Herbert Croly

“ The American civil service will never be really reformed by the sort of civil service laws which have hitherto been passed—no matter how faithfully those laws may be executed. The only way in which administrative efficiency can be secured is by means of an organization which makes a departmental chief absolutely responsible for energetic work and economical administration in his office; and no such responsibility can exist as long as his subordinates are independent of him. ”

“ The election can delegate power only for a limited period. At the end of the limited period another executive will be chosen—possibly a man representing a wholly different political policy. Such a man will want his immediate advisers to share his political point of view; and it is always possible that in electing him the voters will make a mistake and choose an incompetent and irresponsible person. An incompetent or disloyal executive could undoubtedly under such a system do much to disorganize the public service; but what will you have? There can be no efficiency without responsibility. ”

“ Such is the object of the foregoing suggestions towards reconstruction which, radical as they may seem, have been suggested chiefly by an examination of the practical conditions of contemporary reform. Only by the adoption of some such plan can the reformers become something better than perpetual moral protestants who are fighting a battle in which a victory may be less fruitful than defeat. As it is, they are usually flourishing in the eyes of the American people a flask of virtue which, when it is uncorked, proves to be filled with oaths of office. ”

“ When a large number of individuals to whom authority is delegated exercise that authority improperly, one may safely infer that the system is at fault as much as the individual. Local American legislative organization has courted failure. Both the system of representation and functions of the representative body have been admirably calculated to debase the quality of the representatives and to nullify the value of their work. American state legislatures have really never had a fair opportunity. They have almost from the beginning been deprived of any effective responsibility. ”

“ An American electorate is or should be entirely competent to decide whether in general it wishes gambling or the sale of intoxicating liquors to be suppressed, whether it is willing or unwilling to delegate large judicial and legislative authority to commissions, or whether it wishes to exempt buildings from local taxation. In retaining the power of deciding for itself these broad questions of public legislative policy, it is exercising a function, adapted to the popular intelligence and both disciplinary and formative in its effect on those who take the responsibility seriously. ”

“ If a mistake or an abuse occurs, the responsibility for it should be unmistakable and absolute, while if a reform candidate or party is victorious, they should control a machinery of government wholly sufficient for their purposes.
As soon as any attempt is made to devise a system which does concentrate responsibility and power, serious difficulties are encountered. Concentration of responsibility can be brought about in one of two ways—either by subordinating the legislature to the executive or the executive to the legislature. ”

“ A policy of institutional reform must prove its value and gain its experience chiefly in this field; and in formulating such a policy reformers will be placing their hands upon the most palpable and best-recognized weakness in the American political system.
A popular but ill-founded American political illusion concerns the success of their state governments. Americans tend to believe that these governments have on the whole served them well, whereas in truth they have on the whole been ill served by their machinery of local administration and government. ”

“ Such an analysis of the causes of legislative corruption and incompetence is not as correct as it is obvious. It is based upon the old and baleful democratic tendency of always seeking the reason for the failure of a democratic enterprise in some personal betrayal of trust. It is never the people who are at fault. Neither is the betrayal attributed to some defect of organization, which neglects to give the representative individual a sufficient chance. ”

“ A successful attempt to bestow upon legislative bodies, composed of such doubtful material and subject to such equivocal traditions anything resembling complete governmental responsibility, would be a dangerous business. Legislatures have degenerated into the condition of being merely agents, rather than principals in the work of government; and the strength and the propriety of the contemporary movement in favor of the initiative and the referendum is to be attributed to this condition. ”

“ Independent voting and the splitting of tickets is essential to a wholesome expression of public opinion; but in so far as such independence has to be purchased by secrecy its ultimate value may be doubted. American politics will never be "purified" or its general standards improved by an independence which is afraid to come out into the open; and it is curious that with all the current talk about the wholesome effects of "publicity" the reformed ballot sends a voter sneaking into a closet in order to perform his primary political duty. ”

“ Obviously a state government is a much better political agency for the making of such experiments than is a government whose errors would affect the population of the whole country. No better machinery for the accomplishment of a progressive programme of social reform could be advised than a collection of governments endowed with the powers of an American state, and really desirous of advancing particular social questions towards their solution. Such a system would be flexible; it would provoke emulation; it would encourage initiative ”

“ Its great advantage is its comparative safety, because under it no one function of government can attain to any dangerous excess of power. Its great disadvantage consists in the division of responsibility among three independent departments, and the possibility that the public interest would suffer either from lack of coöperation or from actual conflicts. In the case of the general government, the comparative safety of the system of checks and balances was of paramount importance, because the despotic exercise of its vast powers would have wrecked the whole American political system. ”

