XIV. Mark Hanna vs. Tom Johnson

So many strong men sprang out of the Cleveland environment in the city’s youthful years it’s a pity somebody didn’t think of analyzing the soil or testing the air. At the very least, there should have been a Senate investigation.

The situation, as the sunset of the nineteenth century came into view, was that a Clevelander named John D. Rockefeller was cornering most of the money in the world and another Clevelander named Marcus Alonzo Hanna was cornering most of the power in national politics.

But strangely enough, while either Rockefeller or Hanna was capable of shaking the capitals of Europe simply by lifting his little finger, neither one of them had as much influence with his fellow Clevelanders as a portly, curly-haired young man named Tom Loftin Johnson.

Some sticklers for formality among the political science writers of the day insisted on calling him Thomas L. Johnson, which was wrong. He was christened Tom and the name fitted him as no other name could.

Tom L. Johnson today shares the Public Square with Moses Cleaveland. His statue is in the centerpiece of the northwest quadrant of the Square, near the free speech rostrum-no accident of juxtaposition. He was a fierce defender of the public’s right to speak out, and something of a free speaker himself.

Hanna and Johnson were born rivals. They competed in business, they competed in politics, and they competed for a place in history.

They were a pair of street railway executives whose political tracks took them to national glory, each by a different route.

They were opposites, but they were also similar. They were strong men, brilliant men, rich men-and they were poles apart in their philosophies of government. If you were a Clevelander, you took your place at the side of one or the other. You were either with Mark or you were with Tom. They left you no middle ground to stand on, nor any kind of a fence to straddle.

Mark Hanna was the Republican; Tom Johnson was the Democrat.

Hanna was a prosperous businessman, a millionaire, who plunged into politics in his middle age and helped to shape the Republican Party according to his advanced concept of what a political organization should be.

In that time of industrialization, of new businesses and new fortunes, of growing monopolies and trusts, Hanna fought for laissez-faire government. It was his contention that capitalism would flourish best in an atmosphere free of government-imposed inhibitions, with prosperity benefiting everyone as the end result.

Hanna wanted a businesslike national administration and, by example, he encouraged businessmen to take an active part in politics and to play a forceful role in government. His own role was so active and so forceful that he became the archetype of the political boss, the kingmaker, the boss of bosses. He was the inspiration for the Homer Davenport cartoon of the political boss that since has become a journalistic cliche the cartoon of the swollen, arrogant, plutocrat-politician with a large dollar sign on his vest, a cigar in his mouth, and a whiskey bottle gripped in his hand.

Johnson, like Hanna, was a businessman and a millionaire. He was, in fact, just the caliber of man that Mark Hanna wanted to see in politics except for some shocking deviations, including the fact that he was something of a political radical. Tom L. was a disciple of Henry George, the champion of the Single Tax, and he entertained strange advanced notions about the need for civic and political reform, social justice, the rights of the public, and even public ownership of utilities.

The clash between the two strong Clevelanders was inevitable. Over a period of twenty-five years they confronted each other in the lists, and every time they rode at each other the ground shook, the trees bent, and small tidal waves formed in Lake Erie.

New Lisbon, Ohio, a small town near Youngstown, was Mark Hanna’s birthplace. He was the son of Dr. Leonard C. Hanna and Samantha Converse. His father, the descendant of Virginia Quakers, had been trained as a doctor, but never had practiced because of injuries suffered in mounting a horse. His mother, a schoolteacher, was a native of Vermont and had a sharply honed New England sense of propriety.

Dr. Hanna had entered the family’s wholesale grocery business in New Lisbon, and his was said to be the most prosperous household in the town. But the Ohio Canal, connecting the Ohio River and Lake Erie, bypassed New Lisbon and it was almost a death blow to the community. The Hannas finally picked up their belongings and moved to Cleveland in 1852.

Young Mark attended Brownell School and then enrolled in Central High School at the same time that John and William Rockefeller began to attend classes there. The three of them became close friends, and they maintained that friendship through later life.

Mrs. Hanna prevailed on Mark to enroll at Western Reserve College, then in Hudson, Ohio, and he did-briefly. He related the story of how he finished college in four months, instead of the usual four years, when he addressed the college’s seventy-fifth commencement exercise.

“I wanted to go to work. My mother said 1 should go to college. So I went. I was young, innocent, confiding. One day some of the sophomores induced me to help distribute copies of a burlesque program of the exercises of the junior class. I stood on the steps handing them to the audience as they passed in. The President of the college came along. He grasped me by the shoulder and asked, ‘Young man, what are you doing?’

“I replied that I was distributing literature in the interests of education and morality.

“I quit college soon after that. The faculty seemed resigned to my absence. One day the [college] president met me on the street. I had on blue overalls and was hard at work. He looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, ‘Well, I guess you have found your right place!’ And I thought so, too. I liked work better than study. I have been hard at work ever since…”

Hanna’s first job was working as a roustabout on the Merwin Street docks in the employ of Harma, Garretson & Company, a wholesale grocery business and commission house owned by his father, his uncle, and a family friend, Hiram Garretson. He was paid twenty-five dollars a month. Close by, on the same Merwin Street, his old schoolmate, John Rockefeller, was working for Hewitt & Tuttle, another commission house. But Hanna quickly shucked the overalls to become a purser on a lake boat, then a solicitor of business for his father’s company, a job that took him around the state.

Life was not all work. Mark attended a bazaar one night and met a very attractive girl, Charlotte Augusta Rhodes, with whom he fell in love. That was a romantic thing to do, of course, but there is no doubt that it created a new problem, namely: How to break the news to Papa Rhodes. Daniel P. Rhodes was a remarkable man in his own right. Besides being one of the most successful coal and iron merchants in Cleveland, he also was one of the city’s leading Democrats. Young Mark, even then, was unmistakably a Republican, extremely active in the party and extremely outspoken on political subjects.

Rhodes’ first sputtering reaction to the news of the romance was that he did not want any “damned” Republican in his family. There were some points in Hanna’s favor, though, as Rhodes examined the suitor for his daughter’s hand. He was direct, open, and candid-traits that Rhodes treasured-and his mother was from Vermont. Rhodes himself was from Vermont.

Rhodes took pride in his ability to measure men. He was a poker player of sorts and it helped to be able to judge his opponents.

