Background Intro and Key Elements of Post-Civil War Jurisdictional Policy Processes
An historical model of a policy area’s policy process presumes one exists in some form. To accommodate that presumption, our model expands the definition of a policy system to include one dominated by private actor performing essentially public functions such as jurisdictional economic development. That private actors can “allocate values”, i.e. to make decisions on behalf of citizens and society makes many uncomfortable, but during the nineteenth century a private actor dominated economic development policy system is the reality. With the possible exception of Progressive Boston’s Josiah Quincy, the Privatist economic development policy-making during the colonial and Early Republic years largely defaulted economic development policy-making to business elites.
This default to the private sector occurred chiefly in two ways: businessmen as the political leadership of a municipality, and the privatization of economic development policy making through private corporations and specialized quasi-public franchised corporations, and to non-profit corporations such as Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and Civic Reform Clubs. The private sector default, however, was not without its problems.
In the decades before and after the Civil War, the urban private-centered policy system changed noticeably for three reasons. First, the Panic of 1837 and the scandals associated with quasi-public-private franchises, led numerous states to enact the first wave of “gift provisions” which sharpened conflict of interest issues and made more difficult the delegation of public powers to entities other than government itself. Secondly, the shift to industry and manufacturing and the drive to serve national markets exacted monumental changes in the nature, structure and world view of what had been essentially local or regional business elites—indeed, formation of Boards of Trade were a direct consequence of it. Thirdly, the increased use of “chambers of commerce”, civic reform clubs, and “real estate exchanges”, created viable non-profit business led economic development organizations which could not only affect policy-making, but could directly approve and administer economic development programs (i.e. serve as EDOs) with the sometimes formal, sometimes informal use of public powers and resources.
While these nefarious shenanigans were going on, the public sector was trying to get its act together. This section begins in some seriousness to characterize the milieu of public governance in the last half of the nineteenth century. Governmental structures and powers necessary to govern the rising industrial city needed time to secure approval, time to develop some level of capacity and expertise, and further some experimentation to respond to unchartered forces, demands and expectations. Several models of governance will be tried in these years, with predictably varying results and consequences. This period of experimental institutionalization and transition modes of governance was “sausage in the making” and not a very pretty one at that. Twentieth century American sub-state governance developed from a poorly understood late nineteenth century primeval soup-like urban policy system, and to make matters much worse, several urban myths were devised over the years to explain this urban policy evolution. The myths don’t help our history much, so some of this section attempts to separate nineteenth century myth from nineteenth century reality.
As bad as state government was in this era, cities were worse. Andrew D. White, founder of Cornell, wrote “Without the slightest exaggeration … with few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom–the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt.[1] White echoes James Bryce’s comment[2] that “there is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States … The faults of state governments are insignificant compared with the extravagance, corruption and mismanagement which mark the administrations of most great cities”. In 1892, reform journalist Edwin Godkin described “the present condition of city governments in the United States is bringing democratic institutions into contempt the world over, and imperiling some of the best things in our civilization”.[3] As late as 1933, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in his Rise of the City only half-hearted mutter that the development of municipal services in the last decades of the nineteenth century “distinctly creditable [faint praise warning] to a generation … confronted with the phenomenon of a great population everywhere clotting into towns”.[4] College students today read (hopefully) Lincoln Stevens 1904 muck-raking The Shame of the Cities.
The perceived fault for this charming state of affairs was fragmented forms of government imposed on cities by state constitutions crafted from an earlier, Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democratic era. Home Rule which allowed for modern governmental structure was the initial proposed solution. From this follows a fourth trend: the slow incremental capacity-building of local and state governments and the consequent formation of a distinct, identifiable, autonomous urban political class. The irony is most of this urban political capacity-building resulted from the advocacy and leadership of various business elites. In any event local government in the latter half of the nineteenth century moved away from the Jacksonian weak mayor-council with lots of independently elected officials, and a bicameral city council. Cities, especially our Northern hegemonic Big Cities, gradually abandoned Jeffersonian- Jacksonian democracy to form a more centralized, bureaucratic policy system . This section describes this slow and confusing evolution of sub-state capacity-building in the post-Civil War Gilded Age.
The first story in our capacity-building tale recounts the constraints on sub-state governments caused by “Dillon’s Law”, a judicial decision made by of all people, Judge Dillon, in 1868. Much of this story sets the background context for contemporary local governance and policy-making in that Dillon’s Law remains substantially in effect today. The discussion permits us to see one more example of how structures and structural relationships are so enduring, and capture for centuries the values and philosophy of bygone civilizations, not so gone with the wind.
The section’s second story describes the late nineteenth century primeval policy system that early twentieth century structural reformers will replace. Urban history/politics textbooks usually describe these years as dominated by immigrant political machines—and they were. But the machines and their bosses did not govern the Big Cities. Machines/bosses were an important part of that policy system, but machines and bosses shared city-policy-making with others, in particular businessman mayors (and their chamber and civic reform club allies), and an increasing competent bureaucracy insulated in independent or firewalled commissions and departments.
The shame of late nineteenth century urban governance was not they were ruled by corrupt, wasteful machines and their bosses, but that, if anything, that policy system was so fractured that governance, characterized by a coherent predictable policy process, was next to impossible. Only from that earlier disjointed, inefficient system characterized by semi-autonomous islands of sub-policy making, can we better understand the urban reform that followed in the turn of the century. Big City economic development owes its existence to turn of the century structural reformers seeking to establish a stable urban policy system.
[1] Andrew D. White, “City Affairs are not Political“, Forum (December 1890), pp. 213-316. White was co-founder of Cornell, first President of the American Historical Society. Thus spake the nineteenth century Policy World.
[2] Viscount James Bryce, the American Commonwealth, Volumes I & II (1888). Bryce among many notable accomplishments was a British ambassador to the United States.
[3] Edwin Godkin, “The Problems with Municipal Government”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 4, (May 1894), p. 882.
[4] Arthur Schlesinger Sr. the Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (New York, McMillan Company, 1933), p. 120.
Ron W. Coan 