Commonwealth of Ohio

Ohio is a constituent Commonwealth of the United Kingdom of America, lying between Lake Erie and the Ohio river, bounded by the Grand Duchy of Michigan to the north-west, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia and Kentucky across the river to the south, and Indiana to the west. Columbus is the capital and the largest city. The population is approximately 11.9 million, which makes Ohio the fifth most populous polity of the Realm and the largest of the interior.

Ohio has no centre. It has five cities of consequence, none of which is dominant, none of which is near another, and no two of which have ever agreed about what the Commonwealth is for. Columbus governs and grows, Cleveland works the lake, Cincinnati faces the river and the south, Akron made rubber and now makes polymers, and Dayton invents things. The counties between them are corn, soy and small towns; the south-east is Appalachian and poor. The consequence for the Commonwealth’s politics is constant and is the single most useful thing to know about it: Ohio is governed from Columbus by a ministry that must assemble a majority out of five constituencies that want different things, and its constitution gives the cities the power to go their own way when it fails.

The Commonwealth supplied the Realm with a striking number of its national figures. Salmon P. Chase, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley all led its ministry before rising; Hayes went from the premiership at Columbus to Government House, and Ulysses S. Grant and William Howard Taft were both born in Ohio. Ohioans themselves make less of this than outsiders do, and the pattern is more visible in the Realm’s histories than in the Commonwealth’s own memory.

Its defining grievance is a boundary. In 1836 Parliament awarded the Toledo Strip, the mouth of the Maumee and the harbour at the western end of Lake Erie, to the Grand Duchy of Michigan. Ohio had mustered a militia, lost nobody, and lost the case, and it lost it because the Grand Duchy was being settled on the King’s own nephew and Ohio had nobody at court at all. The grievance survives, and survives almost entirely inside a football rivalry.

History

The Ohio country before the Commonwealth

The land between the river and the lake was Indigenous country: the Shawnee in the south and the Scioto valley, the Miami in the west, the Wyandot in the north and centre, the Delaware displaced westward into it from the Susquehanna, and the Mingo along the upper river. It was not empty, it was not wilderness, and it was farmed. The river systems that carried settlement after 1783 had carried trade, diplomacy and war for centuries before, and the towns the Realm’s surveyors mapped were sited where towns had already been.

The Charter settlement of 1783 left the Crown holding a great interior it had promised, in various forms and to various parties, not to open. It opened it. Organised settlement began in the 1780s from the Ohio river, the first permanent town at Marietta in 1788, and the pressure ran up the valleys from the south and west from the seaboard along the lake. The wars that followed were fought by the Realm against confederacies that had every reason to expect the promises to hold, and they ended in the 1790s in cessions extracted after defeat.

The Register’s account of those cessions follows the polity’s own modern historiography, which is unsparing, and the Commonwealth’s museums state without qualification that Ohio exists because a series of guarantees were broken by the government that gave them.

Admission, 1803

Ohio was admitted in 1803, as a Commonwealth, with a constitution adopted at a convention at Chillicothe the same year. It was the first polity of the Realm erected wholly out of the interior rather than out of a colonial charter, and it was therefore the first that had to be designed rather than inherited.

The convention’s work is treated separately in the Constitution of Ohio. Three of its decisions shaped everything that followed. It made the executive answerable to the legislature rather than separately elected, which was not obvious in 1803 and was argued about for a fortnight. It wrote home rule for chartered cities into the instrument, at the insistence of Cincinnati, which was already the largest place in the polity and did not intend to be governed from a capital that had not yet been built. And it included in its bill of rights a clause forbidding any legal disability imposed on account of colour, which passed by a margin of four votes and which prevented Ohio from doing what most free polities of the period did.

The class of the polity carried no argument at the time and carries none now. Ohio is a Commonwealth because its convention chose the style, as its neighbour Illinois’s did; the Realm has no single rule for its polity types, and Ohioans have never made anything of the word. The practical consequence is that the Crown is represented in Ohio by a Governor rather than a Lieutenant-Governor, and that is the whole of it.

Columbus, and the decision to build a capital

The seat of government moved three times in fifteen years. Chillicothe held it, then Zanesville, then Chillicothe again, and each move was a proxy for the quarrel between the river towns of the south and the growing north. In 1812 the Legislature resolved it by choosing a site that was not a town at all: high ground at the forks of the Scioto, near the geographic centre, with nothing on it.

Columbus was therefore built to be a capital and had no other reason to exist. The decision is the earliest expression of the pattern that governs the Commonwealth. Ohio could not agree which of its cities should hold the government, so it put the government where no city was. It has been vindicated twice over: the capital was neutral for a century and a half, and Columbus has since become the largest city in the Commonwealth, so that the compromise has quietly become the thing it was designed to avoid.

The canals and the first prosperity

Ohio’s nineteenth-century wealth came from connecting the river to the lake. The Ohio and Erie Canal, opened through the 1820s and 1830s from Portsmouth on the river to Cleveland on the lake, and the Miami and Erie from Cincinnati north to the Maumee, turned a polity of subsistence farms into a granary with two outlets and made Cleveland out of nothing much. The canals were built on Commonwealth credit, they nearly bankrupted the polity twice, and they were obsolete within thirty years of completion.

They did their work first. The canal decades established the north-south grain trade, established Cleveland and Toledo as lake ports, drew the first large German and Irish labour force into the polity, and left Ohio with a debt and a habit of public works that outlived both.

The Toledo award, 1836

The boundary dispute with Michigan is treated in its own section below. Its place in the Commonwealth’s history is that it happened at the moment Ohio was building the canal that was meant to end at the Maumee, and that the polity lost the harbour it had been digging towards.

Germans, and Cincinnati

The German migration into Ohio is larger, earlier and more political than its equivalent elsewhere in the Realm, and the reason lies in Europe. The revolutions of 1848 failed in Germany and were followed not by a settlement but by the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire in its old form, with the Carlsbad censorship, the university plenipotentiaries and the political police running until the Empire was destroyed in 1866. The German push therefore lasted a generation longer than it might have, and it pushed out disproportionately the people the censorship was designed to reach: teachers, journalists, lawyers, students and organisers.

