www.teachingcleveland.org
From the Columbus Dispatch, December 12, 2010
Mr. Ohio
George V. Voinovich’s dedication to faith, family and state set the foundation for his unprecedented 43-year run in public office, including as a mayor, governor and senatorSUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010 03:02 AM
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By Brent Larkin
Northeast Ohio should regard building a vibrant water-based economy as a priority so important that the future of the entire region depends on it. It probably does.
Water isn’t the only key to a prosperous future. World-class medical facilities, biosciences, renewable and alternative energy all show promise of contributing to our 21st- century economy. But the unquestioned key to that future is an asset whose origin dates back more than a billion years—the world’s most abundant supply of fresh water.
Of all the world’s water, 97 percent of it is salty. Another 2 percent is locked in ice or snow. Of that remaining 1 percent that is fresh water, the Great Lakes contain just under 20 percent of it. Lakes Erie, Ontario, Michigan, Huron, and Superior boast a total of 11,000 miles of shoreline. Recreation alone on the lakes is a $6 billion-a-year industry.
In considering the magnitude of the importance of Northeast Ohio’s most precious asset, consider that 46 percent of the world’s population does not have water piped into their home, that in undeveloped countries people must walk an average of 3.7 miles to get fresh water.
We have 6 quadrillion gallons (that’s 15 zeros) of it at our doorstep.
Cleveland’s past greatness was rooted in its relationship and reliance upon that water. Lake Erie and the large albeit crooked river that flows into it (the Cuyahoga) made the city a giant in manufacturing, shipbuilding and rail transportation.
Manufacturing will remain a significant part of Northeast Ohio’s economy for the foreseeable future, but it’s decline as the centerpiece of that economy has been inexorable and—when viewed with the benefit of hindsight—inevitable.
But booming economies in the West, Southwest and Southeast are now running out of the water they so desperately need to sustain their growth. Indeed, some aquifers in California are down to 25 percent of
capacity.
So as other parts of the country—and world—dry up, cities with great quantities of clean, fresh water have the potential to enjoy an economic resurgence. By 2025, an estimated one-third of the world’s population will not have access to fresh water. As a 2008 Goldman Sachs report concluded, fresh water has become “the natural resource with no substitute.” but as Northeast Ohio plans a water-based economy, that planning requires an understanding and appreciation of history. So before explaining how water can return the region to prosperity, let’s examine its paramount role in the greatness of our past.
In 1772 and again in 1786, a missionary and geographer named John Heckewelder visited the Indian-occupied territory along the Lake Erie shoreline at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. Heckewelder was captivated by the location, which featured the vast lake and countless streams feeding into the river. It was, he thought, the ideal place for a settlement as the young nation expanded west.
On his second visit, Heckewelder established a small trading post along the Cuyahoga, close to what is now known as Tinkers Creek. He also prepared a map of the region.
Relying in part on that map, in 1796 a group of eastern investors purchased from the state of Connecticut what is now the Greater Cleveland region, paying $1.2 million for about three million acres (a little more than 30 cents an acre). They named it the territory of the Western Reserve.
In May of 1796, investors in the Connecticut Land Co. designated Moses Cleaveland as their agent to visit the territory. On July 4, 1796, Cleaveland and his sailing party of about 50 men reached Conneaut. About two weeks later, the group mistakenly thought they had reached its final destination, disappointing surveyors at the small size of the river.
So unhappy was Cleaveland’s group that legend has it they named the small river the Chagrin. More likely is the Indians had already given the Chagrin its name.
Having discovered its likely error, Cleaveland’s party continued west, and on the morning of July 22, 1796, slipped into the Cuyahoga and embarked near the area of the Flats east bank, now known as Settlers Landing. On the day the Cleaveland party landed, the east bank of the Cuyahoga represented the most western point in the United States, or its territories, not controlled by Indian tribes.
Cleaveland was exhausted, but wrote that the location—with its crystal clear lake, magnificent rivers, rich forests, fertile soil, and rolling hills—exceeded investors’ expectations. Within days, Cleaveland had struck a deal with the Iroquois to plot a village east of the river, just south of Lake Erie.
Three months after arriving, Cleaveland left the city that now bears his name, absent that first “a.” He never returned.
In the late 18th century, both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were known to ponder ways of moving goods from the west (the area now known as the Midwest) to population centers in the east. Both centered on the idea of a canal that would move products east along the Ohio River, and at one point Washington was said to recommend a canal that would connect the Ohio to Lake Erie, alongside the Cuyahoga River.
Absent access to a market, farmers in and around the new village of Cleveland struggled in the town’s early years. Then, in the early 1820s, Ohio’s leaders concluded the only way to ensure economic prosperity for the entire state was to construct a canal from the Ohio river north, through Columbus, to Lake Erie.
Many thought the canal’s northern terminus should be in Warren or Sandusky. Alfred Kelley believed that terminus should be in Cleveland. And Alfred Kelley turned out to be a very persuasive man. A lawyer, county prosecutor, the youngest elected member of the legislature, and the first president (1815) of the village of Cleveland, Kelley became the state’s most outspoken and effective promoter of the Ohio & Erie Canal.
In 1821, the state legislature began deliberating issues relating to the canal’s funding, route and construction. Kelley’s relentless lobbying paid off, and in 1825 ground was broken on the northern section of the canal that would link Akron to Cleveland. On July 4, 1827, the first boat to travel the canal route from Akron arrived in the Cleveland Harbor.
By the early 1830s, construction on the canal was complete. Economic growth was now all but guaranteed. And Alfred Kelley had earned his place as one of Cleveland’s greatest citizens.
Consider the canal’s economic impact: In 1830, about three million pounds of goods traveled the canal. By 1838, that number had grown to nineteen million. Products from central Ohio’s farmlands poured into Cleveland’s port, filling the harbor with steamboats and other vessels awaiting their turns at the dock. The dramatic increase in business at the port sparked a building boom along the river and on Superior Avenue, as schools, churches, warehouses, and office space gave birth to what was becoming one of the most vibrant and successful ports on the Great Lakes.
Cleveland could offer something unique, direct access east to New York or southeast to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. No other city on the Great Lakes had water access to New York or New Orleans.
Water was pushing this new young village on a path to prosperity.
In the summer of 1860, the Cleveland Leader, one of the city’s daily newspapers, complained of the city’s plight, “We continue to make nothing and buy everything.” That was about to change. Railroads had dramatically reduced the importance of the Ohio & Erie Canal. By the start of the Civil War, five major rail lines passed through the city. At war’s end, iron from the Lake Superior region began arriving by lake carriers in record amounts.
Much was then shipped by rail to steel manufacturers in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Youngstown. But by 1868, Cleveland itself was home to more than a dozen steel rolling mills. As the industrial revolution generated startling economic growth across the country, for a time no city grew faster than Cleveland. Water and rail made Cleveland a manufacturing giant, the country’s second largest automotive city, and the largest shipbuilding port on the Great Lakes.
Cleveland’s water-based economy was huge, diverse, and—as the 20th century arrived—seemingly recession-proof. In 1860, Cleveland was a relatively tiny town of 43,000. Seventy years later, it was home to a world-class port and a population of more than 900,000—the nation’s sixth largest. Access to water had made it a vibrant and prosperous city. but the end of that prosperity—and the city’s wise use of its water was nearing the end.
Cyrus Eaton, Cleveland’s world-renowned industrialist, once said the Depression hit his hometown harder than any city in the country.
Indeed, the loss of jobs and the post-war flight to the suburbs launched Cleveland on a path of slow, albeit relentless, economic decline.
As the city began to lose residents and jobs, Cleveland also paid a price for not tending to its greatest asset. By the 1960s, both Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River became dangerously polluted, significantly damaging the Northeast Ohio fishing industry and dealing a crippling blow to the city’s reputation.
On June 22, 1969, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga caught fire. Flames on the river reached five stories high. Wooden bridges burned. The city’s water, the primary source of its greatness, made it the butt of jokes that linger to this day.
Three things must happen with our fresh water is it is to play a pivotal role in northeast Ohio’s economic recovery. We must: 1. keep that water here. 2. keep it clean. 3. rebuild the port as an economic hub.
