8 Socialist Capitalist

Albert May Todd grew up in rural Michigan. His home state is remembered as both a Grange and a Greenback region, but also for the founding of the Republican Party in 1854. Part of the Northwest Territory and settled largely by Yankee and Yorker farmers from New England and western New York like the Ranneys and their neighbors, the state inherited a northeastern sensibility that placed a high value on education.^[1] Michigan’s public school system had been established in its 1835 territorial constitution and in legislative acts passed in 1837 when the territory achieved statehood. According to Michigan historian Roy Strickland, education was so important to the residents of the new state that a school was “often the first institution . . . in a newly settled community of the state. The school embodied a confident vision of the future for its citizens.”^[2] As communities grew and enrollment in the ungraded schoolhouses established with each new township increased, the state built union schools in towns and cities. Like the earlier one-room schoolhouses, union schools housed all the region’s students in a single building. But they contained separate rooms for the various grades.

Albert grew up surrounded by the Free-Soil principles that would help define the early Republican Party but that would in the long run be overshadowed by the Whig priorities of strong central government and spending on internal improvements. Later in life, Albert told a story of the party’s beginnings, to chastise Republicans in Congress. The party had begun, he said, in Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854, at a convention that attacked slavery and resolved to defend “the first principles of the republican government and against the schemes of aristocracy. After reading this patriotic declaration of principles,” he commented in 1899, “is it to be wondered at that those who founded the Republican party, seeing that corporate greed had seized its control for the purpose of destroying its splendid early history, should be forced to find another political home where they could still serve the cause of human liberty?”^[3] Unlike the Republican Party, his political journey did not stray from the interest in social justice Albert acquired in rural Michigan.

After a childhood spent following news of the Civil War and studying at home with his liberally educated mother, Albert attended the Sturgis Union School where he concentrated on the classics.^[4] In 1874, after a year of college, he took a backpacking trip across Europe and England, museums and galleries  and absorbing the culture and politics of the Continent and Britain. Early exposure to education, art, foreign cultures, and politics broadened his horizons and opened his mind to new ideas. Travel to Europe and England, and later to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York City as a young businessman, gave Albert a cosmopolitan perspective. All these experiences propelled him toward public service and into a much more egalitarian style of politics than might have been expected for an affluent businessman from the Midwest. Cultural historian Daniel T. Rodgers described the creation of a transatlantic Progressive movement as a relatively urban intellectual development. Albert’s political career suggests Rodgers’s depiction may have missed an important rural element in the transfer of European ideas into American politics.

Histories of the people and ideas that catalyzed the Progressive movement tend to focus on urban reformers like Jane Addams or national politicians like William Jennings Bryan. These people and their ideas are important, but they don’t tell the entire story of political change in America. For example, when Rodgers described the creation of the Public Ownership League of America, he mentioned three of the league’s urban intellectual vice presidents, Frederic Howe, Edward Dunne, and Jane Addams, but not its rural founder and president, Albert May Todd. The transatlantic transference of social experience and policy models Rodgers described in Atlantic Crossings seems heavily weighted toward academic and urban contributors to the dialogue of cultures in the Atlantic world. Even when he discussed agrarian movements, Rodgers remarked: “In a spectrum framed by the issues of the urban, industrial cores, the farmers’ parties occupied no stable, predictable place,” despite the fact that, during much of the period he described, farming was the occupation of the majority of working Americans and more than half the population lived in rural settings.^[5] Perhaps Rodgers focused on urban academic sources because there truly were very few rural people with Progressive ideas. But Albert Todd, like Robert La Folette, attacked the railroads in Congress. And, like William Jennings Bryan, he visited Europe and returned “enthusiastic about the idea of municipal ownership.”^[6] In a book that discusses municipal ownership at length in more than a dozen lengthy passages, Albert Todd is not mentioned. Perhaps rural Progressives like him are not found because they are not looked for.

Albert first ran for office in the Kalamazoo mayoral race of 1893. He ran as a Prohibition candidate and polled only 193 votes. Although he revered the egalitarian impulse that had helped found the Republican Party, he had no illusions about the party’s transformation during the Gilded Age.^[7] The following year, he ran for mayor again and received 192 votes, probably from the same core constituency of local prohibition activists. This was too narrow a base of support, so when he decided to run for Congress in 1895, he ran as a fusion candidate. Fusion, defined by political historian Peter H. Argersinger as “electoral support of a single set of candidates by two or more parties, constituted a significant feature of late nineteenth-century politics, particularly in the Midwest and West, where full or partial fusion occurred in nearly every election.”^[8] Although Democrats were still discredited nationally by Republicans as the party of slavery, their success in fusing with Populists, Free Silver advocates, and others elicited a Republican program of electoral reform in the Midwest in the 1890s that “involved a conscious effort to shape the political arena by disrupting opposition parties, revising traditional campaign and voting practices, and ensuring Republican hegemony—all under the mild cover of procedural reform.” By the early 1890s, Michigan Republicans had experienced more consistent fusion opposition than any other state, and in 1893 a new Republican legislature decided to “purify elections and prevent fraud” by outlawing fusion. As one Republican legislator candidly explained, “We don’t propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us.”^[9]

Albert ran for Congress in defiance of the new Republican law, on a fusion ticket including endorsements from the Democratic Party, the People’s Party, the Free Silver Party, and Prohibition. He had grown up during a period when the Democratic Party was considered by most Michigan residents to be the party of slavery. But he entered politics at a time when the Republican Party had abandoned the Free-Soil ideals that had helped create it.^[10] Outsider movements like Prohibition, Free Silver, and especially Populism appealed to his sense of justice and rural self-determination. His electoral defeat was announced by Kalamazoo newspapers that assumed only his Democratic voters would be counted. But Albert challenged the constitutionality of the anti-fusion law and sued for a mandamus ruling that would require the election committee to count all his votes. In March 1895 regional newspapers and even the New York Times ran a story announcing “Michigan’s Anti-Fusion Law is Upheld—It Compels a Candidate to Elect on Which Ticket He Will Run.” The Michigan Supreme Court validated the Anti-Fusion Act passed by the legislature “but held that, as the time limit under which Todd could have made his selection expired without giving him an opportunity of electing on which ticket he should run, the mandamus prayed for in his case was granted.”^[11] He entered Congress as a nominal Democrat—the first to represent Michigan’s Third District since the Civil War.

