Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,643

This is the grave of Hazen Pingree.

Born in Denmark, Maine in 1840, Pingree went to the local common schools, dropped out at age 14, and worked in a cotton factory in the town of Saco, Maine. Then he got a job at a shoe factory in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and stayed there several years. There wasn’t anything exceptional here, just a working class kid.

In 1862, Pingree joined the Union Army. He had an interesting career during the war. He was in the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Regiment and was on the front lines of the Northern Virginia Campaign that year, including second Manassas. Then after some time involved in the defenses around Washington, he was in units sent back to the front lines and was at Spotsylvania Court House. Then he was taken prisoner. He was actually at Andersonville, but for some reason was transferred to another prison camp and in a rare prisoner exchange that late in the war, he claimed to be someone else and was sent back to the Union by mistake. Poor bastard who was actually supposed to be transferred. From there, he was right back to the front lines and was at Appomattox at the end. As far as I can tell, Pingree never received a serious wound either, so he was pretty lucky in general.

Anyway, after the war Pingree went back to working on shoes, this time in Michigan, but the war had changed him and he had met people and he got an investor to go in with him to set up their own shoe factory. This was very successful. The company opened in 1866 and twenty years later, it was pulling in $1 million a year. It became the second largest shoe company in the United States by the mid-1880s.

So as a rich guy, in the late 1880s, Pingree began to dabble in politics, and then realized he really liked it. He was a good Republican of course. But by the late 1880s, the national tolerance for the unbelievable levels of corruption in the party were starting to make a difference. Of course, Democrats were just as corrupt at the time and they controlled many of the cities. Detroit was more of a mixed town in terms of politics and so one party could not set up a dominant political machine. The closest thing Detroit had to this was the Irish, who were Democrats of course, but they were less effective than other machines. They tended to switch off who was mayor, more or less. But both parties could certainly engage in corruption.

So in 1889, Pingree ran for mayor as a Republican and kicked out the Democratic incumbent. Part of the reason is that Detroit was an ethnically diverse city and so the Irish and Germans and Poles didn’t really get along and didn’t always coalesce around a candidate. A man like Pingree could defeat a divided coalition. He had one big platform–ending corruption. There was a ton of it too. Pingree took on the graft that plagued contracts for sewers and paving, as well as the school board which was also super corrupt. He succeeded. He created municipal owned utility companies that forced the private companies out of business.

He had a huge public battle with the head of the city’s streetcar company over rates, with Pingree demanding it charge lower fares. This came out of an 1891 strike where the Detroit City Railway Company was just awful. Everyone hated this company, as they often hated rail and streetcar companies. There was tons of corruption. It treated workers like garbage and streetcar workers were notoriously poorly treated generally in this era, more than is generally known. When workers went on strike, the company demanded Pingree call in the state militia and do the classic unionbusting thing of the era. Pingree flat refused to do this and instead demanded arbitration of the strike. That was fine with the workers and Pingree brought Detroit City Railway to heel. They hated him for it. Pingree wanted a municipally-owned streetcar system too, but was barred from this due to a ruling that it violated the state constitution. Still, he made the enemies you want to make.

Pingree remained mayor until 1897. He became a voice for the up and coming Progressive movement by engaging in a combination of good government and helping the poor, at least a bit. Whereas many Republicans responded to the Panic of 1893 with some good ol’ beat up the poor policing and some good ol’ bootstrap talk in between kicks and truncheon blows, Pingree expanded programs for the poor. He even did the kind of stunt politics that tends to work–he opened empty lots in the city for the poor to plant gardens, then sold his valuable horse to pay for supplies. He also was a big supporter of Henry George’s Single Tax plan, but more to the point, he wasn’t an ideologue, but rather someone who saw taxing the rich and powerful corporations as the best way forward to bring a rational modern government to his city, state, and nation. The fact that he was so successful in these programs not only made him wildly popular among the working class in Detroit, but has given him a huge reputation in American municipal history. A 1985 survey, for example, ranked Pingree as the third best mayor in American history.

Pingree was always a Republican for sure, so even though he was generally for the poor, he also thought William Jennings Bryan‘s silver platform was bad and worked hard to bring Michigan into the William McKinley camp in 1896. That same vote, he was campaigning for governor and certainly didn’t want a divided party. He won that campaign too, again on a reformer mentality, despite his support for the extremely un-reformer McKinley. As governor he continued to fight hard to rein in corporate power. He forced through a reappraisal of railroad and corporate property so that he could raise taxes on them, which no one had ever succeeding doing in American history before this. He actually wanted to remain mayor of Detroit too. He had a year to go on his term and he claimed he could do both jobs, but the courts ruled against that and forced him to resign the mayor position.

Pingree pushed hard as governor on issues that made him anathema to most of the rich interests in his own party and a lot of the Democrats too. He wanted to abolish child labor. He pushed to introduce Oregon Plan ideas about good governance such as the initiative, recall, and referendum. He called for the direct election of senators. He also called for a legislated eight-hour workday. He didn’t succeed at much of this of course. He was a man ahead of his time. But he laid the groundwork for these ideas to become more mainstream in American politics.

In 1900, Pingree decided to step away. He and his son went on a safari in Africa. On the return home, while in London, he came down with peritonitis. I’m not sure why. Maybe he was a heavy drinker, as that’s often a cause. In any case, despite King Edward VII sending his personal physicians to help, a sign of just how well known Pingree was, he died while in London. He was 60 years old.

What makes Pingree so interesting is that here was an actual Gilded Age capitalist who got rich and realized the system was corrupt and needed change. Not many of those!

Hazen Pingree is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan.

If you would like this series to visit other leaders of the Progressive movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jane Addams is in Cedarville, Illinois and Robert LaFollette is in Madison, Wisconsin. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.