CREDIT: Walter Leedy Postcard Collection, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University
IN THE late 1800s and early 1900s, American cities were a tangle of corruption. Big business was growing in size and political influence, exploiting immigrants from abroad and migrants from rural areas in the burgeoning factory system. Bribery of local officials was widespread, giving businesses private monopolies over key public services, which were typically run inefficiently. Cities were starved for cash, but businesses paid little taxes.
With help from crusading journalists, middle-class reformers, and trade unions, a wave of progressive local officials sought to improve working and living conditions for the urban working class. Reform mayors in Cleveland, Toledo, and Cincinnati, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Jersey City, New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; Bridgeport, Connecticut, and many other cities fought to tax wealthy property owners, create municipal electricity and water utilities, and hold down transit fares. They enacted and strengthened laws to establish building codes, moves guaranteed to make them unpopular with slum landlords. They worked alongside unions and reformers to enact laws to make factories safer. During strikes, they would not allow local police to protect strikebreaking “scabs.” They expanded the number of municipal parks and recreation programs and improved local schools, especially for immigrants and their children. They hired competent administrators to run municipal agencies to clean up the corruption and inefficiency.
Tom Johnson, the mayor of Cleveland between 1901 and 1909, was the most effective of the progressive reform mayors. He was a wealthy businessman—one of a significant number of rich reformers who became “traitors” to their class, although in Johnson’s case it was a class he had climbed into through hard work and influence peddling, not one he was born into.
Johnson was a municipal entrepreneur who expanded the powers of local government to challenge business influence in Cleveland. As mayor, he lowered streetcar fares, created municipally owned public baths, adopted government inspection standards for milk and meat, and expanded the city’s park system. Johnson appointed Rev. Harris Cooley as his director of charities and correction. Cooley created a 2,000-acre farm colony outside the city; it included the Cleveland Workhouse—designed to rehabilitate, not just punish, criminals—as well as the tuberculosis sanatorium and a progressive reform school for boys.
Journalist Lincoln Steffens called Johnson “the best Mayor of the best-governed city in the United States.”
Johnson’s father had fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and his family had owned slaves. While living in Louisville, Kentucky, Johnson quit school, took an office job with a street railway company, and worked his way up to superintendent. He invented a pay-box for trolleys and became wealthy from licensing the patent. In 1876, he purchased his own railway line in Indianapolis and then invested in other firms, including steel mills and railway companies across the Midwest. He would purchase broken-down streetcars and make minimal repairs, then use his political clout and bribes to get local officials to extend the railway system, selling them the reconditioned streetcars for huge profits. He acknowledged, “I am bound to do the best I can for myself. And so I rush in and grab all the monopolies I can get my hands on.” One of Johnson’s fiercest enemies was Hazen Pingree, the reform mayor of Detroit (1890–1897), who battled Johnson over rising streetcar fares.
Johnson hated being ridiculed by Mayor Pingree and other Detroit civic leaders for his influence peddling, and he had a crisis of conscience. He began to deplore the corrupt business and political practices that had brought him wealth. He entered politics. But after serving several uneventful terms in Congress, he returned to Cleveland to run for mayor, inspired by Pingree and by the radical ideas of Henry George (author of an influential 1879 book, Progress and Poverty).
Johnson was elected Cleveland’s mayor in 1901 on a platform of “home rule, 3-cent fare, and just taxation.” Before he became mayor, he observed, “The public utility corporations are a bunch of thieves. I ought to know. I was one of them.” Johnson believed that public utilities—including electric plants, railroads, and trash-removal services—should be regulated, taxed, and even owned by local governments. “If you do not own them they in turn will own you,” he said. “They will rule your politics, corrupt your institutions and finally destroy your liberties.”
Under Johnson’s administration, the city took over garbage collection and disposal and street cleaning, eliminating the bribery and corruption associated with those activities when they had been controlled by private firms. He cleaned up Cleveland’s Water Department, lowered rates, and, as a result, improved public health. State law thwarted Johnson’s plan to establish a municipal streetcar system, but he outmaneuvered his opponents by pressuring the city’s private streetcar company to lease its properties to a municipal traction company, controlled by a five-person board appointed by the mayor.
Johnson’s greatest legacy was his successful battle to create a municipally-owned electrical utility, the Municipal Light Company, known as Muny Light. He thought a public utility would provide an alternative to—and a check on—Cleveland Electrical Illuminating Company (CEI), the powerful private company that had a monopoly at the time. Johnson’s efforts triggered the opposition of the private utilities’ owners and other business leaders, including the Chamber of Commerce. They warned it would lead to socialism. Despite occasional phases of poor management, Muny Light has provided Cleveland’s residents with relatively cheap electricity. (In 1983 its name was changed to Cleveland Public Power.) Several times since the early 1900s, Cleveland’s business leaders tried to persuade city officials to sell Muny Light. (In the 1970s, after Mayor Dennis Kucinich refused to do so, the business establishment worked successfully to defeat him for reelection.)
A Democrat, Johnson was extremely popular among Cleveland’s working-class voters and gained a national reputation as an incorruptible reformer. After only one term as mayor, Johnson became the Democrats’ candidate for Ohio governor in 1903. He campaigned for state taxation of railroad companies and other public utilities. He lost the election but continued to serve as mayor, winning three more terms.
Johnson was Cleveland’s mayor at the same time that Robert M. La Follette became governor of Wisconsin. Both paved the way for other progressive big-city mayors and governors who viewed their role as allies of labor unions, housing advocates, and other reform movements. These include Emil Seidel and Daniel Webster Hoan (Milwaukee’s Socialist Party mayors from 1910 to 1912 and from 1916 to 1940, respectively), Hiram Johnson (California’s governor from 1911 to 1917), Al Smith (New York’s governor from 1918 to 1920 and 1922 to 1928), Floyd Olson (Minnesota’s governor from 1931 to 1936), Frank Murphy (Detroit’s mayor from 1930 to 1933 and later Michigan’s governor from 1937 to 1939), and Fiorello La Guardia (New York City’s mayor from 1934 to 1945). They demonstrated the positive role that progressive and efficient government could play in improving people’s daily lives. Johnson’s Cleveland was a laboratory of Progressive Era reform that inspired activists elsewhere and laid the foundation for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.