Tom Loftin Johnson

• Tom Loftin Johnson
• Born: July 18, 1854
• Died: April 10, 1911

Reform mayor of Cleveland and member of Congress, was born at Blue Spring, near Georgetown, Kentucky, the first of three sons of Albert Johnson and Helen (Loftin) Johnson. Albert Johnson became a cotton planter shortly after his first son’s birth and fought as a Confederate, albeit an opponent of slavery, in the Civil War—a conflict that interrupted Tom Johnson’s elementary school education. Like many families in that part of the South, the Johnsons moved from one place to another during the war, finally settling in Staunton, Virginia. Here Tom Johnson demonstrated great youthful ingenuity by arranging with the conductor to establish a newspaper monopoly on the local train. With the money he made, the Johnsons moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where the boy did odd jobs. He spent a year in Evansville, Indiana, staying with an uncle; at school there he performed poorly in literature but extremely well in mathematics.

Returning to Louisville, Tom Johnson worked in a rolling mill and then rose quickly as an employee of the Louisville Street Railroad, the property of AV. and Bidermann DuPont, scions of the industrial family. Johnson invented the first farebox for coins. In 1874 he married Margaret J. Johnson, a distant relative. Together they were to attract as friends a wide variety of liberal and socially concerned college graduates. They moved to Indianapolis, and in 1876 Johnson obtained the financial support of the DuPonts for the reorganization of the street railroad in that city. He had been in motion all his life, but in 1879 he settled in Cleveland; there he built a street railroad, operating in competition with the business magnate and political leader Mark Hanna, with whom he later competed politically.

Johnson began to broaden his business interests to include steel, again in collaboration with the DuPonts, building new equipment in contracts with the Cambria Company of Johnstown, Pennsylvania and the Lorain Steel Company of Lorain, Ohio. As a member of the relief commission after the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of 1889, Johnson began his career in public service, establishing a reputation for administrative zeal in distributing $3 million to the victims of the catastrophe.

During his involvement in transit systems. Johnson was impressed by Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty and its advocacy of the single tax and free trade. He came to be viewed as a leading adherent of George’s ideas, helping him to build a home near Fort Hamilton, New York, and campaigning vigorously for him in the New York City mayoralty campaign of 1886, as he was to do in 1897. This conversion influenced Johnson’s own political career, which began in 1888. Never having voted until that year, he ran for Congress as a Democrat and lost in the twenty-first district of Ohio. But in 1890 he won a seat, and in 1892 he was reelected for a second term. (He lost a race for a third term in a Republican sweep in 1894.) Despite his interests in the protected steel industry, he spoke out in Congress for free trade: his first major speech opposed a tariff bill. He also argued against a national bank bill.

Johnson, who had become a friend of Governor Pingree of Michigan, went to Detroit in 1899 for a joint campaign to bring the street car system under public ownership and reduce the fare. Their hard-fought battle was stymied by the courts and a coalition of business interests. In Cleveland, however, with an unstable political situation and a newly resigned mayor, opportunity presented itself. In 1901 Johnson ran successfully for mayor, campaigning like an urban populist and reaching out to his constituency by traveling around with a circus tent that accommodated more than 4,000 people. Although he was ridiculed, he won popular support (and his opponents in later campaigns eventually emulated him). He encouraged timid listeners in his audience to ask questions about the running of city government. His campaign was based upon the simple but appealing slogan “Home rule; three cent fare; and just taxation.” Johnson was reelected three times in succession and established a reputation in the nation as the prototype of a progressive reform mayor.

One of Johnson’s leading aides was his attorney Newton D. Baker, later a leading national Democratic party figure. Another important aide was Peter Witt, a former iron molder and trade unionist. Witt, a populist and socialist, worked with the Johnson to establish a tax school to revise tax assessments, which they felt had been weighted in favor of the wealthy. The use of mathematical methods to attack social inequality accorded not only with Johnson’s own background but also with the idea of the progressive movement that reform could come through scientific management.

Court decisions hampered Witt and Johnson, but their effort began a statewide struggle that led to a constitutional amendment in Ohio in 1910. The amendment allowed municipal areas greater freedom to enact more equitable tax laws. Johnson also waged a struggle in Cleveland for greater municipal control over the transit lines. This battle ended in a court receivership. Johnson dealt usually, often effectively, with a city council with a Republican majority. He attempted to help the poor by such measures as abolishing license fees for peddlers. He promoted projects to ameliorate conditions of city life—improved paving, street lighting, and hospital care and public bathhouses. He also favored woman suffrage and public ownership of the railroads. Near the end of his last term his own taxes were investigated. The case was litigated and settled. His health in decline, Johnson lost his bid for reelection in 1909. He died at the age of fifty-six.

The son of an antislavery Confederate who admired Abraham Lincoln, with an itinerant family, and an itinerant himself, Johnson developed financial independence through his ingenuity. Using his freedom to aid political causes that furthered both populist and progressive activity, and joining the progressive concern for social advance through efficient management to the populist concern for the underprivileged and mass participation in government, he exerted a substantial influence upon the movement for good government in America.

Biographical sources include Johnson’s exuberant and sometimes rambling autobiography, My Story (1911), written with E. J. Hauser. C. Lorenz, Tom L. Johnson (1911) is a very general treatment of his life. Other material on Johnson is contained in L. Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904); S. P. Orth, A History of Cleveland, Ohio, vol. 1 (1910); E. M. Avery, A History of Cleveland and its Environs (1918); World’s Work, February 1902, January 1908; Outlook, August 4, 1906, November 16, 1907, July 24, October 23, 1909, April 22, 1911;Nation, September 11, 1902, September 3, 1903, April 13, 1911; Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 11,1911. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1934).