My Story
Authors: Elizabeth J. Hauser
MY STORY
Black Squirrel Books
Photo by Bakody-Berger
BY TOM L. JOHNSON
edited by
ELIZABETH J. HAUSER
The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO, AND LONDON, ENGLAND
In cooperation with
The Western Reserve Historical Society
© 1993 by The Kent State University Press,
Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-37745
ISBN 0-87338-487-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Published in cooperation with The Western Reserve Historical Society.
Previously published by B. W. Huebsch. © 1911 by B. W. Huebsch and
Columbian Sterling Publishing Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Tom Loftin, 1854â1911.
My story / by Tom L. Johnson ; edited by Elizabeth J. Hauser.
p. cm. â (Black squirrel books)
Originally published : New York : Huebsch, 1911.
“In cooperation with the Western Reserve Historical Society.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-487-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) â
1. Johnson, Tom Loftin, 1854â1911. 2. MayorsâOhioâClevelandâ
Biography. 3. OhioâPolitics and governmentâ1865â1950.
4. Cleveland (Ohio)âPolitics and government. 5. Progressivism
(United States politics) I. Hauser, Elizabeth J. II. Western
Reserve Historical Society. III. Title. IV. Series.
F499.C653J64Â Â Â 1993
977.1 â²32041 â²092-dc20
[B]Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 92-37745
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
TO THE MEMORY OF
HENRY GEORGE
Acknowledgment is hereby made of the assistance in the preparation of this story of my friend, Elizabeth J. Hauser, without whose co-operation it would not have been written.
T
OM
L. J
OHNSON
.  Â
Cleveland, Ohio,
January 29, 1911.
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CHAPTERÂ Â Â Â Â | Â |
Johnson Company Works, early picture
Johnson Company Works, recent picture
Certificate issued by the Johnson Company
Tom L. Johnson between thirty-six and thirty-eight
The Lorain Steel Company plant
“Chance was responsible for my tent meeting campaigning”
The Johnson mansion on Euclid avenue
Surveying at Franklin Circle for three-cent fare line
Laying the first rails for the three-cent line
Pitching tent in the Public Square, Cleveland
“My enemies called my tent a circus menagerie”
A poster in the campaign of 1902
Pitching the tent in a cornfield
“The tents were sent from town to town by wagon train”
Asking Mayor's permission to play ball on streets
“By common consent I was the motorman”
Forest City Company laying temporary tracks
Tom L. Johnson entering voting booth
Characteristic group receiving election returns
T
HE
center of the city of Cleveland, Ohio, is fixed about its Public Square. This commons, a tangible reminder of the community's New England roots, also serves as a site of honor for civic monuments. Among these are the memorial to the area's Civil War soldiers, a statue of the founder and namesake of the community, Moses Cleaveland, and a statue of Tom L. Johnson, one of the city's mayors. Johnson's statue is a dignified memorial depicting the former city chief executive in a seated, almost senatorial, pose. The statue is unique in that no other mayor of the city has been so honored. Johnson is memorialized not only in bronze on the Public Square, but also on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, where a newer, less staid representation stands.
Johnson's statues, particularly the one occupying a site of civic honor, are testament to the important place he has been accorded in the annals of the city. Serving as mayor from 1901 to 1909, Johnson literally and figuratively oversaw the city's entrance into the twentieth century. More critically, his programs for urban reform marked a complete break from past political practice in Cleveland and moved him and his administration into the forefront of the Progressive movement in the United States. Johnson's administration was so effective that Lincoln Steffens characterized Cleveland as “the best governed city in the United States.”
1
Along with Hazen Pingree of
Detroit and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones of Toledo, Johnson has since come to be considered by historians as one of the principal figures in the era of Progressive urban reform.
The civic and historical canonization accorded Johnson would most likely have surprised him, for he felt his ideas and administration to be diametrically opposed to the powers of privilege, and it was individuals with privilege who had control of the civic pantheon. This conflict against the powers of the privileged economic elite, rather than personal history, forms the core of
My Story
, Johnson's autobiography.
My Story
is a chronicle of the evolution of a personal reform philosophy and its reception during Johnson's career as a United States congressman and as the chief executive of one of the most rapidly growing cities in turn-of-the-century America.
The city Johnson governed was a community just emerging from what one historian has termed “urban adolescence.” In 1860, immediately before the Civil War, the community had a population of 43,417 and an economy largely reliant on commerce and trade. During the next four decades, Cleveland, well-sited on rail and water transport routes, became an industrial metropolis of the United States. Its population of 381,768 made it the largest city in Ohio in 1900. During Johnson's mayoral administration, the population would expand by nearly 50 percent, making Cleveland a community of 569,663 citizens and the nation's sixth largest city in 1910.
