Cambridge Civic Journal Forum

The following article was referenced at the Sept 23, 2020 City Council meeting on possible Charter review.

HOW TO BREAK A POLITICAL MACHINE
[Collier’s Magazine, January 31, 1948]

Cambridge’s Board of Directors, which replaced the old City Council after the professors finished their reform wave, has reduced the city debt from twelve to three million, built the highest-paid group of employees in any city of comparable size, reduced taxes and increased and streamlined all the city services

BY JOSEPH F. DINNEEN

The taxpayers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, were paying far too much for far too little until a group of college professors and plain citizens got together and took on the local political machine. It was a tough and glorious scrap, but today Cambridge is one of the best-run cities in the land

WE WANT you, Dean Landis, to become the active, working head of a committee to change the charter of the City of Cambridge." The dean of the Harvard Law School was sympathetic, but not interested. He looked at Attorney George McLaughlin and the committee sent to persuade him. "You want me to become a Cambridge city politician," he said, "and I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that. Why pick on me?"

"Because we need a big name. And we need somebody with your kind of ability to head up the fight."

Dean Landis shook his head. "Count me out. I have enough to do without trying to reform the City of Cambridge. Harvard and the city have been fighting for years."

"That’s no reason why Harvard and the city should keep on fighting," McLaughlin persisted. "It’s time they got together. If they don’t, the city will go bankrupt and the professors who live here will find that just as tough as the rest of us. We have a plan to save it, but we want you to help us put it across."

"Why me? And what’s the plan?" The plan which McLaughlin outlined on that day in July, 1938, was simple. But putting it into operation started one of the fanciest political slugging matches the old city across the Charles River had ever seen.

The reason McLaughlin had helped organize forty-nine professors, industrialists, merchants, legionnaires, white-collar workers and laborers into a Committee of Fifty to back the plan, was that they well knew the sad state into which the City of Cambridge had fallen: They had seen the firemen in discarded letter carriers’ uniforms answering alarms with equipment so old it often broke down before it reached the fire; they had driven over the rutted and littered streets and had been stopped cold when unremoved snow made them impassable in winter; they had’ smelled the city when garbage and refuse lay for days without being collected. And they had felt it in their pocketbooks as the taxes inched higher and higher.

The Committee of Fifty had been organized after the first move to correct these abuses had been taken by a team of Harvard experts in government and progressive Massachusetts legislators. This step had been to get the state legislature to pass an act allowing any city to adopt Plan E, the city-manager form of charter, if it voted to do so.

Previously this form of government, which had been pioneered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and had been replacing corrupt municipal machines with streamlined, efficient administration in various other cities throughout the country ever since, had been unavailable to Massachusetts cities. Now that Plan E was available, the Committee of Fifty proposed to arouse the citizens of Cambridge to the point where they’d toss out the city administration and charter and vote in a new order. They well knew that they had a fight ahead of them.

"Mayor John W. Lyons doesn’t know yet that Plan E is poison to him and to all other political bosses," McLaughlin told Landis. "But as soon as we start working to get the people to vote for it, he will. His political machine will start rolling to kill it and he’ll fight as he never fought before because Plan E means his finish."

Dean Landis accepted the job of heading the Committee of Fifty.

McLaughlin was right. Mayor Lyons, Paul Mannos, his chief contractor, who was being investigated by the district attorney and the members of the city council woke up screaming.

The first moves of the opposition made them laugh. James McCauley Landis was going around Cambridge, dropping in at taverns and saloons, chatting with truck drivers and bartenders, talking to them about Plan E, explaining it, discussing it, sounding them out. James Michael Landis, they called him, a comparison to James Michael Curley that they knew he would not like.