After his scrutiny of young Hanna, Charlotte’s father presumably found him acceptable because the couple was married September 27, 1864, in historic old St. John’s Episcopal Church, which still stands at 2600 Church Avenue on the lower West Side. Hanna joined his father-in-law’s company and his business genius quickly made him a standout. The company prospered, acquired shipping lines and railways for the movement of coal, iron are, pig iron, and a variety of by-products, and its name eventually was changed from Rhodes & Company to M. A. Hanna & Company. It remains one of Cleveland’s most formidable business empires to this day.

Success in business having arrived early, and with relative ease, it isn’t surprising that Hanna’s eyes were looking about for a sterner challenge and a more interesting way to employ his brilliance. He found it in politics when, in 1880, the Republican candidate for the Presidency was a fellow townsman, James A. Garfield. Hanna’s contribution to Garfield’s campaign was his organization of the Cleveland Business Men’s Marching Club. His original idea for the club was to use it simply as a means of raising money for the campaign, but it became more than that. The businessmen who enlisted were willing to give their time and effort in Garfield’s behalf, as well as their money. The idea spread to other cities, and Hanna’s innovation became an interesting new political instrument.

The most important single result of that presidential campaign, however, was that it ensnared Hanna completely in the fascinating web of politics. He began to enlarge his circle of political acquaintances and to devote more of his time to the role of a student undertaking to master a fascinating new science. Among those whom he sought out was William McKinley, the congressman from Canton. He had reason to remember McKinley from a time several years previous when his company had had a strike. One of the Hanna workers was shot by the state militia and twenty-three of the strikers subsequently were indicted for violence and tried. Their lawyer was William McKinley, and he did a masterful job. Twenty-two of the strikers were acquitted; one was given a short jail sentence.

Hanna remembered the talented lawyer, now a United States Representative, and was even more deeply impressed when McKinley, chairman of the Ohio delegation to the 1888 Republican Convention, demonstrated the one trait that Hanna prized above all others: loyalty. The delegation was committed to Senator John Sherman of Ohio, who, by the fifth ballot, had Been unable to pick up enough votes to win, and it was plain that his strength was diminishing. A delegate from Connecticut at that point nominated McKinley, who jumped to his feet and refused the honor, reaffirming the delegation’s support of Sherman’s lost cause. Now Hanna was convinced that McKinley was presidential timber, and he began, systematically, to promote his personal candidate for the nation’s highest office.

He decided that 1892, the next national election year, would not be a successful one for the Republican candidate, and he trained his sights on the election of 1896. He had overlooked a most important hurdle-the congressional election of 1890, in which McKinley was defeated in a major political upset.

Here Hanna showed his battlefield versatility. He immediately revised his plans, knowing that McKinley, to be a serious contender for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, had to be kept in the public eye. The solution was to get him elected governor of Ohio. He directed a masterful campaign, and McKinley won the office in 1891.

Another crisis arose in 1893, when McKinley determined to resign as governor because of a personal crisis. He had endorsed notes for a friend who went bankrupt in the financial panic that swept the country that year, making McKinley personally liable for debts totaling $130,000. Hanna, always the master money-raiser, called on the leading millionaire Republicans to rally around with ready cash and they did. The donors were said to include Andrew Carnegie, Charles Taft, Henry Frick, and Hanna himself.

Their investment was in McKinley’s future prospects, and their judgment proved sound in 1896, when the statesman from Canton was elected President of the United States in a national election which was something of an anticlimax, following as it did the tumultuous Republican convention which nominated McKinley. The country was introduced to a new kind of political showmanship and candidate management by Mark Hanna. In boosting McKinley into the White House, Hanna overpowered the political opposition and the voters with an unbelievable barrage of publicity and propaganda.

William Jennings Bryan was the Democratic candidate, and Hanna saw to it that little boys all over the nation soon learned the lines to this singing jingle:

“McKinley drinks soda water,

Bryan drinks rum;

McKinley is a gentleman,

Bryan is a bum!”

In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, Hanna “advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine.”

Hanna was the first of the high-pressure hucksters, the advance man for twentieth-century Madison Avenue to follow. He was responsible for mailing about three hundred million pieces of McKinley literature to the people of the nation; about thirty million a week, including millions printed in a dozen different languages. He had McKinley’s face on drinking mugs, walking sticks, sterling silver spoons, lapel buttons, posters, and badges. He coined the slogan, “The Full Dinner Pail,” and, knowing that McKinley couldn’t match the silver-and-gold oratory of Bryan, Hanna came up with one of the best gimmicks in the history of national politics-the “front porch” campaign. The porch of McKinley’s house in Canton was the homely stage on which he made about twenty appearances a day, each time to a different crowd numbering in the thousands. Railroads cooperated with the G.O.P. in running low-fare excursions to Canton; fares so low, in fact, it was said that it was cheaper for a voter to go to Canton than it was for him to stay

With McKinley elected, Hanna attended to his own ambition. He rejected an invitation to become a member of the cabinet (Postmaster General). He regarded the honor of being a senator as second only to the Presidency. McKinley obligingly named Senator John Sherman of Ohio his Secretary of State, while Governor Asa Bushnell of Ohio completed the lighting double play by appointing Hanna to succeed Sherman.

Hanna liked his life as a senator even more than he had anticipated. He was more than a senator; he was, as one observer described him, McKinley’s “political prime minister.” But the appointment was only for a year’s duration. In 1897, he had to win the Senate seat by going before the Ohio State Legislature and winning its approval. At that time, the state legislatures elected the United States senators.

Some experts, indeed, point to the wild Hanna campaign for senator that year as the rowel that pricked a nation’s conscience and led directly to the adoption of popular election of U.S. senators shortly thereafter.

Hanna himself was unsure of his own vote-getting ability. He once had said to his attorney, James H. Dempsey: “Jim, I could no more be elected Senator than I could fly.”

The Ohio legislature was evenly divided on Hanna’s candidacy, and every vote counted. Wavering legislators were wined and dined and wooed by the Hanna side. Once they had proclaimed their fealty, they were guarded against the wiles and lures of the enemy camp; that is to say, they were made virtual prisoners. One solon, slightly soggy from booze, was snatched away from the Hanna embrace by the opposition, who drugged him and stashed him away in one of their own hideouts. The Hanna henchmen struck right back, rekidnaping the bewildered legislator, redrugging him, and re-establishing him as their prisoner.

It was a raw, open political battle for supremacy, and while the nation looked on at the spectacle aghast, Hanna fought with every weapon he owned. On the big day, January 11, 1898, he had his legislative supporters marched under guard through the streets to the majestic, domeless state capitol building, when he was duly elected United States senator.

