Tom Loftin Johnson (July 18, 1854 – April 10, 1911) was an American industrialist, Georgist politician, and important figure of the Progressive Era and a pioneer in urban political and social reform.

In the 1880s and 90s he expanded his interests to lines in Cleveland, St. Louis, Brooklyn and Detroit, and also entered the steel business, building mills in Lorain, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to provide rails for streetcar tracks.

[5] Two chance events helped spark Johnson's interest in politics and social questions, and convert him from a conventional business tycoon to a radical reformer.

The disaster had been caused by the improper maintenance of a dam holding a private recreational lake, owned by Henry Clay Frick and other Pittsburgh industrialists, who escaped all responsibility for it.

In a time when companies with a monopoly of transport on a route were able to charge five cents for a ride, he made the 'three-cent fare' a cornerstone of his populist philosophy, and later he would come out in favor of complete public ownership.

Johnson liked to rent large circus tents and set them up on neighborhood lots, attracting big crowds for whom he would deliver a powerful speech, banter cheerfully with hecklers, and finish with a stereopticon show with a political moral.

One of the campaign issues had been a valuable piece of city-owned downtown lakefront property, which outgoing mayor John H. Farley and the council had agreed to hand over to the railroads without compensation.

Some of his policies were true innovations, while others mirrored those of the two other notable Progressive Midwestern mayors of the era, Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit and Samuel 'Golden Rule' Jones of Toledo.

"[16] The new administration paved hundreds of miles of streets and expanded the city's park system, building a large number of playgrounds, ball fields and other facilities.

To popular acclaim, the mayor tore up all the 'Keep off the Grass' signs in the city parks, a symbol of his belief in changing parklands' role from passive to active recreation.

Johnson eliminated the haulers' franchises and replace them with a municipal department; he hired back all the men who had lost their jobs, and demonstrated how a public service could provide better performance at lower cost.

[18] In keeping with the administration's focus on public health, a street cleaning force was started, and the city's Water Department was depoliticized and vastly improved.

Police Chief Fred Kohler, a stubborn, incorruptible martinet, gained national renown for cleaning up and professionalizing the force, and clamping down on vice.

The physical symbol of Johnson's revolution in government is Cleveland's civic center, a spacious park surrounded by public buildings, called simply 'The Mall'.

The origins of the 'Group Plan' went back to a competition held by the Cleveland Architectural Club in 1895, but it was Johnson who pushed the appropriations through, and brought in a team headed by Daniel Burnham, the nation's leading planner, to design it.

He founded the Municipal Light and Power Company, and though political opposition kept him from expanding it, the next Progressive mayor, Newton D. Baker, built a new plant that opened in 1914 as the biggest public utility in the U.S. "Muny Light" (now Cleveland Public Power) brought important savings on the city's own electric bills, and those of residents fortunate enough to have access to the service, while it forced the private competitor to keep its own rates low.

In the middle and upper-class sections of the East Side, opponents railed against policies they called expensive and "socialistic", pointing out that after only five years Johnson had nearly doubled the city's debt.

The years that followed his death were perhaps the most creative period in the city's history, in which it perfected excellent library and school systems, while completing the Group Plan's public buildings on the Mall and the ensemble of educational and cultural institutions at University Circle.

[citation needed]Typical of these was Frederick C. Goff, president of the city's largest bank, who once said "I am more concerned that the Cleveland Trust Company shall fulfill its obligations to the community than make money for the stockholders".

A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Johnson ranked as the second-best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.