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. In an idealistic age, civic centers like this were consciously meant to be an architectural expression of democratic ideals. Burnham, who had created the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and designed the restoration of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., brought the City Beautiful movement of the era to Cleveland; work on the Mall and its ensemble of public buildings continued well into the 1930s. Throughout the decade, the transit wars continued unabated. By 1903, the Hanna interests, the lines formerly run by Johnson, and others were consolidated into the Cleveland Electric Railway Company, a private near-monopoly opposed only by the Johnson-supported Municipal Traction Company, offering a three-cent fare. Seven years of conflict exhausted both firms and forced them into receivership. In 1910 voters approved a compromise plan called the 'Tayler Grant' under which Cleveland Electric Railway would lease the lines from the city and be assured of a 6% return. Though the new arrangement worked well for decades, it was seen as a defeat for Johnson. Johnson took up the cause of municipal ownership not only in streetcars, but electric power, to bring down rates by offering competition to the monopoly private utility. 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 a booming city that for decades had been predominantly Republican, fiscally frugal and business-oriented, Johnson's policies made him an extremely divisive figure. As his associate Frederic C. Howe put it, it was a "Ten Years' War", and people were either strongly for the mayor or strongly against him. In winning his four terms, Johnson depended heavily on the vote from ethnic neighborhoods on the West Side, where his three-cent fare streetcars