Introduction to the Book
The Confessions of a Reformer
by Frederic C. Howe
James F. Richardson
[Reprinted in 1988 by The Kent State University Press
First published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925]
Confessions of a Reformer is an important political
autobiography. Originally published in 1925, the book details the
odyssey of Frederic C. Howe from the small-town America of the
post-Civil War decades, where stifling orthodoxy -- whether
religious, political, or economic -- was the norm, to the heady
excitements of Baltimore, Cleveland. and New York during the
Progressive Era. to the disillusionment stemming from repressive
governmental actions during World War I and the postwar Red Scare.
Howe's career is significant precisely because it encompassed so
many of the major themes of American history from the early 1890s to
the mid-1920s. His graduate work at Johns Hopkins (Ph.D. 1892) fired
him with enthusiasm for the possibilities of a society led by an
enlightened class open to positive change; his travels to Europe
convinced him that American cities could also be beautiful, humane,
and cultured; he respond warmly to the political leadership of
Cleveland's Mayor Tom L. Johnson (1901-09) and President Woodrow
Wilson (1913-21), who had been a favorite professor of his at
Hopkins; and he suffered from watching his former hero, President
Wilson, in his second term preside over a government that used its
power to impose conformity and hound dissidents.
Throughout his career, Howe was both doer and writer. While he was
never a profound thinker, his articles and books demonstrate his
belief in the power of information and ideas to help transform
government and society. Like other progressives, he reveled in the
prospect of positive social change under the direction of trained
intelligence. In the optimistic atmosphere of the early 1900s,he and
his colleagues believed that their generation had an opportunity to
escape the dogmatisms of the past and to achieve a secular salvation
in the form of economic and social justice. While Howe does not cite
William James or John Dewey, he shared these philosophers' belief
that humans live in an open universe of possibilities and choices,
not in a closed, deterministic system of absolute laws. He thought
it incumbent upon men like himself, who had the advantages of formal
education, to show "the people" how their aspirations for
a better life could be realized and to hold public office to make
those promises reality. At various times, Howe was a city
councilman, a member of the Ohio Senate, and a federal official.
In retrospect, the Progressive Era of the late 1840s to the
entrance of the United States into World War I in 1917 is one of
those periods of questioning and innovation thought of as an age of
reform. Others are the New Deal years of the 1930s and the
tumultuous 1960s with its civil rights movement and President Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society legislation. The issues and trends of these
reform thrusts are by no means identical: the American economy was
certainly more robust during the Progressive Era and the 1960s than
it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal had to
cope with massive joblessness; at no time during the 1930s did the
unemployment rate go below 14 percent, and during bad years it
reached 20 to 25 percent. Economic stagnation in the 1930s delayed
marriages and kept the birth rate low. Restrictive public policy
held immigration to a minimum; indeed Mexican Americans suffered
from forcible repatriation during the decade. The combination of low
birth rates and limited immigration produced a population profile
characterized more by stability than growth or change.
By contrast, the Progressive Era and the 1960s were periods marked
both by sharp increases in the number of Americans and substantial
change in their composition. In the years before the outbreak of war
in Europe in 1914, the United States absorbed millions of newcomers,
mostly from central, southern, and eastern Europe. Sustained
movement from rural America to the cities resulted in the 1920
census showing for the first time more than half of all Americans
living in urban communities. Most immigrants and those who migrated
to cities were young, as Howe was when he made the move from
Meadville, Pennsylvania, to the wider worlds of Baltimore, New York,
and Cleveland.
Youth is surely a theme of the i 960s. So many of the baby boomers
of the post-World War II period came to an age when their presence
and their buying power exerted influence upon the country,
especially its popular culture. Another important theme of the 1960s
is civil rights, the search for equality by blacks in white America.
In August 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his "I Have a
Dream" speech at the mammoth Washington rally, and it seemed as
if the nation were well on the way toward breaking down racial
barriers. Less than five years later King was dead, the victim of an
assassin's bullet, and the civil rights movement was in disarray.
