DEVELOPMENT OF THE “MODERN” MUNICIPAL POLICY SYSTEM
Up to this point, economic development has been comparable to one hand clapping: private sector EDOs drive policy, and government is little more than a companion along for the ride. The problem was not capitalist greed, government incompetence or even corruption (all of which were plentiful), but a simple lack of government “capacity.” Pre-1910 American municipal government simply lacked sufficient political coherence, expertise, programmatic techniques and structures capable of sustained policy implementation. The municipal policy system was Jeffersonian/Jacksonian fragmented, dispersed authority, encased in a low-tax environment with no one in particular in charge and everybody held accountable. It was little wonder economic development policy was driven, and mostly executed, by the private EDOs and deficient HEDOs. Use of the franchise as an infrastructure EDO, while more effective than most like to admit, was really ugly to watch—and ride. In one sense the franchise got the infrastructure installed, and paid for it; but, as a service delivery structure, it was extremely inefficient and unpopular.
Gilded Age municipal government was further weakened by the hybrid policy system of ward boss-controlled municipal legislatures; by the intermittent, often uneven application of mayoral power; and by consistent interference by state legislatures. Key municipal functions—police, fire and civil service for example—were often run by state legislative-controlled boards/commissions. The urban policy system, in general, tripped through the Gilded Age in perpetual structural crisis. Gilded Age elites knew all
this—and they strive mightily to change things. The task was not an easy one; it took until the first and second decades of the twentieth century before reform efforts finally assembled a credible municipal policy system.
For government to work effectively, if not efficiently, as a partner in economic development it needed:
- nonpolitical expertise;
- coherence in decision-making and program implementation;
- responsible and accountable program structures; and
- key tools essential to governance/program implementation such as planning, budgeting, and accounting.
This basket of reforms only came together in a critical mass that produced a functional policy system when it was embedded within a workable “form of government” (strong mayor, city manager, commission) that structured authority and established a process that permitted sustained policy decision-making, implementation—and even policy evaluation. For many cities this did not occur until sometime between 1910 and 1940.
When reform started, in the 1870s, the most powerful players existing at the time were the wealthier elements of the business community. Municipal structural reform was led by Gilded Age/Progressive Era business and corporate elites and upper/middle class professionals operating out of municipal-based reform organizations. It was these fine folk who leveled the boom on state legislatures to produce the modern municipal policy system. Until that system could play ball, economic development would continue to be a privately led policy system.
Mugwumps Begin the Assault
In the nineteenth century, the reader might 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?24 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 very necessary and time-consuming “got to get the state’s permission” type of legislation. The states left to their own devices liked to micromanage (opportunity for honest graft). These matters were worse in Western territories because, previous to statehood, they were “creatures” of the federal government, administered by territorial legislatures, Congress—or both.
Gilded Age Mugwumps were the earliest structural reformers. Mugwumps were wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant businessmen, frequently of Yankee heritage, who were enemies of ethnic/immigrant political machines. In Pennsylvania, the state was the machine! Mugwumps wanted to “clean up government” (a bit of a cover for protecting their privileged position in municipal affairs), and that meant lots of things—besides putting Tweed in jail. It meant reducing corruption, fraud, governmental waste and taxes, and running city hall more efficiently (cheaply); it also meant attacking the immoral behaviors prevalent among the lower classes (drinking, brawling, prostitution and gambling). Sometimes lost in history, Mugwump reformism was as much a morality and culture war as political.
At that time, the upper business class—the 1870 one percenters—were controlling chambers. Chambers were uncomfortable with outright partisan activity, preferring such activities be carried out elsewhere. Mugwump-led civic leagues were created to handle the outright partisan initiatives which almost always meant putting the political machines (like Tweed) in their place electorally. The anti-Tweed Committee of 70 put Tweed in jail, and then morphed into the New York City Reform Club (from which Teddy Roosevelt based his early political career). Similar organizations sprouted in virtually every municipality between 1870 and 1890. They include the:
+ Citizen’s Reform Association in Philadelphia (1871) and Chicago (1874)
+ Baltimore Reform League (1885)
+ New Orleans Committee of One Hundred (1885)
+ Citizens Association of Boston (1887) + Milwaukee Municipal League (1893 + Civic Federation of Detroit (1894).
By the mid-1890s more than 80 such good government associations existed (Mohl, 1985, pp. 111–12).
