Local Government: An Intellectual History
Sydney (17 May)
On the evening of 11 December 1886, the Indianapolis Evening News – then the largest paper in Indiana – ran an interview on its front page headlined Ten Thousand Passes Yearly: Greed of Legislators and Justices for Free Transportation on Railroad.
The piece was an interview with an unnamed railroad operator, who was not in the mood to hold back about corruption in the state. “I once supposed that the company owned this [rail] road. But I know that legislators and the judges have a first mortgage on it,” they told the journalist.
“I can show you some of the requests for passes that will cause you to lose faith in office-holders, if you have any,” they said. “I have received today a request for an annual pass from a justice of the peace who says they decided in our favour [in a hog case],” they added.
The operator estimated that they gave public officials around 3000 annual passes and at least 6000 trip passes each year to secure favours. “The custom … has been so firmly established and is so generally indulged that we are slaves to it.”
Each of the dozens of elected officials who held diffuse power over Indiana's railroads claimed their own tickets, trading their limited authority for personal benefit, the operator explained.
“We never dream of refusing legislators and members of town councils, and when we want anything from them, we never fail to ask for it! We give passes to county clerks and recorders in return for favours they render in attending to our records, etc,” they said.
The railroad operator’s comments were particularly brazen, but would not have come as a surprise to Indianapolis’ residents. American politicians in the 1880s hardly commanded public respect.
Just a page after the interview, the Indianapolis Evening News reported on an Illinois Representative-elect pleading guilty to assault after thumping a journalist over the head and shoulders with a cane, over an election dispute.
Five years earlier, corruption and patronage had fatal consequences. On 2 July 1881, Charles Guiteau stepped onto a train platform in Washington D.C. and shot the recently elected President James Garfield in the back. Months later, Garfield died from infections stemming from the shooting, marking the first U.S. Presidential assassination since President Abraham Lincoln’s murder.
Guiteau had campaigned for Garfield in the 1880 election, writing a handful of speeches, and expected an Ambassadorship – which he was wholly unqualified for – in return.
When Garfield’s Secretary of State, James Blaine, rebuffed him and the President signalled discomfort with patronage politics, Guiteau decided to act. “Ingratitude is the basest of crimes,” he wrote while planning the assassination, according to Winston Bowman, an Associate Historian at the Federal Judicial Centre.
Americans, by the time the railroad operator spoke, were tired of corruption. Reflecting on the Indianapolis Evening News’ interview, in March 1887, Eugene Debs – who would later become the godfather of American trade unionism – asked: “With legislatures, congresses, and courts and town councils corrupted by bribes, what show is there for honest government? Who does not see at a glance the absolute necessity for radical remedies?”
Debs’ solution was for organised labour to act as a force to “rescue government from the men who … are bent upon its destruction.” And it was a view shared by many on the American Labour Left at the time.
On the same day that it ran the interview on corruption, the Indianapolis Evening News published a short story about a group of unions meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to form the American Federation of Labour (AFL), which would later merge into the AFL-CIO in 1955. The AFL, at its first meeting, explicitly passed a resolution showing solidarity with activists controversially sentenced to death over the Haymarket Affair months earlier.
But the American Labour Movement did not have a monopoly on reform ideas.
As the railroad operator confessed and unions united, a 33-year-old Woodrow Wilson would have been sitting at his office in Princeton University, finishing The Study of Administration, a case for bureaucratic change that would guide reformers for generations.
Wilson, in his essay, lamented that “the poisonous atmosphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration … and corruption ever and again discovered in the bureaus at Washington” show how ideas of good governance were absent in the US.
American and English civic development, he argued, had focused on policy innovation and political freedom, rather than administration. Indeed, Wilson believed that America’s tradition of popular rule made governing harder.
The young professor – just years out of university – made the point that the US political class needed to treat administration as the science of carrying out the public will, distinct from politics, the messy work of determining it.
“The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative,” he said. “The assessment and raising of taxes, for instance, ... and recruiting of the army and navy are all obviously acts of administration; but the [policies] which direct [them] are obviously outside of and above administration,” he added.
Wilson called for specialised, extensive civil service training for government employees, designed to create technical skills and a culture committed to helping elected officials implement policy.
But this is not to say that he supported an unaccountable bureaucracy. He called for a system with “clear-cut responsibility” and visibility to ensure trust. Unlike some of his fellow Progressive-era reformers, Wilson built his model of administration on the assumption that voters could be trusted.
“Public attention must be easily directed, in each case of good or bad administration, to just the man deserving of praise or blame … If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible,” he said.
“The less [the administrator’s] power, the more safely obscure and unnoticed does he feel his position to be, and the more readily does he relapse into remissness,” Wilson added.
For a few decades after writing the piece, Wilson dedicated himself to academia. He wrote prolifically about administration and reform for nearly two decades, rising to become President of Princeton University, before politics came calling.
In March 1909, while still at Princeton, he travelled to Missouri to speak at the St Louis Civic League’s annual dinner. On the night, he delivered his long-brewing case for consolidating power among a small number of public officials, giving them the power to act.
