Chapter 27
Ohio is the farthest west of the east and the farthest north of the south.
—Louis Bromfield
BASICALLY, Ohio is nothing more nor less than a giant carpet of agriculture studded by great cities, and few states are so impressive statistically. Let us gulp down a few figures. It has 93,041 retail stores doing about 20 billion dollars’ worth of business a year, 53 museums, 11 state-owned lakes, 684 parent banks, 13 major railroads, 272 tax-supported libraries, 90 power companies (of which about 50 are municipally owned), 300 square miles of public parks, 14,000 restaurants, more than 1,000 newspapers, 1,700 hotels, 85,500 miles of road, 33 radio stations, and 1,600,000 telephones, which latter figure is greater than the number in the entire continent of South America.
Three things made Ohio historically: (1) emigration from New England, (2) settlement by the veterans of the Revolutionary War, and (3) incursions from the South. Similarly the state falls into three geographic spheres: (a) the north, centering on Cleveland, where the New England heritage is strongest; (b) the “military lands” in the middle, with Columbus as a focus; and (c) the south which pivots on Cincinnati and its river culture with a strong German overlay. The New Englandish north may in turn be subdivided into the “Western Reserve,” which in the beginning was an actual geographic extension of New England, and “the Firelands,” where property was taken up by Connecticuters whose homes had been destroyed during the Revolution. Consider names like Ridgefield, Bridgeport, Danbury, Greenwich. These are Connecticut names of course. They are also names of towns in Ohio.1
The whole United States flows through Ohio; the Buckeye State gives you an almost perfect sense of what the country is as a whole. The state motto was once “an empire within an empire,” and Ohio prides itself greatly on its self-sufficiency. But by and large Ohioans do not, if I may generalize roughly, think of themselves much in state terms. They are not so self-conscious regionally as, say, Hoosiers in Indiana. Ohio is rich in writers. But one thinks of Sherwood Anderson as a “Middle Western’’ rather than an “Ohio” author, of Louis Bromfield as an “American” rather than as an “Ohio” novelist.
I went out to Mr. Bromfield’s farm near Mansfield, and admired his boxers, cook, and agricultural techniques. I will not describe Pleasant Valley since Mr. Bromfield himself has done this so amply. What impressed me most was the feeling this part of Ohio gave of being a crossroads. Take Mansfield. This town of 37,154 people is on the main line of both the Pennsylvania and Erie railroads, with direct service to New York and Chicago both; it is on a branch line of the Baltimore & Ohio, and the New York Central is only twelve miles distant. A stone’s throw away northward is Norwalk, a pure New England town; a stone’s throw away southward is Mount Vernon, a pure southern town. Consider, too, crossroads in another dimension. Mansfield has sixty industrial plants, but it is the center of one of the richest agricultural areas on earth.
Agriculture in Ohio is, of course, a tremendous business; the total investment is about two billion dollars. But in industry the record is even more formidable. This state is a nucleus for 70 per cent of all industrial activity in the nation. It is first in an extraordinary variety of products and enterprises—machine tools, rubber, publishing of periodicals, ceramics, nuts and bolts, steel barrels, washers and rivets, oilcloth, sporting goods, cranes and derricks, playing cards, china, and, among oddities, sewer pipe and false teeth. The craftsmen in this last industry, in Columbus, are largely porcelain workers originally from Belgium. Ohio is the second state in motor vehicles, steel, and blast furnace products; third in paints and varnishes and job printing; fourth in chemicals, aviation, men’s clothing, and bakery goods; fifth in footwear; sixth in paper.2
Industry means cities and in these, too, Ohio is extraordinarily rich. There are no fewer than fifty-one with populations between 10,000 and 100,000, and ten between 100,000 and a million; only Pennsylvania has as many in this latter category. The Ohio cities, scattered over the whole state, range from Toledo (population 282,349) to Van Wert, “the peony capital of the world”;3 from Dayton (210,718) to historic river towns like Marietta; from Youngstown, the second greatest steel city in the world (167,720), to remarkable communities like Steubenville, which is famous equally for pottery and vice; from Akron (244,791) to places with names like Napoleon and Greasy Ridge.
