www.teachingcleveland.org
Documentary written and produced by Gladys Haddad in conjunction with University Hospitals of Cleveland
The script developed by Gladys Haddad for the video production: “Samuel and Flora Stone Mather-Partners in Philanthropy” presented at the Western Reserve Studies Symposium in 1995
Florence Allen, Elizabeth J. Hauser and Greta Coleman 1914 wiki
Elizabeth J. Hauser: The Woman Who Wrote
Tom L. Johnson’s Autobiography
by Marian J. Morton
The pdf is here
The book is called My Story. Its cover shows Tom L. Johnson, Cleveland’s most famous, most beloved mayor, writing something – presumably this book, his autobiography. But it’s a good bet that he didn’t write much of it. The woman who did – and who helped to create this enduring self-portrait of Johnson – was Elizabeth J. Hauser. If he is Cleveland’s most famous, most beloved mayor, she should get some of the credit. This is her story. Or part of it.
VOTES FOR WOMEN
Hauser became a suffragist at age 16 when she joined the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association (OWSA). She was born in 1873 in Girard, Ohio. Her parents, David and Mary Bixler Hauser, were German immigrants. [1] Her father was a butcher.
After high school, Hauser began her career as a journalist at local newspapers, including the Warren Tribune Chronicle. She also worked closely with OWSA president, Harriet Upton Taylor, in the association’s headquarters in Warren, Ohio. In 1895, Hauser became press secretary for both the OWSA and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).[2] She considered herself a writer and journalist all her life.
When the NAWSA moved its headquarters to Warren in 1903, Hauser ran the office. She had already become a force in the Ohio suffrage movement. The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1899 described her as “probably the youngest active worker in the cause for equal rights.”[3] The newspaper also carried her call to the seventeenth annual convention of the OWSA in Cleveland in 1902: she declared, “Ohio, a great progressive commonwealth, … still holds its intelligent women, politically, in the same class as minors, lunatics and criminals.” [4]
Hauser had certainly met Johnson before she arrived in Cleveland in fall 1910. He had been converted to the cause of woman suffrage by Marie Jenney Howe, at least according to her husband Frederick C. Howe, a close friend and political ally of Johnson. [5] Johnson and Hauser both spoke at the annual convention of the OWSA in Youngstown in October 1907: “Friends and enemies alike [were] invited to attend.”[6] In 1909, after the NAWSA and Hauser moved to New York City, Johnson visited its new headquarters.
While she was working in New York, Hauser met Joseph Fels, a wealthy soap-manufacturer (Fels Naptha), who, like Johnson, had become a single taxer. Fels established a foundation to further the single tax cause, and in August 1909, he hired Hauser to work for the foundation for $2,000 a year. [7] Fels, a close friend and supporter of Johnson, probably paid her to edit My Story.
Hauser’s primary assignment when she came to Cleveland was to organize Cleveland suffragists into the Cuyahoga County Woman’s Suffrage Party. She brought “new life and hope” to the Cleveland movement, [8] quickly opening an office and calling a meeting of interested women. She also found time to help out her friend Johnson, who needed a sympathetic editor for his autobiography.
EDITING MY STORY
When Johnson served as mayor of Cleveland, 1901-1909, he joined the ranks of nationally known mayors, including Hazen Pingree of Detroit and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, who represented Progressive reform at the local level. In this context, Johnson embarked on My Story to explain how an extraordinarily successful man like himself could have been defeated by the very Cleveland voters who had made him mayor in three earlier elections. His answer: I have been beaten by “Privilege.”
During the last five months of his life, in failing health, he dictated most of the book’s contents to Hauser. She transcribed the material and organized into coherent chapters the words of a man skilled at public debate but not at writing narrative. [9] For this, he generously gave her credit in the book, and she is acknowledged also on the book’s cover. But she did far more. As she listened, wrote down, organized, and edited his words, she realized that Johnson was not telling the story of himself, or at least, not the story that Clevelanders and his fellow Progressive reformers wanted to read. Her job was to tell that story.
Johnson describes in the first chapter of My Story his youth in Kentucky – his father “a slave owner and cotton planter” [10] and reluctant supporter of the Confederacy, was left penniless by the Civil War. Johnson at age eleven went to work selling newspapers on the train, where he learned that creating a monopoly – in this case of newspapers – was the easiest way to get rich. His parents continued to move around as his father tried to figure out how to earn a living. During this time, Johnson received his “one and only full year of schooling.”[11] From there, he rose rapidly from inventing a streetcar farebox to owning streetcar lines in several cities in his early thirties and then to a mansion on Euclid Avenue. This rags to riches story is the stuff of much American autobiography. Johnson probably included it only because Hauser urged him to: “It was with extreme difficulty that he was induced to include the few delightful personal anecdotes which lend such charm to the early chapters,” she confesses. [12] And indeed, Johnson’s own introduction to the book describes not himself, but “Privilege” – “Big Business, corrupt bosses, subservient courts, pliant legislatures and an Interest-controlled press,” [13] with which he did battle and which not only defeated him but turned the book into a political treatise, instead of a story about its author.
My Story does paint lively portraits of some of Johnson’s personal heroes and political collleagues. First among them, of course, was Henry George, whose book, Social Problems, converted Johnson to the single tax that would become his primary weapon in his fight against Privilege. His conversion from businessman to reformer – although not immediate – became a turning point in his life. Johnson also admired George’s courage – his “willingness to ‘raise hell’ for the sake of a cause or to give one’s life for it.” [14] Another hero: Harrison Cooley, pastor of the Disciples of Christ congregation of which Johnson was a member, who reformed the city’s public facilities for the indigent, ill, and aged, which were named Cooley Farm in his honor. And a brilliant young lawyer, Newton D. Baker, who became Johnson’s city solicitor and later mayor and still later Secretary of War under President Woodrow Wilson. And also Peter Witt, who came to heckle Johnson and stayed to join his ranks. He became Johnson’s city clerk in 1903 and remained in Cleveland politics for decades. Witt sometimes ran interference for Johnson. At one Cleveland City Council meetings, Witt – brushing aside the reasoned arguments of lawyer Baker – went after the directors of the Cleveland Electric Street Railway Company for insulting Johnson and members of council: “Witt not only denounced the policy and methods of the railway company, charging that in the past it had bribed councilmen, corrupted legislators, used dishonest judges …. But one by one he called the men present by name and shaking his finger at them declared the responsibility of each for the particular things of which he held that man to be guilty.” [15]
Johnson describes a few of his own dramatic moments. In 1897, when he was the political manager for George’s campaign for mayor of New York, he was hissed at a public meeting in Brooklyn. He challenged “the group of hissers …. “’Well, what is it? What don’t you like…. ‘Well come on, give us some more of it. I like it, it makes me feel good’ … But I got no response,” and the men slunk away.[16] It became Johnson’s habit to publicly challenge his opponents to a debate; few men took him up on it. As mayor, he urged a councilman to pretend to take a two thousand dollar bribe so that the briber might be revealed at the next council meeting. As the councilman publicly threw the bribe on the table, the briber was arrested as he ran for the door. [17]
These were skirmishes in his long battle against Privilege, the theme of his story. “The city government belonged to the business interests generally …. The campaign funds came largely from business men who believed in a ‘business man’s government ,’ and who couldn’t or wouldn’t see that there was anything radically wrong with it.” [18] In 1907, Johnson ran for re-election against Senator Theodore Burton. Here is Johnson’s version: “Privilege was fighting with its back to the wall now and stopped at nothing in the way of abuse or persecution, not of me only but of the men associated with me. At their clubs, our boys were treated with … obvious insult…. Everywhere the campaign was the town talk. In banks and factories, in offices and stores, on the [street]cars, in the home, in the schools … Even little children in the public schools engaged in the controversy.” [19] If there is a villain in the story, it is Mark Hanna, Johnson’s long-time political and business rival. Hanna, the Republican kingmaker, denounced Johnson as a “the national leader of the Socialist party …. A vote for Johnson is a vote for chaos in this country …. Socialists like thieves steal up behind to stab.” Johnson describes Hanna as “the representative and defender of Privilege.” [20]
But Johnson writes more about his political philosophy than about political drama. Chapters are devoted to teaching “the Lessons [the 1889 flood at] Johnstown Taught” (the flood was caused by “Special Privilege”) ; “The Lessons of Monopoly” ( “law-made privilege” creates poverty, which in turn creates crime, corruption, and vice); “More Lessons of Monopoly” (the necessary corruption of private ownership of streetcars persuaded Johnson to get out of the streetcar business); “The Way Out” (Privilege blocks just taxation). Many more pages teach about his other political platform than describe his actions: the single tax, municipally owned utilities, and municipal home rule. These “lessons” overwhelm not only the narrative, but Johnson, the narrator and the supposed topic of the book.
