Cleveland University (Cleveland’s first institution of higher learning)

Cleveland University from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

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CLEVELAND UNIVERSITY – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

CLEVELAND UNIVERSITY became the city’s first institution of higher learning in a brief career lasting from 1851-53. It was chartered by the Ohio general assembly on 5 Mar. 1851, and its trustees included AHAZ MERCHANT, SAMUEL STARKWEATHER;, and RICHARD HILLIARD. For president, they tapped the recently resigned head of Oberlin Institute, Asa Mahan, who brought most of the new university’s first students from Oberlin with him. Classes began in the Mechanics’ Block on Ontario Street, but the school’s future was closely bound to a proposed campus planned for an area on the west side, hopefully named University Heights. Most of the trustees appeared to be speculating in property in the neighborhood, later known as TREMONT. They set aside a 275-acre parcel for the university, part for the campus and part to raise an endowment fund. Streets in the area were endowed with such academic names as College, Literary, Professor, and Jefferson, and a 3-story building was raised among them for the future home of Cleveland University.

Philosophically, Mahan charted the university along a progressive, non-sectarian course. Citing the examples of Brown and Rochester University, he advocated a practical as opposed to classical course of study. Included in the ultimate plans of Mahan and the trustees was a visionary complex encompassing not only a national university of European scope, but an orphan asylum, old-age retreat, and female seminary as well. After a full year of operation, culminating with the awarding of 8 degrees in June 1852, Cleveland University declined rapidly the following fall. Mahan resigned as president on 13 December, possibly because of a clash of personalities with some of the trustees. One of the school’s chief benefactors, Thirza Pelton, died shortly thereafter on 19 February 1853. Although the Board of Trustees was reorganized that year, the university apparently was liquidated by the end of the academic year. From 1859-68, the Cleveland University building was occupied by the HUMISTON INSTITUTE, a college preparatory school operated by Ransom F. Humiston.

Holtz, Maude E. “Cleveland University: A Forgotten Chapter in Cleveland’s History” (Masters thesis, Western Reserve Univ., 1934).

 

Immigration by Elizabeth Sullivan

Elizabeth Sullivan, who received a BA and MA in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University, started at The Plain Dealer in 1979 as a business reporter. She served in a variety of local and overseas reporting capacities, with one earlier stint as an editorial writer, before rejoining the editorial board in 2003 as an associate editor and foreign affairs columnist. In 2009, Sullivan was named editor of the editorial pages. Additionally, Sullivan writes many of the newspaper’s editorials on energy, international and national security topics.

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Ness, a Mr. Clean Cleveland Desperately Needed

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on July 16, 1996

 

NESS, A MR. CLEAN CLEVELAND DESPERATELY NEEDED

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, June 16, 1996
Author: Bob Rich
 

Cleveland’s own G-Man, Eliot Ness, came to town in the summer of 1934 as head of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit. He had achieved celebrity as the chief of a special Justice Department task force that had literally battered down the doors of Al Capone’s breweries and warehouses in Chicago during Prohibition, but it would be many years later, long after Ness was dead, before a book and TV would make him into a near-mythical lawman.

Ness had always given credit for jailing Capone to the undercover work of the IRS, but he was symbolic of the new breed of enforcement officer: college-educated, smart, and incorruptible – “untouchable” as he became known for spurning constant bribe offers from Capone.

Cleveland had a new mayor, Harold Burton, who, when he couldn’t get the Republican Party’s endorsement, ran as an independent Republican and won. Burton appointed the 32-year-old Ness as his safety director in charge of a thoroughly demoralized force of 2,400 policemen and firemen.

Times had changed since Cleveland’s men in blue were the recognized model for the country under Mayor Tom Johnson; now, with the worst depression in history in full bloom, there were hundreds of homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes and robbers; gambling was wide open, labor extortion common, the police rackets at full blast. Cops looked and acted the way they felt – slovenly and unkempt; sometimes they were informants and even enforcers for mob figures.

In December 1935, author Steven Nickel quoted Ness as telling the Cleveland Advertising Club, “In any city where corrpution continues, it follows that some officers are playing ball with the underworld. If town officials are committed to a program of `protection,’ police work becomes exceedingly difficult, and the officer on the beat, being discouraged from his duty, decides it is best to see as little crime as possible.’

Ness went on to explain that while he personally wasn’t against gambling, profits from illegal gambling opened the door to drug dealing, prostitution and union racketeering.

Quite a mouthful for a young man whom many locals considered not tough enough to be a top cop, with his college-boy good looks, university education and low-key manner. They began to believe him when he transferred 122 policemen, including a captain and 27 lieutenants, and replaced the head of the detective bureau.

Ness captured Cleveland’s affection when he made a flamboyant and courageous raid on the Harvard Club in Newburg Heights, a notorious gambling club operating openly with police protection, one month after his appointment as safety director. He had been called in by the county prosecutor even though the club was out of the city limits, and moved against it as a private citizen, accompanied by police and his newspaper reporter friends.

Now, with the city solidly behind him, Ness put together a team of volunteer detectives and police – Cleveland’s own group of “Untouchables” – and went after corruption in the police force. He used wiretaps, informers, subpoenaed bank accounts; the same tools of the trade he had used against Al Capone in Chicago. Grand jury indictments, trials and convictions followed.

Later, juries would send labor extortionists to jail, leading to anti-union charges against Ness. The AFL investigated and decided that Ness was only against labor racketeering.

He instituted a professional training program for police and reformed the traffic division leading to Cleveland being rated the safest city in the United States by the National Safety Council.

Many evenings, on his own time, he met with youth gang leaders and social workers. He fought to get city funding of playgrounds and basketball courts for Cleveland’s youth: “Keep them off the streets and keep them busy. It’s much better to spend a lot of time and money … keeping them straight than it is to spend even more time and money catching them in the wrong and then trying to set them straight.”

As a result of his programs, there was an 80 percent drop in juvenile delinquency.

Then, a much greater evil than corruption or organized crime struck: a serial killer – the man the media would call the Cleveland Butcher – who left pieces of corpses scattered about.

Water by Brent Larkin (pdf)

Brent Larkin joined The Plain Dealer in 1981 and in 1991 became the director of the newspaper’s opinion pages. In October 2002 Larkin was inducted into The Cleveland Press Club’s Hall of Fame. Larkin retired from The Plain Dealer in May of 2009, but still writes a weekly column for the newspaper’s Sunday Forum section.

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Transportation in Greater Cleveland by James A. Toman (.pdf version)

Transportation in Greater Cleveland by James A. Toman

James A. Toman has authored or co-authored 18 books on various Cleveland topics, particularly those relating to the downtown district and to public transportation. An inveterate collector of Cleveland streetcar photographs, he has also photographed most of the streetcar, light rail, and subways systems in North America. He holds a doctorate in education/clinical counseling, and retired in 2006 after 43 years in the teaching field.. His last educational post was as dean of the Social Sciences/Human Services Division at Lorain County Community College.

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Overview on Transportation from Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

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Teaching Cleveland Digital