Todd wrote to his “Friends and Patrons” informing them that he had been elected a member of Congress but assuring them, “My business will be carried on without interruption, under the management of my sons, who will also refer to me promptly all questions needing my personal attention, so I trust we may continue to receive your confidence and patronage.”^[12] Todd also offered to assist his customers and supporters with any concerns they might wish him to call to the national legislature’s attention. At least one of his important customers took Todd up on his offer, and on March 23, 1897, Todd presented Congress with “Memorial of William Wrigley Jr. & Co., of Chicago, protesting against the proposed duty on gum chicle—to the Committee on Ways and Means.”^[13] But most of the issues he championed for his constituents were classic Populist causes. Among the many petitions he presented to the clerk of the House was an April 1897 petition from the city councilors of Detroit and the Detroit branch of the United Garment Workers Union (although Detroit was well outside his congressional district), protesting the passage of a bill restricting the sale of railroad tickets.^[14] The so-called anti-scalping bill was of great concern to many of his constituents and would consume much of his energy over the next few years. Although Todd regularly presented protests and petitions from his constituents on issues such as pensions for veterans and cigarette and liquor sales, he spent most of his time fighting what he called “the money power.”

Early in the first session of Congress, Todd spoke against the Dingley tariff bill, saying it had been sponsored by “great corporate interests who seek protection from foreign competition, that they may combine among themselves, crush out small producers, and exact unjust tribute from the great mass of people who are the consumers and purchasers.” Instead of raising rates higher even than the 1890 tariff, Todd proposed: “So far as the collection of the Government revenues is concerned, we should stop, for once and forever, this present system of taxing the necessities of life for the encouragement of trusts, and we should maintain our National Government, as we do our State and municipal governments, by direct taxation of all wealth, that of the rich and poor alike, according to that which they possess.”^[15] Todd was not proposing only an income tax but a tax on wealth. State and local property taxes, he reasoned, taxed the principal wealth of average people, their homes or farms. But no taxes on greater fortunes had ever been attempted, and during the Gilded Age such greater fortunes had begun to capture an increasing percentage of national wealth. His suggestion was seen by some as a betrayal of his class, but Todd did not consider himself a member of the class into which his success in the peppermint oil business had propelled him. Unfortunately, his suggestion went nowhere. The Dingley bill had the support of Congress’s Republican majority and active cooperation from President William McKinley, who had preceded Maine congressman Nelson Dingley Jr. as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and had introduced the previous 1890 tariff that bore his name. The Dingley tariff act became law in July 1897 and became the longest-lasting tariff with the highest rates (52 percent) in U.S. history.^[16] Todd rebuked House Republicans in a speech on the floor: “You of the majority have, many of you, voted to pass this bill against your better judgment, and against the judgment and protest of those overtaxed and overburdened people whom you represent, because your leaders sold the influence of your once glorious party to the usurers and trusts who now dictate its policy; and under the party lash and the rule of your caucus you have been driven, at the loss of your independence and manhood, like lambs to the slaughter for the banquet of princes.”^[17]

Todd’s speech covered twenty pages of the appendix to the Congressional Record, and it ranged from opposition to the tariff to the case for bimetallism and a warning against the trusts and plutocrats Todd believed were taking control of the nation. If the plutocrats were not stopped, he said, “it requires no prophetic eye to discern the consolidation of political power following hard after the consolidation of wealth.” And if government failed to check the excesses of business and was revealed to be merely a tool of the wealthy, “then the masses in the cities will become the hotbeds of sedition, and the masses in the country will subside into a peasantry without hope.” Although, unlike Hotchkiss, Todd never overextended his credit or complained of problems with banks in his own business operations, he objected to concentration of power in the hands of Wall Street bankers. He supported bimetallism and Populist proposals to reorganize banking and the money supply on a more democratic basis. The fact that he was a successful businessman helps highlight an aspect of rural Populism that is not widely noticed. Unlike many of the portrayals of Populists, he was an opponent not of business but of monopoly and oligopoly. This may also have been true of many more of the people who supported the People’s Party and its platform.

In addition to opposing the tariff, Todd called for an income tax, saying that the recently passed Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894 imposing a 2 percent tax on incomes of more than four thousand dollars had “rested on the simple principle that the opulent ought to be taxed as well as the poor . . . whose wages and modest profits derived from daily toil.”^[18] He supported a tax on incomes like his own but said, “Against this principle the money power arrayed itself in solid phalanx. Plutocracy filled all the trenches with its mercenaries for the defense of its citadel.” The law, which had attempted to reduce the rates set by the McKinley tariff and make up the deficit with an income tax, had been struck down in 1895 as unconstitutional in the Supreme Court decision in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. Todd called the decision “an example of what the Supreme Court could do in shoring up and fortifying the system of human bondage.” It would take the 1913 passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to establish an income tax in the United States. Many manufacturers took positions on issues such as tariffs based on the effect they would have on either competing imports or their own exports. By the 1890s, the A. M. Todd Company was a leading exporter of peppermint oil, and Todd was always concerned about the introduction of low-quality imports, especially “Japanese” oil made from Mentha arvensis. He believed, however, that he was able to deal with these challenges in the market rather than by recourse to government action. He considered tariffs a direct tax on working people who were the consumers of protected products, for the benefit of large corporations that did not care to improve the competitiveness of those products.

