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.
CHAPTER II
JUST WHAT IS A COUNTY?
Before our forefathers had “brought forth upon this continent a new nation,” there was no universal standard relationship in the colonies between the local and the general colonial or state governments. In Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the towns had begun as separate units; then they federated and gradually developed an organic unity; that is, the localities produced the general government. In the South, on the other hand, the local governments had more the semblance of creatures of the general government designed to meet the expansion of the earliest settlements into wide and therefore less wieldy units for administration.
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 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. It was to act simply as an agency of the state, which had power at will to enlarge or diminish the local sphere of activity or wipe it off the map entirely.
Now the duties which state governments assumed in the early years of the republic were as simple as necessity would allow. This was preeminently the day of “as little government as possible.” The people of the states covenanted with themselves, as it were, to stand guard over life, liberty and property. It was a broad enough program, but it was the custom in those days to interpret it narrowly—no humanitarian activities beyond the crude attempts to deal with the more obvious phases of poverty; no measure of correction in the modern sense; no “public works.” As an incident in meeting these obligations, the constitutional convention and the state legislatures met and laid down statutes or codes of conduct affecting these elementary needs of a civilized people. They defined the various crimes (or adopted the definitions of the English common law); they legalized a civil procedure. It was definitely settled that the voice of the whole people should control in determining what the state should do for its citizens.
Then came the question of getting the means for applying these abstract principles to daily life, of bringing to every man’s own door the means for enforcing his rights. Had the American people proceeded from this point along logical lines they would have cut the administrative machinery to fit their state-wide policies. But it was not so ordered. The officers of the state had determined upon the policies; the officers of the localities were to execute the policies. The period of the American Revolution, with its deep-seated distrust of kingly power, was the beginning of an era of decentralized administration which gained rather than diminished in force for as much as two generations. For the purpose, the existing counties served as instruments ready to hand and their status now became fixed as the local agencies of the state government. New counties were formed from time to time as needs arose. In each of these counties was a loose, but more or less complete organization, which it will now be fitting to describe.
More important perhaps than any other enforcing agent of the county, in these still primitive days, was the sheriff, who sooner or later became a fixture in every American colony. This most ancient officer of the county had been perpetuated through the centuries from Saxon and Norman times. He had inherited nearly all of the powers and prerogatives of his historical prototype as they obtained in England during the seventeenth century. He did not preside over a court in the county, but he could make arrests for violation of the law, with or without a warrant. If his task was too much for one man, he could summon to his aid a posse comitatus of private citizens. And inasmuch as he was obliged not only to apprehend, but to hold his prisoner for trial, it very naturally fell to him to take care of the lock-up or jail.
There had been established, beginning with Connecticut, in 1666, a system of local courts, whose jurisdiction in most states came to be co-extensive with the county. Around this institution centered the official life of the county, so much so that the county capitol is universally known as the “court house.” The sheriff from its beginnings acted as the high servant of this court, in the disposition of prisoners, the execution of judgments, the service of warrants of arrest and in similar duties.
To the account of Connecticut is also to be credited the most unique, and in many ways most important county officer of modern times. In the development of its criminal law, England had never worked out a system of local prosecuting officers. The colonies in the early days had assigned the duty of representing the state’s interest to the magistrates. But in 1704 there was authorized for each county in Connecticut an attorney “to prosecute all criminal offenders ... and suppress vice and immorality.” From this beginning came the distinctively American officer who is variously known as district attorney, prosecutor of the pleas, solicitor, or state’s attorney.
Since the business of the county court (which formerly included administrative as well as judicial matters) was too important not to be recorded, there was established a clerk of court whose duties are summarized in his title. In more recent times, however, the functions of this officer have been both expanded and limited, according to the amount of the transactions in the county. So that, in the larger counties each court, or sometimes a group of courts, have a clerk whose duties are solely concerned with judicial matters, while in less important counties the “county clerk” finds it easily possible to serve in no less than a dozen different capacities. It is the county clerk who ordinarily issues marriage licenses and receives for filing, real estate deeds, mortgages and a variety of other papers.
And then, without apparent good reason, the colonists had brought over from England the coroner. In the days of Alfred the Great this officer had had an honorable and useful place in the realm. As a sort of understudy of the sheriff, he took the latter’s place when he was disabled. Meanwhile he was the King’s local representative, charged with the duty of laying hands on everything that seemed to be without an owner and taking possession of it in the name of the King. But through the lapse of time, the “Crowner” had lost both dignity and duties until there was little left except for him to take charge of the bodies of those who had died by violence or in a suspicious manner, seek the cause of death and locate, if possible, the person responsible for the circumstance.
So much for the organization to administer local justice, which is the irreducible minimum of county government. In early colonial times (and even yet in certain states), the judges and other judicial officers had performed important duties outside this limited field of administering justice. But in time the processes involved in the payment of salaries and the up-keep of a county building, created in sizable counties a “business” problem of no mean proportions. Since in most states these costs have been charged against the county, it has been necessary to install appropriate machinery of fiscal administration. In every county a board of directors, variously selected and denominated, has taken over the management of material things. With the help of a variety of minor administrative officers like the assessors, the treasurer and other fiscal officers, it raises and appropriates money; it audits claims against the county; it borrows money.
Around this judicial and administrative nucleus was built the universal American county. In the rural sections it expanded to meet the lack of any other local government. As an incident to the theory that the state is responsible for at least a minimum of protection of human life, the state government had taken upon itself the care of indigents. This duty it usually turned over directly to the county. The county authorities have also had control (often exclusively so) of rural roads and bridges.
In the performance of these various functions the American people seem to have thought it quite unnecessary for the county to be supplied with the proper apparatus for doing its own policy making. Or, to look at the matter from the other side, they deemed it quite appropriate that the policy-making part of the state government, which is the legislature, should not control the hands and feet, which in matters of local concern consist of the county officials. Elaborate general laws were enacted to prescribe in minute detail the daily round of routine of each officer. Why should he or why should the people think? It was not the purpose of the state that they should. And without thinking, there could be no differences of opinion; without differences of opinion, no “issues”; without issues, no real politics.
CHAPTER III
A CREATURE OF TRADITION
It all came about in this way:
The first settlers in the permanent Virginia colony found a climate that was mild and a soil that was fertile. Numerous rivers radiating through the country furnished a natural means for transportation. Indians were not a serious menace. The settlers themselves were of the landed gentry, closely identified with the established English Church.
Out of such a combination a very definite polity inevitably grew. The people were destined to spread themselves far and wide; agriculture was to be their chief pursuit; little government would be needed and the forms and substance of democracy would have at best a slow growth.
For many years the local government consisted primarily of small groups of settlements which were called hundreds or parishes and were presided over by a vestry of “selected men.” When the plantations were large and scattered, government was sometimes supplied by the owners themselves. But in 1634 in Virginia, the example of English institutions took firmer root and eight shires or counties were formed and made the unit of representation in the colonial assembly and for purposes of military, judicial, highway and fiscal administration. The officers were the county lieutenant (the militia officer), the sheriff (who acted as collector and treasurer), justices of the peace and coroners. All were appointed by the governor of the colony on the recommendation of the justices, and the latter thus became a self-perpetuating body of aristocratic planters controlling the county administration. This body of appointed justices constituted the county court, which to this day in some of the southern states is not only a judicial body, but also corresponds to the board of supervisors or the county commissioners in other localities.