Hanna’s most Significant defeat in national politics came after the death of McKinley’s Vice President, Garret A. Hobart, who died in November 1899. Hanna was outmaneuvered by two rival political bosses, T. C. Platt of New York and Matt Quay of Pennsylvania, who saw to it that Theodore Roosevelt won the vice presidential nomination in 1900. Hanna disliked Roosevelt, whom he called “that damned cowboy,” and he went out of his way to annoy the governor of New York by referring to him as “Teddy.” Roosevelt, on the other hand, irritated Hanna by calling him “Old man.”

The end of the glory road for Hanna came with the assassination of President McKinley on September 6, 1901 by a man named Leon Czolgosz, who turned a short-barreled .32-caliber Iver-Johnson revolver on the Chief Executive in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

Hanna rushed to McKinley’s side as the President’s life ebbed away.

“William… William… Don’t you know me?” he cried out. Hanna’s grief was genuine. Even his critics granted his feeling for McKinley was close to reverence.

Ironically, the anarchist who had murdered the President called Cleveland his home. Czolgosz, the son of a Polish immigrant, was horn in Detroit. The family had moved to Orange Township in Cuyahoga County, where Leon and his two brothers grew up on the farm. In 1880, the family moved to Cleveland, where Leon, a brooding type, took to studying anarchistic literature of the day and attending meetings of anarchistic followers. One such meeting was addressed by the leading anarchist spokesman, Emma Goldman, who declared that all governmental rulers should be exterminated.

“This lecture,” Leon admitted later, “set me on fire with anarchistic ideas; I could, but think I ought to do something heroic.”

That “something heroic” he decided on turned out to be the murder of President McKinley.

As if to put the tragedy behind him with hard work, Hanna was the busiest man in Congress during its next session. He proved, further, to be as valuable an adviser to President Roosevelt as he had been to President McKinley. The new Chief Executive’s opinion of Hanna shot steadily upward as did his fear of the Ohioan as a possible opponent for the Presidency at the next election. He described Hanna’s qualities as “rugged, fearless, straightforwardness of character. No beating around the bush.”

When Hanna hesitated to endorse Roosevelt for the nomination in 1903, Roosevelt challenged him to make his position clear, and the break came. Hanna continued his campaign for re-election to the Senate and won by an overwhelming vote. The experts predicted he would make a bid for the Presidency, but there was a perceptible sag in the old kingmaker’s attitude. The sparkle seemed to have gone out of politics for him when McKinley was extinguished. He looked drawn and tired. In January 1904, shortly after he was sworn in to his new term of office, Mark Hanna took ill with typhoid and died.

Something else had happened in that dreary last third of 1901 to depress Mark Hanna; nothing so dreadful as the assassination of the President, nor as discouraging as the step-up of Roosevelt, but a political development that was, nonetheless, terribly annoying to him personally. It was the election of Tom L. Johnson as mayor of Cleveland.

Hanna saw Johnson’s ascendancy as a menacing portent of things to come. Like most other conservatives of the day, he regarded Johnson as a dangerous radical whose philosophy threatened the security of the established system. He accused Tom L. of being the national leader of the Socialist party. At other times, he called him a “nihilist” and an “anarchist.”

The plain fact was that Johnson had been a burr in Hanna’s side for some twenty-two years, and his election as mayor of Cleveland was a galling climax of their running feud.

Hanna indisputably was the political mastermind of the nation, but even when people were saying that he was more powerful than the President, and joking about McKinley having to dance at the end of Hanna’s string, the Cleveland Republican leader was unable to dominate his own city’s political affairs. He was never able to control Tom Johnson. He could not even win an armistice from him.

Hanna found his strongest opponent right at home. Cleveland knew that Johnson was more than a match for Hanna, and so, in time, did the nation.

Johnson’s dissatisfaction with the governmental and social order of things puzzled Hanna. From the standpoint of that pragmatist, conditions in the United States hardly could have been better than they were in the last glorious quarter of the nineteenth century when the interests of Big Business were able to bend the government to their will. Among those who had taken advantage of the opportunities opened by monopolistic practice was Tom Johnson himself.

Hanna could understand the discontent of the have-nots, but Johnson was one of the haves. He was as much a capitalist as was Hanna, and he owed the system the same kind of loyalty and service. His defection from the approved path of political and economic orthodoxy made him, in effect, a rogue millionaire.

The first confrontation of the two giants in 1879 had set the competitive tone of their relationship during the twenty-five years that followed. It was a head-on conflict, with a street railway franchise in Cleveland as the prize.

They were unlikely opponents. Johnson was a plump, handsome boy of twenty-four years, gentle in manner and soft of voice. He was a newcomer to the city and a nonentity.

Hanna, on the other hand, was one of the city’s leading citizens; a man who counted. It was apparent in his brusque manner, his direct way of speaking, his impatience with underlings.

“Some men must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled,” Mark Hanna once said. “Some men must own; the great mass of men must work for those who own.”

Johnson wanted to win a place in the tangled transit situation in Cleveland where altogether there were eight different street railway companies in operation. One of these, on the West Side, belonged to Mark Hanna, and his company competed for the same franchise that Johnson sought. Hanna’s forces won, even though Johnson’s offer was better. The award was predicated on a technicality in the fine type which gave preference to the bidder with an existing service.

Hanna had won the opening round, but Tom Johnson was a quick learner. This was merely the beginning of the fight. It was the kind of challenge he relished; one in which the odds were against him.

The odds had been heavy against Tom L. Johnson from the beginning. He was born in Blue Spring, Kentucky, near Georgetown, on July 18, 1854, the son of Albert W. Johnson, whose career as a cotton grower was ended by the Civil War.

The family began a nomadic existence that continued even after Colonel Johnson returned from the Confederate Army. Except for one year at a school in Evansville, Indiana, the boy had no formal education. In 1869, though, the family finally settled on a farm near Louisville, Kentucky, and Tom, fifteen, got a job in a rolling mill in the city.

That job lasted only a few months. Two relatives of the Johnson family by marriage, Bidermann and Alfred V. du Pont, had purchased the street railroad in Louisville and they gave Tom a job in the office.

The brothers du Pont were grandsons of Pierre Samuel du Pont, founder of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company.

Tom Johnson’s career with the du Pont railway in Louisville was sensational enough to make Horatio Alger twitch with disbelief. He began as the office boy and handyman at seven dollars a week. At the end of his first year, he was secretary of the company. Two years later, at age seventeen, he was superintendent of the railway. Along the way he also had invented the world’s first coin fare box- a glass and metal container that kept conductor and customers alike honest. He profited to the extent of close to thirty thousand dollars from the invention.

