Politician Extraordinaire
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Politician Extraordinaire

The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey

Frank P. Vazzano

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eBook - ePub

Politician Extraordinaire

The Tempestuous Life and Times of Martin L. Davey

Frank P. Vazzano

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About This Book

The biography of a colorful and controversial 20th-century politician

This carefully researched and engagingly written political biography marks the first full treatment of Ohio native and politician Martin L. Davey. An important figure on the local, state, and national political scene in the early decades of the twentieth century, Davey served as mayor of Kent, Ohio, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and completed two terms as Ohio governor.

As Frank Vazzano shows, Davey, a maverick Democrat, did things his way no matter the consequences, often alienating his own party as well as his Republican foes. His independence, feistiness, and hot temper exasperated even President Franklin Roosevelt, who worried that Davey's machinations in Ohio might hurt the national ticket in 1936. Davey was a New Deal–era politician and a key depression-era governor known for his keen business sense, political savvy, and self-promotion and remembered for his controversial and scandal-ridden governorship.

Rich with Ohio history and politics, this biography of an influential businessman and politician will be important reading for both scholars and the general public.

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Chapter One

Beginnings

Images
STILL A MONTH SHY of his sixteenth birthday, a shaken Martin Davey retraced his steps toward center stage of the Kent Opera House to deliver the commencement address to his high school class of 1900. Only a moment earlier he had been called aside to receive a wrapped gift from his thirty classmates. His anticipation had quickly turned to mortification, however, when he opened the box and saw that it contained nothing but a handful of weeds. Forty years later, after countless successes in business and politics, he still recalled how the cruel prank “burned deep into his soul.”1
But for the moment his humiliation had to be shunted aside and the immediate task at hand completed. He began, “Matter, Mind, and Spirit,” as his proud parents, John and Bertha Davey, beamed from the audience. Years later, Martin admitted, he could recall nothing of the address apart from its title. That was understandable, though, because his father, and not he, had written every word of it. Not only was the speech his father’s, but the elder Davey had drilled his son incessantly until Martin had memorized it to the point where on the Opera House stage “not even an earthquake could jar it from him.”2
John Davey’s insistence on perfection from his son was perfectly in character. His motto, applied to every job, big or small, was “Do it right or not at all.” From their childhood on, the maxim had not been lost on Martin, nor on his sister Belle and brothers Wellington, James, Ira, and Paul.3
John Davey’s nature was shaped by hard upbringing in his native England. Born in 1846 to poor farming parents in the Somersetshire countryside not far from the Welsh border, Davey, from childhood on, knew nothing but toil. At thirteen, after the death of his mother, he was “put out to service” tending cattle and sheep for a neighboring farmer. He was well treated, having a bedroom to himself, which afforded him the privacy to kneel unashamedly in prayer morning and night. In his room he thought often, too, of his dead Episcopalian mother and her “Christian advice.”
His ease ended, however, when his master hired another young man to help on the farm. The newcomer and Davey shared the same room and even the same bed. Davey described what followed as five years of hell.
He worried from the beginning that his new roommate would mock him when he recited his twice-daily prayers. His fears were well founded. No sooner had the pious Davey knelt by the bedside on the first night than the impious newcomer bolted upright and shouted, “What are you doing there, you little devil?” He then savaged the usefulness of prayer. Davey was so shaken that he stopped saying his prayers thereafter. His “sin” so troubled him that he cried even while picking apples in the orchard. He wailed, “My anchorage is gone.” He hated the cowardice he demonstrated in not standing up to his taunter and began to “drift.” Like so many other boys his age, he began to curse, which tortured him all the more. He could not forget his mother’s constant preachment, “swear not at all.” He agonized over his fall from grace, certain that all “swearers go to hell.” Try though he might, the cursing habit had him, and he lamented that “daily there would be some slip of the tongue.”4
Five years into his farm service, a middle-aged friend of his, Tom Braddock, an inveterate swearer, died suddenly of pneumonia. As Braddock breathed his last, he cried, “Hell must be my portion.” When Davey learned of his friend’s deathbed lamentation, he commanded himself, “John Davey, you stop this swearing.” From that moment he not only stopped cursing, he “set a watch against every other possible failure.” John Davey was a driven man. His employer noticed the eighteen-year-old perfectionist and promoted him to chief herdsman and supervisor of all the hired hands.5
However, it was plants, not livestock and people, that fascinated John Davey, and at age twenty, no longer bound to position and place, he set off for Torquay in the south of England, a city known for its beautiful gardens. There he apprenticed himself to a local horticulturist and spent the next six or seven years learning everything he could about plants and landscaping.6
