Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 4. THE NEW DETROITER
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 23-28
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CHAPTER IV

THE NEW DETROITER

The place called the Amos House was a ramshackle, weather-beaten lodging and boarding place, favored by railroad workers employed at the “Junction Yards.” Then, though not later, it was on the outskirts of Detroit. Its main attraction: low-priced meals. For the next three years, young James Couzens lived there, his steel-blue eyes more intently than ever focused on his goal: success.

It was noticeable that he did not mix much with the other Amos House boarders. He stayed out of their bull sessions and only rarely joined in the beer drinking that went on. Nearly everyone else there was called by some nickname. But not Couzens. His deadly serious manner about almost everything discouraged such familiarity.

He did make some friends. But these had to overlook or discount a “don’t-tread-on-me” attitude that often became quite explosive. It was accepted, or at least expected, that if one made a remark that young Couzens disliked, or with which he simply disagreed, he would blurt out a stinging comment or retort. This seemed almost an instinct with him.

In appearance alone, he stood out from most of his fellow railroad workers. Even in his work clothes, he had a buttoned-up look. Instead of a car-checker, he could have been taken for an English bank clerk or even a divinity student, especially after he began to wear thin-rimmed spectacles.

From his always impeccable clothes to his neatly clipped, carefully brushed, blond hair, everything about him except his temper proclaimed disciplined orderliness, precision, and restrained tension. And always, in the taut mold of his forceful, open face, there was a warning that here was a man who spoke his mind.

2

By then, he had become a clean-cut youth of exceptional handsomeness. He was, indeed, a perfect specimen of the Anglo-Saxon type—fair, well-built, with finely chiseled features. That girls would be interested in the young transplanted Canadian, if he gave them half a chance, could have been assumed. In Chatham, he had had one or two friendships with girls, but none that were “serious,” no doubt because of his “don’t-tread-on-me” attitude. In Detroit, he was in no greater hurry to make any such alliance. He was not, however, altogether aloof in this matter. He did have a number of casual dates. Some Saturday nights, he even unloosened the buttoned-up look enough to attend the public dances at the Detroit Armory. On one trip back to Chatham to see his family, he boasted to his brother Homer: “I have so many girls in Detroit that I can take out a different one every night and not get back to the first one for two weeks.” But the brother gathered that this was mainly a boast.¹ Actually, his major concern was getting on at the Michigan Central, keeping his eyes open for all possible promotions.

3

He had come to Detroit at the proper time. In 1890, this city of two hundred thousand was already on the threshold of its destiny. Men in and near Detroit, at precisely this time, were beginning to conceive, and even to make, something that was to propel Detroit, in a span of ten years, to undreamed-of heights of activity and wealth: the horseless carriage. By 1890, young Ransom E. Olds was working at Lansing, Michigan, on just such a contraption, to be propelled by steam. In this same year, on a farm at Dearborn, near Detroit, another man, Henry Ford, was perfecting a two-cylinder gas engine, fascinated with the idea of applying mechanical power to farm chores.²

Not yet, to be sure, was the Detroit of the 1890’s (more grim than gay) entitled to its later favorite nickname: “Dynamic City.” On the contrary, in contrast to other cities of similar size, Detroit then seemed the opposite of dynamic. It was extraordinarily backward in (of all things) public transportation. After other American communities had been using electric trolleys for years, Detroit’s streetcars were still horse-drawn.

Car-checker James Couzens had to walk three miles over dusty or muddy unpaved streets from the Michigan Central yards to the nearest car lines. He was indignant about this—a fact to be remembered.

However, many of those factors destined to make Detroit truly dynamic were already present. It was a city of marked manufacturing ability. Its location on the river connecting it with the Great Lakes made the shipment of products and raw materials easy and profitable. Its stoves, railroad cars, wheels, seeds, cigars, and other manufactured items were known around the world. The Detroit River was already alive with freighters, barges, and steamers.

4

Hazen S. Pingree, a well-to-do, successful, and ebullient manufacturer of shoes, was elected mayor of Detroit the very year young Couzens became a Detroiter. Later this fact would be of special and intriguing interest in respect to Couzens. For, although a wealthy industrialist and also a Republican (in the same ranks as William McKinley and Mark Hanna), this pugnacious Mr. Pingree conducted himself in such a manner that he was scorned by his fellow industrialists as a “socialist.” Indeed, it was in this same year that Pingree, at times battling “special interests” alongside such progressives as Governor John Peter Altgeld, Illinois’ “Eagle Forgotten,” launched the stormy Detroit and Michigan political career that would be credited by one Michigan historian with helping to “lay the basis for the liberal movement in the Republican party which was carried forward more successfully by some of his successors,”³—including one successor named Couzens.

Pingree had burst upon the Detroit political scene just then as a “People’s Mayor,” denouncing tax-dodging corporations and fighting especially for improved public-utility service and lower rates for such service. Critics said he was “utterly lacking in tact and diplomatic gifts.”⁴ Nevertheless he became one of the two outstanding mayors in Detroit history.

Worth recalling is the fact that in 1890 Pingree started a movement for municipal ownership of public transportation, for which action he suffered social ostracism from his clubs and his church. During the panic of ‘93, Pingree increased the conviction of other businessmen that he was a socialist, or another kind of radical, by his insistence that unemployment relief was a function of government. He arbitrarily allowed unemployed laborers to take over vacant lots for raising food, mainly potatoes, and “Pingree’s Potato Patches” became a national phrase, along with “Coxey’s Army”—fighting words in the ideological disputes of that day.