At age twenty, he married a distant cousin, Maggie J. Johnson, and two years later he became a full-fledged railway entrepreneur with the purchase of the majority of the stock of the Indianapolis street railway company from William H. English, who later was a candidate for the vice presidency of the United States.

He had approached English with the hope of selling him his fare boxes.

“I don’t want to buy a fare box, young man,” English said, “but I have a street railroad to sell.”

Johnson bought. He financed the transaction with his profits from the invention and a loan from the du Ponts. The Indianapolis railway was a stumbling, deficit operation, and English proved to be troublesome, but the young executive overcame the problems and turned the system into a profitable enterprise.

His appetite whetted by this achievement, he looked around for another battlefield worthy of his talents and decided on Cleveland as his target. The defeat he suffered at the hands of Mark Hanna in his initial bid only made him more determined.

“I was only twenty-five,” he wrote later, “and willing to learn.”

He purchased the Pearl Street (West 25th Street) Line that ran along that West Side thoroughfare a distance of a few miles to a terminal point at the Market House at Pearl and Lorain streets, just a half-mile short of the Superior Viaduct and the municipally owned tracks on it which would carry a streetcar over the Cuyahoga Valley and into the downtown area.

The trouble was that the precious half-mile of track on Pearl Street between the end of Tom L.’s railway and the Superior Viaduct was owned by the Lorain Street and Woodland Avenue Railway. This was the company in which Harma was a large stockholder. It was headed by a Captain Elias Simms. They would not give Johnson permission to use their tracks and thus enable him to provide uninterrupted, through service downtown to his customers.

Pending a solution of the problem, Johnson resorted to the use of a horse-drawn bus line to carry his passengers from the end of his line to the center of the city. Meanwhile, knowing that the Hanna-Simms franchise was coming up soon for renewal, he made their blocking of through service on his line a hot political issue. The City Council came under such severe civic scrutiny in the controversy that even though it was normally under Hanna’s thumb, it refused to grant a renewal of the Hanna-Simms company’s franchise except on condition that Johnson’s streetcars be allowed the use of his rival’s tracks.

That was Tom Johnson’s first victory over Mark Hanna and it had important consequences. It provided him with a firm footing for future expansion in the Cleveland traction field. It gave him civic and political stature as the man who had heat the formidable Mark Hanna. And, as it turned out, it brought about a situation which led directly to still another victory-a quarrel between Captain Simms and Hanna. The partners fell out and Simms was ousted from his railway post.

Johnson, meanwhile, moved quickly toward expansion. He bought a second railway line, the Jennings Avenue Line, and followed with a bid in the City Council for the big prize- a franchise to construct lines on the East Side. If successful in this bid, he would be able to connect the East Side lines with his existing West Side railways and thus provide Cleveland, for the first time, with cross-city, through rail transportation for a single fare.

The concept captured the imagination of Clevelanders, but the odds again were against Johnson. Hanna’s influence in the City Council and his calculated willingness “to spread the green” gave him the upper hand. It was a tug-of-war for votes. Johnson and Hanna attended every meeting of the council, directing their opposing maneuvers like a pair of field marshals. A vote was ordered and in the roll call two councilmen who always heretofore had voted in the Hanna interest suddenly shifted to the Johnson side. Their votes were decisive. Johnson won the precious franchise and another sensational victory over the great Mark Hanna.

The happy defection of the councilmen, it turned out, puzzled Johnson as much as it did Hanna- so much so that Tom, reasoning that Hanna’s former associate, Simms, might be able to throw some light on the subject, went to the home of his former rival.

Simms came to the door in his shirt-sleeves, squirted some tobacco juice over the bannister, eyed Johnson for a long moment, and finally invited him inside.

Johnson quickly explained the purpose of his visit.

“You’re a smart young feller, Johnson,” Simms said. “Beat me, didn’t ye?”

When Johnson stirred, Simms lifted his hand.

“Yes,” he said, “ye beat me. Folks might say I ain’t very smart. Everybody knows Hanna’s smart, though. Takes more’n a fool to beat Hanna. If you beat Hanna, nobody’ll say that any damn fool could beat Simms. Ye beat me; I want ye to beat Hanna.”

The explanation of Hanna’s defeat was that simple. Simms still retained enough influence with at least two city councilmen to strike back at his old partner and restore some of his shattered pride.

The significance of the Hanna-Johnson conflicts was not the disposition of the prized railway franchises, but the emergence of a strong man who could successfully do battle with the Republican leader-and on his home ground, at that.

In his autobiography, “My Story,” Tom L. reveals that the significance of his successful opposition was not lost on Hanna.

“When I met him the next time I was in Cleveland, Mr. Hanna asked me why I had declined his proposition, pointing out as advantages to such an arrangement his acquaintance and influence with bankers and his familiarity with the political end of the game and my knowledge of and experience in the street railroad business itself.

“My answer was that we were too much alike; that as associates it would be a question of time, and a short time only, until one of us would ‘crowd the other clear off the bench’; that we would make good opponents, not good partners.”

He added: “I have never had any occasion to modify that opinion.”

Up to that time, Tom Johnson, while admittedly a prodigy to be reckoned with in business affairs, had shown no inclination toward public service. Yet, politics was in the tradition of his family. Among his ancestors he counted some who had been members of Congress and governors, and one who even had been Vice President of the United States- Richard M. Johnson, who served with President Martin Van Buren from 1837 to 1841.

The turning paint in Tom Johnson’s life came in 1883 when he bought a book called Social Problems, by Henry George, to while away the time on a train trip. The book disturbed him deeply, as did another work by the same political economist, Progress and Poverty.

George’s theory of the single tax- a tax on land values, including the value of all franchises and public utilities operated for private profit- and his fiery denunciation of the way in which the economic system was tilted in favor of the vested interests, whom he grouped under the name of Privilege, came to the twenty-six-year-old capitalist like a messianic call.

He struggled briefly against the call because what George preached was, in effect, a condemnation of the very monopolistic system and the very practices that were making Johnson rich. In the end, unable to repudiate George’s arguments even with the help of the best intellects around him, Johnson capitulated. He went to Henry George at his home in Brooklyn in 1885, assured himself of the man’s greatness in a series of conversations, and became his lifelong disciple.

It was because of Henry George that Tom Johnson went into politics. His first political speech, a gasping, five-minute struggle, was made in behalf of George’s candidacy for mayor of New York. It was symptomatic of the painful readjustment Johnson would have to make in his way of life.

