The Post-Civil War Jurisdictional Policy Process Evolution
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.
Medieval Cities, Private/Public Corporations and Dillon’s Law
The American Constitution never intended to set up a three tier system of government. There are only two tiers of government (nation and state) possessing sovereignty—both entrusted to them within a constitution sanctioned by the ultimate sovereign, the American People (popular sovereignty). If the city was not to be a sovereign level of government, then what is it? In the United States, it was described as a “public corporation”. Not a corporation like Google or Apple (they are private corporations), but a public corporation. Not that anyone particularly cares, where did that come from?
Believe it or not, it all starts with English medieval cities and how they got along with the English Crown and Parliament. Paraphrasing Gerald E. Frug’s City-Making[5], medieval towns and cities were created by merchants to ply their trades (guilds) with minimal interference for jurisdictional sovereigns such as Kings and Nobles/Parliament. The early capitalists used their accumulated wealth, and their centrality to medieval GNP (achieved through production of vital goods and lending) to wrest autonomy from political restraints. In my words, the medieval city was constituted to be an early free trade zone which was permitted self-rule and autonomy from much external law and taxes. This autonomy to pursue economic objectives for the good of the kingdom, collective identity of its residents, and power for self-rule was expressed in the form of a corporate charter from the King to the city[6].
Colonies in the New World were granted by the King through one of two forms of corporate charters, both of which preserved and passed on the prerogative of the executive to grant city charters to its colonies. Hence, the American city was originally conceived as a corporation similar in purpose and governance to the Hudson Bay Company or the British East India Company. The Colony, after the Revolution, became the State, replacing the King as the source of corporate charters. Beneath that calm surface of change, however, was an ocean of legal opinion and precedent that would periodically rise up from the depths to punish future economic developers. The corporate charters used by the English to establish cities and towns contained ambiguities and tensions that needed resolution to fit in a modern, democratic system. The initial tension was that early English urban areas were autonomous of both kings and nobles, and later Parliament—and were internally structured to sustain that political and economic autonomy. That created yet another set of tensions. Let’s be more specific.
City autonomy, Gerald Frug argued, required that the individuals residing in that corporation submerge their individual demands/rights and conform to those compatible with the overall city’s public purpose, economic growth. The path to economic growth was set by the city’s oligarchic very undemocratic merchant elite. City political and economic autonomy required private interests to be submerged to the organic community. “It was this autonomy for the merchants and their ability to establish their own communal rules that were recognized in the legal status of the town …. A lack of separation between individual property rights and town sovereignty rights, and a mixed political and economic character[7]. Say it another way, city autonomy and urban growth required the suspension of Lockean individual rights to an oligarchic economic elite.
Within city walls, city governance was not democratic, but oligarchic with guild leaders, prominent families and traders serving in the city council. That such governance could easily develop a sort of class struggle politics (of “thin people” versus “fat people” or “popolo magro versus popolo grasso” as described then) was tempered by the acknowledgement of all that a sort of patriotism defending the city at its wall against its enemies came before individual interest. Jean Braudel, the great historian of European cities, characterized these medieval towns as “the West’s first fatherlands”.
Kings, however, being a fickle lot (definitively proven in Monty Python) the corporate charter eventually was regarded by the Stuart dynasty as revocable by the King (in Massachusetts this produced the Andros affair, alluded to in the previous chapter). The cities and Parliament, however, had other thoughts on the matter and the 1688 Glorious Revolution restored the integrity of the municipal charter. The point of all this being that English corporate law had by the time of the U.S. Constitution not distinguished between private and public corporations, held that the purpose of a corporation was economic, not social in nature, and that the power to issue corporations was the executive’s—by that time Parliament. The status of American colonial cities, however, was clouded by their lack of charters from the English executive. Their status appeared to Frug to be legally ambiguous, but Frug concedes American cities were treated by the courts as if they were corporations[8].
