Tom L. Johnson Talks About Harris Cooley

from “My Story”, Tom L. Johnson’s autobiography 1912

From CSU Special Collections

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Mr. Cooley, who had been at the head of the city’s charitable and correctional institutions from the very beginning of my administration, continued in this department, the duties of the new public service board being divided upon lines which assigned to him this field for which he was so admirably adapted. If service of a higher order on humanitarian lines had ever been rendered to any municipality than that rendered by Mr. Cooley to Cleveland, I have yet to hear of it. His convictions as to the causes of poverty and crrime coincided with my own. Believing as we did that society was responsible for poverty and that poverty was the cause of much of the crime in the world, we had no enthusiasm for punishing individuals. We were agreed that the root of the evil must be destroyed, and that in the meantime delinquent men, women and children were to be cared for by the society which had wrong them – not as object of charity, but as fellow-beings who had been deprived of the opportunity to get on in the world. With this broad basis on which to build, the structure of this department of Cleveland’s city government has attracted the attention of the whole civilized world. How small the work of philanthropists with their gifts of dollars appears, compared to the work of this man who gave men hope – a man who while doing charitable things never lost sight of the fact that justice and not charity would have to solve the problems with which he was coping.

In the very beginning Mr. Cooley came to me and said, “The immediate problem that is facing me is these men in the workhouse, some three hundred of them. I’ve been preaching the Golden Rule for many years; now I’m literally challenged to put it into practice. I know very well that we shall be misunderstood, criticized and probably severely opposed if we do to these prisoners as we would be done by.”

“Well, if it’s right, go ahead and do it anyhow,” I answered, and that was the beginning of a parole system that pardoned eleven hundred and sixty men and women in the first two years of our administration. To show what an innovation this was it is well to state that in the same length of time the previous administration had pardoned eighty-four. The correctness of the principle on which the parole system is based and the good results of its practice are now so generally accepted that it could not again encounter the opposition it met when Mr. Cooley instituted it in Cleveland. The newspapers and the churches – those two might makers of public opinion – were against it, yet it was successful from the very start.

In his first annual report Mr. Cooley recommended that a farm colony be established in the country within ten or twelve miles of the city, where all the city’s charges, the old, the sick, the young and the delinquent might be cared for. To quote his own words:

“Underneath this movement back to the land are simple fundamental principles. The first is that normal environment has a strong tendency to restore men to normal mental and physical condition. The second is that the land furnishes the largest opportunities for the aged and the defective to use whatever power and the talents they possess. In shop and factory the man who cannot do his full work is crowded out. Upon the land the men past their prime, the crippled, the weak can always find some useful work.”

Before the end of his nine years’ service Mr. Cooley’s hope was in part at least realized. From time to time the city purchased land upon his recommendation until twenty-five farms – nearly two thousand acres in all – had been acquired. The city council voted to name this great acreage the Cooley Farms, and so it is known. It is divided in the Colony Farm, which has taken the place of the old infirmary or city almshouse, the Overlook Farm for tuberculosis patients, the Correction Farm for workhouse prisoners, the Highland Park Farm, the municipal cemetery. Then there is the farm of two hundred and eight-five acres at Hudson, twenty-three miles from the city, which is the Boys’ Home. This farm was the first of the city’s purchases and the land was bought at less than forty-four dollars an acre. Here in eight cottages, each in charge of a master and matron, the boys from the juvenile court find a temporary home. There is no discipline suggesting a reformatory. There are schools with some manual training in addition to the regular school curriculum, and the care of the stock and other farm work to occupy the boys. The principle is the same as that of the George Junior Republic, but adapted to municipal needs. The boys respond wonderfully to the normal environment provided here. The juvenile court, though a state institution, always had the hearty support of the city administration and the court and the Boys’ Home have cooperated most successfully.

The city’s purchase of the first eight hundred and fifty acres of the Cooley Farms, on which the whole magnificent project hinged, was almost prevented by special privilege. Everything the administration attempted had come to be the object of its attack and at the time we no longer had a majority in the council. One Monday afternoon Mr. Cooley took one of our friendly councilmen out to the farm to show it to him. As something of the greatness of the proposed work dawned upon the man he grew enthusiastic and expressed himself most feelingly in favor of it. That night at the council meeting, when the purchase of the land was under consideration, this man got up and denounced the whole plan in a speech so bitterly sarcastic that it was with extreme difficulty that we saved the day. His speech all but defeated the appropriation. Mr. Cooley was so surprised that he could hardly credit the evidence of his own senses. It was perfectly clear that the councilman had “been seen,” between the time he had visited the farm site with Mr. Cooley in the afternoon and the hour of the council meeting at night. Mr. Cooley felt, as I did, that the enemy might at least have spared this project. The appropriation was made, the farm was purchased, but the incident had sad consequences.

The councilman – a young fellow – had undoubtedly gone into his office with the thought of doing good work and making it a stepping-stone to bigger and better service. When he talked with Mr. Cooley in the afternoon it was himself, the real man in him, that spoke. He believed in Mr. Cooley’s work. What happened between that time and the hour of the council meeting we do not know, but that man was never quite the same afterwards. Somehow he had been undone. He has since died. He wasn’t bad, but Privilege came along and laid hands upon him and spoiled his chance. Its path is strewn with tragedies like this.

