Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in the Bluegrass, 1880-1917

2. "Put Me in Class with the Widow Who Gave the Mite": Lexington’s Joseph Tanner in the Gilded Age

chapter two “Put Me in Class with the Widow Who Gave the Mite” Lexington’s Joseph Tanner in the Gilded Age We had many comforts and conveniences that George Washington and his contemporaries had never dreamed of. . . . [Moreover,] we were entertained . . . by the oratory of Tom Marshal, Joe Blackburn, and the two Breckinridges—worthy successors to the eloquent Pat Henry, Menifee, and Henry Clay. —Joseph M. Tanner, “Fifty Years’ Recollections of Lexington and Vicinity,” circa 1926 In February 1884, thirty-eight-year-old attorney Joseph Tanner, the incumbent Democratic city treasurer for Lexington, Kentucky, entered the race for reelection to that office. He appeared to be an ambitious and rapidly rising politician with many of the right credentials for success: central Kentucky native, white, Protestant (Presbyterian), graduate of Princeton and of Kentucky University College of Law, and a practicing attorney in Lexington since 1873. Tanner occupied a law office in partnership with Stephen G. Sharp at 16 North Upper Street, and he maintained a residence at 48 Drake Street with his wife, Lizzie, and their daughters Bessie, age seven, and Alice, age five. Their first son, Lawrence, the third of the couple’s six children, would be born in August.1 Tanner first won his seat in city government in 1881, the same year reform-minded Claud M. Johnson won the mayor’s race for the second time—to the dismay of Dennis Mulligan, Lexington’s political boss since the Civil War. Mulligan had held sway in Lexington political matters since the 1860s, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the aging and conservative politician found his power waning and his authority increasingly challenged 50  Taking the Town by a group of young reformers led by Johnson. After the turn of the century, Mulligan’s power would pass to William (Billy) Klair, a man Tanner referred to in his memoirs as “my good friend.” Meanwhile, Johnson won his fourth term as mayor in 1884, in spite of a determined campaign by Mulligan . Tanner’s memoirs, written in the 1920s, do not make it clear, politically speaking, whose “man” (if anyone’s) he was in those days, although he practiced law in 1873 with Mulligan’s son James and counted the younger Mulligan among his friends. Tanner seemed to admire both Johnson and the elder Mulligan, but he idealized neither. For both men, he stated, “principles were not so much involved . . . and neither side was over squeamish in morals or methods; politics were very practical in those days.”2 At any rate,Tanner lost his position as city treasurer in 1884, and in fact, he would never be elected to public office again. In retrospect, this political loss seems to have marked the beginning of the decline of his professional life as well, for his career as an attorney essentially ended after the turn of the century. Generally speaking, the power and prestige of the professions rose in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and the legal profession was steeply stratified by gender, race, social background, and education—all of which should have worked to Tanner’s advantage. Nevertheless, there is evidence that he struggled financially as an attorney. After 1884 he turned to the field of real estate to supplement his income, and he finally abandoned the legal profession in favor of the government bureaucracy during the Progressive Era, earning his livelihood as a storekeeper-gauger for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) beginning in 1905. At the end of his life, Tanner saw himself as less than successful and apologized in his memoirs to his late wife for his undistinguished career and chronic financial problems.3 A Man and His Memoirs Joseph Tanner lived and strived, succeeded and failed, and reached his maturity in Lexington during the last decades of the nineteenth century. His life constitutes, to borrow a phrase, “a single historical exhibit” of Lexington culture in the Gilded Age.4 Tanner left behind an intriguing memoir, allowing us to partially reconstruct his life and times. Entitled “Fifty Years’ Recollections of Lexington and Vicinity, Its People and Institutions,” it is a 160-page typewritten manuscript. Although the elderly Tanner lacked the “Put Me in Class with the Widow Who Gave the Mite”  51 ability to produce a smooth, well-organized text, the document reveals a literate and active mind, churning with a wide variety of interests and a full storehouse of memories. Including only...