TWENTY-EIGHT

OCTOBER 24, 1887

The Detroit Wolverines win the thirteenth game of the World Series at Recreation Park. Baseball is developing into the people’s sport. The Wolverines will be driven into bankruptcy by other members of the league, upset by the team’s aggressive recruitment policy. The city is booming, serving as an industrial base for the westward expansion into Michigan and beyond. In a city of migrants, tensions are ever present between the new arrivals from countries such as Germany, Poland, and Italy, and those who had come earlier. City politics, which reflect the various struggles, produces Mayor Hazen Pingree, one of Detroit’s most superb politicians, who will become known as the “Idol of the People.” Pingree’s finest hours come when he first fights the street car monopolies and public utilities and then insists, against rabid opposition, to parcel out public gardening land to immigrant families who are in danger of dying of starvation.

In the bottom of the fourth, in game 13 of the World Series, two Detroit players, to the jaunty tunes of a band, propel a wheelbarrow filled with 520 silver dollars toward home plate at Recreation Park. As the music fades, they call for Detroit catcher Charlie Bennett to come onto the field. Three burly policemen enter and inform Bennett that they will have to take him into custody unless he takes the wheelbarrow around the bases. With the crowd in jubilation, the whole troupe parades off the field to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”1

A crowd of around four thousand supporters had packed Recreation Park to watch this pageant featured during the game between the National League’s Detroit Wolverines and the American Association’s St. Louis Browns. They were in high spirits, largely because the Detroits had already won the fifteen-game contest by winning eight games to the Browns’ three. Detroit mayor Marvin Chamberlain addressed the new world champions: “Detroit is famed for beauty, culture, intelligence, energy and enterprise. But Detroit’s base ball club has carried far and wide, even beyond the bounds of our nation, the renown of our fair city, and in honoring the club we simply honor the city.”2

Even before the regular season had ended, the teams’ business managers had agreed to play all fifteen games no matter what, so they could squeeze as much revenue from the event as possible. The Wolverines had secured their eighth win in Baltimore as the peripatetic competition meandered across the country, with games in New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Boston, as well as in the two teams’ hometowns. Now it was back in Recreation Park, constructed in 1879, one and a half blocks east of Woodward Avenue, between Fremont and Brady Street. Today, it is the location of the Detroit Medical Center, but back then it was part of the Brush Estate. Elijah Brush had bought the property in 1806 when it was still farmland, running two or three miles north from the river into open country. His son Edmund Brush developed the area in the 1850s into an upscale residential district. In the streets just south of Recreation Park, Detroit’s elite built some of the grandest houses in the city toward the end of the century, houses that a hundred years later would become derelict, their images paraded across the world as emblematic of Detroit’s decay—these days, however, Brush Park is making a comeback, and the neighborhood has once again become desirable real estate.

The Brush family had leased the area for the park, and they were financially involved in the venture, designed to host any number of recreational activities, including cricket, croquet, lawn tennis, lacrosse, and the newfangled foot-ball. It was surrounded by a half-mile trotting track where gentlemen could exercise their horses, and one corner was dedicated for use as an open-air skating rink in winter.³

The project’s backers included many of the city’s emerging industrial barons, men who had grown rich during the era of rapid growth brought by the railroads. Some were self-made, but many had inherited property that was becoming more and more valuable, providing collateral for new and profitable investments. One such man was James McMillan, whose Michigan Car Company, in partnership with John Newberry, had supplied railroad cars to the Union Army during the Civil War. They went on to invest in a wide range of new technologies, including street cars and the Detroit telephone system. McMillan and his contemporaries saw themselves as benefactors, serving the public interest by running profitable businesses. The new president of Recreation Park would now serve to bring commercial sport to the people of Detroit.4

Before 1880, cricket had been the more popular sport in Detroit, but base ball (not yet a single word) was on the ascent. Various ancestors of this game had been played in England and the colonies for centuries, but in the 1840s, the Knickerbocker Club of New York had formalized a set of rules that caught on across the country. At first, clubs were amateur organizations, serving mostly the players who enjoyed the game. By the 1860s, however, the sport had become popular enough to attract an audience, and there was money to be made from exhibition games. Many of the best amateurs decided to organize themselves into a professional association, and in 1871, the first baseball league, the National Association, was founded. Badly organized, it folded in 1875, and in 1876, the National League was established by William Hulbert, a Chicagoan involved in the retail grocery business.⁵