For decades, Lake Erie and the river suffered as phosphorous and other industrial pollutants poured into the water unchecked, killing fish and other helpful species, giving the water an untenable odor, closing beaches, and spreading contamination north to the Canadian shoreline.
In 1972, Congress finally acted, passing the Clean Water Act, which regulates the discharge of pollutants into the nation’s surface waters, including lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands, and coastal areas. The act dramatically curtailed the discharge of untreated waste water and sewage from government and industrial sources, and eventually made both Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River safer for swimming and fishing.
The results were remarkable. But eventually, problems returned. Lake Erie today again faces significant problems—largely invasive species, sediment, and the vestiges of pollution. The lake and the river are back from the dead, positioned to play a vital role in the 21st-century economy. But it is worth restating that this rebirth will be sustained only if we keep our water clean, wisely build an economy around it, and prevent other parts of the country from tapping into what is Greater Cleveland’s most precious resource.
Toward that end, in 1986 Congress passed the Water Resource Development Act designed, in part, to prevent diversion of Great Lakes water. But many legal scholars thought the act vulnerable to a legal challenge, so in the mid-1990s representatives of the eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces began negotiating a basin-wide approach to decisions on water usage.
The result was the St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact—commonly called the Great Lakes Compact, a product of more than four years of negotiations by the governors, a 39-member advisory committee, and input from thousands of U.S. and Canadian citizens. Canada enacted the compact rather quickly. Approval by the eight states and the congress took more than five years.
The Ohio House twice ratified the compact, the second time by a vote of 90–3. But Ohio was one of the last states to give its final approval because the compact stalled in the Ohio Senate for more than a year. an April 27, 2008, editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer—one of many the newspaper wrote urging Ohio to ratify the agreement—angrily suggested the Senate’s foot-dragging “represents one of the most unforgivable public policy abuses perpetrated upon the people of Northeast Ohio in decades.” The paper accused more than several senators of concocting “some crackpot theory” that exposed “all of Ohio to economic harm.”
After allowing some face-saving for the Senate, Ohio became the sixth state to ratify the compact. In October of 2008, President George W. Bush signed it, just days after its approval by the U.S. House and less than a month after passing the U.S. Senate.
Now the law of the land, the Great Lakes Compact essentially bans diversion of large amounts of water outside the Great Lakes. In the United States, each of the eight Great Lakes states has a seat on a water resources council. Any water withdrawal exceeding five million gallons daily must be approved by a majority of the council. Similar diversion rules apply in Canada. In Ohio, only counties straddling the Great Lakes Basin are allowed to use Lake Erie water. Diversion approved prior to the compact’s ratification, like Akron’s large scale use of Lake Erie water, are allowed to continue.
The importance of preventing diversions is enormous, as public officials in arid parts of the country have been publicly talking of preying on Great Lakes water since the early days of the 21st century. In late 2007, when he was running for president, new Mexico Governor Bill Richardson called for a national policy to consider redistribution of water to needy areas, remarking that the West was drying up while places around the Great Lakes were “awash in water.” It was around then that a professor at the University of Alabama produced a plan to pipe water out of the Great Lakes into the Sunbelt.
David Naftzger, a former director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors, predicted in 2008 that an eventual water grab is a certainty. “Look at a map showing water shortages and population growth and see how they match up,” Naftzger told the Plain Dealer. “Now look at us and you can see a concern that, as times move on, those areas will be looking at the Great Lakes to bring them water— through either a tanker, pipeline, or natural channels.”
While Congress has the power to repeal the Great Lakes Compact, for now the world’s largest supply of fresh water appears safe. But as a great many commentators have observed, while 20th-century wars were often fought over oil, 21st-century wars will be waged over fresh water.
But even under a worst-case scenario, if some Great Lakes water ends up being diverted later in the century, the advantages enjoyed by the bountiful supply of fresh water enjoyed by just 8 of the 50 states argue strongly for future economic growth.
President Barack Obama has championed a proposal, as of this writing not yet law, that would spend an additional $5 billion over a 10-year period to continue Great Lakes cleanup as part of a plan to revive the lakes’ economic, recreation, and navigational potential. A 2008 Brookings Institute report concluded that such a cleanup would provide Cleveland with an economic boost between $2.1 billion and $3.7 billion with the overall economic benefit to the Great Lakes states estimated at a staggering $100 billion.
The logic is irrefutable. A cleaner Lake Erie for fishing, boating, swimming, and other water activities would not only drive up property values, but would also make the region more desirable for businesses creating jobs and generating wealth. As Greater Cleveland Partnership President, Joe Roman correctly noted, “With 300 miles of shoreline, Cleveland and the rest of Northern Ohio could thrive if we are able to fully realize the economic potential of this tremendous asset.”
Officials in Wisconsin figured this out years before it occurred to those in Greater Cleveland. Four of the world’s 11 largest water technology companies are located in Wisconsin. Milwaukee alone is home to 120 water-related companies. Marquette University Law School now has a water-law curriculum. And planning is underway for a $30 million lake-front headquarters of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Great Lakes Water Institute. Board members and leaders at the Great Lakes Science Center are now engaging in similar water technology efforts, but no one disputes that Greater Cleveland lags behind Milwaukee in planning for a water-based economy of the future.
Toledo Blade
Another significant problem is the troubling growth of toxic algae in Lake Erie and the spread of zebra mussels. The algae colors the water green and can be dangerous to humans, pets, and wildlife. Zebra mussels harm the fishing industry and pollute beaches. These festering problems only underscore the importance of a sizable, federally-funded Great Lakes cleanup plan.
Rebuilding Cleveland’s port as a significant shipping center is proving an even more daunting challenge. the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port authority, a vision of former Mayor Carl Stokes and Council President James Stanton, was created by county voters in 1968 to oversee what was then one of the Great Lakes’ busiest ports. For the first few decades of its existence, the port thrived. For decades, shipping raw materials to make steel was the port’s main business. But even with the steel industry’s decline, an economic impact study in the late 1990s found the port directly accounted for 4,700 jobs, generated $400 million in spending annually, and $64 million in taxes.
But the port also engaged in a obscene amount of over-ambitious thinking, devoting an inordinate amount of time on plans for a World Trade Center, cruise ship and ferry service, an aquarium and lake front retail none of which materialized. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, shipping at the port declined steadily.
With shipping revenues in a free-fall, the port has struggled to raise its $158 million share of the $600 million tab the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needs to dredge mountains of muck from the port and Cuyahoga River. Without that dredging—and a place to dump the muck, federal officials have warned that the Cleveland harbor could be shut down by 2015.
By the summer of 2010, Cleveland’s port was in clear crisis mode. the nine-member board fired its director and hired a new one. it scrapped a costly, $1 billion plan to build a new port several miles east of downtown. there was no clear game plan to raise the funds needed for dredging, nor one to revive its slumping shipping business. adding to those woes was the city’s need to secure federal funding to fix a crumbling slope above the river that threatened shipping to sites downstream.
In a series of news stories and editorials, The Plain Dealer outlined the port’s many “immense challenges,” underscored the need for dramatic change, and correctly linked the need for that change with the necessity of the port playing a major role in reviving Greater Cleveland’s economy.
An old, now somewhat trite, saying holds that, in determining the success of a business, the three most important factors are always location, location, and location. The visionary pioneers who settled this territory more than 200 years ago understood that.
Northeast Ohio and, indeed, the entire Great Lakes region, has something the rest of the world desperately needs. What’s more, we have a lot of it.
More than ever before, the fresh water that served us so well in the past represents our best hope for the future.
Bibliography
archives, The Atlantic “Water Summit.” October 29, 2009.
archives, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 2009.
archives, The Plain Dealer. 1991–2010.
Miller, Carol Poh and Robert Wheeler. Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796–1996. 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Rose, William Ganson. Cleveland: The Making of a City. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1950. reprinted with a new introduction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990.
Van Tassel, David D. and John J. Grabowski. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Wallen, James. Cleveland’s Golden Story: A Chronicle of Hearts that Hoped, Minds that Planned and Hands that Toiled, to Make a City “Great and Glorious.” Cleveland: William Taylor & Son, 1920.
Water: Our Thirsty World. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, April 2010.
Further resources: http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/about/
Sunday July 5, 1998 Plain Dealer article about Fred Kohler
– FRED KOHLER –
Fred Kohler was Cleveland’s most colorful mayor – and the colors were orange and black. They showed up on park benches, waste baskets, city buildings, hydrants and especially signs like the one above.