Only in formal portraits and in some of the fine photos by Louis Van Oeyen does Johnson appear front and center: addressing a tent meeting; surveying the line for the three-cent fare streetcar; driving the first 3-cent fare streetcar; receiving victorious election returns; chatting with a young citizen; entering the voting booth; signing bonds (this is the portrait that appears on the front of the autobiography).
Johnson ends the book optimistically: “The defeats of the movement loom large …. But it is a forward movement and this is the word of cheer I would send to those taking part in it. It is in the nature of Truth never to fail.” [21] Days later, he died. And to his contemporaries, the defeats still loomed large.
Hauser then had to edit an autobiography that was not – in its original form – very much about its subject; she had to focus on Johnson, and not on the defeated Johnson but on the victorious one. It was an enormous challenge. She transcribed his materials as he lay dying, and she had to complete the book in the days shortly after his death so that it could be re-published as soon as possible in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Her editing, and especially her Foreword and her concluding chapter, she explains, are intended to “capture the human quality in him.” Johnson was a reluctant autobiographer, focused on the present, not his own past; he bowed to public pressure to write about himself only “after he became so ill that the slightest physical or mental effort was a severe strain.” [22]
Hauser makes no pretense of journalistic objectivity. Johnson was a “Big, brave, dauntless, resourceful soul.” [23] So self-effacing that only at her urging, did he include the details of his early life. So modest that he understated “the overwhelming odds against which he fought and conquered” and the “persecutions and cruelties of the street railway company and the business interests allied with it” that included the Chamber of Commerce, the retailers, the lawyers, doctors, and ministers. [24] He had great moral courage, championing causes before they became popular: municipal home rule, just taxation, initiative, referendum, and recall. And “After he became convinced of the justice of woman suffrage, he made several speeches for it.” [25] (Johnson apparently did not mention woman suffrage in the dictated materials, and Hauser did not add it.) Hauser lists the accomplishment he had omitted: an efficient city government, a building code, a forestry department, street-paving, bath-houses, parks and recreation facilities, all achieved without graft or scandal. [26] She repeats Lincoln Steffens “estimate of Mr. Johnson as ‘best mayor’ and of Cleveland as ‘the best governed city in the United States.’” [27]
Johnson also did not mention his wife, daughter, and son. Nor did Hauser.
Autobiographers don’t get to write about their own deaths, but Hauser finishes My Story for him. Hauser’s concluding chapter, “Blessed the Land That Knoweth Its Prophets Before They Die,” likens Johnson to the towering Biblical figures who spoke truth but were too often ignored. Hauser describes Johnson’s last painful months, his last public speeches to cheering audiences, his brave death on April 10, 1911, the weeping crowds who watched his passing hearse. She quotes the Cleveland Leader: “’The heart of the city stopped for two hours while the simple cortege passed through the lines of silent, grief-stricken men and women.’”[28]
Hauser had written Johnson’s eulogy. She started out to humanize him; instead she had turned him into a saint.
Newspaper headlines informed readers about Johnson’s last days: “ JOHNSON’S DEATH MATTER OF HOURS”; “TIRED OUT, JOHNSON AWAITS HIS DEATH.”[29] Barely two months after his death, the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced that it would serialize the book: “Tom L. Johnson’s own story – written by himself.” [30] Well, not exactly.
But My Story – and Hauser’s version of this heroic reformer pitted against the powerful status quo – became “the single most important surviving primary source concerning Tom L. Johnson’s role in the American reform movement and Cleveland’s reaction to his mayoral administration.”[31] She had begun his canonization. Historians, sculptors, painters, journalists, and students would follow her lead. [32]
KEEPING THE FAITH
As the book was being prepared for publication, Hauser threw herself back into her suffrage work. In June 1911, she organized a rally at Cedar Point, where she shared the speakers’ platform with her old boss, Harriet Taylor Upton, and Johnson’s colleague, Newton D. Baker. She enlisted the support of some of Cleveland’s “fashionable” women from its “first families. [33] In the 1911 Cleveland mayoral race – run without Johnson for the first time in a decade -, Hauser publicly challenged the six candidates to answer this question: “’Are you in favor of the political enfranchisement of the women of Cleveland and of Ohio?’” All but one answered in the affirmative.[34]
Anti-suffragists, however, remained opposed. In an effort to win them over, the suffragists interviewed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer in April 1912 assured its readers that women would not lose their femininity if they voted: “Why Bless Your Hearts, We’ll Be Just the Same,” read the headline. “Even the leader of the movement in Cleveland, Elizabeth Hauser, to whom has been accorded the credit of securing for the suffrage cause the official public recognition it has received, is of the womanly feminine type.” [35]
The suffragists’ immediate goal was to reform the Ohio constitution by putting on the ballot in 1912 an amendment that would have enfranchised women by changing the words that described a voter from a “white male” to “every citizen.” When enough signatures had been collected, Hauser traveled to Columbus to present the petitions to the state legislature. She opened a headquarters for the Ohio suffrage movement there and registered as its lobbyist. On the eve of the election, Hauser invoked the suffragist heroine Sojourner Truth’s dramatic testimony in Akron in 1851: “If the first woman God ever made [Eve] was strong enough to turn de world upside down all alone, dese women togedder ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again. And now dey is asking to do it, de men better let them.’” [36] Truth’s speech won great applause. But the suffrage amendment lost by 87,000 votes. In August, Hauser had predicted the suffragists’ response to possible defeat: “The forces of evil may prevail to the extent of defeating amendment 23 …, but the righteousness of the measure is not thereby defeated. Its operation is only deferred.”[37]
So Ohio suffragists tried again in 1914, this time using the referendum to amend the Ohio constitution. Hauser continued as a field organizer for the OWSA, acting as its press agent and lobbyist, and then its chairman. She spoke often and forcefully. She told her audience in Salem, Ohio, “All just government is by the consent of the governed, and you cannot deny to woman the right to vote without repudiating the Declaration of Independence.” Targeting the anti-suffragists, she argued, “There is no reason why a few sheltered, protected women, who realize nothing of the sufferings and wrongs and abuses of others of their sex, should be used as an excuse for defeating the cherished purpose of those who are awake, who would make of this a better land in which to live.”[38] A month later she went after the “liquor forces” who opposed votes for women: “The liquor interests of Ohio are out to defeat woman suffrage…. [W]e believe the time has come when we must drive our most bitter enemy from seclusion and force a fight in the open.”[39]
Another defeat in 1914 inspired suffragists to pursue a narrower goal: a state bill that would allow women to vote only in presidential elections. On its behalf, Hauser invoked Johnson: “if Tom Johnson were here, he’d be with us in this fight.” [40]This bill passed the legislature but was repealed by a referendum although the suffragists’ leading lawyer Florence Allen challenged its legality.