Todd passed his distaste for tariffs on to his children. Even after he had handed over control of his company to his sons, the A. M. Todd Company relied on its ability to outcompete its rivals in the market. In 1922, during a period of rapidly rising peppermint oil prices, the protective tariff on imported essential oils was raised from twenty-five cents per pound to 25 percent of the oil’s value. Indiana peppermint growers, suspecting a foreign conspiracy to regulate American exports for the benefit of the Japanese oil producers, lobbied their congressman to raise the tariff rate on Japanese oil to 100 percent. The A. M. Todd Company did not support the tariff, and the bill failed to pass the House; but like other peppermint oil producers, the Todds were concerned about the introduction of lower-quality Japanese mint into the U.S. market. They were willing to compete in the market, but wanted the playing field to be fair. The A. M. Todd Company got the relief it sought in 1923 when the U.S. Department of Agriculture ruled under the statutes of the Pure Food and Drug Act that any product labeled “mint” or “mint flavored” had to contain natural peppermint oil (Mentha piperita) and could not be flavored with Japanese mint (Mentha arvensis). Strict labeling of mint products to prevent fraud was an approach that better fitted the Todd attitude toward competition and the role of government than tariffs. Peppermint was further protected under the United States Pharmacopeia, which specifically designated that any medicinal product compounded from natural peppermint oil had to use material distilled solely from Mentha piperita.^[19]

Although Todd was already a successful businessman in the 1890s when he entered Congress, many of his ideals closely matched those detailed in the People’s Party platform of 1892. He was a lifelong resident of Michigan, which shows Populism addressed concerns held by rural people outside the South and West, as typically portrayed. In addition, the fact that a prosperous capitalist was an opponent of railroads and monopolists and a supporter of Populist ideals suggests the traditional historical understanding of Populism as a resistance movement of down-and-out farmers is flawed. Populism made sense to a successful Midwestern entrepreneur, but both contemporary and historical descriptions of the movement may have failed to appreciate this because they misunderstood the nature of American business. The American people, Todd said, had been tricked into thinking that the nation’s business interests were the interests of the money power. It was more than a mistake to believe that the interests of most businessmen were aligned with those of Wall Street financiers and monopolists: it was a misunderstanding that served the agenda of the money power. Business, Todd declared, included “all the honest and rational industries of the people, applied first to the soil, secondly to the shops, thirdly to the stores and streets; last of all and highest of all, to the intellectual and moral resources of the nation.” It did not belong to the plutocrats, Todd argued in a speech in Congress. “The idea that business is that high-up, occult, and shadowy fact that we see in spectral outline behind the bond, behind the stock exchange, behind the secret conclave of millionaires banqueting at night is one of the false and pernicious aphorisms which the enemies of public liberty have promulgated by a subsidized press to delude the people and lead them to their own destruction.^[20]

As an independent businessman who had made his own fortune in a competitive market, Albert Todd was a living example of rural entrepreneurship that shared the values of rural Populists. He was not a paternalistic patron of rural voters, pandering to their concerns to garner votes. Nor was he beholden to wealthy sponsors rather than the voters of Michigan’s Third District. He felt completely free to fight for values he shared with his constituents and to attack fraud and corruption when he saw it. On February 5, 1898, he made a speech about an armament appropriations bill (H.R. 7441), attacking the Carnegie Steel Company. “If there is any one thing that should fill the American people with amazement and alarm,” he said, “it is the unblushing effrontery with which powerful corporations that have for years plundered the nation ask and receive from Congress the privilege to dictate the laws upon our statute books and continue their system of spoliation.” Todd argued the effect of the appropriations bill would not only be to squander “fabulous sums”; Congress would be authorizing purchases from “disloyal and dishonest corporations . . . at extravagant prices.” He elaborated, listing the “stupendous frauds recently perpetrated upon the Government by the corporation in whose interests these measures are to be passed.”^[21]

Todd reviewed evidence described in a report presented to the Fifty-third Congress, which established that Carnegie Steel had a few years earlier supplied the navy with 8,958 tons of armor plate costing nearly $5.5 million. Carnegie had charged the U.S. Navy more than six hundred dollars per ton for this armor, more than twice the rate most other nations paid for comparable plate, Todd said. But the company had delivered “worthless armor plates . . . containing ‘blowholes’ over 18 inches long [that] were filled with shavings. The opening was then plugged, and the surface was afterwards planed and covered with dust to hide the defects.” To make matters worse, Carnegie Steel had both hidden these defects and lied to the navy about them. Todd said, “False sets of books . . . were kept for the use of the Government inspectors, and another set showing the actual defects were kept by the company in secret.” The nine-hundred-page report, which Todd quoted extensively, also concluded that Carnegie employees had manipulated testing machinery and armor plates to improve test results and increase the apparent tensile strength of the armor. Todd, tying Carnegie Steel’s fraud to the tariff he had recently spoken against, went on: “It is well known that since the enactment of the Dingley law the trusts have become more solidly allied for the purpose of controlling the production and advancing the price of everything which the nation will need in time of war. These trusts have the nation by the throat.” He accused the Carnegie Steel Company of having “practical control” of a trust controlling capital of nearly a hundred million dollars. He concluded his argument by suggesting, “Surely the evidence of its treason is such as alone to demand that the Government cease from further patronizing it.” Instead, he said, Congress should ensure the nation’s safety by funding “the erection of Government works for manufacturing armor plate, ammunition, and arms.”^[22] His suggestion regarding a government-owned munition works was an opening remark for his ongoing advocacy of public ownership. In ironic confirmation of his warnings about the trust, about two years after his speech Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan merged Carnegie Steel with several other companies to create U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

A few weeks later, in February 1898, Todd proposed an amendment to a bill (H.R. 6358) authorizing the Nebraska, Kansas, and Gulf Railway Company to build and operate a line through the Indian Territory. The amendment would have prohibited the railroad from offering free passes to politicians, issuing stock or bonds exceeding the actual cost of the line, or purchasing mines or other properties unrelated to operating the line as a common carrier. But the key feature of the amendment would have given the government a ten-year option to buy the railroad from the Gulf Railway Company for 10 percent over the cost of construction. A point of order was raised, and Todd’s discussion of government ownership of the line was ruled not germane to the bill in question. Todd responded to the objection by admitting he had nothing in particular against the company under discussion but thought a public-ownership provision should be added whenever new railway projects were authorized.^[23]

Todd was a dues-paying member of the Academy of Political Science, the American Political Science Association, the American Social Society, the American Economic Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Stable Money League, the Fabian Society, the American Academy of Social and Political Science, the Proportional Representation League, and the National Municipal League. He also contributed regularly to Kalamazoo’s Cooperative Society.^[24] He had a large library and read widely but was not easily tempted by the more utopian strains of contemporary social thought. As the owner of several large properties, including the multithousand-acre farms Mentha and Campania, he was not an advocate for public ownership of all land, as suggested by Progressive economist Henry George. And as the president of a thriving business, Todd did not favor state ownership of all industry as proposed by the Nationalist Clubs extending the ideas of Edward Bellamy. On the other hand, Todd’s opposition to the abuses of workers and customers and the defrauding of the government by railroad corporations and monopolies made him a natural ally of Eugene V. Debs. Todd sent contributions to the Debs brothers and to Eugene Debs’s defense committee during Debs’s incarceration. Todd did not despise business; he objected strenuously to monopoly and the abuse of power enabled by concentrated wealth. This is a distinction that he was well aware of, based on his arguments in Congress, but one that many historians of the Populist era have lost sight of. It is a distinction that could be useful today.