The effect of George’s philosophy on him was profound, as his friend, Frederic Howe, noted in his Confessions of a Reformer:

“He [Johnson] lived with Henry George whom he loved; had talked every phase of his philosophy through with him. He had its deeper social significance at his finger tips. The single tax had come to him like St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, changing a monopolist into the most dangerous enemy that monopoly could have-an enemy not of men but of institutions.”

Said Johnson, speaking about Henry George’s book:

“If this book is really true, I shall have to give up business. It isn’t right for me to make money out of protected industries, out of street railway franchises, out of land speculation. I must get out of business or prove that this book is wrong.”

But he did not abandon his business career at that time, nor did he prove George wrong. He continued to shine as one of the most successful capitalists of his generation, but some of the sparkle had gone out of the moneymaking game.

“I continued my business with as much zest as ever,” he said, “but my point of view was no longer that of a man whose chief object in life is to get rich.”

It was the beginning of greatness for Tom L. Johnson.

Three years after his meeting with Henry George, Johnson projected himself into politics as an active aspirant to office. He won the nomination as candidate for Congress from Cleveland’s 21st District on the Democratic ticket. He was defeated handily by the haughty Theodore E. Burton.

He made the same race again two years later against the same opponent, but Representive Burton this time made the tactical error that Richard M. Nixon would make against John F. Kennedy- he engaged Johnson in a series of debates. Johnson gave him a drubbing on the platform. It was a case of old fashioned political oratory against a naive kind of candor, and the voters liked the contrasting plain talk. Johnson was elected to Congress and served two terms in which he led the fight for free trade at a time when proponents of high tariff protectionism were riding high in the saddle. He was defeated by his old rival, Burton, in the 1894 election and turned his attention back to business.

Even giving his business part-time attention, Johnson had done rather well. He had invented a grooved streetcar rail and he and his associates, including the du Ponts, had built a factory to manufacture curves, frogs, and switches out of the rail in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; he had bought a railway line in Brooklyn, New York, and in St. Louis. He had rescued the Detroit street railway, which his brother Albert had purchased. Further, he and his associates built the Lorain Steel Company in Lorain, Ohio, which became part of United States Steel Corporation.

Johnson, incidentally, played an important role in the popularization of Coney Island by putting it within reach of the masses through cheap transportation. He merged the Nassau Street railroad with the Atlantic Avenue system and established the first five-cent fare from Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island. The fare previously had been about twenty-five cents.

One night an old millionaire friend, R. T. Wilson of New York, came to Johnson’s hotel room and asked his help through a severe fit of depression that his millions could not relieve, and Johnson suddenly knew that he must escape the net that his many business activities had thrown over his dreams for public service. He began at that time a program of steady withdrawal from business.

On January 8, 1901, Johnson announced at a Jackson Day banquet in Cleveland’s Kennard House that he was forsaking business forever and would devote the rest of his life to politics-not as a candidate for office, but as a worker in the ranks “for the principles of democracy.”

Less than a month later, on February 1, a delegation of fifty Democrats called on Johnson at home and asked him to be a candidate for mayor of Cleveland. They presented him with a petition with 15,682 signatures. Tom L. found the call irresistible. He was nominated at the Democratic primaries in mid-February.

He was a different kind of politician from the very outset. His use of a circus tent for his meetings- an emergency device at first- became a trademark.

He refused to spend a lot of money on his campaign, even though he was wealthy. He wouldn’t even buy a lottery ticket or a ticket to a church gathering.

He wouldn’t promise a delegation of City Hall employees that he would continue them in their jobs if elected. When they asked him to pledge the dismissal of all Republicans holding city jobs, he refused.

He declared against granting extensions of street railway franchises to lines charging any fare higher than three cents.

He went on record as a supporter of Henry George’s single tax philosophy and promised to try to right an unjust appraisal of real property made the year before.

Big Business took Johnsons nomination calmly, and some members of the Chamber of Commerce thought his election might even be a good thing. One of the most widely quoted reactions was that the election gave Cleveland “a chance to get good government and a hundred-thousand-dollar man for mayor at six thousand dollars a year.”

Mark Hanna was not one of the complacent ones. He regarded Tom Johnson as a dangerous man and warned against his election.

The railroad interests also were fearful of Johnson achieving the mayoralty, and they put pressure on the existing city administration of Mayor John Farley and the City Council to reach a settlement on some disputed lakefront land. The land, claimed by the city and the railroads, was worth from ten to twenty million dollars at the time.

“As a citizen,” said Johnson, “I had brought suit to prevent the mayor… from signing an ordinance passed by a crooked council settling the controversy and conveying the land in question to the railroads without compensation.”

Johnson obtained an injunction preventing the city from executing the twenty-million-dollar giveaway ordinance. It was due to expire at eleven o’clock on the morning of April 4. Tom L. was elected mayor on April 1, 1901, defeating his Republican opponent, W. J. Akers, by some six thousand votes. He had three days to win certification of election by the Board of Elections if he was going to block the land gift to the railroads, but it normally took the board from two to three weeks to make its official count.

Johnson prodded the Board of Elections into working night and day to finish the count before the injunction expired. It was a miracle of sorts that they succeeded.

Just thirty-seven minutes before the injunction would die, Johnson took the official oath of office of the city clerk on the third floor of the City Hall, filed his bond, and went directly to the mayor’s office.

“Mr. Farley looked up as I came in and mumbled ungraciously; ‘Well, Tom, when are you going to take hold?’

“I replied that I hoped he would take his time about moving his belongings, but that I had been mayor for several minutes.”

No city ever got such a bargain! A saving of twenty million dollars’ worth of precious lakefront land simply by substituting one mayor for another.

The way in which Tom L. Johnsons election as mayor of Cleveland upset the balance of power in the city and shattered the social and political complacency of the entire community is suggested in a recollection by one of Johnson’s followers, a former Cleveland city councilman named Frederic C. Howe, who, as a Republican, was one of the new chief executive’s opponents in the beginning.

“For the greater part of nine years [Johnson’s reign as mayor],” wrote Howe, «Cleveland was an armed camp. There was but one line of division. It was between those who would crucify Mr. Johnson and all of his friends, and those who believed in him. I doubt if any of the border cities like Washington and Covington during the Civil War were more completely rent asunder than was Cleveland during those years. It is doubtful if the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines in the Italian cities were more bitter, mare remorseless, more cruel than this contention in Cleveland.

“If any kind of cruelty, any kind of coercion, any kind of social, political or financial power was left untried in those years to break the heart of Mr. Johnson, I do not know what or when it was.”

