James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus by Tom Diemer, Lee Leonard, and Richard G. Zimmerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus by Tom Diemer, Lee Leonard, and Richard G. Zimmerman Herb Asher Tom Diemer, Lee Leonard, and Richard G. Zimmerman, James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2014. 256 pp. $34.95. Of the numerous books I have read about Governor Rhodes, James A. Rhodes: Ohio Colossus is the best for a number of reasons. It is the most comprehensive book covering Rhodes' upbringing, his early political experiences, his four successful runs for governor and his unsuccessful 1986 campaign for a fifth term. The book also details the initiatives and accomplishments of the four Rhodes' administrations and discusses the occasional political and policy setbacks. The reader also gets an intimate sense of Rhodes' administrative and management style and of how important a few key staff aides were in keeping the administration on track. For Rhodes, the three key cabinet departments were the Ohio Department of Development, the Ohio Department of Transportation, and the Office of Budget and Management. These three were the departments most relevant to the governor's focus on jobs, economic development, and, often, capital construction bond issues to foster jobs and economic growth. For the other cabinet directors, it was generally sufficient to appoint good people and let them run their departments without much oversight or control—unless they messed up. Both as a candidate and as governor, Rhodes often operated separately from the Ohio Republican Party. The book also covers Rhodes's activities in the four years (1971–1974) between his terms as governor and his post gubernatorial career from 1982 on. The reader learns that Rhodes was an incredibly creative person with ideas galore, an entrepreneurial figure, a dreamer, and a savvy businessman. The [End Page 74] book does a masterful job capturing Rhodes' political philosophy or, perhaps better, his approach to government and politics. When he ran against his Democratic opponents, he would accuse them of having raised taxes and being tax and spend liberals. But after he was elected, he would happily spend these tax dollars on projects and programs. Critics of Rhodes attacked him as a "borrow and spend" governor because he routinely promoted bond issues to be on the ballot to build capital construction projects. The book is more than a descriptive history of the life of Jim Rhodes and the Rhodes era; it is also analytical and interpretive. One gets a good sense of what motivated the Governor. Rhodes understood that government impacted people and that many Ohioans were hurting economically. For Rhodes, the best remedy for that hurt was a job. Indeed, "jobs, jobs, jobs" and "jobs and progress" became the overarching rationale for Rhodes' successful and unsuccessful initiatives. Rhodes believed that Ohioans voted for hope. The book also details some of the problems and setbacks of the Rhodes administrations including the killing of four students at Kent State University during the era of Vietnam War protests. One of the major policy rejections the governor suffered was the overwhelming defeat of his proposed Ohio Bond Commission amendment to the Ohio Constitution. This proposal would have established a "gubernatorial-controlled development bank with the authority to raise, without a further vote of the people, capital improvement funds using long term mortgage financing" (50). This audacious proposal was rejected by the voters by a two to one margin in 1967, but that did not deter Rhodes from successfully advocating for future capital improvement bond issues. The authors treat Governor Rhodes a bit gently in a number of areas. Certainly their discussion of Rhodes' role in the Kent State tragedy is less critical of him than many other narratives on the topic. And repeatedly, the authors are somewhat soft on some of the aspects of development deals that the Governor promoted such as the successful attempt to attract Honda to Ohio. Often, as a facility or a manufacturing plant was being sited, it turned out that friends and supporters of the Governor "had the good fortune" to own land adjacent to these facilities, land which, of course, became much more valuable. And the treatment of how the Governor obtained his real estate license was probably too forgiving, although that story is now firmly...