Such was one line of descent. The Virginians, like most of their contemporaries, knew little and cared less for political science. They simply turned to their English experience, pieced together some old-country institutions and adapted them to the new world. Their experiment succeeded for the time being at least. It could scarcely have failed under such simple conditions.
Of quite a different sort were the influences at work in New England. A severe climate, a rocky soil and menacing Indians drove the colonists into compact communities, where they could live by shipping and fishing. They too were fortunate in striking an environment that rather exactly fitted their old-country experience. For they were a homogeneous, single-minded body of people with firm traditions of democracy and a common religious faith. From the congregational form of organization that was characteristic of the Puritan movement to the town meeting for purposes of civil government, was a single easy step. Thus the “town” idea came to hold the center of the stage in New England local affairs. But it never had the all-sufficiency in its sphere which the county had in the South, and even New England had to recognize a need for more comprehensive subdivisions. And so, in 1636, Massachusetts was divided into four judicial districts in each of which a quarterly court was held. In 1643 four counties were definitely organized, both as judicial and militia districts, and before the middle of the century there was established a system of representative commissioners from each town, who met at the shire town to equalize assessments. The office of county treasurer was created in 1654. Later a militia officer was appointed, and within a few years county officers were entrusted with the duty of registering land titles, recording deeds and probating wills—functions transferred in part from town officers and in part from the governor and council.
So from Virginia and Massachusetts flowed the two streams of institutional influence, the former tending to make the county the exclusive organ of local government, and the other emphasizing the town. Maryland, though it had started out with a somewhat special type of organization borrowed from the County Palatine of Durham, with its manors and hundreds, later came under the sway of Virginian precedents and three counties were established there in 1650. The Carolinas, which were not thoroughly organized until the eighteenth century, followed the Virginia plan in its main outlines. Georgia’s development was not well begun until after the Revolution. Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine all followed the lead of Massachusetts, though the first two of these states minimized the importance of the county to an even greater extent.
To these two lines of influence the central states added the idea of a distinct administrative authority, which was composed in New York of a new body made up of the supervisors of the towns, in New Jersey of the local assessors and in Pennsylvania of special commissioners. These new departures were established in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In all of these states, it should be noted, the township also existed for a limited number of purposes, such as the care of the poor, for election, administration and for purposes of taxation.
The westward movement of population had begun before the Revolution. Following in general the parallels of latitude of their native soil, the pioneers carried their local institutions with them for transplantation, regardless of the wholly different underlying conditions that now confronted them. In their closely populated, homogeneous settlements the New England pioneers that crossed over into the Western Reserve had been accustomed to act through town meetings. Nothing would do now but a reincarnation of the old institutions. The six-mile rectangles into which the surveyors had divided the western territory gave them their opening. There was accordingly developed in the open prairie among the isolated homesteads a unit of government that at least superficially resembled the old New England town. It was but a geometrical expression, to be sure, but the mere shadow of it seems to have given satisfaction. But in 1802, when the state of Ohio was carved out of this territory, this exotic growth was cut short and the “county-township” system of Pennsylvania was adopted. Indiana followed Ohio in this step and the system came to predominate in the Middle West, as for example, in Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
The instinct for harking back to precedents appeared also in the early history of Michigan. When it was organized as a territory it was divided up into counties. But in 1825, under the stimulus of immigration from New York where the township-supervisor plan was in vogue, townships had to be established for particular purposes to meet the prevailing demand for this type of self-government.
In the South, Kentucky and Tennessee took their cues from Virginia and established the justices in control of the county administrative affairs. Mississippi and Alabama took Georgia for their model.
In Louisiana, the parish authority corresponding to the board of supervisors or commissioners is the police jury, which is elected by wards very much on the principle of the New England town.
In the country beyond the Northwest Territory, the clash of New England and southern influences was met by an interesting compromise. In Illinois, for instance, the earliest settlement had been made under southern auspices. The county type of local government was therefore established, but of the style employed in Ohio and Indiana rather than in Kentucky. In 1826, however, the justices were made elective by precincts and later the township was made a corporation for the purposes of school, road, justice and poor relief administration. By 1848 the “town idea” had grown strong enough to force the adoption of a provision in the new constitution for a plan to afford each county an option between the two systems. The northern counties quickly adopted the township plan, while the southern ones clung to the original forms. Wisconsin at an even earlier date (1841) had effected a similar compromise which, however, was swept away seven years later when the township system was made mandatory by the constitution. At a later period Missouri (1879), Nebraska (1883), Minnesota (1878) and Dakota (1883) permitted the adoption of similar optional laws.
In the new Southwest, the Northwest, the Rocky Mountain region and the far West, owing in part to the comparative sparsity of settlement and in part to the thinning out of the definite historical influences, the county has acquired a greater importance than anywhere in the country and the towns or townships, while they have been erected in a number of the states, play but an insignificant part in local government. When Texas became an independent republic, the American county system was substituted for the earlier Mexican local government. Before the middle of the nineteenth century counties had been established in New Mexico, Utah and Oregon; ten years later in Nebraska and Washington; by 1870 in Colorado, Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Arizona.
And so, the institution of the county has been driven westward in obedience to precedent and through the instinct for imitation. Of thoughtful foresight, of definite planning for a serviceable career, about the same measure was applied as in the case of Topsy, who “jest growed.” It could not be otherwise. Local government in pioneer days had to be thrown together more or less on the “hurry-up” plan. On the western prairies as in colonial Virginia, public needs were so limited that it really mattered comparatively little what agencies were employed.
Counties once established acquired a tendency to “stick” tenaciously to nearly their original form. Even in the seventeenth century the county in England was well into a decline. Its disintegration had begun with the growth of populous centers, that demanded more government, both in quantity and in variety. The seven Saxon kingdoms whence counties grew, had ceased to be either natural or convenient self-governing units. In a later period they have ceased to be even important subdivisions for the central administrative departments, and they have been crossed and recrossed by the lines of sanitary and other districts until the original county may be said to be scarcely distinguishable.
In America even sharper and more pervasive social forces have been assaulting this ancient institution. In our thinking of the Industrial Revolution it has been customary to dwell upon its effects in urban districts. This movement made the modern city. But its effect did not stop there. Modern mechanical devices have also made the original county boundary lines obsolete. Steam railway lines have brought into close communication points which were once too distant to be traversed easily and often, under all sorts of conditions. Electric railways, in many instances have supplemented the process. The automobile, particularly of the cheapest type, has brought within easy reach of the court house points which a hundred years ago, when the stage-coach was the standard of locomotion, were too remote for frequent communication. And, finally, the extension of mail facilities and the telephone have minimized the importance of face-to-face business intercourse beyond anything ever dreamed of when counties were first made.
Counties as we see them on the map often fail to take account of the sweeping changes in the character of populations. On the western prairies they were formed for a sparsely distributed people following chiefly agriculture. In the midst of these regions at numerous points have sprung up great centers of manufacture and commerce like Chicago, Kansas City, St. Paul, and Omaha. In their train have followed the multifarious problems of the modern city, which require a very particular sort of governmental treatment.
To these conditions the county as an institution has consistently maintained an attitude of stolid indifference. Division of old counties goes on from year to year. (Bronx county separated from New York in 1914, to the accompaniment of a costly new court house and several hundred new jobs and no benefit to the taxpayers and citizens except a heavy increase in taxation.) But who can recall two counties that have consolidated? Such an exhibition of modernity and of the spirit of progressivism it is apparently not in the nature of the county to afford.
