Sometimes you can learn a lot about the present by reading about the past. Consider the story of Tom Johnson, as told by Page Smith in his People’s History of the US (McGraw Hill).
In the late 1890s Tom Johnson was the major owner of the Detroit City Railways, when he read Henry George, and became a single-taxer. He sold his street railway interests and moved to Cleveland, to become Mayor of the city, with a vision of Cleveland pre-eminent as a single-tax domain. “The fight for reform centered initially on the public ownership of utilities, particularly the street railways and electricity, and the reduction of trolley fares…Fifty injunctions were obtained by Johnson’s enemies to prevent the city from setting cheaper streetcar fares and building a municipal electric lighting plant.” Readers may recall that some seventy years later Dennis Kucinich defied the banks who attempted to blackmail Cleveland into selling the municipal electric utility. In 1998 the Cleveland City Council honored his courage, which they estimated had saved the city $185 million between 1985 and 1995.
The courts ruled against Johnson, saying the city had no right to run a street railway system, and thus sentencing the city to future decades of corruption, grafts and bribery before municipal ownership became a fact. And this, in truth, was part of the backlash against the trolley companies- the graft, poor service, and defaulted obligations found in every “privatized” or “public-private partnership” street railway franchise in the US.
Johnson himself was a bit ahead of his times. “In the basement of his Euclid Avenue home he had workmen construct an abbreviated railroad line on which cars would be moved by electromagnetic force suspended above the rails. Friction would thus be eliminated and trains could move at tremendous speeds. When the officials of General Electric, Charles Steinmetz among them, were consulted, they agreed the notion was scientifically sound.” Was Johnson, perhaps, the actual inventor of the Maglev?
In many ways, American life today echoes the brutal chaotic corrupt rule by corporations in the early 20th century- but this time, we don’t have sixty or seventy years in which to get it sorted. Sometimes a knowledge of the past will provide some very suggestive guideposts to the future.
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