Howe's generation was not much interested in the condition of
Afro-Americans; Woodrow Wilson even imposed segregation among
federal employees where it had not existed before. The progressive
agenda focused more on the implications of concentrated economic
power, how to curb monopoly, maintain competition, and preserve
opportunity for small businessmen in an increasingly oligarchic
economy.
Despite the differences in emphasis among these reform movements,
there are some important parallels. The Progressive Era, the New
Deal, and the 1960s all began with a rush of optimism, a shared
belief that the moment had arrived when outmoded ideas and policies
would be superceded by fresh thinking; bastions of privilege and
injustice would give way to demands for innovation and greater
equality. In each instance, for a few years at least, these demands
for change achieved legislative and institutional expression. During
the Progressive Era, the transformation began on the municipal and
state level -- where Howe was an active participant -- and then
reached the federal government. Both the New Deal and the 1960s
focused on the national level from the beginning.
Whatever the level of government, the limits of reform soon became
apparent. The New Deal was essentially over by 1938. Historian Alien
J. Matusow has entitled his history of liberalism in the 1960s The
Unraveling of America, a designation which accurately conveys
his interpretation. Howe's experience in Cleveland before 1911
taught him how difficult it was to overcome the resistance of
important interests threatened by reform demands. Even President
Wilson minimized the impact of such innovative legislation as the
Federal Reserve System (1913) and the Federal Trade Commission
(1914) by the conservative character of the administrators he
appointed to these agencies. In each reform era, therefore, action
for change brought reaction to limit the impact of that change.
One more important common theme remains to be discussed: war. Each
of these reform thrusts lost whatever vitality persisted when the
United States became a belligerent in a major international
conflict. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the
Wilson administration made prosecution of the war its chief concern,
even at the expense of the civil liberties of those who questioned
our involvement. During World War II, President Roosevelt announced
that Dr. New Deal had been replaced by Dr. Win-the-War. Lyndon
Johnson feared that "the bitch of a war" in Vietnam would
destroy the woman he really loved, his Great Society; Johnson's
expression of concern is a fairly apt description of what did in
fact happen.
During World War I, journalist Randolph Bourne wrote an essay
entitled "The State," whose theme is that war and
repressive statism go hand in hand. Howe, like other progressives,
had put his faith in purposeful social action and contributed to its
realization. When he came to write his Confessions in the 1920s, he
had suffered the disillusioning impact of the war, the flawed peace
settlement, and the postwar Red Scare, where the federal government
carried on a systematic campaign against dissidents and radicals.
Political power was in the hands of business-oriented conservatives
who promoted rather than resisted consolidation of corporate
domination of the American economy. So the dominant tone of the book
fits an interpretation of the 1920s as an interval of conservatism
following a period of reform. Naturally, Howe could not in 1925
anticipate the New Deal, although he did have hopes that new
leadership would arise to rekindle the spirit of reform. When the
New Deal did begin in 1933, Howe, then sixty-six years old, played
an active role in it.
Confessions of a Reformer is the story of Howe's public
life; it is rarely confessional in the sense of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau or St. Augustine. We get some glimpses of the inner
man--his rejection of his childhood religious inheritance and his
desire to make a mark on the world through his writing and his
public service come through. So too does his craving for variety,
for new places and new experiences.
Fred Howe was a restless man not content to choose an endeavor or
profession early in life and then spend a career plowing the same
narrow furrow ever more deeply. At another time he might have been a
religious seeker moving from church to sect and back in hopes of
finding an answer to the big question of how shall I and the rest of
mankind be saved. In his actual life span of 1867 to 1940, he moved
from the middle-class Protestant pieties of Meadville and its
Allegheny College to the intellectual excitement of Johns Hopkins to
the rough and tumble world of New York journalism in the early 1890s
to the often reluctant practice of law in Cleveland and a more
congenial involvement in the city's emerging reform politics under
Mayor Tom L. Johnson. From 1911 to 1914 he was the director of the
People's Institute in New York City, and in 1914 he served the
federal government as commissioner of immigration at New York's
famed Ellis Island, where he remained until 1919. During the 1920s
he spent much of his time either in Europe or on Nantucket Island,
largely out of the public eye. Fortunately, he lived long enough to
be an active participant in the New Deal. The years from 1933 on
were more congenial to someone of Howe's temperament than the 1920s
had been.
