The City Manager and Reformed Cities
Structural reform as government capacity-building was every bit as important as change in form of government. In fact, the almost inevitable consequence of capacity-building (budgeting, accounting, purchasing, and planning accompanied by the employment of experts and neutral professionals) was to convert a weak mayor into a strong(er) mayor system. Change in form of government is more notable in that it was (is) commonly associated with a package of electoral and representative reforms, of which non partisan and at large elections exerted significant effects on who participated in elections as well as re-jiggled the decision-making calculus of the policy system participants. Commission form arrived first on the scene, and until 1915 enjoyed a near monopoly for almost a decade.
As we will discover with Newark, however, the commission’s inadequacies which played out over time with some variation across municipal jurisdictions that limited a fair understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. In any case, a commission form of government could easily produce a policy system more horrendous than the one it replaced. The problem, however, is that once-controlled by individuals who did not want to surrender power, the commission form was no more easier to change than any other policy system. The arrival of the city manager form of government, after Dayton in 1914, provided a much more compelling alternative.
Staunton Virginia (1908) and Sumter South Carolina (1912—same city manager) hold first claim as the earliest municipalities to adopt the city manager form of government. Staunton did not adopt the associated package of election reforms—but rather appointed an administrative official to manage the department and affairs of the existing form of government. Sumter can better justify its claim as the first city manager form of government. Both jurisdictions were 10,000 or less in population at the time of their structural reform. Dayton Ohio in 1914 was the first large city (116,000+) to change over to a city manager form. That the city manager form was labeled at the time as the “Dayton Plan” strongly suggests that it played the chief role in the herd-epidemic diffusion that followed.
The city manager form centralized municipal administration in a single professionally-trained manager making him/her responsible/accountable to the chief elected official (mayor) or body (the city council). The city manager directed the jurisdiction’s principal administrative functions, processes and services, and acted as the representative of the elected officials in management affairs. There is intended to be a clear and formal separation of the management function from politics and policy-decision-making (although this is easier said than done in real life). The clear intention was to install into policy implementation the principles of earlier described as scientific management or early public administration, and to “run government like a business”—efficiently and honestly.
The “thrust” of the associated election reforms is to reduce the impact of districts or wards in policy-decision-making and administrative management. The non partisan/at large elections are intended to reduce special interest and narrow geographies influence and further a community-wide, semi-statesman perspective. In this regard, most perceive the clear intent of city manager form is to “depoliticize” administration/ management/policy implementation, but, also suggests non community-wide perspectives are harmfully parochial and should be limited. The short ballot which ended the independent and partisan election of heads of key departments (police, for example) reduced fragmentation in jurisdictional policy-making and strengthened the legislature and executive. In the Progressive Era the city manager form overcame the fragmentation and semi-chaos of the Gilded Age policy system, and offered the potential for minimizing the impact of political machines and bosses.
The National League of Cities reports (2006 ICMA survey) that city managers presently govern about 55% of present-day American cities (only 1% by commission). The success and the pervasiveness of the city manager form are therefore without question. The city manager was first adopted in 1913 Dayton after a home rule charter reform pushed by executives from National Cash Register. An estimated 158 cities adopted the city manager form by 1920 and by 1923 there were 270 city manager-led cities[1]. Cleveland, Cincinnati and Kansas City were the only Big Cities that converted to city manager. Like the commission, the city manager form appealed to smaller and mid-sized cities of America. Big Cities, following our New York City case study, retained the mayor-council system and several like Buffalo, which had first switched to commission, then city manager, before returning to mayor-council. Again, counties are another matter entirely. Professionalization was instantaneous in that the ICMA was founded in 1914.
The Reformed City
Political scientists in the following decades called attention to the “reformed city” model which included the city manager, non partisan and at large elections, merit or civil service systems, separation of local elections from state and national elections, and the initiative, recall and referendum. Their studies consistently demonstrated that reform cities tended: (1) to be less than 500,000 population; (2) most prevalent in the 25,000-250,000 range and (3) to be ethnically-homogenous, middle class, white, and exhibit high rates of population mobility. During the last decades of the twentieth century, however, elements of the reform model permeated cities of all sizes and so the effects of reformed city model seems to have diluted; even Big Cities have adopted some form of a chief administrative officer (CAO), similar in function to a city manager[2]. While somewhat passé today, reformed cities were for a long while, paradigmatic for political science—and represented the last significant study of the effects of structures on policy-making. This history stresses structures and some reflections on the reformed city are. therefore, warranted.
Criticisms of the reform model include (1) its inability to successfully confront diversity and effectively include minorities, and (2) the establishment of professional bureaucracies which can be unaccountable, closed, and driven by professional norms rather than popular demands. It is believed by many, as evidenced by political scientist Theodore Lowi’s observation that the “legacy of Reform is the bureaucratic city-state“[3]. The implications of a bureaucratically-driven municipal policy system would be more observable in the last decades of the twentieth century when combined with independent funding from federal and state grants in aid, bureaucracies would be attacked as the principal element in a new style boss and machine policy system. Economic developers were immune as urban renewal came under fire as a “bureaucracy gone wild” in the hands of aggressive mayors.