For all this time, Detroit had been a baseball backwater, but the worthy founders of Recreation Park decided they wanted a professional team at their facility, and so they worked with William Hollinger to create one dedicated to the park. Hollinger had gained experience in putting together a professional team in Cleveland, where he had been ousted by his business partner. With financial support from the Recreation Park Company, he organized the Hollinger Nine, Detroit’s first professional baseball team, and set up a schedule of games against a number of strong teams across the country. The plan was to join a league the following year. Interest in Detroit, however, proved modest, and once it became clear that ticket sales would not support the player salaries, the team folded. Hollinger didn’t suffer too much—a star performer at the billiard table, after 1879 he could usually be found competing at one or another of Detroit’s numerous pool halls.⁶

The following year, another member of the Recreation Park Company, William G. Thompson, decided to have a go. Thompson had recently been elected mayor of Detroit, but the job wasn’t so onerous as to prevent him from engaging in a little business on the side.7 Thompson set about raising the funds. But which league should they join? The National League’s William Hulbert sought to run his shop on good Republican principles, and he opposed drinking and gambling—two things the majority of players enjoyed a great deal. At the time, Hulbert was engineering the expulsion of the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Cincinnati, a charter member of the league, had been the first baseball team to turn professional in 1869, and its supporters, predominantly of German origin, were committed to having a few pints while watching Sunday baseball. Hulbert did not just object to the beer, he opposed playing baseball on the Lord’s day altogether.⁸ When Thompson inquired about a franchise for Detroit, organized on Hulbert’s principles, Hulbert persuaded Cincinnati to resign from the National League and to found its own, the American Association, commonly referred to as the “Beer and Whisky League.” In 1881, the newly formed Detroit Wolverines took Cincinnati’s place in the National League.⁹

In anticipation of enthusiastic crowds, the club directors spent $400 on a new grandstand seating 1,200. On opening day in May, 1,265 people showed up, and Thompson reckoned that an average gate of 1,000 would be enough to turn a profit.¹⁰ Professional baseball, however, failed to capture the city’s imagination, and in the years to follow, attendance did not live up to expectations. No doubt, the team’s mediocre performance in the league did not help. After finishing mid-table in its first season, the Wolverines’ performance deteriorated, and in 1884, they finished at the bottom of the standings, with an embarrassing .250 win percentage. By the end of the year, Thompson had decided to stand down as director, though nobody would accuse him of doing so gracefully: he declared that the financial failings of the team were not the owners’ fault but were instead to blame on “the dishonesty and ungratefulness of the players.”¹¹

Thompson’s grievances reveal much about the labor relations of the day. In 1879, Hulbert had introduced the Reserve Clause, a mechanism that effectively tied a player to his club in perpetuity as long as the owner wanted to retain his services—the employer, by contrast, was free to release any player on short notice. Relationships could get testy. The Detroit Free Press reported on Thompson’s gripes in 1884. Thompson recalled telling a player that “he was not batting as he ought.” Apparently, the player, not unreasonably, responded that if Thompson was not happy he should release him from his contract so he could play for another club.12 Thompson was scandalized: “Impudent as a bootblack,” he grumbled, promising that he would “never again, directly or indirectly, employ a man I cannot discharge”—a familiar demand from American moguls then and now.

