Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

Another writer (J. B. Miller) states that the debts of the cities of the Union rose in the twenty years from 1860 to 1880 from about $100,000,000 to $682,000,000; from 1860 to 1875 the increase of debt in our eighteen largest cities was 270 per cent; the increase of taxation was 362 per cent; whereas the increase in taxable valuation was but 157 per cent and in population but 70 per cent. In 1883 the late Andrew D. White wrote as follows:

“I wish to deliberately state a fact easy of verification—the fact that whereas, as a rule, in other civilized countries municipal Governments have been steadily improving until they have been made generally honest and serviceable, our own, as a rule, are the worst in the world, and they are steadily growing worse every day.” (Message of Nineteenth Century to Twentieth.)

In a work published in 1899 by Dorman B. Eaton on the Government of Municipalities, he summarizes in Chapter II the well known and undeniable evils connected with our municipal affairs. He condemns our municipal governments generally as needlessly expensive and inefficient institutions, wherein bribery, blackmail and corruption are characteristic features. He calls “the management of municipal politics and elections a degrading business by which a class of useless and vicious politicians prosper,” and speaks of the system as discreditable and scandalous. “It is not,” he says (p. 22), “the gifted, the noble or the honored men who generally hold the highest municipal offices, but scheming politicians, selfish, adroit party managers, or men of very moderate capacity and even of not very enviable reputation, who would not be desired at the head of a large private business.” In December, 1890, in an article in the Forum Mr. White wrote that he had sojourned in every one of the great European municipalities; and that in every respect for which a city exists they were all superior to our own except Constantinople, where Turkish despotism produced the same haphazard, careless, dirty, corrupt system which we in America know so well as the result of mob despotism. We quote: “Without the slightest exaggeration we may assert that, with very few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom—the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.” Bryce, writing in 1894, found political rings in existence in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Baltimore and New Orleans. He might easily have found similar, though smaller and less conspicuous contrivances in a thousand other cities, towns and villages in the United States. Writing about 1898, Professor Hyslop recites a statement of some of the various well known forms of municipal robbery prevalent in our city administrations:

“Sales of monopolies in the use of public thoroughfares; systematic jobbing of contracts; enormous abuses of patronage; enormous overcharges for necessary public works. Cities have been compelled to buy land for parks and places because the owners wished to sell them; to grade, pave and sewer streets without inhabitants in order to award corrupt contracts for the works; to purchase worthless properties at extravagant prices; to abolish one office and create another with the same duties, or to vary the functions of offices for the sole purpose of redistributing official emoluments; to make or keep the salary of an office unduly high in order that its tenant may pay largely to the party funds; to lengthen the term of office in order to secure the tenure of corrupt or incompetent men. When increasing taxation begins to arouse resistance, loans are launched under false pretences and often with the assistance of falsified accounts. In all the chief towns municipal debts have risen to colossal dimensions and increased with portentous rapidity.” (Hyslop, Democracy, pp. 14, 15.)

This from another writer:

“No candid man can wonder at it. It is the plain, inevitable consequence of the application of the method of extreme democracy to municipal government. The elections are by manhood suffrage. Only a small proportion of the electors have any appreciable interest in moderate taxation and economical administration, and a proportion of votes, which is usually quite sufficient to hold the balance of power, is in the hands of recent and most ignorant immigrants. Is it possible to conceive of conditions more fitted to subserve the purposes of cunning and dishonest men, whose object is personal gain, whose method is the organization of the vicious and ignorant elements of the community into combinations that can turn elections, levy taxes, and appoint administrators? The rings are so skillfully constructed that they can nearly always exclude from office a citizen who is known to be hostile; though a ‘good, easy man, who will not fight, and will make a reputable figurehead, may be an excellent investment.’ Sometimes, no doubt, the bosses quarrel among themselves, and the cause of honest government may gain something by the dispute. But in general, as long as government is not absolutely intolerable, the more industrious and respectable classes keep aloof from the nauseous atmosphere of municipal politics, and decline the long, difficult, doubtful task of entering into conflict with the dominant rings.”

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“The problem,” says Mr. Sterne, “is becoming a very serious one, how, with the growth of a pauper element, property rights in cities can be protected from confiscation at the hands of the non-producing classes. That the suffrage is a spear as well as a shield is a fact which many writers on suffrage leave out of sight; that it not only protects the holder of the vote from aggression, but also enables him to aggress upon the rights of others by means of the taxing power, is a fact to which more and more weight must be given as population increases and the suffrage is extended.” (Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, pp. 99-101.)

This from a high and recent authority:

“The standard of integrity in City Councils is far lower even than in State Legislatures. The calibre of membership has so far deteriorated that in a large proportion of the cities of the country these bodies are held in public contempt.” (Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Government, 1914; Corruption, Legislative.)