The County: The "Dark Continent" of American Politics

by Henry S. Gilbertson

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.