city government

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Rapid expansion and precipitous decline, social conflict, and demands for ever-increasing public services have all characterized the history of the American city. Chicago grew from a trading post to a metropolis of 1.5 million inhabitants in a single lifetime; Detroit was an industrial boomtown in the early twentieth century but the corroding buckle of America's Rustbelt fifty years later. In the mid-nineteenth century Irish and German migration to America's cities posed unprecedented demands and ignited new tensions; one hundred years later millions of blacks moved to the urban core, again transforming urban life.

American city government was responsible for coping with these rapid changes. Although often maligned as corrupt and incompetent, mayors and city councils in the nineteenth century struggled to handle the needs of growing populations desiring more and better police, fire, water, and sewer services. Their successors in the late twentieth century faced rioting, fiscal crisis, and inner-city abandonment and attempted to maintain cities as viable places of work and residence. Throughout American history city government has faced formidable challenges, and lawmakers have tinkered with the mechanism of urban rule to ensure it could meet those challenges.

The rulers of America's small colonial cities devoted much of their time to the regulation and promotion of commerce; they guaranteed standard weights and measures, fixed prices, and supervised wharves, ferries, markets, and fairs. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, municipal governments were focusing increasing attention on such services as fire protection and street lighting, and throughout the colonial era city ordinances attempted to eliminate such nuisances as livestock running through the streets. With only night watches and some volunteer fire companies, municipal work forces remained small well into the nineteenth century. Although the demand for street improvements and better fire protection mounted and municipal taxing powers expanded during the first decades of the nineteenth century, American city government was still a modest operation.

All this changed in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1840s and 1850s one city after another created professional police forces patrolling the streets both night and day, and during the 1850s and 1860s the largest municipalities replaced the volunteer fire brigade with paid full-time firefighters. Meanwhile, some cities were financing the creation of school systems, libraries, and the first large-scale municipal parks. Moreover, municipalities were assuming responsibility for building waterworks and constructing the first comprehensive sewer systems. One consequence of this great leap in the provision of services was a rise in taxes and municipal indebtedness. For example, between 1845 and 1875 Boston's per capita municipal expenditures soared from $8.29 to $42.92 and that city's debt rose from $784,000 to over $27 million.

Responding to this seeming orgy of spending, many taxpayers cried corruption and urged reform. Although rising taxes and debt purchased many needed services, there was enough evidence of malfeasance in public office to anger these concerned citizens. Moreover, middle-class taxpayers viewed with suspicion the rise of political organizations that sought the votes of seemingly uneducated and ill-bred immigrants and offered city jobs to these newcomers from Europe. In the eyes of many native-born, middle-class taxpayers, the city appeared to be falling into the hands of vulgar Irish Catholic aldermen who sought only to line their pockets.

The best-publicized gang of malefactors was New York City's Tweed Ring, a coterie of Democratic politicians associated with the Tammany Hall faction and named for Boss William Tweed. By encouraging contractors to overcharge the city and kick back some of the profits to politicians, the Tweed Ring spent $13 million to construct a courthouse originally estimated to cost $250,000; a prominent reformer claimed that this structure's cornerstone "was conceived in sin, and its dome, if ever finished, will be glazed all over with iniquity." Another outraged businessman declared that "there is not in the history of villainy a parallel for the gigantic crime against property conspired by the Tammany Ring."

Equally disturbing to many middle-class Americans was the willingness of urban politicians to ignore the drinking, gambling, and prostitution that seemed to be corrupting the lower classes and threatening the moral tone of the nation. During the 1890s New York City's Rev. Charles Parkhurst led a well-publicized crusade against the Tammany organization's tolerance of such sin, attacking the ruling Democratic politicians as "a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot," "polluted harpies that, under the pretence of governing this city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals." Throughout the late nineteenth century moral laxity and political thievery were the twin indictments against the political leadership of the country's largest cities. Many middle-class Americans believed that politicians of little breeding were profiting from city projects and compounding their sins by betraying the city to purveyors of evil.

This litany of complaints about corruption and immorality distracted many voters from the great accomplishments of city government during the second half of the nineteenth century. Municipal engineers were providing cities with the most extensive and modern water and sewer systems in the world, guaranteeing middle-class Americans the comfort and convenience of the indoor flush toilet and bathtub. New York City, Chicago, Boston, and a multitude of smaller cities were employing the finest landscape architects to create beautiful parks for harried urban dwellers. Newly created public libraries offered knowledge and enjoyment for millions of city residents. Mud and manure might have been all too evident along the city streets and police might have been pocketing bribes from gamblers rather than upholding moral standards, but a corps of the ablest engineers, park designers, and librarians were providing municipal services unequaled in the Western world.

Nevertheless, in the minds of most middle-class Americans, the bad in city government outweighed the good. President Andrew D. White of Cornell University labeled American city government the "worst in Christendom," and by the beginning of the twentieth century many believed a major restructuring of urban rule was necessary to secure businesslike, efficient municipal government. Thus a number of cities adopted the commission plan of government, which replaced the mayor and council with a small board of commissioners, each elected at large and each responsible for a single area of municipal administration. At-large election weakened the power of the neighborhood politician whom middle-class reformers associated with the corner saloon and the immigrant masses. Moreover, under the new plan voters could easily identify and punish those responsible for shortcomings in city services. If sewers backed up and flooded basements, the electorate could deny the commissioner of public works another term in office, and if cash was missing from the city treasury, voters could hold the commissioner of public finance accountable when they cast their ballots. Yet the commission plan did not provide for a single chief to coordinate the work of the various commissioners, and this shortcoming led to the creation of the city manager scheme. Under this plan an elected city council determined basic policy and appointed a professional, nonpartisan city manager who was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the municipality. Although most of the largest cities did not opt for this plan, during the second and third decades of the twentieth century hundreds of smaller communities and suburban municipalities hired city managers.

