Hazen S. Pingree

Who was Hazen S. Pingree?

Hazen Stuart Pingree was a four-term Republican mayor of Detroit and the 24th Governor of the U.S. State of Michigan. A Yankee who migrated from New England, he was a social reformer who battled corporations and was an early leader of the Progressive Movement.

A businessman with no political experience, Pingree was elected mayor in 1889 after a colorful campaign in which Pingree revealed his tolerance by making a circuit of saloons. Pingree added to the old stock Yankee Republican base by making large inroads into the German and Canadian elements. He was reelected in 1891, 1893 and 1895. Warning repeatedly against the dangers of government by corporations, he launched nationally visible crusades against Detroit's streetcar, gas, electric, and telephone companies. He successfully forced rate reductions that won him widespread popularity. He won public approval for a citizen-owned electric light plant, and became a national spokesman for municipal ownership and close regulation of utilities and street railways. When the nationwide Panic of 1893 caused a severe depression, Pingree gained support by opening empty lots to garden farming – people called him "Potato Patch Pingree." Pingree was a Republican, and had nothing to do with the Populist Party that had considerable support among labor union members. He supported the gold standard in 1896, and worked to carry Michigan for William McKinley over silverite William Jennings Bryan in the intensely competitive 1896 U.S. presidential election. Pingree was on the ballot, too, and was elected governor of Michigan. As governor, he fought a strong conservative opposition, but did succeed in forcing passage of the nation's first major statewide reappraisal of railroad and corporate property, with an eye to raising their taxes. This led to a rational basis for railroad regulation and taxation, emulated by Progressive reformers in other states and nationwide. A survey of scholars in 1999 ranked Pingree as the fourth best mayor in all of American history.