The English public/private corporation, however, fit poorly into the framework of a Republic which embraced Lockean an individual natural right to property. The pure English corporation rendered individual property rights within a corporation subject to the control by the oligarchic elite. To solve this dilemma, American courts divided the corporation into two distinct forms of corporation, one for private economic affairs, and the other for public. Business corporations, only eight in 1780, increased to several hundred by the time of the 1819 Dartmouth College Supreme Court decision[9]. Most of these corporations were those discussed in Chapter 2’s sections on canal, roads, bridges, banks and insurance companies. To us they were mixed enterprises; to Frug they were transitional corporations awaiting Dartmouth’s distinction between private and public corporation. Frug quotes Justice Story’s opinion which to him suggested the Court’s distinction between the two forms: “Another division of corporations is into public and private. Public corporations are generally esteemed such as exist for public political purposes only, such as towns, cities, parishes and counties”[10]. Property held in such public corporations, formed for public purposes only, belonged to the State
Dillon’s Law
The inescapable reason why state legislatures were the first stop in reforming the Gilded Age industrial city was something called Dillon’s Law. For those unfamiliar with “Dillon’s Law”[11] are brief explanation might be helpful. Dillon’s Law is not a fifties TV show, but an Iowa Supreme Court decision, which, for a variety of reasons, was adopted by nearly all other states. The decision by Iowa’s Charles Dillon wound up setting a precedent for decisions in other state courts and in short order hardened into an informal national precedent.
According to Dillon’s Law, the states are preeminent over local government in that in the American constitution, states and federal government alone possess sovereignty or the inherent legal right of existence. The American Constitution did not mention cities except to leave them to the States. Cities, counties and towns, not possessing sovereignty—and thus enjoying no legal status– must be authorized, created and empowered by the state if they are to exist, and function. States to facilitate city-building usually issued “special” charters for each jurisdiction the state allowed. Legally, states included in each charter key elements of the municipal corporation Form of government, for instance, was, in the early years, restricted to some form of a weak mayor-Jeffersonian government.
Dillon’s rule applied a very wide definition of state powers over sub-state governments. According to Dillon’s Law any delegated powers to a sub-state unit of government must be expressed literally in words or “fairly applied or indispensable to powers expressly granted”. Sub-state jurisdictions, as a sweeping generalization, simply could not assume they have the right to take action or initiative in any matter without the state expressly allowing it. In a nutshell, the city could not approve structural reform of its government without state legislative approval.
Frug asserts that Dillon’s decision was a forerunner of the Progressive Movement in that “a critical impediment to the development of a government dedicated to the public goods was the intermingling of public and private sectors”. His decision, in some measure, was an adverse reaction to the recent federal involvement in transcontinental railroad infrastructure—resulting, of course in Credit Mobile which was ongoing at the time of his decision and his writing of his classic work. “By merging public and private spheres, cities had extravagantly invested in private businesses performing functions ‘better left to private enterprise’”[12]. If Frug is correct, Dillon’s Law is an element of latter phases in “gifts clauses” which made more difficult to establish public/private EDOs and which separated private parties from use of public powers, such as eminent domain. The State and state courts were intended to be checks to both private control of government powers, and government abuse of private property.
Dillon’s Law was confirmed by a 1907 federal Supreme Court decision, Hunter versus Pittsburgh. Hunter v. Pittsburgh stated (in part) that Dillon’s Rule was binding on all states and cities unless the state enacted specific legislation to modify Dillon’s Rule.
The State … at its pleasure may modify or withdraw all [city] powers, may take without compensation [city] property … expand or contract the territorial area, unite the whole or a part of it with another municipality, repeal the charter and destroy the [municipal] corporation. All this may be done … with or without the consent of its citizens, or even against their protest …. the State is supreme, and its legislative body, conforming its action to the state constitution, may do as it will, unrestrained by any provision of the Constitution of the United States.[13]
The Hunter ruling succinctly upheld that all sub-state jurisdictions, no matter their size, are merely “creatures of the state“. That is the law of the land today. Thirty nine states[14] have since incorporated Dillon’s rule into their state constitution—Hunter v. Pittsburgh made Dillon’s law the “default”, so if not included in the state constitution a state must follow Dillon’s Law anyway.