“ No plan of political organization can in the nature of things offer an absolute guarantee that a government will not misuse its powers; but a government of the kind suggested, should it prove to be either corrupt or incompetent, could remain in control only by the express acquiescence of the electorate. Its corruption and incompetence could not be concealed, and would inevitably entail serious consequences. ”

“ A politically regenerated state would guarantee in its constitution a much larger measure of home rule to the cities than they now enjoy, while at the same time the reformed legislative authority would endeavor to secure the edifying exercise of these larger powers, not by an embarrassing system of supervision, but by the concentration of the administrative power and responsibility of the municipal authorities. ”

“ Well! the Australian ballot has been adopted more or less completely in the majority of the states; and it has undoubtedly made open electoral corruption more difficult and less common than it once was. But it has not diminished the personal and partisan allegiance on which the power of the local "Boss" is based; and it has done the professional politician as little serious harm as have the civil service laws. Neither can it be considered an ideal method of balloting for the citizens of a free democracy. ”

“ The ship of reform will gather most headway from the association of certain very moderate practical proposals with the issue of a deliberate, persistent, and far more radical challenge to popular political prejudices and errors. It will be sufficient, in case our practical proposals seek to accomplish some small measure both of political and economic reconstruction, and in case they occupy some sort of a family relation to plans of the same kind with which American public opinion is already more or less familiar. ”

“ The benefits which the city governments can slowly accomplish within their own jurisdiction are considerable. They do not, indeed, constitute the exclusive "Hope of Democracy," because the ultimate democratic hope depends on the fulfillment of national responsibilities; and they cannot deal effectively with certain of the fundamental social questions. But by taking advantage of its economic opportunities, the American city can gradually diminish the economic stress within its own jurisdiction. ”

“ It is unnecessary to dwell at any length upon the work of reorganization which would confront a responsible state government in relation to the punishment and the prevention of crime, because public opinion is becoming aroused to the dangers which threaten American society from the escape of criminals and the lax and sluggish administration of the criminal laws. ”

“ Moreover, the passage of reform laws has not had any appreciable effect upon the vitality or the power of the professional politician. The machine has, on the whole, increased rather than diminished in power, during the past twenty-five years. Civil service reform is no longer as vigorously opposed as it used to be, because it is no longer feared. The politicians have found that in its ordinary shape it really does not do them any essential harm. ”

“ The device is becoming so popular that it will probably prevail; and as it prevails, it may have the indirect beneficial result of diminishing the number of regular elections; but at bottom it is a clumsy and mechanical device for the selection of party candidates. It is merely one of the many means generated by American political practice for cheapening the ballot. The way to make votes important and effective is not to increase but to diminish their number.
A democracy has no interest in making good government complicated, difficult, and costly. ”

“ If the state governments are to reach their maximum usefulness in the American political system, they must not only be self-denying in respect to the central government, but generous in respect to their creatures—the municipal corporations. ”

“ But whenever public interest flags,—and it is bound to flag under such an absurd multiplication of elections and under such a complication of electoral machinery,—the politicians can easily nominate their own candidates. Up to date no method has been devised which would prevent them from using their personal followers in the primary elections of both parties; and no such method can be devised without enforcing some comparatively fixed distinction between a Republican and a Democrat, and thus increasing the difficulties of independent voting. ”

“ A state is a political and legal body; and as a political and legal body it cannot escape its appropriate political and social responsibilities. But a state has in the great majority of cases no meaning at all as a center of economic organization and direction. The business carried on within state limits is either essentially related by competition to the national economic system,—or else it is essentially municipal in its scope and meaning. ”

“ In the light of current American political realities the executive deserves the greater share of responsibility and power; and that is why the proposal is made to bestow it on him. The other details of the foregoing plan have been proposed in a similar spirit. They are innovations; but they are innovations which may naturally (and perhaps should) result from certain living practices and movements in American local politics. They merely constitute an attempt to give those ideas and practices candid recognition. No such reorganization may ever be reached in American local government ”

“ Any practical scheme of local institutional reform must be based on the principle of more concentrated responsibility and power, and it must be reached by successive experimental attempts to give a more consistent and efficient form to actual American political practices.
The bestowal upon an executive of increased official responsibility and power will be stigmatized by "old-fashioned Democrats" as dangerously despotic ”

“ A legislative body, whose responsibilities and power are still further reduced, will probably exercise their remaining functions with even greater incompetence, and will, if possible, be composed of a still more inferior class of legislative agents. If the legislature is to perform the inferior but still necessary functions that will necessarily remain in its hands, an attempt should certainly be made to obtain a better quality of representation. ”