CHAPTER IV
FALLING AFOUL OF “DEMOCRACY”
And yet we should do the subject less than justice were we not to recall an historical adventure that befell the county in the period of its coming of age, when it was assuming something like its typical American form.
It was about the time of the Revolution when the atmosphere was particularly uncomfortable for “tyrants” and for every created thing that could be given the semblance of “tyranny.”
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over those States.” So ran the Declaration of Independence, and if it was not a precise statement of fact, it was at least an accurate gauge of the fighting public opinion that was making political institutions. King George’s “frightfulness” seems to have been chiefly and most concretely brought into the public eye in the colonies by the acts of “swarms of officers” that had been sent over “to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
From the point of view of the British Empire, it was a stiffening up of the colonial administration to make effective the Navigation Acts, the Stamp Acts, and similar measures. But it had come too late. Through a century and a half the spirit of independence had grown firmer and firmer and the colonists’ sense of identity with the British Empire had sensibly diminished. So that when the imperial revenue collectors began to “swarm” on their shores, the colonists were goaded into a smashing antimonarchical mood. It was no mere temporary fit of rage, and when physical violence of the Revolution was over, the intellectual upheaval steadily gathered new force through the influence of men of the Jefferson school. One of the feats to which the statesmen of the Revolution devoted themselves was devising means for preventing future “swarms” and the “tyranny” they brought with them.
What irritated them more than all else was the fact that these imperial agents were not colonially selected and controlled. But now the people had replaced the king. They would now select the officers. A happy thought! But how to work it out; that was the question.
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 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. If you had been careful to separate ‘politics’ from ‘administration’ you would have saved our generation a whole world of political woe.”
But the fact is that the then existing institutions had come into being as a patchwork development to meet successive new needs. As for local government, there was so little of it and it ministered to such elementary wants that very few serious questions of policy ever rose within its jurisdiction. Moreover, the officers who came in time to have regulative or semi-legislative functions, seem to have been from the beginning, concerned with the details rather than the policies of government. This was true of the justices of the peace in Virginia, the selectmen in the New England town, the supervisors in New York, and the assessors in New Jersey. There was no choice except between selecting and controlling (or trying to control) administrative officers and foregoing any part whatever in local affairs.
It is of course not to be understood that no local officers were elected before the Revolution. Massachusetts had always had its town “selectmen” and even as early as 1854 each county elected its treasurer and, beginning at a somewhat later date, the county lieutenants. Supervisors were created as elective officers in New York in 1691, but they were executive and representative officers from the very start. And the same may be said of the town assessors in New Jersey (1693) and the county assessors in Pennsylvania. But the real precedent for “electing everybody” was set in Pennsylvania in 1703 when the sheriffs were first chosen by the people—a step which was followed in 1726 by the establishment of elective county commissioners.
But immediately after the Revolution the new notions of democracy began to work more aggressively. Virginia now organized counties and its constitution stipulated that officers not otherwise provided for should be elected by the people. Sheriffs and coroners were made elective under the New Jersey constitution and New York took away the governor’s power of appointment and vested it in a council of appointment, which was composed of the governor and four senators chosen by the legislature.
There were cross-currents in this movement, however, and both in the Northwest (under the ordinance of 1787) and in Kentucky and Tennessee, county officers established in the closing years of the eighteenth century were made appointive, in the one case by the governor and in the other by the county judges. But in the new constitutions of Ohio (1802), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818), the elective principle worked without a hitch. Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri followed. By 1821 the passion had seized New York State, and sheriffs and county clerks were thereafter elected by the voters of the counties.
In Virginia at the constitutional convention in 1829-30, local government was the subject of an acrimonious discussion, with the Jeffersonian influences seeking to break down the established power of the self-perpetuating justices, who were charged with inefficiency, and establish in their place the New England town system. But Madison and Marshall, who were both members of the convention, successfully upheld the existing order. By the middle of the century both Virginia and Kentucky succumbed to the democratic influence and there was a complete reaction from the appointive system. New York extended the elective idea to district attorneys and county judges, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire in due time made similar alterations.
In the states west of the Mississippi the tendency to put all the county officers in the elective class was assumed from the start to be the only method of insuring popular control.
“The rule of the people” at last captured the whole country, except Rhode Island, where even the sheriff is still appointive.[2] The movement was at its height during the long period of democratic control from Jackson to Buchanan, and it had behind it the powerfully stimulating spirit of the new West. It was the conception of practical, direct, but superficial thinkers and politicians. To be sure, the particular appointive system in use in New York and other eastern states under the earlier constitutions had behaved badly. The Jacksonians leaped headlong at the conclusion that the trouble lay in the idea of appointment per se. Other alternatives they did not for a moment consider, but with an air of supreme finality declared that “the people must rule”—by electing as many officials as could be crowded on the ballot.
The fact also that the county possessed no satisfactory appointing power left no other course but to let the people undertake the intricate work of an executive. So that through the passing of the years that single course has materially multiplied the number of elective officers—the people themselves, enamored with the dogma that “the cure for democracy is more democracy” looked on complacently while complication has been heaped upon complication.
In the almost unique opportunity for a simplified government which has been presented to the people of any county, they have strenuously and successfully resisted the change. Such an instance happened a few years ago in the county of San Bernardino, California. The people had already adopted a county charter in which the powers of the county were vested in a single small board of elective officers somewhat on the commission plan now in use in many American cities. It was regarded by many as the highest type of modernized county organization adopted up to that time anywhere in the United States. But in the interval that elapsed between the adoption of the charter and its going into effect, someone discovered (or thought they discovered) that the people were about to be deprived of their ancient liberties and that a local oligarchy was about to be erected. Soon petitions were in circulation and this perfectly good charter, which had been adopted but never tried out in practice, was amended so as to nullify the very principle of organization which pointed to greater simplicity and a better fixing of responsibility.
For nearly a century popular government has been galloping down the highway that leads to governmental confusion. 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.” At regularly recurring intervals the nation-wide county system has been shaken to its foundations over the private futures of their local Tom Joneses and Tom Smiths. One of these respective gentlemen must leave his growing law practice and sacrifice his time to his county by serving papers for the county judge or prosecuting criminals before the Grand Jury. And none but the people is competent to judge which of the two it shall be.
Is the district attorneyship to be filled? Then, properly speaking, there would seem to be nothing to do but to search for the highest technical ability in sight and place it above the influences of any consideration but that of preserving the civil rights of the whole people. It is a simple criterion, around which no “issue” could properly arise. 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. As for the coroner, who would suppose that his grim services could be made the subject of interested, intelligent popular discussion? But the coroner, in a majority of states, is on the “ticket,” a subject ostensibly for the citizens to weigh in the balance with a view to the fittest selection. And then the ballot nearly always bears the candidates for the office of county clerk. He, like the sheriff, has his duties minutely described in the laws, to the dotting of an “i” and the crossing of a “t.” But in the estimation of many good citizens it is of supreme importance that a good Republican or a deserving Democrat should be placed in the office, in order, presumably, that the office forms may be arranged for the filing cases according to the historical doctrines of one or the other of the national parties.
Never was there a serious movement to elect United States marshals or district attorneys. Other and more satisfactory methods of selection have been employed. But for the analogous officers in the states, nothing but popular choice would satisfy the temper of the young American republic.
