Today's urban leaders are more polished, more inclusive, and more powerless than the Titans they replaced — which is why the hardest problems go unsolved
Aaron, thank you. This hits home because it is home. Some of your recent articles and the comments here brought up themes that I am thinking about with this article.
I get the impression the titans in Columbus, the exception being Wexner, were largely from the mainline Protestant tradition. Maybe the collapse of mainline Protestantism, along with a high concentration of college educated residents, correlates with the lack of religion in Columbus today. During the days of the titans, Columbus was not only known as a test market, but also as one of the most charitable cities in the country. I don’t think either point is the case anymore.
One interesting note about the Columbus technocrats of today, such as government, non-profit, and the Columbus Partnership. J.D. Vance lived in Columbus for a time and was very popular with these folks. This was while Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy book was hitting the scene and during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Virtually all of the Columbus establishment was anti-Trump, including Vance himself. During Trump’s first term, Vance moved to Cincinnati and became a Trump supporter for 2020. When Vance started running office, the Columbus establishment that loved him was not so much in love with him. Today, Vance is Vice President. That wouldn’t have happened if he stayed in Columbus.
Thanks. The other Titans were all mainline Protestants with the possible exception of Wobst, whose religious background I couldn't determine. Columbus has a low Catholic population share and was a heavily Protestant community. This is likely because of its lack of heavy industry. It never attracted the large scale European ethnic migrants who were heavily Catholic like the Poles to Chicago. This is part of why the city never had a political machine, and lacks the hyperfragmentation and parochialism of the places that did have more immigrants and/or where more heavily Catholic. Columbus did have a longstanding Jewish merchant elite as well.
Great piece. Historic elites also used to own shocking proportions of real estate in their areas of power. This is because the ownership of land and the ownership of wealth were more or less the same thing in most situations until early modernity and the maturity of the industrial revolution. We don't see a lot of that anymore apart from a few eccentrics. The old playbook can still create some surprising synergies like in your Detroit example, but it isn't the norm.
Perhaps part of it is that it is really easy to be very rich up to a certain level with minimal responsibilities to do anything except not being stupid and self-destructive (a very high bar that many people fail to clear because of the inherent temptations that adhere to wealth). You can be very rich and just accumulate more wealth like an old tree grows a much larger weight of wood every year than a young tree without doing much of anything or being responsible for anyone in your community to a degree not possible before the early 20th century.
Our municipal governments are also weird in that they are administered by these weird semi-professional flunkies who are supposed to be independent, rather than directly by urban shareholders and landowners. Ostensibly this is supposed to make them more neutral and accountable to the broad citizenry, but in practice you just get these weird technocrat mutants obsessed with minutiae like bike lanes and DEI. The experiment has been tried and the results have been bad, but we keep acting like we need more data, so the "experiments" in self-government by what amounts to an educated class of homeless people continue forever. We call this system developed in the 19th and 20th centuries by the Greek-derived word "democracy," but it has nothing to do with what the Greeks would have recognized and is also alien to our native traditions of municipal government.
Robert Fogelson's "Downtown: Its Rise and Fall" details how blue bloods in the older cities set up family trusts using land leases for the land beneath skyscrapers. This is a passive investment for the trust, since the tower's owner pays the land lease in a similar way that they pay property taxes. Even though they don't actively or passively manage the towers, these land lease situations force heirs to take an interest in perpetuating the value of their downtown.
Today, it is too easy to make money and fuel family trusts with public stocks and other strategies that are national, not local. I wonder if heirs around the country have tried to remove land leases from their trusts and replace them with diversified assets.
Former Ohio Senator Rob Portman's family owns The Golden Lamb in Lebanon, which is one of the state's oldest businesses (it's about 200 years old). Stewardship of a regional landmark like this breeds a completely different mindset in an heir than stocks that pay four dividends per year.
I think the issue with that is just risk. An REIT, a private lending product, or just stocks are going to often pay more while having greater downside protection risk. For example, if you inherited a lot of LA rental real estate, a lot of your portfolio would be vulnerable to the novel eviction protection regime they developed in just that city. Or you could make more money on a portfolio that is completely national and not locally exposed to exotic problems.
