The County: The "Dark Continent" of American Politics

by Henry S. Gilbertson

Thus in the domain of charities. We pointed out in Chapter IX that the county was hopelessly deficient in caring for the insane, the defectives and the criminals. Modern methods, which are humane methods, have come to demand strict classification as the very starting point for treatment. But unless the number of subjects for treatment is reasonably large, the expense of such classification is prohibitive. Most counties cannot supply the numbers. They find themselves in the predicament of a rural sheriff who has in custody an average of perhaps six prisoners. If his county were to obey the law it would have ready at all times an establishment which provided special accommodations for almost forty different classes of inmates.

Under these circumstances the only course is to transfer as many classes of prisoners as possible to the care of a larger unit of government that is able economically to segregate. This transfer actually began in some of the older states in the eighteenth century. Massachusetts led the movement by erecting a special prison on Castle Island for the most desperate type of convicts. In 1796, New York began the construction of two state prisons in New York and Albany. In 1816, Ohio built a state penitentiary at Columbus and in 1839, Michigan completed its first state prison at Jackson. Reform institutions in this country began to be established in Massachusetts in 1846 when juvenile offenders were removed from local jails and state prisons. Since then separate institutions for boys and girls have been established in nearly all of the eastern states. New York in 1877 erected the first reformatory to which adult convicts could be committed under an indeterminate sentence.

As for the care of the insane, this was the first department of public welfare administration that was taken over by the whole state, beginning with the establishment of the first hospital in Utica, New York, in 1843. From time to time other states have followed New York’s example until nearly every state has one or more hospitals. With the increase in the number of institutions in a given state further segregation and classification of inmates has been possible. State institutions now furnish the means for appropriate education for the mentally defective who formerly were left to shift for themselves in mismanaged county almshouses. The deaf, dumb and blind have been taken care of in similar fashion. Indeed, the function of county poor relief would now seem to approach as its ideal, the complete transfer to the state of all charity functions except possibly a certain amount of temporary “out-door” relief. But even this rather narrow field has been invaded, for, in New England and New York, at least, a class of “state poor” is known to the statutes.

That the county has often sadly broken down in the guardianship of life and property is a fact which has come into prominence within very recent years. As the police force of the big cities become more and more efficient the field of operation for criminals is transferred to the suburbs, to the small towns and villages and to the open country and the police problem in the rural sections takes on a semi-metropolitan aspect. Good roads, the automobile and the telephone have facilitated the business of thugs and burglars as well as of honest citizens. Said the district attorney of Niagara County, New York, recently, “Nearly every post office safe in Western New York has been robbed, and I do not now recall anybody having been convicted for these crimes. The ordinary constable or deputy sheriff can serve subpœnas and make a levy under an execution providing he is feeling well, but as a general rule he is incapable of coping with even a third-class criminal.” Numerous other equally forcible official statements of the same tenor have been collected by the New York Committee on State Police.

To cope with these crimes of violence and cunning the untrained, politically selected sheriff of the typical rural county is but sadly equipped. He is a temporary elected official to begin with, unschooled in the ways of criminals and unfamiliar with any of the vast paraphernalia of investigation that go to make up a modern police system. Certain parts of the country moreover have peculiar periodical disturbances on a larger scale than criminals operate—riots, lynching parties, flood disasters, strikes. These occasions demand the temporary mobilizing of a comparatively large, well-organized and disciplined force to handle the situation with firmness and fairness. It is no place for the crude old-fashioned sheriff’s posse.

At the present time it is the frequent practice on such occasions to call out the state militia. But while this organization has often doubtless rendered effective service, police duty is not its proper occupation. Every year enlistments fall far below the adequate figure because young men in business and professional life deem it obnoxious to leave their appointed tasks to do a professional policeman’s work. In the discussion of “preparedness” measures it has frequently been proposed that the militia be enlisted solely for national defense and that a special fighting force be developed for state police duty. If such a force were organized on a permanent basis it would practically relieve the sheriff and the constables from police duty.

A model for such a force is found in the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, which has been in existence since 1902. This is an organization of two hundred and twenty mounted policemen formed into four companies under a superintendent of police. Every year it patrols 660,000 miles of rural roads and not only keeps the rural sections singularly free from criminals but has performed numerous other distinctive services. It has prevented disastrous fires and mine explosions, quelled riots, stopped illegal hunting and maintained quarantine during epidemics of disease. It was this constabulary that handled the tremendous crowds at the Gettysburg Centennial in 1913. The force is made up of picked men who are taught the laws of the commonwealth and schooled to enforce them with absolute impartiality against offenders of all classes. It has been free from politics and has won the respect of all classes of the people.

In the domain of highways[18] the county, under the pressure of the good-roads movement, has been rapidly yielding its control to the central government. The good-roads problem simply outgrew the county. It could not be handled efficiently through so small a unit. In the course of railway development everywhere the old lines of tributary traffic by wagon road from the farms to the shipping centers were greatly modified. Their objective point came to have no particular reference to the boundaries of the county or the location of the county seat. Traffic from one county destroyed the roads of another without supplying any compensatory advantages to the latter. Modern road construction, particularly since the advent of the automobile, created technical engineering problems far beyond the capacity of the local officials to solve. Without the aid of better equipped agencies than a unit so small as the county could afford most of the rural roads of the county must have gone to rack and ruin, to say nothing of their meeting the demands of present day traffic. But forty-two state governments, up to 1915, had come to the rescue, either by supplying financial aid, authorizing the employment of convict labor or by furnishing expert advice founded upon scientific research. Up to the year 1914 only Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas had made no provision whatever for state participation in road work.

But the significant point to be noted here is the strong tendency to take entirely out of the hands of the county the whole burden, financial and otherwise, of the great trunk lines and in many cases to impose standards and specifications for construction even where the county does its own road building. Thus, Massachusetts, up to January 1, 1914, had completed more than one thousand miles of state highway through the issuance of state bonds and the levying of automobile taxes, the counties being required to refund the state twenty-five per cent. of the cost of construction. New York established a highway department in 1898 and has authorized bond issues of $100,000,000 for a state system of roads which has already reached an advanced stage of construction. Virginia, Ohio, Maryland and California have made much progress toward a state road system, the California plan calling for two main highways running the length of the state and a system of laterals connecting the county seats with the trunk lines. The state of Iowa has gone so far as to place all road work in the state under the direction of its highway department.

And so, the dominion of the county is being invaded at sundry points. The unification of the judiciary (which it must be admitted has not yet progressed very far), the gradual transfer of the charity and correctional work to the state government, the establishment of a state police and the more imminent abridgment of county control over highways—these movements unmistakably and definitely seem to point the ultimate displacement of the county as an important agent of public service in particular fields.