You Got to Be Kidding: Cities Push Back from Dillon’s Law
In the nineteenth century, the reader would do well to simply assume that most state governments were a basket of policy and moral perversions, largely dysfunctional, with inherent policy biases and distortions. The reader should also feel free to toss in remote, unaccountable, lazy and corrupt as well. Perhaps we exaggerate?[15] In any case, relations between states and their creatures were far from perfect, always complicated, and frequently Dillon’s law was invoked to accomplish all sorts of irritating, personalistic, partisan, not really very necessary and time-consuming “got to get the state’s permission” type of legislation—i.e. the states left to their own devices liked to micro manage (opportunity for honest graft). These matters were even worse in Western territories because previous to statehood they were “creatures” of the federal government–administered by territorial legislatures, the Congress—or both.
In this stifling and shameful atmosphere both the business community and much of the general community sought “home rule” by obtaining a new “municipal charter”[16] from the state legislature. Home rule is state legislation permitting an expanded set of powers and structures to a local government and brings those (and potentially other) powers under the control of the municipality’s citizens. The most typical provision in home rule legislation in this period was to permit the local government to adopt a preferred form of government, a new electoral system, and administrative powers such as budgeting, civil service, and taxing authority. Home rule legislation in this era was “package” legislation including the form of government allowed but also unicameral city councils, nonpartisan and at large electoral systems, a merit or civil service system, fiscal, budgetary, and revenue raising powers and some service delivery and housekeeping powers as well.
1875 Missouri became the first state to adopt home rule for cities (in their case, over 100,000); California followed in 1879 and other states such as Minnesota and Washington followed soon after that. The municipal home rule revolution had commenced. By the 1890’s most states were under serious and sustained pressure to adopt some form of home rule legislation which applied principally to our Big Cities. To develop home rule proposals and advocate for reform legislation, chambers, business groups and good government citizens formed local municipal leagues. City level municipal leagues spread across the nation and most cities of any size would have had formed some type of a municipal league or advocacy group by the late 1880’s. To facilitate state adoption and to achieve some level of standardization from city to city within and across states, a national organization quickly formed. The individual municipal leagues, with allied state and national municipal reformers, came together in 1894 Philadelphia[17] to form the National Municipal League (NML), today’s National Civic League.
If one wants to do great things, like revitalizing a city or building one, one needs great power. How does one forge a political-administrative structure, in a political system characterized by separation of powers, checks and balances, gift provisions, and Dillon’s Law, sufficient to these great purposes? In this environment, the simplest of tasks could challenge traditional relationships, such as those between the weak, but strengthening public sector and the private sector, or that could overcome the limits imposed by states on debt, finance, and taxes. The earlier structural solutions, Chapter 2’s joint stock, mixed enterprise corporations had not ended well—although they proved reasonably effective in putting into place the transportation infrastructure (and banks, insurance corporations, and start up manufacturing firms). The 1862 federal venture into transcontinental railroads, yet another form of “mixed enterprise”, toppled President Grant and dragged him through the 1872 “Credit Mobilier” scandal[18].
So over the next three decades, cities experimented in devising an administrative structure that could cope with the demands and odd tasks demanded of them by voters and simple logistical need. Solutions were often ad hoc, and non-theoretical, many failed or were overturned by courts, and experimentation continued well into the twentieth century. Activity, such as public regulation of private actors, was more political, than administrative, and will be considered when we discuss the Progressive Era in the next two chapters. Some experiment originated from demands launched by new groups in city politics, unions in particular.