But even without paint, nobody was as colorful as Kohler. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt called him “the best police chief in the United States.” He was fired in disgrace for “gross immorality” in 1913, and defeated by voters in 1913, 1914, 1915 and 1916.
Then, in 1921, he was elected mayor in what The Plain Dealer called “the most bizarre and dramatic mayoralty fight Cleveland has ever witnessed” – one in which he was opposed by Democrats, Republicans, newspapers, ministers and civic organizations. And one in which he had no organization, no campaign funds and made no speeches and no promises.
Fred Kohler dropped out of school in the sixth grade to work in his father’s business. In 1889, at the age of 25, he achieved his boyhood dream of becoming a police officer. He rose quickly through the ranks and in 1903 was named chief by Democratic Mayor Tom L. Johnson, even though Kohler himself was a Republican.
He built a national reputation as a spit-and-polish chief who wielded an ax on vice raids while adopting a “golden rule” policy in which first-time minor offenders were released with a warning. He put houses of prostitution out of business by stationing an officer at the door to take the names and addresses of their customers.
In 1910, Mayor Herman Baehr tried to fire Kohler on 25 charges of drunkenness, immorality and conduct unbecoming a police officer, but the Civil Service Commission exonerated him. He was not as fortunate in 1913, after a citizen returned home to find the police chief in bed with his wife. There was a messy divorce and ministers demanded Kohler’s dismissal.
This time, the Civil Service Commission fired him. “All right, boys,” Kohler told reporters. “I’ll be leading the Police Department down Euclid Ave. again someday.”
He promptly ran for councilman in his home ward. To everyone’s surprise, he finished first in first-place votes but lost when second- and third-place votes were counted.
Undaunted, he ran for sheriff the next year and lost. Then he ran for clerk of Municipal Court and lost. Then he ran for county commissioner and won the Republican nomination but lost the general election. In 1918, however, he was elected county commissioner – the only Republican to win that year – and in 1920, led all vote-getters in winning a second term.
That made Kohler a contender for mayor. Still, nobody gave him a chance in the seven-candidate field, especially since he shunned all public appearances. Instead, he trod the streets for months, ringing doorbells and telling citizens, “Hello, I’m Kohler. I’m running for mayor. If you vote for me, I’ll appreciate it. If you don’t, I’ll never know and we can still be good friends just the same.”
Kohler amazed the experts by finishing first, 2,500 votes ahead of Mayor William Fitzgerald. He amazed them again by naming a highly qualified Cabinet without even asking his appointees whether they had voted for him. His first order to them: Prepare a list of unnecessary city workers.
Before the month was out, he had fired 400 employees, cut the pay of the rest by 10 percent, forced them to punch time clocks and notified city unions that existing labor agreements would not be renewed. When the unions threatened a general strike, Kohler said the city would close down if it had to. Critics tried to recall him, but failed to collect the 15,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot.
Anticipating Dennis Kucinich by 65 years, he called a council investigation “a bunch of pinheads seeking cheap publicity.” At the dedication of Public Hall, he denounced “uplifters” (the do-gooders of that era) who got in the way of “practical roughnecks” like himself. Three of his directors resigned after run-ins.
He rejected plans to buy new guns for police, telling them instead to keep the old ones clean. He put signs in city elevators: “Please keep your hats on so that you may have better service.”
But he also stepped up paving, cut streetcar fares, put up street signs, made police shine their shoes, bought an elephant for the zoo, ordered cleanups of city property and told employees they would not be forced to contribute to the Community Fund. And he kept citizens informed of his accomplishments with orange-and-black signs such as, “Tax and Rent Payers have received a dollar’s worth of value for every dollar spent – FRED KOHLER , MAYOR.”
At the end of his term, Kohler declared he had saved taxpayers $1.8 million. Nobody knows whether he would have been re-elected – the city manager plan took effect at the beginning of 1924 – but he won two terms as county sheriff after leaving City Hall. The second ended in turmoil when he was reprimanded for skimping on prisoners’ food and using the money thus saved for other purposes instead of returning it to the county.
Years later, he reflected on his career: “Yes, sir, I wouldn’t mind going all over it again, because I know I was right. And if I did, I’d tell all the old crowd to go to hell – newspapers, council, uplifters, tipoff guys, political hangers-on, bookbugs, ingrates – the whole crowd. I’d paint everything orange again.
“I know I’ve been accused of being high-handed, but I was elected mayor, not anybody else. It was my picnic or my funeral.”
Article about Cleveland City Manager Plan. Plain Dealer July 26, 1998
CITY MANAGER PLAN A FLOP CORRUPTION, POLITICS STILL RULE DESPITE HOPKINS’ LEADERSHIP
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, July 26, 1998
Author: Fred McGunagle
It had the support of “all the best people” – the Board of Real Estate Dealers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Civic League (forerunner of the Citizens League). But as the city manager plan entered its second year, Clevelanders were starting to have second thoughts.
As proposed, the plan would take politics out of city government. Instead of an elected mayor answerable to dozens of diverse groups, there would be a professional manager answerable to a policy-making board, much like a corporation.
The board would be a revised City Council of 25, smaller than the old Council but elected from only four districts. It would end the evils of politics – just as Prohibition was to end the evil of the saloon.
And just like Prohibition, the city manager plan in Cleveland turned out to be a disaster.
A cynical patronage deal between Republican and Democratic bosses ensured that the politicians would be more firmly in control than ever. The city manager was accused of acting like a czar. Councilmen went to prison for corruption and a former councilman expected to turn state’s evidence was murdered just before his court appearance.
The plan was passed by voters in November 1921, to take effect with the elections of 1923. “They were immensely proud of themselves for having solved their municipal ills by taking this new cure in one big dose,” Richard L. Maher wrote in “Our Fair City,” a 1947 book. “They didn’t bother to set up a watchdog. They left the plan to shift for itself.”
Maurice Maschke and Burr Gongwer knew how to shift for themselves. Maschke had been Republican boss since 1914. Gongwer, who had been The Plain Dealer’s politics reporter during the Tom L. Johnson administration, had succeeded Newton D. Baker as head of the declining Democratic organization. The two agreed that Maschke would get 60 percent of city jobs and Gongwer the other 40 percent. On Maschke’s orders, City Council elected William R. Hopkins city manager.
The choice was widely applauded. Hopkins, often described as “a square-jawed Welshman,” had served a term as a Republican councilman in 1897-99 and thereafter was a successful industrial developer and businessman. His vision of the future moved citizens; although he failed to make Cleveland a stopping point on a worldwide dirigible route, he did open Cleveland Municipal Airport (which, in 1951, was renamed Cleveland Hopkins Airport).
Harry L. Davis, the former mayor and governor, led a fight in 1927 to knock out the manager plan. Both parties, newspapers and civic groups rallied to its defense. “The manager plan was saved; or, rather, Hopkins was saved, for he immediately assumed greater powers than before,” Maher wrote. “Clevelanders learned they had a manager who was not interested in background roles. He was determined to be the star – and he was.”
That was fine with Maschke, as long as Hopkins hired the people Maschke wanted hired and took care of Maschke’s friends.
M.J. and O.P. Van Sweringen were very much Maschke’s friends. In the process of building their railroad and transit empire, along with the Terminal Group of buildings, “the Vans” wanted a railroad bridge in a place that interfered with plans for straightening the Cuyahoga River.
Hopkins objected, but Maschke straightened out the city manager – or so he thought. While Maschke was out of town, Hopkins tried to force the issue. Maschke hurried back and, Maher reported, “summoned the members of the Council, cracked the whip for the Van Sweringens, and Hopkins was defeated.”
When another vote to scrap the manager plan was put on the ballot in 1928, Maschke did little. It was Hopkins and the Democrats who led the battle that saved it, though by a narrower margin than before. Hopkins began handing out jobs to Democrats and independents as he pleased.
The margin was even narrower in 1929, but while the Democrats campaigned to save the manager plan, Maschke campaigned to elect a Republican Council, which didn’t need help from Democrats and independents.
He succeeded, and in January 1930, Council fired Hopkins by a vote of 14-11.
In his place, Council – really, Maschke – picked Daniel E. Morgan, a respected state senator but also a loyal Republican.
