responsibility of the SPCA, and the city built a permanent shelter not far from the society’s former facility, years after the mayor retired from city hall.34 Broening, in short, got nowhere.
In his second term, Broening seems to have acquired the pugnacity to start fights, but he—or the city itself—lacked the capacity to resolve them. Baltimore was bossless. Broening’s next battle would prove even more intractable than the dog-pound fight. It centered on the selection of a route for the so-called East-West Viaduct. The project was designed to ease the flow of automobile traffic across the city and disentangle the routes of cars from those of trolleys and trains. The viaduct would carry traffic east from the city’s center, over the tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad and across the Jones Falls valley to the vicinity of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore. At the end of 1928, city engineer Charles Goob considered three trajectories for the elevated thoroughfare. One would extend Franklin Street to the northeast; a second would extend Franklin due east; and a third would run eastward from St. Paul Street along Bath Street (now Orleans Street). Engineer Goob chose the Bath Street option because, he said, it offered the cheapest and most direct route to East Baltimore.35
A surprisingly large number of persons and organizations had decided opinions about Goob’s recommendation. Representatives of the Baltimore Association of Commerce and some neighborhood-based business organizations wanted the viaduct to run northeast from Franklin Street, where it could link up with an existing streetcar line. Engineer Goob opposed running streetcars on the viaduct. Trolleys slowed automobile traffic. The business groups were confident that they and the city could resolve their differences.36
Nearly four months later, however, the mayor appointed a special committee in an attempt to resolve the deadlock. At the end of 1929, the city council declared itself unable to decide which of two alternatives it preferred. Some of its members proposed that the question be decided by public referendum, but the city solicitor advised them that the law ruled out this evasive alternative. The Municipal Art Society retained Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to provide an outsider’s detached assessment of the choices. Olmsted and his brother had designed the exclusive neighborhoods of Roland Park and Guilford and submitted a plan for parks and parkways in the area annexed in 1918. Olmsted expressed surprise at the “amount of heat and partisanship . . . on both sides of this [viaduct] question.” But it was obvious, he said, that the intensity of the dispute had led both sides to exaggerate the advantages and disadvantages of the two remaining viaduct alternatives. Olmsted concluded that Charles Goob’s Bath Street option was preferable to the Franklin Street alternatives, but added that the “merits of the general alternative propositions appear to me much more closely balanced . . . than the proponents of either have been willing to concede or even been able to recognize.”37
The Federation of Republican Women of the Twelfth Ward opted for the Bath Street plan. The Young Men’s Bohemian Democratic Club urged the mayor to adopt the Franklin Street alternative. The representative of the Old Town Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association came out for Bath Street but later changed his mind and endorsed Franklin Street.38
A compromise at the end of 1929 moved the city council to approve the Bath Street plan, but further disputes about the viaduct’s location and prolonged condemnation proceedings delayed construction. The opening ceremonies for the Orleans Street Viaduct would finally occur at the end of 1935, more than four years after Broening left city hall.39
Broening’s proposal to build a waterfront airport on landfill just east of Canton was held up even longer. The mayor initiated discussions on construction of a city airport in 1927. Controversies about its location, cost overruns, and construction problems prevented its completion until 1941.40
The economic consequences of construction delays grew more serious as the national economy faltered. After the stock market crash of 1929, Baltimoreans saw the city’s stalled building projects as an untapped source of urgently needed jobs. The president of the Baltimore Federation of Labor sent the mayor a resolution adopted by the Building Trades Council. It complained of the “unreasonable” delay in building the East-West Viaduct and requested that Broening immediately begin construction. The mayor responded that “we are anxious to expedite the work,” but nothing happened. More than a year later, a state senator urged the mayor to start construction of the viaduct, which had been “in the public mind for too long a time without a spade having yet actually turned. Put to work those who are needy . . . By all means, put an end to this present chaotic state.”41