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.
The Curious Case of Ohio Policy Systems
Bringing our discussion on Progressive Era policy systems to some sort of a conclusion is not as easy as one might think. First, as predicted there were a number of distinct policy systems that first appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century: socialist mayor, social reform mayors, structural reform city manager and structural reform commission, and who can count the variations of machines systems that really took off in several directions during these years. Each of these policy systems were brought about due to supportive constituencies, and surprise these constituencies are likely to profit from their system. Secondly, most of these policy systems were fairly unstable during these volatile years, although the business-led structural reformers—who smartly anchored their policy system in state legislated charter reforms—would prove to be more durable. The others, though, were very much dependent on future electoral success and the maintenance of their coalition.
Perhaps the most interesting observation is that this is an Era characterized by working class involvement in the underlying coalitions of the various policy systems. The early Gilded Age working class and immigrant “involvement” in nineteenth century machine systems was an utilitarian involvement based more on desperation and greed than an involvement meant to express democratic ambitions and aspirations. Instead in the Progressive Age the working class is involving itself and being sought after—or at least taken into account and isolated from involvement. Those policy systems with strong working class involvement (social reform and socialist) in this Era wanted different outputs than the traditional middle and business classes. Street car fares and don’t’ close my saloon on Sundays, neighborhood baths, and for that matter neighborhood almost anything, makes one wonder if working class wanted policy output, including economic development outputs to flow to them as individuals, and to the places in which they lived. This is the people-based economic development that we will speak of in the chapters that follow. Before leaving this thought, however, and knowing how other regions of the nation will respond in future chapters, people-based economic development (and working class-based policy systems) not at all common elsewhere—and find it harder going in some areas of the North and Midwest than others. Perhaps, I am simply reminding the reader that political culture may not have gone away in the Progressive years. More on that later.
Before proceeding onto our glorified case studies which offer a more in depth look at individual cities, a quick look at four Ohio Big Cities (Dayton, Akron, Cleveland and Cincinnati) to glimpse into the immediate future and see how well Progressive policy systems endured. First, Dayton did maintain its city manager system over the next generation. In fact, Dayton still holds the city manager policy system firmly in place as I write this paragraph. We already mentioned the allegation that once in place, the working class Socialist Party, a viable competitor in the old system, was effectively killed off in the next decade. A researcher sympathetic to city manager systems, however, also noticed that while city manager rule resulted in few scandals, and rather smooth day to day management, there was no cutting edge initiatives. It was a “go-with-the-flow, keep-up-the-good-work policy system[7]. Maybe this was fine for a stable Big City, but Dayton had serious challenges ahead of it.
Cleveland went off in another direction—actually several. In 1916 social reform mayor Nelson Baker left the scene. In that year’s election, voters had turned away another potential social reform mayor (Witt) and elected instead three successive Republican Party career-politician mayors. Party machines were dominant after the near decade and a half of Cleveland social reform mayors. Even more startling was in 1924 the city adopted the necessary charter reform to install, of all things, a city manager system. From the start it was evident that was not a wise decision. The city manager system is supposed to be non partisan, but the leaders of both Party organizations got together, presumably smoking cigars in a smoke-filled room, and agreed to the first city manager (businessman William Hopkins) and a consensual split of future patronage. That was not what Patterson had in mind for a city manager system. In any case the city manager met regularly with the Party leaders and, if one thinks about it, the result was a very powerful city manager who seemed to love controversy and being in the limelight.
Hopkins ruled more in the spirit of a strong, but unelected mayor; the city manager form took on the appearance of being a party organization-based dictatorship. Former social reform mayor, then retired, Nelson Baker commented about it: “I do feel humiliated and ashamed when I think of this city of a million people whose manager is picked by an unseen hand from an invisible place, put in power and kept there, subject to the will of an influence over which the people have no control”.[8] Unsurprisingly, ballot proposals to repeal the manager plan appeared on Clevelander’s ballot in 1927, 1928, and 1929, before being successfully approved in 1931. Each had suffered very narrow vote defeats. In any case, the city manager experience in Cleveland produced a party dictatorship, suggesting strongly that the city manager policy system could produce several variations.