Adding to the public’s disillusionment with the system was a series of land scandals. Thomas Fleming, who had become Cleveland’s first black councilman in 1907 and ran the black wards for Maschke, was sent to the penitentiary for graft. So was Councilman Liston Schooley, chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, along with his son.
Councilman William Potter and City Clerk Fred Thomas were indicted but escaped conviction after three trials. Potter was then charged with perjury and was rumored to have made a deal with Prosecutor Ray T. Miller to implicate other councilmen. On Feb. 8, 1931, the day before his trial was to start, he was found in a Glenville apartment with a bullet through his head.
That November, voters threw out the city manager plan. Law Director Harold Burton took office as acting mayor until a special election could be held.
In his chapter on political reform in “The Birth of Modern Cleveland, 1865-1930,” Thomas Campbell offers a final word on the manager plan. Unlike the earlier reforms of the Tom L. Johnson era, he wrote, it was “not rooted in the ideology that was committed to the American dream of greater equality for all citizens.
“Indeed, these structural reforms, with their emphasis on efficiency and bureaucracy and the anti-foreign and anti-union attitudes of the business leadership of these years, left an underlying hostility among the white ethnics that has endured for many years.”
Sunday May 19, 1996 Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine article about Marcus Hanna and the 1896 presidential election.
Marcus Alonzo Hanna had to be stunned.
He had planned it all so beautifully. His man had barely cracked a sweat while capturing the Republican nomination. Even Ohio’s notoriously Balkanized GOP had fallen in line. When the Republican National Convention ended, the White House looked like a lock. And Mark Hanna, Cleveland millionaire-turned-political guru, was sharing the spotlight. “All eyes are on Hanna,” proclaimed the Associated Press. Reporters and well wishers tailed him everywhere. He was the kingmaker. The nominee’s alter ego. The No. 1 FOB – Friend of Bill.
Bill McKinley, that is.
It was the summer of 1896. And William McKinley Jr., Civil War hero, former governor of Ohio and the pride of Canton, was supposed to cruise to the White House.
Only in politics, no lead is permanent until the votes are cast. And by August, a whirlwind of emotion and momentum was blowing out of the West. Its name was William Jennings Bryan. And at its center was an issue no less fundamental than how the American economy would be organized.
Conventional wisdom shifted almost overnight. McKinley’s lead crumbled. Republican bigwigs panicked. But neither McKinley nor Hanna wavered. They simply went out and invented the modern political campaign.
That fall, Hanna would pioneer the art of framing issues and targeting voters. He would experiment with polls and spreading his message through motion pictures. He would stroke and spin the press. Above all, he would spend whatever it took to put his friend in the White House.
And McKinley – along with the tireless Bryan – would begin the long process of making candidates, not parties, the focal point of presidential campaigns. Make no mistake, issues were paramount in 1896. But it was also a campaign about image and character. About what sort of person should lead America into a new century.
On the 100th anniversary of McKinley’s run for president, we take such things for granted. But much of what we will see and hear this election year had its origins at a time of such national unrest and tumult that serious commentators wondered if the nation would survive.
“Many people think that campaign marked the transition from the Old America to the New America,” says Cleveland State University professor Allan Peskin. “It was in many ways the first modern campaign, and McKinley was the first modern president.”
As 1896 began, it appeared to many that America, Old and New, was coming unraveled. Americans today worry about the country’s direction. Americans then had reason to fear it was headed straight off a cliff.
The nation was locked in the third year of a vicious depression. Bank failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures were rampant. Credit was virtually impossible to get. Unemployment lingered around 20 percent nationally, but in resource-producing regions like southeastern Ohio or northern Minnesota, almost everyone was out of work. Bread lines snaked through the streets of every major city. Drought strangled the Great Plains, yet commodity prices were so low that farmers burned corn for fuel. Violent strikes at Homestead Steel and the Pullman rail car plant dominated the news. In western Pennsylvania, angry miners beat an engineer to death and stuffed his body in a coke oven.
An increasingly isolated and uncommunicative Grover Cleveland occupied the Oval Office. Many of his fellow Democrats urged him to do something to spur the economy or at least ease the nation’s pain. Some called for a federal jobs program. Even more urged him to take the country off the gold standard and tie the money supply to silver, a cheaper, more plentiful precious metal. That, advocates of “free silver” argued, would inflate the economy, raise prices and create jobs. But Cleveland stubbornly refused. In his limited vision of government’s role, such things simply weren’t done.
Cleveland’s intransigence led to bloody retribution against his party: In 1894, Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, dropping 117 seats in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate. A generation of leaders was wiped out. On the eve of their convention, the Democrats did not have a true front-runner for their nomination and seemed destined to be torn asunder by the emotional battle between gold and silver.
No wonder Republicans expected another banner year. Oh, they had divisions over the currency issue, too. A few “free silver” delegates walked out of the GOP’s June convention in St. Louis. But most Republicans could unite around a competing economic vision: Their desire for a tariff on imports so high that it would protect American industry, jobs and profits.
And for two decades, no one had been more identified with that philosophy, had fought harder for it in the halls of Congress, had talked up its merits at more party rallies from New England to California than William McKinley. McKinley’s protectionist line had been so appealing to the party faithful that in both 1888 and 1892, large groups of GOP delegates tried to draft him for president.
But McKinley would have none of it. He was a man of principle, and in each year he had promised his support to others. Besides, he also was one of the shrewdest politicians around, and McKinley had determined that 1896 was to be his year.
It sure started out that way. McKinley cruised to the nomination. Potentially powerful rivals like House Speaker Thomas Reed had been trampled by Hanna’s campaign machine. Illinois Sen. Shelby Cullom shelved plans to run when he realized he had been out-organized in his own state by McKinley insurgents.
The GOP convention was more coronation than brawl: Credentials fights pitted rival McKinley delegations against one another. When the nomination was won at 5:17 p.m. on Thursday, June 18, all of McKinley’s hometown, Canton, came to a screaming halt. By that night some 50,000 people from as far away as Cleveland and Niles trooped to William and Ida McKinley’s modest frame house on N. Market St. for a glimpse, a few words, maybe even a handshake from the man they felt sure would be the next president of the United States.
A month later all bets were off. The Democrats, meeting in Chicago, had selected William Jennings Bryan as their nominee. On paper, it looked like a colossal mismatch. Bryan’s political resume was thin: Two terms in the House of Representatives, a failed Senate run in 1894. He was from Nebraska, which was great for growing wheat but lousy for building a national electoral base. And to top it off, he was 36, barely old enough to be president under the Constitution. During the Civil War, 19th-century America’s defining experience, Bryan had been a baby; “Major” McKinley had faced death at Antietam and in the Shenandoah Valley.
But in the late summer of 1896, William Jennings Bryan had something more precious than biography, more valuable than 20 years of political achievement. He had A Cause and for a moment, it seemed, he had The People.
His nomination was the stuff of political legend. Despite two years of relentlessly stumping on behalf of free silver and himself, he had arrived in Chicago a very dark horse. Bryan wrangled a place on the platform committee, maneuvered to give the final speech on the currency plank. In a steamy hall wrought with emotion, he had bounded to the podium two steps at a time. He confidently stepped into the spotlight and declared himself a humble man, yet one made powerful by “the armor of a righteous cause. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty – the cause of humanity.”
This cause pitted gold against silver, Bryan said, West against East, “hardy pioneers” against “the few financial magnates.” Delivering his call for class warfare like a revival preacher, Bryan built to an emotional climax.
“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he thundered. “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”
He thrust out his arms like Christ on Calvary. Silence. Then pandemonium.
Twenty-four hours later, Bryan was the nominee of the Democratic Party.
Reaction was electric. The Populist Party, a rural-based reform movement that had drawn more than a million votes in 1892, endorsed Bryan. As he made his way East – to speak at Madison Square Garden, then take a short vacation – his train was mobbed. Thousands turned out in Omaha, Des Moines, Joliet, Chicago, even Canton.
Through August, Bryan’s wave built. In Cleveland, cannons heralded the arrival of his train and thousands marched with him to the Hollenden Hotel. He spoke to 16,000 people in the Central Armory, to 8,000 at Music Hall and to tens of thousands who could squeeze into neither place from a hotel balcony.