5

The furor stirred up by Pingree’s “radical” ideas, and especially the heated denunciation of them by leaders of his own party, made a strong and lasting impression upon young Couzens. What’s more, even in the 1890’s, though more from temperament than from any studied conclusions, Couzens harbored certain inchoate Pingree-like ideas of his own.

For example, he barked some uncomplimentary remarks to fellow railroaders about the low wages paid to stevedores on the river-front. And he stopped to listen when Single-Tax orators lectured groups of workingmen on Woodward Avenue. Later, he called himself a Single Taxer—“in principle.”⁵ During a streetcar strike in 1891, a stormy episode linked with Pingree’s municipal-ownership program, he sympathized impulsively with a group of strikers he saw tossing bricks at a streetcar. Young Couzens hurled a few bricks himself.

In 1894 there occurred a national railroad strike, the one that resulted from conflict between Eugene V. Debs’ “one big union” and the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. This brought the “social conflict,” as editorialists then described labor-capital tension, quite close to Couzens of the Michigan Central R.R. Company, in the “Junction Yards.”

He was not at all taken in by the overheated propaganda that pictured the Pullman workers and their striking railroad-worker sympathizers under mild-mannered Debs as “anarchists,” “communists,” or some other brand of revolutionists bent upon destroying America. Nor was he taken in by the same kind of clamor that churned around Altgeld in Illinois for protesting on constitutional grounds President Grover Cleveland’s use of federal troops to break the strike—a clamor that soon also churned in Detroit around Mayor Pingree, who supported Governor Altgeld. Young Couzens assessed the outcries of “anarchy” for what they were. Remembering his own slim pay-envelope at the Michigan Central, he made up his mind that the strikers were just railroad men, like himself and his fellows, who merely wanted what he also wanted—somewhat fatter pay envelopes.

His unit of the railroad escaped direct involvement in the Pullman strike. But, in his talks with others at the yards, he did not make it a secret that his sympathies were with Debs’ men. He was aware that if his attitude were “reported” it might cost his job, but his feeling was: If he thought so, why shouldn’t he say so? Nobody was going to take that right from him.⁶ This attitude he never changed.

6

Actually, he was neutral on the “union question,” so far as he himself was concerned, for he was sure that the state of being a “worker” was only temporary for him. So the union question as such was not really a personal matter with James Couzens. Although at times he growled about the Michigan Central that “this road doesn’t appreciate what we workers do,” he worked faithfully for the railroad. And he worked superlatively well. “He was always on the job, worked his head off, never did any fooling around,” a fellow worker at the railroad recalled.⁷

True, his record at the railroad was marred by a “letter of reprimand” on July 20, 1891. This made him “sore as Hell”—and the roar of angry protest that broke from him that day was considered memorable at the “Junction Yards.” The fault, he felt, belonged to a fellow worker for having failed to awaken him, as he had requested, when he was taking a nap toward the end of a long shift. But there was no other black mark against him.⁸ “I was,” he boasted in after years, “the best God-damned car-checker on the line!”⁹

7

As if to point up the fact that he was a “man,” after he became twenty-one in 1893, he went to his superintendent and asked for promotion. The job he wanted was that of boss of the freight office in the yards.

Before long the position was his, although this meant passing over a number of men who had been car-checkers long before he had begun working for the railroad. For the first time, he now had the responsibility of directing the work of other men, including some much older than he. He had no lack of assurance in the way he assumed that responsibility. He was not a popular boss and made no effort to be popular. Already he was a strict disciplinarian. Yet, though he did not win affection, he did win respect. “He never tried to shift responsibility upon others to shield himself; if he made a mistake, he would own up regardless of what the result might be,” one of his men recalled.¹⁰

Nor did he pick on subordinates while kowtowing to superiors. “He was just as assertive with those above him.” A superintendent, one Buchanan, once gave him a “calling down.” Couzens talked back.

“You’re fired!” said Buchanan.

“You can’t fire me!” retorted Couzens.

He wasn’t fired.¹¹

8

At the freight office, for the first time he came into contact with patrons of the railroad, something he had in mind when he asked for the promotion. For he had concluded that it would take too long to realize his ambitions if he stayed in the railroad business. He hoped to get into something with a better and quicker future by meeting the businessmen who used the railroad.

Yet, of all the clerks in the freight office, he was most notorious for treating patrons “rough,” especially when it fell to him to advise them about demurrage charges, a new tariff which had just been established by the Michigan Central and which was bitterly resented by most of the patrons. “The way Jim Couzens talked with these patrons on the telephone, giving them holy hell, was just astounding,” recalled an associate at the freight house.¹²

With Alex Y. Malcomson, a coal dealer, he had had some of his more heroic rows over demurrage charges. But rather than resenting Couzens’ blistering way of laying down the law to him, Malcomson admired it. Malcomson obviously concluded that here was an employee who really looked after an employer’s interests. To the amazement of nearly everyone, Malcomson one day offered a job to Couzens.

In October 1895 Couzens went to work for the Malcomson Fuel Company as assistant bookkeeper, private car-checker, and all-around general factotum, for which he was to receive seventy-five dollars a month.¹³