[Illustration: THIS IS A NEW YORK COUNTY--ALL OFFICERS ELECTED
INDEPENDENTLY OF EACH OTHER AND CO-ORDINATED THEORETICALLY BY ELABORATE
LAWS. HEADLESS, IRRESPONSIBLE, INEFFICIENT, OBSCURE.]
The County
The “Dark Continent” of American Politics
By
H. S. Gilbertson
[Illustration]
New York
The National Short Ballot Organization
1917
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
The American people have never ceased, nor do they give any signs
of ceasing, in their effort to master the mechanics of political
democracy. Curiously, however, they have quite neglected one of the
most promising of all the approaches to this study--the government of
counties. It is in the belief that a discussion of this subject would
tend to throw a great new light upon the “democratic experiment” that
the author has prepared this volume.
This is not a hand-book or a treatise on counties. Such a work cannot
be successfully carried through without a much wider and more thorough
research into the subject than has as yet been attempted. The author
hopes that this present work will do something to suggest and stimulate
such research. In the meantime the outlines of a very real and very
important “county problem” are visible and they mark the scope of this
volume.
The reader will doubtless note the complete absence of any
discussion of the county in its relation to the educational system.
The explanation of this omission lies in the great difficulty of
distinguishing anything like a universal interest of the county in
this branch of public administration, apart from those of the state
government and of the smaller divisions, except in the levying of taxes
and the distribution of tax money.
To Mr. Richard S. Childs, Secretary of The Short Ballot Organization,
the author is indebted for the suggestion that the book should be
written, and for criticisms of the manuscript. Assistance of the most
helpful sort during the manuscript stage was also rendered by Mr.
Herbert R. Sands, of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, and by
Mr. Otho G. Cartwright, of the Westchester County Research Bureau.
Inasmuch also as it has not seemed advisable to encumber the text with
an excessive number of footnotes, the author wishes to acknowledge
particularly his debt to Prof. John A. Fairlie’s volume, _The
Government of Counties, Towns, and Villages_, which was the source
of much of the historical material, and to Mr. Earl W. Crecraft, whose
studies of Hudson County, N. J., have been drawn upon at considerable
length.
H. S. GILBERTSON.
NEW YORK,
January 15, 1917.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--A POLITICAL BY-WAY 1
II.--JUST WHAT IS A COUNTY 9
III.--A CREATURE OF TRADITION 16
IV.--FALLING AFOUL OF “DEMOCRACY” 25
V.--THE JUNGLE 34
VI.--A BASE OF POLITICAL SUPPLIES 43
VII.--URBAN COUNTIES 57
VIII.--COUNTY GOVERNMENTS AT WORK 66
IX.--THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE 80
X.--ROADS AND BRIDGES 94
XI.--NULLIFICATION 104
XII.--STATE MEDDLING 112
XIII.--STATE GUIDANCE 120
XIV.--READJUSTMENTS 129
XV.--COUNTY HOME RULE 145
XVI.--CONSOLIDATION 151
XVII.--RECONSTRUCTION 168
XVIII.--SCIENTIFIC ADMINISTRATION 181
XIX.--THE COUNTY OF THE FUTURE 193
APPENDIX A--CONSTITUTIONAL COUNTY HOME
RULE IN CALIFORNIA 207
APPENDIX B--THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY
CHARTER 219
APPENDIX C--PROPOSED COUNTY HOME RULE
AMENDMENT IN NEW YORK 247
APPENDIX D--PROPOSED COUNTY MANAGER
LAW IN NEW YORK 251
APPENDIX E--THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER
IN NEW YORK CITY 257
APPENDIX F--A COUNTY ALMSHOUSE IN TEXAS 266
BIBLIOGRAPHY 275
INDEX 285
THE COUNTY
CHAPTER I
A POLITICAL BY-WAY
To close up the underground passages to political power, to open up
government and let in the daylight of popular opinion and criticism,
to simplify organization, to make procedure more direct, to fix
unmistakably the responsibilities of every factor in the State; that
has been the strategy of the reconstructive democratic movement in
America in the last fifteen years. Four hundred American cities,
without regret and with little ceremony, have cast aside the tradition
that complexity is the price of liberty. They have started afresh upon
the principle that government is public business to be administered as
simply, as directly, as openly and as cheaply as the law will allow.
