If you know a member-in-good-standing of Cincinnati’s Charter Committee today, thank them and wish them a happy 100th birthday.
Not so much for what they are doing today, but for what their predecessors did 100 years ago.
They are not easily recognizable; they wear no buttons on their lapels or banners across their chests. You will only know if you engage a Charterite in a discussion of Cincinnati government and politics.
If you are relatively new to Cincinnati, or pay little attention to city politics, you may not even know what a Charterite is.
I’ve been covering politics in Cincinnati for over 40 years and I can’t begin to count the number of Cincinnati voters over the years who give me a blank stare when I start talking about the Charter Committee.
But, if you live in the city, you do owe the Charter Committee a debt of gratitude.
A century ago, the original Charterites turned this city from a political cesspool run by corrupt and incompetent fools into a city with a clean government where a nine-member council set policy and a professional city manager ran the day-to-day operations of the city.
RELATED: Why does Cincinnati have a council-manager form of government?
There have been some glitches. Three council members — not Charterites — have gone to prison in this decade on corruption charges.
But, all things considered, it has been a pretty good model of what the Charter Committee has said all along is its mission: "good government" for Cincinnati.
So how did it begin?
By the early 1920s, Cincinnati's government was considered by many to be the most corrupt and least efficient in the country, controlled by the political machine run by Republican Rudolph Hynicka, a dubious character who made a fortune by graft and by owning a string of burlesque houses.
Hynicka spent more time in New York City than he did in Cincinnati, running his Columbia Burlesque Circuit.
There was a 32-member city council — 31 of them Republicans and most of them saloon keepers
But the real power was with the GOP central committee, controlled by Hynicka.
Corruption is one thing, but incompetence at running government is quite another. Cincinnatians were getting tired of Hynicka and his crew as the garbage started piling in the streets.
Honest Republicans — many of them young lawyers — were sick and tired of the corruption of the Hynicka machine and created a reform organization called the Cincinnatus Association, with Murray Seasongood as their leader.
Cincinnatus fought and won a battle against a Hynicka tax hike.
From the archives: Why the 'culture of corruption' at Cincinnati City Hall?
That led to the creation of "The Birdless Ballot League," which wanted non-partisan elections. "Birdless" because in those days, ballots bore either a Republican eagle or a Democratic rooster. The birds were visual signals for residents who could not read English or who couldn't read at all.
In June 1924, the Birdless Ballot League merged with other reform groups and became the Charter Committee.
The next year, Charter was successfully blowing up the Hynicka machine, consigning it to the dustbin of history.
In 1925, Cincinnatians adopted a council-manager form of government, a nine-member city council, elected by proportional representation (or PR), a voting system that, in the end, created opportunities for Black candidates to run and win in a city dominated by white voters.
Six Charter candidates won council seats in the first election under the new system, and Seasongood was chosen as mayor.
Charter candidates dominated city council elections until the late 1950s. The Democratic Party couldn’t even field their own candidates for most of that time.
But, in 1957, the Republican Party dealt a major blow to Charter.
The Republican Party was determined not to allow a Black man — in this case, Vice Mayor Ted Berry — to become the city's mayor.
In one of the ugliest moments in Cincinnati's history, a racist sub rosa campaign circulated anti-Berry propaganda and the voters went to the polls that year and ended proportional representation, which for years, ended the chances of Berry and any other Black candidate from winning a council seat.
Republicans dominated city council until 1969, when the Democratic Party and the Charter Committee joined forces to field council slates. That coalition won a majority in 1971.
The two parties split the two-year mayoral terms in one year for each party. That produced mayoral stints for Bobbie Sterne and Charlie Taft on the Charter side; Tom Luken and Jerry Springer for the Democrats.
Things were rolling along quite smoothly for Charter until one man blew up the Democratic-Charter coalition.
That one man was the Hamilton County Democratic Party chairman at the time — John "Socko" Wiethe, a crusty, bullheaded man who had played football in the early days of the NFL.
Wiethe woke up one morning and declared the coalition was over — the Charterites were on their own.
RELATED: Meet the man making the Charter Committee a force once again
Charterites like Sterne, Marian Spencer, Jim Tarbell and Tyrone Yates continued to be elected to council, but since Wiethe parted ways with the Charterites, their greatest successes have been by "us too" endorsements of Democratic candidates and Republicans such as Steve Goodin and Liz Keating.
Still, the self-proclaimed "good government" party soldiers on.
There have been many times during my 42 years of covering Cincinnati politics that I — and others — have thought the Charter Committee was DOA.
But they keep waking up.
Maybe there is another Golden Age of Charter on the way. Watching City Council members being marched off to jail in recent years was disconcerting for many in Cincinnati, to say the least.
Who knows? The Charter Committee has more lives than an alley cat.