For most of his life, Howe was an active writer, expounding his
views on democracy, equality of opportunity, the evils of monopoly,
and the lessons Americans could learn from English and German cities
on how to create beautiful and corruption-free communities. The best
expression of these aspirations is in his The City: The Hope of
Democracy, published in 1905. Like other reform-minded persons,
before the war he thought ideas and information more powerful than
interests and that intelligence properly applied could end abuses
and promote social well-being. He was particularly influenced by the
ideas of Henry George, who in Progress and Poverty (1879)
had argued that growing wealth and growing poverty went hand in hand
because a disproportionate share of the social product went to the
land owner. The land owner was in effect a monopolistjust as were
those who controlled natural resources like coal and iron, or who
succeeded in obtaining franchises to provide street railways and
other public services -- the so-called natural monopolies.
In these views, Howe followed the lead of Tom Johnson, a street
railway entrepreneur who became the anti-monopolist mayor of
Cleveland in 1901 and served until 1909. Johnson attracted a core of
able young men in his fight against "Privilege," his term
for those who reaped the benefits of a growing industrial city with
little cost or risk to themselves. His disciples included Newton D.
Baker, Cleveland's law director under Johnson, mayor of the city
from 1912 to 1915. and subsequently secretary of war under President
Woodrow Wilson. Baker, like Howe, had been a student of Wilson's at
Johns Hopkins. Peter Witt, a blacklisted union man. lacked Howe and
Baker's formal education and social polish. What he did have was a
slashing and vitriolic style that took the skin off his numerous
opponents. He once described golf as a game that needlessly prolongs
the lives of some of our most useless citizens. Howe, a cradle
Republican, supported Democrat Johnson as a member of Cleveland's
city council, and then switched parties to become a Democratic state
senator in Ohio.
Howe's profession at this time was the law, knowledge of which was
acquired reluctantly and under great pressure when newspaper work
was hard to come by in the depressed years of the I890s. According
to Confessions of a Reformer, he never loved the law; he
wanted variety and change while the law governed present conduct by
a set of often outmoded past rules. The old rules that survived were
those which benefitted employers rather than employees. Howe was
particularly incensed at the law's treatment of those killed or
injured on the job. Lawyers who represented workers or their
survivors in such cases were condemned by their peers as "ambulance
chasers" while those who represented corporations were leaders
of the bar. Paradoxically, Howe was himself associated with two
leading establishment figures, James and Harry Garfield, sons of the
former president of the United States. The Garfields supported Howe
in his political activities, no matter how much business the firm
lost because of Howe's connection with Johnson, some of whose
policies were hated by Cleveland's elite.
Johnson and Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones of Toledo,
another wealthy businessman, have always been cited by historians as
leading examples of municipal progressives. Progressivism was not a
single unified doctrine; rather, it was a diversified set of
responses to the realization that the United States had become an
industrial nation dominated by big businesses and big cities.
Included in progressivism were movements for honest, efficient, and
more expansive municipal government, weakened corporate domination
of state legislatures. strengthened public control or public
ownership of utilities, democratization of the political process and
weakened party organizations, women's suffrage, expansion of
government's power to regulate business, and adoption of social
welfare legislation.
Not everyone who could legitimately be called a progressive
supported all of these proposals; in some instances they might be
contradictory. For example, supporters of honesty and efficiency in
government often sought to limit popular participation; they wished
not only to weaken party organizations but also to raise the class
level of those chosen for public office and eliminate local and
lower class influence from municipal government. The city manager
form of city government with its nonpartisan-at-large elections of a
small council which would in turn appoint a chief executive, is a
classic example.
