John J. Gilligan: The Politics of Principle by Mark Bernstein (review)

In John J. Gilligan: The Politics of Principle, Mark Bernstein provides an accessible, comprehensive, and informative account of the life and career of Ohio Democratic politician John Joyce Gilligan. He was Ohio’s sixty-second governor, a one-termer who from 1971 to 1975 changed how the state’s government operated, creating a legacy that outlasted his brief tenure.

Bernstein argues that Ohio, in the nineteenth century, was a prosperous, inventive, and progressive place which, by the 1920s, had slipped into political fogeyism and economic complacency. Gilligan, witty and intellectual (or arrogant and aloof, his critics would say), challenged the hidebound leaders of the state and persuaded Ohioans to create the government they actually needed rather than continue to suffer a government that served only the few. Bernstein then counterintuitively suggests that despite serving only one term as governor and despite running campaigns better known for losing rather than winning, Gilligan nevertheless was the most important governor of Ohio during the twentieth century.

Gilligan changed Ohio government in several ways. He increased its power to regulate the environment by establishing the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, improved services at long neglected state mental health facilities and correctional institutions, and attempted to make educating and training Ohio’s citizens a key part of its economic development strategy, which the Gilligan team suggested was a contrast to the bombastic sloganeering favored by his predecessor and successor, Republican James Rhodes. To help pay for these and other programs that tried to improve the social safety net and increase economic opportunity for all, Gilligan persuaded Ohioans to accept the state’s first income tax. Gilligan signed it into law in 1971 and beat back a repeal effort in 1972.

Bernstein helps readers understand why Gilligan attempted this politically risky, yet transformative agenda. Gilligan was both a devout Catholic and a courageous man. In December of 1941 he planned to withdraw from Notre Dame before graduating. His plan? To train for the priesthood. World War Two intervened and Gilligan instead joined the US Navy, finished college, and then served in the war. He saw action at both D-Day and at Okinawa, earning a Silver Star. After the war, the calling and the courage persisted, though finding new outlets, as Gilligan turned to politics to serve the community. In 1953, he became a Cincinnati councilman. He defended a city employee against politically motivated charges of communist affiliations, advocated an income tax to rebuild Cincinnati’s woeful finances even though union allies opposed it, and unsuccessfully pushed for a local commission to investigate and punish racially discriminatory hiring. In 1955 he nearly lost reelection. In 1964, Gilligan won election to the US House of Representatives from a heavily Republican district (Lyndon Johnson’s coattails were critical), voted for liberal initiatives then pouring from Johnson’s White House, and promptly lost his seat in 1966, in part because of his liberal record. In these Cincinnati campaigns Gilligan was admirable, saying clearly what he believed and acting on those beliefs regardless of the political cost.

Bernstein presents the pieces of Gilligan’s career clearly, so the reader can pull together two tenets of the “Politics of Principle.” First, grasping for individual wealth was natural and useful. After all, Gilligan’s father and grandfather had built a thriving funeral business, allowing the family to summer in Michigan at their cottage (during the Great Depression, no less), to afford tuition at Catholic schools, and to finance most of John’s first campaign. But capitalist endeavors were morally just only to the extent that pursuers of profit tended to the commonweal. Second, to sacrifice nothing was to do nothing. Gilligan rejected the family business. He chose instead the academy, disappointing his father by teaching English at Xavier University. His father, however, still influenced him. Active in civic affairs, including charitable drives and local politics, Gilligan’s father modeled the kind of citizen his son wanted to be: intelligent and principled for sure...