A Machine of Nonpoliticians

Nevertheless the new kind of machine that was growing in Cambridge bewildered Mayor Lyons. Its leaders were not politicians. None of them had ever been elected to public office; they were a collection of educators and businessmen swelled by an assortment of nobodies from all wards. They sponsored no candidate, but he knew they were out to defeat him. They didn’t say so. They held political rallies, advocating the adoption of a new and fantastic form of city charter. Dean Landis, the three lawyer McLaughlins, George, Walter and Charles, were a flying squadron buzzing around to clubrooms, the Y.M.C.A. and church groups explaining it in detail, while speakers from the League of Women Voters were missionaries among the women.

Mayor Lyons examined the proposed city-charter and was astonished. It deprived a mayor of all power and made him merely the ceremonial head of the city. It would end a system of contract awards and city contractors. It would make the city council a board of directors of the city corporation and pay each one of them an unheard-of $4,000 a year. It did away with the system of marking a cross on a ballot and permitted every voter to vote for every candidate in a system known as proportional representation. The voter simply put a number one after his first choice, number two after the second and so on down the list.

It was election year and the proponents were trying to get the charter on the ballot. That required the signatures of 10 per cent of the voters —5,000 persons. The mayor and the city contractors were determined to keep it off the ballot at any cost.

"This is a bold and barefaced attempt to overturn our form of government," the mayor shouted from platforms and street-corner rostrums. "This is Communism. This system was designed in Moscow and approved by Stalin. This is a pernicious attempt by the Harvard Reds to destroy the American way."

The brothers McLaughlin, Charles, George and Walter (left to right), were ringleaders in the fight to organize a group which could oust the political machine. All lawyers, they handled their forces like generals

"There’s nothing Communistic  about it," the McLaughlins, Dean Landis and a growing corps of speakers answered from the same and other platforms. "It was adapted from democratic systems in Ireland and England by Charles P. Taft to cure corruption and mismanagement in Cincinnati 15 years ago. He added American improvements and refinements and it put Cincinnati back on its feet." As Election Day came nearer, the fight became hot and bitter. Public speakers for Plan E making whirlwind campaign tours around the city came out of meeting places to find the air let out of their tires. A paving block was hurled through the window of the home of one of the speakers. But the Civic Association, which had grown out of the Committee of Fifty, kept on growing.

Already there were more than enough signatures to put on the ballot the question: "Shall Cambridge accept Plan E?" The signatures were filed as required with the State Ballot Law Commission, and verified. There was a deadline established by law —Saturday, October 8th, midnight— when all legal election forms must be completed in time to have ballots printed and distributed. Time was running out and suddenly the Committee of Fifty spotted an unintended booby trap in the state law covering referendums. This was a provision that "the city clerk upon the vote of the council" must transmit a petition for a referendum to the Secretary of State.

"How do we lick this one?" George McLaughlin asked the dean of the Law School. "How can we compel a hostile council to vote a proposal to wipe itself out?"

"A writ of mandamus?" the dean suggested.

"A writ of mandamus is an instrument to compel an official to do a purely administrative act, like making a police chief appoint a cop from a civil service list. Has a writ of mandamus ever been issued to compel a legislative body to pass a yes or no vote?" McLaughlin asked. "I doubt it."

"The courts never interfere with the legislative branch of the government, I’ll agree," Landis said, "but in this case it can be argued. Is this particular vote a legislative or administrative act? You’ll have to reason your way through that one."

On the Tuesday before deadline, the city council met and adjourned without taking any action on the petition. Its next regular meeting would not be held until the Tuesday after the deadline had passed; but Boston and Cambridge newspapers were so scornful and there was now such an impressive number of Plan E supporters throughout the city that the council became uneasy. The president of the council announced that he would call a special meeting to act on the petition on Friday, 24 hours before deadline.

On Friday the strategy of the opposition became clear. Groups of citizens appeared at the Ballot Law Commission to question the validity of signatures on the Plan E petition, alleging wholesale forgeries. The commission protested the lateness of the hour and inquired indignantly why the objections had not been made earlier; but the charges had to be investigated. The commission set ID o’clock next morning for a hearing.

