John J. Gilligan

The Politics of Principle

Mark Bernstein

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776781
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The life and public service of Ohio's transformative governor

This first full-length biography of John Joyce Gilligan argues that Ohio's sixty-second governor was the most significant Democrat in the state's postwar years. But it is more than the story of a governor. Through painstaking research and dozens of interviews, author Mark Bernstein paints a vivid picture of Ohio's past and its prospects for the future that includes an array of lesser politicians— some of them outlandish—who aided or opposed Gilligan's efforts.

Gilligan did not intend to have a political career. The Cincinnati native resolved to join a Jesuit seminary, but when Pearl Harbor was bombed, he enlisted in the Navy and won the Silver Star at Okinawa. While on leave, Gilligan married the former Katie Dixon, whom he had known since childhood. After the war, the Gilligans settled in Cincinnati where Jack attended graduate school and taught at Xavier University. What drew him into politics was Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign, which ignited in Gilligan a belief in politics as public service. His service included a decade on Cincinnati's city council and his 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" congress as the representative for Ohio's First District.

Through these years, Ohio's Democratic Party was largely conservative. It was dominated by five-time governor and two-term senator Frank Lausche. Gilligan allied himself with labor, minorities, and academics to launch the long shot senatorial campaign that defeated the incumbent in the 1968 Democratic primary. Though Gilligan lost by a narrow margin that November, he emerged as the state's leading Democrat and its successful 1970 gubernatorial candidate.

By the 1970s, Ohio's ills were manifest. Schools closed for lack of funds; the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire. Once in office, Gilligan financed improvements by maneuvering the state's first income taxes through a Republican-controlled legislature. He expanded support for education and mental health, while establishing the Ohio EPA and campaign finance reform. It was a record that prompted talk of a Gilligan presidential run in 1976.

Bernstein examines the reasons for Gilligan's wholly unexpected defeat for reelection in 1974 and shows that afterward, Gilligan steadfastly pursued his commitment to civic engagement by heading the Peace Studies program at the University of Notre Dame, establishing the Civic Forum at the University of Cincinnati and, in 1999, running successfully for Cincinnati school board—at age 78.

John J. Gilligan: The Politics of Principle presents a lively and fascinating portrait of a distinctive figure of postwar American liberalism.

1

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Mr. Gilligan

Wilbur Wright was once asked to name the prerequisites of success. Easy, he said, “Pick out a good father and mother and begin life in Ohio.”¹ There was more than state (or family) pride in Wilbur’s response; there was due appreciation of the Buckeye state’s peculiar history. When Americans first spilled over the Appalachians, Ohio was the only contiguous free state on the other side. As such, it attracted all manner of groups—from the Mormons who settled in Kirtland to the German separatists who founded Zoar. Ohio was where the Yankee blacksmiths from New Hampshire and the mill workers from Massachusetts and the small farmers of Virginia mixed and mingled and where they created a population no longer tied to the Atlantic, a population that looked forward to the West rather than back to Europe. A population, for the lack of a better word, of Americans.

Ohio offered vast resources to a scattered population, an imbalance that rewarded inventiveness. Initially, these inventions were incidental things, like better ways to squeeze cider from an apple or extract honey from a hive. Eventually these inventions changed the world—the work of the Ohio-born Thomas Edison, of Ohio-born Charles Kettering, and of Wilbur and his Ohio-born brother Orville.

Ohio was patriotic to its fighting core. The state was home to the generals who won the Civil War—Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—and home to most of the presidents who followed that conflict; between 1869, when Ulysses S. Grant took office, and 1923, when Warren G. Harding died, there was an Ohio-born president in the White House more than half the time.