All of the departments under Mr. Cooley were placed on a new basis, each as radical and as rational as the parole system or the method of conducting the Boys’ Home. Over the entrance to the Old Couples’ Cottage is inscribed, “To lose money is better than to lose love,” and the old men and women, instead of being separated as formerly and simply herded until death takes them away, live together now, and useful employment is provided for all who are able to work, for idleness is the great destroyer of happiness. Especial care has been taken to better the surroundings of the crippled and the sick. The buildings on Colony Farm are of marble dust plaster finish with red tile roofs and the Spanish mission style of architecture. Beautifully located on a ridge six hundred feet above the city, they look out onto Lake Erie ten miles away. A complete picture of the buildings, even to the olive trees which are one day to grow in the court and the fountain which is to splash in the center, to the canary birds singing in gilt cages in the windows of the cottages, to the old ladies sitting at their spinning wheels in the sun and to the old men cobbling shoes or working in wood in the shops, existed in Mr. Cooley’s mind when the city bought the first of the land and long before a spadeful of earth had been turned in exacavating.

The tuberculosis sanitarium is half a mile from the colony group, protected by a forest of seventy acres on the north and northwest and looking out over open country on the other sides. Here is waged an unequal contest with a disease which science can never eliminate until the social and industrial conditions which are responsible for it are changed. A mile and a half from the Colony Farm is the Correction Farm for the workhouse prisoners. The men come and go as they like from their work on the farm, at excavating for new buildings or quarrying stone. Refractory prisoners, instead of being dealt with by the old brutalizing methods, are bathed and given clean clothes and then sent off by themselves to reflect – not to solitary confinement in dark cells but to one of the “sun dungeons” originated by Mr. Cooley. These rooms – three of them – in one of the towers of the building are painted white, and flooded with light, sunshine and fresh air. It is part of Mr. Cooley’s theory that men need just such surroundings to put them in a normal state of mind when they are feeling ill used or ugly. – “Sending them to the Thinking Tower,” he calls it. – A volume would be inadequate to give even a partial conception of this branch of our administration’s activities.

All of the land in the city farms has increased greatly in value since it was purchased. Purely as a business venture it has been a good investment. Its value as a social investment cannot be estimated.

Newton D. Baker – The Civil Warrior (documentary)

The link is here

A Teaching Cleveland Documentary. Camera, production and editing by Jeremy Borison. Special thanks to Dr. John J. Grabowski, Tom Suddes, Greg Deegan and Brent Larkin. Also to the Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland State University Special Collections and the Western Reserve Historical Society.

 

World War 1 in Cleveland from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland

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WORLD WAR I. With a population of 560,665 on the eve of World War I, Cleveland stood as the 6th-largest city in the U.S. It thrived economically on the manufacture of iron and steel, paints and varnishes, foundry and machine-shop products, and electrical machinery and supplies. Although recently surpassed by Detroit in automobile production, it still excelled in the making of auto accessories. Proof of the city’s financial importance was offered late in 1914, when Cleveland was selected as headquarters for the 4th Federal Reserve District (seeFEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF CLEVELAND). The years of U.S. neutrality were bonanza ones for Cleveland’s industries, as its workers satisfied contracts for uniforms, weapons, automobiles and trucks, and chemicals for explosives. By the fall of 1918, it was estimated that the city had produced $750 million worth of munitions in the 4 years since the war had begun. The issues of the war itself were primarily of interest to the 35% of the city’s population (1910 census) of foreign birth. War touched the city more directly with the sinking of the Lusitaniaon 8 May 1915, as 7 Clevelanders were listed among the 114 Americans killed on the torpedoed British liner. By the time Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in Mar. 1917, Clevelanders were packing war meetings in GRAYS ARMORY and aiding the U.S. Naval Reserve in the formation of Lake Erie’s “mosquito fleet” of 500 ships.


A World War I Liberty Loan drive on Public Square, July 1918. WRHS.

Upon America’s entry into the war on 6 Apr. 1917, a county draft board consisting of DANIEL E. MORGANSTARR CADWALLADER, and Dr. Walter B. Laffer was named to supervise the local application of the new Selective Service System. By the year’s end, 25,000 draftees had joined 8,000 volunteers in the area’s total of men under arms. By war’s end, almost 41,000 Clevelanders had joined the services; 1,023 of them were killed in the conflict. Led by Maj. GEO. W. CRILE, Base Hospital Unit No. 4 from Lakeside Hospital had been among the first Americans to reach France, as early as May 1917 (see LAKESIDE UNIT, WORLD WAR I). On the home front, Cleveland factories continued to supply the war effort with arms and equipment. The WHITE MOTOR CORP.. alone produced a total of 18,000 trucks for the use of the U.S. and its allies. As men stepped into the trenches and assembly lines, women were called upon to fill the breach. The CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS dropped an old ruling that forced female teachers to resign upon marriage. Gertrude Nader greeted Cedar-Fairmount line commuters in 1918 as Cleveland’s first streetcar “conductorette,” although the female conductors would later lose their jobs as the result of a postwar strike.