Life in Cleveland changed when the stout (260 pounds), curly-haired mayor took office. Cleveland voters had sown the wind and they reaped a whirlwind. Not many of the people in the street had understood him during his campaign as he inveighed against Privilege and hammered words of criticism at monopolistic practices, especially the public utility companies that provided the city’s electricity, artificial gas, and street railway service, but they had deep faith in this man who had turned his back on money and privilege to serve them.

The city delighted in the spectacle of the new mayor at work. The people chuckled and applauded when he ordered the parks department to pull up the “Don’t Walk on the Grass” signs and invited the citizens to go out of their way to walk on the public greens wherever they found them. They watched admiringly as he ordered new playgrounds, instituted reforms in the city’s penal policy, bought farmlands for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents, ordered the city to take over garbage collection and disposal (saving the city money in the process), began a new policy of law enforcement, warred on billboards, put whitewings to work cleaning up the city streets, and hammered at county tax policies.

Among those who stood by and watched the new mayor in amazement was Lincoln Steffens, the nation’s leading exposer of municipal corruption, who described Johnson’s debut in office in these words:

“It was like seeing a captain of industry on the stage. He listened, all attention, till he understood. Then he would smile or laugh, give a decision, and ‘Next!’ No asking time to ‘think it over’ or to ‘consult his colleagues,’ no talk of ‘commissions to investigate,’ no ‘come again next week.’ It was no or yes, genial, jolly, but final.”

Vice was a prominent part of the Cleveland way of life when Johnson took over; most of it concentrated along the northern edge of the downtown section. The new mayor certainly was no prude, but his sense of civic propriety was offended by what he saw, especially as he recognized that a large degree of police cooperation was an essential element wherever wickedness was able to flourish. He reached deep into the back ranks of the police department and pulled out an arrogant officer named Fred Kohler against whom a number of complaints had been lodged. At first he answered the complaints by sending Kohler to the sticks, but now he decided he had been unfair and that Kohler could be, in fact, a real asset to his administration.

“How would you like to be chief?” he asked the stiff-necked Teuton.

“I haven’t asked for it,” replied Kohler rudely. He added gratuitously: “I’m a Republican.”

“I don’t care anything about your politics,” said the mayor, “and I know you haven’t asked for anything.”

Kohler became his police chief. In later years he was to become mayor himself.

There were other appointments like that one, as Johnson crossed over party lines without any hesitation in search of the right men, causing Democratic party regulars to wax wistful. But the bipartisan approach gave him a strong staff of executive assistants, even though his choices seemed to be unlikely-and unwise-to the professional politicians. For example, he named as city solicitor a young man just beginning the practice of law, and he had to withstand loud criticism for his selection. The man was Newton D. Baker, and he turned out to be brilliant in the city’s service as law director. Later he also would be an outstanding mayor, a leading world figure as Secretary of War in the cabinet of Woodrow Wilson, and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1920s.

Johnson’s welfare director was his own minister, Rev. Harris R. Cooley, a great humanitarian with the conviction that society was at least partly responsible for delinquency through its imposition of a life of poverty on so many of the wrongdoers. He believed that society had an obligation to help rehabilitate these people, not as an act of charity but as a matter of justice. The city purchased twenty-five farms with two thousand acres of land during the Johnson administration for the establishment in the country of farm colonies for the care of all city charges- the old, the sick, the young, and the delinquent. This humane experiment in the salvation of unfortunates drew international attention and widespread praise for the progressive new Cleveland city government.

His administration included, as city clerk, a rough-talking former steel puddler from Newburgh named Peter Witt, who first thrust himself into Tom Johnson’s awareness by heckling him loudly at a campaign tent rally; a Republican named William Stinchcomb, who put together the city’s magnificent Metropolitan Park System and devoted his life to its administration; and Alfred Benesch, a scholarly lawyer who went on to serve as safety director under Mayor Baker and as a member of the city’s Board of Education for several decades.

Among the wide-eyed newspapermen covering the Johnson administration was a Plain Dealer reporter named W. B. (“Burr”) Gongwer. The mayor liked him and persuaded him to forsake his career in journalism to become his secretary. After Johnson’s death, Congwer became the party boss and reigned into the 1930s.

The Johnson administration, in brief, was a breeding ground from which issued most of the city’s leaders during the next twenty years, and all of them seemed to be imbued with something of the spirit and drive of the man who was their political mentor. Lincoln Steffens called them “the happiest gang of reformers in America.”

Lined up in opposition to those Johnson-led reformers, however, was a strong lineup of those who favored the old Hanna policy of standing pat. They were, in Johnson’s eyes, the Princes of Privilege.

Even as mayor, Tom L. did not turn his attention away from his favorite field of battle, the street railway system. All through his four terms of office he fought for the three-cent fare, and it became the rallying cry of all his followers. Eventually it did come about, but not until he had left office, and it lasted only a short while.

He fought monopolism as only an old monopolist would know how to fight it. He fought fire with fire. Instead of engaging in futile denunciations of the monopoly enjoyed by the artificial gas and coal interests, Johnson invited the backers of John D. Rockefeller’s East Ohio Gas Company to bid for a franchise in Cleveland. This group had hesitated to try for the prize because its members knew that Mayor Johnson was aware Standard Oil Company, the biggest trust of them all, owned the natural gas wells. They assumed he would oppose their bid, but he disarmed them with his hearty welcome instead. The reason was that he knew the natural gas would be cheaper and that the public would benefit.

The coal and artificial gas interests, meanwhile, had raised a hefty fund to buy the support of the City Council members. This legislative approach, while admittedly crude and dishonest, nevertheless could be impressively effective. One of the council members, a man named Charlie Kohl, had qualms of conscience, though, and confided in Mayor Johnson that a man named Dr. Daykin had offered him five thousand dollars to vote against the natural gas interests.

The mayor interrupted his dinner- a real indication that he thought the information important.

“Charlie,” he said, shrewdly, “if you were a really game man, I would suggest a line of action. But I don’t think you would carry it out, so there is no use in my advising you.”

The councilman pleaded for the chance to prove that he was game and honest. The mayor nodded approvingly and recommended that the councilman return to Dr. Daykin and take as big a bribe as he could coax out of him.

At the City Council meeting that night, the mayor took the floor and made a sweeping accusation of dishonesty against the artificial gas and coal interests. He noted as he talked that Dr. Daykin was among the interested spectators in the council chamber. When he reached the key point in his speech, Councilman Kohl dramatically stepped forward and slapped the thousand dollars in bribe money on the table.

In the pandemonium that ensued, Dr. Daykin hurried toward the nearest exit, but Johnson’s booming voice halted him in his tracks.

