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SCI LIBRARY

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.