About any of these and others, pages might be written. Canton (108,401) is the home of Timken roller bearings and also of one of the notable causes célèbres in modern American journalism, the murder in 1926 of Don Mellett, editor of the Canton Daily News. Toledo has the most mature and provocative city planning program in the United States, as worked out by Norman Bel Geddes and others; what is more no city needs one more badly. Akron is of course the rubber center of the universe, and is like nothing else on the face of the earth; until the war at least, 90 per cent or more of all American tires and tubes came from Akron. This illustrates an odd tendency among great American corporations, particularly those which are intense competitors—that of huddling together in the same community, like automobiles in Detroit, or sheep.
The Two Great C’s
I said in the foreword to this book that, if possible, I always tried to see people in every camp, and that it was an ideal day professionally when, for instance, I was able to talk to the CIO in the morning and the chamber of commerce in the afternoon. Three times in Ohio, once in Cleveland, once in Cincinnati, once in Columbus, I had the good fortune to go this experience one better. Through the courtesy of friends a small round table was arranged, and I found myself talking to people of both camps at one and the same time. All I had to do was ask a question or two, and then sit back and listen to my hosts flail away at each other. When, four or five hours later, the plaster began to fall off the wall, it was time to go home, and I knew more than I had known before.
CLEVELAND (population 1,214,943 metropolitan area; 878,336 city limits), which has roughly I per cent of the total population of the country, is the sixth largest American city and from any point of view one of the most important. I have already made mention of its civic spirit; I know of no other metropolis with quite so impressive a record in the practical application of good citizenship to government. Next to New York, it is probably the best-run big city in the country.
Cleveland has one of the finest civic centers in the nation, and it was the founder (back in 1913) of the community chest idea. It takes culture very seriously indeed, and its symphony has the highest endowment of any orchestra in the world; it spends $2.27 per capita per year on its public library, as against 51½¢ in New York. It is an excellent town for book buying, and its Citizens League watches public affairs sharply. It has a good City Club (on the model of Town Hall in New York), the first Health Museum in the United States, an admirable art museum, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Cleveland Council on World Affairs. This last organization, aiming to bring an intimate knowledge of international problems directly into the community, has 3,383 active members; by contrast the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations has 2,334 and the Foreign Policy Association of New York 4,496, though both these cities are of course much larger.
The Cultural Gardens of Cleveland are another uniqueness. The city is one of the most heterogeneous in the nation; roughly 50 per cent of its population is foreign born, and another 30 per cent is of the second generation. But no single nationality group has more than 15 per cent of the total in either category. The British and the Czechs each have 15 per cent, closely followed by the Germans. The Poles make up 13.2 per cent of the combined total, Italians 8.9 per cent, Jugoslavs 6.2 per cent, Hungarians 6.4 per cent, Russians 5.6 per cent. The idea behind the Cultural Gardens is to harmonize the different foreign groups into a kind of orchestra, rather than to melt them down. Some years ago a grove in one of the public parks was dedicated to the memory of Shakespeare, and subsequently a Jewish memorial was laid out in the same area. Then came a German garden, planned as a shrine to Mendelssohn. An association was then formed to tie together other projects of the same type, with the city giving space, on the understanding that each memorial must celebrate a figure in the world of culture, not a military man. There are fifteen so far. That of the Italians is to Virgil, that of the Hungarians to Liszt. The Czechs and Slovaks have their separate groves. That of the Irish is in the form of a Celtic cross, since they couldn’t agree on any one person as a dedicatee.
Cleveland, I heard it said, responds to movements for the millennium better than any other city in the world. One joke is that a group of civic-minded citizens will presently set out “to organize the weather,” which is apt to be notably capricious and unpleasant. Another is that Cleveland is the city where every rich burgher, returning home at night, catechizes himself with a dutiful prayer, “Have I co-operated well today?”
Reasons for all this are several. One is the tradition of good government laid down by such men as Newton D. Baker, and another the spirit of noblesse oblige fostered by the earlier Cleveland tycoons, like Samuel W. Mather, one of the few men ever to have been a director of both United States Steel and Bethlehem Steel at the same time. John D. Rockefeller was of course a Clevelander. And many “medium” millionaires, I heard, have given the city much more than Detroit ever got from its much richer automobile barons. Frederick C. Goff, a former Rockefeller attorney and president of the Cleveland Trust Company, one of the half dozen leading banks of the nation, set a precedent when he said on one occasion, “I am more concerned that the Cleveland Trust Company shall fulfill its obligations to the community than make money for stockholders.” Another point is that Cleveland was never dominated by a single financial group, like the Mellons in Pitts-burgh; industry is diversified, wealth is widely dispersed, and there was lively competition in good works.