To be sure, Thompson might have had some cause for complaint. Young male athletes in that age liked to party, which meant drinking, womanizing, and gambling. The clubs, who now tended to see the players as assets they had invested in and hence were entitled to protect, tried to impose strict discipline and even went so far as hiring private detectives to monitor their activities.¹³ But as the Detroit Free Press reported, they did not follow through on their threats of hefty fines, and the “result has been that players have gone upon the diamond so intoxicated that they could not stand still; with eyes so bleared from a night’s carouse that if a ball came to them they could see three or four…. In this condition, they have muffed, fumbled, thrown wildly, and played like chumps generally; disgusted the patrons of the game, and reduced attendance nearly to the vanishing point.”¹⁴

After Thompson resigned in a huff, another businessman, Frederick Stearns, stepped forward in 1885 to lead the Detroit club. He decided that the only way to make the club successful was to acquire the league’s best players, and in September 1885, he bought the ailing Buffalo franchise in order to acquire its stars, known as the Big Four. The strategy paid off: after coming close in 1886, they won the league pennant and the World Series in 1887. Growing success brought a growing fan base, and the games now raised gates sufficient to fund the most expensive payroll in the league.¹⁵ The Detroit Free Press, too, changed its tune, publishing this editorial:

The success of the Detroits, in capturing all the base ball honors of the year is something in which the city and citizens may justly take a good deal of pride. It may not be the highest possible preeminence for a city to have a winning nine; but it is very pleasant and gratifying, and it has an actual mercantile value. The stalwart striking and rapid running, the precise pitching and careful catching that the “boys” have done in behalf of the city, have advertised Detroit in a manner and to an extent which could not readily have been achieved in any other way.16

Stearns’s ploy, however, had angered his fellow owners. While happy to engage in sporting competition, they were not interested in business competition. They preferred to control the league in the manner of the emerging business trusts that were dominating the American economy. Businesses like Standard Oil made money by amalgamating competing enterprises and coordinating on prices while resisting organized labor. Stearns was not playing this game, and as Detroit was one of the low-drawing teams in the league, he was vulnerable to retribution. His punishment arrived when the other teams replaced the 30 percent gate share for the visiting team with a guaranteed minimum payment. The Wolverines had relied on making large returns while on the road, and the new rule was the beginning of the end. That end came very quickly. Within a year of Charlie Bennett’s triumphal procession, the directors closed down the team, citing large financial losses, and left Detroit without a professional baseball team.¹⁷

That era in American history is known as the Gilded Age for a reason. The great commercial enterprises of the times accumulated untold wealth for their owners; to this day, the names of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie evoke visions of conspicuous opulence. But the rapid economic expansion and the vast profits it enabled also generated poverty and hardship, notably among the huge immigrant populations arriving from eastern and southern Europe. The worthies of Detroit, a large fraction of whom had inherited substantial wealth, sang the still- familiar tune: anyone can make it as long as he works hard and shows a spirit of enterprise. Financial failure is moral failure; there are no legitimate workers’ grievances, just the complaints of the lazy, the ungrateful, and the dishonest. The catchphrase of the day, coined by the social Darwinian Herbert Spencer, predicted and condoned the “survival of the fittest.” Meanwhile, the wealthy organized their trusts and combines to avoid competition, keep labor down, and further increase profits. The philosophy of the Republicans was popular with the white Anglo-Saxon and Irish-American men whose families were relatively established in the country. Already substantial landowners, they prospered as the economy grew, and they dominated Michigan politics—while Detroit was largely Democratic, the city did not yet have much influence in the then overwhelmingly rural state.18

After Thompson, who as a popular Republican had bucked Detroit’s preference for Democrats, the position of mayor and many of the Common Council seats had fallen into the hands of the Democrats—better liked than their counterparts, not least because they opposed the temperance movement. That movement had become so unpopular that it began to affect Republicans’ chances at the ballot box. By 1889, they were searching for a candidate who could generate broader appeal. The leading Republican figure in the state was James McMillan, who had been elected that year as U.S. senator of Michigan, a post he would hold for the rest of his life. He led a small cabal that identified Hazen Pingree as a suitable candidate for mayor—leading to one of the greatest bait-and-switch operations in the history of American municipal politics.