They went in very large numbers to Cincinnati, which was the nearest large American city to the river route inland, and they arrived with politics. The Over-the-Rhine district north of the canal was German-speaking for a century, and Cincinnati carried German newspapers, German schools, German singing societies, German gymnastic clubs, a German theatre and a German-language edition of the Commonwealth’s statutes into living memory. Cincinnati’s Germans were reliably anti-slavery, reliably anti-clerical, reliably suspicious of state authority, and reliably ungovernable by the city’s political managers, and their arrival is the single largest change in the character of Ohio politics in the nineteenth century.

They did not leave a vernacular. Unlike Wisconsindeutsch, which survived because nobody ever thought it worth suppressing, Cincinnati German was a city language in a city that assimilated hard, and the two Great Wars finished what the schools had begun. What survives is the built city, the food, the choral tradition, a great many surnames, and a documented civic history that Cincinnati now curates carefully.

The river, slavery and the free Commonwealth that was not free

Ohio’s southern boundary was the line between free soil and slavery for sixty years, and the Commonwealth’s conduct on that line is the most uncomfortable subject in its history.

Ohio never enacted Black Laws. The clause of 1803 held, and the polity that would very probably have passed the disabilities its neighbours passed was prevented by four votes at Chillicothe from doing so. This is a real fact and the Commonwealth is entitled to it.

It is also very nearly the whole of the credit. The clause forbade legal disabilities and was construed for a century to forbid nothing else, and every exclusion that could be practised without a statute was practised. Ohio’s cities segregated by covenant, by lease, by the practice of employers and by the ordinary conduct of school boards operating within the letter of a constitution that said nothing about them. The federal American Rights Act of 1866 could not reach any of it, because as enacted it bound federal authority alone and did not touch a polity, a city or a private party, and it did not do so for ninety-six years. What Ohio demonstrates, more cleanly than any other polity, is that a constitutional guarantee against legal disability and a comprehensively segregated society are perfectly compatible.

Against that stand two things that are also true. Fugitive-slave claims crossed at Cincinnati constantly and were resisted constantly, by lawyers of whom Salmon P. Chase was the most formidable, and by organised free Black communities of which Oberlin’s was the most effective in the Realm. Ohio was a route out for very large numbers of people, and the work was done by Ohioans at risk to themselves. The Commonwealth’s record is therefore both things at once, and its own museums now say so.

The rebellion, 1861 to 1863

Ohio was solid. There was scattered opposition in the river counties, where trade and family ran south, and it never amounted to a movement or produced a crisis of loyalty. No fighting of consequence took place on Ohio soil.

What is remarkable is the scale of the contribution. Ohio supplied more men to the federal forces in proportion to population than any polity except one, supplied the largest share of the Realm’s manufactured war material, and fed a good deal of the army. The Twenty-third Ohio, a federally embodied wartime regiment recruited in the Commonwealth, carried both a future Governor-General and a future Prime Minister: Rutherford B. Hayes commanded in it and William McKinley enlisted into it as a private soldier at eighteen, and the relationship formed between them there decided McKinley’s career.

The Commonwealth’s memory of the war is accordingly a memory of supply rather than of suffering, which distinguishes it sharply from Missouri and Arkansas, and which Ohioans occasionally forget makes them unusual.

Industry, and the men Ohio sent away

The half-century after the war made Ohio the industrial centre of the Realm’s interior: iron and then steel in the Mahoning valley and at Cleveland, rubber at Akron from the 1870s, machine tools and soap at Cincinnati, cash registers and precision manufacture at Dayton, coal in the south-east, and glass, ceramics and chemicals along the lake.

It also produced the run of national figures. Chase led the Ohio ministry from 1856 to 1860 and became Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Governor-General. Hayes led it from 1868 to 1872 and again from 1876 to 1881, arbitrated the Paraguay boundary for Blaine’s ministry from Columbus, and went from the premiership directly to Government House. McKinley led it from 1892 to 1895 and resigned it to return to national politics. Grant was born at Point Pleasant on the river in 1822 and Taft at Cincinnati in 1857, and Taft’s first judicial office was on Ohio’s own Superior Court.

Ohioans do not experience this as a pattern. It is three premierships across thirty-nine years in a period of seventy, in a polity that has had a great many premiers, and the Commonwealth’s own political memory is of city machines, canal debts and the Legislature rather than of a nursery for national leaders. The pattern is a construction of the Realm’s historians, and it is a sound one, but it is not how Ohio thinks about itself.

The city machines

Ohio’s political machines were municipal and never statewide, and the reason is the reason for everything else in this article. A machine needs a centre: a single city large enough that controlling it controls the polity. Ohio has never had one. What it had instead was five cities of comparable weight, each of which could be organised and none of which could be used to organise the rest, and the result was four or five separate machines that spent a great deal of their energy on each other.

The most formidable was at Cincinnati, where George B. Cox built from the 1880s an organisation that held the city for a quarter of a century on the ordinary materials: saloon licences, municipal contracts, the police, the German and Irish wards, and a working accommodation with the business houses. It was efficient, it was frankly corrupt, and it delivered a city that functioned. Cleveland’s organisation was looser and more often broken by reform mayors; Columbus’s was small because the city was; Toledo’s ceased to be Ohio’s problem in 1836.

The Cincinnati machine’s fall is the Commonwealth’s set piece. It came apart between 1905 and 1912 under a combination of newspaper investigation, a reform slate and a criminal prosecution, and what replaced it was the council-manager charter with a proportional council that Cincinnati still substantially uses. The city moved in a decade from the most machine-governed place in the Commonwealth to the most elaborately reformed, and it did so under the home rule article, without a single act of the Ohio Legislature.

That is the pattern in miniature. Ohio’s cities produced their own corruption and their own cures, on their own authority, and Columbus was a spectator to both. A polity that had chosen not to have a centre found that neither its vices nor its reforms could be organised at the Commonwealth level, and it has been finding that ever since.