Cleveland has always produced and helped make famous financial folk (including some not so generous) of the most varied and dramatic types—like the super-bucket-shop promoters Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen, who made astonishing forays into both railroad and financial morals, and, in a totally different category, William S. Jack and Ralph M. Heintz who have been called “the Katzenjammer Kids of U. S. Industry”4 and whose “Jack and Heintz” did remarkable work in war production. There are also a number of heads of smaller corporations who conduct management on a highly personalized level and who have a strong sense of social responsibility—men like James F. Lincoln of the Lincoln Electric Company, where employees have averaged wages of $5,800 per year; Franklin G. Smith of the Osborn Manufacturing Company, about which Julian Street once wrote a provocative pamphlet; and Robert Black, the son of a miner, whose White Motor Company has an enviable record in labor matters.
Take a ruler. Lay it across a map from the Mesabi Range to the Pennsylvania coal fields. It will hit Lake Erie precisely at Cleveland, and this of course is the principal reason for its phenomenal development. One odd point is that Cleveland might very well have had the automobile industry, instead of Detroit, had it not been for the kind of trifling personal accident on which industrial as well as political history often turns. This, at least, is the Ohio version of the story. In 1908, Jim Packard arrived in Cleveland, looking for property on which to build an automobile factory. He called on Colonel J. J. Sullivan, then the head of the chamber of commerce, asking for assistance. Sullivan’s reply was, “Nothing doing!” Cleveland, he said, wasn’t interested in any such new-fangled contraption, and besides it had just induced the largest clothes-pin manufacturer in the country to build a local plant!
Cleveland, like all industrial cities, can go in for remarkably technical language on occasion. Here are some details of surplus war goods advertised in a local paper:
Hot Rolled Strip
184,553#—.118×5⅜” HR Coiled Dead Soft Strip. SAE 1010
Mill Edge Oiled. 275#/Coil ……… $2.31/CWT
160,879#—.065” ×1⅓½” HR Mill Edge WD 1010, Pickled and Oiled. Approx. 235#/Coil ……… $2.10/CWT
Cold Rolled Strip
476,500#—.120# ±.003” ×3¾” ± .010” Strip, Cup, Steel Case, 4SCCS, Cal. 45, Hardness Not Over Rockwell B60. Material FXS-486
The city is quite well served in newspapers: the Plain Dealer (conservative Democrat) and News (Republican) are vigorous competitors, though owned by the same company, in the pattern familiar all over the United States. Scripps-Howard is very important in Ohio, with three papers, the Cincinnati Post, Columbus Citizen, and Cleveland Press. This last, a good liberal sheet, is supposed to be the biggest money maker of all Scripps-Howard properties; it was founded by the original Scripps himself, and was famous for years as a penny newspaper. One curiosity about journalism in Ohio is that so many papers use dispatches from Reuters, the British news service.
The city is a great one for homes (as against apartments), and it attracts able men from all over the nation. For instance at a lunch with fourteen civic leaders, I found that only one had been born in Cleveland. Probably its most distinguished citizen today is a rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver.
Cleveland lives in the competitive orbit of Detroit, Buffalo and Pitts-burgh more than with the rest of Ohio. I asked Cleveland friends what they thought of Cincinnati. Answer: “We’re quite friendly to Cincinnati, when we happen to think about it.”
Cleveland has about as much charm as an automobile cemetery or the inside of a dynamo; CINCINNATI (population metropolitan area 789,309, city limits 455,610) is packed with charm. Like all the river cities partly German in origin (Louisville, St. Louis, Milwaukee), it has a certain stately and also sleepy quality, a flavor of detachment, soundness, and je m’en fiche-ism. Many years ago Longfellow called it the Queen City of the West, and for all its Germanness, it is one of the most truly American cities in the nation; for instance—in acute contrast to Cleveland—it has a higher proportion of native-born citizens than any city of similar rank.