Ohio women – and all American women – did get the vote on August 18, 1920 after Congress and three-fourths of the states had passed the Nineteenth Amendment.
Months before, the NAWSA, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, anticipating this victory and its challenges, formally established the League of Women Voters (LWV) in February 1920. In May, Hauser returned to Cleveland to help re-organize the Cleveland Woman Suffrage Party of Greater Cleveland into the new Cleveland LWV. Suffragist leader Belle Sherwin was elected president of the local group; Hauser became a regional director. Both would soon assume leadership positions in the national LWV. Sherwin was its president, 1924-1934. Hauser served on the national board and executive council through the 1930s. In 1931, Hauser, Sherwin, Upton, and Allen, Hauser’s long-time friends and allies, were named to the national LWV Roll of Honor for their role in winning the vote.
Although the league had a broad-ranging reform agenda including minimum wage and protective legislation for women and more stringent child labor laws, its primary goal was to educate newly enfranchised women to vote and run for office to ensure that the long suffrage battle had not fought in vain. The league also championed other political reforms that Johnson might have found congenial, such as the city manager form of government, initially supported, then opposed by Baker, and proportional representational voting, supported by Witt. [41]
The LWV was non-partisan, endorsing issues, not candidates. This was a pragmatic decision since members and officers belonged to different political parties. For example, Upton was a Republican; Allen, a Democrat.
Hauser joined the Progressive Party as did Witt and Howe. She returned to Cleveland in July 1924 for the party convention, which nominated Senator Robert LaFollette for President. Identified as the president of the Ohio LWV, she was photographed with other “Progressive Bosses,” including labor leaders, trade unionists, Socialist Morris Hillquit, and Harriet Stanton Blatch, suffragist and daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. [42] LaFollette had supported woman suffrage early in his political career. The party platform endorsed familiar reform issues such as the public ownership of railways and water sources and just taxation. Hauser and Witt served on the party’s Ohio Conference for Political Action. Her connections to women voters made her valuable to Lafollette; he added political breadth to the league.
Hauser served simultaneously the League of Women Voters and the Progressive Party, seeing both as logical expressions of her hope to reform American life. Just weeks before the 1924 party convention in Cleveland, she addressed a league meeting in Buffalo on “Political Housekeeping.” “It will be a great day for this country when the women voters, conscious of their might, undertake a political clean-up with the same vigor which characterizes their housecleaning…. Dare we suggest that it may even be necessary … to get a new house if the old one cannot be made healthfully habitable.[43]” Johnson and LaFollette would have agreed about the need for a new house.
MY STORY, OUR STORY, HER STORY
Thanks to Hauser, My Story became our story. As Hauser well knew, the book was what Johnson’s devoted contemporaries wanted to read. Her version of Johnson’s story also shaped all later conversations about Johnson and inspired historians, teachers, journalists, painters, poets, film-makers, and two fine statues, one in our Public Square. The story set the bar so high for later mayors that no one – except maybe Baker – has come even close to measuring up although Dennis Kucinich deliberately cast himself as Johnson’s heir. Cleveland history buffs still like to read My Story. We love Tom Johnson, the champion of Progressive reform, “the best mayor” of our “best governed city.” And we read Hauser’s words about our “big, brave, dauntless, resourceful” leader and sigh wistfully, contrasting Cleveland’s golden years under Johnson with its decline under all the lesser mayors who followed.
Hauser’s own story, on the other hand, remains pretty much untold although she is less anonymous than the tens of thousands of her fellow suffragists. No statues, no paintings, no books celebrate her. But her name does appear on the bronze League of Women Voters National Roll of Honor. And she did become a professional writer, an applauded speaker, a seasoned organizer, an activist who hobnobbed with the important women and men of her day. Not bad for the daughter of a butcher, from a tiny Ohio town, who had only a high school education. She never became mayor of a major American city. But she helped to create one for us.
[1] https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1009638274
[2] https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1009638274
[3] Cleveland Plain Dealer (CPD), October 1, 1899: 24.
[4] CPD, September 7, 1902: 6.
[5] Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (Kent, OH, 1988), 137.
[6] CPD, October 6, 1907: 46.
Morning News, August 7, 1909: 6.
[8] Virginia Clark Abbott, The History of Woman Suffrage and the League of Women Voters in Cuyahoga County, 1911-1945 (Cleveland, 1949), 12, 15. This is the best source on the local movement in this period. See also http://teachingcleveland.org/how-cleveland-women-got-the-vote-by-marian-morton/
[9] Tom L. Johnson, My Story (My Story), edited by Elizabeth J. Hauser, second edition IKent, OHio, 1993), xxvii-xxix.
[10] My Story, 2.
[11] My Story, 7.
[12] My Story, xxviii.
[13] My Story, vi.
[14] My Story, 58.
[15] My Story, 258.
[16] My Story, 56.
[17] My Story, 214-215.
[18] My Story, 114.
[19] My Story, 270.
[20] My Story, 202-203.
[21] My Story, 294.
[22] My Story, xxviii.
[23] My Story, xxxviii.
[24] My Story, xxxviii.
[25] My Story, xxxii.
[26] My Story, xxxv.
[27] My Story, xxxvi.
[28] My Story, 313.
[29] CPD, April 8, 1911: 1; CPD, April 9: 1.
[30] CPD, June 15, 1911:12.
[31] John G. Grabowski, Forward to Second Edition, My Story, xxiii.
[32] Johnson has never lacked for hagiographers. Here are only a few.
“America’s Best Mayor,” (2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v39bCf509BQ;
Robert H Bremner, “Tom L. Johnson,” Ohio Historical Journal. Volume 59, January 1950, 1-13.
George Condon, Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret (Cleveland, 1981).
Edmund Vance Cooke, “A Man Is Passing” (1910).