[2] By the legislature.
CHAPTER V
THE “JUNGLE”
The long “bed-quilt” ballot of county officers, as a Chicago newspaperman called it, at first innocently, and then maliciously, deceived, misled and disfranchised the “average citizen.” As to the manner in which this result was brought about, more hereafter.
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.
To the devotees of this theory, the idea that the county should have a directing executive head, if indeed it ever received consideration, was apparently too suggestive of Hanoverian monarchy to be seriously entertained. This was to be a “government of laws, not of men”—the people would see that all went well.
It was such a spirit, no doubt, that guided the development of the county system in an eastern state, which the writer studied a few years ago. In the course of this effort the interrelations of officers in a typical unit were diagrammed—with the result shown in frontispiece. It was found, for instance, that the county clerk who was “directly responsible to the people” was given duties to perform under some twenty different laws, the enforcement of which under the constitution was charged upon the governor as the chief executive of the state. In fulfillment of these obligations he was found to be under the direction, among others, of the superintendent of banking, the superintendent of insurance, the commissioner of excise and the secretary of state. For the routine of his office he was answerable to the local board of supervisors. The sheriff, who “took his orders from the people,” was found to be answerable to the supervisors, the surrogate and the county judge. The district attorney was put down as subject to at least three minor state officers besides the governor and the board of supervisors. The county treasurer looked up (or was supposed to) to the state commissioner of excise, the state board of tax commissioners, the commissioner of education, the comptroller and the state treasurer.
And in all this wilderness of conflicting responsibility there was, be it reiterated, no single officer who could be called the executive. The governor, it is true, had power to remove and fill vacancies, but even this negative control was conditioned by the fact that there were sixty-one counties in the state, that some of them were hundreds of miles from the capital and that the governor was charged with a thousand other responsibilities besides looking after the counties. It was true that the state comptroller was given power to examine into the fiscal affairs of the various counties, but this safeguard was of limited value in practice, owing to the small number of examiners which the legislature provides.
No, the ingenious Anglo-Saxon mind had discovered a substitute for efficient personal supervision! If a given officer were to go wrong or neglect his duties, then the supervisors were authorized to go to the district attorney and persuade him, if possible, to take action on the officer’s bond or to institute a criminal prosecution. If the district attorney was negligent in the matter, the supervisors might go to the governor with charges of neglect of duty. But if the original officer in question was just lazy, slow or inefficient, then everybody simply could wait “till he got round” to doing his duty.
To this day this circumambulation in the name of democracy actually fulfills the conception of popular rule for no inconsiderable body of political leaders. Where the system goes wrong, they inject a little more confusion, a little more irresponsibility into the plan of government. Take, for instance, the Indiana system. In 1898 the county government became the subject of a state-wide scandal and was made the political issue of the year. The governor in his biennial message followed the good old American custom: more complications, more division of responsibility. He recommended a system of “safeguards” which had the effect of taking away power (and responsibility) from the county board (commissioners) and vesting it in a brand-new body known as the council, composed of seven members, three elected from the county at large, and one from each of the four councilmanic districts. This council was made the tax-levying and money-appropriating body for the county and no money could henceforth be drawn from the county treasury except upon their appropriation. It also was given the sole authority to issue bonds and borrow money. And so the county governments in Indiana were blocked at just one more point and the county commissioners were made just one shade less accountable than they were before the enactment of this ingenious piece of “reform” legislation.
Two of the New England states developed equally clever methods of breaking down financial responsibility. New Hampshire, with its boards of commissioners elected by the people of the counties would seem to be well-equipped with fiscal agencies. But not so! The commissioners may only recommend appropriations for county expenses—and a “convention,” consisting of the members of the House of Representatives of the various towns then allows, or disallows, them. Such an institution was created many years ago. Connecticut goes New Hampshire one better by constituting the convention of the local members of both houses of the legislature. The convention may not only vote the amount of the general county appropriation, but the appropriation for any specific items of county expenditures for the two fiscal years following, or for the repairs and alterations of county buildings.
Democracy via complication was applied also in the state of New Jersey, when the legislature of 1898 took from the board of chosen freeholders (supervisors) of Hudson County the control over the Hudson County Boulevard. An act passed in that year created a separate new commission of three members to be elected by the people, upon which was conferred powers comparable to those of a separate municipality. The commission was even given the right to maintain a separate police force, to own and operate a separate electric lighting plant, to employ its own cleaning and repairing force and to act in other ways entirely separate from the county road and highway system and independent of the street departments of those municipalities through which the road lies. This independent body was authorized to fix its own appropriations and make them mandatory upon the board of chosen freeholders, to let all contracts for the construction of the roads under its charge and to employ a separate engineer.
When Hudson County began to lay out its park system, the disintegration of the county system was carried a step further. Another wing was added to the amorphous county structure, a Park Commission to be composed of four members. These were not to be elected like the Boulevard commissioners, or appointed by an executive, as is done in most cities, or chosen by the board of chosen freeholders, but appointed by the Judge of the Court of Common Pleas! This commission also became a separate corporation, like the Boulevard Commission, and now has power to requisition appropriations on the board of chosen freeholders.
But the end of the tale is not yet. In 1912, Hudson County undertook the extermination of mosquitoes. Another independent board! More independent mandatory powers of appropriation! And the appointment of six members in this instance was vested in the Judge of the Supreme Court. Add to this layout a board of elections, appointed by the governor, on the nomination of the chairmen of the two leading political parties, and you have the county jungle in all its primeval grandeur.
The people of New Jersey were thoroughly consistent in 1900 when their legislature broke with precedent and undertook to supply their counties of the first class with some sort of a head by creating the office of county supervisor. The governing boards of these counties were at that time composed of representatives from various municipalities. So it was decided, in order to give the whole people a voice in the government, to have the new officer elected at large. The legislature had no notion of giving anyone any new power. They proposed to further subdivide existing power. True, the law under which this new office was created, designates the supervisor as the chief executive. But, as has so often been the case in city charters, this designation proved to be only a fiction. The law gave the supervisor the right to remove subordinates, but no instrumentality with which to investigate the conduct of hundreds of county officers and employees and thus to make his authority effective. Moreover, he was crippled by the fact that the board of freeholders might reverse his decisions and reinstate the officers or employees suspended. But what is of more importance, the supervisor was given no power of original appointment.
Similarly, Cook County, Ill., acquired a president of the board of county commissioners, who is elected by the people. Kings County, N. Y., before consolidation with New York City, had a supervisor-at-large. But neither of these dignitaries has or had any powers of appointment comparable to, let us say, those of the mayor of Cleveland or of New York. In the general run of counties, the executive is not a single officer but the governing board itself. Where the “town plan” is in vogue, as in certain Illinois counties, and throughout New York State, this body may be very large and unwieldy and is wholly incapable of supervising administrative detail, except through small committees, with the added division of responsibility which that implies.
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. But the county clerk may not recognize their superior authority, preferring to run his office, to suit his personal convenience; and if the supervisors undertake to check him he may find some way of appealing to the people. The superintendent of the poor, the treasurer and the auditor may likewise go their respective paces in defiance of all superior authority. If in the course of their official routine these officers collect sundry fees, they may account for them or not, as they please, so far as the governing body is concerned. They may be reached by some slow process of litigation, but never in the direct summary way that is employed in private business. 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.
