No doubt inspired by Teddy Roosevelt's example with the creation of the National Municipal League in Philadelphia, 49 of the leading citizens of Seattle met in the offices of the Commercial Club to create their own "Municipal League" on March 17, 1894. Seattle had only been settled 43 years earlier and it had been incorporated as a city for barely a quarter of a century, so it is not surprising that this gathering included many of the city's founders, including Arthur Denny, Morgan Carkeek. Dexter Horton, and John McGilvra. As written in the group's constitution, their aims were "to separate the administration of municipal affairs from party politics" and otherwise "to vigilantly watch over, criticize, approve or condemn" the city government.

From this initial Saturday evening session came a successful campaign to rewrite Seattle's City Charter in 1896, but by the time of the election, the nascent League had already ceased meeting.

Fourteen years elapsed before serious efforts began in the fall of 1909 with the aim of reviving the Municipal

League. This time it was a different kind of group which met to ponder the state of Seattle-lawyers, physicians, managers, and other professional men, many of whom had been drawn to the burgeoning metropolis only recently. They met in the law offices of Herr, Bayley, Wilson & Smith for months before consolidating a cadre of leaders bold enough to frame a constitution for a resuscitated Municipal League.

They finally unveiled their proposals at a public meeting on May 23, 1910. and to the surprise and pleasure of the organizers, 120 men promptly signed on as charter members, electing Hugh N. Caldwell (later mayor of Seattle) as the president of the new Municipal League of Seattle. They dedicated themselves to the ideals of active citizenship, competent officials, wholesome legislation, scientific investigation, full publicity, and constructive solutions."

In the Seattle of 1910, they had their job cut out for them. Thanks largely to the Klondike gold rush of 1897, the city had exploded with new wealth and population. Within its then 59 square miles of land (since more than doubled through successive annexations) lived 237,194 men, women and children served by a little over 1,000 acres of parks, 67 public schools, and one University boasting 2,000 students. People and goods traveled along 140 miles of paved streets and 101 miles of planked streets, with the other 522 miles alternating between dust and mud, mostly the latter. Eight transcontinental railroads and 57 steamship lines carried 546 million in annual exports and almost 550 million in imports, and over 13,000 building permits were granted in 1910 alone.

With such growth and prosperity came graft, patronage, crime, prostitution, racial tension, poverty, and all the ills of modern city life. For the Municipal League and other reformers such as the Public Welfare League, these evils were personified by the incumbent mayor Hiram Gill who supported an "open town" policy of tolerance toward the city's thriving Red Light district, gambling, and other vices. In October of 1910, the League and its allies petitioned for Hill's recall and the voters ousted him at the next election (Hill would return to office three years later as a 'reform candidate.")

"Throwing the rascals out" was not the sum of the League's agenda, however. It also campaigned for a variety of positive programs, including a municipal telephone service and creation of a Municipal Plans Commission. The latter retained the services of Frederick Law Olmsted's protégé. Virgil Rogue, who drafted a visionary

comprehensive plan calling for, among other improvements, creation of a San Francisco-style Civic Center in the then incomplete Denny Regrade, a trolley tunnel under Lake Washington and acquisition of Mercer Island as a city park. The plan elicited determined opposition from the city establishment, excoriated by the League as the "Downtown Trust," which feared Bogue's Civic Center would devalue the central business district. Despite a valiant campaign led by such notables as city engineer R.H. Thompson, the Bogue Plan was crushed at the polls in 1912, landing the fledgling League its first defeat.

Undaunted, the Municipal League continued to press for reforms. In 1912 it conducted its first evaluation of candidates, and in 1913, it made the first use of the new power of referendum to repeal an ordinance it perceived as "tying the hands of the police." It pressed for creation of a Port Commission, for pasteurization of milk, for civil service examinations for city and county workers, for competitive bidding for public works contracts, for nonpartisan elections, for annual budgeting, and a host of other reforms we now take for granted.

During these early years, the Municipal League also sided more often than not with organized labor and social reformers in calling for the 8-hour day, child labor laws, health and safety regulation of working conditions, and relief for the unemployed. It campaigned for slum clearance, editorializing "Greed held cause for building congestion," and for emergency housing in 1915 for an estimated 5,000 "home-less men." In these and subsequent campaigns. the League joined forces with other organizations-its victories were invariably shared by kindred groups.

Railing against election frauds and political graft, the League agitated in 1913 against construction of the City-County Building (now the King County Court House) as a "humbug" and for consolidation of county and municipal government. Despite such grand crusades, the League also found time to advocate music in the parks to "exert an uplifting moral influence which will help [the people] bear their burdens with less grumbling," and to propose a system of public "comfort stations" to replace the restrooms in some 300 bars expected to be closed in 1916 by the advent of Prohibition.

By the close of the First World War, however, the League had taken a more conservative turn, aided undoubtedly by the chaos of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 and the Red Scare that swept the nation. Many of the League's members were now themselves part of the "Establishment,” and they focused their attention and energies on a narrower scope of political and govern mental reforms.