Labour, and the twentieth century

The organising drives are the Commonwealth’s defining twentieth-century experience, and they were violent. Steel at Cleveland, Youngstown and Canton, and rubber at Akron, were organised between the 1910s and the 1930s against employers who fought with private police, evictions, blacklists, injunctions and, on several occasions, gunfire. Men were killed at Youngstown and at Massillon. The rubber workers at Akron pioneered the sit-down strike in the Realm, occupying plants rather than picketing them, and won recognition by it.

The Commonwealth’s authorities were on the employers’ side more often than not, and the Ohio Legislature’s use of injunctions against organising in the 1920s is a matter of record. Recognition came, when it came, through federal law and through the endurance of people who had very little, and the industrial peace that followed lasted about thirty-five years.

The arsenal of the Realm

Ohio’s contribution to both Great Wars was industrial and was very large. The Commonwealth made steel, aircraft engines, rubber for tyres and barrage balloons, machine tools, tanks at Lima, ordnance at Ravenna and a great share of the Realm’s aluminium, and its plants ran on a labour force that included, for the first time, very large numbers of women and of Black workers brought north for the purpose.

The second of the wars did more to change the Commonwealth than any event between the canals and the closures. It ended the long unemployment of the 1930s, it drew the last great wave of the northward migration into cities that had no housing prepared for it, it made the unions permanent by making them necessary, and it built plant capacity on a scale that the peacetime market would not sustain for more than a generation. The prosperity of Ohio between 1945 and 1970 was real, was widely shared by the standards of the Realm, and rested on an industrial base built for a war and never fundamentally reconsidered afterwards.

The Commonwealth’s wartime record includes the housing riots of 1943 and the systematic refusal of the northern cities to house the workers they had recruited, and both are in the Commonwealth’s own histories.

Suburbanisation

Between 1950 and 1980 the population of every one of Ohio’s cities fell and the population of every one of Ohio’s metropolitan counties rose. People did not leave the Commonwealth; they left its municipalities, for suburbs incorporated under the same home rule article that had let the cities govern themselves, and which now let the suburbs govern themselves separately from the cities they surrounded.

The consequences compounded. A city whose taxable wealth is moving beyond its boundary cannot fund the services of the people who remain, and Ohio’s constitution provides no mechanism for annexation against the wishes of an incorporated suburb. Columbus, which annexed aggressively in the 1950s and 1960s by tying water supply to consent, is the exception and is the reason it is now the largest city in the Commonwealth. Cleveland, which did not, is the reason the others are not.

The home rule article therefore did two opposite things within a century. It made Ohio’s cities the most self-governing in the Realm, and it made them unable to grow, and the second of these has mattered more.

The closures

From the early 1970s the steel went. Youngstown lost its mills within a decade and lost about half its population over three; Cleveland’s east side emptied; Akron’s tyre plants closed one after another; Dayton and Canton lost their largest employers. The Commonwealth’s response was slow, was organised around attracting replacement industry that did not arrive, and is generally judged in Ohio to have failed.

The article does not hurry past this. The closures are the largest single event in the modern history of the Commonwealth, they removed the economic basis of four of its cities within twenty years, and their consequences are the subject of most of Ohio’s present politics.

The river that burned

The Cuyahoga caught fire at Cleveland in 1969, as it had several times before without anybody outside Ohio noticing, and this time it was photographed. The image of a working river alight beneath a railway bridge, in the industrial heart of the Realm’s interior, did more for the Realm’s environmental law than a decade of argument had.

The Waters of the Realm Act 1971 followed, the Realm’s first general federal water statute, and it is the reason the Commonwealth of Ohio appears in the constitutional law of the Realm more prominently than in its political history. Ohio does not regard this as a compliment and the article does not offer it as one. The river burned because the Commonwealth had permitted it to be used as a drain for a century, and the credit for what followed belongs to the photograph.

Geography

Ohio divides three ways, and the divisions are glacial in origin and economic in effect.

The lake plain in the north is flat, wet, exceptionally fertile where it has been drained, and was the Great Black Swamp until the nineteenth century made it farmland at enormous cost in labour and drainage tile. It carries Cleveland, the lake ports and the westernmost farm counties.

The till plains of the west and centre are the glaciated country: gently rolling, deep-soiled, and the corn and soy belt of the Commonwealth. Columbus, Dayton and Springfield sit on them. This is the part of Ohio that looks like Indiana and Illinois, and it is the part that has changed least.

The Appalachian plateau of the south and east was never glaciated. It is hill country, cut by steep valleys, thin-soiled, coal-bearing, forested, and poor. It covers about a third of the Commonwealth and holds under a seventh of its people.

The Commonwealth’s rivers run two ways from a low divide that crosses it diagonally. Everything north of the divide goes to the lake by the Maumee, the Sandusky and the Cuyahoga; everything south goes to the Ohio by the Scioto, the Great Miami and the Muskingum. The divide is barely perceptible on the ground and decided the Commonwealth’s early economic geography completely, since it determined which towns could reach which market before the canals were dug to cross it.

The climate is humid continental, cold and grey in winter, hot and thundery in summer, with a lake-effect snowbelt along the north-east shore that gives the counties east of Cleveland several times the snowfall of Cincinnati two hundred and fifty kilometres away. The growing season is long enough for corn everywhere and for soft fruit and vines along the lake, where the water moderates the frosts. Ohio sits at the western end of the Realm’s severe-weather corridor and takes tornadoes in spring, most destructively at Xenia in 1974, and river flooding in late winter, most destructively at Dayton in 1913, which produced the Commonwealth’s conservancy districts and the flood-control works that still protect the Miami valley.

The Ohio river runs the southern and eastern boundary for about seven hundred kilometres and is a working navigation the whole way. Lake Erie is the northern frontier and the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes, which is why it is also the most biologically productive and the most easily damaged. Across it lies the separate Crown realm of New Albion.

Toledo and the Michigan boundary

The Commonwealth’s northern boundary is not where Ohio drew it, and the difference is about twelve hundred square kilometres containing the mouth of the Maumee river and the best natural harbour at the western end of Lake Erie.

The dispute

Ohio’s admitting instrument of 1803 described the northern line by reference to the southern extremity of Lake Michigan, a point nobody had accurately surveyed, and the Commonwealth’s convention had inserted a saving clause providing that if the line fell south of the Maumee bay the boundary should run to the bay’s northern cape instead. Michigan, organised later, worked from the earlier survey and claimed the strip the saving clause had been written to secure.