It is as though a board of directors were charged with the control of a private enterprise, but were expressly denied the power to select the manager and heads of departments to whom they might delegate their authority over details.
CHAPTER VI
A BASE OF POLITICAL SUPPLIES
In the course of its democratic adventures the county was incapacitated for standing on its own feet. When every independent elective officer became a law to himself, the county ceased to be a single government. Politically it became then little more than a convenient way of speaking of a group of officers whose field of activity was closely related. In these very close relations lay the material for serious conflicts of interest that brought friction, delays, inaction. County governments could really get nowhere. Their energies were consumed in standing still and keeping alive. Since separate officers of the county had no common superior, the county could not move in any particular direction; no more than an army of self-directing divisions, each with a will of its own.
Moreover there came to be counties which could not even organize themselves, even after the imperfect fashion described in the laws of the state. The people grew in numbers, their interests increased in complexity and county affairs sank into comparative insignificance. In their theory of pure democracy via the ballot, they spread out their interest in county officers so thin that no single officer got sufficient attention to make him realize their influence. County candidates were mixed up on the ballot with a multitude of others, state, national and municipal, so that it was practically certain that not only unknown but often undesirable citizens would step into power with the “people’s” stamp of approval. The voters of New York have been electing coroners (or have been thinking they did). When a few people in 1914 began to delve into the history of the office, they turned up an astonishing situation. Scarcely one of the men who had been elected to the office in a period of twelve years could be said to have had even a modest part of the qualifications required for the positions. Some of the worst rascals of all had been elected in reform administrations and as one coroner admitted on the stand, the controlling purpose in mind in the selection was that of “balancing the ticket” so that geographical sections and racial and religious elements would get their proper share in the spoils.
Rural electorates probably have done better all along the line with their county officers than the voters in the cities. Measured by the standards of personal acquaintanceship, the candidates for county office have perhaps nearly always been known quantities in the rural districts. The “glad-hander” and the accomplished back-slapper has gotten on famously. They have made a business of knowing everybody. And yet they have sometimes, as private individuals, failed to reveal to their most intimate friends the qualities which have made them unfit for a public trust. Placed in offices of conspicuous responsibility where the sunlight of public opinion and criticism has beat upon them, it is impossible that many men would have gone far wrong. But since the work of county officers has had little to do with the shaping of public policies upon which the average voter has any opinion; since the county jail has not been a public museum where men were wont to take their friends and families, and since there has been nothing especially interesting about the serving of a warrant of arrest or attachment, the officers involved have not always revealed their innermost personal qualities. Year after year a smiling popular sheriff might go on doing these services in the most expensive, inefficient way, with here and there a touch of corruption; and the great body of voters who met him every week at the lodge would be none the wiser. In the same way the voters might elect a “good fellow” superintendent of the poor. They might continue to know him as a good fellow but it has been a rare constituency that has followed him up in his official duties to know how “good” he was to the unfortunates under his care and to the public in general. It has been a rare good fellow who has combined in his single person the ability to shake every right hand and kiss every baby in the county, with a really modern, scientific knowledge of the treatment of poverty.
The county clerk upon assuming office shuts himself away in a forest of filing cases and meets the public officially only as they come to him for a marriage license or to file a deed or mortgage. And as for the coroner, mostly people have been glad to leave him severely alone, trusting that no untoward mishap will bring them into his clutches. For all ordinary purposes they have regarded him as a grim joke, not knowing that in many cases a misstep on his part might result in the escape of a criminal or spoil the case of a litigant entitled to damages or of a policyholder to his insurance.
A possible exception to this inconspicuousness is the district attorney. American communities appear to have reserved high political honors to the most efficient and best advertised “man-hunter.” A white light of public interest has always beat upon the public prosecutor. Many a reputation for skill and courage and all-around general administrative ability has been built up around a record of convictions of notorious criminals. The district attorney with a sense of the dramatic has usually been in line for the governorship of his state. It seems also to be regarded as conducive to efficiency that this officer should be controlled directly through the ballot.
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.
Gradually there has come to life a new profession, a governing class, with leadership, discipline and resources. To the acknowledged head of this fraternity have come aspirants to public honors and seekers after favors. Power and influence have been laid at his feet. He has become the virtual dictator of the county’s political destinies. 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.
He is with us yet, this clever, dominating, often silent personage, sometimes in a single individual, sometimes in a group, sometimes benevolent, respectable and public-spirited, sometimes brutal and mercenary. It may not always be easy to find him, but he is always present in every American county; for there is no stable government without him.
For the development of his peculiar talents the county is a particularly favorable environment. For the county, in a word, is in the shadow—the ideal condition for complete irresponsibility, which is the father of bossism.
But what do the voters do if they do not in fact elect their officers?
It is now perfectly well known to students of political science that what the usual run of voter does in such a case is to ratify one or the other set of candidates who have been previously culled over by the county committee of either party. It is true that, under the direct primary system, independent voters may start a revolt if the politicians do something that is particularly “bold” and “raw.” But even that privilege is of questionable value, for it breaks down even the kind of responsibility that obtains under the rule of an unofficial executive, since the boss, if criticized for a bad selection, is always able to fall back upon the explanation that “the people did it themselves.”
And when the votes have been counted and the candidates chosen, what of the citizens and the politicians then? Armed with a certificate of election “direct from the people,” the sheriff, the coroner, the county clerk, owe no legal allegiance to anyone save to them. But the people have finished watching the election count and have gone home and back to work on concerns which are infinitely more absorbing than any which affects the county government.
Then there comes into play another political allegiance which is not of law. The “governing class,” which gave the separate county officers their jobs, is not in business for its health. It does not put men in paid positions out of pure bigness of heart. It performs a public service and it earns a right to collect a toll. And it collects! 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. Just so the American democracy has adapted itself to the difficult political situation which it has itself created. The political unit, which in the present instance is the county, is legally without a head; forthwith instead of going to pieces, it grows this necessary piece of anatomy outside its own body, and lo, an altogether unworkable system is made tolerably workable!
One reason why the boss flourishes so bountifully in the county is the almost complete lack of any special legal qualifications for filling the offices (except the district attorneyship). Anybody can be a county clerk. He need only appoint as his chief deputy a faithful easy-going person who has been on the job for years at a stretch and has made himself indispensable as a master of the details of the office. This deputy will, of course, be the real county clerk and he will draw a comparatively modest salary because he is of no direct use to the “organization,” while the elected official collects the high compensation, spends a little time in the office every day, dividing the rest between the interests of the “ring” and his own legitimate private business, which goes right on as usual throughout his term.
Another attraction in the county offices is the large fees which are paid in probably the majority of counties in lieu of stated salaries. The county clerk collects from the person immediately benefited, a sum fixed by statute for each document filed. The sheriff makes similar collections for the service of each legal process. The coroner draws from the county a fixed amount for each inquest.
The theory of the fee system is, first, that the service is paid for by the party whom it most concerns and secondly, that a specific reward for a specific service will be an incentive to the officer to do his duty. Nearly everywhere, however, the theory has worked out very badly. 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. But in addition to this sum he is now (1916) receiving annually about $60,000 in fees. The county treasurer of Cook County, Ill., within very recent years, is said to have pocketed during his four-year term about the better part of $500,000,—he was never willing to tell the public just what the amount was and the law has protected his policy of silence.