Cincinnati was a handsome young matron before Chicago even existed and when Cleveland was a helter-skelter village. By 1820, it was the biggest town in the country north of New Orleans; for some years it was headquarters of the government of Northwest Territory; in 1860, it was one of three cities in America with a population greater than 100,000. This was partly because, in the early years, the Ohio River was the Main Street of the nation, and at Cincinnati three distinct and highly civilized groups converged—Virginia younger sons, Welsh Quakers from Pennsylvania, and New Englanders. The great German wave of migration came later, between the 50’s and the 70’s. These Germans were mostly cultivated and luxury-loving folk. Many chose Cincinnati because of the vineyards nearby, and some went into the brewery business; many because it was a flourishing center of crafts that needed skilled labor, like carriage-making. Cincinnati began to give way to Chicago and the north at about the time of the Chicago fire; Chicago, like a Phoenix out of the ashes, built a modern industrial equipment from scratch, and ran away with much of its trade. Also the main line of westward movement shifted to the north. The Buffalo-Cleveland-Toledo-Chicago lake and railway channel replaced the Ohio River as Route No. I to the West.
In 1945—just after World War II was won!—the following letter appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Your editorial entitled “Relentless Propaganda,” surely gets many a reader’s “goat” because it seems to be the style of many editors, including yourself to “kick” the Germans around, and at the same time, we should have love for all races. I am American born, German descent and have loved ones both relatives and friends in Germany, and feel that the German people could not help what their leaders did any more than what we could help for what Roosevelt did … and why should correspondence not be opened between the German people and Americans. The Germans are just as fine a race as any other race, and when it comes to science, engineering, mechanical work, they take their place in the world the same as any other nationality, but jealousy and hate has been stirred and continued by you. Be a U.S.A. citizen and practice what you preach.
Cleveland is proud of its culture with much justification as we know; Cincinnati has plenty of culture too, though it does not advertise it with such self-consciousness. Its literary club (which has more distinction than such clubs usually have) will be one hundred years old in 1948; it was the first town west of the Alleghenies to have a symphony, and its municipal university, founded in 1819, is the oldest (and one of the best) in the United States; it had the first law school and the first medical school in Northwest Territory. Cincinnati history is rich with names like Stephen Foster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John James Audubon.
Nor is Cincinnati today an industrial backwater by any means. It has a stupendous soap business (Procter & Gamble), one of the biggest shoe factories in the nation (United States Shoe), and the largest machine-tool plant in the world. This latter is the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company; it has been operated for three generations by the Geier family in a tradition patriarchal in the extreme, with a staff of German mechanics almost as patriarchal as their bosses. Also Cincinnati is the biggest coal distributor5 in the country, and it is the seat of the Crosley Corporation, which makes automobiles, airplanes, and various electrical devices. WLW, the Crosley radio station, is the biggest in the nation in dollar volume of business; it even exceeds the great stations in New York, though Cincinnati ranks only seventeenth among American cities in population, and New York is first.6
One leading problem today is slum clearance, and another is sewage. Some new industries that might have been attracted to Cincinnati (for instance Fisher Body recently chose Columbus as a new site instead) went elsewhere because of an exasperating situation over zoning. The zoning ordinances, originally designed to save people’s homes, now serve to perpetuate the slums, and these are among the most insufferable in the nation; 40 per cent of buildings on the river front and in the “Basin” are substandard. The labor groups—a conspicuous Cincinnati labor leader is Jack Kroll, state president of the CIO, who succeeded Sidney Hillman as national director of the PAC—and liberals generally want to clean out the slums under a long-range housing program, and make available new sites for industry. What holds this up is largely the propertied class, which is in a cleft stick; it too wants new industry, but on the other hand it won’t give up its rents. Americans, it seems, can solve anything except a problem so simple and elemental as where citizens shall live.
Sewage is a lively issue. The city gets its water from the Ohio River. Also it dumps its refuse into this river. “Cincinnati’s own untreated sewage,” writes George Sessions Perry in the Saturday Evening Post,7 “goes into the river only a few hundred yards below the intakes for the city’s water plant.”
Should a big city get bigger? Isn’t a city of half a million people big enough? What would it profit Cincinnati to become a Detroit? Is Cleveland really happy—with one-third of its population forced to live outside its own city limits, with its upper bracket of rental values suburban? Cincinnati, which is not a booster town, ponders these questions gravely, and is inclined to answer in the negative.