Interesting. I didn't know Portman owned the golden lamb. I do think that ground leases are in decline, but are still common in NYC. But again, that latter city is one of the few places where a significant number of people still have fortunes directly tied to the value of Manhattan real estate. Sounds like a great book I need to check out.
Historically (like Dell Computer 2005 and Maytag 2003) diversity fanatics gain control of the board. Seattle is/was a liberal-wack-job nexus. Boeing documents surfacing a few years ago have the strong odor of hysterical obsession with eradicating demonic white privilege. They exhibit this by attacking their own (white) engineers.
The cat-and-mouse MO: The board hires a new CEO with the specific intent to show the world how virtuous the board is; and make the CEO the fall-guy if the madness leads to failure, which of course it does.
What modern liberalism does is to substitute the universal awareness that demons exist, but instead of dealing with supernatural demons they can only look for corporeal ones, in this case white supremacy, because they don't believe in supernatural demons. Modernist liberals are constantly assailed by corporeal demons; racism, sexism, homophobia, climate deniers, vax deniers, on and on. They are in a state of constant hysteria and spend trillions of dollars every year attempting to eradicate, punish or control the demons. They are experts in deflection and double talk.
Outstanding as always. Perhaps the two "tracks" of the K will keep going for a while. A visitor to San Francisco recently (Ed West?) wrote of how strange it is to see highly paid tech workers queuing for trendy expensive restaurants, stepping past fentanyl zombies lying on the sidewalk, and the two classes of people acting as if each other didn't exist. Admittedly an extreme example, but it seems that America is wealthy enough to tolerate a great deal of dysfunction, fraud, and expensive welfare programs, as long as the line keeps going up for the top half of the K.
I’m a political “activist” in Columbus. This gives me a lot to consider. The bit about religious disaffiliation is particularly resonant and helps explain the ground level realities. A few points I’d like to add:
—In the 1980’s, decisions were made to elevate Ohio State University to “Public Ivy” status, competing with the likes of the University of Michigan and UC-Berkeley. Open enrollment was eliminated for the sprawling Columbus campus, but retained for satellite campuses in small, economically stagnant towns. Emphasis shifted away from forging students into civically-minded, economically-productive Ohioans, and towards a focus on attracting “top talent” in a global marketplace.
—Because most of the city’s growth came well after the industrial boom, Columbus is sprawled out in very inefficient ways. Township, municipal, county, and school district(!) lines make decision-making more circuitous, with more choke points. One of the biggest impediments to social connections is a 20 minute drive. (I have heard an elected official lament his colleagues’ reluctance to leave Downtown and engage with more distant neighborhoods.)
—The religious landscape is a hodgepodge of aging WASPs and nominal Catholics, as well as diverse nondenominational evangelicals. If you are a millennial or Gen-Z, your religious involvement is primarily wedding- or holiday-related, at most.
—The only enduring institutions here are government and the university. Technocratic thinking is dominant in the cultural DNA. Government is management by another name. With a lack of strong overarching allegiances, the political landscape has similar vibes to a mainline denomination.
I am curious about what the old Titans would have done about the poverty of the 50,000 to 60,000 Somalis in Columbus. Would a different leadership model really make a difference there?
No. But the federal government isn't sending refugees. They are resettled via local non-profit agencies. Certainly if the civic leadership didn't want large scale Somali refugee resettlement, in the old days they would have had a lot of influence with those organizations to shape their behavior.
We can handle 10-20K better than 50-60K in the same sense that I can handle shooting myself in one foot better than I can handle shooting myself in both feet.
What benefit to Columbus would 10-20K Somalis be? Just as America should fashion foreign policy based on its own interests while compromising just enough to maintain relationships, Columbus should pursue policies that benefit Columbus, rather than policies that make some leftist in D.C. feel good about himself.
Looking at the description in the article, I can guarantee that there were a lot of low-skill jobs created in this economic boom that no one is going to move from their hometown for; depending on how many people are unemployed in Columbus and why, a few thousand Somalian immigrants would be able to A. find jobs and support themselves and B. do so without significantly depressing wages.
You would also be better able to settle them strategically--i.e., scattered about so they can't clump up into unassimilable blocs.
Aaron, thank you. This hits home because it is home. Some of your recent articles and the comments here brought up themes that I am thinking about with this article.
