ROADS AND BRIDGES
To the county in most of the states has also been committed from early
times, the obligation to carry forward what is now generally recognized
as one of the greatest of unifying, nationalizing, civilizing factors
in this or any time--highways. Through these avenues of communication
the people of the wilderness were to break their solitude, establish
common understandings and give value to the products of the earth by
creating markets for their distribution. Over the highways access was
to be had with schools and churches.
From the colonial period and well down into the nineteenth century,
the construction and maintenance of roads was, in diminishing degree,
a private enterprise, operated by turnpike companies primarily for
the benefit of their stock-holders rather than that of the public.
Gradually road making came to be regarded as a public function, at
first in respect to the repairs upon the private toll roads and then in
original construction. In the year 1913 the amount which counties of
the country spent upon their highways had mounted to $55,514,891.
To the fulfillment of this great function the county brought those
weaknesses of governmental organization, that lack of equipment, that
defective loyalty to the service of the whole people which have been
described heretofore. The erection of a road system was a demand for
broad, foreseeing knowledge and appreciation of the needs of the whole
county, high technical skill in the art of road making and adequate
financial arrangements. The county supplied none of these.
What the county did supply and how it supplied it may be worth the
recital, even though in these days of the “good-roads” movement the
state government is constantly stiffening its hold upon highway matters.
To begin with, the whole public road function is rooted, historically,
in the tradition of the people’s infinite political versatility and
infallibility. The true democrat of the nineteenth century never
doubted his ability to select and control the human agents for
executing a technical and difficult engineering problem, which has
baffled the resources of modern specialists. And so, to this day, the
management of road construction and care over a great portion of the
country is entrusted to a farmer, a blacksmith, a plumber or some other
species of layman who has sufficient popularity with his neighbors
and the county chairman to get himself chosen as town supervisor. In
some states the rôle of road manager is played by the somewhat better
equipped county surveyor, who, however, like the supervisor, is picked
in the majority of cases because of his vote-getting qualities rather
than for any technical training.
Under these circumstances the roadmaster is apt to enter upon his
public duties with a sense of his obligation not to the whole community
and its ultimate interest, but to those articulate sections of the
people who are most likely to make themselves felt on the next election
day. As a certain highway engineer illustrated the situation: “Here’s
$10,000 to spend on roads. Here also is Jeff Browning up on Nut Creek,
who wants quite a little road work done. Of course, Jeff lives fifteen
miles from the county seat, and there’s fifteen miles of bad roads
between his place and town, _but Jeff voted the whole settlement for
me_, and he has some idle teams, and we’ll just help him along by
spending some money at his place.” It is one of the familiar processes
of practical politics and the imagination should have no difficulty in
picturing any number of equally accommodating transactions.
Quite as serious an aspect of road control directly by elective
officers is that it gives too great and too convenient an opportunity
for layman advice and prejudice to bear upon a technical problem. One
curious idea which is prevalent in middle western rural districts
is that a road, in order to be a road, must be on a section line,
regardless of the contour of the land, the convenience of users of the
highway or the character of the soil. The engineer above quoted tells
of a very bad hill about two miles north of Poplar Bluff, Mo. “The
grade,” says Mr. Edy, “must have been something like twelve per cent.
in places. It was estimated that by going around this hill, a grade of
six per cent. could be obtained, increasing the distance but slightly,
and traversing almost worthless ground. The owner, however, would
neither give nor sell a right of way, holding that unless the road were
maintained ‘on the line’ it would not be a real road. Something like
$400 was spent on this bill in an effort to make it passable, when half
that amount would have made a permanent road in a new location.”
Of course, when the organization of the county gives to Jeff Browning
and the philosopher of Poplar Bluff the predominating influence in road
affairs, there can be nothing in the way of a county road policy or
road plan that is based upon the economic and social needs of the whole
people. The system enthrones petty rural sectionalism and narrowness
and condones a form of graft which is without doubt as vicious in
principle as the stealing of a street railway franchise. Where the
township supervisor is the responsible official the case is at its
worst for it means just so many more executive units to be watched,
just so many more standards of road construction, just so many more
independent road plans.
The “business” end of county road administration is often weighted
down to earth with the same sublime faith in the wisdom of the average
citizen. Rarely have counties maintained anything that approximated
adequate records of cost or serviceability of their roads and bridges
or data upon which they could construct a satisfactory policy of
construction, if indeed their governing bodies have dreamed of the need
or the value of such aids. Even of so highly developed a community as
Monroe County, New York, in which the City of Rochester is situated,
it could be said concerning the office of highway superintendent that
“the only record now kept is a bill book in which are entered all
claims against the county highway fund which are paid through the
superintendent’s office, all payrolls and all claims for personal
service.”[12]
Much the same lack of appreciation for facts was revealed in a cruder
way in a grand jury investigation during 1912 of the methods of the
Board of Commissioners in Darke County, Ohio, where it was discovered
that minutes were rarely read and contracts were voted twenty at a time
and sometimes without the formality of a vote, in direct violation of
the law.
