William Mills Ivins

• William Mills Ivins
• Born: April 22, 1851
• Died: July 23, 1915

Lawyer and civic reformer, was born in Freehold, New Jersey. His parents, Augustus Ivins and Sarah Mills Ivins, moved to Brooklyn, New York, when Ivins was a young boy. He was educated at Adelphi Academy and after graduation worked for a while for a publishing company. He soon left this concern, however, to study law at Columbia University. He was graduated in 1873, passed the bar, and subsequently established a firm in Brooklyn.

Early in his career Ivins became interested in municipal politics, and especially in the rooting out of corruption. He was part of a movement that drove Hugh McLaughlin, boss of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, into retirement in 1880. Because of this and other efforts to fight political abuses, Ivins won a local reputation as a reformer.

In 1880 William R. Grace, a prominent businessman and Tammany for, was elected mayor of New York City and appointed Ivins as his personal secretary. Ivins moved to Manhattan and was named city chamberlain in 1885, an office that he held until 1889 and that enabled him to gain expert knowledge of municipal government. During the 1880s Ivins was active in the County Democracy, an organization that had grown up in opposition to Tammany. Very much a Mugwump and not at all a party man, Ivins broke with the County Democracy when he felt that it too had become a machine, dedicated to its own interests over those of the public.

From 1886 to 1888 Ivins also served as a state judge-advocate general. In 1889 he resigned his office as city chamberlain to begin a business career as a partner in the firm of W. R. Grace & Co., which had extensive commercial dealings in South America. But finding business unsatisfying, Ivins soon returned to law and political reform.

During 1890-1891 Ivins served as counsel to the New York State Senate committee on cities, which undertook an investigation of the New York City government. This work enhanced Ivins’s reputation, for he proved an able cross-examiner, adept in drawing the truth out of recalcitrant witnesses. He also prepared the committee’s report, which demonstrated his expert knowledge of municipal affairs.

Ivins’s reputation helped to win him the Republican nomination for mayor of New York City in 1905. He came in a distant third to George B. McLellan, the Democratic candidate, and William Randolph Hearst, who ran as an independent. Ivins had little hope of winning, but his chances were badly undercut by the defection of Republican voters who cared little for his tendency to put the public interest above party loyalty. In an address entitled “The Soul of the People,” which he delivered in 1906, Ivins contended that the three greatest issues facing the nation were reform of election laws, municipal control of public utilities, and the revamping of municipal government.

During his life Ivins did much to address these issues. From the 1880s on he called for reforms in New York’s election laws that would take power away from the party machines and make for a purer democracy. He also served as counsel to a number of commissions that studied the operations of New York City’s utilities, and his name was associated with the movement for public service commissions. In 1907 Ivins served on a committee, appointed by the state legislature, that proposed a new charter for New York City. Like many of Ivins’s other proposals, this charter was not adopted, but it had an impact on municipal reform during the Progressive era. Ivins might best be regarded as a bridge between late nineteenth-century Mugwumps and Progressive reformers who stressed the importance of honest, efficient government, particularly on the municipal level.

In addition to his attainments as a lawyer and reformer, Ivins was a man of wide-ranging intellectual interests—so varied that The New York Times compared him to Leonardo da Vinci. A bibliophile, he owned an extensive library that indluded many rare items. He was also an art collector and a member of the Municipal Art Society. An accomplished linguist, he was a master of French, German, Spanish, Portugese, and Italian, working on translations of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was as well a student of military history and diplomacy, among other subjects, and at his death his papers contained manuscripts on these subjects.

Ivins died at the age of sixty-four, before he was able to complete an ambitious study of the rubber trade. He was survived by his wife Emma Laura (Yard) Ivins, whom he had married on February 3, 1879, and by their four children.

Ivins’s published writings include Machine Politics (1887). For biographical material see the Dictionary of American Biography (1932) and the obituary in The New York Times, July 24, 1915.