There was also a committee which touched on an interest that includes every inhabitant—county government. One might have imagined that this body too could have attracted at least one or two celebrities. There are sixty-one counties in New York State. Everybody lives in one. They safeguard property, personal and civil rights. But not so. Two or three public hearings; no ex-presidents; no college heads; no considerable number of interested private citizens—such was the tangible display of awakening to the subject at hand.
At a singularly appropriate moment, however, a brand-new association of clerks of the boards of supervisors was formed. Several members of the body appeared in person before the convention. The committee appealed to them to enrich its fund of information concerning the home government. They were given a free rein to tell of the needs of their counties.
In view of collateral facts, the testimony of this notable group of public servants is peculiarly illuminating. The representative of a central New York county was there and blandly did he announce that his people were perfectly satisfied with their county government; they would not dream of modifying it. The clerk from a Hudson River county was equally optimistic, and went to some pains to show in detail just how very well his county was governed. Similar testimony was presented from a county in the capital district. Then up spoke the clerk from near the borders of Pennsylvania: the people of this neighboring state had conceived so great an admiration for the form of his county government that they were longing to substitute it for their own rather simpler system.
Now for the collateral facts. Not more than two months following this hearing, officers of the National Committee on Prison Labor got word of misdoings at the jail in the central New York county and succeeded in securing a Grand Jury investigation. The details of their findings scarcely lend themselves to print. Enough to say that the sheriff’s deputies had made a practice of allowing both men and women prisoners to come and go at will and permitted most disreputable conditions to prevail in the prison. Shortly after the committee hearings the state comptroller completed his investigation of the financial affairs of the Hudson River county. His report reeks with accounts of flagrant and intentional violations of the laws on the part of not one but nearly all of the county officers. As for the clerk from the capital district, he was confronted at the hearing itself with several pieces of special legislation passed, at the instance of the sheriff and the superintendent of the poor, for the increase of salaries of deputies over the head of the local governing body. That this appeal was not so much in the interests of the county as of “political expediency” and at the expense of the taxpayers, he cheerfully admitted. But as for the near-Pennsylvania county, that was the earthly home of a man who had conceived a clever method of breaking into the county treasury by having the board of supervisors create for his benefit, contrary to law, the position of “county custodian.” Once firmly settled in his new position he persuaded the board to turn over to him (quite illegally) their responsibility for auditing the claims against the county, and persuaded the county treasurer to cash any warrant that might have his “O. K.” When he had made away, in this manner, with some ninety thousand dollars, the comptroller discovered his misdoings. Of the whole bad mess, the solution which the “custodian” selected was suicide. But the government of that county had not been fundamentally changed to meet the defects of organization revealed in these disclosures.
A collection of isolated facts? Familiar American graft and inefficiency? Perhaps. But in the cities and in the states the public has been going after such things. In the counties of New York the people apparently did not know that such conditions were present. The clerks who appeared at Albany and were, for the most part, the sole representatives of their several counties, seem to have told the truth, at least about the people’s complacency, but they might have been more accurate and more complimentary if they had labeled it “lack of knowledge.”
From coast to coast a deep silence broods over county affairs. Can it be that, while cities have been reveling in franchise scandals and police have been going into partnership with vice interests, while state legislatures have been lightly voting away public money on useless political jobs and extravagant public institutions, the county alone is free from every breath of scandal and is a model of official uprightness? Scores of municipal leagues and city clubs and bureaus of municipal research are delving into city affairs and finding opportunities for betterment at every turn of the hand. But the number of county organizations that are doing critical and constructive work could be numbered on the ten fingers, or less. Many of the colleges offer courses specifically on municipal government, but the “one pervasive unit of local government throughout the United States” is disposed of with a brief mention. No political scientist has ever had the ambition to plow into the soil, so that while there is now available a five-hundred-page bibliography of city government, there has never been written a single volume[1] devoted exclusively to counties. Journalists for the most part have left the subject severely alone.
And yet in those few instances where the county has been put under the microscope or has been given more than a passing thought, the reward of the investigators’ labors have always been so certain and rich as to excite wonder as to how much further the shortcomings of the county extend. In Hudson County, N. J., a few years ago, the cost of the court house which had been fixed at nine hundred thousand dollars, threatened to run up to seven million dollars. Impressed by this striking circumstance, a body of citizens formed themselves into a permanent Federation to look deeper and longer into this back alley of their civic life. They found that the court house incident was but the most dramatic of a hundred falls from grace. The Public Efficiency Society of Cook County, Ill., the Westchester County Research Bureau, the Taxpayers’ Association of Suffolk County, the Nassau County Association in New York and the Tax Association of Alameda County in California have all been richly repaid for their investments in county government research. Sporadic cases? Possibly. And then again perhaps there is something basically defective in the system.
But is it all a matter of importance?
If universality and magnitude of cost count for anything, yes. Nearly all the inhabitants of the United States live in a county and nearly every voter takes part in the affairs of one. There are over three thousand such units. In their corporate capacity they had in 1913 a net indebtedness of $371,528,268 (per capita, $4.33), which was a growth from $196,564,619 in 1902 (per capita, $2.80). In that year they spent for general government, $385,181,760, which is something like one third the cost of the federal government for the same period. Of this amount, $102,334,964 was for general management. Through these county governments the American people spent for highway purposes, $55,514,891; for the protection of life and property, $15,213,229; for the conservation of health, $2,815,466; for education, $57,682,193; for libraries, $364,712; for recreation, $419,556 (mostly in the single state of New Jersey); for public service enterprises, $189,122; for interest charges, $17,417,593; upon structures of a more or less permanent nature, $89,839,726.
The figures, though of course not to be taken too seriously, are in some cases as impressive for their paucity as in others for their magnitude, for throughout a large part of the United States the county is the sole agency of local government.