Frederic Clemson Howe

• Frederic Clemson Howe
• Born: November 21, 1867
• Died: August 3, 1940

Urban reformer, public official, and author, was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, the only son and the first of four children of Andrew Jackson Howe, a local furniture maker and retailer, and Jane (Clemson) Howe. His father was of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and his mother was descended from Swedish immigrants and Quakers. As a young man in the conservative and heavily Methodist town of Meadville, Frederic Howe devoured books at the public library and worked as a volunteer at The Meadville Democrat.

After graduating from Allegheny College in 1889, he took his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1892 and did postgraduate work at the University of Halle in Germany. At Johns Hopkins he had been influenced by Professors Woodrow Wilson and Richard T. Ely; Ely taught him to perceive the grimness of the industrial system, in which “men were numbers rather than human beings.” Howe was also impressed by the British historian James Bryce, who lectured on the need for scholars to enter politics. When Howe returned to the United States in 1893, looking for work as a journalist, he was set back by the economic recession of 1892-93. For a time he worked in New York City as an agent watching for saloon violations. Having attended law school at the University of Maryland and having also studied in New York, he was admitted to the bar in Pittsburgh. Here, as secretary of the city tax commission, he learned about industrial corruption—in the railroad business in particular—and the experience strengthened the lessons Ely had taught him.

In 1894 Howe joined the Cleveland law firm of Harry and James Garfield, sons of President James A. Garfield. As a friend and ally of Tom Johnson, who became mayor of Cleveland on a platform calling for control of the street railways and the reduction poverty, Howe served in the city council. His first conversation with Johnson concerned Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, a book that argued that social equity could be established by a single land tax. George’s ideas interested Johnson and soon beguiled Howe.

Howe became converted to the idea of public ownership of the street railways, which he said, could exist as a private business “only by bribery.” In his reelection bid as an independent, he dramatized his break with the big-business interests in the Republican party, and lost. But he became chairman of the Cleveland City Finance Commission and from 1906 to 1908 served in the Ohio state senate.

Gradually Howe developed a vision of what better cities might be like. The possibility of an orderly and beautiful city “became ... an absorbing passion.” He “viewed the city as an architect. ... It was a ... thing with a conscious purpose.” He studied cities “as one might study art... curbs, sewers,... sky-lines.” He admired Europe, where the cities operated social services and “men of distinction” served as mayors. The city, he thought, should be an ameliorative social agency, ministering to the needs of the deprived.

Howe gained the respect even of his opponents, such as Mark Hanna, the Republican leader who was strongly allied with big business. He could be friendly with Hanna and yet concede, in Confessions of a Monopolist (1906), that monopoly and corruption work together. “It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer gives way to disease,” he wrote. Equitable taxation, including taxation of monopoly, became a major interest of Howe’s in his desire to reshape the cities. His more general view of the urban future appeared in The City: The Hope of Democracy (1905). He became expert in the means by which European cities dealt with planning and hoped that an American “civic revival” would make civic planning the beginning of a moral, cultural, and economic renewal.

In 1904 Howe married Marie H. Jenney, a Unitarian minister and scholar whom he had courted for several years, and her feminism seriously influenced his thinking. Howe had become wealthy as a lawyer in Cleveland, but he began to view law not as a “learned profession” but as a “business, a trade.” He had been campaigning against big business interests as a reform politician yet working for railroads, trusts, and bankers as a lawyer. Now he began to lose interest in this work; more than ever he wanted simply to put big business under control. After briefly editing Ridgway’s Weekly, he moved in 1910 to New York City, where his wife became active in the Woman’s Suffrage party. Howe’s conversion to feminism became more substantial. His own earlier “unwillingness to abdicate masculine power” made him “better understand men’s unwillingness to abdicate economic power.”

For three years Howe directed the People’s Institute, which encouraged reforms and reform movements. Socially, he began to circulate in Greenwich Village with such bohemians as the journalist Max Eastman, the writers Floyd Dell and John Reed, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and black leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Associating with these radical intellectuals was a large step from Meadville and even the reform politics of Cleveland. Howe engaged largely in the progressive politics of the period, helping to elect the political reformer John Purroy Mitchel as mayor of New York and working closely with the progressive reformer Amos Pinchot. Howe helped found the National Progressive Republican League, supporting the early abortive presidential candidacy of Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin in 1912.

In the 1912 elections Howe supported his old professor, Woodrow Wilson, for president. In 1914 Wilson appointed him Commissioner of Immigration of the Port of New York, in charge of Ellis Island. Seeking improved conditions for the arrivals on the “Island of Tears,” Howe explained their rights to them and fought resistance to reforms in the oppressive bureaucratic atmosphere.

But aggressive congressional investigating committees became concerned about his reforms and, as the European war heated in 1915-16, angered by his criticism of munitions makers and other forces eager for American entry into the conflict. The approach of war also made the political atmosphere less sympathetic to the needs of immigrants. During the war and after, Howe defended the right of free speech for dissidents and opposed the deportation of aliens on political grounds—stands that made him once more of a target for congressional fury. Members of Congress attacked him as a socialist and accused him of permitting sexual immorality and gambling on the island. Howe resigned as commissioner in 1919.

In 1919 Howe served as consultant on eastern Mediterranean affairs for the American delegation, headed by President Wilson, to the Paris Peace Conference. He joined other progressives in criticizing Wilson for compromising liberal ideals and creating a League of Nations as “a league of conquest rather than a covenant of freedom.” Economic imperialism drove nations into war, he wrote Wilson, and “America had no business in Paris.” His own experience during the war and his analysis of its impact persuaded Howe that the results of the conflict had crushed the prewar “liberal movement.”

After the war Howe promoted a plan for nationalization of the railroads and encouraged cooperative banking by unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. He wrote favorably about cooperative production in Denmark: A Cooperative Commonwealth. (1921). Howe helped organize the Conference for Progressive Political Action in the 1922 congressional elections. Cementing ties between rural and urban reformers, the conference paved the way for the Progressive party presidential candidacy of Senator La Follette in 1924, a campaign in which Howe became active as a researcher. During the summers of the 1920s he directed the School for Opinion on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. After organizing older progressives to aid Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Howe became consumer counsel in the new Agricultural Adjustment Administration, seeking to create consumers’ vigilante groups to combat food profiteering. Criticized by opponents for being too radical, he was demoted to the position of adviser to the secretary of agriculture. In 1937 he became a consultant on farm tenancy and cooperatives in the Philippines.

Howe died of a heart ailment in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-two. At the time of his death he was engaged in a study of European banking.

Howe had wide intellectual and political interests, global as well as national. In an attempt to focus his vision of an egalitarian and cosmopolitan culture in a political strategy of reform, he became a leading authority on urban issues and on a wide variety of other critical concerns in American life.

Howe’s books include the autobiography Confessions of a Reformer (1925); Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy (1912); European Cities at Work (1913); and The Modern City and Its Problems (1915). For biographical material see the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune, August 4, 1940.