By the late 1870’s union-backed candidates were winning elections to all levels of government, and captured the mayor’s office in cities like Scranton, Utica, Birmingham and Toledo. In a dramatic departure from the politics associated with businessman mayors, issues which pressed for government ownership of parts of the urban infrastructure (utilities and regional transportation systems) were not uncommon. In 1881, the Mechanics Assembly of San Francisco pressed for gas, water, and street-sweeping and in 1886, no less than Henry George himself was invited to run for New York City’s mayor on a platform of public ownership of that city’s mass transit.[19] Most of these more “radical” demands carried over into decades beyond this chapter’s focus, but In 1894, New York City voters approved in referendum the City’s ownership and operation of a subway (and in the same year Detroit voters approved a street railway, in 1902 Seattle voters approved a bond issue for a municipal owned power plant, and in the same year Chicago voters approved four to one for that city to own its mass transit system.[20]
Far more typical, however, is that municipalities desiring to freeze water followed a predetermined process. Before we begin, think of your life without a refrigerator. How do you keep stuff cold? Ice. Ice cut from frozen bodies of water and stored below ground in very cold caves or ice houses. Affordable ice was a public necessity and that is what encouraged municipalities of all stripes and persuasions to enter into and compete with private firms in the ice market. City governments do this all the time today—public Wi-Fi for example. In the 1870’s and 80’s this needed to survive the Dillon’s Law process. By this point an extra feature had been added. Literally Dillon’s Law required the state legislature to approve legislation enabling a lower unit of government to enter into an action. By the 1880’s a second step, judicial review, entered the picture and the state court, Supreme Court usually, could review the state legislature’s enabling legislation to make a determination if the legislature’s action was constitutional or not. In this manner, the state court system became a player in urban and economic development evolution. If the state court was literal, i.e. it followed a “strict construction” of the state constitution, change would be difficult indeed. The reader, no doubt, might dimly perceive that Mistoffelees and political culture have entered the premises.
Enter “the saga of municipal ice sector involvement”. In most cases when municipalities entered into the ice industry, no court action followed. In general, however, it did as happened when the socialist mayor of Schenectady started that city’s ice business (1911) fulfilling his election pledge to “save the babies of the working class”. The city attorney reasoned that existing legislation empowered the city to store and transport water (water lines, etc) and ice was, after all, only frozen water. So hiring workers striking from General Electric, he started cutting ice and storing it. In the summer he gave it free to needy families—that was before a state court, on July 4th, decided it was not legal. So that night the city set up a non-profit and continued its ice business. Private ice companies struck back and harassed their new competitor. They got needed financing by selling “ice at cost” buttons and finished the summer. Next winter the river did not freeze and the whole endeavor melted away. Courts throughout the nation, when asked, blocked municipalities from the ice business.
In 1915, Harvard University’s Municipal Research Bureau (the Policy World if you cared to note) reported that it found many municipalities had entered the ice business and that it resulted in lower cost ice to the consumer. By 1919 Cleveland owned and managed a cold storage plant, and many municipalities in the Privatist, but hot and humid South did so as well. In 1919, however, one state supreme court, Missouri, in Kansas City v. Orear overturned an approved municipal bond referendum to build and construct a municipal ice plant. It was not, the courts held, a legitimate public purpose “and not even the sovereign Legislature, much less a municipal corporation, can, by fiat, make that public which is in fact private”. The year after, the state of Missouri approved a constitutional referendum/amendment permitting municipalities to engage in the ice business. Ten years later (1929) the owners of the Denton Texas Home Ice Company thought they could stop Denton Texas from starting its own municipal ice business; that state court, however, said the city could do it—and the Texas Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision allowing the municipality to proceed with its ice business.[21] Get the point?