Both readings were arguable. Ohio’s was arguable on the instrument and Michigan’s was arguable on the survey, and each polity spent thirty years accumulating the other kind of evidence.

The muster of 1835

In the spring and summer of 1835 both polities passed statutes extending their courts over the strip, both appointed officers to it, and both mustered militia. Ohio’s force assembled near Perrysburg and Michigan’s near Toledo. They did not engage. There was one exchange of blows outside a tavern at Phillips Corners, a deputy sheriff was stabbed with a penknife and recovered, and the remainder of the episode consisted of two bodies of armed farmers manoeuvring for six weeks in country neither wished to damage.

Nobody was killed. This matters more than it sounds, because it left the Commonwealth with a grievance and no dead to hang it on, and a grievance without casualties does not become a solemn thing. It becomes a joke, and it did.

The award of 1836

Parliament settled it, and settled it for Michigan.

The proceeding was formally a boundary bill and substantively a decision about which of two petitioners had the ear of the government. The Grand Duchy of Michigan was being settled, by the same Parliament and in the same year, on Prince Augustus of Cambridge, the King’s eight-year-old nephew, the founder of the House of Mackinac, and the connection was close and actively worked. Michigan’s case was made in London and at Government House by people who were received. Ohio’s was made by a delegation of the Ohio Legislature, competently and at length, to ministers who had no particular reason to attend to it.

Ohio lost because it had nobody at court. This is the settled judgment of the Realm’s historians and of the Commonwealth’s own, and it is not seriously contested. It was a matter of access rather than of merit; the ministry’s own law officers thought the question genuinely open and said so; and the strip went to the polity with the duke.

The award is inseparable from the thing this article has already said twice. A Commonwealth of five cities that agree about nothing does not produce a single voice, and a polity without a single voice has nobody to send. Michigan had the King’s nephew. Ohio had a delegation.

Since

Ohio was compensated, after a fashion, with territory to the west that it had not asked for and with a federal contribution to the Miami and Erie Canal, which was then completed to a terminus in another polity. Toledo grew into a substantial industrial city under Michigan and is now the anchor of the Grand Duchy’s southern corridor.

The grievance survives. It survives ritually, in the annual football match between the Commonwealth’s university and Michigan’s, which is the most heavily attended sporting fixture in the interior of the Realm and in which the Strip is invoked every year by people who could not find it on a map. Underneath the ritual there is something real, and it surfaces whenever the two polities have business: over the lake, over the river, over freight, and most sharply over water, because the drinking water of Toledo is drawn from a lake that Ohio’s farms pollute, and the Commonwealth is therefore in the position of poisoning a city it still claims to have been robbed of.

Constitutional system

Ohio is governed under the Constitution of Ohio of 1803, adopted at Chillicothe, amended more than a hundred and seventy times and never replaced. It is the oldest polity constitution in the Realm’s interior and the only one erected wholly out of territory rather than out of a colonial charter. Its full text and history are treated separately in the Constitution of Ohio.

Three of its provisions govern the Commonwealth’s political life. It vests the executive in a ministry answerable to the lower house. It guarantees home rule to chartered cities in terms that later constitutions elsewhere in the Realm copied and weakened. And its bill of rights forbids any legal disability imposed on account of colour, a clause of 1803 whose consequences are described above and whose narrow construction is the Commonwealth’s longest-running constitutional argument.

Ohio has no citizens’ initiative. The question was put seriously in 1912, when a convention sat expressly to consider it, and the convention declined by a substantial margin. The stated ground was that a Commonwealth with strong home rule already gave its people a direct instrument at the level where most of their government happened, and that a statewide initiative would principally serve whichever of the five cities could organise fastest. The unstated ground, which the delegates’ own correspondence makes plain, was that Cincinnati and Cleveland each feared the other’s capacity to organise. The refusal distinguishes Ohio sharply from Missouri, whose initiative is the pride of that polity and the source of its central constitutional fight, and the two neighbours are the Realm’s clearest natural experiment on the question.

The Governor

The Crown is represented in the Commonwealth by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the federal ministry after consultation with the Premier, holding office for a term of five years, and drawn by long convention from outside politics. The incumbent is Marian Ruhl, a former president of a Commonwealth university, non-partisan, appointed in 2024.

The office is deliberately and successfully invisible. Ohio’s Governors summon and dissolve the Legislature on advice, give assent, receive the Premier weekly, open sessions, sign commissions, and represent the Crown at funerals, floods and the opening of things. No Governor of Ohio has ever refused assent, dismissed a ministry, declined a dissolution or made a public statement on a contested question, and the Commonwealth regards this as the correct performance of the office rather than as an absence of one.

The contrast with Arkansas, where a Governor refused to sign against his own Premier in 1957 and precipitated a constitutional crisis inside a civil rights crisis, is instructive and is not accidental. Ohio’s constitution gives the Governor the same reserve authority every Crown representative in the Realm holds. It has simply never been in a position where using it was the only remaining option, in part because the Commonwealth’s cities can act on their own account when Columbus will not, so that a deadlock between the ministry and the polity has never had to be resolved at the top.

Ohioans are not much interested in the office and could not generally name its holder. This is the ordinary condition of Crown representation in the Realm and Ohio is the purest example of it.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of the Commonwealth of Ohio, who holds office while commanding the confidence of the House of Representatives and governs from Columbus with a cabinet drawn from the Legislature.

The office has been held by three men who became national figures. Salmon P. Chase led the ministry from 1856 to 1860 and left it for the Exchequer and eventually for Government House. Rutherford B. Hayes held it from 1868 to 1872 and from 1876 to 1881, conducted the Paraguay arbitration from Columbus in 1878 on the Blaine ministry’s commission, and went from Ohio directly to Government House in 1881. William McKinley held it from 1892 to 1895 and resigned it to return to the Commons and to the premiership of the Realm.

