MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT IN AN AVERAGE
CITY:
CLEVELAND, 1876-1900
by JAMES B. WHIPPLE
Instructor in History, Western
Reserve University
I
Studies of municipal politics have
tended to emphasize the best
governed city, or the worst. In many
ways this may be an accurate
reflection of the national scene, where
contemporaries were pre-
occupied with the same extremes.
Cleveland, between 1876 and 1900,
does not fall into either of these
classifications. Nevertheless, taken
as an average city, it might be more
representative of American
urban politics than Lincoln Steffens'
cities of shame or the Cleveland
which he admired under the
administration of Tom L. Johnson.
Cleveland serves as an excellent
typical city because in almost
every sense it fits the
urban-industrial pattern of the nineteenth cen-
tury and thus faced the problems which
were coincident with our
municipal growth. The Forest City began
the century as a frontier
community where its population of about
six hundred made it one
of the smallest towns on the Western
Reserve. Isolated from the
main path of commerce and westward
migration along the Ohio
River, it faced a dim future. All this
changed, however, after the
Erie Canal and the Ohio canals placed
Cleveland astride the new,
more vital lines of American
communication. Clevelanders pros-
pered and their city flourished first
as a market place. By midcentury,
commerce began to yield to
manufacturing, and Cleveland became
one of the centers of industrialization
which gained momentum
during the Civil War and shattered much
of our agrarian culture in
the last quarter of the century. By
1900 factories, warehouses, stores,
amusement resorts, and homes spread out
fan-like from Public
Square. Its population of over 380,000
made it the largest city in
Ohio and the eighth largest in the
United States. Thus Cleveland,
like so many other American towns,
underwent a rapid transforma-
tion from a rural to an
urban-industrial way of life. The change
demanded adjustments in practically
every aspect of community
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