Notes & Comments

Cleveland: Success City in Promoting Public Office

By: Melvin G. Holli, University of Illinois at Chicago

PATHWAYS TO POWER: or The Yellow Brick Road to Emerald City

Is the big-city mayoralty a “stepping stone to higher ground” as the Reverend Jesse Jackson asserted when Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington, was elected, or is it as New York scholar Wallace Sayre declared in his famous “Sayre’s Law” a dead-end job whereby Gotham’s mayors “come from anywhere and go nowhere”?¹

In seeking an answer to that question, I examined the upward political mobility of all of the mayors who served between 1820 and 1980 in the fifteen big cities. (The fifteen big cities were selected from those with the longest duration in the top fifteen population class for the period under study). In the search that includes 679 biographies found in the Bibliographical Dictionary of American Mayors, we find that Cleveland, with its seven “success” mayors, emerges as something of a nursery for growing national leaders. In second place is Detroit with five upward achievers, followed by San Francisco and Boston with four, and then Baltimore, New Orleans, and New York with three apiece, which covers the top half of the big cities studied. At the very bottom of the post-mayoral achievement scale are Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles with a mere one each.²

Since the fifteen cities are different in age, population size, and locations in the nation this leads to a series of questions such as, what bearing does the age of a city have on the production of national leaders via the mayor’s chair? Prime facie, it would seem obvious that the oldest cities should have a comparative advantage in that they have had more time to play the political game and practice in producing political leaders. Yet, the answer seems to be in the negative, since the top four in success-producers – Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston – range in age from being relative juveniles to senior cities. By contrast, three of the oldest seaport cities, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia, produced fewer upwardly mobile mayors. Thus, the age of the city seems to confer no advantage.

Another logical deduction might be that population size confers advantage, but that does not seem to be the case either. New York, the largest and one of the oldest, and her sister cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore (the latter two which ranked high in the big city population scales of the 19th and early 20th centuries) were low in the production of politicians who leaped from city hall to national prominence and national office. It seems evident from the tables and the text that neither the age of the city, nor its population size carries much explanatory power in telling us why some cities are nurseries and breeding ground for upwardly mobile politicians while others function more like astronomers’ black holes.

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