At the armory, he was embraced by Jacob Coxey, who in 1894 had led a ragtag “army” of unemployed workers to Washington only to be met by police clubs and jail cells. People wedged into every corner of the mammoth hall. “Not only were the aisles jammed, but men were clinging on windowsills high up and hanging in all sorts of impossible places,” the Associated Press reported.
In Columbus the next day, Bryan spoke to more than 50,000 people at the Statehouse. There were 20,000 more at Springfield, 40,000 at Toledo.
“What is the meaning of this enormous outpouring of the people,” Bryan asked in Cleveland. “No ordinary occasion would produce this scene. No ordinary campaign would stir men’s hearts as they are being stirred now.”
Republicans’ hearts were surely stirring. News reports told of Hanna going to Chicago – one of two national headquarters for the GOP – to “assume personal control of the campaign in the West.” Canton’s Evening Repository, an unabashed McKinley booster, reported that anxious Republicans were prodding “Major McKinley to enter the campaign upon the stump.” McKinley insiders hinted that he would agree.
Understand that until 1896, American presidential candidates clung to the quaint fiction that, like George Washington, they were above actually seeking the job. Parties would campaign – aggressively – but candidates would rarely engage the voters personally. James Garfield in 1880 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 had invited supporters to come to their homes for short speeches, but even such “front-porch” campaigns were considered innovative.
Now Bryan was destroying the mold. In the fall of 1896, he would travel 18,000 miles and give up to two dozen speeches a day. He loved the roar of the crowd, fed upon it. Besides, he had little choice. The Democratic Party was broke. Most of its best organizers and fund-raisers were Cleveland backers and “gold bugs,” now relegated to political Siberia. If Bryan were to have any campaign at all, he had to stump.
McKinley faced neither money nor organizational problems. And after listening to his advisers, he quickly and firmly declined to stump. The thought seemed to offend him. According to historian Gilbert C. Fite, he told Hanna, “I might just as well put a trapeze on my front lawn and compete with some professional athletes as go out speaking against Bryan. … I have to think when I speak.”
Yet if McKinley was not in Bryan’s league as an orator – almost no one was – he still was considered one of best public speakers and debaters of his day. His reluctance to stump may have stemmed from a desire to keep his wife, Ida – who suffered from depression and epilepsy – out of the public eye. But it also appears to have been strategic: He and Hanna calculated that Bryan’s one-note appeal would ebb. “In 30 days,” McKinley told intimates in midsummer, “no one will be talking about silver.” He was wrong about that, but he correctly guessed that Bryan’s frenetic style would produce diminishing returns. Eventually, McKinley figured, restraint would reassure voters.
Hanna took charge of reaching the voters. Using Big Business’ fear of Bryan and free silver, he raised a war chest of some $4 million – at a time when daily newspapers sold for a penny. And he spent every last dime on innovations that would rapidly become standard political fare:
He used polls – albeit primitive ones – to gauge the strength of the two candidates in critical Midwestern states.
He dispatched 1,400 surrogate speakers to sing McKinley’s praises and deliver a unified message of the party’s plans, its “Contract With America,” if you will. Some took along a grainy moving picture of the candidate.
He created campaign teams aimed at specific groups such as women, German-Americans and “coloreds.” They got information tailored to their presumed interests, just as direct-mail appeals attempt to target subsets of voters today.
Most important, he ordered up some 200 million pamphlets, newspaper inserts and other pieces of literature to make the GOP case. Voters in what Hanna and his lieutenants believed to be swing areas were deluged with pamphlets, many of them 20 or more pages long, with graphs and lengthy text that laid out the Republican case.
“Hanna believed that people must be educated on the heresies of free silver and told about the virtues of the protective tariff,” wrote Fite. “This could be accomplished, he believed, by flooding voters with the printed word.”
He also decided to flood Canton with voters. If McKinley would not go to the country, Hanna would bring the country to him. He negotiated special rail fares and started hauling supporters to Ohio. The modest “front porch” campaigns of years past would be lifted to new levels of intensity and sophistication.
From Labor Day on, every day but Sunday found McKinley meeting and greeting visiting voters. Some would be from Republican clubs; others represented businesses, labor groups, ethnic societies, even, on one memorable fall afternoon, thousands of bicycling enthusiasts who pedaled through the streets of downtown Canton. On Saturdays, the politicking lasted from dawn until well into the evening. McKinley biographer Margaret Leech estimated that between his nomination and Election Day, at least 750,000 pilgrims journeyed to the GOP mecca.
A routine was born: Arriving delegations were met by local partisans, often including a marching band. They would parade to the N. Market house, through city streets festooned with flags and bunting and red, white and blue Chinese lanterns. McKinley would come out on the porch and a spokesman for the group would make a few remarks – drafted and read by McKinley in advance. Most bemoaned the bad economy back home and suggested how it could be improved by a good dose of protection.
Then McKinley spoke. He usually started with an anecdote or observation about his visitors. “The history of Illinois sparkles all over with great events and achievements like the heavens above with their glistening stars,” he told a delegation from the Land of Lincoln.
He would speak of sound money and protection: “I do not know what you think about it, but I believe that it is a good deal better to open up the mills of the United States to the labor of America than to open up the mints of the United States to the silver of the world.”
He would talk of law and order and warn against class conflict: “Let no man who is homeless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence, when built.”
And he would talk, unashamedly, much as Ronald Reagan would nearly a century later, about the inherent goodness of America and Americans: “There is just one class under our flag and all of us belong to it, and the poorest boy in the Mahoning Valley, thank God, under our free institutions can aspire to the confidence and honor of his countrymen. What a splendid, glorious Republic we have. Nothing like it under the sun!”
The cumulative impact was powerful. Hanna’s operation was careful to make sure each delegation’s hometown papers got complete texts of McKinley’s remarks – in plenty of time for the next edition. Paul Kleppner, a professor of history and political science at Northern Illinois University, wrote a book about the 1896 campaign. He says he was struck by the extensive coverage the visits received, especially from small-town papers throughout the Midwest.
It is an article of faith among political strategists that a winning candidate must control the debate. By October, McKinley had done just that. The campaign was no longer about gold vs. silver; it was about protection, his turf. That allowed him to woo urban workers, a group of voters who had been Democrats throughout the 19th century but who deserted the party after 1893. Although Democrats at the time charged that employers browbeat their workers to back McKinley, it’s not clear labor needed much prodding.
McKinley, argues Kleppner, offered blue-collar America a comfortable home. He had always had good relations with labor. As a young attorney, he defended Massillon strikers charged with rioting. As governor of Ohio, he pressed arbitration as an alternative to strikes. When he dispatched the militia to quell a violent strike, he kept in touch with union leaders and sent in so many soldiers that resistance was futile. And his protectionist philosophy embodied American politics at its most basic. It was, as former Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes might say, about “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”
“The contest in 1896 was really between two conflicting views of economic growth, much as this year’s might be,” says Kleppner. “Protective tariffs as wage protection was the key. It was an ideology that Republicans spun out very successfully.”
Bryan never managed to trump it. And he increasing seemed a poor fit with the majority of Americans who by 1896 lived in cities, not the countryside. Just three years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed, Bryan ran like a latter-day Jefferson, proclaiming the moral superiority of rural life. Case Western Reserve University political scientist Alexander P. Lamis notes that Bryan habitually referred to “our farms” and “your cities.” “He never really hit it off with the urban proletariat,” says Lamis. “That’s how the election was lost – the urban working class voted with their employers.”
Cleveland State historian Peskin says those workers also were voting their own interests. Bryan talked incessantly about raising food prices to help impoverished farmers. It was only natural – he had grown up in rural Illinois and made his political mark in Nebraska. But McKinley, whose parents ran a small foundry in the Mahoning Valley, settled in Canton, a slice of the emerging, industrial America. “I don’t think you had to threaten people to get them to vote against higher food prices,” says Peskin.
Peskin suggests that Bryan had another problem with city voters: His blend of politics and religious fundamentalism turned off urban Catholics and Jews who “could see they didn’t have much of a place in Bryan’s world.” And while McKinley was a devout Methodist, he was anything but threatening.
