Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

What a hell Burma would be for the Puritan! And what a heaven for everybody else! Perhaps we would all better go live there.

These things, however, should be no part of a mayor’s business, and perhaps I may justify my speaking of them by saying that I spoke of them principally to make that point clear. They and some other problems that may or may not be foreign to his duties, have the effect of keeping a mayor from his real work which is or should be, the administration of the communal affairs of the city, and not the regulation of the private affairs of the people in it. It is quite impossible to imagine any work more delightful than this administration. Hampered in it as one is by politicians, who regard every question from the viewpoint of the parish pump, it is nevertheless inspiring to be concerned about great works of construction regarding the public comfort and convenience, the public health and the public amenities. It is in such work that one may catch a glimpse of the vast possibilities of our democracy, of which our cities are the models and the hope.

I have observed in Germany that the mayors of the cities there are not burdened by these extraneous issues, and I think that that is the reason the German cities are the most admirably administered in the world. Perhaps I should say governed, too, though that is hardly correct, since the governing there is done by the state through its own officials. I have not been in Germany often enough or remained long enough to be able to assert that government, in its effect for good, is quite as much a superstition as it is everywhere; mere political government, I mean, which seems to be so implicitly for the selfish benefit of those who do the governing. But the administration of public affairs is so entirely another matter, that it is as beautiful, at least in its possibilities as government is ugly in its actualities, and it is precisely because there has been so much insistence on government in our cities that there is as yet so little administration, and that so inefficient.

In Germany the burgomeister is not chosen for his political views, or for his theories of any sort, or for his popularity; he is chosen because of his ability for the work he is to perform, and he is retained in office as long as he performs that work properly. It is so with all municipal departments and the result is order and efficient administration. When a German city wants a mayor, it seeks one by inquiring among other cities; sometimes it advertises for him. It would be quite impossible, of course, for our cities to advertise for mayors, not that there would be any lack of applicants, since everyone is considered capable of directing the affairs of a city in this country. Of course everyone is not capable; few of the persons chosen are capable at the time they are chosen. Many of them become very capable after they have had experience, but they gain this experience at the expense of the public, and about the time they have gained it, their services are dispensed with, and a new incompetent accidentally succeeds them.

The condition is due partly to the fact that we are of a tradition that is concerned with governing exclusively, and not administering; our conception is of an executive, a kind of lieutenant or subaltern of the sovereign power, and in our proverbial fear and jealousy of kings we see that he does not have too much power or develop those powers he has by a long tenure of office.

The officials of a German city are pure administrators, and nothing else; they are not governors or censors. They are not charged in fact with police powers at all. And if they were, they would not have questions of such delicacy to meet, for the police there are for the purpose of protecting life and property, and they are not expected to regulate the personal conduct and refine the morals of the community, or to rear the young. They have not confused their functions with the censores mores of old Rome, or like us, with the beadles of New England villages of colonial times. That is, the Puritan spirit is not known there, at least in the intensified acerbity in which it exists with us; moral problems, oddly enough, are left to parents, teachers or pastors. The police over there are generally a part of the military organizations. It would be better of course, to bear the ills we have than to transplant any military system to our soil, for state police in America would become mere Cossacks employed to keep the laboring population in subjection. But if the state is to undertake to regulate the moral conduct of the inhabitants of cities, it should provide all the means of regulation and take all the responsibility, including the onus of violating the democratic principle. If the state is to regenerate the land by the machinery of morals police, it should have its own morals police, tell them just how to proceed to compel the inhabitants of cities to be moral, and pay them out of the state treasury.

LII

It is, however, a curious characteristic of our people, or of the vocal minority of them, that while they insist on every possible interference with every private and personal right, in the field of moral conduct, they nevertheless will tolerate no interference whatever with property rights. Thus it was precisely as Cossacks that many employers of labor insisted on my using the police to cow their workmen whenever there was a strike.

During my first term it befell that our city was torn by strikes, all the union machinists in town walked out, then the moulders, and at last a great factory wherein automobiles were made was “struck,” as the workingmen say. It is impossible to give an idea of the worry such a condition causes officials. It is more than that sensation of weariness, of irritation, even of disgust, which it causes the general public. This is due partly to the resentment created by the interference with physical comfort, and even peace of mind, since there is in us all something more than a fear of disorder and tumult, in that innate love of harmony which exists potentially in humanity. But to the official there is a greater difficulty because of the responsibility to which he is held. People intuitively regard strikers as public enemies, and while the blame for the irritation caused by strikes is visited on the direct and apparent cause, that is, the strikers themselves; it is visited, too, on the official head of the local government, who is supposed to be able somehow to put a stop to such things. The general or mass intelligence will not as yet go much deeper than the superfices of the problem, or seek to understand the causes of economic unrest and disorder; it still thinks in old sequences and puts its trust in the weapons of the flesh.

I think I shall never forget the first call I had from a delegation of manufacturers during the early days of those strikes. They came in not too friendly spirit, but rather in their capacity of “citizens and tax-payers,” standing on their rights, as they understood them, though they in common with most of us and with the law as well, had only the most hazy notions as to what those rights were, and perhaps still hazier notions as to their duties. “We come,” said the spokesman, “representing two millions of dollars’ worth of property.”