From another middle western state comes an illuminating description
of the method of awarding bids on bridge construction: “Each
competitor submitted his own drawings and an estimate to a board of
commissioners, not one of whom had the least technical knowledge or
practical experience, but was ‘led away’ generally _by the size of
the drawing_ and the accompanying estimate.
“The result was shoddy work, insufficient piers or abutments, piles not
driven down to any safe and permanent depth and finally a bridge that
was built for appearance, not durability nor permanency. Just as soon
as we had a flood bringing down logs, stumps and trees, some of these
would strike or swing against the piers and down came the structure,
floating away or lodging in the stream, causing a jamb to accumulate,
holding up the stream and overflowing land for miles.
“It took many years to get a system where an engineer designed a bridge
with details of construction, steel or iron cylinders filled with
concrete as piers, and a superintendent of construction who knew his
business to take charge of the work.
“Thus we spent thousands of dollars for bridges to be erected simply
to see them carried out; in one instance twice. But the cost and
failure combined in time brought forth such protests that such a system
would not be tolerated longer; but the waste was done and the money
practically thrown away.
“In county road repair and construction we were no better. The
district boss was elected politically, and of course he rewarded his
commissioner friends by working the road fund. He dared not complain
of short hours or little done or sitting by the road discussing how
to ‘fix the election,’ and usually the work was done just before the
nomination and election. The ‘dump of dirt’ was left in a pile, not
even leveled; every team avoided it if possible, and when winter then
came it was ‘slurry’ and mud. No ditches or outlets for same were made
or cleaned out, and if any suggestion was made for improvement, you
were told ‘it was good enough before you came and you can get out if
you don’t want to stay.’”
In Polk County, Iowa, an investigation in 1912 disclosed the fact that
the board of supervisors had paid out $100,000 for contracts without
asking for bids. They never required plans or specifications of any
bridge to be constructed. Bridges had been ordered without any idea of
what they would cost. No guarantee bond was required and bridges were
accepted without inspection. Certain companies had been favored to the
exclusion of others and the result was that in many counties bridges
were built at a cost fifty per cent. higher than their reasonable value.
To the rich opportunities for “turning an honest dollar” which lurked
in such systems and in such an attitude on the part of the public
officers, the “powers that prey” have been keenly alive. The tale that
was told a few years ago, with a multitude of specifications, by a
few enterprising farm journals in the Middle West, rivals, except in
dramatic quality and the size of the sums involved, the characteristic
falls from grace which have been heretofore associated with ward
aldermen and legislators hailing from wicked urban districts. It was a
serious indictment of county officialdom which is contained in a letter
of the chairman of the Roads and Highways Committee of the lower house
in Kansas, who wrote in 1913:
“I know there are comparatively few county commissioners who profit
personally by the manipulations of the bridge companies but the
representatives of the companies are shrewd men who understand
thoroughly that the average county commissioner is very jealous of his
bridge patronage, and brooks no interference with his handling of the
bridge business with a free hand. Consequently the bridge men play this
feature to the limit and to their own profit.”[13]
That Iowa was inoculated with the same germ is suggested by remarks of
Alson Secor, the editor of _Successful Farming_:
“The bridge men are not depending upon a lobby at Des Moines, or any
state capitol, to put through what they want, or to prevent legislation
that will make bridge letting competitive. They work to elect or defeat
supervisors. They finance state supervisors’ annual meetings and give
the watchdogs of the public treasury that contains your tax money such
a good time that the ‘boys’ fall under lasting obligations to the
bridge companies.
“Bribe the lawmakers? Oh, no! You can’t say that. It isn’t a bribe
to hand a man a line of soft talk, is it? It isn’t a bribe to give a
county official a hilarious good time at a summer resort, is it? Or to
pay his hotel bills when he attends the state meetings? No--a thousand
times no--legally.
“But the bridge men get there just the same. They have for years
prevented any legislation that would give them a dollar’s worth of
bridge work for a dollar’s worth of taxes.”
So well satisfied were the favored bridge builders with the _status
quo_ in Nebraska in 1913 that they are said to have maintained at
the state legislature a powerful lobby to oppose by corrupt methods a
bill whose one purpose was to require bidders to furnish estimates on
uniform blanks. The information thus obtained would have been placed
on file at the state capitol and made available to all who might wish
to compare the cost of construction in different counties--light would
have been let into the operations of the counties in bridge-building
matters.
It would seem, then, that the _system_ did have much to do with
waste of public funds and inefficiency of every sort and was the basis
of a certain amount of corruption, in all the states mentioned. It was
not all simply a matter of “good” men and “bad” men. But the breakdown
of the county in highway affairs is fast becoming ancient history, not
directly, through a process of regeneration, but through forces playing
upon the county from without which we will again identify for the
present simply as the “good-roads” movement, of which more hereafter.
[12] From an unpublished report of the Rochester Bureau of Municipal
Research, 1915.
[13] _Successful Farming_, June, 1913.