The statue of Hazen Pingree, as we mentioned, sits on the corner of Woodward and Adams; he leans forward as if ready to jump up and start an argument with William Maybury, whose statue he faces—a fitting posture since there were few things Pingree relished as much as arguments. He had fought in the Civil War in the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, and he heard from Union soldiers that there were good opportunities in the growing city of Detroit. He moved there in 1865 and found work cutting leather in a shoe factory. After some years, he used his savings to buy out the owner and rose to become one of Detroit’s major manufacturers—his shop went from eight to seven hundred employees in a few years, and before you knew it, he was running one of the biggest shoe factories in the country. This was just the kind of rags-to-riches story Republicans liked. On October 31, 1889, they sent Pingree a letter, signed by nearly a hundred of the city’s prominent Republicans, asking him to stand for mayor. The Detroit Plaindealer published the letter, a remarkable document in itself:

We, the undersigned, desiring to have at the head of our city government a man whose business career will be a guarantee that the same ability shown in his business will be brought to bear in the administration of city affairs, to the end that economy shall be affected and a policy pursued which shall have in view the reduction of our present extravagant rate of taxation … , earnestly request you to allow the use of your name as a candidate for mayor, pledging to you in the event of your selection our hearty and active support to secure your election to that position.19

It soon transpired that Mayor Pingree, elected with the pledged “hearty and active support” of his fellow businessmen, had no interest in lowering anybody’s taxes, and even less interest in furthering the causes of the men who had heaved him into office. When he was done four terms later, he had emerged as the Bernie Sanders of Detroit. A fine homage by Bill Loomis sums up the high points:

Pingree got private corporations to lower the price of natural gas, telephone service and street car rates. He reconstructed the sewer system and improved Detroit’s horrible unpaved streets that were considered among the worst in the country for a big city. He constructed public schools, the first public parks, and free public baths. He exposed corruption in the school board and bribery at the private lighting company. He initiated the first publicly owned transit company and city-owned electric company after he found that Detroit was paying nearly double the rates charged in Toledo, Cleveland, Grand Rapids and Buffalo. He implemented equal tax policies for the city, and he forced down the rates for river ferries. He started competitive bidding for street car companies and he brought about electrified rapid transit. He did away with the old toll roads and began his nationally famous potato patch plan that helped feed thousands through a devastating economic depression.²⁰

Pingree was particularly enthusiastic when it came to addressing corruption in the way city contracts were handled. When he took office, Detroit had a sum of four paved streets—the rest were made of wood, much of it rotting. Bribes to council members and city inspectors were common, whether in the construction of roads, sewers, or school buildings. Pingree started out in the most straightforward manner: by establishing the best method of constructing a street, by ordering contractors to adopt best practice, and by checking their bills against their actual expenses. The business community was not pleased, and his early backers began to suspect that they had made a fateful mistake. They were relieved of all doubt when in summer of 1894, Pingree, furious about the continuing grift, had the entire school board arrested after documenting their demand for bribes in a sting operation.

As Pingree’s star fell with the monied elite, it rose with the citizens he served. His intense hatred for the railway and streetcar industry in particular made him popular with the working-class residents that depended on public transportation. Detroit’s first “urban railway” had begun operating in 1863, with carriages drawn by horses along tracks. Those streetcars soon became an essential mode of transportation for Detroit’s workers. When other cities started to electrify their streetcar systems in the 1880s, the Detroit City Railway Company, which held the monopoly franchise in the city, refused to invest—while charging the high fare of five cents a ride. In 1891, the company’s employees went on strike, and three days of bloody rioting ensued, with angry citizens overturning street cars in protest of the owners’ profiteering—among them a young James Couzens who would later pioneer Ford’s $5-per-day wage.21 The owners, furious, asked for state troops, but Pingree refused. Siding with the workers, he campaigned to end the company’s monopoly franchise and to force through lower prices. On May 12, 1891, the parties reached an agreement, and the streetcar companies had to recognize a new union, an AFL-affiliated local.

Mayor Pingree became a passionate advocate for public ownership of public transportation. He conducted studies and personally paid to send City Council members on field trips to study how other cities operated municipally owned streetcar systems. He quickly became a hero to working-class Detroit while making implacable enemies of the Republican elite. James McMillan, whose business interests in the streetcar industry were under attack, became a lifelong foe. The men who had placed their hopes for lower taxes in Hazen Pingree now furiously sought to find anybody who could challenge him for his position—to no avail. McMillan even backed a Democrat to get rid of Pingree, but he won his re-election handily—his policies earned him the honorific of the “Idol of the People,” written now into the stone of his monument.