Mugwumps became strong advocates of civil service reform and therefore of municipal charters that made it possible. Allegedly, the movement formally began in 1877 with the formation of the New York City Civil Service Reform Association. The driving force behind that fine group was Mugwump editor of Harper’s Weekly, George William Curtis. Between 1877 and 1881, 30 or so civil service reform associations were launched in other cities. The assassination of President Garfield by a frustrated (and insane) job-seeker prompted the 1881 formation of the National Civil Service Reform League. In short order, the 1883 federal Pendleton Act (federal civil service) followed. Several states quickly copied the federal initiative: New York (1883), Massachusetts (1884) and several municipalities—Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, New Orleans and Seattle during the early–mid 1890s. With the passage of civil service reform in most states by the 1890s, Mugwumps ran out of steam.
National Municipal League
With Mugwumps out of fashion, a Progressive alternative developed: the municipal league. Drawn from the municipal business and professional community, their initial reform was strengthening mayoral power to counter city legislatures controlled by ward bosses and ethnic machines. Of necessity, this required new city charters granted only by state legislatures. Rather than approach urban reform piecemeal, a comprehensive mélange of charter reforms included in one charter was labeled “home rule” as such a charter delegated broad, sometimes sweeping authority to city voters to deeply alter their government. Missouri in 1875 was the first state to adopt home rule for cities (in its case, of over 100,000); California followed in 1879 and Minnesota and Washington soon after that. By the 1890s most states had either adopted some version of home rule or were under serious pressure to do so.
The pressure for home rule charters came from the 80 or so municipal league/good government associations that had been established (1890). Municipal leagues eventually took over reform leadership, and by the late 1890s reformers had evolved into comprehensive municipal “structural reformers.” Structural reformers proved to be one of the most significant forces in our state/sub-state economic development history. Overcoming Mugwump localism, municipal leagues formed the National Municipal League (NML) in 1894,25 today’s National Civic League. Within two years approximately 260 local civic and municipal leagues were functioning in the nation’s cities.
NML reformers believed that the chief problems of the city could be rectified through changes in the structural framework of municipal government. In 1889, the NML publicized its “model” or benchmark city charter that outlined the various structural improvements endorsed by their membership … . The NML called for extensive home rule from the state legislature, strong mayor, civil service, a unicameral city council, secret ballot elections, separation of municipal from state and national elections and at large elections. Urban fiscal control should be entrusted to an elected and administratively independent city controller, and street car franchises should be for limited periods of time. (Mohl, 1985, p. 116)
The NML inspired the 1902 Bureau of the Census’s initial compilation of key fiscal data for municipalities, and its commitment to “a major program of comparative statistical reporting and research designed to advance structural reform initiatives, and to make structural and administrative innovations accessible to city governments” (Mohl, 1985, p. 117). The Census Bureau instituted a uniform accounting system for cities, making corruption and fiscal waste easier to identify.
The local muscle behind the structural reform movement was provided by chambers of commerce. Their most profound changes lie in reform of elections and the rationalization of municipal bureaucracies through scientific management principles, civil service and reliance upon professional expertise in policy-making—and, of course, removal of waste and corruption and tax reduction. The impact of all these reforms, however, was maximized when the jurisdiction embraced new-fangled “forms” of government that entered into municipal policy agendas in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Form of Government and Municipal Public Policy System
Form of government is sort of structural container which “organizes” the policy process and defines and institutionalizes authority relationships within the government policy system. Within the framework set in place by the form of government, the public policy system can wend its way through agenda-setting to evaluation. Form of government determines the “how” and the “who” (institutions and policy actors) of its public policy-making—the governmental component of the larger jurisdictional policy system. Before proceeding, a brief digression distinguishing the “public” and the larger more inclusive jurisdictional “policy” system may be helpful—even if unwanted.
Today government, the public policy system, is usually the dominant element of the jurisdictional policy system. As the reader knows by now, in the nineteenth century the public policy system was underdeveloped and a weak participant in the jurisdictional policy system. At this point in our history that is about to change. As a policy area, however, a good deal of local ED policy and programs remain beyond the control of the local municipal public policy system. State governments do their own thing, as does the federal government (SBA). All sorts of private actors, even nonprofits (universities, professional associations), operate outside the boundaries of the municipal public policy system. To better appreciate the big picture of what goes on within a municipal jurisdiction this history relies on the jurisdictional policy system. Nevertheless, since a considerable piece of the jurisdictional action after World War II involves the governmental public policy system, it will be included as well. Effort will be made to alert the reader when we refer specifically to the public policy system—otherwise default will remain with the larger jurisdictional policy system.