But there was more than horticulture to be learned. In nineteenth-century England, education was neither compulsory nor free, so John Davey had never gone to school, and even at twenty-one had not yet learned to read or write. A kindly man from Torquay, however, took a liking to Davey and taught him the alphabet and then encouraged him to read. With only a copy of the New Testament and a dictionary to guide him, John Davey began to teach himself to read and write. Soon he acquired a grammar book and a hymnal and from these learned how to fix words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. There was no stopping him now. After laboring ten or twelve hours a day in Torquay’s gardens, Davey read and wrote long into the night. His passion for language was limitless, leading even to the later study of Greek and Latin. Words, he said, were indispensable to thinking: “Without words one cannot think, and it is thought that moves the world.”7
While in Torquay, Davey also developed his spirituality. Through his landlady, he met the congregation of Upton Vale [Baptist] Chapel and spent many evenings socializing and taking religion classes. He felt comfortable as a Baptist, believing that for the first time he had discovered the true “Spirit of God.” On Sundays, he and other young men from Upton Vale traveled around Torquay seeking converts. Constant preaching and praying turned him into an excellent speaker. Later he would put the oratorical skills he honed in Torquay to good use in America.8
As he had impressed as a teenager tending cattle and sheep, he likewise struck those who knew him in Torquay. The rector of his church offered to use his influence to start Davey in his own business, while other friends offered to pay his tuition to Spurgeon College, one of England’s best seminaries. His employer, anxious to keep so good a worker, offered him higher wages. But the promise of a lucrative business career left him cold, and the bleak prospects of salvation proffered by a career in the Calvinist theology offered by Spurgeon repelled him. Not even the temptation of higher pay working the landscapes of Torquay was enough to dissuade him from going to America.9
In the spring of 1873, John Davey, age twenty-seven, landed in New York and then left for Warren, Ohio, where he lived with a kind family that encouraged his passion for gardening while he worked as a janitor in a private school. He continued to study botany and bought his own greenhouse where he grew beautiful plants, particularly an amazing fuchsia that blossomed nearly from floor to ceiling.10 The greenhouse failed, but during this early phase of his American life John Davey developed the interest that grew into the abiding passion of his life—trees. Struck by the disdain Americans had for what Davey considered one of their greatest resources and objects of beauty, the new immigrant began a lifelong study of trees and their preservation.11
There was, however, more to his life than trees. He joined the Disciple Church in Warren, where he met and courted twenty-year-old Bertha Reeves, the daughter of the church’s pastor, Harmon Reeves. They married in 1879 and by the next year had their first child, Belle. Shortly afterward, the new parents moved to Kent, Ohio, when John Davey was hired to tend Standing Rock Cemetery, then little more than acres of tangled shrubs and neglected trees.12
Standing Rock became a laboratory for Davey. He now used all the years of study and hands-on experience in Torquay to the fullest. Almost miraculously, John Davey transformed what had been a public eyesore into an area of civic pride in Kent. More than a mere cemetery, Standing Rock was now a beautiful memorial park. But even more important, in converting Standing Rock Cemetery to a thing of beauty, John Davey, through trial and error and constant experimentation, saved many of the cemetery’s dying maples and oaks and in the process created a new science—tree surgery.
Although Kentites were proud of their cemetery, they little appreciated the special skills that John Davey had developed and applied. Tree surgery was a science ahead of its time, something that had spectacularly transformed Standing Rock but had little, if any, marketability. Consequently, John Davey bought a greenhouse and some land, intending to augment his salary by selling produce. At the same time, he took to writing pamphlets and lecturing on politics, religion, birds, and, of course, his beloved trees. But little money came of Davey’s ventures, and life for his family was hardly more than hand to mouth.13
John Davey, far more dreamer than realist, was fortunate that his wife Bertha was firmly rooted in practicality. While John was off saving trees, writing, lecturing, and pursuing one horticultural venture after another, it was Bertha Reeves Davey who tended to the seven Davey children when they were sick, saw to it that they kept up with their school lessons, cooked, baked, and in general kept the household together.14
This was the family life that Martin Luther Davey knew as a boy growing up in Kent, Ohio. Born on July 25, 1884, he was John and Bertha’s third child, preceded by sister Belle, brother Wellington, and followed by Jim (named after President James A. Garfield, whom John Davey had met when Garfield was a congressman visiting Warren), Ira, Paul, and baby sister Rosella. Both Ira and Rosella died in childhood.
Kent in the 1880s was a booming village. Its population had soared more than a thousand since the 1870s and, according to the census of 1880, stood at 3,309. But in many ways it was still a backward place, far more rooted in the early nineteenth century than in the late. Its streets were unpaved and unlighted, and there was no municipal water supply. Cattle still roamed through town, destroying the old wooden sidewalks that kept Kentites from sloshing through the mud in sloppy weather. The problem was so bad that the village council on July 1, 1880, passed an ordinance that fined owners of wandering cows one to five dollars. The law also covered pigs and horses and had enough bite to put an end to freely roaming livestock in the streets of Kent.
Images
John Davey with (left to right) Belle, Wellington, Martin, ca. 1892. Evangeline Davey Smith Collection, Martin L. Davey Papers, Kent State University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.