But it must not be supposed that these rich prizes remain the personal property of an individual officer. Nor is it to be supposed that the numerous deputyships which often provide berths at a much higher compensation than would be allowed for the same service under private auspices, go to enrich the head of the office. No, the man or the men, who put the sheriff or the county treasurer where they are have a great deal to say about the disposition of this money. In New Jersey, lest a single county officer should take himself too seriously in this respect, the law provides that all appointments of the sheriff shall be confirmed by the board of freeholders—and confirmation means control. If the Cook County treasurer had kept the fees of his office, it is hardly to be supposed that the county commissioners for years would have bitterly fought to prevent an accounting for these funds.
The county is indeed a wonderfully bountiful base of supplies for the spoilsmen. The circumstance goes far to explain the slow growth of the merit system in this branch of government. Civil service laws are in force to-day in eighteen counties in New York, four in New Jersey, one in Colorado, one in Illinois, two in California and the more important counties in Ohio. That is the extent of the merit system in counties. Even in states like Massachusetts, Illinois and Wisconsin, where state-wide civil service laws affecting cities are in operation, appointments in the county offices are filled on the principle of “to the victor belong the spoils.” In New York State the courts have enunciated a principle with reference to the relation between the sheriff and his deputies which has the effect of fortifying the system against attack and its most prolific outlet. For, said the court in Flaherty vs. Milliken,[3] “the relation between a sheriff and his appointees is not merely that the sheriff is responsible for the default of his appointee, but that the appointee for said default is liable to the sheriff and to no one else.” “The practical operation of this rule of personal agency,” says the New York Civil Service Commission, “is in large measure to open the door for political purposes of persons in whom no real trust is reposed. These offices are in practice found to be a haven for political spoilsmen....”
But “spoils” often connotes something besides jobs that pay salaries or fees. In Westchester County, N. Y., where county affairs are known to the public rather more intimately than elsewhere (owing to the activities of the local Research Bureau), it has been found that perhaps the richest patronage of all is in the county advertising. The state of New York requires, for instance, the publication in every county of the complete session laws of the legislature, in two papers. It means the setting up in newspaper type of two or more large legal volumes of intricate matter that no one could possibly use in that form. Then there are multitudinous formal legal notices that issue from the various offices at the court house, that rarely, in the nature of the case, interest more than the two or three parties who may never see them at all. Every paper that prints this material gets paid, often at a much higher rate than it would be compensated for ordinary commercial work. In one case an honest printer in Westchester County was so indiscreet and independent as to submit to the Board of Supervisors a bill at something approximating a fair rate,—$600. His rivals remonstrated and undertook to get him to raise his figure—they were charging $1060 for the same matter. But the independent said: “No, $600 is the legal price and moreover it is good pay.” The board audited his claim and of course cut down the rival papers accordingly,—but never thereafter did the county printing go to the man who wanted to be fair to the public.
Papers that go in for public advertising could not in many cases exist without it. Indeed many papers are created for the purpose of absorbing this business. Their circulation is usually limited to a few hundred copies. They cannot afford to criticize the administration in power or to express themselves independently on any public issue. Where there are several such organs in a county (Westchester has about twenty) the newspaper field tends to be closed effectively against the type of legitimate journal which would exercise a wholesome influence on public opinion.
Just to what extent and how intensely this stifling influence exists throughout the country is one of the really dark secrets of the county problem. It shows its head in so many widely separated places and there are so many feeble “boiler-plate” weekly papers that carry county advertising, that one is led to suspect that it is a very pervasive factor, especially in rural politics.
The importance of county spoils is not merely local. Throughout the northern states, except in New England, the county is undoubtedly the strongest link in the whole nation-wide system of party organization. Party politicians hoot when reformers suggest that local politics has nothing to do with the tariff or the Mexican question. And they are right! Whether properly or improperly, it has very much to do with these questions, or rather with the selection of the men who handle them. The power, for instance, of Tammany Hall in national politics is measured by its power to swing the most populous county in what is usually a pivotal state. Its power in the county is in direct ratio to the number of offices with which it may reward party service.
Party organization for a great part of the country has the county committee as its basis. This is especially true of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania where the present organization dates back prior to the Civil War. The state committee is chosen from districts based upon counties and the state machine is an assembling of all the local cogs and wheels. Politicians think and talk in terms of counties in their party councils and in the legislature. State machines are principally an assemblage of county units. In many states legislative representatives are chosen from county districts.
Trace the political record of the members of Congress. An astonishing proportion have come up either through county offices or through state legislative positions filled by general county tickets. To that extent the national legislature is the fruit of the county system. And is it not safe to say, with the selection of certain Congressmen in mind, that the stream of national politics is poisoned at the source?
It is not strange that machine politicians have come to look upon the county as a source whence blessings flow. The county has both created and sustained them!
[3] New Jersey courts have rendered a diametrically opposite opinion.
CHAPTER VII
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.
CHAPTER VIII
COUNTY GOVERNMENTS AT WORK
“Granted the truth of all you say; that every county officer stands on his independent pedestal of authority, that the county is a headless institution where responsibility is scattered in a thousand different directions; that urban counties are the weakest brothers in the political family—granted all that, but what of it?”
So cogitates the “average American”—or so it would seem. If he reads his county paper consistently he has been held in his seat over and over again by the hackneyed lines of Pope:
“For forms of government let fools contest;
What e’er is best administered is best.”
After a long course of mental stimulation along these lines, we are quite prepared to hear him remark that after all what really counts for government is MEN—an observation which is supposed to silence all contradiction. Your “average” friend, if he has more than an average political energy, then goes out and helps to see that the “right sort” of man is elected coroner.
There is undoubtedly more than an element of truth and wisdom in all these sentiments. The industrial world is coming more and more to believe that the great essential in coöperative effort of any sort is not plan of organization, not methods, but personnel—men. 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.
But does the typical American government work that way? We shall examine in this chapter the relationships between the system, the men and the product.
To get the right angle on the subject, we should put ourselves in the position of, let us say, the sheriff of Pike County. He is a likable, popular fellow—that is how he happens to be sheriff. His likability, his popularity, have made him a particularly valuable adjunct of the Pike County Republican (or Democratic) organization. In the election campaign he has proven himself a vote-getter, he has given the organization a respectable tone. And now that he is in office his congenital good nature has not been changed. His popularity has been due to his unfailing loyalty to his friends and supporters. These good people swarm about him on the first day of his term and he has it not in his heart to refuse the only favor within his power to grant.
So much for one set of claimants upon his favor. But there is also the whole body of his supporters, the general electorate and the tax-paying contingent of the county; they have a claim upon him too and the new sheriff enters upon his duties with a sincere desire to serve them by running his office in the most efficient and economical manner. The significant part of the whole business is that these two ambitions are more than likely to prove inconsistent. Personal friendship dictates that he should hand out deputyships to “the boys” of his own heart; public service, that he should ignore the claims of friendship and man his office with competent assistants, regardless of personal, political or ecclesiastical connections. And so the new officer, through a situation not of his own making, is caught in a dilemma. Probably nine out of ten county officials either resolve the difficulty on the grounds of friendship or strike a compromise between their conflicting desires—and the efficiency of the office in either case is impaired. Every man coming into an office with favors to dispense has strings attached to his person. He cannot look his public duties quite squarely in the eye, but has always to qualify every new plan, every selection of a subordinate with “What will the county chairman say?” And if he has ambitions to hold office for a second term, or to go higher, he is naturally careful about irritating the goose that lays the golden egg. For the county chairman is not apt to be keen about the plans for economy or reducing the number of jobs for “the boys.” Such plans do not fit in with his requirements.
