Notes & Comments

The Lake City’s mayoral achievers had different backgrounds from those in the Motor City. Unlike Detroit, where four of the five upward succeeders were labeled reformers, only one of Cleveland’s mayors, Newton Baker (a political successor to reformer Thomas L. Johnson), could be identified as a reformer by either contemporaries or later urban historians. Four of Cleveland’s success mayors were Roman Catholics: Locher, Celebrezze, Burke, and Lausche. Two were foreign born, with Locher being born in Romania and Celebrezze in Italy; and if one includes Slovenian-American Lausche, three were of South and Eastern European heritages, as was a goodly portion of the city’s voting population.⁸

The pathway to City Hall in Cleveland for its success mayors was also somewhat different from that of other cities. Five of the seven success mayors could have been said to have “inherited” their jobs: four including Baker, Burton, Burke and Locher held important prior offices (Law Director) that made them the next in the line of succession and moved them into the mayor’s chair when the city leader moved up the political feeding-chain or out of City Hall. One (Celebrezze) had attracted so much attention in the Ohio legislature that when Mayor Burke ascended to the United States Senate, the Democrats named Celebrezze acting mayor, and he went on to win four re-elections.

Showing why five of the seven Cleveland success mayors got into office by succession, however, does not explain why they went higher in the political system, and why specifically Cleveland leads in this regard over other cities. Part of the answer may be the connection between the city and the state political systems. Ohio has excelled as a recruiting ground for national political leaders. Between the Civil War and 1920, seven Ohioans were elected to the presidency, ending with Harding’s election in 1920. At the same time six Ohioans sat on the United States Supreme Court and two served as Chief Justices. Ohio also sent nineteen men to cabinet positions, and several of the state’s politicians wielded substantial power in the national legislature, including John Sherman, George Pendleton, Marcus A. Hanna, and Joseph B. Foraker. “Not since the Virginia dynasty dominated national government during the early years of the Republic,” historian R. Douglas Hurt notes, “had a state made such a mark on national political affairs.”⁹

Ohioans dominated national politics for seventy years because Ohio was, to a large extent, a microcosm of the nation. Hurt writes that the elements of that microcosm were “the diversity of the people, the strength of the industrial and agricultural economy, and the balance between rural and urban populations.” Further, he observes that “the individuals who played major roles in national affairs appealed to broad national constituencies because they learned their skills in Ohio, where political success required candidates to reconcile wide differences among the voters. Ohioans were northerners and southerners as well as easterners and westerners.” Consequently, Ohio’s politicians addressed constituencies that were the same as those across the nation,” and were thus good choices for appointment to national office.¹⁰

Finally, the pragmatic and centrist character of Ohio politics, Hurt asserts, has made it “job-oriented rather than issue-oriented,” unlike Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota: the latter three are “issue-oriented states” at election time, and for the most part less attractive in recruiting a national political leadership. In the Buckeye State, which is the “great Middle-class state,” Hurt concludes that the “public tends to favor rectitude rather than reform.”¹¹

Another Midwestern political culture and contender for being a nationally representative state is Illinois. Although Illinois has also been labeled as a “cross section of America” by historian Cullom Davis and by pollsters as a “microcosm” of the nation and a “bellwether” in predicting voting trends, yet that national appeal of its urban politicians has been negated by Chicago’s reputation as a “clout city.” Chicago, that “Sodom of the lakeshore,” the hometown of Al Capone and machine politics, has erased whatever middle-America attractions Chicago might have had for national electorates. Unlike Cleveland, the Windy City’s mayor’s chair has not been a launching platform for high state or national office.¹²

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