That night the council met again and refused to vote to send the petition along to the Secretary of State.

"We couldn’t," members said. "The petition is now in litigation. It may turn out to be invalid."

Writ of Mandamus Sought

There was a council of war in the cellar of George McLaughlin’s house. "What do you suggest now?" McLaughlin asked Dean Landis. "You’re the chairman of this committee."

"We’ll go after the writ of mandamus."

"Good!" McLaughlin agreed. "I’ve been canvassing that possibility all week. I can’t find a single important legal mind in Boston or Cambridge who thinks it can be done. They all say you can’t get a writ of mandamus for that purpose and they all say there isn’t time. The courts move too slow."

Landis nodded. "Let’s speed them up."

Harvard Law School’s Dean Landis was a hard man to convince, but finally he got mad

Organization began right away. Judges were consulted and lawyers enlisted that night. At five o’clock the following morning, the three McLaughlins were in their office facing Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston typing out subpoenas for every person who filed an objection to signatures and for all thirteen members of the city council. There were two jurisdictions involved, Suffolk, which is Boston, and Middlesex, Cambridge. Fifteen lawyers with 15 constables attached were deployed in strategic places around the city, at the Statehouse, the two courthouses, in a district attorney’s office, in drugstores by pay stations and in police stations.

It was their job to channel and chart the case through the Ballot Law Commission and all of the courts to the Supreme Court before the stroke of midnight. In the early morning hours, constables and lawyers were combing Cambridge picking up the objectors and city councilors, and by 10 o’clock that morning they had all been herded before the commission—all except those objectors who apparently lived on vacant lots or were unknown at the addresses given. Some who were awakened in their beds or were disturbed at breakfast didn’t know what their objections were nor how to sustain them.

Justice on the Move

Three lawyers had been assigned to the Ballot Law Commission, and as they called witnesses, one by one their objections dissipated. By 11 o’clock in the morning, the petition was cleared and made legal. The wheels of justice had been speeded up as they never had been in local judicial history. While the ballot law hearing was going on, three more lawyers were piloting the petition for a writ of mandamus through to the courts.

According to the timetable, the court orders directing the councilors to appear should have been in Boston in time to serve them upon the city councilors as the Ballot Law Commission hearing broke up; but the orders were late, or the hearing ended too soon, and the councilors got away. Not far, though. The legal squadron knew where to pick them up from hour to hour.

By 1 o’clock the preliminary hearing on the writ of mandamus before a single justice was over, and he agreed to convene the full bench of the Supreme Court by 3 o’clock. Once again the three lawyers opposite the Boston courthouse began typing—this time turning out writs for the other 12 lawyers to serve on the councilors.

Harvard was playing Princeton that afternoon. Each Cambridge city councilor is entitled to two seats for every Harvard stadium game. As each councilor walked over the Larz Anderson Bridge that afternoon, a lawyer spotted him, pointed him out to his constable. The constable stepped up, saluted the councilor with "Greetings!" and slapped the writ in his hand.

At 3 o’clock a disappointed, dejected and bewildered city council was standing before Supreme Court Justice Dolan. The full bench had already reviewed the petition and Justice Dolan had been assigned to hear the arguments and dispose of the case. City Solicitor Richard C. Evarts, a good lawyer, represented the council, but he had had no time to prepare his case. Justice Dolan issued the writ directing the council to meet before midnight.

There was still one loophole. The councilors might refuse to hold a meeting because they had not been served legal notice of the court’s order. Once again the typewriter battery of lawyers went to work, and that evening, while the councilors were home for dinner, notice was served upon each of them.

The council met at 7:30 that night, and although there was nothing the members could do but pass the order, they debated it for two and a half hours. The deadline was then two hours away and the order still had to be written and signed. The city clerk was a trustworthy and efficient official, but the eyes of a company of lawyers were upon him from the moment he received the document until he left the building. When he came out of City Hall to drive to the Statehouse, he found himself boxed on all sides by accompanying cars. The Plan E committee was taking no chances that something untoward might befall him. He arrived to deposit the document with the Secretary of State exactly 15 minutes before deadline.

