"Under New Management"

Readers of political fiction are well acquainted with the traditional figure of the Boss, especially the Boss in the field of municipal government. He is usually pictured with a red neck which hangs in folds over his collar. Across his paunchy stomach runs a heavy gold watch-chain. From his mouth protrudes a long, black stogy. By night he counts poker chips; by day he miscounts ballots. He has become the symbol of the U. S. civic misrule which caused the late James Bryce to say that municipal government has been the outstanding failure in the U. S. political system.

Last week the people of Indianapolis decided that their city government represented one such "outstanding failure." Said Meredith Nicholson, famed Hoosier novelist: "Do you know that for not one but for half a dozen years the newspapers of Indianapolis have printed almost daily stories of the degradation of public office?. . . We have had one shameful thing after another and the end is not yet. . . .We seem to have placed ourselves in the unenviable category of Philadelphia--a city corrupt but contented."

But the people of Indianapolis were not "contented." To the polls they went, marked 53,000 ballots for the adoption of a City Manager plan of government, marked 9,000 for the retention of the Mayor-and-Council system. Under the new plan, the city will be governed by seven commissioners, elected by popular vote. The commissioners will select a city manager and a mayor (a member of the commission), but the mayor's duties will be largely along lines of giving visiting celebrities the keys of the city.

The City Manager system cannot take effect until Jan. 1, 1930, since the Indiana legislature recently amended the law dealing with changes in city government to stipulate that any change in Indianapolis could not become operative until the present group of city officials complete their elective terms. However, City Manager adherents hope to have this legislative action (which was pushed through purely as a life-saver for the city hall officials) declared unconstitutional. They talked also of bringing impeachment proceedings against Mayor John L. Duvall. The Mayor, elected in 1925 with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, will shortly go on trial, along with the City Comptroller, his brother-in-law, for political corruption in the 1925 election. The Indianapolis election was generally interpreted as the end of "Klan rule" in Indiana, though there was very little organized opposition to the City Manager movement.

Perhaps the most adversely criticised feature of the government of U. S. cities has been the extension of the national political party system to municipal government. For election after election, U. S. city dwellers have voted for Democratic or Republican candidates for local offices, notwithstanding the fact that the Democratic and Republican parties, as such, arose from national, not from local issues, and differ on national, not local, principles. Why, for instance, should Peoria have a Democratic Fire Chief or Kankakee a Republican Sewer Commissioner? As Meredith Nicholson said in Indianapolis last week: "I do not believe that President Coolidge burst into tears when he heard that the College Avenue bridge had caved in." Nevertheless, U. S. cities have usually conducted their local elections along strictly party lines. Cincinnati, for instance, in national affairs a strongly Republican city, returned a Republican city administration for election after election, and many a mayor, many a councilman found the famed name of Abraham Lincoln, the sacred name of the Grand Old Party a potent campaign help, till, in 1926, Cincinnati adopted the City Manager system.

Of course, from the standpoint of practical politics, there is an excellent reason for maintaining the partisan system in municipal election. George W. Olvany, Manhattan Tammany Hall leader, recently said that though William Gibbs McAdoo might not like Tammany Hall, he would certainly expect Tammany Hall to "get out the vote" for him in the event of his nomination for the Presidency. City machines function at their liveliest in presidential years and no one can question their value to the head of their party's national ticket. But their benefit to their own cities is perhaps more open to debate.

However, it took the Galveston Flood (1900) to give the movement for non-partisan civic control a chance to demonstrate its merit. The flood left both the city and the city government in a state approaching collapse; as a rehabilitation emergency, control of the city was put into the hands of five commissioners appointed by the governor of Texas. So well did the commission handle reconstruction work that it was continued even after the crisis had passed, the commissioners being elected by popular vote after courts ruled that government by an appointed commission was not constitutional. The weakness of the commission system was that it provided for no one head of the government. This defect was remedied in 1913 when the City Manager first appeared. Chosen by the commissioners and sometimes an out-of-town man, he usually is theoretically subordinate to the commissioners and subject to removal by them. He is, however, the executive head of the government and a strong executive can always exercise over the legislative branch of the government much more power than might be inferred from his constitutional limitations.

Today some 360 U. S. cities and towns have City Manager governments of one type or another. Cleveland, with a population approaching a million is the largest City Manager municipality (City Manager, William R. Hopkins). Other outstanding examples of the City Manager system are: Sacramento, Miami, Kansas City (Mo.), Dayton, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Norfolk, Fort Worth (Tex.), and in Canada, Montreal. Rapid City, S. Dak., summer home of the U. S. Government, also is a City Manager city.