The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, an organization of leading
business and professional men, played an important role in the
city's public life. Its committees prepared well-researched and
well-written reports on various public issues. The chamber had more
information and a better grasp of the implications of proposals than
did the city council. The chamber supported Mayor Johnson where it
thought his policies would enhance Cleveland's reputation as a
desirable place to live and do business; one such policy was
development of the Group Plan, Cleveland's version of a monumental
civic center. Fred Howe, as State Senator in Ohio, played a lead ing
role in the ad option of the legislation authorizing Cleveland to
Proceed with this project, one in keeping with national trends at
the time.
In the 1890s and 1900s, various cities around the country sought
to improve their downtowns by building monumental railroad stations,
such as Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal in New York,
and major public structures. Known as the "city beautiful
movement," this form of urban planning drew inspiration from
the famous White City built for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago
in 1893, whose guiding spirit was architect Daniel Burnham. Here for
almost the first time, Americans saw a city rationally planned and
with its buildings conceived in relationship to each other and to
the street pattern. Burnham then went on to oversee the revival of
the L'Enfant plan for Washington, D.C. in 1901 before being invited
to Cleveland to chair the planning committee for the Group Plan the
following year. Both Tom Johnson and the Chamber of Commerce wanted
Cleveland's major public buildings grouped around an expansive mall
to Present to the world a visible embodiment of the city's wealth
and power, to show that an American industrial city was more than
smoke and soot, that it could match the great public squares and
buildings of Europe.
Where the chamber and Mayor Johnson and his followers emphatically
parted company was over the issue of the ownership and control of
public utilities, especially street railways. Before 1910, the
automobile was a luxury item, and most city dwellers either walked
to work or rode the electrically powered street railways, known as
trolleys. Because the trolleys used public property, operators
needed the approval of city governments in the form of franchises.
Franchises conveyed valuable property rights to the holders in
raising the value of real estate along lines, and street railway
promoters were often the owners and developers of adjacent real
estate. Until rising costs reduced profits, the provision of
transportation itself was also a money maker. Mark Hanna, until his
death in 1904 Tom Johnson's great opponent in Cleveland, referred to
his street railways as his savings bank. Johnson, whose own fortune
was based on street railways, advocated public ownership. Only in
this way could the corruption of government by those seeking
franchises he avoided. Otherwise those fighting corruption in
government were doomed to failure because they refused to get at the
source of corruption. Also, the monopoly conveyed by franchises
enriched a few people at the expense of the city's workers, who
endured tedious, overcrowded rides so that promoters and
stockholders might benefit.
Because Ohio's constitution forbade public ownership of street
railways, Johnson, Baker, and Howe had to resort to a variety of
unsatisfactory expedients to try to achieve the substance of public
ownership without the legal form. These efforts encountered the
implacable opposition of the city's monopolistic street railway
entrepreneurs, law firms tied to them, the Chamber of Commerce, and
banks, which profited from the status quo. The prolonged struggle
cost Mayor Johnson his health and his fortune and ultimately led,
not to Public ownership, but to enhanced public control over the
private company.
Howe and others of Johnson's circle found that political
opposition led to social ostracism. Not unnaturally, Howe wanted to
be accepted and respected by men of his own class--those who came
from old stock backgrounds and enjoyed extensive formal educations
and above-average incomes. The bruising street railway battle made
that difficult; while his law partners did not desert him, others of
his circle did. Here was direct evidence that interests were indeed
stronger than ideas or information and that while many business and
professional men were prepared to devote time, energy, and some
money to the improvement of their city, they would draw back and
turn hostile if their basic interests were threatened.