Dayton: John Patterson, Socialists, and the Dayton Plan
Dayton did not wander into its adoption of the city manager form of government—it was led there by a series of events and the persistent, generational-long determination of the CEO of Dayton’s largest employer: John Patterson of National Cash Register. Patterson was not a moral reformer; he did not (like Tom Johnson) seek to battle corporate monopolies or to seek justice for the downtrodden. In his words, drawn from a speech made to the Dayton Board of Trade, the purpose in changing the form of government to city manager was to place government administration on a “strict business basis … directed not by partisans, either Republican or Democratic, but by men who are skilled in business management and social science. A city is a great business enterprise whose stockholders are the people … people’s money [should be treated] as a trust fund, to be expended wisely and economically, without waste, and for the benefit of all citizens”[4]. Patterson is a pure business structural reformer.
Patterson commenced his crusade in 1896, long before Staunton or Sumter. After a decade of fruitless effort, Patterson had enough with Dayton’s Gilded Age waste and fragmentation; in 1907 he threatened to move National Cash Register out of the city. He caught the attention of the city council and they addressed some of Patterson’s immediate issues—and Patterson did not carry out his threat. By 1912 Patterson had accelerated his reform efforts and was chair of a chamber charter reform committee. That committee approved a charter reform to adopt the city manager form of government, complete with non partisan election and a five member council elected at large. And then, conveniently, came the March 1913 Dayton Flood. Four hundred died and $100 million dollars of property was destroyed. The mayor, it might be added, took off for drier geographies, and could not be found for several days. Patterson and National Cash Register hit the streets and conducted rescue missions with 300 boats constructed by National Cash Register employees. NCR became the headquarters for the Red Cross and for the National Guard when they finally got to Dayton. A hospital, morgue, and home for the homeless also were established at NCR.
When the council manager charter reform was voted in four months later, it was approved 2-1. By March 1920, 177 cities had adopted the city manager form. Most of these early adoptions “concentrated in the Midwest, South, and California. Michigan led the nation with 23 while the Northeast lagged behind with only 18. Three of the four city manager municipalities of over 100,000 population were in Michigan or Ohio (Dayton, Grand Rapids and Akron)[5].
Once in place, the Dayton Plan (city manager structural reform) exerted a now-forgotten effect on subsequent Dayton politics. Previous to adoption of the Plan, many Daytonians strongly suspected the city, an automotive industrial and manufacturing center with heavy unionized neighborhoods and a largely ineffective Gilded Age policy system, would follow Milwaukee’s lead and elect a Socialist mayor. The two political parties had already formed a fusion party in anticipation of making a united front against the Socialists. But the Flood, Patterson as a local hero, and the quick adoption of non partisan elections and city manager form of government changed the political setting dramatically. In the first election for adoption of the new city charter, a non partisan “Citizens” slate of candidates won all the seats and shut out the Socialists completely. With the non partisan election in place, the Socialists were restricted to victories in their home neighborhoods and were unable to achieve a city-wide majority.
The Socialists would not surrender, however. In 1917, they waged a major election campaign in the primary election (partisan) and outpolled both the Citizen’s fusion party and the Democratic Party—winning almost half the votes cast. In the general election several months later, America had declared war on Germany and entered into World War I. Socialists were linked as the “party of pro-Germanism” that wanted “to see the Kaiser as the emperor of the world. … for every Socialist ballot that is cast at this time becomes a bullet fired at an American soldier”. It was not likely that Socialists would do well under this kind of attack—the timing, with no fault of the own, was incredibly poor. In the election, Socialists won 43% of the vote, failing only in middle class wards. In 1945, Dayton Socialists won 45% of the vote. In 1923, with Socialist Party finances shattered, the Party sold its headquarters office to the Ku Klux Klan; in 1928 socialists garnered less than 10% of the vote.[6] It is argued that the victory of Dayton’s city manager plan crushed the Socialist Party and served as in surmountable barrier to the Socialists ever achieving city-wide victory.
[1] Raymond A. Mohl, the New City, op. cit. p. 120. Richard S. Childs, the father of city manager system, played an aggressive role to promote the city manager form. He also linked the city manager form with non partisan and at large elections and the short ballot reform as well.
[2] H. George Frederickson, Gary A. Johnson, and Curtis H. Wood, The Adapted City: Institutional Dynamics and Structural Change (Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 2004)
[3] Theodore Lowi, “Machine Politics: Old and New”, The Public Interest, Volume 25, p. 86. See also Kleinberg’s Urban America, chapter 3 for an overall treatment of this period and its future policy implications.
[4] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 121-122.
[5] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit. p. 122.
[6] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit. p. 129.
Ron W. Coan 