Todd took advantage of his business background, which included extensive experience shipping and receiving freight via American railroads, to cut through what he considered the absurdity of Congress’s subservience to wealth. In March 1898, he commented on a proposed amendment to a bill regarding fees paid to the railroads for transporting U.S. mail. “It has been repeatedly shown from undisputed and official authorities that the service for which the Government pays the railroads $8 per 100 pounds for a distance less than a 500-mile basis the railroads obtain for 40 cents per 100 pounds.” Todd criticized the additional annual fee of three million dollars the railroads charged the government for “car service” and asked, “What would an individual shipper, a business firm, or a corporation say if, after paying simply the regular tariff rates for freight, the railroads were to demand more under the claim of ‘car rental’? The railroads would not dare suggest it.” The Republicans, Todd continued, said they supported “a ‘business Administration.’ Here, gentlemen, is an opportunity to prove your sincerity. Let us apply in the administration of the public business the same care, common sense, and honesty we apply in private business.”^[25]

His opposition to a military-industrial money power dominated by companies like Carnegie Steel did not make Todd a pacifist, however. On March 30, 1898, he introduced “a joint resolution (H. Res. 209) declaring war between the United States and the Kingdom of Spain and recognizing the independence of the Republic of Cuba.”^[26] But if the United States was going to war, Albert Todd expected American businesses to pitch in—or at the very least to refrain from profiteering. On May 2, 1898, he called the House’s attention to the fact that the presidents of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Central Traffic Association had been appointed as heads of a national transportation authority to coordinate war shipping. He charged that under the new system “no competition will be allowed for the Government business, and . . . there is no one to represent the interests of the Government.” The result, he said, would be “wholesale plunder of the Treasury and the money needed to carry the war to a successful conclusion.”^[27] To protect the war effort, he introduced a joint resolution (H. Res. 254) of inquiry, directed to the secretary of war, “requesting information regarding the rates paid the railroads for transportation of troops and Government supplies; whether competition exists; and how the public welfare is affected by the appointment of a railroad president and other railroad officials to assume official control of Government transportation.”^[28]

Todd also made a speech in May 1898 supporting another plank from the People’s Party platform of 1892, a constitutional amendment mandating the direct election of senators. He elaborated, suggesting that in addition to direct election, America should consider direct legislation through initiatives and referenda. He gave the example of the recent purchase by Switzerland of its national rail system for 1.2 billion francs in February 1898, following a referendum that passed with more than a two-to-one majority. The first result of direct legislation in Switzerland, he said, “was the total abolishment of the lobby, ‘the third house.’ The bribers gone, the professional politician soon became unknown as such, and then in turn political parties were dissolved, and now partisanship never warps the judgment of the voter. . . . To-day Switzerland is a model republic.”^[29] Todd concluded by introducing “a bill to purify the public service, and to prevent unjust discriminations by corporations against citizens of the United States.” He attached an appendix to the record, including an article describing the Swiss railroad initiative in detail and the constitution of the Direct Legislation League of Philadelphia.

In May 1898 Todd also returned to the anti-scalping issue had had raised earlier in the session, presenting sixty-five petitions from Michigan unions and organizations “protesting against the passage of the bill forbidding railroad ticket brokerage.”^[30] The anti-scalping bill, introduced by New York Republican James Sherman, was seen by Todd and the unions as class legislation. Although Sherman had claimed that the bill “had been repeatedly recommended by the Interstate Commerce committee, that it had support of newspapers and commercial bodies, and that over 3,000 petitions in its favor had been presented to the House,” organizations such as the National Building Trades Council and the American Federation of Labor opposed it.^[31] During congressional hearings, a representative of Samuel Gompers declared the bill was written in the interest of the railroads. “It is not in our interest, we believe. It is legislation which proposes to restrict the privileges of the citizen.” Speaking for Gompers, the union representative said the bill was “more reaching in its vicious spirit than the proposed attempt to make more moral, more honest, the ticket broker,” as its proponents claimed.^[32] The point was that the railroads claimed the right to prevent the buyer of a ticket from disposing of it as the buyer chose, because that choice might include giving or selling the ticket to a third party. Although the financial issue for railroad corporations might be large-scale ticket brokers, the issues for individual ticket buyers were convenience, the principle of ownership, and the fact that restricting ticket resale would lead to higher ticket prices.

On the bill’s final day of debate, during a four-hour session, Todd made a long speech defending an amendment he proposed, which would have eviscerated the bill by prohibiting the railroads from imposing “any restrictions or limitations as to when or by whom any ticket may be used after having once been purchased from the common carrier issuing the same or any legally authorized agent.”^[33] The point of the amendment was to ensure, as the union representative had suggested, that any ticket holder would be able to use, give away, or sell a rail ticket in the same way he or she could any other personal property. Although the bill was ostensibly directed at ticket brokers, Todd said the true “object of the bill is, by making it a crime to buy and sell railroad tickets except through the men whom the railroads appoint, to entrench the railroad pool behind another bulwark of law and enable them to advance and maintain rates already oppressive.” As an example of the wickedness of railroads, he spoke at length about the Credit Mobilier scandal of 1873, which he said had been systematically erased from public memory. The House Committee report on the subject “is extremely difficult to procure, copies having been destroyed as far as possible to remove from public view the great crime committed.” Todd connected the suppression of the report with the nomination of James Garfield, who had been a key figure in the scandal: “Within less than an hour after Mr. Garfield’s nomination to the Presidency nearly every copy had been sequestered from the Capitol, he being among the number implicated.” Todd digressed to discuss the Standard Oil Company’s collusion with the railroads in a section of his speech entitled “The History of a Corporate Crime.” He then quoted extensively from the 1887 Pattison report on the Credit Mobilier scandal. Todd remarked he was adding all this material into the record “for the purpose of placing in the debates of Congress for the use of the future historian who shall write ‘The History of the Rise of Corporate Imperialism.’” Todd’s amendment was defeated, the bill passed the House 119–101, and Todd’s colleagues voted to have his speech stricken from the Congressional Record. It was printed instead in the appendix, where it has been very useful to future historians.