Johnson, Baker, and Howe were not socialists. Johnson had made a
lot of money, liked the good life, and continued to tinker with
money-making schemes during his mayoral years. From the end of his
service as secretary of war until his death i n 1 93 7, Baker was
one of Cleveland's and the nation's best known and most highly
compensated lawyers. Howe opposed socialism because he associated it
with regimentation and the stifling of creativity. Although he never
used quite this language, Howe wanted a reformed capitalism, one
with genuine equality of opportunity, no undue profiting from rising
land values, and no monopolistic control of natural resources of
public utilities. As Howe was not a deep or systematic thinker, the
reader will not encounter in this book a probing examination of the
complexities of reconciling individual freedom with social
well-being. What the reader will experience is the continuing
perplexity of a man of good will whose life, like that of many
others, involved a continuing unlearning of what he thought he knew.
A case in point is his attitude toward the Constitution and
constitutionalism. At Hopkins, Woodrow Wilson and other faculty
members inculcated a veneration of the Constitution and a perception
of its drafters as wise and experienced men whose knowledge of
history and political principles enabled them to solve the great
riddles of creating a governing framework for a free people. Later
Howe came to view the framers as men afraid of democracy and the
popular will who built a government designed to thwart rather than
encourage constructive change. The manner in which Ohio's
constitution protected the economic interests of monopolists by
forbidding municipal ownership of street railways was a compelling
local example. If action designed to Protect workers or otherwise
threaten corporate interests successfully made it through the
legislative maze, where corporate lobbyists abounded, judges
appointed from the ranks of safely conservative lawyers could find
some constitutional provision that it violated. Like other
Progressives, Howe chafed at the courts' functioning as a third
house of the legislature. He supported the recall of all public
officials, including judges, so that those who frustrated the
popular will could be removed by popular vote.
Howe's most satisfying public service in Cleveland was his last
one, that on the tax commission to reappraise property. Following
Ohio law, the city had not reassessed in ten years and so did not
reap the revenue benefits of rising land values after 1900. Johnson
and his followers had contended since coming into office that small
homeowners paid more than their fair share because of the
undervaluation of industrial and commercial real estate. As
followers of Henry George, they also wanted to tax land more than
buildings so that speculators who held land hoping to profit from
rising values would pay more than those who used their land for
productive purposes. The Ohio Constitution of 1851 required that all
property be assessed at 100 percent of its market value, a
requirement never observed. Counties vied with each other in
underassessing so that their residents would pay less to the state.
Railroad land was taxed according to the number of miles of track in
a particular county, not the value of the land on which the track
stood. Within cities assessments varied widely from one parcel to
another because of political influence among landowners and
incompetence among assessors. Newton Baker estimated that property
in Cleveland was assessed at anywhere from 10 to 110 percent of true
value.
Howe was proud of the fact that he and his colleagues in the
reassessment of 1910 were able to redress many of these inequities.
They had to tax improvements as well as land values because of
constitutional requirements, but they were at least able to reduce
the comparative burden on the small homeowner. What Howe does not
tell us is that at the same time when Cleveland's tax duplicate, the
total value of assessed property, more than doubled. the state
legislature imposed stringent limitations on the power of all units
of government in the state to raise reve nue. Over the next decade
the city accumulated millions of dollars of operating deficits
because the state prevented it from taxing its citil.ens adequately.
The state eased these prohibitions in the early 1920s, and for a
brief period the city enjoyed some financial stability. The Great
Depression that set in after the stock market crash of 1929 again
turned Cleveland from the "City on a Hill" of the Johnson
years to a city in a hole.
These developments occurred after Howe left Cleveland for New York
in 1911. During his first sojourn in New York in the 1890s he was a
young man struggling to make a career as a journal ist in a highly
competitive marketplace and a depressed economy. Now he was a
financially secure man in his forties, able to escape the despised
practice of law for something more engaging. Howe notes that by this
point in his life, he was financially free to pursue his own bent.
What he does not tell us is whether this freedom came from the
successful practice of law or from some other source.
