The County: The "Dark Continent" of American Politics

by Henry S. Gilbertson

To the county in most of the states has also been committed from early times, the obligation to carry forward what is now generally recognized as one of the greatest of unifying, nationalizing, civilizing factors in this or any time—highways. Through these avenues of communication the people of the wilderness were to break their solitude, establish common understandings and give value to the products of the earth by creating markets for their distribution. Over the highways access was to be had with schools and churches.

From the colonial period and well down into the nineteenth century, the construction and maintenance of roads was, in diminishing degree, a private enterprise, operated by turnpike companies primarily for the benefit of their stock-holders rather than that of the public. Gradually road making came to be regarded as a public function, at first in respect to the repairs upon the private toll roads and then in original construction. In the year 1913 the amount which counties of the country spent upon their highways had mounted to $55,514,891.

To the fulfillment of this great function the county brought those weaknesses of governmental organization, that lack of equipment, that defective loyalty to the service of the whole people which have been described heretofore. The erection of a road system was a demand for broad, foreseeing knowledge and appreciation of the needs of the whole county, high technical skill in the art of road making and adequate financial arrangements. The county supplied none of these.

What the county did supply and how it supplied it may be worth the recital, even though in these days of the “good-roads” movement the state government is constantly stiffening its hold upon highway matters.

To begin with, the whole public road function is rooted, historically, in the tradition of the people’s infinite political versatility and infallibility. The true democrat of the nineteenth century never doubted his ability to select and control the human agents for executing a technical and difficult engineering problem, which has baffled the resources of modern specialists. And so, to this day, the management of road construction and care over a great portion of the country is entrusted to a farmer, a blacksmith, a plumber or some other species of layman who has sufficient popularity with his neighbors and the county chairman to get himself chosen as town supervisor. In some states the rôle of road manager is played by the somewhat better equipped county surveyor, who, however, like the supervisor, is picked in the majority of cases because of his vote-getting qualities rather than for any technical training.

Under these circumstances the roadmaster is apt to enter upon his public duties with a sense of his obligation not to the whole community and its ultimate interest, but to those articulate sections of the people who are most likely to make themselves felt on the next election day. As a certain highway engineer illustrated the situation: “Here’s $10,000 to spend on roads. Here also is Jeff Browning up on Nut Creek, who wants quite a little road work done. Of course, Jeff lives fifteen miles from the county seat, and there’s fifteen miles of bad roads between his place and town, but Jeff voted the whole settlement for me, and he has some idle teams, and we’ll just help him along by spending some money at his place.” It is one of the familiar processes of practical politics and the imagination should have no difficulty in picturing any number of equally accommodating transactions.

Quite as serious an aspect of road control directly by elective officers is that it gives too great and too convenient an opportunity for layman advice and prejudice to bear upon a technical problem. One curious idea which is prevalent in middle western rural districts is that a road, in order to be a road, must be on a section line, regardless of the contour of the land, the convenience of users of the highway or the character of the soil. The engineer above quoted tells of a very bad hill about two miles north of Poplar Bluff, Mo. “The grade,” says Mr. Edy, “must have been something like twelve per cent. in places. It was estimated that by going around this hill, a grade of six per cent. could be obtained, increasing the distance but slightly, and traversing almost worthless ground. The owner, however, would neither give nor sell a right of way, holding that unless the road were maintained ‘on the line’ it would not be a real road. Something like $400 was spent on this bill in an effort to make it passable, when half that amount would have made a permanent road in a new location.”

Of course, when the organization of the county gives to Jeff Browning and the philosopher of Poplar Bluff the predominating influence in road affairs, there can be nothing in the way of a county road policy or road plan that is based upon the economic and social needs of the whole people. The system enthrones petty rural sectionalism and narrowness and condones a form of graft which is without doubt as vicious in principle as the stealing of a street railway franchise. Where the township supervisor is the responsible official the case is at its worst for it means just so many more executive units to be watched, just so many more standards of road construction, just so many more independent road plans.

The “business” end of county road administration is often weighted down to earth with the same sublime faith in the wisdom of the average citizen. Rarely have counties maintained anything that approximated adequate records of cost or serviceability of their roads and bridges or data upon which they could construct a satisfactory policy of construction, if indeed their governing bodies have dreamed of the need or the value of such aids. Even of so highly developed a community as Monroe County, New York, in which the City of Rochester is situated, it could be said concerning the office of highway superintendent that “the only record now kept is a bill book in which are entered all claims against the county highway fund which are paid through the superintendent’s office, all payrolls and all claims for personal service.”[12]

Much the same lack of appreciation for facts was revealed in a cruder way in a grand jury investigation during 1912 of the methods of the Board of Commissioners in Darke County, Ohio, where it was discovered that minutes were rarely read and contracts were voted twenty at a time and sometimes without the formality of a vote, in direct violation of the law.