Ohio does not experience the premiership as a stepping stone. Three men across thirty-nine years, in an office that has had more than forty holders, is a pattern visible from outside and not from within, and no Ohio politician plans a career on it. What the office is in practice is a coalition-management job of unusual difficulty, because the Premier must hold together a majority assembled from constituencies with genuinely opposed interests: a growing capital, a declining industrial north, a southern river city that looks away from the rest, prosperous suburbs, agricultural counties, and an Appalachian south-east with the Commonwealth’s worst poverty and least political weight.

The present Premier is Dale Ackerman, Conservative and Crown Union, in office since 2025. His majority rests on the county seats and the outer suburbs of the three largest cities, and not on the cities themselves, which is the ordinary shape of a Conservative majority in Ohio and the reason the Commonwealth’s politics is so heavily preoccupied with the relationship between Columbus and the municipalities.

The Legislature

The Commonwealth’s legislature is called, without ornament, the Ohio Legislature. Every other polity of the Realm gave its assembly a dignified name and Ohio did not, and the plainness is characteristic enough that Ohioans point it out.

It is bicameral. The House of Representatives has ninety-nine members elected for two years from single-member districts and is the confidence chamber; a ministry that loses its confidence resigns or seeks a dissolution. The Senate has thirty-three members elected for four years from districts formed by grouping three House districts, half renewed every two years. The Senate may delay but not defeat supply, may amend other legislation freely, and has an absolute veto on constitutional amendments proposed by the Legislature, which is the one place its power is decisive.

The Legislature sits at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, a heavy Greek Revival building begun in 1839 and finished, after twenty-two years of argument about money, in 1861. It has no dome, the design having been altered mid-construction and the drum left capped flat, and the resulting silhouette is the most recognisable public building in the Commonwealth precisely because it looks unfinished.

The chamber’s twentieth-century record includes the anti-organising injunctions of the 1920s, which are described above and are not a proud passage. Its modern reputation is for the steady preemption of municipal ordinances, which is the Commonwealth’s central political quarrel and is treated below.

Counties and local government

Ohio has eighty-eight counties, a number fixed in 1888 and never altered, and the counties are the least important tier of Ohio government.

Real authority sits with the chartered cities and, in the rural parts, with the townships. The constitutional guarantee of home rule allows a chartered city to adopt its own form of government, levy its own taxes within limits, provide its own services and legislate on municipal matters without reference to Columbus, and Ohio’s cities have used the power to diverge from one another to a degree unusual in the Realm. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron, Dayton, Toledo before 1836 and about two hundred smaller places all operate under charters they wrote themselves, and no two are alike. Cincinnati has run a council-manager government with a proportional element since the 1920s; Cleveland has a strong elected mayor; Columbus has something between the two.

This is why Ohio’s cities are so unlike each other, and it is a constitutional fact rather than a cultural one. A polity that could not agree on a centre wrote a constitution permitting each of its parts to govern itself, and the parts did.

The counties do what the constitution and statute give them and no more: courts, records, the sheriff, roads outside municipalities, elections, and a share of welfare administration. Consolidation has been proposed in every generation since 1920 and has never come close to passing, because eighty-eight county establishments are eighty-eight sets of elected officers with local followings, and the Legislature is made of people who owe them favours. The Commonwealth’s own auditors have described the arrangement as indefensible in successive reports for sixty years.

Law and the courts

Ohio’s judiciary is elected, which is the ordinary interior pattern and is unusual in the Realm as a whole. Judges of the courts of common pleas, of the courts of appeals and of the Supreme Court of Ohio stand for election on a ballot that does not print party labels, having been nominated in party primaries, an arrangement that satisfies nobody and has survived every attempt to change it.

The Supreme Court of Ohio has seven justices and a Chief Justice, sits at Columbus, and hears appeals from the courts of appeals and constitutional questions arising under the Constitution of 1803. Its most consequential modern work has been on school funding, described below, where it found the Commonwealth’s system unconstitutional four times across a decade and was unable to obtain compliance.

The Superior Court, on which William Howard Taft sat in the late 1880s before his federal career, was a commercial court of the larger cities and was absorbed into the common pleas structure in the reorganisation of 1912. Ohio lawyers still refer to the older reports.

Two features of Ohio’s legal system are worth noting for their effect on the Commonwealth’s politics. The first is that its home rule jurisprudence has been the busiest in the Realm for thirty years, the courts being required to decide, case by case and statute by statute, whether a given municipal ordinance is a matter of local self-government protected by the constitution or an exercise of the police power that the Legislature may preempt. The distinction is not workable in principle and has been applied inconsistently in practice, and the doctrine now consists of several hundred decisions that cannot be reconciled with one another.

The second is that Ohio’s courts have been unusually willing to declare Commonwealth action unconstitutional and unusually unable to obtain compliance, of which the school funding litigation is the leading but not the only example. The Supreme Court of Ohio has no contempt practice adequate to a defendant that is a legislature, and the Commonwealth has learned across four decades that a judgment against the Legislature is a statement of the law rather than an instruction that must be obeyed.

Ohio’s criminal law and its constabulary are ordinary for the Realm. The Commonwealth’s constabulary is a polity force under the Premier’s minister of justice, the cities maintain their own municipal forces under their charters, and the resulting patchwork of eighty-odd separate police establishments in the metropolitan counties is a standing subject of complaint and of unsuccessful reform bills.

Economy

Ohio’s economy is the most diversified of any interior polity and is smaller than it was, relative to the Realm, than at any time since 1850.

Motor vehicles and parts remain the largest manufacturing employer. Assembly plants and a very deep supplier network are spread across the west and centre of the Commonwealth rather than concentrated, which is why Ohio survived the contraction of the industry better than the Grand Duchy of Michigan did and why its recovery has been correspondingly less visible.

Polymers and chemicals are the successor to rubber and are centred on Akron, where the research capacity outlived the manufacturing. The Commonwealth’s polymer science is the strongest in the Realm and is attached to a university built on it, and the sector employs a fraction of what the tyre plants did at a multiple of the wage.

Steel persists, much reduced, at Cleveland, Canton and along the river, in specialty and electrical grades rather than in tonnage. The Mahoning valley, which was the heart of it, has almost none left.