Cincinnati politics are crazily fascinating. The story is too long to tell with any aroma here. The municipality is run by nine council members who are elected on a nonpartisan basis and, uniquely in America except in New York, by proportionate representation, as a result of the Charter reforms. “PR” is of course a thicket of pitfalls for politicians amateur or professional. Under “PR,” as I heard it said, if you make one friend and seven enemies, you win. What it does is ensure effective minority representation.
The nine councilors choose one among themselves as mayor, whose function is ceremonial, and hire a city manager who really runs the town. The mayor gets $6,000 per year, the city manager $25,000. Cincinnati has been very lucky in its managers; it has had only three since the system started twenty-odd years ago, and all were, and are, first-class men: Colonel C. O. Sherrill, an army engineer; Clarence Dykstra who was president of the University of Wisconsin and is now provost of the University of California (L.A.); and the present incumbent, a railway man and administrator who had previously managed the Union Station, Wilbur M. Kellogg.8
What really makes the fur fly in Cincinnati is something else—Charter. This was born out of adversity in the early 1920’s, when the city lay prostrate under bad government. Liberal citizens organized a reform movement, against the Republican bosses then in power and, aided greatly by woman suffrage which had just come in, won an election to amend the city charter as it then existed—hence the name “Charter.” In 1925, Charter transformed itself into an overt political party, which it still is, in the shape of a Democratic, independent, and liberal Republican coalition. It held a majority in the council for twelve years, from 1926 to 1938; as of the moment it is the minority party, with four seats to five held by the regular Republicans.
I happened to be in Cincinnati at the time of the last municipal election, and I was forthwith inducted into these mysteries. Republicans and Charterites each put up a slate, and the voter, under “PR,” must indicate by number his nine preferences; there is no such thing as an “X” on the ballot for councilmen. Each party seeks naturally to choose candidates who will reach special categories of voters; each presents as a rule one labor man, one Negro, one Republican Catholic, one Democratic Catholic, and so on; the real contest is then between the rivals in each of these special “pools.” Charter did not, however, put up a Negro candidate in the last election, on the theory that the Negro community preferred not to vote on racial lines; instead it supported a strong labor man, Rollin H. Everett, who had both AF of L and CIO support. One leading Republican told me, “If Everett noses out our Negro, we’re done for.” Everett did indeed do so, but the Republicans maintained a council majority anyway. Incidentally Cincinnati is 13 per cent a Negro town, and the Negro vote usually carries the balance of power.
Cincinnati’s most distinguished citizen today is probably Charles Phelps Taft II, Bob’s brother. The two Tafts differ strikingly. For instance Charlie is, and has been for years, a leading Charterite; he sits on the council as a Charter member now, and is thus cheek by jowl with the CIO. This is not to say that he is a flaming radical. He is, however, enormously more liberal than Bob. Bob has always been fiercely anti-Charter, Charlie Taft served during most of the war in the State Department (as director both of the office of transport and communications and as chief of Wartime Economic Affairs) and has often worked at New Deal jobs. He takes a broad liberal view both nationally and internationally; he supported Roosevelt in part, and has been an attorney for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It is, indeed, extraordinary that two brothers—and partners in the same law firm—can have views so widely divergent, philosophies so contradistinctive, and still remain close friends. Basically Charles, though full of warmth and charm, is a do-gooder. He has always been a big YMCA and local church-and-charity man, and in December, 1946, he was elected president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the first layman ever to hold this exalted post.
Another Taft out-of-the-ordinary is Hulbert, half-cousin to the brothers and publisher of the Times-Star. This wealthy newspaper blankets southern Ohio almost as the Cleveland Plain Dealer blankets northern. What the Times-Star believes in, its publisher says, is only one thing—“the American middle class.” Hulbert Taft is the most conservative man I met in forty-eight states. He told me that, driving through Cincinnati, you could tell which neighborhoods were “Republican and Times-Star” by the fact that they would be “clean and self-respecting.” He once wrote a letter to Alf Landon saying that he would gladly “remain” a Republican if the party didn’t elect a “radical” like Dewey; he thinks that the nomination of Willkie in 1940 was “treasonable” and that Lindbergh would make a president almost as good as Calvin Coolidge.