Like Reagan, he was publicly affable and consistently underestimated. History has generally been much kinder to Bryan, the silver-tongued rival he defeated in 1896 and again in 1900, and to his flamboyant successor – Teddy Roosevelt. Longtime House power Joseph Cannon of Missouri joked that McKinley kept his ear so close to the ground, it was full of grasshoppers. Democrats bitterly complained that he was merely Hanna’s puppet. But most historians agree that McKinley held the upper hand not only in that relationship, but in virtually all political dealings. He was able, wrote future Secretary of State Elihu Root, to make powerful men “think his ideas were theirs. He cared nothing about credit, but McKinley always had his way.”
Within the party, he carefully avoided what now might be called social or cultural issues. Many of his Republican contemporaries would rail about immigration or temperance, flirt with anti-Catholicism. But McKinley, says Kleppner, would have nothing to do with such talk. Though Pat Buchanan’s tirades against free trade in this year’s GOP primaries provoked some comparisons to McKinley, that analogy misses the mark: Buchanan was stridently, unrepentantly conservative on social issues; McKinley was the original “Big Tent” Republican.
“Everybody liked McKinley,” says Peskin. “He created the modern Republican Party and ushered in an era of Republican domination that lasts right up until the Great Depression.”
Finally, McKinley won – by 600,000 votes out of 14 million – by running where American winners almost always do: in the middle of the road. Bryan’s us-against-them fire no doubt won the nomination and made him a popular sensation. But he never disowned his more extreme backers: The Populist Party favored federal ownership of railroads and curtailing the power of federal courts. Fiery “Silver Democrat” Ben Tillman of South Carolina boasted on the eve of the election that he was proud to be called “an anarchist.” No wonder Hanna – 92 years before George Bush’s fabled visit to a New Jersey flag factory – appropriated Old Glory as a GOP totem.
“People liked [Bryan] but did not trust his judgment,” concluded Sen. Peter Norbeck of South Dakota, writing in the 1920s, on the eve of another national calamity. “They felt his heart might be right, but that his leadership was not safe.”
McKinley never forgot that the prize of November requires more than true believers. Even his position on the emotional currency issue had just enough wiggle room – he favored leaving the gold standard if the world’s other financial powers would also do so. Like Reagan once again, he was invariably upbeat and optimistic. Amid the woes of depression, he insisted that America’s best days were just ahead. The country may have been near financial and social meltdown, wrote historian H. Wayne Morgan, but McKinley “shrewdly capitalized on the average man’s unwillingness to believe in classes in a land that stressed individual opportunity.”
A century later, America stands at the dawn of a new millennium. Its economy is going through another transformation. Traditional manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Information, not iron or coal, is the key commodity of the moment. Over the next few months, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole will argue over who has the best ideas for managing that sometimes painful transition and for restoring order to a society that seems out of kilter.
If the history of 1896 is any guide, the election of 1996 may well turn on whose arguments – both political and personal – are more convincing.
He is setting the stage for a firebrand muckraker soon to arrive on a southbound train out of Toledo.
“Hear Charles E. Ruthenberg of Cleveland, the Socialist candidate for governor of Ohio, tonight at the corner of Main and Center streets!” shouts the workman, heading up Main with a megaphone and a hurricane lamp hooked on a long pole.
At the Fostoria train depot, a tall, blue-eyed, balding man with six toes on his left foot steps to the platform. He is traveling alone and no one, not even his comrade the town crier, is there to pick up his grip.
But welcoming fanfare and brass bands – the stuff of Democrats, Republicans and Bull Moosers – are not what Ruthenberg expects on this low-budget stump. “We have no corporations to donate thousands,” he tells the gaslight crowd. “Our fund must come from the working classes.”
Ruthenberg’s trip to the Seneca County town and his soapbox tirade against American capitalism that autumn night of 1912 are not even footnotes in Fostoria history. Not a Fostorian today has likely heard of Charles Ruthenberg. Even Clevelanders don’t know the name. And for years his family spoke of him in whispers.
“There was no way I would say I was related to this guy even though he was a hero,” says his granddaughter, Marcy Ruthenberg Pollack, who was raised in Bay Village and now lives in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Indeed, knowing that your grandfather founded the American Communist Party, served time in the infamous Sing Sing State Prison in New York, and had been dubbed “the most arrested man in America” is something you keep secret while growing up in Republican-heavy Bay Village.
Pollack remembers a mention of her grandfather in a documentary film about communism shown in Mr. Wells’ history class at Bay Village High School.
“I’m sitting there in my seat, trying to sink down, hoping they don’t think I’m related,” she recalls. “I’m thinking, `Are they going to tar and feather me or burn a cross on my front yard?’ My cheeks were so red.’
Though history has generally ignored Ruthenberg and at times treated him unkindly, the facts show he was a major player in Cleveland’s reform politics in the first decade of this century. In the 1920s, he was regarded as one of the most left-wing radicals in America.
Time magazine called him the “master Bolshevik” and “archenemy” of the State Department.
And the Philadelphia Bulletin said: “Ruthenberg is the chief official of a movement that admittedly is the chief instrument of Communist propaganda in this country.”
Inspired by the reform politics of Cleveland Mayor Tom L. Johnson, Ruthenberg fought for municipal ownership of utilities and transit systems, helped organize unions for Cleveland teachers, garment workers and retail clerks, and in 1917 nearly won election as mayor. One newspaper printed a Ruthenberg victory in galley proofs. He polled more than 27,000 votes out of 100,000 cast in a three-way race.
But Lolly the Trolley tourists today can bet on not seeing a plaque or a landmark in memory of Cleveland’s famous radical. His legacy is just a few brittle newspaper clippings, yellowing in old, dusty files.
“He did not live to see the revolution, so his life’s work went for naught,” a Cleveland newspaper wrote when Ruthenberg died in 1927.
“He died alone at 44, shadowed by broken hopes,” Time magazine said.
Charles Emil Ruthenberg was born in 1882 to German-Lutheran parents in a house still standing on W. 85th St., near Lorain Ave.
In the days when children toiled in sweatshops, women and blacks had no vote and blue-collar men were sacrificed like kindling to the furnaces of industrial America, Ruthenberg’s job was agitation.
He began his political life on a soapbox at the corner of W. 25th St. and Clark Ave., and he ended it in ashes, sealed in a bronze urn inside the Kremlin Wall in Moscow.
He is one of three Americans – the others are journalist John Reed and labor leader Bill Haywood – buried in the Kremlin.
“Under the walls of the Kremlin the bed will be soft,” a Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, wrote at Ruthenberg’s death. “Lenin and Jack Reed will be waiting to welcome you, Charlie.”
Ruthenberg’s parents, August and Wilhelmina, had come from Germany to Cleveland with their eight children in 1882, the same year their ninth and youngest child, Charles, was born.
In the old country, August was a cigar maker who, at 36 years old, became a widower with five children. He married Wilhelmina, a 28-year-old servant girl from Berlin who had a daughter, and the couple had three more children.
Wilhelmina was a dyed-in-the-wool Lutheran. August, a tough, black-bearded Cleveland dock worker and saloonkeeper, had no use for the church.
When Charles was 14, he went to work in a bookstore in the Old Arcade and took night classes in bookkeeping at a business school.
When he was 16, his father died and Charles took a job as a carpenter’s helper for a picture-frame company.
At 18, Ruthenberg, known to his friends as C.E. or C.E.R., became a bookkeeper and salesman for the Cleveland office of the New York publishing firm, Selmar Hess Co. There he met MacBain Walker, an atheist who had come from Albany, N.Y., with queer ideas like public ownership of utilities; worker-controlled factories; Utopian societies.
“I promptly began communicating these `poisonous’ doctrines to Charles, but the pupil was soon ahead of the teacher,’ Walker wrote in a 1944 letter to Oakley Johnson, Ruthenberg’s less-than-objective Communist biographer. “I would say that in two years, C.E.R. knew much more than I ever knew about such things.
“He … introduced me to Marx and scientific Socialism. C.E.R. continued to get more and more enthusiastic until he gave up business to devote his whole energies to the cause.”
For the next 17 years, Ruthenberg worked a variety of white-collar jobs while pushing Socialism throughout blue-collar Cleveland. In 1917, while employed as an executive for a garment manufacturer, the Printz-Biederman Co., he was told by his employer he would have to chose between his job and his politics.
