URBAN COUNTIES
The county has been put to its severest test in modern urban
communities.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century began the
away-from-the-farm movement. The discovery of steam power and its
application to every department of industry began to draw men,
women and children from their homes to earn a livelihood in the
new industrial order. It became necessary for them to congregate
in factories; they could no longer spread themselves out over the
countryside. Out of the factory system came the city, came hundreds of
cities along the coasts and rivers and even on the open prairies. New
methods of transportation accelerated the process. The movement has
never stopped; not even yet, when more than a third of the country’s
inhabitants are living in cities of twenty-five thousand inhabitants
and more. Out of the growth of cities came congestion of population;
out of congestion, problems of very existence without number.
The colonial heritage of local government was wholly unadapted to
any such emergency. In simple pioneer communities it was easy to
provide government that met the unexacting standards of the times.
Efficient government was not a live issue. Government, good or bad,
was little needed and there was little of it. And if that little was
ill-conceived, what matter?
But the time came when local government began to feel the strain of new
responsibilities. Cities failed miserably--“conspicuously.” Counties
failed even more miserably but without observation. It was not so much
that local government was called upon to perform more services, but
that it was to adapt itself to new conditions of service, to execute
old forms of service in a more intensive fashion. For instance, in
a general way, the state had charged the county with the protection
of life. Under rural conditions the obligation seems to have been
performed tolerably well, because violations of the law are rarer where
population is thin. A sheriff, with the help of a few constables and
the power to summon citizens to his aid in times of special emergency,
was all the police that was needed in most communities. With the growth
of the city the police problem was intensified even out of proportion
to the numbers of the people. Keeping the peace came to mean no longer
the mere matter of quelling disturbances. The city with its teeming
population not only bred violence and disorder, but it afforded
opportunities for immunity through concealment. A new police problem
quite foreign to the capacities of the ancient office of sheriff grew
up. The city had to meet the professional, scientific criminal with
specialized instrumentalities and organization. Crowds on the congested
city streets had to be taken care of and numerous other incidentals of
the congested city had to be foreseen.
The city likewise developed an entirely new problem of public charity,
which quite outgrew the capacities of that amateur sociologist, the
county poormaster.
The coroner, too, sadly missed the mark in numerous cases. In the
new industrial order in the cities, not only was criminal violence
multiplied but industrial fatalities added heavily to the terrors of
city life for the working class. The civil liabilities which were
imposed upon employers and upon insurance companies made it more than
ever important that every sudden or suspicious death be investigated
with the utmost scientific thoroughness. Such service it was of course
impossible for the untrained elective political coroner to render, and
the world will never know the costly mistakes that are chargeable to
his inexpertness.
In the fullness of time court organization also revealed the necessity
for differentiation between various classes of cases which were
presented for settlement. Again, the protection of life against
communicable diseases and of property against fire were two functions
that the rural local government had completely overlooked or neglected,
and when urban conditions arose in the midst of the county there was
nothing in the original local government machinery that could be made
to respond to these needs. The county was apparently stereotyped to
minister to local conditions as they were conceived in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Its organization was merely adapted to
perform the simple cut-and-dried services that had been laid down for
it in centuries gone by. Its expansion into new and bigger fields of
service seems never to have been seriously considered.
But the pungent fact is that counties, when they have ceased to serve
the needs of urban life, have been so slow to retire from the field.
What state has stripped the sheriff of his power to interfere in a riot
or a strike to the infinite annoyance of the thousand per cent. more
competent police force of the city? How very few states have shown the
coroner the door and replaced him with a scientifically trained medical
examiner! Not less ridiculous the board of county supervisors in great
cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, solemnly ruling over a
territory almost identical in its extent with the bailiwick of the city
authorities. Why should not a single body do all the local regulating?
And so, the urban county problem is first of all a question of
ill-adapted instruments of government perpetuated long past their
period of utility.
In the second place it is a matter of duplication and conflict of
organization and effort as between the city and the county. When the
charter in Los Angeles County was revised in 1912 it was found that in
the urban communities three separate groups of officers were charged
with keeping the peace: the sheriff and his deputies, the constables
of the several townships and the police of the city. Their duties
were substantially the same, they covered the same ground. The public
scattered its civic attention accordingly. It was this same state
of California which within the last twenty years has authorized its
cities to have separate tax assessors--two sets of officials to go
out and get precisely the same information. Ever since that time the
taxable property in the city has been rated differently by the two sets
of officers. And the reason? Apparently a double one: to enable the
individual counties to beat down their proportion of the state tax and
at the same time to allow the cities to raise their valuations and keep
down the tax rate. The political value of a double set of officers is
of course not to be overlooked.