“You won’t get very far, Doctor. Some of my friends are waiting for you outside!”

The East Ohio Gas Company’s franchise then was approved and without a dissenting vote- a notable triumph for the mayor. The hapless Dr. Daykin was arrested, tried, and acquitted.

Mayor Johnson also fought fiercely the monopoly enjoyed by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. He tried, unsuccessfully, to get voter approval of bond issues to finance a competitive municipal light plant in 1903. Failing in this, he called for annexation of a small suburb, South Brooklyn, which, fortuitously, already had a small light plant. His campaign to annex the town was fiercely resisted; so much so that the mayor openly charged fifteen Republican members of the City Council with misfeasance and two Democrat councilmen with bribery. Annexation was approved, and the city expanded the municipal plant into a formidable, effective regulator of electric rates charged by the private utility. The latter company, by way of illustration, had charged the city $87.60 annually for each street light in 1900. By the time Tom Johnson left office, the competition of the municipal plant had reduced that cost to $54.96 a year for each light. C.E.I. rates, generally, dropped 20 per cent in three years. The municipal operation has served as an efficient yardstick for some sixty years, saving Clevelanders many millions of dollars over that time, as Tom L. foresaw it would.

He instituted other improvements, among them enforcement of honest weights and measures, the building of grade crossings, construction of public bathhouses, reduction of water bills, adoption of a model building code, inspection of meat and dairy products, creation of a forestry department, a crusade against gambling, the washing of city streets, band concerts in the parks in summer, and skating carnivals in winter.

Cleveland sparkled and danced with the excitement of the Johnson administration. Lincoln Steffens called Tom L. “the best mayor of the best-governed city in the United States.” That was the headiest kind of praise, coming from the great muckraker who once had been openly skeptical of Jonson.

In one of his volumes of random reminiscences, Lincoln Steffens Speaking, it was written of the Cleveland reformer:

“Tom Johnson, the big businessman who became mayor of Cleveland for an economic purpose, set the precedent for all businessmen and engineers in politics. The ministers and their followers, the good people, called on him to enforce the laws against the saloons, bawdy houses, and petty vice. He refused openly, explicitly, absolutely.

“He said that he had gone into politics to tackle the economic conditions which produced the evils the clergy complained of; he would deal with the causes of riches, poverty, and crime. He would not waste time on the symptoms which engaged the moralists.

“‘I will not be diverted,’ he declared to their faces, ’from my larger purposes to your petty purposes. I would rather not be mayor; I would rather stick to the big crooked business you approve than go chasing the miserable men and women you want punished. I shall do the job I was elected to do, leaving your dirty work to you, and, if I have any trouble from you, I will turn aside long enough to show up you and your congregations and your churches and trace your roots to the grafts you are sharing in and living on.’

“They did not know they were in on any graft, so he showed them a little, just enough to frighten them, and they quit. Tom Johnson had no trouble from the churches.”

Not everybody in Cleveland agreed with Steffens that Johnson was a great mayor. The man, after all, was a radical; a traitor to his class. He seemed to be intent on upsetting the status quo, and such a man was dangerous.

Men of great influence in the city stirred uneasily as they watched the new mayor. Mark Hanna had no doubts at all about the nature of the threat posed by his old foe. Whenever he could take his eyes off the national scene, he looked worriedly in the direction of Johnson. And when Tom L. made a bid for the governorship of Ohio in 1903, the tired old senator found new strength to fight him around the state.

Johnson was a picturesque campaigner. He took his circus tent everywhere in Ohio, and it was a more efficient auditorium than ever before, giving him the mobility he needed. He roared up and down the dusty Ohio roads and through towns and hamlets in his Winton motorcar, the Red Devil, the long curls that crept out from beneath the back of his black derby blowing in the wind. Ohioans enjoyed the spectacle. And close behind Tom L. came Senator Mark Hanna, the most famous man in the nation outside of Theodore Roosevelt, and he tried to top every argument that Tom L. presented to the voters. He even topped his tent, coming out with one that was bigger than Johnson’s.

This was one time that Mark Hanna won over Tom L. Johnson. The voters elected as governor Myron T. Herrick, a fellow Clevelander. It also was the last battle between Johnson and the Boss of Bosses because Senator Hanna died at the beginning of the following year.

Opposition to Mayor Johnson did not die, however. It persisted throughout the four terms he served in office, rising to its highest, shrillest crescendo in 1907 when the alarmed Republican Party waged its most spectacular campaign against his re-election. Representative Theodore E. Burton, the man whom he had engaged in battle over the seat in Congress years before, was selected by the party as the strongest candidate who could be put against the troublesome mayor.

Burton was reluctant to forsake his congressional job, but the party pressured him into accepting the mayoralty nomination. Even President Theodore Roosevelt urged Burton to make the sacrifice, and he agreed.

Cleveland probably had the most interesting mayoralty campaign in its history that summer and autumn of 1907. Burton was known as “the old Roman,” and his method of campaigning was directly opposite to the style of Johnson. Burton spoke in long, reverberating, rolling phrases with a classical grandeur to every syllable. He was the statesman and the orator; dignity personified; a visitor from Greek mythology come down to walk among the mortals.

It was at a tent meeting of Republicans in an Irish ward that the congressman made the momentous announcement of his decision to run for mayor.

“Jacta alea est!” he cried out, flinging his arm dramatically.

The Irish weren’t too sure if that was good, but they applauded dutifully anyway while interpreters rushed around the audience with the translation of the congressman’s Latin: “The die is cast!”

Tom Johnson was not the man to let that opportunity slip past. At his next tent meeting, he recalled Burton’s Latin quotation and came up with his own interpretation. He said he thought the words meant, “Let ‘er go, Gallagher!”

Clevelanders howled with delight.

Congressman Burton doggedly stayed with his formal style of speech, however, opening one evening of campaign oratory with the following preamble:

“I have spoken within the halls of Parliament in London, and in London’s Crystal Palace; in Berlin and in the south of France; within the confines of the Arctic Circle, in the valley of the Yukon, Alaska- but kind friends, I am glad to be here with you tonight!”

Peter Witt liked that opening so much that a few nights later he opened a Johnson rally with:

“I have spoken in the corn fields of Ashtabula, in the stone quarries of Berea, and at the town hall in Chardon… but kind friends, I am glad to be here with you tonight!”

There was no doubt who won that exchange.

There were a few low punches thrown against Johnson in that campaign, including stories that he was a drunkard, consorted with women of questionable repute, frequented low dives, and encouraged debauches everywhere he went.

