Last week, I participated in a forum about the 100th Anniversary of what in Cincinnati is known as the Charter movement.
For those not from here, the Charterites were reformers who, in 1924, toppled the City Hall of Cincinnati when a back-room culture of “bossism” had made it the most corrupt city in the United States. The Charterites formed an independent party and led a popular movement that resulted in the rewriting of the City’s Constitution (its charter), making wholesale reforms to clean up broken government—including adding civil service protections, employee unions, reformed elections to eliminate backroom deals and appointments, bolstering citizen involvement, professional management, and the like. A strong majority of Cincinnati voters approved these reforms, and the old corrupt bosses were promptly replaced by reform candidates. The essence of those reforms have lasted to this day.
Enduring what we are going through in Ohio and other corrupted states today—where every lever of government power is used against the citizens on behalf of entrenched insiders and extremists—I explained to the group that I admired the Charter movement now more than ever.
As we are learning painfully, toppling corrupted government (when it infects every part of government, from the ballot board to the courts; and is willing to protect itself with lies, lawlessness, dirty money, and abuse of power) is a truly challenging assignment.
BUT, as the Charterite movement in Cincinnati showed, when the people have reached a boiling point, it can happen.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Reform Push
The session reminded me of another reform movement, and a speech by Teddy Roosevelt I return to frequently. He gave this speech at Carnegie Hall, 12 years prior to the Charter revolution in Cincinnati. And Roosevelt’s words are remarkable for how closely they describe the moment we find ourselves in today (and that Cincinnati found itself in in 1924).
Roosevelt was pushing to amend the Ohio Constitution, as part of a broader call for reform that was sweeping the country, particularly at the state level. The heart of the reform was to give the citizens of Ohio the power to directly amend their Constitution through the initiative and referendum process — yes, the exact power we are using today to finally end gerrymandering through Issue 1 (thank you TR!).
Read Roosevelt’s words closely. You will see just how similar things were back then to now—at least when it comes to unaccountable politicians corrupting their government to impose the will of the minority upon everyone else:
“The great fundamental issue now before before our people can be stated briefly. It is, Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them. I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents pay lip-loyalty to this doctrine; but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.
I have scant patience with this talk of the tyranny of the majority. Wherever there is tyranny of the majority, I shall protest against it with all my heart and soul. But we are today suffering from the tyranny of minorities. It is a small minority that is grabbing our coal-deposits, our water-powers, and our harbor fronts. A small minority is battening on the sale of adulterated foods and drugs. It is a small minority that lies behind monopolies and trusts….The only tyrannies from which men, women, and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities….
No sane man who has been familiar with the government of this country for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much of the rule of the majority. The trouble has been a far different one that, at many times and in many localities, there have held public office in the States and in the nation men who have, in fact, served not the whole people, but some special class or special interest. I am not thinking only of those special interests which by grosser methods, by bribery and crime, have stolen from the people.
I am thinking as much of their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States, while the rights of all the people were merely an unsecured debt. Am I overstating the case? Have our political leaders always, or generally, recognized their duty to the people as anything more than a duty to disperse the mob, see that the ashes are taken away, and distribute patronage? Have our leaders always, or generally, worked for the benefit of human beings, to increase the prosperity of all the people, to give each some opportunity of living decently and bringing up his children well? The questions need no answer….
Now there has sprung up a feeling deep in the hearts of the people—not of the bosses and professional politicians, not of the beneficiaries of special privilege—a pervading belief of thinking men that when the majority of the people do in fact, as well as theory, rule, then the servants of the people will come more quickly to answer and obey, not the commands of the special interests, but those of the whole people….”
Roosevelt went on to list a number of reforms that will serve this end:
“First, there are the "initiative and referendum," which are so framed that if the legislatures obey the command of some special interest, and obstinately refuse the will of the majority, the majority may step in and legislate directly. No man would say that it was best to conduct all legislation by direct vote of the people--it would mean the loss of deliberation, of patient consideration but, on the other hand, no one whose mental arteries have not long since hardened can doubt that the proposed changes are needed when the legislatures refuse to carry out the will of the people. The proposal is a method to reach an undeniable evil….”
“We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men. If on this new continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing; and we shall do as little if we merely set the greed of envy against the greed of arrogance, and thereby destroy the material well-being of all of us. To turn this government either into government by a plutocracy or government by a mob would be to repeat on a larger scale the lamentable failures of the world that is dead. We stand against all tyranny, by the few or by the many. We stand for 'the rule of the many in the interest of all of us, for the rule of the many in a spirit of courage, of common sense, of high purpose, above all in a spirit of kindly justice toward every man and every woman. We not merely admit, but insist, that there must be self-control on the part of the people, that they must keenly perceive their own duties as well as the rights of others; but we also insist that the people can do nothing unless they not merely have, but exercise to the full, their own rights.”
Wow.
112 years later, we are engaged in the same struggle. In so many states, all that Roosevelt describes then is exactly the battle we are in now:
A small group, locked into power in a state, gerrymandered into districts they rigged for themselves, often protected by courts of fellow partisans, ruling that state on behalf of a privileged few…of a “special class” and “special interest”…who work to keep them in power.
“Legislatures [who] refuse to carry out the will of the people”—the majority—on issue after issue, from reproductive freedom, to supporting public schools, to a middle-class based economics, to common sense gun reforms, to education freedom (Ie. No books bans), and so on.
And when it comes to democracy itself, politicians “champion[ing] every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.” Sounds so damn familiar!
You know, like gerrymandering itself. Or Issue 1 last August, trying to raise the threshold for Amendments to 60%.
Or like this week, politicians and the Ohio Supreme Court manipulating ballot language to fool the people to vote in the exact opposite way from how they intend to vote (against the politicians and for themselves).
So….those of you in Ohio and across the country battling FOR reform in some way—be it Issue 1 to ban gerrymandering in Ohio, or initiatives to protect reproductive freedom in Florida or Missouri and override out-of-touch and gerrymandered legislatures—know that you are part of a national battle for reform, just like by patriots and heroes from a century before. The conditions in these states today are as corrupted as the entrenched “bossism” and corruption Americans confronted a century ago.
And then, when people had reached a boiling point, they did ultimately succeed.
We can too.
46 days.
Take our recent wins for reform and democracy—both Issue 1s in Ohio last year, referenda and election wins across the country since Dobbs, the end of gerrymandering in Wisconsins following the change of that court’s majority, and more—and keep going.
At the state level in particular, we must convert our recent victories and momentum into a lasting movement for reform. We must make permanent that “feeling deep in the hearts of the people” that something is badly broken, and we are the only ones who can fix it.
Let’s get bold. Let’s build a movement that our kids (like Charlie below) will look back on impressed—as impressed as I was by what the Charter Party managed to pull off a century ago, knowing as I do from my own experience just how difficult that victory must’ve been.
Never stop fighting for democracy.
And those in Ohio, vote Yes on 1!
As i recall, those in power in 1924 pulled every trick in the book to kill the reform idea of a new city charter, including putting a bunch (4) of alternatives on the ballot ahead of the actual vote on the new charter. So to pass, the knowledgeable voter had to vote "no" 4 times and then "yes!"
It'd be good to confirm this recollection of the actual history - important, because it's the same nonsense we see today to subvert the will of the electorate.
Have my sign up on Tiedeman Road in the city of Brooklyn. Thanks to a good friend who stuck it in the hard dirt in my yard.