Health systems and universities are now the largest employers outright, and this is the most important economic fact about modern Ohio. The Cleveland hospital complexes, the Cincinnati academic medical centre and the Columbus university system together employ more Ohioans than all the Commonwealth’s factories, and they are concentrated in exactly the cities the closures hit, which has cushioned Cleveland and transformed Columbus while doing nothing whatever for Youngstown or the south-east.

Logistics exploits the one advantage geography still gives the Commonwealth. Ohio is within a day’s road haul of a very large share of the Realm’s eastern population, and the distribution industry that follows from this has filled a great deal of the flat land along the interstates with warehousing. The jobs are numerous, are not well paid, and are the principal replacement employment in the towns that lost manufacturing.

Agriculture is corn, soy, hogs and a dairy belt in the north-east that nobody outside the Commonwealth thinks about. It is productive, is a small share of employment, and is the source of the phosphorus running into Lake Erie.

Coal in the south-east is nearly finished, and what remains of it is described in the section on political tensions rather than here, because in Ohio it is now a political subject rather than an economic one.

Transport

The Commonwealth is a corridor and has been since the canals. Three of the Realm’s principal east-west trunk routes cross it, together with the north-south route from the lake to the river, and the interchange at Columbus is among the busiest in the interior.

Rail carries very heavy freight tonnage, Ohio lying across the routes between the eastern seaboard, Chicago and the south. Passenger services on the Realm’s network are adequate between the large cities and poor everywhere else, and the Commonwealth has been arguing about a Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati passenger line since the 1970s without building one, which Ohioans regard as the definitive illustration of their politics.

The Ohio river is a working navigation with locks and dams the whole length of the boundary, moving coal, aggregates, chemicals and grain. The lake ports at Cleveland, Lorain, Ashtabula and Conneaut handle ore, coal and general cargo, and the ore trade with the upper lakes is the oldest continuous commercial traffic in the Commonwealth.

Airports at Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati serve the Commonwealth without any of the three becoming a principal hub of the Realm, which is a familiar Ohio outcome and follows from the same arithmetic as everything else: three cities of similar size, none large enough alone.

Welfare, health and education

Ohio’s health provision is the National Health Service of America guarantee delivered through Commonwealth arrangements, as everywhere in the Realm, and Ohio’s delivery is markedly better than the Realm’s average in the three large cities and markedly worse than it in the south-east. The academic medical centres at Cleveland and Cincinnati are among the best in the world and are within four hours’ drive of counties whose life expectancy is among the lowest in the Realm, and the Commonwealth has never found this contrast easy to discuss.

Schools are funded principally on local property, and the consequences have been litigated to a standstill. The Supreme Court of Ohio held the system unconstitutional in 1997 and three times subsequently, on the ground that a constitution requiring a thorough and efficient system of common schools cannot be satisfied by one whose quality varies with the taxable wealth of the district. The Legislature responded each time with partial measures, the Court eventually released jurisdiction without the constitutional defect having been cured, and the case is taught throughout the Realm as the standard illustration of a court that was entirely right and entirely unable to do anything about it.

The universities are the Commonwealth’s greatest asset and its principal modern export. The Commonwealth university at Columbus is one of the largest in the Realm and is the centre of the capital’s growth; Cincinnati and Cleveland hold major research universities; Akron holds the polymer science that came out of rubber; and Dayton holds an engineering tradition attached to the RAAF establishment.

Oberlin, in the north, is the institution the Realm knows Ohio for. It was the first college in the Realm to admit Black students and women, its free Black community was the most effective organised resistance to fugitive-slave enforcement in the Commonwealth, and two of its members died at Harpers Ferry. It is a small college of about three thousand students and it occupies a place in the Realm’s moral history out of all proportion to its size.

Cities

Ohio’s cities are the polity, and the fact that there are five of them, none dominant, is the fact from which everything else in this article follows.

Columbus

The capital, the largest city, and the only one that is growing. Columbus was built to be a seat of government on empty ground in 1812 and had no other reason to exist for a century, and it now holds close to a million people in the municipality and well over two million in its region.

Its growth is recent and is built on government, the university, insurance, research and logistics rather than on manufacturing, which is why it did not fall when the others did. It is the destination of most recent arrivals to the Commonwealth, is the youngest of the five cities by median age, and is the only one whose politics is not organised around loss. Ohioans from elsewhere find it characterless and say so, and Columbus is untroubled by this.

Cleveland

The lake city, the industrial capital of the Commonwealth for a century, and the hardest fall. Cleveland made steel, refined oil, built machinery and shipped ore, and between 1950 and 2000 it lost more than half its population. The east side emptied and has not refilled.

What survived is remarkable and is not the same city. The hospital complexes are among the largest employers in the Realm, the orchestra is one of the finest anywhere, the museum and the university are first-rate, and the lakefront has been reclaimed from the industry that made it unusable. Cleveland is a city with world-class institutions and a municipal tax base that cannot support them, which is the structural problem underneath most of its politics.

Cincinnati

The oldest, the river city, and the one that looks south. Cincinnati was the largest place in the interior of the Realm before the canals and the railways moved the trade north, was the great German city described above, and retains a built fabric, a food, a choral tradition and a civic self-regard that the rest of the Commonwealth finds slightly comic.

It faces Kentucky across the river, its metropolitan region lies in three polities, and its economic and social orientation has always been southern in a way that Cleveland’s is not. This is the oldest of Ohio’s internal divisions and it has never closed.

Akron

Rubber, and a single-industry town that lost the industry. Four great tyre companies were headquartered within a few kilometres of one another, employed a very large proportion of the city, and were gone or reduced to nothing within twenty years of the 1970s.

What is left is the research. Akron’s polymer science outlived its manufacturing, is attached to a university built around it, and supports a chemicals and materials sector that is genuinely strong and employs a small fraction of the number the plants did. It is the clearest case in the Commonwealth of a place that saved the knowledge and lost the work.

Dayton

Invention, and a separate story from the rest. Dayton was the Realm’s most inventive city per head for about forty years around the turn of the twentieth century: the cash register, a great deal of early aviation, the self-starter, and a patent record that outstripped cities five times its size.