That conclusion was further supported by the experience of Akron. In 1920, the rubber capital of the world adopted the city manager system. There too it was evident from the onset that things were rotten in Denmark (actually I’m sure it’s quite nice there). In 1920 the Republican dominated city council selected the Republican-elected mayor as the first city manager. In essence, he was a Republican mayor with a new title, and to outsiders it was hard to tell the difference. Democrats, predictably fared badly in this policy system. The newspaper soon charged that undemocratic party rule strengthened a “small group of special interests [which found it] easier to control one man who had not been elected than several who had”. It later claimed the city manager had “about the same principles as a reformed highwayman and just brains enough to keep out of an imbecile asylum”. The Chamber of Commerce, an original supporter of the city manager plan, did not take a position on the issue when in 1923 the manager form was repealed. It would seem that one cannot simply graft a form of government onto policy processes augmented by their supportive political cultures and expect a uniform policy system to result. Say it another way, Big Cities and city managers did not seem to go very well together.
But then there is Cincinnati. Cox had run a machine in partnership with business structural reformers for a decade a half. Asked to retire by the President of the United States, he did. Several Republican structural reformers and then a Democrat social reform mayor followed in his wake (Cox died shortly after he retired). Four Republican structural reformers were subsequently elected. Then in 1925, a “new” political party, the Charterite, formed to lead the city’s adoption of a city manager form. The Charterite Party was victorious is the following elections and they proved dedicated to stopping in its tracks any party machine that attempted to control the city manager. “Cincinnati reformers ran their own independent slate for city council. Their platform was straightforward: “Business methods in government—freedom from political bosses”. What’s more they continued to win and remain faithful in a succession of future elections. In the middle 1930’s Charterite Charles Taft wrote “There is in this movement [Charterite] in Cincinnati the type of religious conviction which is not fanatical; which is not ecstatic; which is hard-headed, and yet idealistic, a conviction, a faith that local good government is a possibility”[9]. Where were these people in Cleveland and Akron when those cities needed such fine and dedicated leaders? Was it that those cities lacked an equivalently strong and motivated business elite (because that was what controlled Cincinnati)? If so, why?
Why is it that four Ohio cities in the same years do such violently different things to their city manager form of government? Why is it that four Ohio cities had such different variations and policy system history over the next generation?
Putting It All Together:
So wrapping it up, a lot of micro case studies, a lot of variation as promised, and a lot of “reform” or at least change. At the end of the Progressive Era (give or take a few years) in 1920, urban government and politics did not follow Gilded Age scripts. The political landscape screamed out that much had changed (women could vote in 1920); continued immigration, innovation and economic growth, not to mention a World War, however, suggested volatility and perhaps too much change. The politics of the twenties called for a “Return to Normal”, Prohibition, and the Red Scare and an ever-more violent unionism seemed unsettling to many. In this environment, the immigrations spigot was finally turned down, and by 1924, off. I inject this turmoil so the reader may take a step back and remember reform is change, and change may be exhilarating, but it also is unsettling. As far as urban governance goes, there had been much change, but one could wonder at the end how much had, in fact, changed.
First, the social reform mayors had pretty much left the urban stage—but machines had not. It seemed the buggers were pretty resilient and had found ways to overcome the commission form, and in Kansas City the Pendergast machine prospered alongside the city manager government. Tammany was back in New York, and Philadelphia was still machine controlled. New machines were popping up all the time–in Jersey City and Memphis for example. The commission form of government was clearly not working out, yet the occasional city would still adopt it. Cities were constantly trying to change governments and would continue to do so, at a reduced rate, over the next thirty years.