To coordinate the city’s war activities, Mayor HARRY L. DAVIS appointed a MAYOR’S ADVISORY WAR COMMITTEE to be financed from money from the Red Cross drive. Supervised under the umbrella of the Mayor’s Committee were such activities as the war gardens campaign, the “Four Minute Men” speakers’ bureau, and local efforts in the Treasury Dept.’s Liberty Loan drives. Clevelanders oversubscribed the first 2 Liberty Loan campaigns by $70 million. Nothing was deemed too excessive in the city’s desire to flaunt its patriotism. The Board of Education honored one of America’s allies by naming a new elementary school after Lafayette. A 1918 Flag Day Pageant in WADE PARK, witnessed by 150,000 Clevelanders, featured a SPIRIT OF `76 tableau personally directed by ARCHIBALD M. WILLARD. On the negative side, a local branch of the American Protective League was organized to aid the Dept. of Justice in locating draft “slackers,” investigating food hoarding, and suppressing alien disturbances. Some violators of the city’s first “gasless Sunday” in Sept. 1918 returned to their cars to find the tires slashed.

Despite the outward appearance of 100% Americanism, there were those who objected to the U.S. entry into the war. Members of the city’s German and Hungarian communities had hoped for continued neutrality, as did many IRISH, who saw any assistance to the Allies as helping their traditional enemy, the English. Radical political groups, including some Socialists, also advocated neutrality. Socialist Eugene Debs’s criticism of the war resulted in his arrest in Cleveland and subsequent imprisonment in 1918 (see DEBS FEDERAL COURT TRIAL). Cleveland’s ethnic communities–“hyphenated Americans” in the parlance of the day–came in for their share of patriotic pressure. An Americanization Board was established by the Mayor’s Advisory Committee, and naturalization classes were inaugurated under the direction of Dr. RAYMOND MOLEY (see AMERICANIZATION). With the cooperation of the Cleveland Board of Education, free language classes were advertised in 24 different locations. Some ethnic newspapers began printing editorials in English to circumvent a law requiring the filing of translations of war-related copy with the local postmaster.

A particularly intense trial was reserved for the city’s 132,000 residents of German extraction. The German language was dropped from the curriculum of the public elementary schools, although its study was retained on grounds of “military necessity” in the high schools. Local members of the American Protective League, in fact, campaigned to outlaw even the public use of the “enemy” language. Directors of the German American Savings Bank wisely voted to conduct future business under the less provocative nomenclature of the AMERICAN SAVINGS BANK. So many obstacles were raised for Cleveland’s German newspaper WAECHTER UND ANZEIGER that one scholar found it surprising that the paper survived the war at all. Not so lucky was the German-American president of BALDWIN-WALLACE COLLEGE, Arthur Louis Breslich, who aroused the patriotic indignation of his students and faculty at the 1917 Christmas service by attempting to lead them in the singing of the German-language version of “Silent Night.” Following protests, petitions, and parades against the president’s “passive” patriotism, Dr. Breslich was permanently suspended from his duties by the Baldwin-Wallace trustees. While the war could not end too soon for the city’s German-Americans, its hysteria lingered months beyond Armistice Day for most Clevelanders. Thanks to a premature story appearing in the CLEVELAND PRESS, Cleveland celebrated the famous “false armistice” on 7 Nov., as well as the real one 4 days later. More than half a million people still flocked to the Allied War Exposition on the lakefront the following week, where they witnessed a simulated battle and toured 3 mi. of trenches. Even Cleveland’s MAY DAY RIOTS of 1919 can be attributed at least partly to the smoldering embers of World War I patriotism.

Although Cleveland joined in the nation’s desire to return to “normalcy,” the war had left it changed in at least one major respect. It effectively blocked the flow of immigration from Europe to the nation’s urban centers, a change that would be institutionalized in the restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s. To fill the resultant labor shortages in the country’s war industries, employers turned to the disaffected African American population of the South. Partly as a result of active recruitment and partly from word-of-mouth advertisement, Cleveland’s black population grew by 308%, from 8,448 to 34,451, in the decade ending in 1920 (see AFRICAN AMERICANS). One of the local black newspapers, the CLEVELAND ADVOCATE, began a special “Industrial Page” to assist in their adjustment. Unlike their predecessors, who had tended to come from the border states and live in close proximity with other groups, the new arrivals were more likely to come from the Deep South and settle in areas of dense black concentration. “In the midst of a city that had once been proud of its integrationist tradition,” observed historian Kenneth L. Kusmer, “a black ghetto was taking shape.” World War I thus marked the end of Cleveland’s second demographic era, which saw the original New England stock leavened by the influx of the New Immigration. It ushered in a period of transition in which the European immigrants were to be assimilated and succeeded by a third wave of newcomers from the American South.

Judith G. Cetina

Cuyahoga County Archives

J. E. Vacha

Cleveland Public Schools

Last Modified: 27 Mar 1998 11:13:57 AM 

 

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