George F. Cotterill

George Fletcher Cotterill (November 18, 1865 – October 13, 1958) was an American civil servant and politician. progressive. He was an advocate of woman suffrage, prohibition, land value tax, municipalisation of port facilities and utilities, and the development of public parks.

Youth and early career Born in Oxford, England, Cotterill was the son of a gardener Robert Cotterill and his wife Alice. The family immigrated to the United States in May 1872, when he was six, arriving in Boston before settling on a farm in Montclair, New Jersey. After graduating from high school in Montclair—at the young age of 15 and as class valedictorian—he worked as a rod man on a railroad survey, while training to be a surveyor and engineer.

Thomson and Cotterill

Thomson became City Engineer in 1892 and appointed Cotterill as an assistant. They developed the basis of what remains Seattle's main water supply over a century later (see Seattle Public Utilities), bringing in water from the Cedar River. barely a month after the Great Seattle Fire (6 June 1889) Seattle's citizens had voted 1,875 to 51 to acquire and operate their own water system. However, the Panic of 1893 wrecked the city's finances. ) gave the city a steady supply of clean water.

Other achievements by Thomson and Cotterill in this era included 25 miles of bicycle trails (later the basis of the city's Olmsted boulevard system) the filling of tideflats that compose much of today's SoDo and Industrial District south of Downtown Seattle, and the development of the plats that still determine the general plan of the piers on Seattle's Central Waterfront. Each pier is more or less a parallelogram. Most earlier piers, none of which survive, formed a perfect right angle to the shore, and the curvature of the shore meant that each pier was at a slightly different angle, causing potential for collisions. Their uniform northeast–southwest direction was prescribed by Thomson and Cotterill not only solved that problem but also spared freight trains from needing to make a sharp right angle.

Politics An increasingly prominent figure in the city, Cotterill was soon embroiled in matters unrelated to his technical skills (or even his financial skills) Gold Rush money had turned Seattle into a wide open city: brothels and casinos flourished, as did concomitant corruption. Cotterill had been a Republican, but in 1900 he supported populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan for president and ran for mayor of Seattle, nominally as a nonpartisan, but effectively as a Democrat. It was not the Democrats' year, and Cotterill lost (as he would also lose a Congressional race two years later). He resigned his city job and resumed private practice. The U.S. did not grant women the right to vote until the 19th amendment passed in 1920.

Cotterill was the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in 1908 and 1910, but lost both races. Hiram Gill ran successfully for the Seattle mayoralty in 1910 on "open city" platform, defeating real estate man George W. Dilling. Gill opposed municipal ownership of utilities, arguing not only for privatised transit, but for privatised waterworks, and opposing the then-young Seattle City Light electric utility. He was generally anti-tax and anti-union. Gill reinstalled police chief Charles "Wappy" Wappenstein, whom Gill's predecessor John F. Miller had dismissed as corrupt. Wappenstein promptly established a regime far more "open" than any that Gill had overtly advocated. Every prostitute in Seattle was expected to pay $10 a month to "Wappy", and the police department made sure they paid. Beacon Hill became home to a 500-room brothel with a 15-year lease from the city. It did not take long for the voters to get fed up, and Gill was recalled from office in 1911, though it would not be his last time as mayor. Dilling finished out Gill's term. Wappenstein eventually went to prison. Reformers, many of them with no party affiliation, formed the majority of the Seattle City Council. Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" candidacy carried the state in the presidential election later that year, though Roosevelt did not win the country.

Although in some ways his moment of triumph, Cotterill was by this time, in Roger Sales's words, riding "two horses… moving in different directions". His desire for municipal ownership of utilities and public control of ports allied him with labour and populism; his lifelong Prohibitionist views did not. The Prohibitionist movement was, by this time, aligning itself with issues that wanted small government on most other issues, because they had come to believe that big government inevitably meant corruption. Meanwhile, labour was moving farther left, toward socialism and even anarcho-syndicalism.

Prohibitionism and the temperance movement had always been at the centre of Cotterill's morality. His parents had been members of the United Kingdom Temperance Alliance. During his childhood in England, he attended the Band of Hope, an organisation for children's temperance education. His mother had formed the local chapter. He attended a convention of the International Order of Good Templars in 1897 and was involved with the Templars for the rest of his life, serving for a time as Grand Secretary of the Washington State division and later as Chief Templar of the national division. He was a member of the Anti-Saloon League and in 1909, was appointed by President Taft to represent the US at the International Congress against Alcoholism; in 1913 he was reappointed to this role by President Wilson.

That was hardly the last of the labour troubles Cotterill faced as mayor. Later that year, the Teamsters struck for union recognition and a closed shop. Cotterill attempted to remain neutral, which the employers viewed as support for the union.

Roughly a decade after his retirement, he died in a Seattle nursing home.