With industrialization, Ohio offered location, mineral wealth, and deep reserves of water. Iron ore from Minnesota traveled by ponderous lake carriers to be made into steel in Cleveland, the city in which John D. Rockefeller built the very model of the modern monopoly. Ohio cities specialized. Akron had rubber; Toledo had glass; Dayton was second only to Detroit in the auto industry. Visiting northeastern Ohio in 1962, John Steinbeck wrote, “My eyes and mind were battered by the fantastic hugeness and energy of production, a complication that resembles chaos and cannot be.”² That energy had been fueled by enormous investments in industrial plants made during the Second World War. Arguably, the immediate postwar years saw Ohio’s industrial strength at its peak. From that peak, it is difficult to say with certainty when the state’s decline began. Cleveland’s manufacturing employment, for example, began to drop off in 1969. Historian George Knepper notes that in the 1950s Ohio’s economy accounted for more than 6 percent of the nation’s gross national product (GNP). Thereafter this percentage fell, slowly but steadily, to less than 5 percent by the century’s close.

There are numerous reasons for this decline. Still, if the word is used broadly, the best explanation might be underinvestment. Knepper observes, “Too many of [the] industrial plants had been built fifty or sixty years earlier, when industries were first reaching giant size, and too little had been done to modernize these plants or to replace them with more efficient, competitive facilities.”³ Competitive, that is, with the newer and often union-free plants, first in the Carolinas and the Sunbelt and then later in Asia. But the shortchanging of investment was not simply of industrial capital. The state, generally, declined to invest in itself: Ohio did not boast of the quality of its public schools, its facilities for the disabled, its local government services; rather, it boasted of how little it spent on them. And there was a further underinvestment, which might be termed a lack of receptivity to ideas: the future could always be secured by patching the old ways together.

One day may be identified as the beginning of when things started to change: on January 10, 1971, John Joyce Gilligan was sworn in as Ohio’s sixty-second governor. All but universally known as Jack, Gilligan had a political career short by the standards of major national politicians. He served a single term in the U.S. Congress and then a single term as governor of Ohio.

That term in the 89th Congress is, however, generally regarded as the most important since the early New Deal. It was the Congress that enacted Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation, landmark actions like the Voting Rights Bill, Medicare, the War on Poverty, the Model Cities program, the Elementary and Secondary Education Acts. And for these and other measures Jack Gilligan, then a forty-four-year-old congressman from Cincinnati, voted—and, in most cases, voted enthusiastically.

Gilligan’s 1971–75 tenure in the Ohio Statehouse may be similarly viewed as the state’s most important since the 1913–14 governorship of the business progressive James Cox. In Gilligan’s four years, and very much under his leadership, Ohio enacted the state’s first personal and business income tax, an act with multiple consequences. It not only established the wherewithal with which to reverse the history of underfunded services in the state, but it was a statement by the people of Ohio of what kind of state they wished to live in. It was a state which, among other things, would protect its environment, fund its schools, provide decent treatment to the mentally and physically disabled, and apply ethical standards to those who governed.

The establishment of the income tax is seen as a watershed in Ohio state politics; it was a measure that undergirded state government finances for ensuing decades. To hear Jack Gilligan tell it, the enacting of that tax was rather a simple matter. First, one had to establish the fairly simple proposition that Ohio needed the money. Second, one had to establish the fairly simple proposition that a progressive income tax was the fairest way to raise the funds needed. As it happened, the establishing of these two simple propositions involved ten months of siege warfare with a Republican-controlled legislature.

Jack Gilligan was a natural teacher drawn to the company of the young and open-minded, whom he did the service of taking seriously. Some of those who responded to his politics and his nature went on to highly notable political careers. Pollster Peter Hart joined Gilligan’s 1968 Senate campaign at age twenty-six. Political analyst Mark Shields, then thirty-one, arrived a few months later as political director of the fall campaign. With them and with a good deal of others, Gilligan, despite the age difference, developed warm and lasting ties. Shields suggested that the basis of Gilligan’s appeal was that “he could make people believe they were better than they were, and so they became so.”⁴