Early in the morning after election, when the last vote had been counted. Dean Landis was sitting on a table in Plan E campaign headquarters, swinging his legs idly, drinking a cup of stale coffee from a near-by urn, looking down at the floor thoughtfully, surrounded by a group of disconsolate campaign workers. Plan E had lost.

"What do we do now?" one of them asked.

The dean got down from the table. "Now we start working to put this over two years from now. Get out the cards. Organize the mailing list. Announce the next meeting and arrange it. We lost fairly. We weren’t counted out. We didn’t have enough voles. Next time we’ll have enough votes."

Before the next campaign had arrived, District Attorney Robert Bradford had closed in on Mayor Lyons and Contractor Mannos and sent them to jail for soliciting bribes, a conviction that helped make him governor. The Cambridge Civic Association had swelled to overwhelming proportions, and the campaign was even more bitter. On a night in late October, Dean Landis and George McLaughlin were sitting in an automobile on the fringe of an opposition rally, listening to a councilor plead and fight for votes. The councilor espied Landis and pointed him out to the crowd.

“There’s Dean Landis in an automobile over there with Georgie McLaughlin," he said. "James Michael Landis. He came to me the other day and he said to me: ‘If you’ll support Plan E, I’ll deliver to you the support of the Cambridge Civic Association,’ and I said to him, ‘No, Dean. You can’t bribe me.’ "

Accusation Stirs Landis

The dean was reaching for the door and at the same time shucking off his coat. "He can’t get away with that," he said.

McLaughlin pulled him back. "Wait a minute! Cool off."

"He’s a bar," the dean struggled to get loose.

"The people he’s talking to know that. What are you going to do? Mix it up with him? Clip him on the chin? That’ll give you a lot of personal satisfaction tonight, and tomorrow you’ll be all over front pages for having a brawl with a candidate." The dean subsided and McLaughlin drove away.

Plan E won that year, and the following year the Civic Association put the plan into operation. The first board of directors, which took the place of the city council, hired as city manager John B. Atkinson, World War I veteran, Boston College graduate and an experienced executive in the shoe business. He had never been in politics and had never managed a city. The first thing he did was to throw all of the city contractors and hangers-on out of City Hall. Then he called all city employees before him.

"The city," he told them, "is now under new management. No city employee is going to be fired. From now on, you don’t need any political influence to hold your job and political influence won’t get you advancement or more money. What you’re going to be paid depends upon what you do and how you do it. Everybody working for this city is getting a raise in pay right now. The cost of living is going up—and you need it—but you’re going to earn it.

"From now on you’re going to do all the work that has to be done in this city – including the work that has been done in the past by city contractors and subcontractors and their employees. From now on, you’ll get a raise every year until you’re the best-paid city employees in the country. From there on, the size of your salary is up to yourself."

The employees liked that. The local unions did not; but they couldn’t do much about it. Atkinson needed a number of specialists in city administration and picked them among city employees, even sending them to colleges for special training. The new city road builders got their fundamental training in techniques in road building and surfacing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose professors and instructors had a stake in Cambridge city government. He appointed college professors, specialists and instructors to nonpaying advisory posts. The city’s postwar plan, advanced and ambitious, was designed by Professor Frederick J. Adams of MIT, who became the head of the Cambridge Planning Board.