The Wright brothers were Dayton men and the Realm’s air research establishment is still there, which gives the city a continuing federal presence and a technical workforce that the rest of its economy has not matched. Dayton has lost employment on the same scale as Akron and has recovered less. It is the least discussed of Ohio’s cities and the one whose decline is least explained by anything the Commonwealth did or failed to do.

The Mahoning valley

Youngstown and Canton are not among the five but are the sharpest case in the Commonwealth. The valley made iron and then steel from the 1850s, it made William McKinley, who practised law at Canton and is buried there, and the mills closed between 1977 and 1980 with a completeness that has become the Realm’s standard example of deindustrialisation. Youngstown has lost about two thirds of its people. The Commonwealth’s failure to replace what went is the most serious charge Ohioans make against their own government, and it is a fair one.

Demographics

Ohio’s population is approximately 11.9 million and has been almost flat for forty years, growth in Columbus and its region offsetting decline nearly everywhere else. The Commonwealth is older than the Realm’s average, less foreign-born, and more likely than any comparable polity to be lived in by people born there.

The Black population of the cities is large and dates chiefly from the northward migration of the twentieth century, which brought very large numbers into Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Akron and the Mahoning valley for industrial work. It arrived into cities that had no Black Laws and comprehensive private segregation, was confined by covenant and lending practice into defined districts, and was then disproportionately hit by the closures, which removed the employment that had been the point of the migration. The consequences are visible in the Commonwealth’s housing, schools and health outcomes and are not in dispute.

Appalachian white migration from Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio’s own south-east into the industrial cities is a distinct movement with its own history, its own neighbourhoods, its own music and its own experience of being condescended to. It is less studied than the Black migration, ran alongside it, and produced in several cities a working population of two groups who had arrived for the same jobs from opposite sides of the same mountains and who were frequently set against one another.

German and Irish settlement of the nineteenth century is legible everywhere in surnames, parishes, church buildings, breweries and place names, and is the deepest layer of the Commonwealth’s European ancestry.

Ohio holds among the largest Amish and conservative Anabaptist communities anywhere in the world, concentrated in Holmes county and its neighbours in the east-central hills. The settlement is old, large, growing rapidly, and economically substantial in furniture, construction and agriculture, and its relations with the Commonwealth are governed by a body of accommodation in schooling, road use and social insurance that is worked out case by case and has been mostly peaceable.

Recent arrivals go overwhelmingly to Columbus, which is why Columbus grows and the rest does not. The capital holds significant Somali, Bhutanese-Nepali, Latin American and West African communities, and is now materially more diverse than any other part of the Commonwealth.

Society and culture

Ohio’s culture is not a single thing, which is the recurring theme of this article and is genuinely true of the Commonwealth’s social life. There is no Ohio accent; there are at least three, and the isogloss between the northern and the midland speech runs across the middle of the polity and is among the sharpest in the Realm.

Football is the Commonwealth’s serious cultural fact. The university game at Columbus commands attendance and attention that no other institution in Ohio approaches, and the annual fixture against Michigan’s university is the largest sporting event in the interior. It is also where the Toledo grievance now lives: the Strip is invoked, the boundary is cited, and the whole nineteenth-century quarrel is conducted once a year in a form that permits it to be felt without requiring anybody to do anything about it. Professional clubs in the three large cities are followed with the ordinary loyalty and are not culturally central in the same way.

Religion is a live social fact rather than a formal one. The Commonwealth is heavily Catholic in Cincinnati and the industrial north from the German and Irish settlement, heavily evangelical in the south and the Appalachian counties, and holds the Anabaptist settlements of the eastern hills. The Church of America is established in the Realm and is a modest presence in Ohio, which has always been a polity of dissenting and immigrant congregations rather than of the establishment, and the Commonwealth’s public life is correspondingly unceremonious about religion in a way that its private life is not.

Ohio’s food is German, Appalachian and Eastern European in roughly that order, and Cincinnati’s chilli, which is a Macedonian dish served on spaghetti and is not chilli in any sense the rest of the Realm recognises, is defended locally with a vehemence that visitors find difficult to account for.

The Commonwealth’s press was once among the best in the Realm, the Cleveland and Cincinnati papers having been serious national voices into the 1970s, and its contraction since has been as steep as the industry’s. Most Ohio counties now have no daily paper. The consequence for a polity whose government is dispersed across eighty-eight counties and two hundred chartered municipalities is that a great deal of local government is now conducted without anybody watching, and the Commonwealth’s own auditors have said so.

Ohio’s contribution to the Realm’s music is out of proportion to its size, chiefly through Cleveland and Dayton, and its contribution to the Realm’s literature is a body of writing about leaving Ohio which Ohioans read with a certain grim recognition.

The Commonwealth’s civic culture is unshowy, procedural and suspicious of grandeur. Its public buildings are plain, its ceremonies are short, its Governors are unknown, its legislature is called the Ohio Legislature, and its capitol has no dome. None of this is accidental and Ohioans are aware of all of it.

Ohio in the Realm

Ohio returns fifteen members to the House of Commons, twelve from constituencies and three as top-up members, which makes it the sixth largest delegation in the Realm and the largest from the interior. Its seats are Cleveland Central, Cleveland East, Columbus Central, Columbus North, Columbus and the Franklin Suburbs, Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Suburbs, Akron, Dayton, Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley, Canton, and Appalachian Ohio.

The delegation does not vote as a bloc and never has. Ohio’s members divide by city and by party in roughly the proportions the Commonwealth itself divides, and no Ohio interest has ever been carried at Westminster by the delegation acting together. This is the Toledo problem in its modern form and it recurs whenever the Commonwealth needs something from the Realm.

Ohio is nonetheless a polity that federal politicians take seriously, for the ordinary reason that fifteen seats spread across industrial cities, prosperous suburbs, farm counties and an Appalachian remnant behave rather like the Realm in miniature. Whether it is genuinely a bellwether is disputed by the Realm’s psephologists, several of whom point out that a polity which is losing manufacturing faster than the Realm as a whole cannot indefinitely resemble it. The Commonwealth is indifferent to the argument.

