Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,884

This is the grave of Carter Harrison, IV.

Born in 1860 in Chicago, Harrison grew up in the Chicago political class. His father was after all Carter Harrison III, the mayor of Chicago and king of machine politics. Harrison was brought up to be a city leader. His father sent him to Germany for his education. He stayed over there for quite awhile, but when his father bought the Chicago Times in 1891 to be the voice of his political machine, young Carter came home to run it. This was the only major newspaper in the city to support the Pullman strikers, so it was not only a Democratic Party paper but a strong labor paper. At this time, he was the editor of the paper, stepping down in 1895.

Harrison stepped down from running the paper to run for mayor. His father was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker in 1893 (live by the machine, die by the machine) and Harrison was running directly on his father’s legacy. It worked too. He was elected for the first time in 1897. He was pretty similar to his father too–a classic Gilded Age machine guy. Now, good government liberal types–a type I honestly don’t have a lot of patience for then or now because while I don’t disagree on principle with most of it, they miss the forest for the trees of holding power and the good that can come from that–have made the Harrisons look not great. But what the Harrison administration really meant at the time was not legislating morality. The good government types of the time were very anti-sex work and Harrison was more into regulating it, which he did. Was this all above board? Ok, no. But the moral prigs of 1897 were also wrong about a lot of things.

Meanwhile, Harrison was enough of a reformer to pull in some middle class support. He did realize that the corruption of his father’s years needed taming. So he took on the streetcar system, which Charles Yerkes wanted to turn into a monopoly. Harrison would not allow this and they became bitter enemies. This led to the Chicago Traction Wars. See, back in the 1860s, the Illinois legislature had granted 99 year franchises to transportation companies. They were of questionable legality. Harrison Sr. had cut a deal with Yerkes and friends in 1883 that would extend their franchises for 20 more years and we would all work out the legalities in that time. But that didn’t happen. The legality was still dubious. The Illinois legislature could be bought off for a song–they were Gilded Age Republicans after all. But the reformer governor John Altgeld, one of the underrated heroes of American history, vetoed it. That happened in 1895. By the time the bill came up again, in 1897, Harrison Jr. was mayor and he lobbied the legislature to kill it. So Yerkes went to the Chicago city council to have the fight there and he and Harrison spent the next years at each other’s throats, fighting dirty old school political fights over this issue. Yerkes finally backed off in 1899, sold his interests and moved to New York. But people still kept trying to push this forward and that lasted into the 1910s.

Through all of this, Harrison had the support of the public, who saw cheaper and better streetcar lines as a good thing. Harrison then found himself on the other side of the issue. There were reformer groups in the city that wanted the companies destroyed and the city to take it over. These were mostly socialists who believed in municipal ownership of utilities. Harrison however believed in working with the existing companies for cut deals that would lead to better service. This battle became so great that Harrison decided to not run for reelection in 1905. The other part of that though is that Harrison desperately wanted to be president. He campaigned hard within the Democratic Party to be the 1904 presidential candidate. Instead, it went to the legendary Alton Parker, who doesn’t remember that guy….So he took a timeout on his political career generally. In fact, Harrison was not that serious of a contender. Parker’s top rival for the nomination was William Randolph Hearst, so at least that was avoided.

Harrison was also a politician above all. He could read the tea leaves. While he had no interest in shutting down the city’s red light districts, after 1900, the momentum for this kept growing. So for political reasons, he pretended like this was something he wanted to do. So when he ran for mayor again in 1911, this was something he pledged to do. He created a commission to clean up the city and shut down the red light district in 1911, including the legendary Everleigh Club, probably the highest end brothel in America, a place so famous that it was the future Kaiser Wilhelm’s top stop when he visited the United States as crown prince. Harrison did not want to leave office, but eventually, he pissed off the machine men too much. Him coming down against the red light districts and the vices generally really infuriated his old allies, the men who had been with his family since the beginning of his father’s term. So he lost the primary in 1915 for a sixth term. Then the guy who won the nomination had already been removed from previous office due to stealing money. So the Republicans won that election….Talk about overbeliveing in your machine.

After this, Harrison was just a senior Democratic Party figure. He had to be taken care of when the patronage came to town. So he was in the wilderness in the 20s, though by no means poor or powerless locally. But in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, Harrison expected to benefit and he did. FDR named him IRS collector for the District of Chicago. Now that’s an old school patronage job. He stayed in that job all the way until 1944, satisified where he was in life and in the Democratic Party. He also wrote a couple of books, including a 1944 memoir titled Growing Up with Chicago. He lived forever, all the way until 1953, an era so completely different from when he started in politics that it must have been wild to experience. He was 93 upon his death.

Carter Harrison IV is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois. His grave is not just that small stone. He’s with his father, who has the gigantic monument that adorns the whole family’s plot and you can see that if you click on his post.

If you would like this series to visit other Democrats of the early 20th century, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alton Parker is in Kingston, New York and George Gray, another person in the running in 1904, is in New Castle, Delaware. All these years and I have never visited a Delaware grave. What a gap in my life and in yours. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.