An unpublished report of the City Club of Milwaukee reveals a
paralleling of city and county services at numerous points. The city
was found to be maintaining an emergency hospital, a tuberculosis
sanitarium and a corps of milk inspectors, while the county maintained
similar services through a general hospital, a tuberculosis
sanitarium, a visiting physician and a district nurse. The county jail
and the police station were in close proximity but under separate
jurisdictions. Where the county handled public works through an
engineering department the city operated through a highway department,
each unit requiring practically the same sort of administrative and
technical direction. City and county did their purchasing separately
and in the respective public works departments there was a duplication
of testing laboratories and of engineering and other service records.
Separate city and county regulative or governing bodies added
materially both to the expense of government and to the number of
elective officers.
Then again, the urban county, including judicial officers, has
contributed more to the length of the ballot than any other division
of government. In the year 1910 before the adoption of the present
charter, the Los Angeles city ballot, which has been frequently
exhibited as a horrible example, contained the names of candidates for
forty-five separate offices. Twenty-eight of these belonged to the
county-township system!
The Chicago voter, as the result of the early influences plus the
additions to the number of offices which have been made from time to
time, casts a ballot for about twenty-five candidates, including the
sheriff, the treasurer, county clerk, clerk of the probate court, clerk
of the criminal court, president of the county commissioners, ten
county commissioners, judge of the county court. The voter in Omaha, in
addition to the usual run of county officers, selects also thirty-two
deputy tax assessors, all on a single ballot. In most states these
officers are chosen on the same day and on the same ballot with a long
list of state and judicial officers, so that the county election is
only an incidental and minor issue in the whole complicated business.
On election day the urban county offices are usually found at the
bottom of the ballot. Usually numerous and obscure enough in their own
right in the country districts, their contributions to the obscurity of
voting in the city are more than doubly important.
When to an immoderately long ballot, to duplication of functions
as between county and city, there is added a multiplicity of local
government units, all considerations of responsibility in government
or intelligence of citizenship fall to the ground. Such is the case
in Cook County, Illinois, where the Bureau of Public Efficiency
has issued a striking little pamphlet on _The Nineteen Local
Governments in Chicago_. (The number has since been increased
to twenty-two.) Twenty-two separate taxing bodies, and one hundred
and forty-four officials which every Chicago voter is expected to
choose! Is it a wonder that “Mr. Voter,” to quote the title of an
accompanying cartoon, is “dazed?” As the pamphlet says: “The large
number of local governments in Chicago, with their very large number
of elective officials, independent of one another, operates to produce
not only inefficient public service but an enormous waste of public
revenues. The present multiplicity of governing bodies, with a lack
of centralized control and the long ballot, results in confusing
complexity and makes gross inefficiency and waste on a large scale
inevitable.”
The city too has proven itself an altogether unfavorable environment
for clean, active county citizenship. A thousand and one preoccupations
and distractions in the city have strongly tended to drive the
populace to forget that it even lives in a county. The county does
little for the city dweller. It does not keep his house from burning
or his pockets from being picked. It does not build the streets on
which he travels nor perform any humane services which could stir his
admiration. The sheriff is no neighbor of his nor does he hear of
that officer from one year’s end to another, unless it be his rare
fortune to be a party to some legal action. The newspapers, to be
sure, are apt to give a great deal of space to criminal trials and
feature the activities of the district attorney. But even that is apt
to be directed more to metropolitan sensationalism than to helpful
citizenship.
The greater the power entrusted to the municipalities within the
county, the more interesting things it is given to do, in just that
measure does the county itself suffer from inattention on the part of
the citizens, till the extreme is reached in a condition described in
a report on Cook County by Prof. F. D. Bramhall of the University of
Chicago:
“The city corporate stands in the mind of most men for their local
government; it has its picturesque history, its visible physical
embodiments, its corporate personality, its stimulus to the pride
of its people and its claim upon their loyalty. The county can make
no such appeal, and it is a political fact to be reckoned with that
however you may urge that the county is an essential part of city
government, that the city electorate is almost equivalent to the
county electorate, and should assert an equal proprietorship, it is
almost impossible to overcome the obsession that the county is an
alien thing. There is no more serious consequence of the parceling out
of our local governmental powers and the shattering of responsibility
for our municipal housekeeping than just this forfeiture of the sense
of identification with government and the force of local patriotism
which should be a tremendous asset for American political government.”
Without a doubt, the urban, and particularly the metropolitan county,
is the county at its worst.