After being elected mayor of Cleveland in 1941, Frank Lausche was asked to fire city Safety Director Eliot Ness, the untouchable crimestopper most famous for busting mobster Al Capone.
The Democratic machine bosses wanted Mr. Lausche to replace Mr. Ness, a Republican, with a party crony. Mr. Lausche refused.
Mr. Lausche s break with Cleveland Democrats solidified his identity as the rarest breed of politician a genuine independent.
As he ascended to become Ohio governor and a U.S. senator, Mr. Lausche appealed to voters by abandoning party lines and ideologies, according to a new biography by James E. Odenkirk, Frank J. Lausche: Ohio s Great Political Maverick.
A Democrat ought not to vote for a bad Democrat. Nor should a Republican vote for a bad Republican, Mr. Lausche told a Youngstown rally in the 1940s. Your selection should be made only on the basis of what is best for your country and my country.
Governor Lausche s long and successful career in the past century could be a guide for the candidates for governor this year, especially for U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland (D., Lisbon), the front-runner in the May 2 Democratic primary.
Much like Mr. Lausche, the leading candidates in this year s governor s race have battled elements of their parties establishments. Yet, unlike Mr. Lausche, neither has alienated their parties dominant interest groups.
Congressman Strickland, substantially ahead of former state Rep. Bryan Flannery in the latest polls, has stood up against his party s national agenda in opposing gun control, but he has done so when speaking to Democrats at a gun club.
I ve tried to prevent myself from being pigeonholed as someone who reacts on party expectations, Mr. Strickland said recently.
Ken Blackwell, Ohio s secretary of state, who is leading Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro in the polls for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has bucked his party by openly criticizing outgoing Gov. Bob Taft, a fellow Republican, for his tax policies, claiming they betray conservative principles.
Long after Mr. Lausche left the Senate in 1969, Ohio politicians looked to him as a master statesman.
When I first went to the legislature, I was asked, Are you a Republican? said George Voinovich in 1995, a former Cleveland mayor and Ohio governor, and a current U.S. senator. My response was, I m a Lausche Republican!
Mr. Lausche s oratory prowess sparked a legion of fans, including James A. Rhodes, a Republican who served 16 years as Ohio s governor.
We actually stole word by word from his speeches, Mr. Rhodes said at Mr. Lausche s 1990 funeral.
Because of the scandals swirling around Columbus in the past year from the Tom Noe rare-coin investment debacle to Governor Taft s convictions for ethics violations Republicans are faced with a different kind of election this year, and Democrats have been given their best chance to make inroads in two decades.
[Ken Blackwell s] the person who challenges the establishment, challenges the status quo, said Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo, before adding a vital caveat. You can be a maverick, but you cannot win unless you re a coalition builder.
And there s the rub. While candidates who veer from party machines are popular in opinion polls, they won t necessarily triumph in elections. As a result, candidates today must simultaneously assert their independence while maintaining their party loyalty.
For much of his career, Mr. Lausche was able to avoid this dilemma because his low-key campaigns were inexpensive, he had an ethnic and geographic political base, and he was a persuasive speaker.
Elected to the governor s office five times and the Senate twice, he dominated state politics between World War II and the Vietnam War. He had attained enough national stature by 1956 to be considered a potential Democratic nominee for the presidency. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, contemplated having Mr. Lausche as his running mate as he sought a second term.
Opinion polls do not exist showing why voters returned Mr. Lausche to office so often. But the themes of his campaigns were constant. He defined himself as a genuine Democrat who believes in equal opportunity for all without stacking the cards in favor of one group or another, said a 1965 Blade article.
Mr. Lausche pushed ideas that broadened the opportunities available to the country, the state, and its residents. He chastised any entity that might limit those opportunities whether it be his own Democratic Party or organized labor.
And even though a Democrat, he was a conservative in many ways.
Since Mr. Lausche s tenure, two of the three Democrats elected governor have served one term: Toledo s Mike DiSalle and Cincinnati s John Gilligan.
And during his eight years as governor, Democrat Richard Celeste fought internal scandals, which paved the way for the current GOP dominance statewide.
Mr. Lausche was more conservative than Republican governors such as Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Voinovich, said Mr. Odenkirk, the author of the latest book about Mr. Lausche.
He was a very conservative, anti-Communist, minimum government spending, no pork barrel, the author said last week.
With his unkempt steel wool hair, Mr. Lausche cultivated a common man image. He owned just two dress suits when he first moved into the governor s mansion in 1945. His predecessor, Gov. John Bricker, left office with 92 suits.
Rather than spin words, Mr. Lausche spoke his mind. At a Prohibition-era speech, he wowed the Chagrin Falls Women s Christian Temperance Union, which rewarded him with loud applause before the question-and-answer period.
You haven t said anything about light wine and beer. How do you stand on them? a woman asked.
I could use a cold glass of beer right now, said Mr. Lausche, undermining any goodwill that had existed moments earlier.
That honesty also transformed unwelcoming audiences into fervent supporters.
Mr. Lausche spoke to a group of hostile Cincinnati Democrats for about an hour in 1944, according to Inside U.S.A., a book by John Gunther.