Todd did not win reelection to Congress. In November 1898, he was narrowly defeated by Michigan’s secretary of state, Republican Washington Gardner, by 21,182 votes to 19,864.^[34] The close vote, in spite of the defeat of fusion tickets and the Republican Party’s decision to run a heavyweight candidate in Michigan’s small Third District, suggests that his political ideas had a widespread following among his constituents. Todd spent the final months of the Fifty-fifth Congress arguing against government waste and corruption. In the summer of 1898, he proposed an amendment to a naval appropriation bill (H.R. 3483) for the war in Cuba, suggesting a decrease in the amount budgeted for transportation over the next six months from $44 million to $20 million. He cited several examples of railroads grossly overcharging the military, even in excess of the rates they charged the general public, which he suggested were already abusive. The amendment failed.^[35] On January 28, 1899, Todd spoke against a bill to increase the size of the standing army in peacetime. He offered an amendment: “The Army of the United States shall in time of peace consist of the same numbers as the peace footing authorized by existing law.” The amendment also directed the president “to recall the military and naval forces of the United States from the islands of the Philippines whenever the United States Government shall have evidence of the formation of a stable and independent government in those islands by the inhabitants thereof.” Todd argued that the Filipinos “have already adopted a republican government of their own.”^[36] This amendment also failed.

Finally, in February 1899, before the new Congress began in March, Todd offered another amendment attempting to lower the appropriation for troop transportation. He argued that the railroads were gouging the government and remarked, “Whenever I have had the honor to address Congress or to offer amendments for the protection of the public from the avarice of trusts, gentlemen on the other side, who are the agents and attorneys of these trusts, have endeavored by disorder, ridicule, or sneers to prevent a fair hearing.” Todd complained that in an effort to silence him, “‘points of order’ would be raised, it being well understood that whatever is opposed to the onward march of the trusts is subject to a ‘point of order.’ I have,” he said, “always considered it an honor to be opposed by such influences, and believe that he whose work here has not earned the antagonism of the opposition has not merited the approval of his conscience or the public.”^[37]

His final amendment of course failed, but Todd left Congress undeterred. In September 1899 newspapers across the nation ran stories about a large antitrust conference held in Chicago. Todd was a member of executive committee of the new organization, which was reported to be “national in scope and non-partisan in character, and is to be amalgamated finally with the National Anti-Trust League.”^[38] In 1900, he ran for mayor of Kalamazoo but was defeated by Republican Judge A. J. Mills. Todd decided not to run for Congress in 1900, and a Grand Rapids newspaper remarked, “This is something to be sincerely regretted. . . . It was Mr. Todd who brought the prohibitionists, democrats, populists, silver republicans, and socialists together in one grand combine.” The paper concluded that the state was unfortunate that “no other man in all Michigan could engineer the formation of such a political trust.”^[39] After the passage of the anti-fusion law, Todd would not have been able to achieve the same upset victory he had managed in 1896. But he had almost won reelection as a Democrat in 1898, suggesting that many of his supporters in the other parties were prepared to vote for him regardless of the ticket he ran on.

Being out of office did not keep Albert Todd out of the national spotlight. He made the news again in 1900, when newspapers everywhere ran a story entitled “Socialists to Start a College.” The papers declared that after being “forced out of the colleges and universities endowed by the rich, several leaders of socialistic thought in the United States and England have determined to organize educational institutions of their own.” Supporters of a school “where the believers in the ideas of socialism may make their homes” were several business leaders and politicians, including “Mayor Samuel Jones of Toledo, N. O. Nelson, the St. Louis manufacturer, Mrs. E. D. Rand, who endowed the chair formerly held by Prof. Herron at Iowa College, and A. M. Todd, ‘The Peppermint King,’ of Kalamazoo, Mich.”^[40] The school would come to be known as the Rand School of Social Science, after its main benefactor, Mrs. Rand. Caroline Amanda Sherfey Rand was the daughter of a Burlington, Iowa, merchant and the widow of Elbridge Dexter Rand, a wealthy livestock and lumber baron. Mrs. Rand’s daughter, also named Caroline, married Christian socialist George Davis Herron, who along with Eugene V. Debs, Jane Addams, and Annie Diggs had founded the Social Reform Union.^[41] When Mrs. Rand died in 1905, she left two hundred thousand to establish a school for socialist education, naming her daughter and Professor Herron as trustees. The school opened in 1906 in New York City, where it held classes and ran a summer camp in the Poconos for fifty years.

Todd remained a strong supporter of the Rand School for the rest of his life. And in 1903 he put some of his social idealism on display. An advertising supplement he had printed in London’s Chemist and Druggist for January 1903 included quotes from an article on Campania, entitled “The Largest Mint Farm,” that praised the peppermint farm’s efficiency. The article described Campania as being “operated on the principle of avoiding every unnecessary waste. And this principle is extended to the management and welfare of the employees. They are paid something higher than usual wages, and a higher standard of efficiency is accordingly expected and realized from them.” Todd and his managers, the article continued, “evidently believe it is good economy to greet their men cordially whenever they meet them at their work or elsewhere. They are treated as men, not merely as ‘hands,’ and consequently have every inducement to improve their efficiency in the work.”^[42]