I get the impression the titans in Columbus, the exception being Wexner, were largely from the mainline Protestant tradition. Maybe the collapse of mainline Protestantism, along with a high concentration of college educated residents, correlates with the lack of religion in Columbus today. During the days of the titans, Columbus was not only known as a test market, but also as one of the most charitable cities in the country. I don’t think either point is the case anymore.
One interesting note about the Columbus technocrats of today, such as government, non-profit, and the Columbus Partnership. J.D. Vance lived in Columbus for a time and was very popular with these folks. This was while Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy book was hitting the scene and during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Virtually all of the Columbus establishment was anti-Trump, including Vance himself. During Trump’s first term, Vance moved to Cincinnati and became a Trump supporter for 2020. When Vance started running office, the Columbus establishment that loved him was not so much in love with him. Today, Vance is Vice President. That wouldn’t have happened if he stayed in Columbus.
Thanks. The other Titans were all mainline Protestants with the possible exception of Wobst, whose religious background I couldn't determine. Columbus has a low Catholic population share and was a heavily Protestant community. This is likely because of its lack of heavy industry. It never attracted the large scale European ethnic migrants who were heavily Catholic like the Poles to Chicago. This is part of why the city never had a political machine, and lacks the hyperfragmentation and parochialism of the places that did have more immigrants and/or where more heavily Catholic. Columbus did have a longstanding Jewish merchant elite as well.
Great piece. Historic elites also used to own shocking proportions of real estate in their areas of power. This is because the ownership of land and the ownership of wealth were more or less the same thing in most situations until early modernity and the maturity of the industrial revolution. We don't see a lot of that anymore apart from a few eccentrics. The old playbook can still create some surprising synergies like in your Detroit example, but it isn't the norm.
Perhaps part of it is that it is really easy to be very rich up to a certain level with minimal responsibilities to do anything except not being stupid and self-destructive (a very high bar that many people fail to clear because of the inherent temptations that adhere to wealth). You can be very rich and just accumulate more wealth like an old tree grows a much larger weight of wood every year than a young tree without doing much of anything or being responsible for anyone in your community to a degree not possible before the early 20th century.
Our municipal governments are also weird in that they are administered by these weird semi-professional flunkies who are supposed to be independent, rather than directly by urban shareholders and landowners. Ostensibly this is supposed to make them more neutral and accountable to the broad citizenry, but in practice you just get these weird technocrat mutants obsessed with minutiae like bike lanes and DEI. The experiment has been tried and the results have been bad, but we keep acting like we need more data, so the "experiments" in self-government by what amounts to an educated class of homeless people continue forever. We call this system developed in the 19th and 20th centuries by the Greek-derived word "democracy," but it has nothing to do with what the Greeks would have recognized and is also alien to our native traditions of municipal government.
Robert Fogelson's "Downtown: Its Rise and Fall" details how blue bloods in the older cities set up family trusts using land leases for the land beneath skyscrapers. This is a passive investment for the trust, since the tower's owner pays the land lease in a similar way that they pay property taxes. Even though they don't actively or passively manage the towers, these land lease situations force heirs to take an interest in perpetuating the value of their downtown.
Today, it is too easy to make money and fuel family trusts with public stocks and other strategies that are national, not local. I wonder if heirs around the country have tried to remove land leases from their trusts and replace them with diversified assets.
Former Ohio Senator Rob Portman's family owns The Golden Lamb in Lebanon, which is one of the state's oldest businesses (it's about 200 years old). Stewardship of a regional landmark like this breeds a completely different mindset in an heir than stocks that pay four dividends per year.
I think the issue with that is just risk. An REIT, a private lending product, or just stocks are going to often pay more while having greater downside protection risk. For example, if you inherited a lot of LA rental real estate, a lot of your portfolio would be vulnerable to the novel eviction protection regime they developed in just that city. Or you could make more money on a portfolio that is completely national and not locally exposed to exotic problems.
Interesting. I didn't know Portman owned the golden lamb. I do think that ground leases are in decline, but are still common in NYC. But again, that latter city is one of the few places where a significant number of people still have fortunes directly tied to the value of Manhattan real estate. Sounds like a great book I need to check out.
Historically (like Dell Computer 2005 and Maytag 2003) diversity fanatics gain control of the board. Seattle is/was a liberal-wack-job nexus. Boeing documents surfacing a few years ago have the strong odor of hysterical obsession with eradicating demonic white privilege. They exhibit this by attacking their own (white) engineers.
