George Guthrie, elected mayor of Pittsburgh in 1906 on a reform, anti-machine platform, spent his adult life battling the machine government. Guthrie came from an elite Pittsburgh family with a political tradition-both his father and his maternal grandfather had been mayors of Pittsburgh. 1 Guthrie graduated from Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh) and went on to a successful career as an attorney in the firm of Kerr & Guthrie. But his heart and soul were in reform politics. In 1896, a mass meeting held to protest the power of the Magee-Flinn machine led to the formation of the Citizens' Municipal League, which chose Oliver McClintock as its president and Guthrie as its candidate for mayor in that year's election. The Citizens' Municipal League opposed the system in which "a few appointed leaders ... have assumed as overseers the control of both city and state legislation, the election and appointment of all officials and employees, the grants of franchise and awards of public contracts, and have turned the current of pecuniary and political ... to their own interest." The Citizens' Municipal League was one of many municipal reform organizations arising in American cities in the 1890s, and became quickly linked to the National Municipal League (NML), which had formed at the end of 1894 and had its first annual meeting in May of 1895. George Guthrie would serve as the Citizens' Municipal League delegate to the following year's national meeting of the NML, and two years later both Guthrie and McClintock were serving on the NMI.:s executive committee. 2 Although he lost in a close race that he claims was tainted by voter fraud, Guthrie's zeal continued for the passage of civil service laws and the ascendancy of non-partisan, honest, and independent local government. He was an early and active member of the Voters' League in Pittsburgh, was an executive council member of the

National Municipal League and a frequent speaker at their conferences, belonged to the Civil Service Reform Association, and was prominent in Democratic Party politics. 3

Guthrie was also a vestryman and loyal member of Calvary Episcopal Church, had been an active parishioner during George Hodges' tenure, and was a preeminent example of the "Calvary Crowd" who moved out from the church into the city, battling for political influence and municipal reform. Guthrie in this sense represents well the trend of reform in Pittsburgh in these years: out of the church and into the world. Although not all reform impulses had been located exclusively within the church world in 1890s Pittsburgh, much of the reform energy certainly had. In the years from 1895 to 1912, however, reform in Pittsburgh would be dominated by civic reform organizations and non-partisan political organizations,4 and it was these organizations which would collectively become the primary site of societal debate. In the 1890s Calvary Episcopal Church could legitimately be called the "linchpin" of Progressive reform in Pittsburgh;5 in the first decade of the twentieth century the Voters' League, the Civic Club, and the reform administration of George Guthrie assumed this mantle.