Before he came, it was a dead sure shot that 90 percent of the people there would vote against him; when he left, 90 percent were on his side, one attendee said.
Rivals underestimated Mr. Lausche, a Cleveland native born in 1895 to immigrants from Slovenia, a country sandwiched between Italy and Austria.
He has a foreign name and looks foreign, which does not go well in rural Ohio, wrote Robert Taft, grandfather of the current governor, in a 1944 letter to a friend. He is Catholic but married a divorced woman, which leaves him rather weak with both religious groups.
Mr. Lausche s wife, Jane Sheal, was actually Methodist and not a divorcee. The marriage itself embodied the independence exhibited in Mr. Lausche s politics. She was Protestant. He was Catholic. They did not attend church together.
Although he rarely went to Mass, Mr. Lausche Ohio s first Catholic governor maintained close ties to St. Vitus, a Slovenian church off of St. Clair Avenue on Cleveland s east side.
The couple s courtship and engagement took seven years. The marriage was kept secret for two weeks. They honeymooned in Washington.
Her parents were Republicans. He agreed to live with them for several weeks after their 1928 marriage. She learned Slovenian in order to talk with his mother, Frances.
A former interior decorator, Mrs. Lausche kept her husband who was indifferent to clothes, food, or weather organized. Her abilities caused reporters to state that she was better than Eleanor Roosevelt, the highly respected wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Despite Mr. Taft s comments, Mr. Lausche benefited from having a foreign last name.
Fluent in English and Slovenian, Mr. Lausche had a natural political base in ethnic neighborhoods that flourished at the turn of the century because of a boom in European immigration, Mr. Odenkirk writes.
In fact, Mr. Lausche s bilingualism attracted his first prominent supporter, Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the former Cleveland Press, a newspaper that tirelessly championed Mr. Lausche s candidacies.
Mr. Lausche was among second-generation Americans who maintained an ethnic identity while assimilating into American culture, an uncommon balance in today s political environment.
Buckeye State politicians no longer possess the same degree of immigrant constituencies. About 3 percent of Ohio residents are foreign-born, well below the national average of 11 percent, according to the 2000 Census.
And the percentage of the state s population living in Cuyahoga and Summit counties, Mr. Lausche s geographic base, has declined.
As Ohio has swung more conservative politically in recent years, candidates, especially Democrats, could take a page from Mr. Lausche s playbook if they want to achieve electoral success.
Contrary to conventional wisdom in the 1940s and 1950s, rural Ohioans many of them Republicans accepted Mr. Lausche, who never graduated from college but played semi-pro baseball while attending the John Marshall School of Law in Cleveland.
At a game in Belmont County, near the West Virginia border, Mr. Lausche first noticed the ravages of strip mining. Restoring old strip mines became a torch issue in his campaigns for governor and senator, boosting Mr. Lausche s popularity in southern Ohio.
A big part of Governor Lausche s success is that he operated separately from political bosses and their pet issues. Rather than structure his campaign around Democratic interest groups, he founded it on the idea of service.
The principal purpose of a political organization should be to render service to the government, while a political machine is a body ostensibly organized for that purpose, but in reality functioning to gain spoils and patronage for itself, Governor Lausche said in 1945.
His words carried weight because they were backed by public actions that challenged the political machines.
In his first gubernatorial campaign, he refused to take money from anyone who did business with the state. And his campaign reimbursed Cleveland for the days then-Mayor Lausche spent on the gubernatorial trail.
He won the 1944 election by spending $27,132, a microscopic sum compared to the $988,000 spent by his Republican opponent, James Garfield Stewart, former mayor of Cincinnati.
How candidates finance their campaigns is at the heart of the current scandal in Ohio, with Mr. Noe, a GOP fund-raiser, charged with stealing money from state-funded rare-coin funds he managed and charged with illegally funneling money to the Bush-Cheney campaign.
Mr. Noe was a contributor to Governor Taft, Mr. Blackwell, Mr. Petro, and most top elected Republican state officials.
Blade investigations have shown that the campaigns of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Petro have accepted campaign cash from employees or political action committees of companies doing business with their state offices.
While Mr. Blackwell has stressed the need for greater transparency in contributions and state contracts, Mr. Petro has called for a moratorium on contributions from contractors.
Mr. Strickland, a newcomer on the statewide political scene, is still accepting contributions from state vendors, but says the entire contracting system must be scrutinized.
Mr. Lausche summarized his political philosophy as pragmatic and anti-elitist.
I will support legislation to guarantee constitutional rights and to promote the general welfare, keeping in mind a realistic financial limit on what the government can and cannot do, he told The Blade in 1965.
In Mr. Lausche s opinion, labor unions detracted from the general welfare because they forced new employees to join them.
Attracting voluntary members is not a difficult task for an organization providing useful services and commanding the respect of its followers, he said in 1977. A compulsory membership scheme benefits only the offices of an organization and its bureaucracy.
That mind-set rankled union leadership, which eventually would spend millions of dollars to defeat Mr. Lausche in the 1968 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Even though union leaders campaigned against Mr. Lausche, many union members responded positively to his message.