Inasmuch as their former governments were not adapted to that ideal,
they have hastened to make them over. Contrary to prediction, the
palladium of liberty has not fallen. Business goes on as usual, public
business in a way that is amazingly satisfactory, as compared with the
“good old” days.
Where will the movement stop? Have all the secret passages been closed?
Have all the dark alleys of local politics been lighted? Or does work
for explorers lie ahead?
In 1915 the constitutional convention then in session at Albany, was
surveying the foundations of the political structure of New York,
undertaking to make adjustments to the sweeping changes that had
come over the life of the state in the previous twenty-year period.
Committees were chosen to rake the far corners of the system for
needed adjustment. Hundreds of experts were summoned and hundreds of
citizens voluntarily appeared to press their views and their wants.
The committee having in charge the organization of the _state_
government listened to an ex-president, the heads of two leading
universities, prominent efficiency experts and every important state
officer. The committee on _cities_ gave audience to the mayor
and chief legal officers of every important city in the state, while
the conference of mayors was sufficiently interested to send one of
its number to stump the state for an amendment which would promote
the welfare of New York cities. The work of these divisions of the
convention was of deepest concern to the state. It received from the
press and the public no small amount of interested comment.
There was also a committee which touched on an interest that includes
every inhabitant--county government. One might have imagined that this
body too could have attracted at least one or two celebrities. There
are sixty-one counties in New York State. Everybody lives in one. They
safeguard property, personal and civil rights. But not so. Two or three
public hearings; no ex-presidents; no college heads; no considerable
number of interested private citizens--such was the tangible display of
awakening to the subject at hand.
At a singularly appropriate moment, however, a brand-new association
of clerks of the boards of supervisors was formed. Several members
of the body appeared in person before the convention. The committee
appealed to them to enrich its fund of information concerning the home
government. They were given a free rein to tell of the needs of their
counties.
In view of collateral facts, the testimony of this notable group of
public servants is peculiarly illuminating. The representative of a
central New York county was there and blandly did he announce that his
people were perfectly satisfied with their county government; they
would not dream of modifying it. The clerk from a Hudson River county
was equally optimistic, and went to some pains to show in detail just
how very well his county was governed. Similar testimony was presented
from a county in the capital district. Then up spoke the clerk from
near the borders of Pennsylvania: the people of this neighboring
state had conceived so great an admiration for the form of his county
government that they were longing to substitute it for their own rather
simpler system.
Now for the collateral facts. Not more than two months following this
hearing, officers of the National Committee on Prison Labor got word
of misdoings at the jail in the central New York county and succeeded
in securing a Grand Jury investigation. The details of their findings
scarcely lend themselves to print. Enough to say that the sheriff’s
deputies had made a practice of allowing both men and women prisoners
to come and go at will and permitted most disreputable conditions to
prevail in the prison. Shortly after the committee hearings the state
comptroller completed his investigation of the financial affairs of
the Hudson River county. His report reeks with accounts of flagrant
and intentional violations of the laws on the part of not one but
nearly all of the county officers. As for the clerk from the capital
district, he was confronted at the hearing itself with several pieces
of special legislation passed, at the instance of the sheriff and the
superintendent of the poor, for the increase of salaries of deputies
over the head of the local governing body. That this appeal was not
so much in the interests of the county as of “political expediency”
and at the expense of the taxpayers, he cheerfully admitted. But as
for the near-Pennsylvania county, that was the earthly home of a man
who had conceived a clever method of breaking into the county treasury
by having the board of supervisors create for his benefit, contrary
to law, the position of “county custodian.” Once firmly settled in
his new position he persuaded the board to turn over to him (quite
illegally) their responsibility for auditing the claims against the
county, and persuaded the county treasurer to cash any warrant that
might have his “O. K.” When he had made away, in this manner, with some
ninety thousand dollars, the comptroller discovered his misdoings. Of
the whole bad mess, the solution which the “custodian” selected was
suicide. But the government of that county had not been fundamentally
changed to meet the defects of organization revealed in these
disclosures.