Brent Larkin, Plain Dealer, August 4, 2019: E 1.
Carl Lorenz, Tom L. Johnson (New York, 1911).
Eugene E. Murdock, “Cleveland’s Johnson: Elected Mayor.” Ohio Historical Journal, Volume 62, October 1953, 323-333.
“Progressive Reform for the Common Man,” (2009)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW8sJS6UPPw.
Hoyt Landon Warner, Progressivism in Ohio 1897-1917 (Columbus: 1964.
See also these: http://teachingcleveland.org/tom-l-johnson-aggegation/
Grabowski’s Foreword to the second edition of My Story makes a more cautious assessment xi-xxv.
[33] Abbot, 12-17.
[34] CPD, August 19, 1911: 3.
[35] CPD, April 7, 1912: 8.
[36] Topeka Plain Dealer, Sept. 6, 1912: 2.
[37] CPD, August 31, 1912: 9.
[38] Salem News, June 11, 1914: 8.
[39] Akron Beacon Journal, July 13, 1914: 2.
[40] CPD, December 10, 1016: 15.
[41] Abbott, 16, 18.
[42] Casper Star Tribune, July 5, 1924: 1.
[43] Zanesville Times Signal, July 13, 1924: 15.
Marian J. Morton is professor emeritus of history at John Carroll University and the author of many articles and books on Cleveland history, including three other Arcadia titles: Cleveland Heights, Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, and Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb. She has written many essays for Teaching Cleveland Digital and for that we will be eternally grateful.
Learn how the FAIR SCHOOL FUNDING PLAN will provide an equitable, comprehensive, transparent funding model that will change the face of public education across Ohio.
The video is here
More info:
www.RealTalkLWV.org
Sponsored by League of Women Voters Ohio, Ohio Education Association, Ohio Federation of Teachers, and Ohio PTA
On December 11, 2020, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) adopted a new policy prioritizing racial and economic equity when making regional decisions about highway interchanges. NOACA is the first metropolitan planning organization (MPO) in the state to require this level of analysis for proposed highway interchange projects. Previously, decisions were made primarily focused on the impact of traffic flow and safety; with the new policy, consideration will be given to economic development, environmental justice, quality of life, transit and bike use, and racial equity.
This new policy follows decades of highway additions and expansions that encouraged suburban and exurban sprawl at the expense of the urban core – a practice that is often cited as a contributing factor to the region’s racial segregation, persistent economic inequality, generational urban poverty, and struggling school systems.
Many supporters of the policy believe it is long overdue – and hope it will lead to greater cooperation to strengthen the region as a whole, rather than pitting communities against each other in competition for jobs and new development. Others question the practicality of any continued suburban expansion given the region’s flat population growth.
Join us as three regional leaders discuss the policy and its short- and long-term implications for the future of Northeast Ohio.
The livestream will be available beginning at 12 p.m. here:
www.cityclub.org/forums/2021/02/03/sprawl-vs-smart-growth-building-an-equitable-and-thriving-region?fbclid=IwAR2GQ2U4uYR3mYhumaAoeeIUDSqfuAqID7u2O-wHAYcdYHsbrOJjB3WWmRQ
Produced and hosted by The City Club of Cleveland. Community partner: League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland
1) Fred Crawford (right) presents Thompson Trophy to aviator Roscoe Turner at Cleveland National Air Races 1934(?) (WRHS)
2) National Air Race poster 1947
3) Lewis Research Center sign at entrance Brookpark Road 1962 (CSU)
The pdf is here
Cleveland and Aviation History.
What Could Have Been and Why It Didn’t
By Michael D. Roberts
Billowy clouds, majestically back-lite by the sun’s glow, is the sky above a Cleveland Labor Day. It heralds the coming of fall, the best and most compelling season here. Its arrival is accompanied by a fury of sound as demonstrating air craft roar and roll in the heavens.
The sky holds an important history for Cleveland which for a time was the citadel of the world’s aviation achievement and adventure. And then, in later years, it played a key role in America’s race to the moon.
However, the fame, glamor and prosperity of aviation eluded Cleveland over the years as the city lost its edge in innovation, partially because of bad politics, a loss of vision, a crippling Depression and the government’s dispersion of industry in World War II. Some say the town never fully recovered from these adversities.
But as World War I drew to a close in 1918, Cleveland’s industries thrived and its development of technology continued to be dynamic, an economy driven by steel, electrical machinery, chemicals, paints, machine tools, and automobiles. In 1920, Cuyahoga County ranked as the fourth most productive manufacturing region in the country.
To support this diverse economic base was a financial infrastructure of 38 banks that encouraged the expansion of existing businesses and the development of new ventures. Equally important, was the psychological dynamic that existed in that era’s political and business leadership. It embraced the future with a progressive pride that focused on achievement and wealth.
This environment generated opportunity and the greatest source of that ingredient was skyward. World War I was the coming of the airplane and the promise of a whole new industry beckoned irresistibly to visionary entrepreneurs.
Ironically, the development of American aviation had been hindered by the very inventors of the airplane. The Wright brothers, who first few in 1903, claimed they owned patents to virtually every feature that constituted an aircraft. The brothers were litigious in protecting their interests and succeeded in stalling the efforts of others to develop an aviation industry in the United States.
While the air plane’s success in World War I foretold its future, not one American- made aircraft flew in that conflict. As a nation, the U.S. was far behind the European countries in flight.
When the United States declared war on Germany April 6, 1917, Cleveland businessman Alva T. Bradley sought a way to take advantage of his avuncular contacts in Washington. The U.S. Secretary of War was Newton D. Baker, a former Cleveland mayor and a friend. Procuring military equipment for the war was in the hands of another Cleveland businessman.
Bradley, through contacts in the sports world— he was the managing partner of the Cleveland Indians— met Glenn L. Martin one day in California.
Martin was 31 that fall in 1917, but already was recognized as an aviation pioneer, pilot and inventor. He had just endured an unpleasant business defeat when he met Bradley and was looking for a way to reconstitute his aircraft company. Bradley was searching for ways to take advantage of the war effort and bring a new industry to Cleveland.
Bradley convened Cleveland businessmen Charles Thompson, S. Livingston Mather, A.S. Mather and W.G Mather to raise enough money to lure the young aviator and his ideas to the city. The company was originally located on 9th Street near Chester Avenue.
The five investors raised $2.5 million for a new factory which was relocated at East 162nd Street and St. Clair Avenue, eight miles from downtown. It employed nearly 400. A small landing strip called Martin Field was constructed and used by the postal service as the city had yet to build an airport. When Martin obtained a contract from the army to build bombers for the war, many of his workers from California joined him in Cleveland. The new Martin company was incorporated on September 10, 1917.
Among those joining Martin would be Donald Douglas, Larry Bell, and Dutch Kindleberg who would go on to create such companies as McDonnell Douglas, Bell Helicopter, and Rockwell International. Martin’s company would eventually merge into Martin Marietta. Cleveland was poised at the cutting edge of aviation technology, but its political and business leaders failed to realize it.
