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The County: The "Dark Continent" of American Politics

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Henry S. Gilbertson
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About This Book

The author examines county government as an overlooked layer of American democracy, surveying its origins, legal status, and functions while documenting sanitary, fiscal, and administrative failures. He analyzes how tradition, fragmentation of elected offices, local political machines, and inadequate state oversight produce inefficiency, corruption, and uneven services in urban and rural counties. Case studies and statutory comparisons illustrate problems in jails, almshouses, roads, public health, and fiscal management. Proposed remedies include state guidance, constitutional and charter home rule, consolidation, county managers, and scientific administration aimed at reconstructing counties for more accountable, efficient government and outlining possibilities for future reform.

PREFACE

The American people have never ceased, nor do they give any signs of ceasing, in their effort to master the mechanics of political democracy. Curiously, however, they have quite neglected one of the most promising of all the approaches to this study—the government of counties. It is in the belief that a discussion of this subject would tend to throw a great new light upon the “democratic experiment” that the author has prepared this volume.

This is not a hand-book or a treatise on counties. Such a work cannot be successfully carried through without a much wider and more thorough research into the subject than has as yet been attempted. The author hopes that this present work will do something to suggest and stimulate such research. In the meantime the outlines of a very real and very important “county problem” are visible and they mark the scope of this volume.

The reader will doubtless note the complete absence of any discussion of the county in its relation to the educational system. The explanation of this omission lies in the great difficulty of distinguishing anything like a universal interest of the county in this branch of public administration, apart from those of the state government and of the smaller divisions, except in the levying of taxes and the distribution of tax money.

To Mr. Richard S. Childs, Secretary of The Short Ballot Organization, the author is indebted for the suggestion that the book should be written, and for criticisms of the manuscript. Assistance of the most helpful sort during the manuscript stage was also rendered by Mr. Herbert R. Sands, of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, and by Mr. Otho G. Cartwright, of the Westchester County Research Bureau.

Inasmuch also as it has not seemed advisable to encumber the text with an excessive number of footnotes, the author wishes to acknowledge particularly his debt to Prof. John A. Fairlie’s volume, The Government of Counties, Towns, and Villages, which was the source of much of the historical material, and to Mr. Earl W. Crecraft, whose studies of Hudson County, N. J., have been drawn upon at considerable length.

H. S. Gilbertson.

New York,
January 15, 1917.