Hazen Stuart Pingree

• Hazen S. Pingree
• Born: August 30, 1840
• Died: June 18, 1901

Reform mayor of Detroit and governor of Michigan, was born in Denmark, Maine, the fourth child of Jasper Pingree, a farmer, and Adeline (Bryant) Pingree. He left school at fourteen to work in a cotton mill and later in a shoe factory. In the summer of 1862 he enlisted in Company F, Fourteenth Massachusetts Infantry (later the First Massachusetts Heavy Artillery), and in 1864 reenlisted for the duration of the Civil War. He was captured in May 1864 and paroled in November. After being mustered out as a private in 1865, Pingree joined the westward tide of Union veterans and moved to Detroit, where he found work in a shoe factory

Detroit in 1865 was on the threshold of a massive economic boom. The city had been shifting from commerce to industry for twenty years; Michigan law and court decisions had erected strong barriers against any public control over business; and the arrival of a wave of newcomers—veterans, Yankees, and European immigrants—with a penchant for technological innovation completed the conditions for rapid growth. Pingree’s early career typified the rise of Detroit’s postwar generation of industrial giants. On becoming a partner in a small shoe-manufacturing concern late in 1866, he immediately set about modernizing its primitive operations in the best tradition of nineteenth-century rationalism.

The company developed into a million-dollar business, and Pingree bought a house in an elite neighborhood for his family, which included his wife, the former Frances A. Gilbert (a schoolteacher whom he had married in 1872), his son and two daughters, and his father. He attended Baptist services regularly and became a booster and a joiner. He was active in the GAR (the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ group), the Masons, and the Michigan Club (a group of prominent businessmen formed to revitalize the Republican party after its defeat in 1884).

In 1889 the Michigan Club offered Pingree the nomination for mayor and he embarked on an active campaign, promising reform in the city administration. According to the club’s nominating petition, “reform” meant lower taxes and less public spending, but to the rank-and-file voters Pingree conveyed a different interpretation of reform. He courted his old shoe customers, organized his employees into a Pingree for Mayor club, and mingled with Irish, German, and Polish immigrant voters in neighborhood saloons. These activities, and his endorsement of the eight-hour day, brought him the traditionally Democratic labor and ethnic vote and an easy victory.

After entering office, the politically na]ve Pingree gradually became aware of the stranglehold that private vested interests held on Detroit and its 200,000 people. In the course of two tempestuous terms, during which he fought the gas, electric, telephone, and—above all—transit companies, he evolved from an antimachine structural reformer who emphasized honesty, efficiency, and businesslike organization into a social reformer who advocated outright public ownership and control of public utilities and transit. Along with his continued sensitivity to ethnic interests, these policies brought many working-class and foreign-stock voters into the Republican party, revitalizing it in a way not anticipated by the Michigan Club.

In 1896 Pingree was elected to the first of two terms as governor of Michigan. With a program that anticipated those of Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and other progressives, he fought the railroad and mining companies in an effort to stop their chronic tax evasion, and he established commissions to devise scientific methods of evaluating corporate property for the purpose of setting equitable taxes and rates. He was less effective as governor than as mayor; legislatures were uncooperative, the device of direct appeal to the voters was not as powerful over a wider area, and his second term was shadowed by scandals. Physically and financially depleted, Pingree retired from public life—temporarily, he insisted—to travel and to write a history of the Boer War. At the age of sixty, while doing research in England, he died.

Hazen Pingree’s significance as an important progressive reformer was long neglected by historians who concentrated on figures emerging after the “official” beginning of the progressive era—the advent of Theodore Roosevelt as president. More recent studies of urban history have demonstrated that Pingree left an important legacy to progressivism and to urban reform. His administration showed that contrary to the received wisdom of nineteenth-century reformers, honesty, efficiency, and social responsibility could be combined without purging municipal governments of their working-class and ethnic representatives through civil-service reform. Perhaps more significantly, it showed that modern city government can be an effective instrument for social change and the creation of unity in a fragmented society.

Pingree’s papers are in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. His only book was Facts and Opinions, or Dangers That Beset Us (1895), but many of his addresses are in print. For biographical data see Michigan Biographies, vol. 2 (1924) and W. M. Pengry, A Genealogical Record of the Descendants of Moses Pengry of Ipswich, Massachusetts (1881). M. G. Holli. Reform in Detroit: Haien S. Pingree and Urban Politics (1969), views Pingree’s career in the light of modern urban studies. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1934).