I asked some Cincinnati friends what they thought of Cleveland. Reply: “Cleveland is contentious, introspective, and not really part of the United States!”
Columbus and the Wolfes
The capital of Ohio, COLUMBUS (population metropolitan area 365,796; city limits 306,087), does not think of itself as a metropolis; it is in transition from what Cincinnati was to what Cleveland is. Originally it was called Franklinton, and it became the capital only after a vivid struggle with two rival towns, Worthington and Dublin. One story is that Dublin was chosen first, but lost its claim when its representatives were beaten by Franklinton in a poker game, while deluded with drink.9
Columbus today is a spacious and friendly town; a big issue is apt to be whether or not to cut down the trees and so make a street broader. It is a fanatic and frenzied football town; if you don’t go to football games on Saturday, people think you’re an odd fish and a pariah. It is a strong religious town; there are more Methodists, I heard, within a one-hundred-mile radius of Columbus than any other city in the world. Roman Catholic influence, though not nearly so weighty as in Cincinnati, is also considerable; for instance the film Mission to Moscow was withdrawn from exhibition after one day’s showing. Later, however, it was resuscitated in small neighborhood theaters. As to politics, the “Catholics can nominate, but not elect,” I heard it put. Finally, Columbus is 11 per cent a Negro town.
No fewer than 3,500 different Columbus organizations are represented in an over-all correlating agency, the Community Services Board, the aim of which is to “broaden the basis of the city’s culture.” It includes 88 parent-teacher associations, 700 separate church organizations, 135 Negro groupings of various kinds, and great numbers of patriotic, Masonic, fraternal, neighborhood, and other units, like the Columbus Council for Democracy, the Columbus Town Meeting, and the Council of Social Agencies. This is archetypically American and archetypically middle western. It healthily represents a familiar preoccupation with “co-operative” thinking, a desire to create leadership which is the chief community problem almost everywhere in the United States, and an attempt to overcome apathy and develop in citizens a sense of responsibility to the city as a whole.
One of the strangest and least-known stories in America is that of the Columbus Wolfes. Talk about the self-made man, or men! The Wolfe dynasty (contrary to some opinion, the family is not Jewish) was for many years the greatest single force in Columbus politics, journalism and business, and its political influence seeped widely into the state at large. Several times when I asked people who ran Ohio, the answer was, “the Wolfe interests.” But this was an exaggeration. One qualifying remark I heard was, “After all the Wolfes have to clear with the Taft machine in Cincinnati and Cleveland doesn’t pay much attention to them,” and one eminent man of politics told me, “Sure the Wolfes boss the town, but if you want to get licked, just get the Dispatch (one of the Wolfe papers) on your side.” Again one may note the way Americans in general tend to oppose anybody who is known to be bossed.
Two Wolfe brothers initiated the dynasty. Both are dead, and a group of sons and nephews now carry on the family. Robert F. Wolfe fell off the top of the Dispatch building some years ago. Harry Preston Wolfe died in his bed, aged seventy-three, in January, 1946. They began as poor boys; Harry got his start in life as a lamplighter in a remote Ohio village. Robert got his, in a manner of speaking, in the penitentiary; he was jailed for assault, having knocked down someone who had insulted his cousin in a barroom brawl. He then broke jail, was retaken and sent to the penitentiary for jailbreak. While a prisoner, he practiced the trade of shoemaking. Robert’s wife, incidentally, was a first cousin of Thurston the magician.
Robert, emerging from jail, joined forces with Harry, and they founded the Wolfe Wear-U-Well Shoe Corporation. This was almost fifty years ago. As of today the same company is one of the biggest and most successful in the country, serving thirty-eight states with 3,600 retail outlets. The Wolfes became interested in publishing as far back as 1903; eventually they came to control the Dispatch, the Ohio State Journal, and several radio stations including WBNS. They turned to politics too, and their summer place, known as the Wigwam, was a kind of Republican headquarters; here Landon, Hoover and innumerable other party dignitaries have been entertained. Also at the Wigwam the Wolfes kept—pet wolves!