“Simplify your process, and you will begin to control; complicate them, and you will get farther and farther away,” Wilson said that night, his later political ally Richard Childs recounted in a 1956 review.
Childs, who also backed the early career of Robert Moses, the New York planner made infamous by Robert Caro’s Power Broker, was a political reformer in his own right. Before meeting Wilson, he had written The Short Ballot, a piece calling for executive power to be held by a smaller number of elected officials.
Soon after, Childs and Wilson began to co-lead the National Short Ballot Organisation, pushing municipalities to consolidate. By 1911, they had begun to convince cities to adopt versions of their plan. And that same year, Wilson entered public office for the first time, as Governor of New Jersey, his home since the 1880s.
Wielding the power of the state for the first time in his career, Wilson embarked on an ambitious reform agenda, designed to clean up politics in the state. He actively rejected patronage and stunted the power of political parties.
On a municipal level, he passed the Walsh Act, which allowed cities in New Jersey to trial a new form of local government, the Commission Plan. Commission Plan cities elected boards of people to serve as dual legislators and administrators, held to account at open meetings.
“Commission form of government is the very one to take up because it is so easy to understand. You elect five men to run the government, and you hold them responsible for running it right. You can watch five men where you could not watch twenty-five,” he told a crowd in Jersey City in July 1911.
He was not naïve to the possibility of corruption. Some New Jersey cities had elected poor Commissioners after adopting the model, but, with power concentrated and visible, they were quickly recalled, he told another group in Baltimore that December.
“Under our system of commission government, there is a very great advantage in having an opportunity to identify your undesirable commission,” he said.
And he did not simply support the policy. He was effusive in his praise of the new model that he hoped would speed across the US.
“There is a zest in commission government not found in any private arrangement ever conceived by the mind of man. That wine, the wine of absolute confidence, of your fellow man, quickens every drop of blood in your body,” he said.
But not everyone in the Short Ballot movement shared Wilson’s enthusiasm for Commissioners. Childs supported Wilson’s plan, but only as a stepping stone. He thought the model was unsound, but believed it opened the door to new forms of local government.
As Wilson served out his term as Governor, became a wartime President, and then spent months in Paris, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, Childs powered on with the Short Ballot reform agenda.
And in 1912, after the city of Sumter, South Carolina appointed an apolitical city manager to run the daily business of government, he became one of the prime advocates of manager-based city councils.
Mayors and other councillors pass ordinances and budgets in manager-based city systems, but lack operational and broad staffing control over local governments. They act as legislators, not operators.
Managers, unlike Commissioners, are separate from elected officials and usually outlive political cycles, heightening their independence. By 1914, the US had 17 city managers; by 1955, they accounted for the plurality of large US cities. And the model soon spread out across the world.
At the time, Childs and Wilson’s preferred models differed, but not in ways that mattered very much.
In the 1910s, administration across most levels of government largely involved box-checking exercises. The work required care and skill, technical knowledge and integrity, but not value judgements.
As an example, when then-President Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, it approved or rejected mergers on the basis of whether revenue levels hit thresholds or trade practices met specific criteria.
Whether formally elected officials or apolitical appointees held executive control mattered less than whether they were held to account for failures.
When New Zealand eventually consolidated its hundreds of local councils and boards into district and regional councils in 1989, the Fourth Labour Government backed Childs’ model. District and regional councils got power and the ability to set policy, but administration became the domain of staff under the immediate direction of independent, unelected managers.
For a few years – as in the 1910s – this did not matter too much. But over time, views of administration changed. Cities grew and the rigidity of planning laws became a burden, creating demands for more nimble, agile regulatory frameworks.
In 1991, the New Zealand Government passed the Resource Management Act and, in doing so, blurred the line between politics and administration on a local level. Section 104 of the Act requires planners to consider a wide range of impacts related to consents and form considered judgments about them.
New Zealand’s Ministry of the Environment notes that planners need to be satisfied that most proposals with potential environmental impacts align with relevant Government plans and objectives.
Planners may consider everything from design considerations and economic impacts to infrastructure and transport effects, as long as it is relevant to local and national policies. But the Act does not mandate any specific weighting of values. Consenting officials have the right to emphasise criteria as they choose, within the bounds of relevant policies.
That may create a more dynamic government, but it also attacks the separation at the heart of Wilsonian administration. The line between politics and governance.
The differences between Wilson and Childs’ models of local government did not originally matter because administrators – whomever they were – simply did what legislators clearly wanted. But the moment that the values of administrators entered the work of administration, those differences began to shape the democratic character of cities around the world. At that moment, Wilson’s trust in democratic oversight suddenly became vital to maintaining public accountability.
A public unsatisfied with a Commissioner’s approach to planning could recall them, as Wilson noted. A public unsatisfied with decisions coming out of a Council’s planning team cannot.
People can vote for politicians who support one approach to planning or another, and those officials can change entire policy frameworks. But they cannot shift the internal cultures of Councils, adjust how staff subjectively assess applications.
On a fundamental level, elected officials cannot – as Wilson wrote in The Study of Administration – guarantee a “civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness of class spirit quite out of the question.”
By Avinash Govind