Proud Queen

Rare among cities, Cincinnati lies along her seven hills watching the lordly Ohio lap at her feet. Proud is the Queen City of her Gruen watches, her Ivory soap, her municipally-owned railway which brings her half a million a year, her celebrated zoo and outdoor opera, her beer, her famed families of Longworths and Tafts. Prouder still was she last week. Cincinnati had done for the fifth time what no other U. S. city of comparable size (452.000 pop.) had done twice in succession--reinaugurated a reform municipal government. And Cincinnati was that almost equally rare big town which closed its books Dec. 31, 1933 without a deficit.

Clevelanders who had impulsively planted the seeds of Reform and had then left the fruit to be choked by the weeds of oldtime political organization, Philadelphians who had just succeeded in throwing a small monkey-wrench into the long-lived Vare machine, New Yorkers who were putting their second Fusion government in 20 years into the City Hall, could benefit by looking to well-governed Cincinnati for a lesson. The lesson was fresh from the presses in highly readable book form, City Management: The Cincinnati Experiment -- by a bright young man who had associated himself with the movement from the beginning, who had gotten his political ideals from his Presidential father, his aggressive pertinacity from the football fields of New Haven and the battlefields of France--Charles Phelps Taft II.

Few cities have a blacker political past than Cincinnati. Extreme informality marked her electoral methods in the 20's. On election morning the first voters to the polls chose the judges. If a Democratic sheriff was in office, he was likely to round up all the Negroes in the calaboose for the day, lest they vote Republican. In the election of 1884, there were two fatal shootings and Election Judge William Howard Taft was one of the very few who went unarmed.

The movement to wrest the city from its stodgy, wasteful organization control began inconspicuously in 1920 with a broken engagement. An ex-Army captain, who had been elected to one term in Congress, asked 25 young business and professional men, mostly just out of the service, to meet him for a Sunday night smoker. He then forgot the date. But from this inauspicious beginning sprang the Cincinnatus Association, an organization which discussed local political affairs so shrewdly and entertainingly that it was not long before it found itself a minor sphere of influence in the community. First real accomplishment of the Cincinnatus Association was a successful campaign, led by Harvardman Murray Seasongood, a local lawyer and a witty public speaker, to defeat an extra tax levy. When another Cincinnatus member forced the County to take over the city's tuberculosis sanatorium, which was about to be closed for lack of funds, the Association began to feel its oats. Next step was the Birdless Ballot League, which aimed to put a crimp in Republican control by removing symbols from the ballots, thus negating the traditional instructions from ward bosses to their illiterate constituents: "Vote the bird with the pants!" From the Birdless Ballot League grew the City Charter Committee, which after a survey proposed a form of city government which would be ruled by nine councilmen, elected by a system of proportional representation, who would appoint a city manager and elect a mayor from their number. After a stiff battle, the charter was voted in 1924, Ohio being one of those fortunate States which allow its municipalities to choose charters without consent of the Legislature. Next year the Charter Committee elected a majority to the council, and a Charterman, Lawyer Seasongood, was made Mayor.* To be city manager Mayor Seasongood had found Col. Clarence Osborne Sherrill, an Army engineer who was managing the Capitol building & grounds at Washington.

Results of Manager Sherrill's four and a half year administration appropriately climax the tale of how a group of decent energetic citizens rescued their town. The city paid 22% less for its street building materials in 1926 than it had in 1925. Dirt which had cost $1.35 a yd. in 1925, cost 35-c- a yd, a year later. In 1926 Cincinnati paid $36,000 less for street maintenance than it had the year before "when it rode on holes." "Where," asks Author Taft, "had the money gone?" Whereas in 1925 a citizen with a 50 ft. frontage was assessed $5.75 for street improvement, in 1927 he paid 97-c-, in later years nothing. Applying merely the old maintenance cost, the city hall was transformed from a dilapidated rookery into a first-class public building. More than 80 mi. of street railway were laid, miles of sewers, with little additional burden to the taxpayers. And Cincinnati began retiring its debt at the rate of $850,000 a year. More slowly, the social service and police departments were peeled of their incompetence and corruption. In the surrounding county, where Author Taft was elected attorney in 1926, only to lose in 1928, reform came harder, but the county can now hold its head almost as high as Cincinnati. Can the movement last? Author Taft thinks so, although he admits that an incorrupt government steps on many toes, recalls a prominent manufacturer who has left the Charter group because he could not get a $2 parking ticket "fixed." Mr. Taft also warns that local good-government movements should beware of tangling up with State or national politics, as the Charter people learned to their cost. His biggest point is that civic reformers must not only burn with zeal on election day but all year round.

"The faith of the few men who started this movement," concludes Author Taft, "has been amply justified. The giant may loom large; he may seem overwhelming. The inertia of people is even more discouraging. And yet this group of Davids, for all their weakness, were able to overcome Goliath of the Machine. . . . They proved that good government in American cities of substantial size is a possibility."

*Farrar & Rinehart, $2.50.

*Charterman Russell Wilson took office last week for the third time.

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