The company said if he quit his radical avocation he would be given a $10,000 block in company stock, a pay raise to $5,000 a year and a chance to become vice president.
His boss, Mr. Fish, gave him 24 hours to decide. Ruthenberg, married with a 12-year-old child, had already made up his mind. “It isn’t dollars with me,” he said, opting for a stipend as a full-time organizer for the Socialist Party.
Ruthenberg had joined the party in January 1909, at age 26, and that summer he was preaching the political doctrine on soapboxes throughout the city. It was said he mixed metaphors and spoke with his eyes closed.
“He was ill at ease and did not seem to know what to do with his hands,” his longtime friend Ted Kretchmar wrote to Johnson in 1940. “However, he soon became adept in public speaking.”
Helen Winter, 87, of Detroit, formerly of Cleveland, recalls her mother taking her to hear Ruthenberg speak at Market Square, across from the West Side Market, when she was 8 years old.
The year was 1916 and Ruthenberg was railing against World War I, calling it “a war to secure the investments of the ruling class.”
“He was very good,” says Winter. “People were very attentive. There was no heckling. I think he stood on top of a car.”
Ruthenberg, however, is not remembered for goose-flesh oratory or inspiring quotations. His strength in the left-wing movement was his organizational skills and his whirlwind energy. He once organized 19 rallies protesting the espionage conviction of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and spoke at five of them in one day.
He constantly wrote pamphlets and articles for local and national socialist magazines. And he was a perennial, albeit unsuccessful, Socialist candidate for public office – state treasurer, 1910; Cleveland mayor, 1911; Ohio governor, 1912; U.S. Senate, 1914; mayor, 1915; Congress, 1916; mayor, 1917; Congress, 1918; mayor, 1919.
He called for public ownership of ice plants, dairies, crematories and slaughterhouses, demanded more bathhouses in the city, and pushed for free lunches and textbooks in schools.
He fought for unemployment insurance, and helped establish a minimum wage in the city by collecting more than enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot, where it passed.
But the work kept him from his wife, Rose, and the couple’s only child, Daniel. When he wasn’t in a union hall, on a street corner or in jail, he was at Socialist headquarters on Prospect Ave., clacking away on a clunky old typewriter late at night, a cork-tipped Herbert Tareyton burning in an ashtray; a cup of black coffee going cold.
“CER was usually too busy to pay too much attention to me,” Daniel would later write as an adult. “He was away from home from 1918 to his death.”
If Ruthenberg was too busy to spend time with his child, it was often because he was in jail. He was tagged “the most arrested man in America.” From 1917 until his death there was only six months when he was not under indictment, in jail or under appeal on charges relating to overthrowing the government.
He was first collared in 1913 at E. 9th St. and Vincent Ave. during one of his soapbox soliloquies. Police hauled him to the station, but released him within hours without charge and the agitator went right back to the corner.
In June 1916, he stood at the foot of Tom L. Johnson’s statue on Public Square and condemned the sending of U.S. troops into Mexico. “There is no reason why any man should go down into the hell of war to fight for the dollars of the ruling class,” he told 1,000 people. The tirade attracted militiamen and a riot started.
“His speeches in halls and in Public Square generally were followed by trouble,” the Cleveland Press wrote after his death.
The United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, prompting Ruthenberg to organize anti-war rallies throughout the city. He was banned from speaking at the City Club, the “citadel of free speech,” because of his stance against the war, according to Cleveland historian Thomas Campbell.
But Ruthenberg drew massive crowds at other forums: Moose Hall, Acme Hall, Grays Armory, East Technical High School, Public Square. He shouted, “War is murder,” and he urged citizens to avoid the draft.
That June, Ruthenberg and two colleagues, Alfred Wagenknecht (Helen Winter’s father) of Lakewood and Charles Baker of Hamilton, were indicted by a federal grand jury for obstructing the Conscription Act.
They were convicted in U.S. District Court in Cleveland and were sentenced to a year in the Canton Workhouse. Their appeals were unsuccessful and they spent 10 months behind bars.
In prison, Ruthenberg was tortured because he refused to work in a steamy basement laundry. He was strung up by his wrists with his toes just inches off the ground. When his lawyer, Morris Wolf, got word of the treatment, he went to Canton and demanded to see his client.
“C.E.R. almost had to be helped into the room,” Wolf told Ruthenberg’s biographer. “He slumped over and began crying. He was pale and in very bad shape.”
When Wolf threatened to go to the Cleveland Press, prison officials agreed to let Ruthenberg be hired out for farm work and later he was given clerical work in the prison office.
In June 1918, the Socialist Party of Ohio held a picnic in Nimisilla Park, across the street from the workhouse. Presidential candidate Debs was the speaker.
Before his speech, Debs visited Ruthenberg in jail. “They talked for a moment about the war and its cost in lives,” Wagenknecht wrote in 1940.
Debs then joined the picnic and from a rostrum he praised the courage of the three inmates and lashed out against the war. “When Wall Street says `war,’ the press says `war’ and the pulpit promptly follows with `amen,’ he told the crowd. The famous speech eventually resulted in Debs’ arrest and conviction in the same court that convicted the Cleveland trio. Although he spent Election Day in jail, the presidential candidate still polled nearly 1 million votes.
Ohio in those days was often called the “Red State” because of its socialist activity. But Ruthenberg’s shade of red was making the Socialist Party’s right-wingers uneasy.
As a top leader of the party’s left wing – which included non-English-speaking immigrants – Ruthenberg’s positions opposing the war and embracing the November 1917 Russian Revolution were splitting the ranks.
Right-wingers in the party were out to reform American capitalism to make it more palatable to socialist thought. But the Ruthenberg faction called for the complete elimination of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state.
“He contributed much to the breakdown of the socialist movement in the United States,” New York Judge Jacob Panken, a socialist, wrote in 1958. “He may have been a dedicated man seeking the good of all mankind, but he was completely wrong in his ideas and tactics.”
The Plain Dealer wrote in 1927: “He flamed across the Cleveland firmament as a red radical of the deepest dye. … Ruthenberg, more than any other man in the United States, wrecked the Socialist Party that once polled nearly a million votes for Eugene V. Debs.”
In 1919, fresh out of the workhouse and still pumped up on radical dogma, Ruthenberg was back on the streets.
But by now, mainstream America was becoming less and less tolerant of Reds. Parades commemorating May Day – the international celebration of organized labor – were banned that year in many American cities. But in Cleveland, Ruthenberg led tens of thousands of immigrant workers bearing red flags through downtown streets, only to be ambushed by soldiers and vigilantes brandishing guns and clubs.
“I saw men and women brutally beaten, though they made no resistance,” Plain Dealer reporter Ted Robinson would write in an introduction to a novel about the Red scare of that time. “I saw the blood flow in sickening streams at the city’s busiest corner.”
Demonstrators Joseph Ivanyi, 38, of Woodhill Rd., and Samuel Pearlman, 18, of Kinsman Rd., were killed. More than 200 people, including 16 policemen, were injured. And 134, including Ruthenberg, were arrested. Of those arrested, only five were American-born. And most of the immigrants were deported.
Ruthenberg and Socialist leaders Tom Clifford and J.J. Fried were charged with assault to kill. The charges against the trio were eventually dropped, but the bloody May Day in Cleveland and riots in other major cities that spring day of 1919 signaled America’s angry mood toward a growing Socialism.
“The Red flag will never flutter in Cleveland again,” declared Safety Director A.B. Sprosty. “It is the insignia of disorder and blood. It is the symbol of anti-government.”
But Ruthenberg, who described the event as the culmination of his “will and purpose,” remained defiant. “The proletarian world revolution had begun,” he wrote four years later, recalling the “psychological attitude of 1919.”
“The workers were on the march. The Revolution would sweep on. In a few years … the workers of the United States would be marching step by step with the revolutionary workers of Europe.”
But peasant blouses and greatcoats were falling out of vogue in the United States as mainstream Americans were ready to flap and ragtime into the Roaring ’20s.
“The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in retrospect. “(M)aybe we had gone to war for J.P. Morgan’s loans after all. But because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation.”
In September 1919, left-wing Socialists meeting in Chicago broke away and formed the Communist Party, naming Ruthenberg the first general secretary.