In any event the New York of 1911 and the next few years offered a
great deal to Howe and his wife, Marie Jenney Howe, whom he had
married in 1904. In Cleveland, Howe had discour aged his wife's
career aspirations; in that conservative city a working wife meant
that her husband had failed in his basic responsibilities as
provider. The unspoken corollary was that men then did not have to
fear economic competition from women. In New York, where Greenwich
Village was just entering into its greatest period of cultural
innovation, feminism flourished in the advanced circles in which the
Howes moved. He notes the stimulation they received from the bright
young people who visited their West 12th Street apartment. Howe was
one of the older liberals found at Mabel Dodge's famous salon, one
of the many times and places where America was in the process of
losing its innocence.
Howe's position as director of the People's Institute provided
opportunities to interact both with members of New York's elite and
the more intellectually ambitious of the immigrants from the tower
East Side. Charles Sprague Smith, former professor of German at
Columbia University, founded the institute in 1897 at Cooper Union.
Cooper Union, located just north and west of the most densely
populated Jewish section of the city, provided a 1600-seat
auditorium where many of the country's more interesting minds could
lecture on and debate socialism, housing issues, and labor problems
before audiences rich in political passion and intellectual
involvement although poor in money. For all the valuable
opportunities it afforded, however, the institute never escaped a
measure of condescension toward its immigrant constituency.
Howe provides some indirect evidence of this point when he says
that before he became commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island in
1914 he never thought much about immigration. Yet in Cleveland,
where he was so active in local affairs, three quarters of its
population in 1910 were either foreign born or had at least one
foreign-born parent. In New York at the same time the corresponding
figure was four-fifths. Howe and others of his background were more
likely to do things for the immigrant poor than to do things with
them, a not surprising attitude in view of the ethnic and class
divisions characteristic of American society (and most others that
one can cite).
At Ellis Island, where Howe remained until 1919, he labored to
make the processing of new arrivals as humane as possible and to
promote employment opportunities. He established what later became
the United States Employment Service. Like other middle managers he
had his difficulties both with those below and those above him
within his own organization, He shared other educated Americans'
enthusiasm for the British civil service, which recruited many of
the best and brightest of that society; he had a much lower opinion
of the career bureaucrats under his supervision who were more
interested in their privileges and prerogatives than in serving
their clients. Howe also experienced periodic political pressure on
issues such as the "white slavery" scare, where young
immigrants were viewed by concerned old stock moralists primarily as
potential prostitutes or pimps. In trying to preserve humanity and
perspective, Howe had to contend with a superior in Washington,
himself of immigrant background, who wanted to show others how
tough, not how understanding and compassionate, he was.
Howe had come into the federal service because of his longstanding
admiration for President Woodrow Wilson. This respect turned to
condemnation with the Wilson administration's repressive actions
against civil liberties both during and after World War I.
Immigration officials bore the brunt of this campaign because of the
fear of foreign-born dissidents and radicals. So long as deportation
was considered an administrative and not a judicial proceeding, the
foreign born were relatively easy targets of repressive governmental
action. Howe and Louis Post struggled heroically to slow down,
indeed to derail, this campaign of deportation. Others like him who
had championed strong leadership and the positive state had some
rethinking to do when they saw the uses to which political power
could be put.
Howe made one more attempt to serve Wilson when, surprisingly, he
attended the Paris Peace Conference as an expert in Near Eastern
affairs. He writes of his interest in this region, although it is
unlikely that his knowledge could have been extensive. The various
scholars and other experts who made up "The Inquiry," the
name given Wilson's panel of specialist advisers, found their work
largely ignored in the actual drafting of the treaties.
After the war, Howe largely withdrew from public life. In the
early 1920s he was in his fifties, content to spend much of the
winter in Europe and the summer on Nantucket Island. He did conduct
a "School of Opinion" on Nantucket whose "faculty"
included writers Floyd Deli. Bruce Bliven, and Sinclair Lewis.