Ohio’s relationship with its neighbours is cordial except with Michigan, where the boundary, the lake and the football supply a permanent low-grade friction; close with Illinois, the other interior Commonwealth, with which it shares a constitutional class, a river system and a good deal of history; and complicated with Kentucky and West Virginia, whose people have moved into Ohio’s cities for a century and whose hills continue across the river into Ohio’s poorest counties.

Political tensions

The cities against the Legislature

This is the Commonwealth’s central fight and has been for thirty years. The constitution guarantees home rule; the Legislature has preempted it steadily, by statute, on minimum wages, on tenancy, on firearms, on municipal utilities, on plastics, on local revenue and on the regulation of short-term letting. Each preemption is separately defensible and the accumulation has hollowed out a constitutional guarantee without amending it.

The cities litigate and mostly lose, the Supreme Court of Ohio having construed the home rule article narrowly since the 1990s. The Legislature’s majority is drawn from counties and suburbs and has no electoral reason to stop. The result is that the most distinctive provision of Ohio’s constitution, the provision that made the cities as different from one another as they are, is being emptied by ordinary legislation, and there is no mechanism by which the cities can prevent it. The Commonwealth declined the citizens’ initiative in 1912, and the cities have had no way to appeal over the Legislature’s head ever since.

Appalachian Ohio

The south-east has the Commonwealth’s worst poverty, worst health, worst broadband, fewest doctors, oldest population and least political weight, and it has had all of these for a century. Coal was extracted, the profits went elsewhere, the employment ended, and the land was left with the subsidence, the acid drainage and the orphaned wells.

The Commonwealth has never known what to do about it. Every ministry of the past sixty years has announced a programme for the region and none has changed the trajectory. The counties are too thinly populated to attract the industry that replaced manufacturing elsewhere, too far from the cities to commute, and too few in the Legislature to compel attention. Ohio’s Appalachian counties have more in common with West Virginia and eastern Kentucky than with Columbus, know it, and vote accordingly.

The article states this plainly because the Commonwealth’s own reporting does. The region was a resource colony of its own polity for a hundred years and the polity has not repaid it.

The lake

Phosphorus runs off Ohio’s farms into the Maumee and thence into the western basin of Lake Erie, where it feeds an algal bloom every summer. The blooms are toxic, they close beaches, they kill fish, and in bad years they threaten the drinking water of the lakeshore cities.

The largest of those cities is Toledo, which is in the Grand Duchy of Michigan. Ohio therefore stands in the position of degrading the water supply of the city it lost and still claims, and every negotiation between the two polities is conducted with that fact in the room. Ohio’s regulation of agricultural runoff is voluntary, is agreed with the farm organisations, and has not worked; the Commonwealth’s own monitoring says so. Michigan has pressed for binding limits, in the federal courts and at the Realm’s level, and the matter is unresolved.

The closures, still

Forty years on, the politics of the industrial towns is still organised around what left. It expresses itself in a durable suspicion of both national parties, in a receptiveness to Alternative for the Realm in places that voted Labour for four generations, and in a public argument about whether anything could have been done that has never been settled and is conducted with more bitterness in Ohio than anywhere else in the Realm.

Assessment

Ohio is the Realm’s most complete case of a polity whose difficulties are structural rather than circumstantial. It has good land, three navigable frontiers, the best position in the interior for moving goods, world-class hospitals and universities, a diversified manufacturing base and eleven million people. It also has five cities that have never agreed about anything, a capital built on empty ground precisely so that none of them would have to concede to another, a constitution that responded to the disagreement by letting each part govern itself, and a legislature now dismantling that settlement without replacing it.

The Commonwealth’s failures are the failures of a polity that cannot act as one. It lost the Toledo Strip because it had no single voice to send to a ministry that would have listened to one. It could not replace what the closures took because the response would have had to be Commonwealth-wide and the Commonwealth does not do Commonwealth-wide things well. It has not repaid its Appalachian counties because they are outvoted and there is no mechanism by which being outvoted can be appealed. Its schools remain funded in a way its own supreme court has four times held unconstitutional.

Its successes are the successes of its parts. Cleveland’s hospitals, Akron’s polymer science, Dayton’s engineering, Cincinnati’s civic fabric, Columbus’s growth and Oberlin’s history are all achievements of institutions and cities rather than of the polity, and the polity’s own contribution to each of them is modest.

Whether the Realm should read Ohio as a warning about weak centres or as a demonstration that strong localities can carry a polity through fifty years of industrial collapse is a live argument, conducted mostly by people who are not Ohioans. Ohio’s own view, insofar as eleven million people have one, is that the question is badly posed, and that the Commonwealth has been getting by on the competence of its cities for two centuries because it has never had anything else to get by on.

Chronology

Symbols

The Commonwealth’s flag is a white field between two blue bands, the upper for Lake Erie and the lower for the Ohio river, charged with five red discs of equal size, equally spaced, for the five cities. The equality is the point of the design and was the point of the argument about it: the assembly that adopted the flag in 1902 rejected three submissions in which one charge was larger than the others, and the surviving minutes record a Cleveland member observing that the Commonwealth would never agree which one it should be.

The arms show the Scioto valley with the sun rising behind Mount Logan, an old device predating the flag, and are used on Commonwealth instruments rather than in public. The motto is With God, all things are possible, adopted in 1959 after a long argument and used sparingly.

The Commonwealth observes Admission Day on 1 March, without a public holiday, and it is the least marked polity day in the Realm.

Trivia

See also

• Grand Duchy of Michigan, which holds the Toledo Strip
• Commonwealth of Illinois, the other interior Commonwealth
• Province of Pennsylvania, the eastern neighbour
• Commonwealth of West Virginia, across the river
• Constitution of Ohio, the instrument of 1803
• Rutherford B. Hayes, Premier of Ohio and Governor-General
• Salmon P. Chase, Premier of Ohio, Chancellor and Governor-General
• William McKinley, Premier of Ohio and Prime Minister
• William Howard Taft, born at Cincinnati, of Ohio’s Superior Court
• Ulysses S. Grant, born at Point Pleasant on the river
• Holy Roman Empire, whose censorship sent Cincinnati its Germans