2
The growing population served a geometrically expanding industrial economy. The value of industrial production, a mere $6,973,737 for Cleveland and its home county (Cuyahoga) in 1860, rose to almost $140 million for the city alone in 1900. Within the following decade, the value of production nearly doubled. Centered on core industries of iron and steel, Cleveland's factories attracted a labor force drawn from many countries around the world. The New England cultural homogeneity evidenced by the central Public Square had long since given way to a polyglot population sequestered in ethnic neighborhoods built around the factories that provided employment for their inhabitants. Three-quarters of the community's residents were either foreign-born or of foreign parentage when Tom L. Johnson took office. His challenge was not so much to govern an American city but to administer a midwestern version of the Hapsburg Empire, one with seemingly as many social and political conflicts.
Cleveland's urban adolescence produced a plethora of problems as growth and diversity outstripped a physical and social infrastructure planned for a smaller and more homogeneous community. New housing could not be built rapidly or cheaply enough for the flood of new residents. A water system, fire and police service, and urban transport designed for an antebellum community struggled to meet the needs of a city that, through annexation and expansion, grew from 7.325 square miles in 1860 to over 34 square miles some four decades later.
Many issues needed resolution. The many industries lining the Cuyahoga River, which cut through the low-lying industrial flats adjacent to the city's center, created pollution so extensive that by the early 1900s, water drawn from Lake Erie nearly a mile offshore was found to be tainted. For that matter, in some urban neighborhoods running water was not yet a
household item. A 1901 survey of homes in the lower Woodland Avenue area near the city center showed only 83 bathtubs in a community of 7,728 people.
3
Other surveys of this district showed severe overcrowding, with sixty-year-old single-family homes being subdivided to house up to nine families. Matters would be exacerbated by continued demographic growth in the next decade. By 1910, the growing population and housing shortage had caused density in another inner-city district, the Central neighborhood, to reach a level of 110 persons per acre, a figure more typical of the industrial districts of Liver-pool or other older European cities.
4
Overcrowding, poor nutrition, and bad sanitation left their marks in rising rates of tuberculosis and increased crime and juvenile delinquency.
One of the keys to alleviating neighborhood overcrowding was providing residents with inexpensive transit so that they could live away from the district in which they were employed. Efficient intracity transportation was also needed simply to allow the expanding metropolis to continue interacting. Here, too, Cleveland found itself beset with problems. Private corporations operated the city's street railways, basing their rights to do so on governmental franchises often obtained through shady deals and various political shenanigans. Twenty-two different lines operated by eight companies served the city in the early 1890s. By the mid-1890s, two companies, Cleveland
City Railway Company and the Cleveland Electric Railway Company, monopolized local ground transportation. Despite the consolidation, it was still impossible for a citizen to use a single fare to travel across the city, and, given the monopoly enjoyed by the two companies, known respectively as Little Con and Big Con, fares were set to satisfy profits rather than the poorly served traveling public. More than any other, the issue of affordable urban transportation came to characterize the reform agenda of Tom L. Johnson.
Although Johnson's mayoral administration would come to grips with many of these urban dilemmas, cognizance of the city's problems and a search for ways to address them arose before 1900. By the mid-1890s, a variety of initiatives designed to address the city's changing needs were in place. Social settlements began work in various urban neighborhoods: day nurseries were established to serve the children of working mothers. In 1900, well-to-do donors, beset by an ever-growing number of requests for support, began a program to rationalize and organize charitable contributions. And by 1910, laws had been enacted to erect bathhouses in older neighborhoods and to standardize building codes.
The impetus for these and other typical Progressive-era changes came not from government but from the private sector. Indeed, the Chamber of Commerce, the body most representative of the city's business and industrial community, was the driving force behind the enactment of bathhouse and housing code legislation. Its Committee on Benevolent Associations, established in 1900, would by 1913 evolve into the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, the predecessor agency of United Way and the Federation for Community Planning. Furthermore, it was the members of the business community that funded and guided the work of social settlements
such as Hiram House (1896), Goodrich House (1897), and Alta House (1900).
5
That the private sector acted in a conservative, measured manner was to be expected. However, while the basis of the Progressive-era response derived from a local tradition of civic stewardship dating back to the community's New England roots, its overall tenor in the 1890s and early 1900s was one of modernity, rationality, and order. This derived from the tenets of modern business, the same ones that had made Cleveland's industries grow and prosper. The new traditions of rational, scientific reform moved Cleveland squarely into the main-stream of Progressive-era change.