Other reforms in structure and procedure also were popular among citizens seeking an honest, effective government. Critics of corruption urged adoption of nonpartisan elections, new methods of municipal accounting, a civil service system for city employees, and state constitutional amendments to halt state legislative interference in municipal affairs. City governments were creations of the state legislatures with no powers but those granted by the state. Now the cry was for home rule and greater local control of municipal operations. Together with the commission and manager plans these reforms were all attempts to overhaul the machinery of government and achieve the administrative efficiency popularly associated with the modern business corporation.

Structural changes, however, did not satisfy some reform crusaders of the early twentieth century. These leaders sought reform that supposedly would help the "little guy" who suffered from misrule of the cities. According to such mayors as Detroit's Hazen Pingree, Toledo's Samuel Jones, and Cleveland's Tom Johnson, streetcar companies operating under franchises granted by the city councils were charging extortionate fares and providing poor service. Moreover, leaders like Jones and Johnson claimed that crackdowns on saloons penalized working-class patrons of those establishments while city governments too often ignored the large-scale thievery of public utility magnates. Jones wrote that government must cease to be "an instrument of the cunning few for the purpose of plundering the poor," and a vital step toward this goal would be municipal ownership of public utilities. Throughout the nation there were growing demands for city operation of electric, gas, and streetcar companies, and the periodic renegotiation of franchises ignited bitter debate, with proponents of municipal ownership attacking greedy tycoons and advocates of private enterprise brandishing charges of rampant socialism. The result was increased regulation of public utilities by state commissions, but municipal ownership made only modest headway.

By the 1920s, however, the automobile was freeing many city dwellers of their bondage to the hated streetcar companies. It was also accelerating the flow of population beyond the central-city limits to newly developing suburban municipalities. One consequence was the political fragmentation of urban America with scores of city governments sharing authority within a single metropolitan area. The number of municipalities in suburban St. Louis County, Missouri, for example, soared from twenty-one in 1930 to forty-one in 1940 to eighty-three in 1950. An older central city such as St. Louis included manufacturing and retailing, working-class housing and middle-class residences. Thus its municipal government was a compromise among diverse interests, not totally satisfying to any. Yet the suburban municipalities were most often small homogeneous units offering government tailored to one fragment of metropolitan society. Upper-middle-class suburbs adopted stiff zoning ordinances excluding undesirable businesses and maintained public schools that emphasized preparation for college. Industrial suburbs offered manufacturers low taxes and a tolerant attitude toward pollution. Given the choice between inclusive central-city government and exclusive suburban rule, most Americans who could afford to opted for the latter.

Yet such fragmentation posed formidable problems. It fostered inequity, with some municipalities enjoying excellent services and others poor services; in some communities the tax burden was light but elsewhere it was heavy. Moreover, this multitude of municipalities posed an obstacle to metropolitan planning and cooperation. To achieve regional planning of facilities and services required delicate negotiation among a myriad of governments that too often proved impossible. Some southwestern cities such as Phoenix, San Diego, Albuquerque, and Houston continued to annex outlying tracts, thus limiting the problem of fragmentation. In a few other communities such as Nashville and Indianapolis the consolidation of the city and county likewise ensured some degree of metropolitan unity. But in an increasing number of metropolitan areas, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, fragmentation was becoming the general rule.

With residents and business migrating outward to suburban municipalities, central-city governments were too often left with a decaying tax base. Slum housing and vacant factories were commonplace in the central cities, and these structures added little to municipal treasuries. To enhance city tax rolls the federal government launched an urban renewal program in 1949, granting money to municipalities to encourage the reconstruction of the urban core. Yet rebuilding proceeded slowly and offered no quick cure for central-city ills. Meanwhile, poor migrants from the American South and Latin America supplanted more affluent residents, imposing new demands on local welfare services and schools. And by the 1960s municipal employees were resorting to protests and strikes to force higher wages from city governments. With the tax base shrinking, service demands mounting, and municipal employees expecting more in their paychecks, fiscal crisis loomed for many older central-city governments. Federal aid and creative bookkeeping saved some cities from disaster in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the virtual bankruptcy of New York City in 1975 and the default of Cleveland in 1978 made the municipal fiscal crisis front-page news. Layoffs of municipal employees and a series of austerity budgets followed, yet in the 1980s the fragmentation of local government in America continued to ensure a patchwork of metropolitan units, some rich and some poor, some struggling and some thriving.

Bibliography:

Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (1969); Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (1984).

Author:

Jon C. Teaford

See also Black Ghettos; Corruption; Education; Fire Departments; Internal Migration; La Guardia, Fiorello; Libraries and Museums; Police Forces; Public Transportation; Suburbanization; Tammany Hall; Tweed Ring; Urban Bosses and Machine Politics; Urbanization.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the government of a municipality