By most accounts Martin was an odd character, and clearly one that would not fit in with Cleveland’s Union Club crowd. He had worked in the circus, flew in early movies, raced automobiles, set flight records and possessed a quirky personality. Even though The Cleveland Press cast him as one of the town’s most eligible bachelors, he did not date. He preferred the company of his mother, Mina, who was constantly at his side.
A tall, thin man with thick black hair, circular eye glasses, and a bit flamboyant in dress, Martin possessed a strangely aesthetic appearance. One writer noted that he had “prissy” mannerisms and was often critical of the smallest things. One business associate said of him that he was not the kind of man with whom you would want to spend a vacation.
But Martin had a zest for the good life. He drove around town with his mother in an ostentatious Stuz Biarritz automobile with snakeskin trim. They lived in a 19-room, 2.-acre mansion on Lake Shore Boulevard in Bratenahl.
The 61,000 square factory at 16800 St. Clair was completed in April and the first prototype bomber flew on August 17. In October, the army flying service accepted the plane and ordered 50 MB-1s.
The company built 20 bombers before the war ended in November of 1918 and with it the cancellation of the contract for planes. In 1919, the government continued to order a few MB-1s but the costs of production continued to rise while profits dropped and the Cleveland investors soon lost interest.
Only the intercession of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, head of army aviation, saved the Martin company from failure. Mitchell was an aviation visionary who sought to prepare the nation for the next war by investing heavily in air power. At risk to his career, he funded Martin toward those ends.
The Martin bomber did not see action in World War I, but it did find its place in aviation history when it sunk an obsolete German battleship in a highly publicized and controversial demonstration of air power promoted by Mitchell.
Through out his Cleveland years Martin had been active promoting the need for a sizable airport that could meet the future needs of a major city. Martin Field had become a liability of sorts. People complained of crashes in the neighborhood. The bombers could not be flown from the site and had to be transported by rail to the east coast at a cost of $800 per plane at which the government balked.
In January of 1925, William R. Hopkins, the city manager of Cleveland submitted a document to city council that proposed a study of the possibility of constructing a municipal airport. There were no such facilities in existence in the country.
Hopkins assembled a panel of experts with unmatched experience in aviation including Martin along with Billy Mitchell, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, of World War I fame, and other members of the army and navy air services. They were assembled to select a site for an airport. Martin had hopes that the city would provide land on the site for him to build an aircraft factory. The city dashed those hopes just as the Baltimore Industrial Bureau contacted Martin, urging he move his company to that city. In the meantime, the Navy was advising that Martin move his plant to the East Coast where seaplanes could easily be produced.
An account in the The Cleveland Press at the time quoted a business man as saying it was the banks that drove Martin from the town.
“They thought he was a screwball,” quoted one businessman.
The refusal to aid Martin was a terrible mistake, one that proved harmful to the future of the city’s industrial base. Years later Frederick C. Crawford, a contemporary and himself a significant figure in aviation here , would tell the writer that it was the plain stupidity of public officials here that resulted in Martin’s departure.
“To think that at one time we had five aviation pioneers here that would go on to create the biggest aircraft companies in the world and that we lost them is stunning,” Crawford said.
Martin would go on to flourish in Baltimore, developing remarkable technology that went into some of the best aircraft in the world. The advancements in aviation created by World II enabled the business to prosper in peacetime. The company eventually grew to be known as Martin-Marietta and employed as many as 50,000 at one point.
Meanwhile, public interest in aviation was stimulated by the airplane’s role in World War I which was coming to a close. Surplus planes and trained pilots suddenly became available for commercial enterprise. At first, army pilots flew six-cent air mail on scheduled flights. What is considered to be the first official commercial use of air mail in the U.S. occurred on August 12, 1918 when the Post Office Department initiated the service.
Cleveland was an important way point on those early air mail runs. Located between the busy postal hubs of New York and Chicago, the city was a key link in the emerging system. Cleveland’s first flights began in December of 1918 even though the city had no real airport.
At first a crude landing strip was established at Woodland Hills Park at East 93rd and Kinsman Avenue. The pilots complained of the location because of the many trees surrounding it. Landing was particular dangerous at night.
When the weather made the park location inoperable, Glen Martin offered the use of his facilities at St. Clair and East 162rd Street. Postal officials informed the city that even Martin Field was inadequate and if the city wished to remain a principle stop in the mail system it needed a real airport. The message was a wake up call for government and business officials.
For those who find government’s grind indecisive and slow, the history of Cleveland’s airport is refreshing and remarkable. Hopkins presented a plan to city council in January of 1925. The site committee which included Glenn Martin had identified a location on Cleveland’s west side that was deemed perfect. The city then promoted a $1,250,000 bond issue to purchase 1,014 acres of land from the city of Brook Park. It was located 1.6 miles from Riverside Drive to the bank of Rocky River and 1.4 miles from Brookpark Road. The original airport used only 100 acres of land and in all some 30,000 trees were cleared for its runways.
The early days at the airport consisted of a cement block building and a hastily cleared field with a 1,400 foot runway in what was then a remote part of town. On May 1, 1925 a east bound flight landed with mail destined for New York. It marked the first takeoff from the field. The airport was officially dedicated on July 1, attracting some 100,000 persons, a testimony to the era’s romance with aviation.
The airport was the first municipally owned anywhere and within two years it was deemed the busiest in the world with the traffic of eight planes every 24 hours.
In retrospect the purchase of the land with the anticipation of the growth of aviation was one of the best decisions by a Cleveland government. By 1935 the landing space had been expanded to over a thousand acres making it by far the largest airport in the world. The four largest airports in Europe—Croyden in England, LeBourget in France, and Templehof in Germany could all be placed within the perimeter of Cleveland Municipal Airport with room for yet air field similar in size.
It was not just the size of the airport that drew admiration from the aviation community, it was the technology that Cleveland Municipal Airport brought with it. Claude F. King, who would go on to be the manager of the airport, invented the first lighted night landing system, a blessing for all the aviators who flew the mail. And when then airport commissioner Major Jack Berry returned from a trip to England and witnessed the use of radio in the controlling of aircraft, he found the ubiquitous and ingenious King had already installed a radio which was the first voice two-way radio communication in the world. Now pilots could be advised of weather, field conditions and nearby air traffic.
It was King’s conception of a control tower featuring radio communication that was the principle on which every airport in the world would henceforth adopt and adapt to give aviation the global reach we know today. In 1927, plans for a lakefront airport east of the 9th Street pier were first introduced. It took 20 years, and considerable land fill until it was completed as Burke Lakefront Airport.
The world war had glamorized the airplane and the American public could not get enough of it as veteran pilots with surplus planes barnstormed across the county offering rides and entertaining crowds with aerobatics. Youths built models and the movies heightened the interest with films flavored with romance, stunts and dog fighting.
Aviation industries blossomed and developed technology that leap-forged flying forward at a tremendous rate. To test and heighten this technology air races were held and the first official national event took place on Long Island and was sponsored by The New York World in 1920.
In Cleveland two men took special interest in the idea of national air races which were circulating through various cities for nine years. Why not host an aviation extravaganza at the biggest airport in the world every year? They reasoned.