Banking was another interest; in 1929 the Wolfes organized BancOhio which today controls some twenty Ohio banks, including the biggest in Columbus; it has branches in seventeen Ohio cities, with capital resources of 275 million dollars.10 Finally the Wolfes were prominent in civic affairs (donating stretches of parkway to the city and so on), in university circles (but they were never able to control the university though one Wolfe man was a prominent trustee for some years), and agriculture. The Wolfe Farms, also known as Agricultural Lands, Ltd., is supposed to be the biggest single farming operation east of the Mississippi.
As I heard it put in Columbus, there was nothing sinister in any of this. But that a single family should have set the tone and pace of an entire capital city, almost without opposition or qualification, for more than a generation, wasn’t quite what you would call pure democracy either.
Note on Buckeye Character
Never underestimate the homeliness of Americans. In contrast to the Wolfe story consider the life and works of the late Alvin Victor (“Honest Vic”) Donahey, three times Democratic governor of Ohio and Senator once. Mr. Donahey, according to legends that have grown about him, is the only man the state ever sent to Washington who never made a speech there. When governor, he would divide bills into two piles, those “for the people” and those against; his “policy” was simply to support one pile, and throw the other out. His favorite political motto was, “You can’t win a campaign with creased pants.” Once, when he was state auditor, an official submitted an expense account that included a notation, “Baked Potato—35¢.” The unhappy creature had been charged this amount on a railway diner. Donahey disallowed the scandalous item, saying that nobody should or could spend such a sum for a mere potato, became known as “Honest Vic,” and was launched instanter on a long and noteworthy political career.
Ohio: Miscellaneous
One important Ohio issue is something vicious known as strip mining, and another, indirectly related, is a proposal for an Ohio Valley Authority on the model of TVA.
Enormous quantities of coal lie very close to the surface in the United States: “strip mining” is simply open-air mining whereby such coal is shoveled or scraped off by bulldozer, steam shovel, or even a man with a pick and a wheelbarrow. One-fifth (roughly 110 million tons) of all coal produced in America today is strip mined, which fact came to close national attention during John L. Lewis’s seventeen-day coal strike late in 1946. Mr. Ickes among others suggested that the best way to circumvent Lewis, if the strike continued, would be to assign army and navy to strip mining in Ohio and the other great strip-mine states. But strip mining has manifest evils and disadvantages. It makes a violently controversial issue.11
For one thing, unless local legislation forces the strip miners to do something about it, the process defaces the countryside by leaving unsightly mounds and ridges where the bulldozers pass—like the detritus of the gold mining dredges in Montana on a vastly larger and uglier scale. For another, strip mining obviously ruins agriculture: a power shovel, according to the article just cited, will chew up “an entire 300-acre farm to a depth of 75 or 80 feet” in a year. Again, the natural growth of trees is destroyed, which in turn means loss of topsoil and stimulus to erosion. Still again, the strip mines “lower the water table” and this can lead eventually to floods and dislocation of the entire balance of nature in an area.
Strip mining is certainly a problem in Ohio—the coal operators only just managed to beat two different bills last year which would have abolished it—but it is not quite so frightening a problem as in Indiana, Illinois, and particularly Missouri, where good land is being totally destroyed. In Ohio the phenomenon is still mostly limited to marginal, nonproductive land in the hillbilly counties near the West Virginia border. Of course the strip miners themselves assert vigorously that they are helping, not hindering, the farmer. They pay him well for his land, and in twenty years or so, they say, the “spoil banks” will be green again.
OVA is not a burning local issue. It may very well become one, however, if strip mining causes future floods. The Ohio River is, at best, notorious for periodic devastating floods; one of these all but drowned out Cincinnati and Louisville ten years ago. But it won’t be easy to establish an OVA, whether for flood control or other reasons: the valley of the Ohio is intensively industrialized, and you cannot easily make lakes out of towns (though the floods may do so temporarily!); also the Ohio’s fall of water is much less than that of the Tennessee, which makes for difficult engineering problems. The chief non-Ohio force arguing intermittently for an OVA is the New York Daily News.
On Education in Ohio
The state has no material resources at all comparable with its citizens, and no hope of perpetuity except in the intelligence and integrity of its people.