Todd entered local politics again in 1907, when he proposed at a hearing convened to consider amending the city of Kalamazoo’s charter that the city should bar officials of local corporations from holding office. The proposal was not adopted, but Todd remained interested in both local and national political issues. He continued to send contributions to the Debs brothers and supported Eugene V. Debs in his political campaigns. In the fall of 1913, after Albert and Augusta Todd’s fourteen-month visit to Europe, the Wilkes-Barre Times ran an article entitled “Todd’s Little Ticket.” It described the National Popular Government League’s convention in Washington and told the story of a rail ticket Todd had bought in Switzerland. “Todd was over studying the initiative and referendum. Todd wanted to travel throughout the cantons; to go by rail and also by boat. He wanted to be spared the bother of buying a new ticket every time he started for the next place.” He asked the state rail service to sell him a single ticket for his entire forty-two-day stay in Switzerland, and it obliged him. Although the Swiss rail system was “the costliest-per-mile roadbed in the world—costliest because of two great tunnels driven through the granite heart of the Alps,” the government-owned system sold Todd a twenty-seven-dollar ticket that allowed him unlimited travel for his entire stay. The article concluded, “The Swiss railroads are good roads. They give a good service. They also give a cheap service. And they serve the public first—no banker management, no underwriting graft; no inside ring buying up scrap-iron feeders and selling it at big profit to themselves as officers and directors; and, naturally, no doubtful securities or trouble to get funds when the road needs fixing up.”^[43] The railroad corporations of the United States, which had received massive gifts of government funding and 175 million acres of land grants (an area larger than the state of Texas), could make none of these claims.

Using information he had accumulated in his travels to advance his long-held interest public ownership, Todd brought together four like-minded Kalamazoo residents to form a local Municipal Ownership League in August 1914. The league’s first order of business was to advocate that the city of Kalamazoo should take over its gas supply. In March 1915, the league hired a British expert to write a detailed assessment of the current gas company and propose an alternative plan for a public gasworks. The expert concluded that the public project could provide gas to consumers for seventy-five cents per thousand cubic feet at a profit that would pay for the project in less than twenty years, versus the current private rate of $1.25. The expert concluded that even if it decided against undertaking a municipal project, the city ought to renew the private franchise at a rate of seventy-five cents, which he calculated would still be profitable for the contractor. At the lower rate, he predicted, gas consumption in Kalamazoo would rise significantly. A referendum vote in September 1915 failed to return the three-fifths majority needed to create a municipal gasworks. Todd attributed the loss to “lavish expenditure of money on the part of the [private] gas company [that] so influenced public opinion through the press and widespread misrepresentation of facts by means of cunningly-worded literature.”^[44] A few months later, Todd became founding president of the Public Ownership League of America. Other officers of the new national organization included Jane Addams, vice president, and New Jersey manufacturer Charles H. Ingersoll, treasurer.

By the 1910s, the A. M. Todd Company dominated the peppermint oil and general essential oil markets, and Albert Todd’s children were largely responsible for the daily running of it. Todd received regular profit-sharing dividends on his company shares, in addition to a modest $416 monthly salary. He had abundant money and time to devote to his political passions. He opened an office for the Public Ownership League in Washington, D.C., and increased his support of the Rand School, which had its own page in Todd’s ledger book. In August 1917, Todd recorded a contribution of five thousand dollars to the Society of the Commonwealth Center. In parentheses he added, “I have written to the Society that if they are able to reduce their indebted to $50,000 by Sept. 1, 1918, the $5,000 is to be made a gift to them, & the bonds returned to them marked ‘Canceled and paid.’ I offered as per letter enclosing checks, to return the stock canceled if total debt is reduced to $50,000 in one year.”^[45] The Society of the Commonwealth Center was the leaseholder of the “People’s House,” a six-story building purchased from the YWCA that became the Rand School’s new headquarters in the fall of 1917. And Todd subsidized the Public Ownership League’s printing office, which published a series of booklets, several written by Todd himself. One of these was a 122-page booklet entitled Municipal Ownership with a Special Survey of Municipal Gas Plants in America and Europe.^[46]

Todd introduced the subject of public ownership by saying that because of the “intimate relations early in life with the railroads, telegraph and other public utilities” he had experienced as a merchant and peppermint oil dealer in rural Michigan, “the conviction came to [him] that the corporations operating them were not only usurping functions that rightly belonged to the government, but were rapidly becoming so rich and powerful as to be a serious menace to liberty, justice and democracy, in defiance of which, private monopoly ever sought to control the making and administration of law.” He explained how coal gas was made and gave an overview of the history of the gas industry and its present scope. He then devoted individual chapters to the municipal gas works of Virginia, Minnesota, Indianapolis, Germany, and Great Britain, and to “The Fight for Municipal Gas in Kalamazoo with an Investigation of Costs and Profits.” In his discussion of the Kalamazoo situation, he noted: “All of the public utilities of Kalamazoo, Michigan, with the exception of the electric lighting of the streets and the operation of the public water plant are under the control of a single monopoly directed from 14 Wall Street, New York City, which corporation also controls the public utilities of many of the other cities of Michigan as well as those of other states.” Number 14 Wall Street was the address of the newly built Bankers Trust skyscraper. The tower’s entire thirty-first floor was occupied by an apartment belonging to banking mogul J. P. Morgan.

In late 1918 the Washington Times carried an article entitled “The Public Ownership League of America,” written by the league’s secretary, Carl D. Thompson. “The people,” Thompson wrote, “want the Government to keep the railroads and the wire systems now that it has ‘taken them over.’ And especially since hundreds of millions of dollars of the people’s money is being put into the roads to repair them and bring them up to standard.” The takeover Thompson referred to was Woodrow Wilson’s wartime nationalization of the American rail system in December 1918. Since public money was being spent to renovate the national rail system, Thompson argued, the time had come to make public ownership of the rail system permanent. The article featured a list of the league’s officers, including its president, Albert M. Todd, and vice presidents, Jane Addams of Hull House, former Illinois governor Edward F. Dunne, chairman of the War Labor Board Frank P. Walsh, and president of the United Mineworkers Union, Frank Hawes.^[47]

On February 21, 1919, Todd gave testimony as president of the league, advocating for public ownership of the railroads at hearings held by the Interstate Commerce Commission. The league, he said, “does not advocate Government ownership of private industries, but is largely devoted to studying and applying the practical problems of democratic government in a broad and impartial manner, and sending its findings to all parts of the country.” Demonstrating his thorough understanding of the economic principles involved, he continued: “It [the league] is especially interested in promoting Government ownership of those resources and agencies which are natural monopolies and which the Government can own and manage better for the general public welfare than they can be owned and managed by private interests.”^[48] Natural monopolies are defined by economists as situations where the most efficient number of firms in a market is one, generally because only one is needed. Many Americans accepted the observation that railroads were a natural monopoly, because of the excessive cost of laying competing tracks side by side simply to create price competition. The issue was how to reduce prices without competition, and the answer to that was public ownership. Woodrow Wilson had nationalized the American rail system in December 1918, and Todd wanted government ownership to continue after the war under the provisions of a bill (H.R. 10550) introduced by Wisconsin congressman William J. Cary. “The railroads,” Todd said, “are a natural monopoly, and a private monopoly is abhorrent to democracy.”^[49]

