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The Manager Plan and the Metropolitan Community1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
The labels that happen to become attached to things are of little consequence; the substance is what counts. Good government does not consist in getting any certain caption placed upon a municipal organization; it consists in the introduction into its daily functioning of practices and processes that guarantee responsiveness to public needs. Four main types of governmental structure have figured in the history of American cities: strong council, strong mayor, commission, and council-manager. Each of these has several features peculiar to itself, yet there are a number of principles and provisions, which, if not common to all four types, are at least not incompatible with any of them and are capable, as experience has shown, of being adopted or employed in connection with all.
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- Municipal Affairs
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1939
References
2 Attention is called in passing to the variegated background of the government and politics of Illinois. The five or six million people who comprise the rank and file of the population of the state have a great many basic interests in common; nevertheless they also have many more-than-superficial interests separating them. (By “basic interests,” the author refers to common needs for food, clothing, shelter, security and employment; among “more-than-superficial interests” are included religion, race, political partisanship, and similar differentials.) Whatever formula is developed, it must be sufficiently comprehensive to effect a reconciliation or “balancing” of all interests and groups. Democracy requires that its political institutions be equally solicitous for the happiness and welfare of all groups in proportion to their numbers.
3 The needs of the country's 95 other metropolitan areas vary somewhat, but they are not basically different.
4 See the discussion of “Planes of Planning” in the Report of the Mississippi Valley Committee of the Public Works Administration (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1934), p. 223Google Scholar.
5 See Journal of Illinois House of Representatives for April 13, 1937.
6 Chicago Daily News, Editorials, April 1, 15, and 17, 1937.
7 See the Federation News, official publication of the Chicago Federation of Labor, February 29, 1937, p. 2Google Scholar. (Just how much “deliberation” preceded the formal “condemnation” is a moot question. What the Federation did was to approve a committee report rejecting a proposal that labor support the “manager movement.” So many locals have since shown considerable interest in the plan that leaders in the movement are now (November, 1938) hopeful that the Federation will shortly reverse its position.)
8 Obviously, personal factors of the most private and compelling character operate in a situation like this, but the author does not consider himself entitled to impose on the reader his purely idle speculations about them.
9 See any copy of the Federation News during the spring, summer, or fall of 1938. Each issue included the script of an “anti-manager” radio address delivered during the week over WCFL, owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor.
10 The writer conferred with the committee named by the C. F. L. to consider the invitation to support the city-manager bills before the committee made its adverse report.
11 See editorials in the weekly Cleveland Citizen during September and October, 1927.
12 Federation News, December 14, 1935, p. 4Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., July 6, 1929. Two years earlier, a Cleveland laborer phrased the question in this fashion: “The issue … is to decide whether or not to keep intact the standing confession to the rest of the world that the people of Cleveland are not intelligent enough to select and direct their chief hired person.” See The Cleveland Citizen, October 29, 1927.
14 Ibid., Editorial, April 14, 1928, p. 1.
15 See “Hatton Advises City-Manager Plan for Chicago”, Federation News, March 30, 1929, pp. 3, 9Google Scholar, for a warning to labor on the limitations of the electoral process as a method of selecting an able executive.
16 See House Bill No. 414, Sixtieth Illinois General Assembly, 1937, p. 30.
17 See Federation News, May 15, 1937, p. 4Google Scholar. Illinois does not have the recall, but it has what might be called a form of the referendum. By securing the proper number of signatures to petitions, the voters either of a municipality or of the state may force the city council or the General Assembly to place a public policy proposition on the ballot. But the results of such an election are not legally binding. See Maynard, D. M., “The Operation of the Referendum in Chicago,” University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, 1930Google Scholar. It is understood that these features will be included in a new set of bills to be introduced in January, 1938.
18 Macdonald, Austin F., American City Government (New York, 1936), p. 243Google Scholar. John H. Millar criticized the plan for Chicago on this ground in an extended letter to the Chicago Daily News, July 2, 1938.
19 The foregoing points are adopted from Anderson, William, American City Government (New York, 1932), p. 333Google Scholar.
20 There have been only 22 backsliders, leaving 472 still adhering.
21 The National Municipal League's Committee on Revision of the Model City Charter, meeting in Chicago in June, 1937, to consider changes in the fifth draft of the text, agreed that the council-manager plan ought to be continued as the basis for the model charter.
22 Nine, the number proposed in the defeated bills, is patently too small. On the basis of New York City's plan, Chicago should have a council of approximately 15. Enlarging this by several seats would probably be still better.
23 Dolan, T. J., “A Bit of History”, The Cleveland Citizen, October 29, 1927, p. 3Google Scholar.
24 Hallett, G. H. Jr., “Why Not Make Votes Count?”, American Federationist, April, 1929, pp. 451–452Google Scholar.
25 Federation News, Editorial, January 5, 1935, p. 4Google Scholar.
26 Like Louis XIV's “I am the state,” it does not make much difference whether these things were actually said or not. They might have been said and would have been “in character.”
27 Macdonald, op. cit., pp. 244–245.
28 Anderson, op. cit., p. 335. Robert E. Garrigan, civic director of the City Club, one of the groups aggressively working for the manager plan in Chicago, denied in a letter to the Chicago Daily News on July 16, 1938, that the Chicago manager group is seriously opposed to retention of an elective mayorship.
29 Macdonald, op. cit., pp. 247–248. This charge of inapplicability was really the main theme of the Millar letter cited in footnote 18.
30 In anticipation of the arguments of those who might be disposed to turn this point the other way because of what happened in Cleveland, the reader is referred to “Five Years of City Manager Government in Cleveland”, National Municipal Review, Supplement (March, 1929)Google Scholar, and to Bromage, Arthur W., “Black Sheep: The Story of the Abandonments of the Manager Plan”, National Municipal Review (February, 1936), pp. 85–91Google Scholar.
31 See New York City Charter, adopted November 3, 1936, Art. 9. The charter became fully effective on January 1, 1938.
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