John Lokar, his longtime political aide, estimated in 1994 that Mr. Lausche enjoyed about a 50-50 support from labor.
Mr. Lausche s core campaign strategy was to rally an amorphous group of voters around a relatively universal core of ideas instead of making promises of preferential policies to the influential leaders of pre-existing blocs.
Congressman Strickland has followed a similar course of symbolic independence by declining to accept congressional health insurance until all of his constituents are insured.
Unlike Mr. Strickland, Mr. Lausche was uninterested in receiving endorsements from labor unions and other party-related entities seeking to influence policies.
Although Mr. Lausche lost his gubernatorial re-election campaign in 1946, voters returned him to the governor s office from 1948 to 1954. In 1956, he won a U.S. Senate seat.
Mr. Lausche maintained an open and friendly administration in Columbus, said William Saxbe last week.
Mr. Saxbe, now 89, was a Republican member of the Ohio House during Mr. Lausche s tenure as governor.
He wanted to be all things to all people, and you could never tell what he was going to do, said Mr. Saxbe, who later served as a U.S. senator and ambassador to India. He would invite me and other Republicans to policy meetings.
Republicans were active in the Lausche administration, even holding seats in his cabinet. Mr. Lausche s conservative fiscal policies guaranteed support from the GOP.
Although its revenue has nearly trebled [from $396 million to $1,019,759,404], Ohio has not voted a general tax increase during the Lausche decade, Time magazine reported in 1956. The governor runs the state on a tight annual budget and usually reports a tidy surplus in the treasury each year.
He increased spending for welfare and education programs but refused to accede to the budgetary demands made by the teachers union, a key Democratic constituency, according to a 1985 book about Mr. Lausche called Ohio s Lincoln.
His most enduring legislative accomplishment was the planning and construction of the Ohio Turnpike. He pushed a bond issue through the General Assembly in 1949 and a separate $500 million bond referendum in 1953 to finance it.
By maintaining cordial relations with Republicans, Mr. Lausche isolated himself from his own party and the influences of its bosses, a favorite target in his anti-corruption speeches on the campaign trail.
His major concern was keeping himself in office, said John Gilligan, 85, who beat Mr. Lausche in the 1968 Senate primary. He wouldn t tolerate anyone else having any kind of attention.
Part of the problem with being an independent is that there is only room for one. Political parties have a full slate of candidates seeking office, each hoping to grab the coattails ahead of them.
At a Democratic event during Mr. Lausche s tenure as governor, Mr. Gilligan stationed a photographer behind a row of potted palms. After Mr. Lausche shook the hands of three Democrats running for legislature, the three turned him around to the palm trees.
A flashbulb exploded and suddenly Mr. Lausche was making an unwilling endorsement of his winning team for the next morning s newspaper.
The cameraman went racing down the hall with a state trooper in pursuit, Mr. Gilligan said. That s how ridiculous it was.
Mr. Lausche opposed organized labor, an important source of Democratic votes then and now. He supported a 1958 ballot initiative that would have allowed new factory workers to opt out of joining their co-workers union, a heresy among Democrats.
He had started out as a workingman s representative, but he was just dreadful on all labor-management issues, said Mr. Gilligan, who lost the 1968 general election for U.S. Senate after beating Mr. Lausche in the primary but became Ohio s governor from 1971-1975.
With cooperation from the AFL-CIO, Mr. Gilligan mounted a campaign to oust the two-term senator in 1968. Party leaders estimated that it would take more than $2 million ($11.39 million today) to beat Mr. Lausche.
His strength was really a myth, Warren Smith, a bitter foe of Mr. Lausche s, said recently. Mr. Smith was executive secretary of the AFL-CIO during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Time had eroded Mr. Lausche s base. The Vietnam War and civil rights movements had pushed voters to ideological stances that did not exist at the beginning of his career. And Mr. Lausche was a Vietnam hawk, despite the controversy surrounding the war.
He lost touch with voters in 1968, who cared more about urban problems than party bosses or communism. But Mr. Lausche preferred to harp about the French and what a bum Charles de Gaulle turned out to be, a Cleveland Plain Dealer analysis showed after his Senate defeat.
Mr. Gilligan also relied on a new campaign tool: television. He produced a 30-minute documentary in which he voiced concerns about pollution, poverty, and the Vietnam War.
I agree, we re in a new era of politics, Lausche adviser Sam Abrams told the Plain Dealer. We thought Lausche was so well-entrenched and some of our earlier polls showed him winning 2-1 that it created a feeling Lausche didn t have to do anything differently than he always has.
The expense of television ads now makes it difficult for candidates to turn down contributions as Mr. Lausche did.
Quite frankly, I think campaigns have changed rather dramatically since Lausche served in office, Mr. Strickland said. You ve got a duty as a candidate to communicate with the voters and get your viewpoint out to people.
But for any candidate who clears the primary, it continues to be worthwhile to study Mr. Lausche s campaign strategies.
He couldn t be beaten in the general election, Mr. Gilligan said.
Contact Joshua Boak at: jboak@theblade.com or 419-724-6728.
First Published April 16, 2006, 3:38 p.m.