During the past seven years every job done in Cambridge has been done by its own hired hands with this result: Since 1941 the city reduced its debt from $12,000,000 to $3,000,000, and at the same time raised the salaries of all of its city employees $1,300,000, actually making them the best paid in any city of comparable size in the world. It reduced its tax rate from $48 to $35.50 without raising the values of its taxable properties. While cutting the city’s debt 75 per cent and reducing its tax rate—unheard of and considered to be impossible during war and postwar years when all costs were climbing—the city also did this:

Built eleven playgrounds and a new bathing beach; junked all of its obsolete fire-fighting and police equipment, replacing it with the latest and best apparatus obtainable, including the last word in two-way radio transmitters and receivers; modernized, re-equipped and enlarged its City Hospital, including the latest and most elaborate X ray; bought a fleet of sanitation trucks that are washed down daily and repainted white frequently; hired architects for G.I.s and built 1,200 modern housing units for them (not obsolete barracks, jerry-built shacks or Quonset huts); resurfaced more yards of streets in five years than all other cities of comparable size in 15 years.

Cambridge has its own printing plant, manned and operated by city employees. It prints everything for the city from stationery to books. It has its own photostat plant, which turns out copies of documents, plans and blueprints for city departments. The city incinerator was always an expensive loss, as was the garbage-disposal plant. The incinerator now pays the city a profit of $36,000 a year, while the garbage-disposal plant turns in a profit of $8,500. By businesslike methods, it increased the income of its City Hospital from $121,000 to $360,000 a year.

City employees do everything: painting, paper hanging, plumbing, repairing and building. The city furnishes the materials; the employees do the rest. Cambridge employs a staff of buyers who roam and scour the country picking up supplies in competition with contractors and private business. For $200,000 recently these roving purchasing agents picked up from Army and Navy surplus stores supplies that would otherwise cost $2,000,000.

The Cambridge City Corporation is hardboiled and tough with its debtors. Its crack law department collects every penny owed the city by the State of Massachusetts and by surrounding cities and towns in water, electric, transit and other tax adjustments. The law department fights rather than settles all doubtful claims against the city. For example, claims from people tripping over sidewalks have dropped from $48,000 a year to $15,000 a year because the city lawyers will fight the full distance to the Supreme Court if necessary. The city is just as tough with its own delinquent taxpayers and collects 99 per cent of its taxes from them. On last August 1st, it had less than one per cent miscellaneous taxes outstanding, and a phenomenal zero outstanding real-estate and personal taxes.

Speculators and Rent Gougers Hit

Valuations of homes, industrial and business establishments were left severely alone, except when speculators and rent gougers were involved. When a man sold for $12,000 a place that was worth $2,500 on the city’s tax books, they looked into it right away. If it was worth $12,000 to the new buyer it was worth almost that to the tax collector and the speculator was promptly slugged with the new tax bill. If a property owner raised rents, he was treated the same way. New businesses and new industries have been crowding Cambridge so fast that it’s a problem to find quartet’s for them.

The city doesn’t borrow any long-term money. It saves the interest. Its credit is probably better than that of any other city in the country.

Cambridge has become a phenomenal experiment in city government. The resources and laboratories of MIT test all of its building and road materials, equipment and machinery. Problems in physical improvement are for MIT students to solve. The Littauer School of Government, with Professor Morris Lambie as adviser, helps on problems of government and city betterment.

Hand in glove with the Civic Association is the Cambridge Research Association to examine all aspects of city government. Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of MIT, his administrative assistant, Robert Kimball, and Bernice Cronkhite, former dean of Radcliffe College, are members of the board of directors of the Research Association while President James Bryant Conant of Harvard is an ordinary, dues-paying member of the Civic Association.

Meetings of the Civic Association are almost unbelievable. A federal judge sits between a truck driver, and a housemaid, and a professor of archaeology drapes himself over a radiator next to a cop.

The old system dies hard, but in Plan E, according to Professor Lambie, the entrenched politician skilled in yesteryear’s technique can see the curtain falling on the city-boss type of government. "A political machine can’t operate under Plan E," says Lambie. "Good or bad government originates with the people of any community, but the fact that the people of a community want good government doesn’t mean that they’ll get it. They’ll get good government only if there is a charter and an election system in power through which they can function."

THE END