Louis W. Greve and Frederick C. Crawford both lead companies that manufactured aircraft parts and had a decided interest in promoting their products while at the same time doing the same for aviation in general. Greve was the president of the Cleveland Pneumatic Tool Company which made hydraulic landing gears. Crawford at that time was general manager of Thompson Products which later would become TRW. Crawford would preside over that company in later years.
Thompson Products had developed a sodium valve for aircraft engines that was used by Charles Lindbergh on his famous 1927 trans Atlantic flight to Paris. Years later at his 100th birthday party, Crawford told me that the night before the flight he changed the valves in the aviator’s plane, the Spirit of Saint Louis, without the Lindbergh’s knowledge.
“Lindbergh knew about flying, but not much about engineering,” Crawford said. “If I hadn’t changed those valves chances are he would never have made it.” The later publicity that the company received from those valves in that plane proved to be invaluable.
Thanks to Crawford and Greve, Cleveland was selected for the 1929 national air races. The town was beside itself as the opening ceremonies were held downtown with a parade comprised of 200 floats, 21 bands and hundreds of marchers attended by an estimated 300,000 spectators. The spectacle shut down Euclid Avenue on a hot day late in August. Three Goodyear blimps patrolled the skies above the celebrants.
The next day more than 100,000 persons attended the first flying events in a sensational display of aviation that was reported world-wide. There were demonstrations of techniques like dead stick landings, parachuting, acrobatics and a Navy team that flew tied together with rope. Charles Lindbergh piloted an open cockpit plane, banking over a standing crowd. Other aviation luminaries like Amelia Earhart appeared and each day there was a set of air races including an all woman’s contest known as the “Powder Puff Derby.”
But what seemed to seize the crowd’s attention the most was the close -course racing which would become a hallmark of the event. The first race was a flight of five laps around a 10-mile circuit marked by pylons with the finish line ending in front of the grandstands. The winner averaged 194.9 miles per hour.
That first race was sponsored by the Thompson Company and its trophy would later become emblematic of aviation’s highest achievement. Air racing proved a dangerous pursuit as six pilots lost their lives seeking glory that weekend.
In many ways that August air race was the last good time that the city would experience for years. In two months the stock market would crash and pitch America into the Great Depression followed by World War II.
In 1930 the races were held in Chicago, but because Cleveland had produced a $90,000 profit the year before the city was awarded the races for the next five years. The races were canceled during World War II, but resumed in 1946. (As a child, the writer witnessed the races that year. It left him with an indelible interest in aviation.) It was a spectacle of flight featuring powerful planes developed during the war along with the first jets. The thousands who witnessed the demonstrations and races were awe struck by the noise, beauty and force of the event.
But it was just that—the speed and power of the whole thing—that would ultimately cause the demise of the aerial extravaganza. Tragedy struck in 1949 when one of the racers missed a pylon and crashed into a house in Berea, killing a mother and child. That effectively ended high-power air racing at the Cleveland airport.
The races were important beyond the entertainment they provided. In the 1930’s, suffering from the Depression, the government had little money to spend on research and development of aircraft. The races offered an alternative with its competitive spirit and pilots willing to push the envelope in developing engines and experimenting with fuels.
This also translated to emergence of a substantial aviation industry in and around Cleveland. While there was no company that built an aircraft from the sum of its parts, there were, over the years, ancillary businesses that played a big role in developing those parts that went into flight. For instance, there was the Standard Oil salesman who accidentally discovered the Wright brothers at work in Dayton and recommended the oil that went into the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Standard Oil of Ohio would later become a major sponsor of the air races.
When Lindbergh made his famous flight to Paris, his plane was fueled with Standard Oil gas that ran through tubing made the Parker Appliance Company on Cleveland’s west side. Later, after the war, the company bought the Hannifin Manufacturing Company and it exists today as Parker Hannifin a manufacture of aircraft values, hydraulic supply systems, flight controls and other aviation products.
The company had equipment on NASA’s moon landings.
In the late 1930s the federal government, spurred by the dark events in Europe, realized that American aviation was lagging behind that of the major world powers. German, Japan and England were producing the best aircraft based on advanced technology. There was alarm and a sudden need to unlimber the nation’s celestial ingenuity.
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) announced a national competition for an aircraft-engine research laboratory, a venture that would cost an estimated $40,000,000 and be the largest such facility in the world. Some 40 cities applied for the project and the search was reduced to just five finalists, Cleveland being among them. There was plenty of land adjacent to the airport which gave the city somewhat of an edge in the matter.
Fred Crawford, not only a capable engineer, but an astute politician as well, seized on the idea like a man possessed. The laboratory would be a perfect companion for his company which ultimately became TRW. It would also raise Cleveland’s profile in the aviation community.
Crawford slyly pointed out to the search committee during hearings that Cleveland was beyond the range of German bombers and the Nazis undoubtedly would soon have aircraft that could threaten any East Coast sites that were proposed for the laboratory.
The big obstacle facing the city was electrical power. The Cleveland Electrical Illuminating Company did not have the capacity to produce the needed power to run the gigantic wind tunnel which was the soul of the laboratory. But at the last minute Crawford hit on a plan that would solve the problem.
The wind tunnel would only be employed at night when the city’s electrical grids were in moderate use and with that ingenious stroke the huge laboratory found its home.
The laboratory was dedicated on May 20, 1943 and consisted if 12 buildings and wind tunnels able to produce winds of five hundred miles per hour. The facility was able to test aircraft engines at 67 degrees below zero.
It should be noted how prescient the city’s leadership was in those days. The acquisition of an immense acreage of land in the anticipation of the future of aviation lead to the development of an aircraft industry that then attracted the NACA laboratory which would later become NASA Lewis and play an important role in the Apollo program and the landing of a man on the moon.
In many ways the work at the laboratory was vital, but esoteric in that it did not yield itself to interesting publicity, leaving the public uninformed as to what took place within its sprawling confines. Added to that, much of the work was cloaked in secrecy. It played a major role in developing the engines and fuel that enabled B-29 bombers to fly at heights that Japanese defenders could not reach resulting in an end to that terrible conflict.
With the end of World War II, aviation entered a new era with the introduction of jet engines and research on fuels that would produce supersonic speeds. In 1950 the Lewis laboratory began to experiment with liquid hydrogen, a light explosive fuel that was difficult to manage but offered the ingredients that would propel heavy loads at high speeds.
As the cold war began to grip the world, a lonely black B-57 could be seen by fishermen on Lake Erie as it scooted across summer skies, a curious sight that was shrugged off as an aerial oddity. What few knew was that the jet was was equipped with one engine that was fueled by liquid hydrogen. The engineers at Lewis were in the process of taming the volatile gas.
On October 4, 1957, the American public awoke to the stunning news that the Russians had sent a satellite into space. A sense of palatable panic seized the nation which prompted President Dwight Eisenhower to create a civilian organization that would shepherd all projects related to space into a single entity known as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It would initially be organized and lead by the leadership of the Lewis Laboratory which was converted into a NASA installation.
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy made a dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress announcing a plan to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The mission was to became known as the Apollo project and its embryonic beginnings would be found in the Cleveland scientific community.