The city manager form of government did find a home in cities of 25,000 up to 250,000[10]. The secret for this success was not a mystery. Sufficient size to require professional management but a limited somewhat homogenous middle class population which valued professional management and could sustain a consensus within which professional management and political leaders could make policy. Instability was most evident in the Big Cities, however. If the city grew too large, heterogeneity entered into political life. The lower and working class, it was evident, did not share in the business and professional ethos underlying the council-manager form of government. So, one feature of contemporary policy systems, the difference in policy systems between first/second tier cities and the other tiers had developed from the Progressive Era structural reform movement. Economic developers working in a Big City would face a different policy process and policy system than the compatriots in the other tiers. Suburban policy systems would be different than central city policy systems.
Urban reform was a two-pronged reform. First, it was a bundle of electoral reforms (non partisan elections, referendums and initiatives, off-year municipal elections, and at large legislatures). These reforms were meant to, if this makes sense, take politics out of politics, and, more precisely, damage the ability of machines to control political parties. The underlying philosophy, seen best in at large elections, is a notion that the public’s best interest is achieved by viewing the “city as a whole”—the community, the city tax payer. Special interests or agendas, such as neighborhoods and any ethnic or demographic grouping that may live in them are disadvantaged. This sense of the public interest also would seem to distinguish the public interest from private interests or a firm’s self-interest as well.
When the day came that cities would remove slum and blighted neighborhoods, I suspect non partisan and at large elections made it somewhat easier. In the Progressive Age, structural reforms such as unicameral legislature and the at large election put a pretty serious crimp in the power of urban legislatures and correspondingly strengthen that of the mayor, and the chief officials of his/her “administration”. When one combines this with the augmented bureaucratic capacity discussed in the below paragraphs, the most important result of these power-centralizing structural reforms was to create a much stronger mayor, making that office the single most powerful institution in the urban policy process. Of course, a stronger office occupied by an incompetent leaves an even greater vacuum. It is equally true, of course, is the mayor continues to be directly elected and elections would seem to be the place political parties would be paramount. That too, however, was challenged by another Progressive electoral reform—the non partisan election.
The non partisan election now dominates municipal politics. Banfield and Wilson report that in 1960 98% of cities greater than 25,000 in the Plains region used non-partisan elections. California and Wisconsin mandated them. Yet, in 1960 less than 24% of Middle Atlantic cities had non partisan elections. New England cities more than doubled that rate—even though they were half the rate of Plains and Western states. Regional location exerted a noticeable effect on the adoption of form of government in the first half of the twentieth century. Still by 1929 about half of American cities had at least some non partisan elections.
The effect of non partisan elections never much failed to stirred researchers in this era; so we are left with anecdotal evidence. In the Milwaukee and Dayton case studies, non partisan elections seem to have devastating effects on socialist parties. One hazards a guess that whatever else, non partisan elections reduced the role and impact of political parties in local elections. Whether we are the better for this, is left up to the reader. But it is certain that in a non partisan system strong mayor system, the mayor must be cast about for her own political coalition and financing as are the city council. In such a context, everybody is independently elected.
The second prong was managerial and bureaucratic in nature. This was the age of professions and experts—and the introduction of sizeable municipal bureaucracies into the municipal policy process. Budget, audit, purchasing and finance departments, planning departments, consolidation of small bureaus, divisions and independent agencies into large conglomerate-like cabinet departments appear in the Progressive years. But there were no formal economic development departments. There was agriculture and some commerce bureaus, the tourist bureau, but not economic development departments. Chamber of commerce and chamber-style economic development, assisted by newly founded port authorities, still dominated the Progressive Era and Roaring Twenties economic development landscape.
[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.
[7] Landrum R. Bolling, City Manager Government in Dayton (Chicago, Public Administration Service, 1940); See also Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 203.
[8] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 203.
[9] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 204.
[10] By 1960 Banfield and Wilson reported 50 % of cities in that population range had council-manager systems. Cities greater than 500,000 (four cities) were 19% council-manager. The reformed city had certainly jelled by that point; Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 169, Table 10.
Ron W. Coan 