The system hamstrings the man. Once a county officer in New Jersey needed two additional clerks. Believing, however, that the board of chosen freeholders was following a strict program of economy, he went to them asking for four new men, with the thought that his requisition would be cut in half. But not so. The official and the board were of opposite parties. A member of the board came around and remarked that “you need eight new men.” The officer is said to have taken the hint and jobs were accordingly provided for four deserving members of each of the leading parties.
In such cases it is clearly not personality but the system that dominates.
The enforced division of allegiance between party and people is but a single source of personal inefficiency. Under the much lauded “government of laws” that reaches the heights of absurdity in the county, the chance of effective law enforcement is reduced to a minimum. Take it for instance in the exact compliance with statutory procedure. The sale of a piece of real estate for non-payment of taxes, for instance, must be conducted in accord with a detailed series of steps set forth in the law, or the title of the property is clouded. Claims for payment for services rendered or material supplied, may also be legally allowed only after the proper formalities have been observed. And in countless other directions the efficiency of the county officers and employees must be measured principally by a meticulous obedience to the law.
But contrast the necessity with the performance: The former chief of the Bureau of Municipal Accounts in the Comptroller’s office of an eastern state, after examining the affairs of fifty-six counties, was able in 1914 to say: “In not a single county examined has there been found compliance with every provision of law. On the contrary, in each of the counties examined serious irregularities in financial transactions have been disclosed, and the taxpayers’ money illegally expended, in some cases beyond recovery.”
The comptroller’s agents examined the affairs of county “A.” Of the transactions for the year ending October 31, 1913, they said: “County administration during that year was carried on, in many important respects, illegally, and in many cases the officials completely ignored the law, resulting in waste of public money, amounting to many thousands of dollars.” The former treasurer of this county, according to the official report, “had, it would seem, no proper conception of the legal duties imposed upon him. He made payments of unauthorized drafts of committees of the board.... His important statutory duty to pay only on proper legal authority apparently constituted meaningless words.” The same authority reported that:
“The board of supervisors ordered payments that were without authority of law, to the extent of many thousands of dollars. The illegalities in the audits of the board of supervisors were particularly objectionable because of the fact that many of the subjects of criticism were called to the board’s attention in the report of a former examination. Illegal payments under such circumstances became a defiance of legal restriction.... The administration of the poor fund was not in accord with the law and through a failure of the officials to understand the requirements of the law and the necessities of the county, the lack of proper coöperation between the county treasurer, the superintendent of the poor, and the board of supervisors, confusion resulted in the poor fund finances and a large deficit accumulated which was financed by illegal temporary loans.... The county has suffered to a material extent from inefficiency, indifference to law and neglect.”
That discoveries were by no means local or unique is indicated by periodical complaints that have come up from other parts of the country.
Was it men, as such, or was it not also a system that gave rise to the evidences of bad government in County “B.”? Did it simply happen that the treasurer, the county judge, the district attorney, the sheriff and the justices of the peace were all breaking the laws at once? Is it to be supposed that law-breaking flourished naturally in the atmosphere of that particular region? The performances of these officers are both so instructive and picturesque that they will bear a brief recounting here.
The examiners of the affairs of this county a few years ago turned up this quaint little document:
“Ellenberg Center, Nov. 21, 1900.
County of....................., Dr., to Wellington Hay. 1898, Sept. 22. To 7 days’ labor with deputy sheriff looking up stolen horse $14.00 To paid all expenses per above 15.60 $29.60 “Mr. Hay performed services in following up two horse thieves who had stolen his horse at my request as sheriff, one of the men, George Burnham, had several indictments against him in this county and all who knew his doings were anxious for his capture, I certainly think Mr. Hay should be paid.
“C. W. Vaughan,
“Late Sheriff.”
| County of....................., Dr., to Wellington Hay. | ||
| 1898, Sept. 22. To 7 days’ labor with deputy sheriff looking up stolen horse | $14.00 | |
| To paid all expenses per above | 15.60 | |
| $29.60 | ||
In this instance, Mr. Hay, a deputy sheriff, was charging the county for chasing up his own horse. The county treasurer who paid this claim was the one who, in spite of very definite provisions of law, had failed to designate the banks which should have custody of the county funds, and deposited them with a favored institution which paid the county no interest; who failed to keep any cash book or any account with any bank even on the stubs of his check book; who allowed at least one creditor of the county to collect an illegal claim four times. This is the county in which the county judge was found to have his own private law offices elaborately furnished with all the up-to-date filing devices and blanks, all at the public expense; in which the coroner reports that between the 13th and the 19th of May he had worked fifteen days and collected in full from the county. The records of practically every other officer in the county revealed similar irregularities and a similar lack of any fine sense of the interests of the public.
Did it just happen that the people of county “A” or county “B” elected none but law-breakers to office? Was it the character of the officers which alone was responsible for “inefficiency, indifference to law and neglect?” Would the condition have been different with another average set of men in office?
This is certain: that upon the officers of county “A” was imposed the duty of enforcing laws which were both intricate and difficult for a layman to find, and when found, to understand. But over and above all this, there was no constant discipline of a responsible organization and no certain and swift penalty for non-compliance with or disobedience of the law.
So difficult is the case, in fact, that it would seem from reports emanating from different parts of the country, that county officers have long ceased to worry about the legality of most of their acts. A common practice is not to investigate the law at all but to look back over the work of predecessors and follow in their tracks—an easier and more natural method for the untrained mind than to seek legal authority for action at its fountainhead in the statutes. But it makes a joke of the statutes! And when, in the absence of a powerful executive head, these written laws, which constitute most important connecting link, between the various county officers, are broken, the directing hand of the state is perforce withdrawn.
The failures of government in these counties were due in no small measure at least to the system, rather than to the individual men. No mere “good” man would necessarily have been better qualified or more inclined to look up the law and follow it implicitly. For it is not of such qualities that political “goodness,” from the voters’ standpoint, consists!
Nor are these minor delinquencies the sole products of the evil system. In Hudson County, New Jersey, with a citizenry somewhat less alert and with state officials a little less vigilant, the essential factors present in the counties mentioned gave rise to positive conscienceless and willful waste of public funds. The story is illuminating:
The building of the court house was begun under an act of the legislature which authorized a committee of the board of chosen freeholders to purchase such lands and erect such county buildings as might be needed. The committee was empowered to appoint its own counsel and architect to go ahead and build. The only limitation upon its powers was that it should spend not to exceed four fifths of one per cent. of the county ratables. This was a restriction which, under the amount of ratables as of the time when the project was authorized, would have permitted a maximum expenditure of about $1,580,000. But before even the contracts had been let the growth in valuations had so increased that the committee might legally spend $7,500,000.
The original figure for the cost of the court house had been $990,000, but before the citizens of the county were aroused it reached $3,328,016. Investigation revealed such extravagance and carelessness with the county’s money in every detail, that the legislature in 1911 abolished the committee and created a court house commission, the members of which were to be appointed by the Justice of the Supreme Court.
