By Richard O. Jones
Although the opposition was loud and prominent, Hamilton elected a Socialist mayor in the aftermath of the Great Flood of 1913.
The Hamilton Evening Journal spread the text of four affidavits and a telegram across its front page that fall to prove that the Socialist candidate for mayor was a liar.
The charge Fred Hinkel had been making from stumps around town was a simple one, and in a city still shoveling flood mud out of its cellars it landed hard. He told crowds that the Chamber of Commerce and the Retail Merchants’ Association had gone to the new National Market Company on a mission to make it quit selling meat so cheap.
The Journal answered in italic capitals. “HINKLE’S STORY IS AN ABSOLUTE LIE, PURE AND SIMPLE, NOTHING ELSE AND HE SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF HIMSELF TO TELL IT.” A line below that: “MR. HINKLE’S BALD-HEADED FALSEHOOD HAS BEEN SPIKED.” The paper dared him to answer.
It had expected better of him. “Hinkle was looked upon as a man overzealous for the cause of socialism,” the editor allowed, “and most people thought he was man enough to conduct an honorable campaign.”
He was twenty-six years old.
Frederick Andrew Hinkel came into the world at Darrtown on December 4, 1886. The family carved its name Hinkel on the stones in the cemetery there. More often than not, the newspapers spelled him “Hinkle” throughout his life and career, but official documents used the “Hinkel” spelling.
His father, Frederick Alexander Hinkel, died on January 19, 1890. Fred was three. That left Marietta Watt Hinkel with four boys in a village of a few hundred people: Walter, born 1881, William in 1883, Frank in 1885, and the baby.
He finished the eighth grade in the Milford Township schools in 1901, then sat the Boxwell examination, the state’s test that let a farm boy into a public high school without paying tuition, and passed it. A newspaper years afterward called him a graduate of Miami University.
He was no stray radical. Ohio was fertile ground, and Hamilton, full of foundries and paper mills and German and Irish labor, was better ground than most.
In 1911 the Socialists took a majority of the city council while Democrat Thad Straub held the mayor’s chair. The man the majority elected council president was Walter Watt Hinkel, Fred’s older brother.
Two sons of a Darrtown widow now ran the left wing of an industrial city, and for two years they ran it against a Democratic mayor. The temper of that council shows in one remark by City Solicitor B. F. Primmer, who helped kill a railroad crossing in South Hamilton on the grounds that it was “not needed for rich men to run their automobiles over.”
Then the river came.
The Great Miami crested at Hamilton on March 26, 1913, at 34.6 feet, thirteen feet above anything in the record. All but one of the bridges went out. The counting of the dead has never been fully settled.
Eight months later the mud was still in the streets, and the city went to the polls.
On November 4, 1913, the Socialist Party took Hamilton whole. Hinkel won the mayor’s office. Primmer took the solicitor’s chair, Ernest Shafor the treasury, Horace Shank the bench of the new municipal court with William Blackall as his clerk. Five seats on council went red. When the counting stopped there were ten Socialists in city hall, five Citizens’ Ticket men, and one lone Democrat.
Hinkel took office January 1, 1914, and the majority began appointing its own: safety director, public service director, city engineer, building inspector, street commissioner, and the superintendents of the municipal gas, electric, and water plants.
The ordinance that defined the administration came early. The council cut the police force by a third. Patrolmen went from thirty-six to twenty-four. Two detective positions and a sergeant’s job were abolished. Salaries were fixed by the month: one hundred fifteen dollars for the chief, eighty-five for a detective, seventy for a patrolman.
The Hamilton Daily Republican-News reported that the Socialists refused to state what stand they would take on the red-light district, on gambling, or on Sunday theaters. The paper later coined a word for the whole business: “Hinkelism.”
Despite the constant drubbing by both daily newspapers, Democrats and Republicans were forced to fuse behind one ticket to defeat him, and on November 2, 1915, John A. Holzberger took the mayor’s office, Leon Ziliox the council presidency, and the Democrats eight seats on council. Exactly one Socialist, Ferd Aker, kept his chair.
The voters, the Daily News wrote, had “repudiated Hinkelism in a manner which left no doubt as to their disapproval of the present administration.” An editorial delivered the epitaph: “Socialism has been on trial for two years and it has failed.”
Hinkel was twenty-nine, and he wasn’t done yet. He read law and was practicing by the middle twenties.
And he kept running. In 1923 he filed for mayor as an independent against Democratic incumbent Koehler and Republican Howard Kelly. The Journal, which had no use for him, reported his own account of his motive without quite believing it: he had entered the race “only because he hopes that he can improve the conditions in Hamilton and bring about a strict administration of the city and an enforcement of the laws.” The man who would not discuss the red-light district in 1914 was running on law enforcement in 1923. That same editorial griped about a million-dollar debt the city had taken on for an electric plant “that will probably be worth less than nothing to the public.”
He died at Hamilton in the first week of January 1928, at forty-one. The Optimist Club paused to note his passing. They buried him in Hamilton under a flat marker set beside the big family stone cut HINKEL.