Howe's political activity during these years came through the
Conference on Progressive Political Activity, organized in 1922
under the leadership of the various unions of railroad workers. The
railroad unions, known as brotherhoods, were interested in the
adoption of the Plumb Plan, a form of nationalization of the
railroads. Other progressives participated because they saw the
conference as a vehicle for supporting reform candidates and
proposals. In 1924 it became the nucleus of the progressive effort
to elect Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin as president. La
Follette had been a leading progressive Republican before the war
and staunchly opposed the entrance of the United States into the
war. His followers hoped that since both major parties had nominated
conservatives, Calvin Coolidge for the Republicans and John W. Davis
for the Democrats, the progressives would do well. Coolidge ascended
to the presidency after Warren Harding died in office in 1923 but
largely escaped being tarnished with the scandals associated with
the Harding administration. Davis was a compromise candidate for the
Democrats whose convention witnessed a titanic struggle between the
followers of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and William G.
McAdoo.
Although neither Davis nor La Follette would prevent Coolidge's
election, the Progressive candidate, who had been nominated in
Cleveland, won a plurality of the city's votes. This result
disturbed the city's elite mightily. Business leaders worried about
the city's reputation for radicalism; they were afraid that
entrepreneurs would avoid Cleveland because of its strong
construction unions and the political philosophy represented by the
vote for La Follette. The metropolitan area vote went for Coolidge
because of the suburbs' strong support for the Republican candidate.
Confessions of a Reformer does not discuss the differences
in voting patterns between city and suburb and their implications
for his earlier book title, The City: The Hope of Democracy.
Confessions does indicate Howe's love of cities and his hope that
American cities could acquire the more positive characteristics of
English and German municipalities. But by the mid-1920s many
families who could afford to had left the city for low-density, high
income suburbs where they could be assured of "good"
(i.e., socially homogeneous) schools and sufficient control over
land use to prevent businesses from encroaching upon their
residential areas. Urban residential land had long been divided
along lines of income, race, and ethnicity. The city of Cleveland
itself constituted a series of ethnic villages. What was different
by the 1920s was that old stock, above-average income people were no
longer part of the same polity as more recent arrivals, new
immigrants and blacks, or the less successful of their own kind.
They sought not only more space and newer housing but also a refuge
from the cosmopolitanism ("cosmo" is Cleveland shorthand
for ethnic) and political complexity of the city.
Before 1910 Cleveland leaders often assumed it was simply a matter
of time before the suburbs became absorbed into the city. As late as
1916 the Chamber of Commerce established a committee on annexation
to Promote the political integration of city and suburbs. By 1924,
the committee on annexation had become the committee on cooperative
metropolitan government, one more instance where the title gives
away the plot. Chamber leaders now assumed the continuing
independence of the suburbs; after all this was where most of them
lived by choice. What the chamber did seek was an arrangement that
would combine some governmental functions while leaving schools and
land use control in local hands.
Though many of these developments lay in the future, especially
the explosive growth of suburbia after World War II, it is worth
noting that by 1925, the year Confessions of a Reformer was
originally published. the pattern of socially superior suburbs
fiercely committed to maintaining their political independence was
well established. Various attempts to bring about metropolitan
government in Cleveland, from the 1920s to the 1950s. failed. In
recent decades a number of single-function metropolitan area
agencies have been created. Unfortunately since no general
government encompasses the metropolitan area as a whole, these
agencies often lack accountability to anyone other than themselves.
Howe lived for another fifteen years after the publication of this
memoir. With the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president
of the United States in 1933 and the creation of the New Deal,
Howe's brand of liberalism was back in style. In the mid-1920s
prosperity and a concern for cultural conformity dominated political
life, with a majority of voters ready to "keep cool with
Coolidge." The depression of the 1930s with its massive
unemployment engendered a desire for government action, a desire
that FDR and his colleagues were more than ready to satisfy.