Dillon’s Law and state judicial review became the de facto process by which nearly every major economic development innovation or change went through—and goes through to the present day. The bias, at least initially, was that court’s followed a strict construction and enforced older interpretations and precedent (including gift clauses) of the state constitutions—continuing the traditions and values of the first settlers and preserving values of the founding fathers. Then, on a state by state basis, subject to subsequent legal activity, the court would continue to review and decide whether or not the action was constitutional and would make determinations which shaped the content and the process by which these economic development innovations would be permitted. In many cases, over time, the court could even reverse early decisions, but often doing so preserving as much of the traditional judicial precedent as possible. So tax exempt bond issuance, tax increment financing, eminent domain associated with urban renewal, eminent domain, municipal ability to lend to private firms and own property to benefit private firms (industrial parks), economic development zones, annexation etc. went through this maze and obstacle course. In this manner, the fifty state SSS, described in our opening chapter, came into being.
That is why in economic development “a rose is not a rose”. What is a rose in one state, is a peach in another, and outright forbidden in a third.
[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.
[5] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 27-30.
[6] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., pp. 32-33.
[7] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., pp.27-28.
[8] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., p. 37.
[9] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., pp. 39-40. The Dartmouth decision confirmed the rights of private property and contract law, institutionalizing the legal status of private property within a corporation.
[10] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., p. 41. Justices Marshal and Washington also rendered opinions similar in nature to Story’s. At this point, the reader is advised that Frug is presenting an argument that he believed this line of reasoning was incorrect—and that it left cities without power, unable to cope with demands of its citizenry. In later chapters we will return to Frug, and others, to deal with some of their concerns and remedies. I would also comment that my perspective regarding colonial urban charters varies considerably from Frug’s—especially in regards to his assertion that New England towns controlled the State (p. 43). Frug is developing a line of juridical reasoning which in later chapters will support an enhancement of city powers and freedoms independent of the State.
[11] John F. Dillon was a noted jurist specializing in state -local relationships. His Municipal Corporations (1872) is still a cornerstone book of municipal law. “Municipal corporations (which include cities, towns and villages) owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from the (state) legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist“. Dillon’s decision contrasted with “the Cooley Doctrine” which stressed a degree of municipal independence and self-determination which passed into obscurity. Today, the reader can visit a fountain memorial to Judge Dillon in Davenport Iowa. While I never discuss predictions, especially about the future, I will mention that Justice Dillon’s nephew, a certain Charles Dillon Stengel, now better known as “Casey” Stengel, will be a former Yankee, and even later in the future will be the first New York Met manager.
[12] Gerald E. Frug, City-Making, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
[13] Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161, 178-179 (1907).
[14] Including those which have subsequently passed home rule and modified Dillon’s Law a bit.
[15] Jon C. Teaford should be consulted for a more balanced perspective. For a more cynical treatment download or stream “Blazing Saddles” or the “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”. They are funny and closer to the truth than you might realize.
[16] Most cities already had acquired municipal charters from the state legislatures and hence home rule necessitated a revamp or a replacement of the original charter.
[17] In attendance were Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Frederick Law Olmsted and Mary Mumford.
[18] Chapter 4 will present some very interesting and terribly important economic development consequences which follow from the reaction to that scandal. The innovation prompted by that scandal will serve as the foundation for city-building in the American West, and the attraction strategy for our profession.
[19] Gail Radford, The Rise of the Public Authority: State-building and Economic Development in Twentieth Century America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 74. I follow much of Dr. Radford’s Chapter 3 in this discussion.
[20] Gail Radford, The Rise of the Public Authority, op. cit., p. 74. The activities associated with social reform mayors during the Progressive Era will be further detailed in the next chapter.
[21] This entire case study was taken from Gail Radford, chapter 3, in her The Rise of Public Authority, op. cit., pp. 78-82. We are indebted to her for this excellent research. I confess, however, that she did not intend it to demonstrate the development of a state SSS—her purpose, as in part was ours, was to demonstrate how public authorities engaged in some form of economic development found it difficult to navigate though Dillon’s Law and state judicial review.
Ron W. Coan 