Gradually the wooden walks were ripped up in favor of stone, brick, or gravel pathways. At about the same time a dozen oil lamps were sited downtown. By 1882 the oil lamps gave way to fifty Belden Vapor gasoline lamps resting on cedar posts throughout the village. The children of Kent enjoyed following lamplighter Ovie Nichols as he made his rounds every evening until the gasoline lamps were replaced with gas lights in 1886. Electrification of town lights occurred on June 5, 1889, and, aided by the ingenuity of Thomas Edison, Kent strode into modernity.
The debate over electrification of city lighting services had stirred the citizens, many of whom thought that such modernization was too costly. But the ill will generated by the electric light issue paled in comparison to the anger fueled by the decision dictating where the village’s new water supply would originate. Waterworks engineers chose Plum Creek, south of town, a source detractors claimed was so befouled with maggots and offal from a nearby slaughterhouse that its water was “not fit for hogs to drink.” The Plum Creek decision so divided Kentites that even the editors of two local and rival newspapers, the Kent Courier and the Kent News, got into a public fistfight over the issue.15
The Plum Creek debate galvanized John Davey. A keen environmentalist even before the word became popular, he quickly threw himself against the Plum Creek promoters. He and other Kentites wanted the new waterworks located north of town, where there was abundant fresh spring water. Davey railed against the Plum Creek location, but influential Kentites, who stood to profit from the sale of adjacent land, were too powerful, and Plum Creek prevailed. Not even two lawsuits stopped the project, and construction went ahead. On May 13, 1887, the new waterworks opened its mains, and city water for the first time gushed into local homes and businesses.16
In fighting the Plum Creek location, John Davey made bitter enemies. Already regarded as a bit of a crank, his reputation suffered all the more. His foes sneered at him for his poverty, and the whole family became the persistent butt of cruel jokes. The family’s humiliation especially stung young Martin Davey and was likely the reason his classmates treated him so contemptuously at his high school commencement.
The Davey family’s poverty forced a resourcefulness upon young Martin. By the age of ten he already had his own horseradish route. His father, of course, had planted the pungent root, but it was Martin who dug it out of the frozen ground in February and March. After grating the horseradish (and frequently his knuckles), Davey canned it and then sold it for a nickel a cup. Meager though his pay was, Martin’s resourcefulness kept the Davey family afloat during the cold winter and early spring months when John Davey’s greenhouse business languished.
Life was hard in the Davey household but probably not too unlike that of many other nineteenth-century small-town families. John Davey buried part of his summer and fall harvest to preserve it and resurrected it during the winter. The family kept a milking cow and Bertha Davey baked delicious bread, pies, and doughnuts for the family. She knew how to stretch the meagerest of provisions. Long into his adulthood, Martin Davey remembered how his mother would buy a five-cent soup bone and, with home-grown vegetables, concoct a delicious beef stew.
Usually there was enough money to buy a small piece of meat and some flour, but there were times, especially in the winter, when the family cupboard was bare. Once, at a near desperate moment, Frank Reeves, Bertha’s brother, arrived as an angel of mercy. His sister’s poverty must have been evident, because within an hour or two of his visit the local grocer, laden with ham, flour, and other provisions, knocked on the Davey door. Years later Martin Davey still remembered the joy generated by Reeves’s generosity. Other Reeves brothers would periodically help the Daveys by sending a few dollars out of the two or three they earned daily.
John Davey was a hard-working, honorable man, but he could not manage money. When Belle Davey, the oldest child, was chosen to deliver an address at her high school commencement in 1899, there was no money for a new dress. That bothered Martin, not yet fifteen, so he struck a bargain with his father. John Davey had grown a beautiful crop of pansies that spring, and his son agreed to sell them in return for a generous commission. Martin Davey worked hard and made not only enough money to get Belle a new dress, but also enough to buy his mother a new hat and his own first pair of long pants.17
Housing for the family was never grand, either. The first house John Davey provided for his family in Kent was a barnlike structure on Mantua Street near the cemetery where he worked. That was in 1881.
A few years later, in what became a familiar pattern, the family moved, this time to a two-room house that John Davey built on Grant Street near the Cuyahoga River. There he attached a greenhouse to the back of the home, and then, on some open beds on the lot, he grew vegetables and flowers to be sold. The Grant Street house, with a horse pastured out back, was where Martin Davey was born.18
The hard work demanded by his father failed to stifle all young Martin’s youthful exuberance. One summer day, he and his older brother, Wellington, were helping themselves to a neighbor’s cherries. More alert than Wellington, Martin stopped pilfering just as the neighbor’s daughter spied the cherry thieves. Wellington was caught red-handed and took the scolding. Martin, far from innocent, was praised for resisting the temptation that corrupted his brother. To compound the unfairness, the victimized neighbor rewarded an undeserving Martin with a quart of cherries she had already picked. Feeling guilty because Wellington alone paid for a “crime” that both had committed, Martin shared his cherries with his brother.
Martin was not always so fortunate. There were times he paid the price for his actions. One of the Davey neighbors was an odd character named Joe Prairie. He looked and dressed more like a figure out of the early nineteenth century than the late. His hair was long, and he wore a long black coat, tie, and hat. Local gossip ha...

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