T. Keith Glennan, president of Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) was NASA’s first administrator and the first leader of the Apollo program was Abe Silverstein, the director of the Lewis Research Center.
The real story of the moon landing on July 20, 1969 was liquid hydrogen. The Russians were never able to develop a powerful enough fuel to duplicate the feat, a crowning achievement for the
scientific team at the laboratory which is now known as NASA Glenn after astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth.
But the sad addendum to this story rested in the politics connected to the establishment of NASA. Despite all of Cleveland’s contributions to the success of space flight, it was overlooked when it came to the creation of the agency headquarters.
President Kennedy had put the space program in the hands of then Vice President Lyndon Johnson of Texas who was the masterful politician of his time. Glennan learned this early in the project.
According to his diary, Glennan received a call from Congressman Albert Thomas, a Texas Democrat, who headed the appropriations committee reviewing the NASA budget. The call dealt with where the headquarters of the Manned Space Center would be established.
“Now look here, Doctor, let’s cut the bull, Thomas says. “Your budget calls for $14 million and I am telling you that you won’t get a god-damned cent unless that laboratory is moved to Houston.”
Later Lyndon Johnson would quip that Houston was closer to the moon than Cleveland. It was a cruel demonstration of the lack of political clout that Ohio possessed in Washington.
Ambler Park 1934 (CSU), Ambler Park 1912 Map (pub domain), Ambler Park 1940 (CSU)
The Gardeners Versus the Government: The Ambler Park Skirmish
by Marian J. Morton
The pdf is here
Cleveland history buffs love the story of how feisty women’s garden clubs helped halt the federal highway destined to destroy the beautiful Shaker Lakes and nearby neighborhoods. [1] This is what the women did: in 1966, a consortium of 30 garden clubs created what is now the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes and got it designated a national education landmark; so designated, it became it an obstacle to the proposed Clark Freeway. Today, the center’s mission is to preserve and enhance the lakes’ natural environment. It’s a wonderful Goliath versus David story, or rather, a wonderful story of Goliath versus the “ladies in tennis shoes,” as the gardeners were described, the term suggesting that they were ineffectual socialites and dilettantes. The women, of course, had powerful allies: grassroots organizations that sprang up in opposition to the several proposed freeways; the mayors of Shaker and Cleveland Heights and Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, who knew very well that freeways can destroy a city; and Sun Press editor Harry Volk, whose editorials and news articles kept the issue alive from 1965 to its demise in 1970.
And whether they knew it or not, the women had history on their side: three decades earlier, the women of local garden clubs had also triumphed over the federal government. Marshalling the power of organized womanhood and their own social connections and with significant help from a sympathetic newspaper, they thwarted the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)’s threatened destruction of the natural beauties of Ambler Park.
Beginning in the early twentieth century, garden clubs organized middle- and upper-class women for the socially acceptable purpose of beautifying their own homes and gardens. Club activities – meetings, luncheons, elections, fund-raisers, plant sales, lectures – dominated the women’s pages of many newspapers. And as often happened when women got together, they looked beyond their own homes and became advocates for public causes – in this case, civic beautification and conserving the natural landscape. Consequently, they also became political players.
A local example: in the 1920s, the Shaker Garden Club began to plant wildflowers around the Shaker Lakes and in 1930, cherry trees. In 1933, the club developed a broader plan for the lakes’ region and got permission from the city of Cleveland to “improve park property adjacent to the upper Shaker Lakes.” [2] The lakes had been a gift in 1895 to Cleveland from the Shaker Heights Land Company, which had bought the Shaker community’s property and later sold it to developers Otis P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen in 1913. The proximity of the lakes to Shaker Heights’ handsome new homes greatly enhanced their value, as the Van Sweringens had hoped.
By 1933, however, the Great Depression had taken hold, and the Van Sweringens’ real estate empire had collapsed. Even affluent suburbs like Shaker and Cleveland Heights had residents so down on their luck that they needed help from the federal government. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration created the Civil Works Administration (CWA) to take men off local relief rolls and put them to work on publicly useful projects such as parks, playgrounds, schools, roads, and bridges. Cities that had projects already designed or underway got a head start.
The Shaker Garden Club’s plan for Shaker Lakes, for example, was ready to go. In December 1933, CWA workers, “directed by the City of Cleveland Parks Department … and the women of the Shaker Lakes Garden Club,” began to “transform the 300 acres of forests and meadowlands of Shaker Heights into a great city recreation area.” [3] This ambitious plan didn’t happen exactly that way, but in October 1934, the CWA had almost completed work on the landscaping and a set of stone steps on the peninsula of the upper [Horseshoe] lake. [4]
When the CWA began work on Ambler Park, however, it was a different story: gardeners clashed instead of cooperated with the federal government. The CWA project on Ambler Park was part of the larger project to improve Doan Brook, which began in the Shaker Lakes and then proceeded through Ambler Park and from there to Rockefeller and Gordon Parks. Like the Shaker Lakes, most of Ambler Park had been a gift to the city of Cleveland from a developer, Martha B. Ambler, owner of the property that became Cleveland Heights’ elegant enclave, Ambler Heights, that bordered the park on the north.
Ambler Park also had a very different terrain. The Shaker Lakes were small and man-made, on flat meadowland, and designed to run the mills of the Shaker settlement. The lakes could be easily domesticated with wild flowers and cherry trees. In contrast, much of Ambler Park ran through a steep, shale-lined ravine, which dropped sharply from the lakes on “the heights” down to Cedar Road and University Circle. Major thoroughfares flanked it on the south and north.
The park’s geography did not lend itself to baseball diamonds or tennis courts although there was a small pond at the foot of the park used for ice skating in the 1910s. By necessity and design, most of Ambler Park was kept in its natural state. Cleveland city officials in 1908 hoped to “cultivate [its] wild beauty.” [5] They boasted of its birds and summer foliage. On one sunny Sunday in 1911, 10,000 people rode the streetcar or walked to enjoy the park. [6] The most frequent visitors were the dozens of Boy Scout troops who used the park to test their wilderness skills during the 1920s.
But the untamed landscape also created dangers: children drowned in the pond or ran their sleds into trees; motorists occasionally crashed down into the ravine. And there was crime, including a sensational gangland slaying of two gamblers found trussed up, shot, and tossed into the park’s depths in 1927. And the park itself was endangered. In the mid-1920s, debris from building Baldwin Reservoir to the south was tossed down the ravine. Even worse, in 1930, County Commissioner J.H. Harris suggested that a boulevard be cut through the ravine to speed automobile traffic to and from the Heights. The Cleveland Plain Dealer editorialized about “Saving Ambler Park[:] …. there is no convincing reason why [a roadway] should be made the instrument of destroying most of what remains of Ambler Park’s glory.” [7] The idea went nowhere; Fairhill (then Fairmount) Road on the south side of the ravine was widened instead.
So park lovers were already concerned when the CWA began to enclose Doan Brook with culverts and cement walls in both Rockefeller and Ambler Parks. Photos from April 1934 show workers in Ambler Park struggling with huge chunks of concrete.[8] But the CWA’s primary goal was putting men to work; its secondary goal was to prevent erosion and keep the brook from overflowing its banks. Conserving the beauties of nature was not a priority.