This was part of a broader outlook. Jack Gilligan was an unlikely politician. In his various campaigns, Gilligan drew to his banner a fair number of individuals who in their adolescence or college years had imagined themselves as future senators or governors or congressman or campaign managers or, God forbid, press secretaries. But Gilligan was the only one engaged in the enterprise who, as an adolescent, saw himself becoming a Jesuit priest. Jack Gilligan was not Catholic by identification. His religion was more than a matter of habit and ritual; it was something by which he was informed, a body of social thought on which he reflected and from which he drew sustenance and direction—and this included politics. In one interview, Gilligan said:

One of the basic things to answer is the question: what is politics all about? Is it a matter of a contest—like the American League—where the emphasis in on scoring points? That’s the way the game had been played for a very long time by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Often, that was the end and the objective: capture office; hold office; reward the friends of the winning side. But there is an alternate notion, that of using political office primarily for changing the society, changing in substantive ways how we live together and work together.⁵

Jack Gilligan was a good-sized, good-looking man (despite what he termed his “banana nose”) whose distinctive characteristic was his red hair. He was highly intelligent, a very quick study, and a sharp debater. He was a true son of Cincinnati, a city that is a mélange of German, Irish, Jewish, African American, and Appalachians set on hills that make for curious intersections and wonderful views, and altogether Ohio’s most interesting city. Cincinnati was a place Jack Gilligan loved. He was a fourth-generation Cincinnatian and also the fourth generation in the family business, which was funeral homes. It was a business which provided death’s necessities, one that made the Gilligan family affluent and fairly prominent and one in which Jack had no discernible desire to take part.

Between the time Gilligan gave up on the Jesuits and entered into his political career, he spent some years teaching English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He had an English teacher’s respect for the language and regard for the power of words well chosen. This was evident when, in 1944, during his wartime navy service, he sat in the officers’ quarters of the USS Emmons and carefully selected the words he would write to Mary Kathryn Dixon in Cincinnati to propose marriage. Due to the war, their courtship had occurred all but entirely by correspondence. Katie was the daughter of longtime family friends. Well-educated in her own right and a high school English teacher, she was a somewhat reticent woman, but she was a lover of children. And, Gilligan said, “she was pretty.”⁶ Their marriage produced four children and lasted the half-century until her death.

The seat in Congress that Gilligan captured in 1964 had considerable pedigree. Earlier in the century, it was held by Nicholas Longworth, known for his wealth, his charm, his Speakership of the House, and his wife, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who survived her husband by half a century, became something of a Washington institution and was known for her sharp but discerning wit. In the days before women had the vote, Mrs. Longworth noted that politicians were either men or boys. The boys, she said, went into politics to be something; the men went into politics to do something. Gilligan was one of the latter.

What Gilligan shared with others was a vision of government as a kind of inter-generation compact that knitted up the community. As Shields expressed it, “The inescapable truth is that each of us has been warmed by fires we did not build; each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig. We can do no less for those who come after us.”⁷ Those words were spoken at a 2008 breakfast gathering in Columbus that served as the kickoff event for the Gilligan Institute (one of whose projects is this book. Gilligan engendered loyalty among those who had worked in his administration and elsewhere; the crowd on hand on that occasion numbered well over 300.

In political terms, Gilligan was something of a head turner. As a freshman congressman, he was the subject of a cover story in the New York Times Magazine written by David Broder. Broder said of Gilligan, “There are, God knows, plenty of charming Irishmen in politics. He had that in spades. Aside from the charm quotient, what was distinctive about him was that sense ‘I know what is corrupting and distorting the politics here’—whether it was in the House or in Ohio—‘and that’s my target.’ He was very clear in his mind what he was fighting against.”⁸ Indeed, in a 1997 interview, Gilligan said so with some eloquence:

It was not government that depressed wage scales and benefits to the point where it is almost impossible for middle class families to exist on the income of a single wage earner; it was not government that has outsourced work to take advantage of non-union wage rates; it was not government that ran the entire savings and loan industry [the then current financial catastrophe] into bankruptcy to the tune of a hundred billion of taxpayers’ money; and, finally, it was not government that poisoned our rivers and lakes, polluted the air we breathe, pillaged our forests, and ravaged the countryside for private profit.⁹

Gilligan was, often enough, angry. He had an already-florid complexion that readily went red-faced. He thought of life in terms of purpose and was impatient with those who did not act accordingly. One of his children recalled:

We would often go to Mass together as a family on a Sunday. Pretty much every week, we’d get back in the car and my father would begin to redeliver the sermon. Because whatever it had been about—say, Jonah and the whale—Dad would start on what should have been said. We are in the middle of war in Vietnam, why are we not talking about that? Or something that might be happening in Cincinnati that he thought of in terms of right or wrong. He would start to redeliver the sermon that should have been given. He saw it as a missed opportunity to deliver a message.¹⁰

He was a very quick study, a possessor of a keen political intelligence, and a sharp-edged debater, one strongly disinclined to suffer fools gladly. One high school classmate said that as a young man Gilligan projected “hauteur—as though he imagined himself destined for big things.”¹¹ Later, the pejorative most applied (rather frequently) to Gilligan by persons with a less delicate sense of language was “arrogant.”

There is an alternate explanation. Gilligan was an extraordinarily self-directed individual; unusual for a politician, it was his own approval that chiefly concerned him, not the approval of others. One member of his gubernatorial circle said, “I think he felt he had a belief system of what needed to be done to accomplish his goals; therefore, as long as he was meeting his own expectations, he felt he was doing what was needed.”¹² Another member of the inner circle agreed that Gilligan’s most important contract was with himself but noted that this “might be a definition of arrogance.”¹³

Leave the last word to a member of the loyal opposition. Charles Kurfess served as the Republican Speaker of the House during Gilligan’s first two years as governor; as such, he was an indispensable ally in securing the state income tax. Some years back, a reporter approached Kurfess and said he was writing something in connection with a forthcoming Gilligan birthday event. Would Kurfess, the reporter asked, say that Jack Gilligan was “arrogant”? Kurfess arched himself and replied, “I would never say that Jack Gilligan was arrogant on his birthday.”¹⁴

Gilligan likely did not feel in large gatherings the comfortable ease that was his in smaller settings. He was a considerable raconteur, the story-telling voice on which the other dinner guests would focus. One advantage of hailing from Ohio is that the state is filled with implausible political figures who lend themselves to anecdote. Like “Jumping” Joe Ferguson, who, as a candidate in the 1950 U.S. Senate election, was asked what he thought about Quemoy and Matsu, two contested isl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Mr. Gilligan
• 2 Background
• 3 Jack’s Family
• 4 Notre Dame
• 5 To D-Day
• 6 To Okinawa and Back
• 7 Xavier
• 8 Charter Politics
• 9 The First Election
• 10 The Democrats Stir
• 11 Urban Renewal
• 12 “The Miamis Are Everywhere”
• 13 The 1964 Campaign for Congress
• 14 The Great Society Congressman
• 15 Defeat
• 16 Frank Lausche
• 17 The Unbeatable Foe
• 18 The Summer of Discontent
• 19 “My Purpose Holds”
• 20 Setting Sail for Columbus
• 21 The 1970 Campaign
• 22 Ohio on the Verge
• 23 Setting Up Shop
• 24 Round 1: The House
• 25 Round 2: The Senate
• 26 The High Point
• 27 The Progressive Moment
• 28 The Humane Environment
• 29 The Physical Environment
• 30 The Economic Environment
• 31 The Political Environment
• 32 The Sure Thing
• 33 A Long Night, and the Morning After
• 34 Departure and the Next Step
• 35 Washington, Again
• 36 Notre Dame, Again
• 37 Cincinnati, Finally
• Afterword
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Bibliography
• Index