Todd observed that ineffective government regulation of privately owned railroads “has made ‘looting’ of the roads and public possible. Why not remove the loot and secure public ownership of the railways at the same time, since they inevitably and naturally go together?” Todd concluded by suggesting that although it might take five or ten years after nationalizing the railroads for them to pay for themselves, “the period in which the Government has been in control and facing a world war and the most adverse obstacles of all kinds here at home, has been quite sufficient to demonstrate both to unbiased experts and to millions of our people, railroad employees almost universally, and many others, that Government control must be continued.”^[50] The Interstate Commerce Commission ignored Todd’s testimony and the league’s proposal, and the railroads were returned to private control in March 1920, under the Esch-Cummins Act. Although rail workers had won an eight-hour workday during the war years, in 1922 they faced a 12 percent wage cut. Four hundred thousand workers walked off the job, beginning the largest rail strike since Eugene V. Debs’s Pullman Strike of 1894.

In addition to supporting American corporations, Wilson’s wartime government suppressed dissent. The Red Scare and wartime attacks on the civil rights of American citizens also affected the Rand School, which was raided and prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. In an attempt to explain that it was not a training school for spies, the Rand’s administrators published a booklet in the school’s defense, declaring: “The Rand School of Social Science last year had 5,000 students. Rand students, when they finish their training, go out to be lecturers, street speakers, teachers and organizers in the labor movement.” The school, they said, prepared its students with social theory to make sense of the experiences they had as workers. “They become leading spirits among their fellows, for they have supplemented their toil-won knowledge of present social and industrial evils with an intelligent, constructive idealism that builds in a new and better way where the present system fails and collapses.” This knowledge and the activism that resulted was designed to be a force for positive change rather than an attack on America. The school claimed that its students had “created a high and unique function for itself . . . whose energies are dedicated to the cause of political freedom and economic justice.”^[51] His ledger page for the school lists a number of contributions Todd made to its defense fund and to the personal defense fund of the school’s publication editor, Algernon Lee.

In July 1918, Todd presented an essay to the Academy of Political Science at its National Conference on the War Economy. His “Relation of Public Ownership to Democracy and Social Justice” summarized his thinking on the subject and was reprinted by a variety of public-affairs periodicals and by the Public Ownership League. Todd framed his argument with an affirmation that “democracy is the greatest thing in the world,” and by pointing out the extreme sacrifices people had just made in in the world war to “make the world safe” for it. He then quoted Lincoln, suggesting that securing democracy was the “unfinished work which they who have fought here have thus far so nobly advanced . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”^[52] The challenge to democracy, Todd continued, was “special privilege.” He again quoted Lincoln, saying that “as a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow.” Todd continued, “His prophecy already has been in part fulfilled, because special privilege has been permitted to secure the control of our great public functions. To restore Democracy, by nationalizing our great public utilities in the interest of the public good, is the great work now before us.”^[53] To Albert Todd, advocacy of public ownership had become a fight to restore democracy to a nation overrun by corporate power. He framed his argument in his interpretation of America’s founding principles, learned in his youth on the Michigan prairie.

Todd claimed that in order to avoid what Jefferson had called the “aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,” the public should own and the government should operate all “utilities and services which are of universal need . . . and especially those which either by nature or by law are monopolies.” Specifically, he proposed to nationalize railroads, telegraph and telephone services, and municipal services such as street railways and gas and electricity utilities. Drawing on his travels in Europe and his study of other nations such as Russia, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and China, Todd observed: “The United States of America is the only nation in the world which does not publicly own and operate its telephone and telegraph systems as government functions” (original emphasis).^[54] He claimed that contrary to a public opinion beguiled by the corporate-controlled press, European public utilities were operated economically. “All these public utilities were efficiently administered and gave a profit to the government.” And “strikes and labor trouble of any kind are so extremely rare as to be almost unknown under public ownership, for the public has no interest nor desire to treat its ‘citizen employees’ otherwise than with generosity and justice.”^[55]

Todd never expressed his opinion regarding the Federal Reserve System, established in 1914. It is possible he viewed it as an attempt to restrict the influence of the money power as it was expressed in financial institutions such as J. P. Morgan’s Wall Street bank, which had presided over the creation of the trusts and monopolies Todd had consistently opposed. To the extent that J. P. Morgan and Company seemed to oppose the government intervention in banking undertaken with the Federal Reserve, Todd may have considered the central bank a positive change.

Todd continued with a detailed description of the Swiss railway system, which had begun under private ownership but had been purchased by the government and been nationalized after a public referendum in 1898. He observed that although the mountainous terrain of Switzerland made railway construction about five times as expensive as it was in the United States, Swiss fares were substantially lower than those in America. He then reviewed the history of the Pacific Railroad construction and the Credit Mobilier’s bribery of politicians before moving on to more recent history. Between 1912 and 1915, he said, the Interstate Commerce Commission had investigated five railway systems that accounted for one-third of the nation’s rail miles. “The evidence secured by the commission shows that every railroad company investigated knowingly falsified its accounts, partly in order to hide expenditures of large sums for controlling politics and elections and influencing legislation and the administration of laws.”^[56] In the case of one railroad, the report had found “more than 300 subsidiary corporations in a web of entangling alliances with each other, many of which are seemingly planned, created, and manipulated by lawyers expressly retained for the purpose of concealment or deception.” This railroad, the report continued, was plagued by “the most glaring instances of maladministration,” and the problems railroads faced were caused by their own mismanagement and not at all by government regulation, which was a frequent excuse. In fact, Todd said, a railroad corporation’s “greatest losses and most costly blunders were made in attempting to circumvent governmental regulation and to extend its domination beyond the limits fixed by law.”^[57] He closed by reiterating, “Government ownership of railroads is desirable; it is practicable; it is the only democratic and just solution of the railway problem, the great emergency of American reconstruction.”^[58]