Women’s gardening groups led the attack on what they saw as a destructive approach to the natural landscape. Their spokesperson was Elizabeth Ring Ireland Mather, chairman of the Cleveland parks committee of the Garden Center (now the Cleveland Botanical Gardens). She was the wife of William Gwinn Mather, a prominent industrialist and philanthropist and Cleveland’s “first citizen.” But she was a powerful civic activist in her own right. She was a founder in 1930 of the Garden Center, then located on the Wade Lagoon, and she remained deeply invested in the planning and beautification of University Circle throughout her life. [9]
In 1933, under Mather’s direction, the Garden Center became the Garden Center of Greater Cleveland. Its members included gardening and horticultural groups and women’s civic groups from several suburbs, as well as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Natural History Museum. In December, Mather, on behalf of the center’s “nearly 200,000 members,” asked that federal relief money be spent on planting trees and shrubs along state highways, not simply widening and grading them.[10] Six months later, Mather demanded that Governor George White come up with the money she believed her groups had been promised. [11]
In the meantime, she also accused Cleveland Mayor Harry L. Davis of allowing the managing of Cleveland’s parks to become a “political football”: political appointees who knew little about parks – and were almost certainly Democrats – had allowed streets and parks to become “ugly and neglected.” The city should create a non-partisan park board that would develop a comprehensive plan, informed by experts, she argued. The mayor responded that even if there were enough money for such a board, it would be composed of residents of Cleveland, “not of the Heights.” The message: suburban women had no business poking around in city business. [12] (Mather lived in Bratenahl.)
In 1935, the WPA replaced the CWA. But the approach to Ambler Park remained the same: walls and culverts.
On April 20, 1936, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Josephine Robertson blasted the WPA’s destruction of Ambler Park on page one. “Natural beauty spots in the city’s parks are being laid waste by WPA workers …. The pretty meandering brooks and rills in which many generations of children have waded have been organized between high walls like open sewers.” The habitat of woodland animals has been destroyed, she continued, and “The natural mat of leaves and mold, the wild flowers and mosses are being scraped off the banks … The natural cover for birds … is being uprooted.” Robertson interviewed strollers heartbroken and astonished that their park’s natural beauties had fallen victim to “pickaxes and shovels …. ‘The woods is gone now,’” one mourned. [13]
The very next day, Mather and the gardeners jumped in. The Garden Center’s formidable alliance of Cleveland’s social and cultural elite established a committee to “investigate WPA plans to wall up” Doan Brook through Ambler Park. Colonel Joseph H. Alexander, Cuyahoga County WPA director, responded, “It’s all a matter of taste.” The women disagreed. “Why fix nature?” they asked. When he explained that walls would prevent erosion from the thousands of gallons of water dumped into the brook from the reservoir, the gardeners pointed out that this water had been dumped into the brook for many years from the Fairmount and then the Baldwin Reservoir without damage. Further, they accused the WPA of “digging out the homes of little animals and destroying the natural vegetation along the way.” [14]
The Plain Dealer rallied to the women’s cause: “WPA workers, blunderingly trying to improve on nature in Cleveland parks, remind one of those highway engineers who are found occasionally slashing century-old trees so that a road may be made just a big straighter …. Thus many lovers of natural beauty will echo the protest against what the WPA is now doing to Ambler Park. One hopes there is landscaping as well as engineering talent in the high command of the WPA which will stay the hand of the slashers before it is too late.” [15]
In the hot seat, Cleveland City Parks Director Hugh E. Varga passed the buck, claiming that his department had “practically no check on the way projects were carried out,” although the city had apparently okayed the original plans. He promised to do better: “a committee of Cleveland’s most prominent landscape architects [would] recommend” changes to WPA plans. “I will do all I can to preserve the natural beauty of the parks.”[16]
A month later, the Plain Dealer headlines shouted, “Ambler Brook Reprieved; Prison Walls Won’t Rise.” The committee Varga had promised recommended that the eastern end of Ambler Park “should be kept in a natural condition.” The gardeners had won. Robertson breathed a sigh of relief: “the sylvan brook in Ambler Park, which was threatened with being walled up like a sewer … will babble gayly by its natural green and wooded banks.” The chipmunks and the birds are safe, Cleveland children will still wade in the shallow water.” [17]
WPA work on Ambler Park continued through the 1930s. Photographs taken in 1940– at least for public relations purposes – show graceful steps and walkways winding through the stone outcropping and woods that line the brook. [18] The western-most end of Ambler Park was culverted.
Although the WPA left a very visible built legacy in nearby parks – the landscaping and statuary of Rockefeller Park and a handsome bridge in Forest Hills Park – , the WPA left behind in Ambler Park the (almost) natural setting for which the skirmish had been fought.
The preservation of Ambler Park was a small – but early – victory for the environment and for these gardeners: it illustrated that “women in tennis shoes” can be a force to be reckoned with, that private citizens can become political actors, and that private gardens can lead to civic beautification – especially with local journalists on your side. It left a legacy of grassroots activism for women of the 1960s and beyond.
Ambler Park has changed since 1940. Today, Facebook pages show that local artists have left their own marks on its shale outcropping. [19] Mather’s gardeners might not approve. Nevertheless, thanks to her and her gardeners, the park is still a place where strollers and birdwatchers and students can admire and learn about the beauties of nature. [20]
[1] For example, Lauren R. Pacini and Laura M. Peskin, Preserving the Shaker Parklands, The Story of the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes (Cleveland, 2016).
[2] Cleveland Plain Dealer (CPD), June 1, 1933: 4)
[3] Local History Ephemera File, Shaker Heights Library.
[4] CPD, October 14, 1934: 28.
[5] CPD, February 16, 1908: 5.
[6] CPD, October 16, 1911: 12.
[7] CPD, November 18, 1930: 10.
[8] https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/press/id/14388/rec/3
[9] https://case.edu/ech/articles/m/mather-elizabeth-ring-ireland.
[10] CPD, December 5, 1933: 10.
[11] CPD, June 30, 1934: 9.
[12] CPD, May 9, 1934:14.
[13] CPD, April 20, 1936: 1, 5.
[14] CPD, April 21, 1936: 1,4.
[15] CPD, April 21, 1936:8.
[16] CPD, April 24, 1936: 1
[17] CPD, May 25,1936: 1.
[18] https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/gardens/id/258/rec/4; https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/gardens/id/235/rec/7
[19] https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1299229313445614&set=a.401484156553472&type=3&theater;
Mr. Adorjan's 6th grade science class learns about geology in the classroom and in the park just south of the school. …
Posted by Roxboro Middle School PTA on Thursday, November 15, 2012
[20] https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1299229313445614&set=a.401484156553472&type=3&theater;
5/6/20
War and Pestilence: Cleveland Confronts the “Spanish Flu” 1918
by John J. Grabowski
the lecture starts at 3:45
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VFPrN4BvvicQe-t8wYHPKEWe1XxWK05g/view
Thanks to CWRU Siegal Lifelong Learning