Pingree was responding to the increasing monopolization of economic life in the United States. In 1890, the U.S. Congress had passed the Sherman Act, which prohibited collusion and the deliberate monopolization of industries. This was also a direct response to the growing threat that concerted business interests posed in American life, and Mayor Pingree would come to embody the new archetypal politician of the “Progressive Era.” Pingree viewed the emergence of monopolization as a form of extortion practiced at the expense of the working class, and his campaigns were vocally indignant about the rampant exploitation. His political convictions and his policy prescriptions would now get this Republican businessman identified as a socialist: he saw municipal control of core services, provided at the city’s expense, as the only way to forestall a revolution. He didn’t stop with streetcars but also challenged local monopolies on telephony, another business in which McMillan was heavily invested, and on the ferries that crossed the river to Canada or to Belle Isle, the lovely island the city had acquired in 1879.22 He led a successful campaign to eliminate the last of the toll roads in the city, which he saw as a regressive tax on the poor, and he took on widespread tax evasion, which was depleting the city’s budget.²³ Many of the shipping lines on the riverfront, for instance, declared their head offices to be located in landlocked Hamtramck to avoid the higher Detroit taxes—the same strategy Henry Ford would employ twenty years later when he located his assembly line to Highland Park.²⁴

Pingree’s finest hour may have come in 1894, after Detroit was hit by the nationwide economic recession following the Panic of 1893. The banks were hit hard, and manufacturers laid off workers until the male unemployment rate rose to an estimated 33 percent, with immigrants hit even harder. Street riots broke out, violently suppressed by armed police. Loomis reports that “500 men armed with shovels attacked Sheriff C.P. Collins and two deputies who emptied their revolvers into the charging mob, but soon shovels came down on them and beat them into a ‘senseless bloody mass,’ according to the Detroit Tribune.” Mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike counseled austerity—cutting public services just when they were needed the most. Pingree first responded by asking bakeries to lower the price of bread, and he created jobs by banning trucks, allowing at least some men to earn a living by hauling rock with wheelbarrows.²⁵ But none of that was enough, so Pingree turned to urban farming. Why not turn vacant city land over to anybody who wanted to feed themselves? The city’s rich, the papers, and the churches scoffed, and his fund-raising efforts came to nothing. Undeterred, the mayor sold one of his dearest possessions, a prize-winning horse, and kicked off his potato patch program on 430 acres of Detroit land. In the end, over 1,500 families were able to sustain themselves on Pingree’s Potato Patches, a program that became famous across the United States.26

Hazen Pingree’s political career was forged in the upheavals of Detroit in the early 1890s, but his vision extended far beyond the city he led. He went on to campaign nationally for municipal control and social reform, first in his capacity as mayor, and then as state governor, a position he held from 1897 until his death in London in 1901. Although few people outside of Detroit know his name now, many of his ideas would emerge over the course of the twentieth century in the form of policies crucial to a humane industrial society. Echoes of his urban farming initiative live on in modern-day Detroit, where derelict land has been turned into beloved community gardens.

Hazen Pingree also presided over the end of Detroit’s pro-baseball drought. In 1894, the Detroit Creams were launched. They played their first two seasons at League Park, a venue their owner George Vanderbeck had renovated on the East Side at Helen and Lafayette, not far from the bridge to Belle Isle. The Creams joined the Western League, organized by Ban Johnson. Even though they finished poorly in their first season, enough fans showed up to keep the business going. The opening of the 1895 season was a moving affair, in honor of Charlie Bennett—the same catcher of the old Wolverines who had played in the 1887 World Series but later had tragically lost both feet in a railroad accident. Still much beloved by Detroit baseball fans, he was enthroned behind home plate while the mayor of Detroit, Hazen Pingree, threw out the opening pitch—on May 1, the international day of labor, also known as “May Day.”²⁷ Within a few short years, the Creams would move to a new stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, named Bennett Park in Charlie’s honor; the Western League would become the American League, and the Creams, too, got a new name: the Detroit Tigers.