James Allen Rhodes (13 September 1909-4 March 2001) was the Republican Mayor of Columbus from 1944 to 1952 (succeeding Floyd F. Green and preceding Robert T. Oestreicher) and Governor of Ohio from 14 January 1963 to 11 January 1971 (succeeding Michael DiSalle and preceding John J. Gilligan) and from 13 January 1975 to 10 January 1983 (succeeding Gilligan and preceding Dick Celeste).
Biography[]
James Allen Rhodes was born in Coalton, Ohio in 1909 to parents of Welsh descent, and he was raised in Springfield. He ran a variety store that sold donuts, hamburgers, porn films, and numbers games bets before climbing up the Columbus political ladder, serving on the city's board of education from 1937 to 1939, as city auditor from 1939 to 1943, as Mayor from 1944 to 1952 (during which he introduced the city's first income tax), as State Auditor from 1953 to 1963, and as Governor from 1963 to 1971 and from 1975 to 1983. Rhodes campaigned for "jobs and progress" as a means of decreasing crime, divorce, and mental illness. He failed in his 1970 US Senate bid due to the Kent State massacre two days earlier, caused by his dispatch of National Guard troops onto the campus at the request of Kent mayor LeRoy Satrom. Rhodes declared that campus protesters were worse than the Brownshirts, communists, Night Riders, and vigilantes just a day before the massacre. Rhodes was nevertheless re-elected during the 1970s, and he was pied by Steve Conliff at the opening of the state fair in 1977; Conliff then unsuccessfully challenged Rhodes for renomination. Rhodes died in 2001.