Abstract
Unvoiced assumptions and informal notions about the relationship of individual to government are evident when examining what individuals expect they should be able to know about the actions and deliberations of government and what officials believe they owe citizens. The interactions of gadfly and municipal functionary reveal two critical changes in the way people thought about governance during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: that cities were essentially businesses that provided public services and that the residents of cities were essentially consumers of service rather than active participants in governing their communities. New beliefs about the source of municipal authority and the importance of technical expertise generated new city government structures. An examination of court cases shows that at the start of this period, demands for accountability were often granted. By the end, they were not.
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Notes
- 1.
Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1994 reprint of 1935 play), p. 37.
- 2.
John Dillon, The Law of Municipal Corporations (2nd edition) (New York: James Cockcroft and Co., 1873).
- 3.
People ex rel. Henry v. Cornell, 35 How. Pr. 31, (New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, 1868), at 36.
- 4.
Nevada Revised Statutes 239.010, which reversed the restrictions set in State ex rel. Nevada Title v. Grimes, 29 Nev. 50, 84 P. 1064 (Nevada Supreme Court, 1906). Discussion of the key cases here has been limited to passing mention in Harold L. Cross, The People’s Right to Know: Legal Access to Public Records and Proceedings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953) and in a handful of law review articles, as in Robert Alan Blum, “Access to Governmental Information in California,” California Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, (Oct., 1966), pp. 1650–1680; H.R.M. “Public Records: Right of Inspection: Evidence: Exclusion of Public Records from Inspection Because of Privilege,” California Law Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (May, 1922) pp. 346–350; “Intoxicating Liquors. Certiorari. License to Sell Liquor Granted during National Prohibition Set Aside at Suit of Private Citizen,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Jan., 1920), p. 478; “Mandamus Parties Right of Private Citizen to Compel Issuance of Warrant for Arrest,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 25, No. 7 (May, 1912), pp. 667–668, and “Community from Judicial Control of Executive Officers and Members of the Legislature,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 8 (June, 1910), pp. 633–635. Even Cornell’s story has drawn little interest. The bizarre disposition of Henry v. Cornell is mentioned only in “Municipal Corporations: Right of Corporator to Examine Books,” Michigan Law Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Nov., 1903), pp. 148–149.
- 5.
Gerald McFarland, Mugwumps, Morals and Politics, 1884–1920 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975); David Tucker, Mugwumps, Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). Men like Ferry (though not Ferry himself) can be found in Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and in John Higham, Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). Richard A. Hogarty, Leon Abbett’s New Jersey: The Emergence of the Modern Governor (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001) has a good discussion of the fading Mugwump type in New Jersey.
- 6.
Richard Hofstadter’s discussion of status politics in his classic The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955) points toward the link between an individual’s perception of place in community and ideas about how the community should be run. Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (State College: Penn State University Press, 1998), and Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) are helpful in drawing attention toward such inward-looking reflections. Thoughtful discussion of reform mentality can be found in Mark Wahlgren Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
- 7.
On the Progressive impulse toward administrative and managerial efficiency, Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1967) is particularly helpful, as are Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); and Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997). Jessica Trounstine, Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland and Chicago (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997); Martin J. Schiesl: The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1880–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Richard Stillman, The Rise of the City Manager: A Public Professional in Local Government (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974) discusses this impulse as it specifically applies to city governance. John Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York, W.W. Norton, 1978) with its focus on the reform accomplishments of political machines provides an interesting counterpoint to arguments about the effectiveness of Progressive reforms; it is worth noting that he, as do many others, including Trounstine and Finegold, focuses on organized political movement and actions, which no doubt is why the individual assertion of the right to know and what it indicates about ideas of democracy is not discussed. Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990) and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Random House, 1993) describe a new consumer mentality that with respect to the way individuals saw their relationship to government displaced older, republican notions.
- 8.
For the development of municipal government during this period, see Shelton Stromquist, Re-inventing ‘The People’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); David J. Barron, “Reclaiming Home Rule,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 116, No. 8 (Jun., 2003), pp. 2255–2386 (especially pp. 2280–2321); Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); David Knoke, “The Spread of Municipal Reform: Temporal, Spatial, and Social Dynamics.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 87, No. 6 (May, 1982), pp. 1314–1339; Kenneth Fox, Better City Government, Innovation in American Urban Politics 1850–1937 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency, Municipal Administration and Reform in America: 1880–1920 (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1977); Bradley Robert Rice, Progressive Cities, the Commission Government Movement in America, 1901–1920 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); and Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Municipal Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, (Oct., 1964) Vol. 55, No. 4, pp. 157–169 and James Weinstein, “Organized Business and the City Commission and Manager Movements,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1962), pp. 166–182.
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Ress, D. (2018). The Micropolitics of Accountability. In: Municipal Accountability in the American Age of Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68258-7_1
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