As previously mentioned, the pervasive form of nineteenth-century municipal government was the “weak mayor” form. The initial thrust of the NML was to legitimize the Big City trend moving toward a stronger mayor and professional “expert” management in a home rule charter reform. Eventually this new form of government was appropriately labeled “strong mayor” (it has become even more complicated as the late twentieth-century strong mayor was adapted to incorporate elements of other forms of government—the “Adapted City’ (Frederickson, 2003). As we shall discover, most of our Big Cities wound up with the strong mayor form of government—but pre-World War II many installed other forms of government described below. Conversely, second- and third-tier cities usually embraced and retained the newer forms of government such as city manager. All this gets ahead of ourselves, but alerts the reader that current forms of government are the result of an evolution that begins in this section.
It all started with the commission plan. The city commission arrived on the scene as an emergency response to Galveston’s 1901 hurricane that killed 6000 people and destroyed most of the city. At the request of the city’s business elite, the state legislature (Texas) established a five-man unicameral commission to replace the imploded mayor–council system. In the new commission form, individual commissioners headed a specific department, thus defining clear lines of responsibility. Because the commission as a collective possessed policy-making and administrative powers, public decision-making was streamlined and public policy was accountable to policymakers—and voters. The commission plan promised “businessman efficiency” with a unity of policy-making and policy implementation. The most common reforms packaged with the commission home rule request were nonpartisan elections, at large elections, the short ballot and a civil service.
Within a few years, Galveston had rebuilt, so business leaders in other Texas cities (Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso and San Antonio) also approved commission charters. The commission accordingly acquired the moniker “the Texas Idea” (Mohl, 1985, p. 118). Des Moines may have been the first northern city to adopt the commission plan, in 1907. By 1920 the commission epidemic hit the nation hard: almost 500 cities (75 in Texas alone) adopted the commission—most of them newer, smaller, off the immigrant trail and more middle class in social structure (Rice, 2014). Over the next half-century counties also adopted the commission form—most counties today are commissions. The popularity of county commission government stems mostly from state constitutions that were approved or amended during this period. Only a few large cities adopted the commission structure: Kansas City (1910), Oakland (1911),
Denver (1913), Omaha (1912), St. Paul (1914), Jersey City (1913), Newark (1914) and Buffalo (1916) (Mohl, 1985, p. 119). Most of these cities later abandoned the commission, testifying to demonstrated policy-making inadequacies. In practice the commission form proved grossly ineffective in most cities of any size and heterogeneity. The more durable form of government proved to be the city manager. Today only 1 percent of municipal governments are commissions (2006 ICMA Survey).
City Manager Form
Staunton Virginia (1908) and Sumter South Carolina (1912—same city manager) hold first claim as the earliest municipalities to adopt the city manager form. Staunton did not adopt the associated package of election reforms, only appointing an administrative official to manage departments 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. Dayton Ohio in 1914 was the first large city (116,000+) to change to city manager. That the city manager form was labeled at the time as the “Dayton Plan” strongly suggests that Dayton played the chief role in the herd-epidemic diffusion that followed.26 An estimated 158 cities adopted the city manager form by 1920, and by 1923 there were 270 city manager-led cities (Mohl, 1985, p. 120). 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 usually retained the mayor–council system; and several, like Buffalo—which had first switched to commission, then city manager— returned to mayor–council. Early adoptions concentrated in the Midwest, the 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) (Teaford, 1993, p. 122)
The city manager was adopted in Dayton after a home rule charter reform pushed by John Patterson, the CEO of National Cash Register (NCR), Dayton’s largest employer. Patterson was not a moral reformer; he did not battle corporate monopolies or seek justice for the downtrodden. In a speech made to the Dayton Board of Trade, Patterson stated that the purpose intended with the city manager form of government 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. (Teaford, 1993, pp. 121–2)
Patterson commenced his crusade in 1896, long before Staunton or Sumter. After a decade of fruitless effort, he had had enough of Dayton’s Gilded Age waste and fragmentation; in 1907 he threatened to move NCR out of the city—but to no avail. In 1912 Patterson accelerated his reform efforts, becoming chair of a chamber charter reform committee. That committee approved a city manager charter reform, complete with nonpartisan election and a five-member council elected at large. And then, conveniently, came the March 1913 Dayton Flood: 400 people died and $100 million 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 NCR hit the streets and conducted rescue missions with 300 boats constructed by the company’s employees. NCR became the Red Cross and National Guard headquarters. A hospital, morgue and shelter for the homeless also were established there. It is likely the flood, as had the Galveston hurricane, made structural reform possible. When the council manager charter reform was voted in four months later, it was approved by two to one.