6
Tom Johnson was no stranger to either Cleveland or the rationalized methods of modern business when he first took up the office of mayor in 1901. Born in Kentucky in 1854 to a family that reluctantly supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War and suffered impoverishment because of that choice, Johnson necessarily entered the world of business at an early age. He became associated with the lucrative street railway business at the age of fifteen, initially working as an office boy for a Louisville company owned by family friends Bidermann and Alfred V. DuPont. By dint of hard work and inventive genius (he developed the prototype of the glass fare-box still used by urban transit systems), Johnson soon amassed a small fortune. Having invested his wealth into the business that had created it, he had become a street railway
magnate by his mid-twenties, with holdings in Indianapolis, Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Cleveland. By the time he moved to Cleveland in 1883 to better manage his local interests, he was a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of the street railway business with an extraordinary knowledge of the technical, economic, and political aspects of urban transport.
Johnson prospered in Cleveland. In addition to managing his network of street railways, he continued to tinker and invent in an effort to make his lines more efficient. His invention of the trilby grooved rail for streetcars was followed by the establishment of factories in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Lorain, Ohio, that would produce the product. By the mid-1880s, he was a wealthy member of the city's social and business elite, with a mansion on fashionable Euclid Avenue and membership in the city's prestigious Union Club.
Given this background, one would have expected him easily to mesh with the variety of Progressive reform underway in Cleveland. However, by the time he assumed the mayor's office in 1901, he had undergone a radical change, one that would cause him to abandon his personal connections with “privilege” and expend his considerable fortune in pursuing a political career through which he could promote his own reform agenda. While certain portions of that agenda, particularly a campaign for urban home rule and efficiency in government, appealed to his business peers, other aspects, including advocacy of the single tax, free trade, and municipal ownership, caused him to be considered a traitor to his class.
Johnson's conversion from capitalist to radical reformer had almost biblical overtones. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he experienced a revelation. In Johnson's case, it was the 1883 chance reading of Henry George's
Social Problems
. Intrigued, he went on to read
Progress and Poverty
. Curious about
George's advocacy of the single tax and his strong antimonopoly stand, Johnson sought out the author and soon became both a convert to his theories and a close personal friend.
7
The conversion did not cause Johnson to abandon his capitalist pursuits. Rather, he continued business as usual while beginning what could be termed an avocational association with reform, assisting, for instance, in George's New York City mayoral campaign of 1886. Johnson finally concluded that he would have to stand for public office in order to achieve the reform agenda he supported. Following an unsuccessful attempt in 1888, he was elected to Congress as a representative from Ohio's twenty-first district in 1890. His two terms saw him advocating free trade and joining a handful of other single taxers, including “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, in promoting the theory on a national level. Johnson's association with the single tax, his support of William Jennings Bryan in the 1900 presidential campaign, and his membership in the Democratic party served to distance him from his business peers. Finally, in 1901, he abandoned his business career entirely to devote his life to the cause in which he so strongly believed. That same year the Cleveland Democratic party nominated him for mayor, and he went on to win the office by a margin of over six thousand votes.
Johnson's accomplishments during his four mayoral terms have achieved an almost legendary status. Foremost, in true Progressive style, he made city government more efficient and professional. This he accomplished by surrounding himself with a cadre of assistants, appointees, and likeminded politicians, the most noted among them being Newton D. Baker,
his city solicitor. Baker, who would go on to become mayor in 1912 and, later, secretary of war under Woodrow Wilson, was Johnson's true heir apparent. Another Johnson staffer, Professor William Bemis, was recruited to run the city's water department. Bemis, an expert on taxation and utilities, had no political experience, yet with Johnson's backing he depoliticized the water department (characterized as a “nest of hacks”), increasing its efficiency and, most importantly, vastly improving its services as well as the quality of the product. Harris Cooley, a Disciples of Christ minister and Johnson's pastor, became the director of charities and correction and created an internationally recognized model penal colony, a tuberculosis sanitarium, and an infirmary for the city at what became known as the “Cooley Farms” in suburban Warrensville Township. Frederick Kohler, a discipline-minded police captain, became Johnson's chief of police, a post in which he cleaned up and professionalized the local constabulary. Lastly, Peter Witt, a single-taxer and trade unionist, became Johnson's city clerk and, more importantly, the most visable and forceful spokesman for Johnson's version of radical democracy.