But G-men, out to bust radical leaders and deport their foreign-born followers, were driving the Reds underground. “The reaction to Russia at that time destroyed the dissent movement,” says historian Campbell. “It killed a healthy criticism and the left never recovered.”
That year, Ruthenberg was arrested at least four times and he and seven others, including Irish socialist James Larkin, were indicted in New York on criminal anarchy for publishing the “Left Wing Manifesto.”
A four-week trial in New York in 1920 ended with Ruthenberg being sentenced to five to 10 years in Sing Sing State Prison. He spent a year and a half behind bars, taking a correspondence course in American history from Columbia University and writing daily love letters to his mistress, Rachel Ragozin, a Russian-born Jew raised in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ragozin was a schoolteacher who joined the Socialist Party in 1914 because she was attracted to its position against World War I.
“War shocked me,” she told Ruthenberg’s biographer Johnson, although he never mentioned her in the biography.
Ruthenberg and Ragozin met at a party convention in Bridgman, Mich., on May 26, 1920, six months before he was sent to Sing Sing. During a break in the politics, they walked along the dunes near Lake Michigan.
“I was falling in love with him,” Johnson quoted her saying in unpublished, handwritten notes for his book. “His deep voice, his sweet smile, a nice soft look in his face as he looked down at me.”
By this time, Ruthenberg was living in Chicago where the Communist Party was headquartered, while Rose was in Cleveland raising Daniel alone. Though Rose kept a candle in the window for her husband, night trains coming through town carried his love letters to New York.
“Dear Rachel … When I finish this letter I will go to the cot in the corner and look down and see you resting there between the white sheets,” Ruthenberg wrote a month after they first met. “And I will wish with all my heart that you were really there, so that I might again kneel down beside you and put my arms around you and feel you(r) warm lips on mine and forget everything but that you love me and I love you. …”
Ruthenberg couldn’t keep his mind on his work while his lover was in New York. She seemed to become more important to him than the class struggle.
“Ten years ago a victory in a party struggle or to stand before a great audience and stir the people to wave after wave of applause … were things to be worth fighting for,” he wrote to Ragozin in June 1920. “But I no longer have illusions about these things. … The victory which I won in your weighing of me means more to me than any other victory.”
On a crisp, clear October day, a few weeks before Ruthenberg was convicted and sentenced, the couple took a train to upstate New York, where they walked in the countryside, collecting flowers and watching the sun set.
He told her: “They can’t shut me away from this, from all this beauty.”
But on Nov. 19, 1920, Ruthenberg was doused in a cold shower and caged in a Sing Sing cellblock. The notorious prison, built in 1825, was Ruthenberg’s home for 18 months.
“Even though there is the barrier of stone walls between us, that cannot rob me of the memories of the past,” he wrote to Ragozin on Nov. 25, 1920. “Those evenings when you taught me the names of the stars – I do not see the stars now – and my own Rocky River, which we visited together. All these are clear and bright in my mind and help to bring me peace and happiness, even here.”
Ragozin visited whenever she could, bringing him books and news of the movement.
“Sweetheart,” she wrote on Jan. 16, 1921. “In what way am I freer than you(?) The same walls that shut you in fetter me as effectively as if I were behind them.”
“Dear Rachel … It has been too long since you have been here. … Dreams, dreams, dreams and four stone walls and an iron door laugh back mockingly. … C.E. Ruthenberg #71624.”
Ruthenberg was locked up with Isaac E. Ferguson, a Communist leader from Chicago, who successfully worked on appeals and early releases for the two. They were freed in April 1922, and Ferguson, predicting Ruthenberg would be arrested again in six months, quit the cause.
He told Rachel: “There’ll be a lot of trouble in this struggle and a lot of dead. All the leaders will be sacrificed and I propose to live my life.”
He was too prophetic. Just four months out of Sing Sing, Ruthenberg and 16 other Communist leaders were arrested in woods near Bridgman, Mich., where they were meeting to plan the party’s upcoming convention in Chicago.
Ruthenberg was tried and convicted in state court on a charge of criminal syndicalism. The Michigan Supreme Court in 1924 upheld the conviction, and in January 1925 he spent two weeks in prison before U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis released him on a writ, pending a new trial.
The next month, Ruthenberg was back in national headlines: “15,000 Go Wild When Ruthenberg Asks Soviet Rule.
“Frenzy of Applause Greets His Plea in Madison Square Garden for Workers’ Regime in U.S.”
Ruthenberg told the massive New York crowd: “Prisons have only one effect on revolutionists. Prisons can only steel their will and increase their determination to strike blow after blow until the ugly capitalistic system which puts men in prisons is swept out of existence.”
He would never see the inside of a prison cell again. Two years later, the Michigan case still under appeal, his appendix burst and he was rushed to American Hospital of Chicago, where an emergency operation was performed on Feb. 27, 1927. He died of peritonitis three days later.
“RUTHENBERG IS DEAD,” shouted the bold headline across the top of the Daily Worker.
For two days, his body lay in state while honor guards in red shirts and black armbands kept vigil. Rose and Daniel arrived from Cleveland. He left only $50 in personal property.
A mass procession carried the dead Communist’s body to a crematorium and his ashes were sealed in an urn inscribed: “Our Leader, Comrade Ruthenberg.”
Sad comrades carried the urn to Carnegie Hall in New York for a memorial service, then on to Moscow, to a sepulcher in the Kremlin Wall. Red Army soldiers fired salutes, echoing across the great square.
“To you I bring from far America the ashes of my Comrade Ruthenberg, the fallen leader of our Communist Party,” J. Louis Engdahl said in his eulogy. “When American imperialism entered the world war, Ruthenberg stood before the masses in the open places of his native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and declared: `Not a penny to pay for the Wall Street War.’
“And American capitalism sent our Comrade Ruthenberg to prison because he dared speak, brave and courageous, for the working class of America.”
Back home, Ruthenberg memorials continued for weeks in union halls and left-wing gathering places, where the fallen comrade was eulogized as an American hero. But his place in history is subject to debate. Time magazine remembered him as “bitter, humorless, antagonizing more than he converted.”
And historian Theodore Draper wrote: “No great practical achievement and no significant theoretical contribution was linked with Ruthenberg’s name.”
But in fairness to Cleveland’s less-than-favorite son, maybe the best way to resolve the debate is to let Ruthenberg have the final say: “When you write my biography,” he wrote to Ragozin from prison, “just say I loved flowers.”
Rose died in 1967. Daniel died in 1989. It is uncertain what became of Ragozin.
“I don’t remember whether Rose knew of the other woman or not,” says Marcy Ruthenberg Pollack, the youngest of Daniel’s two daughters. She said Rose never discussed those turbulent days and rarely talked about her husband.
“We didn’t know my grandfather, but I think he had an impact on our family because we’re all pacifists,” she says today. “I know he was a pacifist. And I know that’s why he went to prison. To stand up for peace is not easy.”
Plain Dealer article and video about Stanley Tolliver, January 13, 2011
Plain Dealer obituary for Stanley Tolliver, January 3. 2011
From the Encyclopedia of Cleveland
http://ech.cwru.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=MDR
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The MAY DAY RIOTS, which occurred in Cleveland on 1 May (May Day) 1919, involved Socialists, trade-union members, police, and military troops. The Socialists and trade unionists were participants in a May Day parade to protest the recent jailing of Socialist leader Eugene Debs and to promote the mayoral candidacy of its organizer, CHAS. RUTHENBERG†. Its 32 labor and Socialist groups were divided into 4 units, each with a red flag and an American flag at its head; many marchers also wore red clothing or red badges. While marching to PUBLIC SQUARE one of the units was stopped on Superior Ave. by a group of Victory Loan Workers (see WORLD WAR I), who asked that their red flags be lowered, and at that point the rioting began. Before the day ended, the disorder had spread to Public Square and to the Socialist party headquarters on Prospect Ave., which was ransacked by a mob of 100 men. Two people were killed, 40 injured, and 116 arrested in the course of the violence, and mounted police, army trucks, and tanks were needed to restore order. Cleveland’s riots were the most violent of a series of similar disorders that took place throughout the U.S. Although it is uncertain who actually began the trouble, the actions of those involved were largely shaped by the anti-Bolshevik hysteria that permeated the country during the “Red Scare” of 1919. |
From Wikipedia
Thesis written by Michael Metsner, CWRU Department of History