The Republicans imported the acid pen of Cartoonist Homer Davenport from New York, and he concentrated all his undeniable talent for violent caricature against Johnson in the pages of the Cleveland Leader. Before undertaking the assignment, Davenport, himself a believer in the single tax, came to Johnson and apologized in advance. Johnson told him he understood his position and to go ahead and do his best. “I’ll forgive you,” he told the cartoonist. Davenport nodded his thanks. “You will,” he said, “but my father never will.”

Johnson never deviated in his career from a policy of shunning personal abuse.

“There is very great danger,” he said, “of having the best of movements sidetracked by the calling of hard names and the personal abuse of individuals. Tactics of that kind will never get anywhere. Throughout the whole of our fight we adhered to our first plan, which was to attack institutions- Privilege, and not men.”

Tom L. beat Theordore Burton handily, sending the congressman fleeing back to Washington, and Peter Witt sent President Roosevelt a needling telegram which said: “Cleveland as usual went moral again. The next time you tell Theodore to run, tell him which way.”

The campaign had taken a lot out of Tom Johnson, however. His health was beginning to fail, and he had worries. His wife was ill. His daughter had made an unfortunate marriage with a man posing as an Italian “nobleman.” His fortune had dwindled steadily away.

His only recreation was an invention he had been working on in his basement during the busy political years- a new system of transporting people in cars suspended from an overhead rail and powered by electromagnetic impulse. His working model was successful and he confidently estimated that his novel railway system would be able to propel people from New York to Chicago in two hours’ time- at an average speed of five hundred miles an hour! While the claim still sounds fantastic, engineers of the General Electric Company came to Cleveland from Schenectady at Johnson’s invitation to inspect his brainchild, and their judgment was that it was a magnificent concept, basically sound. The G.E. management signed an agreement with Johnson to build a test project, but considerable expense was involved and the idea fell by the wayside of a busy life.

Tom L. had other things to think about.

In 1909, to everybody’s astonishment, he was defeated in his bid for a fifth term as mayor. It was an upset that made national headlines, a stunning surprise even to the winner, a former West Side brewer named Herman C. Baehr, who served out his two years and was retired from office. From that day on, though, he signed his name “Former Mayor Herman C. Baehr.”

At the end of his term, Tom L. told the new mayor:

“I have served the people for nearly nine years. I have had more of misfortune in those nine years than in any other period of my life. As that is true, it is also true that I have had more of joy.

“In those nine years I have given the biggest and the best part of me. I have served the people of Cleveland the best I knew how.”

During Tom Johnson’s years as mayor, his personal fortune had dwindled away. An indication of his financial plight was seen in his disposition of the big mansion on Millionaire’s Row right after the election. He and his wife moved into an apartment hotel, and he went to New York for medical treatment. In 1910, against the advice of doctors and friends, he made a tour of Europe, where he was hailed everywhere he went- in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland. The climax of his reception was a dinner in his honor in the House of Parliament.

Upon his return to the United States, he was given a public reception and dinner in the Hotel Astor in New York by his admirers on May 31, 1910. He died in Cleveland less than a year later, April 10, 1911.

The Cleveland Leader, describing the passage of the simple funeral cortege of six automobiles through the city streets leading to the Union Station, said:

“Two hundred thousand persons saw Tom L. Johnson’s last journey through Cleveland. The heart of the city stopped for two hours…”

They took Tom Johnson’s body to Brooklyn and buried him where he wanted to rest in death- alongside the grave of Henry George in Greenwood Cemetery.

The way Cleveland sorrowed, it was as if a President of the United States had died. There was an instant awareness among the people that a great man had passed their way and paused long enough to brush away the cobwebs of disillusionment that had almost covered the bright, idealistic American dream.

“…Honesty is not enough,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, one of those who sorrowed; “it takes intelligence, some knowledge or theory of economics, courage, strength, will power, humor, leadership- it takes intellectual integrity to solve our political problems. And these Tom Johnson had above all the politicians of my day.

“His courage was the laughing sort; his humor was the kind that saved him tears. He had the instinct and the habit of experimentation, and he had the training of a big successful man of business on the other side of politics. A practical business man, he was a practical politician, too. He knew the game. He could pick and lead a team; men loved to follow him; he made it fun…

“He cleared my head of a lot of rubbish, left there from my academic education and reform associations. I asked him one day why he had thought I would not understand him if he told me what he was up to in Cleveland.

“‘Oh, I could see,’ he said, ‘that you did not know what it was that corrupted politics. First you thought it was bad politicians, who turned out to be pretty good fellows. Then you blamed the bad business men who bribed the good fellows, till you discovered that not all business men bribed and those who did were pretty good business men. The little business men didn’t bribe; so you settled upon, you invented, the phrase “big business,” and that’s as far as you and your kind have got: that it is big business that does all the harm.

“‘Hell! Can’t you see that it’s privileged business that does it? Whether it’s a big steam railroad that wants a franchise or a little gambling-house that wants not to be raided, a temperance society that wants a law passed, a poor little prostitute, or a big merchant occupying an alley for storage- it’s those who seek privileges who corrupt, it’s those who possess privileges that defend our corrupt politics. Can’t you see that?’

“This was more like a Hash of light than a speech, and as I took it in and shed it around in my head, he added: ‘It is privilege that causes evil in the world, not wickedness, and not men.’

“And I remembered then something I heard him say one day to a group of business men he was fighting, something neither they nor I understood at the time. To a remonstrance of theirs that I do not recall, he blurted out: It’s fun, running the business of the city of Cleveland; it’s the biggest, most complicated, most difficult, and most satisfying business in Cleveland. A street railway is child’s play compared with it; a coal mine is a snap; a bank?- bah! There’s something that blinds you fellows, and I know what it is. It’s what fooled me so long when I was running public service corporations. And I’ll tell you something you want to know: How to beat me.

“‘If I could take away from you the things you have, the franchises, the privileges, that make you enemies of your city, you would see what I see and run for my job yourselves, and you’d beat me for mayor and manage the city of Cleveland better than I do.’

“Tom Johnson struck at the sources of the evils, not at the individuals and classes usually blamed, with all his fine intelligence and all the powers of an unusually powerful mayor…. He explained his acts with patience, care and eloquence to the whole town; he held the votes of the common people…”

There was a mystique to this mayor, as there is around all great men. Those who fell under his spell lived dreamily and fanatically for his cause; they were not so much his supporters as they were his followers. They believed in him and they loved him as few statesmen in the history of the United States have been privileged to receive the faith and affection of the people.