Ohio History Journal


MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT IN AN AVERAGE CITY:

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT IN AN AVERAGE CITY:

CLEVELAND, 1876-1900

 

by JAMES B. WHIPPLE

Instructor in History, Western Reserve University

 

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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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