A collection of isolated facts? Familiar American graft and
inefficiency? Perhaps. But in the cities and in the states the public
has been going after such things. In the counties of New York the
people apparently did not know that such conditions were present. The
clerks who appeared at Albany and were, for the most part, the sole
representatives of their several counties, seem to have told the truth,
at least about the people’s complacency, but they might have been
more accurate and more complimentary if they had labeled it “lack of
knowledge.”
From coast to coast a deep silence broods over county affairs. Can
it be that, while cities have been reveling in franchise scandals
and police have been going into partnership with vice interests,
while state legislatures have been lightly voting away public money
on useless political jobs and extravagant public institutions, the
county alone is free from every breath of scandal and is a model of
official uprightness? Scores of municipal leagues and city clubs
and bureaus of municipal research are delving into city affairs and
finding opportunities for betterment at every turn of the hand.
But the number of county organizations that are doing critical and
constructive work could be numbered on the ten fingers, or less. Many
of the colleges offer courses specifically on municipal government,
but the “one pervasive unit of local government throughout the United
States” is disposed of with a brief mention. No political scientist
has ever had the ambition to plow into the soil, so that while there
is now available a five-hundred-page bibliography of city government,
there has never been written a single volume[1] devoted exclusively to
counties. Journalists for the most part have left the subject severely
alone.
And yet in those few instances where the county has been put under the
microscope or has been given more than a passing thought, the reward
of the investigators’ labors have always been so certain and rich as
to excite wonder as to how much further the shortcomings of the county
extend. In Hudson County, N. J., a few years ago, the cost of the court
house which had been fixed at nine hundred thousand dollars, threatened
to run up to seven million dollars. Impressed by this striking
circumstance, a body of citizens formed themselves into a permanent
Federation to look deeper and longer into this back alley of their
civic life. They found that the court house incident was but the most
dramatic of a hundred falls from grace. The Public Efficiency Society
of Cook County, Ill., the Westchester County Research Bureau, the
Taxpayers’ Association of Suffolk County, the Nassau County Association
in New York and the Tax Association of Alameda County in California
have all been richly repaid for their investments in county government
research. Sporadic cases? Possibly. And then again perhaps there is
something basically defective in the system.
But is it all a matter of importance?
If universality and magnitude of cost count for anything, yes. Nearly
all the inhabitants of the United States live in a county and nearly
every voter takes part in the affairs of one. There are over three
thousand such units. In their corporate capacity they had in 1913 a
net indebtedness of $371,528,268 (per capita, $4.33), which was a
growth from $196,564,619 in 1902 (per capita, $2.80). In that year they
spent for general government, $385,181,760, which is something like
one third the cost of the federal government for the same period. Of
this amount, $102,334,964 was for general management. Through these
county governments the American people spent for highway purposes,
$55,514,891; for the protection of life and property, $15,213,229; for
the conservation of health, $2,815,466; for education, $57,682,193;
for libraries, $364,712; for recreation, $419,556 (mostly in the
single state of New Jersey); for public service enterprises, $189,122;
for interest charges, $17,417,593; upon structures of a more or less
permanent nature, $89,839,726.
The figures, though of course not to be taken too seriously, are in
some cases as impressive for their paucity as in others for their
magnitude, for throughout a large part of the United States the county
is the sole agency of local government.
Counties pretty much throughout the nation are the corner-stone of the
system of partisan government and organization.
Counties, for this variety of reasons, therefore, would seem to be a
fit subject for scrutiny as to their relation to some of the vital
issues of American life.
[1] _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science_, May, 1913, contains a number of important monographs on
the subject.