Mayor George Ainslie
George Ainslie, the 54th mayor of Richmond who held office from 1912 to 1924, is little known today despite his successes. Competency is not as often enshrined in the public memory as are grand achievements, flamboyance or scandal.
Ainslie came into office as a two-year figurehead official with little authority amid a byzantine arrangement of governmental commissions and committees overseen by an elected Common Council and Board of Aldermen. Ainslie exhibited aplomb while weathering three alterations of the municipal machinery that by 1918 had made him the city’s four-year chief executive officer three times.
During Ainslie’s time, however, the 1902 Virginia constitution restricted voting rights by imposing poll taxes and other qualifications that blocked ballot access for most Blacks and some whites. Further, white women couldn’t vote until 1920.
He was born into Reconstruction-era Richmond on Oct. 10, 1868, one of five children of George Alexander and Jenette Currie Ainslie. Prior to the Civil War, his father had founded the Ainslie Carriage Works, headed the fire department, directed the vocational-technical Virginia Mechanics Institute and served on the Chamber of Commerce. Following his 1889 death, an older son, David, took over the business.
Young George grew up at 2519 E. Grace St., which is still standing in Church Hill and bears a plaque honoring his father’s memory.
Ainslie graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1890 and earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1893. He pledged with the Kappa Alpha fraternity, founded on the idea of gentlemanly behavior as embodied, in their view, by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
He carried a captain’s rank in the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, a military organization of the state guard and an important part of the social whirl. And he joined the downtown bastion of white soft power, the Commonwealth Club.
Ainslie’s looks and voice must’ve helped, too. Many Richmonders considered him “remarkably handsome,” as the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial page gushed. The writer complimented Ainslie’s “good physique and clear-cut features.”
In the fall of 1903, Ainslie married New Orleanian Antoinette Burthe. Together, they raised two daughters, Mary and Maude.
Ainslie and law partner Miles Martin represented Virginia Passenger and Power Company. The private traction company operated electric streetcars. He defended the firm in often-heated legal debates about fares, transfers and track alignments. His name came up for various positions including postmaster, judge and state senator. Then, in 1903, he started a three-year term on the city’s police commission.
These weren’t easy times.
During 1903-04, disputes erupted against VP&P, with trolley operators demanding higher wages and a boycott by Black ridership of the streetcars due to VP&P’s segregationist policies.
The labor strike turned violent and 1,300 state guardsmen were called in to keep order, including members of the Richmond Blues. At least two people died. VP&P’s intransigence in both cases rolled the firm into receivership. Whether or not these events affected Ainslie, who had represented the company while also belonging to the Blues, isn’t clear.
Regardless, in August 1912 he got his break when Mayor David Crockett Richardson was appointed by the governor to the Hustings Court bench. Richmond’s Democratic Committee didn’t hold a primary. Instead, Ainslie was unanimously picked by the Common Council to complete Richardson’s term.
Ainslie married Antoinette Burthe in 1903.
Richmond simultaneously experienced one of its periodic outbreaks of political convulsion.
The 1912 General Assembly granted charter changes that reduced the city’s eight political wards to four while a five-member elected-at-large Administrative Board held executive powers. This effort at efficiency ran headlong into an otherwise cumbersome two-chamber city legislature composed of more than 50 mostly chummy white men.
After the board’s abolition in 1918, the mayor gained near-complete authority over city departments. Ainslie used that power over his three full terms to pave streets, install lights, enhance distribution for water, sewer and gas, and advocate for parks, playgrounds and a public library.
Ainslie also sought to improve the lives of all citizens, “no matter as to his race, creed or color.” Black rights activist and Richmond Planet publisher John Mitchell Jr. complimented the mayor’s efforts, though he also spoke about how Black mortality rates were related to what today we call food deserts. Mitchell declared that the food wasted by the city’s hotels and private residences “would feed half of Richmond free of charge.”
In October 1915, the Times-Dispatch mentioned how Ainslie was “importuned by a delegation of negroes to interfere” with the showing at the Academy of Music of “The Birth of a Nation,” a cinematic spectacle with racist propaganda at its core. Ainslie wrote to David Shea, manager of the Academy, that he’d not heard “the slightest unfavorable comment” about the picture.
Ainslie’s salient achievement came at noon on Nov. 15, 1914, following a two-year struggle in courts and with public opinion, when Richmond absorbed 16 square miles of Henrico and Chesterfield counties. Almost all the neighborhoods had evolved due to streetcars, which grew with the aid of Ainslie’s work as a lawyer. Among the annexed areas were the independent communities of Barton Heights, Ginter Park and Highland Park; the neighborhoods of North Richmond, Forest Hill and Westover Hills; and a corner of town called Scott’s Addition.
The annexation added 20,000 people and properties of nearly $12 million in taxable value. A tax increase was checked by a 30-year, half-million-dollar bond that covered transfer costs. Yet residents of older neighborhoods, especially in the working-class wards, felt Ainslie favored the new sections while theirs went wanting.
Their dissatisfaction gave an opening to John Fulmer Bright, a Medical College of Virginia graduate who specialized in dentistry, a colonel in the First Virginia Regiment, a former one-term delegate and, recently, the Henrico County coroner. He was a dapper, courtly fellow of epic obstinance who trumpeted “good government for less money or better government for the same money.”
Ainslie lost the seesawing Democratic primary decision on a cold and wet Tuesday, April 1, 1924. Bright took a majority of 1,300 votes.
One report told of betting on the outcome causing the exchange of $200,000. Other wagers cost only dignity: Ainslie supporter H.S. Francis agreed to push Bright associate P.R. Vellines down Broad Street in a baby carriage.
After Ainslie’s final “state of the city” report in July 1924, the Times-Dispatch opined that his 12 years as mayor “will ever remain a monument to his ability, his wisdom and fidelity — a monument, too, which will ever be of great and practical value to the city and people of Richmond.”
After his victory, Bright declared an end to a self-perpetuating political class. He administrated Richmond for 16 years by refusing to change almost anything.
Ainslie became president of the American Holding and Finance Corporation. He died in 1931, age 62, of heart failure at his family’s home, 1814 Park Ave.