The building of county court houses under just such auspices and with a similar outcome is a characteristic bit of local history the country over. But county shortcomings do not always stop at willful extravagance. Sometimes it is a tale of grafting of the grossest sort, of which typical conditions a story is related by Herbert Quick, who had charge of an investigation into the affairs of Woodbury County, Iowa, some twenty years ago. The county supervisors apparently had traveled unobserved, unchecked, along the same road but further, as the officers of county “A” and the court house committee of Hudson County. Says Mr. Quick:
“A supervisor would draw thousands of dollars from the road and bridge funds on his own warrant, put the money in his pocket, and account for it by turning in receipts for road or bridge work. Some of this work was done and some was not. Most of the receipts were signed by political supporters of the supervisors. To some of them were signed names of persons who never existed.
“Everything the county bought was extravagantly bought. Any dealer who was willing to put in padded bills could get the chance to sell his goods.
“There was a regular system of letting bills go unpaid so that the persons furnishing the goods would put in the statements the second time, after which they would be paid twice—once to the firm to which they were really owing, and again to one or more of the county ring. In most cases the merchant furnishing the goods never knew of the double payment. They had a system of orders and receipts by which the merchant was kept in ignorance.
“In some cases the approaches to bridges were built and charged twice, once to the road fund and once to the bridge fund. The man who did the work got one payment and the grafters got the other. The people paid twice in these cases, and sometimes three times.
“A merchant sold some blankets to the county for the use of the prisoners in the jail. He was allowed about a hundred dollars on the county claim register, but refused to accept the payment and sued the county. In court he recovered judgment for all he claimed, and was paid out of the judgment fund. The general fund claim he had refused to accept showed as unpaid. Somebody on the inside went to him and got an order for ‘any sums due me from the county’ and drew the original bill over again. So the county paid the original allowance, the amount of the judgment, and the costs of the lawsuit. Rather dear blankets!
“Orders of this sort were drawn in the names of the people who had been dead for years.
“This is a sample of the sort of work which prevailed in that county, and which plunged the county into debt from which it will not recover, the way things generally go, for generations.”
In Indiana the leaven of obscurity and irresponsibility had long been working when the state board of accounts took up its work in 1909. The records of that office since that time show that more than one million six hundred thousand dollars had been charged against local officials and partly recovered. The board states that in their belief fully ninety per cent. of this was not due to deliberate wrongdoing but to an indulgent indifference, resulting in an almost endless confusion and incomplete accounts. Like the county officers in many another state, the officials in the Indiana counties, according to a message of former Governor Mount, “had been following precedents on an ascending scale.”
If the whole trouble lies in the personnel of government, there is either no real county problem or else the problem is unsolved. If it is merely a matter of men, the voters of the county need only, when the next election falls due, to “turn the rascals out” and elect more promising successors. But then that is what the voters have been doing these many years, and county government has not materially improved!
But if when the “good man” theory has been tested to the limit and found wanting, nothing else appears, may it not be suggested that the system has much to do with the man first in his selection and then in the influence that determines his conduct? The officers in the counties cited were creatures of the flesh. They found themselves involved in an organization which not only gave them little or no moral support, but which actually surrounded them with temptation to loaf, to commit errors and to steal. They were under no discipline to obey the law or to treat the interests of the county with any due consideration.
In the realm of government, as in the department of horticulture, it would appear that figs are not gathered from thistles.
CHAPTER IX
THE HUMANITARIAN SIDE
But the delinquencies of the county are not wholly related in terms of finance. Some good friend of the system is sure to come forward with the remark that “county policies, like every other branch of the business, may be expensive, but it has a good deal of wholesome humanity about it.”
A view that is worth examining!
To the lot of the county, acting through the machinery and under the influences which have been described, has fallen in large part, the extensive and important governmental burden of looking after the poor who are always with us, the sick in mind and those in prison. The magnitude of this task in a populous center may be gathered from this summary of the humanitarian functions of Cook County, by Dr. Graham Taylor.
“It housed, fed and cared for about eleven thousand prisoners in the county jail, nearly ten thousand of whom required medical treatment for infectious diseases.
“It gathered in, temporarily cared for and committed to state asylums or discharged, 2334 insane patients.
“It assumed and maintained care for 10,597 delinquent and dependent children.
“It isolated and stamped out contagion.
“It housed, fed and furnished medical and surgical treatment for 34,000 sick people, 1000 tuberculosis patients, and 3000 aged, infirm or irresponsible people.
“It supplied food, clothing and fuel to about 200,000 persons; buried 978 pauper and friendless dead, and granted $165,000 to 350 indigent mothers for the support of 1126 children. To perform this service it required the full time of 3000 employees and part time of about 10,000 others. The appropriations of Cook County for 1913 total $7,072,486.96.”
Such is the budget of what we may call the human problem of a great metropolitan county. Between the services rendered in such a unit and those of a sparsely settled, back-country county, almost anywhere in the United States, the difference is one of degree rather than of kind.
This is the ancient heritage of the church, which it has gradually transferred to the shoulders of the State, beginning at a time when the treatment of unfortunates was yet mostly a matter of getting undesirable citizens out of the way without actually assassinating them. The recipients of relief in early times were all treated as just so much of a public charge and all were obliged to wear the letter “P.” There was no science of penology, and the insane were treated as possessed of devils. Modern institutional care was practically undreamed of.
But the care of unfortunates within the last half century has come under the dominion of the scientific spirit. The old way was to “bunch” all kinds of poor and all kinds of dependents and all classes of criminals, regardless of all antecedent circumstances and all hope of betterment. Science, on the other hand, has demanded first, investigation into the causes and nature of crime and deficiency, then classification of cases. New York led the way in the treatment of these social relief problems by starting the process of segregation. In the early part of the nineteenth century the almshouses in America and the workhouse in England began to be built, as an expedient for facilitating investigation of applicants and decreasing expense. These institutions were soon used to house all sorts and conditions of men, women and children. Says one authority[4]:
“If you went into an almshouse in any of the counties of this State as recently as the ’70s of the last century, you would have found a mixture of the aged, who were in the almshouse simply because they were old and misfortune had come to them and they had lost their money and were therefore obliged to spend their last days in the almshouse. In addition, you would find children of all ages, beginning with infants. A large number of infants, especially illegitimate children, would be housed in the same building and would be cared for promiscuously with the older groups. You would also find large numbers of the insane, as there was no separate provision for them at that time. So with the epileptic and feeble-minded and every class of dependent vagrant and inebriate. It was a veritable dumping-ground for all sorts and conditions of humanity.”
In the movement for segregation of cases the first step was to secure a prohibition against the commitment of children to the almshouses. Special provision was later made for the insane. From time to time other classes of cases, including the feeble-minded, the epileptics and vagrants, have been transferred for appropriate treatment elsewhere. Later came the public health movement, the basic idea of which is the segregation of the sick poor from those who are sound in body but destitute. Even at the present time the almshouses are used for inebriates.
In a later period the standards for the treatment of prisoners have been advanced somewhat more slowly but along the same scientific principle of classification and segregation, but less with reference to psychological and sociological causes or the nature of crime than to the conveniences of administration. But segregation has been prescribed by law in generous measure according to certain crude principles of decency and justice. Thus the New York Prison law provides at least ten classifications, involving separation of men from women, men from boys, persons awaiting trial from those under sentence, civil prisoners and witnesses from criminal prisoners.
So much for the modern standards. Against such standards the success or failure of the county as a humanitarian agency must be measured.