The city manager form centralized municipal administration around a professionally trained manager responsible/accountable to the chief elected official (mayor) and 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 was intended a formal separation of the management function from politics. The clear intention was to install the principles of scientific management and “run government like a business”—efficiently and honestly. The “thrust” of city manager election reforms reduced reliance on wards in elections. Nonpartisan/at large elections reduced special interest and neighborhoods to further a community-wide, semi-statesman perspective. The clear intent of the city manager form was to “depoliticize” administration/management/policy implementation. The short ballot, which ended the independent and partisan election of key department heads, 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 minimized the impact of machines and bosses.
The city manager form of government found a home in cities of 25,000 up to 250,000.27 The secret of this success was not a mystery. Sufficient size to require professional management, but a reasonably homogenous middle-class population that valued professional management and could sustain that consensus was its most fertile ground. If the city was large, heterogeneity entered into political life. The lower and working classes, it was evident, did not share the business and professional ethos underlying the council–manager form of government. So, one feature of contemporary policy systems remains the difference in policy systems between first/second-tier cities and the other tiers developed from the Progressive Era structural reform movement. Suburbs and western cities in particular are bastions of council–manager systems.
Municipal Research Bureaus
When the major corporate elites abandoned the chamber of commerce, they did not abandon their involvement in the Big Cities. Instead, the heavy hitters funded a new EDO that represented the purest form of scientific management and structural reform found in the pre-Depression years: the municipal research bureau. The thrust of the municipal research bureau was to insert the best practices of scientific management (planning, budgeting, finance, personnel management and accounting/audit) into Big City governmental administration. Scientific management asserted that “the technical side of running a government could be analyzed and developed on a factual basis in the same way as a business” (Schiesl, 1977, p. 14). The first municipal research bureau, established in 1906–07 in New York City (Dahlberg, 1966), was funded by Carnegie, Rockefeller and Mellon (McDonald, 2010). In Big City after Big City municipal one percenters stepped up to the plate to ensure their jurisdiction’s place in the Big City hierarchy—in this case competing to prove that they too could professionalize, modernize and make more efficient and honest their urban governance.
So, for example, Philadelphia set up a pilot bureau in 1908 and founded the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia in 1912. The Economy League was described as:
a local agency of a few private citizens who employ experts in what may be called municipal knowledge to examine municipal affairs, with a view to getting rid of antiquated, clumsy, slipshod or extravagant ways of doing things and substituting as far as possible, modern ones—system, precision, competency, and economy.28
Chicago established an Efficiency Division within its Civil Service Commission (1910-16), and its corporate elite founded the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency (1910-32). Massachusetts established its Commission on Economy and Efficiency in 1912.
Bureaus pursued a robust agenda, including research/analysis of the region’s resources and challenges “with a goal of promoting sound public policy and increasing the region’s prosperity.” Research bureaus established formal linkages with universities and the larger Policy World. In 1912 the first director of the New York City Bureau of Municipal Research (Henry Bruère) published a book applying efficiency principles to municipal management. In 1913, after the election of reform mayor John Purroy Mitchell, Bruère was appointed his “chief of staff” and tasked with creating a municipal civil service system. Bruère, using the municipal research bureau as his staff, assigned the task to a promising young staff member, Robert Moses.29 Moses crafted a civil service system for New York City following careful scientific management principles, with each position’s elements precisely defined and assigned a mathematical grade (Judd, 1984, pp. 99–100). Another area of municipal research bureau concern was budgetary practices. Again, the New York Bureau of Municipal Research wrote a municipal budgeting handbook and sent it to 300 municipalities. Additional research generated by the bureau’s experts was also diffused across the nation. Newly elected President Taft created the first presidential commission on municipal budgets, and appointed the president of the New York Municipal Research Bureau as its chair.
Ron W. Coan 