Henry S. Gilbertson

“ And even government presents instances of men who have “made good” conspicuously against a form of organization which favored insubordination, against the interference of invisible powers, against the hundred and one cunningly devised handicaps to good administration.
We might with good grace take kindly to a system that brought distinguished, capable, honest, well-qualified men for the public service. If we could get good men and good administration as the normal output of the existing systems of county government, there would be satisfaction all around. ”

“ And so, county government everywhere was conceived in a spirit of negation. The people elect their boards of supervisors or county commissioners, hoping thereby to keep their fingers on the public purse through direct agents. The supervisors, in their turn, undertake to regulate the finances of the sheriff, the district attorney, the county clerk and the rest. But, lo, these officers are no subordinates of theirs; they are the people’s humble servants. The supervisors may set out upon a program of economy and efficiency, including, let us say, the standardization of supplies. ”

“ The county of the past has lacked opportunity to “do itself proud.” The county of the future will be equipped to do interesting things in an interesting way. But it must develop policies—real politics—as a substitute for the interest that has made place hunting and place holding a basic rural industry. The farmer of the future must be given something more wholesome to think about “during the long winter evenings” than who is to be the next coroner; and he must cease to measure his freedom by the number of offices he attempts to fill with his ballot. ”

“ The laws underlying the organization of the county government have not been changed; but there has grown up, quite outside the statute books and outside the court house itself, a second government that has supplied the great lack in the official, legal one, the lack of a definite head. The new factor in the county’s affairs has come to exercise the powers of an executive. Theoretically the people have elected his heads of departments; practically he has chosen them himself. The people have retained the forms while he has arrogated to himself the substance of political power. ”

“ It is a fatally ineffectual procedure. And when a dozen or nineteen officers, chosen by popular election, are thrown together, it is clear that every one of them is the legal peer of every other, since everyone acknowledges a common superior. And since the people are a rather too unwieldy body to look after the details of county business, each officer must be a law unto himself. And it is perhaps just as well that none of them has been designated as an official chief, since the facts of organization would refute and nullify any such arrangement. ”

“ 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 [Pg 98] is often weighted down to earth with the same sublime faith in the wisdom of the average citizen. ”

“ In the general overhauling of the systems, perhaps the elective county judge will disappear. But liberty, for all that, will not vanish from the earth. States as diverse in their location and composition as New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey and South Carolina never drifted quite completely into the habit of “electing everybody,” and they are good states. The Federal judiciary, too, is appointive, and it is not more culpable, by standards of either the progressiveness or of administrative efficiency, than most of the state courts. ”

“ But the most serious misfits of town government are the local agents of tax administration. Wherever the town is the smallest tax unit not only is the number of officials needlessly multiplied, but diverse standards of property valuation are set up and competition is resorted to between towns with a view to escaping their just share of taxation. Without a dissenting voice the recognized tax experts of the county are firmly of the opinion that the town as a unit of tax assessment and tax collection must give way to the county. ”

“ And so, the system of popular election has given no assurance that, though the people may know them ever so well as individuals, they would know their candidates in the sense that fixes their electoral responsibility.
What has had to be done, but what the people of the county have been unwilling or unable to do for themselves, has given to a public-minded fraction of the community the opportunity of their lives. They have generously taken over the people’s government and run it for them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sufferings of the insane in the county Poor Farms would so stir the compassion of the humane people of this state, could they but walk among these fellow-citizens of theirs and witness the misery to which they have been abandoned, that almshouse care would not survive the next session of the legislature. Take away, however, the meager attention given in the Poor Farms by those who, while they know nothing of mental diseases or of how to care for them, are moved by kindly impulses and recognize that the insane are sent to them for care and not for punishment ”

“ What the state government actually does when it regulates or supervises is to hold up the county official to standards of performance. This is the proper work of officers or boards in the administrative branch. It relates not to what the county shall do as a matter of broad policy, but how the county shall redeem its obligation in matters of routine, detail and technique. The state agency may have only the power to “visit and inspect,” like the New York State Board of Charities, or it may, like the Comptroller of the same state, actually impose forms of procedure. ”

“ It is doubtless proper that every person who receives special service should contribute accordingly to the expense of government. In small counties where the work of the county is limited there seems also to be much to be said in favor of the officer keeping the fees. But in large counties having an enormous business the compensation from this source is often all out of proportion to the amount of service rendered. It would seem, for instance, that the sheriff of New York County, who is never a man of special training, would be amply compensated for his routine services by a salary of $12,000. ”

“ Quite as fundamental to the welfare of the rural county as turnpikes and bridges is the awakening of its intellectual life. The school system is becoming everywhere more highly centralized, so that educational policies and administration are controlled from the state capitol. But the schools only meet the demand in an elementary limited way, leaving the adult population and the graduate of the common and high schools for the most part unprovided for. ”