—Ohio State University Motto
Ohio boils with colleges and universities; it has forty-three, more than any state except Pennsylvania, and five are actually state universities. First came Miami University at Oxford and Ohio University at Athens, in the southern area where the state was settled first. Next Ohio State University, the biggest and best known of the five and one of the great universities of the country, was established at Columbus; originally it was a land-grant college, and its emphasis on agriculture is still very marked. Fourth, in 1912, the northeastern part of Ohio demanded a university of its own, and the normal school at Kent was given this status. Fifth, Bowling Green University was similarly set up for the northwest. All five today are quite separate and distinct institutions; they compete with vigor for students and for funds from the state treasury, though a single board superintends their finances.
Then consider the city universities in Cincinnati, Akron, and Toledo as well as Western Reserve at Cleveland, and a number of smaller schools, some of them denominational like Capital University (Lutheran) at Columbus. Many of these have a signal individuality. Antioch at Yellow Springs is one of the most distinctive colleges in the nation, and Oberlin was the first educational institution in the United States to admit women on equal terms with men, and Negroes on equal terms with whites. Wilberforce, near Xenia, is one of the best-known Negro institutions in the country, and it is supported in part by state funds. Also there are Ohio Wesleyan at Delaware, Wooster (where the Compton family of university presidents sprang from), Heidelberg at Tiffin, and Denison at Granville.
Ohio State is a colossus. It has more than seventy buildings, upwards of 14,000 students, a stadium that seats 74,000, its own radio station, a “twilight school’’ for evening classes, and a vice president—“in charge of education”! It teaches liberal arts and agriculture first, and then anything that makes for a good living or extension of the wealth of Ohio. The variety of curriculum, though a commonplace to Americans and perfectly typical of all middle western state universities with a strong vocational slant, will astonish any European. Among courses offered are:
Ice Cream Manufacturing
Elementary Russian
Introduction to Clothing and Textiles
Factors in Successful Marriage
Motor Carrier Organization
The Social Work Approach to Life Adjustments
Pliny and Catullus
Driers, Kilns, and Theory of Firing
Education of Exceptional Children
Epidemic Diseases in Warfare
Principles of Taxonomy: Monocots and Dicots
Intermediate Japanese
Anatomy of the Horse
Old Provençal
Woodlot Management
Tuition at Ohio State, as in most state universities in the nation, is of course (nominal charges excepted) absolutely free to residents of the state. Americans take this phenomenon for granted, but it is another point of unceasing wonder to almost all Europeans.
So to conclude with the Middle West, though we shall touch middle western characteristics elsewhere, notably in Pittsburgh, before this book is done. We take a long jump now to the baffling, astringent, and tightly productive world of New England.
1 Cf. Hatcher, Lake Erie, p. 66. Among other Ohio place names straight out of New England are Salem, Montpelier, Springfield, Cambridge, Middletown.
2 Think back to Iowa’s agricultural firsts as an indication of the way American states complement each other.
3 How many similar “capitals” exist in the United States! I have already mentioned several, and a good many more are to come, for instance the rose, barbecue, and natural gas “capitals.” In California is the “artichoke capital” of the world, and in Texas the “honey” capital. Carrying this further, a shop in Manhattan calls itself the “stationery” capital of the world.
4 Time, April 8, 1946.
5 Another unique feature is that the city owns a railway, which goes by the imposing name of Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific; colloquially the line is known as Cincinnati-Southern, and the municipality owns the tracks as far as Chattanooga. This railway development came about when the community fathers saw the necessity of changing over from a river to a railroad era. Today, the railway income pays the service on the city debt.
6 Consider also what Cincinnati contributes to radio in terms of soap operas!
7 In the Cities of America series, April 20, 1946.449
8 Cincinnati is the biggest American city to have a city manager. Others are Kansas City (Mo.), Norfolk, San Diego, Rochester, and Oakland. The city manager system began to all intents and purposes in Ohio; Dayton was the first considerable town in the country to have one, largely as a result of initiative by the Patterson family that runs the National Cash Register Company
9 This type of story is told of several state capitals, for instance Sacramento. A bill to make a town named St. Peter, rather than St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota, was once passed by the Minnesota legislature. But the St. Paul adherents kidnapped the engrossing clerk, kept him drunk for a week, and so prevented the bill from being properly drawn UD.
10 New York Times, January 10, 1945.
11 A fair-minded account of the whole topic is “The Battle of the Spoil Banks, by Alfred H. Sinks, Harper’s Magazine, as condensed by Reader’s Digest, July, 1946.