Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 15. THE JOB-SEEKER AGAIN
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 103-106
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CHAPTER XV

THE JOB-SEEKER AGAIN

Even after his break with Ford, Couzens remained a director in the company, and continued to take an interest in the “social experiment” in the Ford organization. He continued to make crusading speeches to other businessmen. Before the Windsor (Ontario) Board of Trade, he denounced businessmen who paid low wages to girls and then headed “committees to save women from prostitution.” “I have no use,” he said, “for the man who works a lot of girls at $3.50 and $4.00 a week, and then puts on a frock coat on Sunday.”¹ He had in mind a millionaire merchant who was known for paying low wages to female employees and whom he ordered out of his house when this merchant called on him for a contribution to a home for wayward girls.

He also retained the presidency of the Highland Park State Bank. That activity, his Wabeek farm, his investments, and his post as head of the Detroit Street Railway Commission should have been sufficient to keep him contentedly occupied. Instead, he became restless and fidgety.

It seemed for a time that the Street Railway Commission by itself would provide a cure for what he considered his idleness. During the previous year, in August 1915, he had stirred up the old Pingree municipal ownership issue, informing Jere C. Hutchins, the president of the Detroit Union Railways, that the city should buy the D.U.R. lines. Hutchins had been astounded when Couzens called him on the telephone to make the suggestion. “It has seemed to me that the people are satisfied with conditions as they are!” Hutchins said.

“Not at all!” Couzens said. “What is wanted is municipal ownership. What do you want for the lines?”² So he forced the issue—and a municipal election on the question.

2

A referendum on the question was set for the following November. Couzens threw himself into the campaign to get Detroiters to vote in favor of the proposal. Victory would mean a satisfying and ready-made job for him, for he would be the manager of the city-operated streetcar system if the referendum proposal carried. With his own funds he financed the printing of literature that supported the purchase of the system. He directed the lawyers in a fight against an effort to have the referendum barred by a court injunction, one asked for by Clarence Burton, the Detroit historian. “I don’t care about the merits of this or any other plan,” said Burton. “I want the courts to say that municipal ownership of street railways is illegal and can never be had in this city.”³

The injunction suit was killed, and the issue went to the voters as scheduled, with Couzens the principal speaker at mass meetings organized behind the proposal. On the whole, his speeches were effective. The spectacle of a multimillionaire arguing for municipal ownership caught the imagination of the city and it seemed the answer to the main argument of the D.U.R., that the plan was “socialistic.”

But he had naively committed one serious political error. Shrewd Jere C. Hutchins had refused to set a price on the D.U.R properties. Couzens determined to go ahead with the referendum anyway. If the people voted to buy the lines, the price was to be set later by the judges of the County Court.

Coached by Hutchins, the opposition immediately raised a powerful cry: “Couzens is asking the city to buy a pig in a poke!”

Couzens tried to counter this move by announcing that if the price eventually set by the court was not satisfactory, he, personally, would re-purchase the lines for $40,000,000, higher than any figure the company had ever set on its property. But the “pig in a poke” cry deterred even old-time followers of Pingree from actively supporting him.

Another handicap was a matter with which Couzens himself was not involved—at least not yet. The city administration then admittedly was corrupt. The police department, especially, was notoriously graft-ridden. “Do you want such an administration to run the streetcar lines?” the opposition demanded. Couzens had what sounded like an effective answer. “The opposition tries to befog the issue by talking of graft. Well, speaking of graft, how about private business? There is more favoritism, more politics, and more graft in private business—and I should know—than in any city government in America. If you can’t run your lines and keep out graft, you are a poor lot of citizens. What does the D.U.R. care about you? All they care about is your fares. The streetcar line is by nature a monopoly, and you should own it.”⁴

But this argument was not enough. The referendum lost by three thousand votes.⁵

“I’m in a mess,” Couzens told Jay Hayden that night. “Now I have to get a job.”⁶

The following spring, out of sheer desperation, he organized another bank, the Highland Park State Bank of Detroit (later the Bank of Detroit), and became its president. At first, he was delighted with the new bank. “I never experienced such joy in my life as I did the day of the opening,” he told John W. Anderson. But soon he was forced to recognize the bank for what it was—just another money-making machine. He was still looking for a “job,” a new career.

3

The streetcar question apart, it seemed inevitable that he would find his career in public affairs. Milton McRae had been urging him for some time to go into politics. Indeed, in 1913 he had advised Couzens to accept the Board of Commerce presidency with that in view.⁷ And Couzens clearly was interested even before leaving Ford.

He had set his sights high—on national politics. Thus, after the failure of the streetcar referendum, he “considered” becoming a candidate for United States Senator, and some of the newspapers began printing items to the effect that his wealth made him a natural contender against Senator Charles E. Townsend in 1916.

But he dropped the idea when it became obvious that he could not hope to unseat Townsend. Instead, he served as treasurer of Townsend’s re-election campaign.⁸ He believed, naively, that this was the way to break into politics.

In that same year, 1916, he dabbled in the preliminaries of the Presidential campaign that developed into the contest between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes. To Charles B. Warren, the Republican National Committeeman, he wrote: “I am keenly interested in the success of the Republican Party this fall.” To prove his interest, he sent Warren a four-thousand-dollar check for the party campaign fund.⁹ Out of gratitude for this contribution, the party designated him as a Hughes elector, even though he had been active in an unsuccessful boom on behalf of Theodore Roosevelt and had sat conspicuously on the platform at a Detroit meeting for “T.R.” He was a delegate to both the state and national Republican conventions, in opposition, incidentally, to a group from Michigan that was booming Henry Ford for the Republican nomination for President.¹⁰

4

Before voting time, however, it was a local election that became more important to him. Mayor Marx, a Republican, was seeking re-election, and was handicapped by his lax police department. Marx’s secretary, Edward T. Fitzgerald, called on Couzens to ask him if he would be interested in becoming commissioner of police.¹¹ The political strategy was obvious: If Couzens became Commissioner of Police, the Marx regime could be salvaged.

“It came to me like a flash,” Couzens later recalled, “that here was my opportunity.” He said he was interested, but on a condition. He had to have a “free hand without political interference of any kind.”¹² There followed talks with Marx and John Dodge. On September 28, 1916, Marx announced that Commissioner John Gillespie had resigned and that Couzens had taken his place, a substitution that saved the election for Mayor Marx—and launched Couzens upon his new career.¹³