Todd invited Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago to visit him in Kalamazoo in May 1921. Addams was a vice president of Todd’s Public Ownership League, and the two reformers had traveled in roughly the same circles for decades but may not to have met more than briefly. Todd said he had been to Hull House, “but unfortunately on occasions when you were not present.” He wrote to Addams in early May in response to a letter from her, to say he would be happy to be her host in Kalamazoo, as she had apparently suggested, or, he said, “[If] circumstances make it inconvenient for you to come I shall be delighted to call upon you when I am in Chicago, (where I go quite frequently).”^[59] He also responded to her inquiry about his interest in starting a school of social science like the Rand School in Chicago. He said he had made some “preliminary surveys” but had become concerned that recently “the forces of special privilege and those who have grown rich through war, realizing the injustice of their acts, have decided to eliminate from our schools the teachings of fundamental justice.” He noted that a bill had recently reached its third reading in the New York legislature “compelling every teacher to affirm under oath that he or she does not believe in a ‘change of government’ by force or otherwise.” If such laws passed, he said, “a school such as I had in mind might be compelled to close. It is, of course, possible that the character and courage of the American people will not permit this.” A few weeks later, again responding to a letter from Addams, Todd asked her for the name and address of a man who had written to him on Hull House stationery to discuss starting a school of social science in Chicago. Todd said he had misplaced the letter and asked her to “express to him my apology” and to “transmit my views of the situation as expressed to you. I greatly regret the apparent discourtesy arising from the mislaying of his letter.”^[60]

In 1922, Todd retired as president of the league and was replaced by Willis J. Spaulding, the public-utilities commissioner of Springfield, Illinois. Spaulding was twenty years younger than the seventy-two-year-old Todd and was later instrumental in establishing public water and electrical services in Springfield and building Lake Springfield. Todd retained the title of honorary president but began spending more time at home with his books and artworks. In the eight trips he had made to Europe between 1907 and 1923, he had acquired and shipped home more than thirty thousand pounds of art objects. At the end of his life, he accelerated the process of giving his art away. Other wealthy art collectors such as J. P. Morgan admitted to the press that they had failed to “make some suitable disposition” of their collections “which would render them permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people.”^[61] Todd began giving his art collection away during his lifetime. He provided paintings to decorate the walls of the social hall in his farm community at Mentha and of the public schools of Kalamazoo. He loaned a large part of his collection to Kalamazoo College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which later became permanent gifts. His only stipulation in these gifts was that the recipients had to display the art where the public would be able to see it.

Albert Todd’s gifts of art had a profound social goal in addition to aesthetic appreciation. Todd told a reporter from the Detroit News, “I am buying pictures that will make man more human to his brother.” But the aesthetic goal was also profound in his mind, and he continued, “But also that will strike at the roots of all exploitation by developing the general appreciation of beauty. If the world saw beauty, it would abolish the wrongs of economic injustice; it would open the door of equal opportunity for all.”^[62] Although he apparently considered himself a religious man, Todd never explained any of his actions in terms of his faith. His personal beliefs seem to have provided him with a moral compass rather than with specific rules for action.^[63] In this sense of secular morality, Todd was not too different from the previous peppermint oil-producing family descended from the explicitly materialist Samuel Ranney. All told, Todd gave away more than four hundred paintings during his lifetime. He told another reporter, “It is as important to lift the hearts of men by beauty as it is to challenge their thought by pointing out social misery and wrong.” People needed a belief in the goodness of humanity and the world to challenge injustice and hope for change, Todd thought. And, he said, “I am having a good time buying what I don’t need and never can use. But people can use them, get joy and inspiration from them.” Todd replied to the reporter’s final question: “No, I’ve never figured the money I’ve spent for paintings. If I did, I might get scared and quit.”^[64] When Albert May Todd died at the age of eighty-one on October 6, 1931, his family continued his policy of sharing his collection. In November, paintings worth sixty thousand dollars were given to the city’s public schools, again with the single stipulation that they be kept on display in classrooms and public spaces. A month later, twenty-nine more art objects from the Todd collection were given to Kalamazoo College.

Todd grew up in rural Michigan and lived in the small city of Kalamazoo. He traveled extensively for business and pleasure and was an avid student of European culture, politics, and economics. He was a very successful capitalist who by the end of the career was credited with (or accused of) single-handedly controlling the American peppermint oil markets. But he achieved his success in a competitive marketplace and consistently opposed monopolies built on government-granted privileges or protection. His rural background and Midwestern experience drew his political ideals toward populism and democratic socialism. But Todd was far from the stereotypical populist or socialist. In The Populist Vision, historian Charles Postel examined the ways “Americans responded to the traumas of technological innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural globalization” at the end of the nineteenth century.^[65] Postel told a story of how “Populists were influenced by modernity,” but not all Populists were victims of modernity. Albert Todd was a technological innovator and the leader of a corporation with an international clientele that was occasionally suspected of seeking to monopolize the essential oil business. His populism was not characterized by rural anxiety over the baffling complexity of new urban commercial and financial centers. Todd was one of the populists Postel described who “sought to reshape government as an agency of the majority rather than of the corporate and wealthy minority.” But Todd wished to use government as an agent of democracy not from a generalized dread of plutocracy enflamed by muckraking media but because he had precise personal knowledge of the excesses and corruption of an economy run for the benefit of the money power.^[66] Similarly, he supported socialists and their organizations throughout his life but never advocated the elimination of capitalist competition and collective ownership of all of the means of production. It may be significant this was the single plank of the Socialist Labor Party’s platform that the populists had rejected when formulating their 1892 party platform.^[67] Todd’s example of a successful businessman supporting Populist ideals suggests the standard portrayal of the People’s Party may be incomplete. Like many populists, Todd had no interest in nationalizing everything. He sought public ownership of natural monopolies and government action to break trusts and combinations that prevented competition. And he fought to eliminate tariffs that supported wealthy corporations at the expense of poor, often rural consumers. Ultimately, he believed in people. He advocated for democratic reforms because he trusted regular people like himself to make better decisions than plutocrats. And he gave his artworks to public institutions to “lift the hearts” of his neighbors and help them believe in a brighter future.