IMAGE EXTRACTED FROM MICROFILM BY GREG HAND
For better or worse, mostly worse, no history of Cincinnati can be written without significant attention to the reign of George Barnsdale Cox, the man known as Boss Cox. For forty years, from the 1880s into the 1920s, Cox and his minions ran Cincinnati like a private fiefdom. It is remarkable that the Cox Machine was brought low by a bunch of birds.
Cox ruled from his position as chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party and during his reign no one got elected in Hamilton County without the Boss’s approval. To keep the votes rolling in for his chosen politicians, Cox dispensed county funds where loyalty could be bought. Cox ignored the city’s parks where squirrels didn’t vote. Cox bled the schools because teachers didn’t vote and, as one of Cox’s lieutenants was quoted, “most of them are women, anyway.”
Cox’s favorite voters were dependable machine constituents who voted a straight Republican ticket. It mattered not whether they knew who they were voting for. In fact, it was probably preferable that they didn’t care who they elected. Through bribes and favors, Cox owned the illiterate vote in Cincinnati. Cox’s ward heelers had one simple task – to vote a straight Republican ticket. To do so, voters didn’t need to read. They need only remember to vote the eagle.
Voting was a lot more complicated 100 years ago than it is today. In 1920, each party had its own ballot, and each ballot had a symbol or logo on the top. There were no Elephants or Donkeys. Republican ballots showed an eagle at the top, while Democratic ballots were emblazoned with a rooster. The Socialists employed a hand holding a torch. Prohibitionists used a rose.
Under the party symbol, each ballot showed a big circle. If a voter wanted to vote a straight party ticket, all they had to do was mark a big, bold X through that circle and drop the ballot in the appropriate box. That big circle was extremely convenient for illiterate voters and Cincinnati had a lot of them. These voters cared not a whit about any candidate. All they knew was that a beer or a fifty-cent piece awaited once a poll monitor signaled to the ward boss that the voter had marked the correct ballot. For illiterate voters, the non-partisan judicial ballot was indecipherable and fist fights broke out at various polls when party hacks offered to “help” illiterate voters translate the judicial ballots.
One hundred years ago, in January 1924, a group of Cincinnati reformers organized the Birdless Ballot League to eliminate party ballots. It proved to be the death knell for the Boss Cox machine. Although the idea had been circulated before, it was lawyer Henry Bentley who made the birdless ballot his personal crusade. Bentley’s proposal was simple: Eliminate the party emblems from the ballot and force voters to individually select candidates by name. If adopted, the birdless ballot would effectively disenfranchise anyone who couldn’t read and thereby remove a big tool from the Cox Machine’s toolbox.
IMAGE EXTRACTED FROM MICROFILM BY GREG HAND
By the time Bentley got involved, the Cox Machine was a sputtering hulk of its former magnificence. Cox himself had died in 1916. His lieutenants, grown fat and happy with the spoils of graft and corruption, found interests outside the grind of municipal politics. Mike Mullen, whose influence extended well beyond his homebase in the Fifth Ward, died in 1921. August “Garry” Herrmann had all but retired from politics to oversee the Cincinnati Reds. Only Rudolph “Rud” Hynicka was still in control, and he had long since relocated to New York City, where he managed a string of burlesque theaters.
It was left to local party stalwarts to gin up the opposition to Bentley’s proposal. Gilbert Bettman, a Republican of the Cox camp, fumed during a speech to the Women’s City Club [Cincinnati Post 18 April 1924]:
“The birdless ballot, historically unsound, illogical and wholly negative, judged by this single standard, would not tend to bring better or more capable men into the public service. In-so-far as it would have any effect, it would weaken the structure of parties, creating a political hodge-podge, bloc or minority government.”
Bettman’s speeches that year were reminders that the old Cox Machine had chewed up reformers before and expected to easily dispense with Bentley and his ilk. And yet, despite its invulnerable reputation, the Cox gang had endured occasional, if temporary, revolts almost from the moment it seized control of the city. The Machine had learned to bend a little when necessary but to snap back once the reformers relaxed. In 1924, they complacently ignored a groundswell that had been gaining strength over the past decade. Consequently, the Machine underestimated the opposition.
Simultaneous with Bentley’s call for birdless ballots, the Cincinnatus League, another group of reformers, including future mayors Murray Seasongood and Russell Wilson, agitated for a charter establishing a city manager form of government. Seasongood and his allies recognized that the birdless ballot was step in the right direction, but the ultimate goal needed to be a complete reform of city government. At the urging of the Cincinnati Post, which had built its reputation as the anti-Cox newspaper in town, the charter supporters and the ballot reformers joined forces.
It is all but forgotten today, but the Charterite reformers succeeded largely because of Cincinnati’s Socialists, particularly Herbert Bigelow, pastor of the non-denominational People’s Church. That congregation provided many of the volunteers essential to the reform movement. It was they who circulated petitions, got out the vote and lobbied for change at public meetings.
The Cox/Hynicka syndicate tried to confuse voters by promoting their own charter issues on the 1924 ballot. If either of those measures passed, city council would have been reorganized but no substantial changes would have taken place.
As it developed, Cincinnati’s voters were inspired by the idea of a ballot without birds. On November 4, 1924, the Charterite referendum received more than 88,000 votes, with only 39,000 votes in opposition. The new charter streamlined city council to just nine city-wide seats instead of an unwieldy legislative body with a representative from all 32 wards. The new council selected a weak, mostly ceremonial, mayor to preside at council, and hired a city manager to conduct most city business. Overnight, Cincinnati’s reputation as one of the worst-governed cities in America was transformed and the city became known as one of the best and most efficiently run municipalities in the country.
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