The cat-and-mouse MO: The board hires a new CEO with the specific intent to show the world how virtuous the board is; and make the CEO the fall-guy if the madness leads to failure, which of course it does.
What modern liberalism does is to substitute the universal awareness that demons exist, but instead of dealing with supernatural demons they can only look for corporeal ones, in this case white supremacy, because they don't believe in supernatural demons. Modernist liberals are constantly assailed by corporeal demons; racism, sexism, homophobia, climate deniers, vax deniers, on and on. They are in a state of constant hysteria and spend trillions of dollars every year attempting to eradicate, punish or control the demons. They are experts in deflection and double talk.
Outstanding as always. Perhaps the two "tracks" of the K will keep going for a while. A visitor to San Francisco recently (Ed West?) wrote of how strange it is to see highly paid tech workers queuing for trendy expensive restaurants, stepping past fentanyl zombies lying on the sidewalk, and the two classes of people acting as if each other didn't exist. Admittedly an extreme example, but it seems that America is wealthy enough to tolerate a great deal of dysfunction, fraud, and expensive welfare programs, as long as the line keeps going up for the top half of the K.
Yeah, San Francisco is an extreme microcosm of this phenomenon. The AI industry can frankly get along fine no matter what happens to everyone else.
I’m a political “activist” in Columbus. This gives me a lot to consider. The bit about religious disaffiliation is particularly resonant and helps explain the ground level realities. A few points I’d like to add:
—In the 1980’s, decisions were made to elevate Ohio State University to “Public Ivy” status, competing with the likes of the University of Michigan and UC-Berkeley. Open enrollment was eliminated for the sprawling Columbus campus, but retained for satellite campuses in small, economically stagnant towns. Emphasis shifted away from forging students into civically-minded, economically-productive Ohioans, and towards a focus on attracting “top talent” in a global marketplace.
—Because most of the city’s growth came well after the industrial boom, Columbus is sprawled out in very inefficient ways. Township, municipal, county, and school district(!) lines make decision-making more circuitous, with more choke points. One of the biggest impediments to social connections is a 20 minute drive. (I have heard an elected official lament his colleagues’ reluctance to leave Downtown and engage with more distant neighborhoods.)
—The religious landscape is a hodgepodge of aging WASPs and nominal Catholics, as well as diverse nondenominational evangelicals. If you are a millennial or Gen-Z, your religious involvement is primarily wedding- or holiday-related, at most.
—The only enduring institutions here are government and the university. Technocratic thinking is dominant in the cultural DNA. Government is management by another name. With a lack of strong overarching allegiances, the political landscape has similar vibes to a mainline denomination.
Thanks for the additional insights.
I am curious about what the old Titans would have done about the poverty of the 50,000 to 60,000 Somalis in Columbus. Would a different leadership model really make a difference there?
They may well have nixed the idea of large scale refugee resettlement in the first place.
Do local governments have the authority to refuse the "refugees" that the federal government sends their way?
No. But the federal government isn't sending refugees. They are resettled via local non-profit agencies. Certainly if the civic leadership didn't want large scale Somali refugee resettlement, in the old days they would have had a lot of influence with those organizations to shape their behavior.
Or at the very least might have said "We can handle 10-20k, but not 50-60k."
We can handle 10-20K better than 50-60K in the same sense that I can handle shooting myself in one foot better than I can handle shooting myself in both feet.
What benefit to Columbus would 10-20K Somalis be? Just as America should fashion foreign policy based on its own interests while compromising just enough to maintain relationships, Columbus should pursue policies that benefit Columbus, rather than policies that make some leftist in D.C. feel good about himself.
Looking at the description in the article, I can guarantee that there were a lot of low-skill jobs created in this economic boom that no one is going to move from their hometown for; depending on how many people are unemployed in Columbus and why, a few thousand Somalian immigrants would be able to A. find jobs and support themselves and B. do so without significantly depressing wages.
You would also be better able to settle them strategically--i.e., scattered about so they can't clump up into unassimilable blocs.
This is an outstanding piece - thank you!
I'll second this.
Thank you!
Fantastic analysis.
Thank you!