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.