Agriculture was a particularly troubled sector of the economy. After
unprecedented prosperity during World War I, growers of the great
staple crops such as wheat and cotton faced hard times even during
the 1920s. The world-wide depression of the 1930s made their lot,
and that of virtually all farmers, much worse. One of the New Deal's
major innovations was the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,
which Howe joined in 1933 as consumer counsel. The old progressive,
now sixty-six pears old, joined a group of younger liberals such as
Chicago lawyer and later Federal Judge Jerome Frank in seeking to
protect the interests of consumers. This group's goal was to prevent
programs for farmers from gouging food buyers. Within the agency,
the urban liberals were regarded as an exotic lot by the veteran
agricultural professionals. One famous anecdote involves a city bred
lawyer demanding, "But what does this do for the macaroni
growers?"
Apart from social origins and cultural styles were serious
conflicts of policy. The agricultural specialists, more committed to
the interests of large commercial farmers than of tenants or
consumers, won the internal battle and drove the liberals either out
of the agency or into impotence within it.
Howe stayed on for a while as a special adviser to Secretary of
Agriculture Henry Wallace. In 1937 he left to become a consultant to
the Philippine administration on rural issues. At the time of his
death on August 3, 1940, he was associated with the Federal Monopoly
Committee.
With this final assignment, Howe's political career had in a sense
come full circle, from the antimonopoly orientation of the Johnson
years in Cleveland to this federal effort. Neither succeeded in
achieving its stated goals. Public ownership of Cleveland's transit
system came only when private enterprise saw no profit in it, while
the New Deal's approach to the issue of concentrated economic power
was half-hearted, inconsistent, and self-contradictory.
Yet it would be wrong to regard Howe's career as a set of
failures. Throughout his life, he set himself to something more than
just making money. As a young man he had a vision of what a good
city could be and worked hard to make that dream a reality in
Cleveland. In New York he was an active participant in some of the
most exciting cultural developments of the twentieth century. The
flowering of bohemian Greenwich Village and the thirst for
knowledge, political debate, and cultural expression among East
European Jewish immigrants in the years before the United States
entered World War I constituted important sources of energy,
creativity, and inspiration both then and for later decades.
Unfortunately, the war unleashed demands for repression and
conformity, demands which Howe's former hero, Woodrow Wilson, too
readily supported. In this bleak political climate, Howe found his j
oh as commissioner of immigration a "nightmare." His
participation in peacemaking and the postwar international
settlement was not much better.
Confessions of a Reformer reflects his disappointment with
the failure of old stock, Protestant, middle-class America, his
people, to lead the way in the creation of a more open, generous,
and humane society. He was not without hope. He saw great
possibilities in the leadership of the railroad unions, a specific
confidence that proved to be quite unfounded. However, the general
point that reform would once again rise was valid.
When this book first appeared in the mid-1920s, the progressive
impulse associated with the prewar period was more faint than
throbbing. In the White House, President Coolidge deliberately set
out to reduce the role and significance of government. Agencies
established to regulate business acted more as promoters of
consolidation than opponents of monopoly or combinations in
restraint of trade, while unions and social legislation faced an
especially hostile judiciary. In the private sector innovation
flourished, and industries such as automobiles, motor trucks,
movies, radio, and electric power experienced rapid growth. Howe was
less exhilarated by prosperity than troubled by America's cultural
and political shortcomings. At this stage of his life, he was ready
to let other, younger people bear the burden of struggle. Like St,
Paul in another context, he had fought the good fight. The New Deal
years showed that the old battler still had a couple of good rounds
left in him.
Historians rightly warn against too facile parallels between past
and present. Still, it is intriguing to think that Calvin Coolidge
is one of Ronald Reagan's heroes and that the era of Reagan will
soon come to a close. No one can predict the shape of American
politics in the 1990s, but somehow it would not be surprising if
that period had more in common with the Progressive Era or the New
Deal than the 1920s or the 1980s. If so, Fred Howe would be pleased.