“ Here is a county which has become so conspicuous and interesting to its citizens that they form themselves into local political parties, founded upon genuine differences of opinion and policy to make their citizenship felt in its government. In the seats of the governing body sit, not the typical office seeker to which we are accustomed in America, but men of the influence and ability of Lord Rosebery, afterwards the prime minister of England, and Sir John Lubbock. ”

“ One attendant, a cheerful young man, is employed by the county to look after the forty-odd inmates who at the least compose the Poor Farm population. He used to be a trolley car conductor but now he receives forty dollars a month for attending to the inmates, male and female, who cannot care for themselves. He brings back the feeble-minded when they wander off, he finds epileptics when they fall in their attacks and he sees that all are fed. ”

“ Nowhere does the record state that because the people elected long strings of officers, the people therefore controlled those officers. All the while the services which government could render have become more and more numerous and the public needs of the people more pressing. And all the while too, the filling and holding of office for office sake has been vested with exaggerated importance, so that the county more perhaps than any other civil division has been the home of fictitious political “issues.” ”

“ What could such a county do for its citizens?
It should be kept in mind that this county of the imagination with which we are particularly concerned will be practically confined to rural and semi-rural localities. Here, even while we dream, a very actual metamorphosis is going on which inevitably promotes a sense of community interest. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford, the countryside is getting together in spite of itself! The rural gentry will think in bigger units and the basis of its allegiances will be correspondingly broadened. ”

“ But popular government has regularly and almost universally thrown the selection of the public prosecutor over into the political arena, where tests of fitness for specific duties count not half so much as a good campaign speech or the ability to swing a township into the Republican or Democratic column.
In the same way many sheriffs might have set before them the plain duty to obey the rigid prescriptions of the statutes. But American democracy has all but universally decreed that sheriffs shall be selected after the manner of discretionary, policy-determining officers. ”

“ The bosses collect “theirs” not only in terms of power to name the officers whom the people shall elect, but insofar as no bothersome civil service law is in the way they select also the subordinates. And through this power of appointment they exercise various other powers which make them to all intents and purposes the real seat of final authority in the county.
And so we see the workings of a natural law. In nature the organism that survives is that naturally selected one that adapts itself to its environment. ”

“ It is easy enough to pick flaws in their handicraft, but it should be borne in mind that the architects of the nineteenth century American democracy were working in the dark without models or precedents and without established principles of organization. It is easy now to look back and [Pg 27] say: “You carried your ‘democracy’ too far. It would have been not only enough, but infinitely more effective to have let the people select simply the legislative or ‘policy-determining’ officers and subordinated the administration to them. The thing to do was to control the source of power. ”

“ But aside from all that, the long ballot principle turned out to be the father of irresponsible organization. Each elective officer received his commission straight from the people; his accountability was solely and directly to them. No officer was to be entrusted with much power for the fear that he might emulate King George and enslave the county. Government generally was regarded as a natural but more or less necessary enemy of the people to be tied with a short rope lest it break loose and do incalculable damage. ”

“ A board of supervisors or a county manager or a county engineer armed with an answer to this series of extremely pertinent questions and a modicum of common honesty would be proof against ninety-nine per cent. of the “slick” deals which are so often “put over” on an unsuspecting public and their easy-going servants.
The science of public administration consists principally in knowing exactly where you are and what you are doing—knowledge gained through experimentation, investigation and comparison and by consultation of authoritative standards and with authorities themselves. ”

“ If we could leave this Poor Farm, having seen so [Pg 267] much and no more, we could think of it again only with feelings of pleasure that the county’s unfortunates were provided for so comfortably; but standing alone is an old brick building in which the insane are kept and this must be visited too. It is a gloomy place, coming out of the bright October sun, but when your eyes become accustomed to the shadows, you see what this county has provided for the insane who are neglected by the great mother state. ”

“ Always they are the product either of some personal initiative or some organized effort. Does any county clearly lack that element of citizen leadership? Then the obvious need of the county is to bridge that gap. The rural population of America suffers (the word is all too weak) for the lack of a public community sense. Every “average” rural citizen is a unit, he does not travel in droves—so much for his independence. ”

“ By the time of the constitution of 1789, it became possible to standardize the division of labor of governing the continent. In the center of the scheme were placed the states, which reserved to themselves all the governmental power there was, except what the constitution specifically conferred upon the federal government. Henceforth, whatever may have been its historical origin or [Pg 10] its ancient traditions, every local division of government was to content itself with such functions as were to be portioned out to it by superior state authority. It was to have no “inherent” powers. ”

“ But everywhere the people have waived the right or privilege of a logical government when they have illogically insisted upon selecting their officers locally. When the district attorney, for instance, is chosen by the electors of the county he may be legally the state’s representative but he is practically a local officer in very much the same sense as the mayor. ”