CHAPTER XIX
THE COUNTY OF THE FUTURE
In our mind’s eye we have now completely made over the system. Metropolitan counties have retired from the field; the remainder have in a large measure been put in command of their own destinies through a generous extension of the home-rule principle. The county politician of the conventional type has been extinguished and single-minded service of the whole people has replaced a hyphenated allegiance that put the county chairman in the place of highest honor.
What could such a county do for its citizens?
It should be kept in mind that this county of the imagination with which we are particularly concerned will be practically confined to rural and semi-rural localities. Here, even while we dream, a very actual metamorphosis is going on which inevitably promotes a sense of community interest. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford, the countryside is getting together in spite of itself! The rural gentry will think in bigger units and the basis of its allegiances will be correspondingly broadened. And a more fundamental accomplishment for county betterment could not well be conceived, for, as Herbert Quick has asked: “Did you ever know a man that was proud of his county?” The answer to which he gives himself: “I knew but one such man and his relations were all in county offices.”
The county of the past has lacked opportunity to “do itself proud.” The county of the future will be equipped to do interesting things in an interesting way. But it must develop policies—real politics—as a substitute for the interest that has made place hunting and place holding a basic rural industry. The farmer of the future must be given something more wholesome to think about “during the long winter evenings” than who is to be the next coroner; and he must cease to measure his freedom by the number of offices he attempts to fill with his ballot.
But before county citizenship is raised to the point of appreciation of the new order a benevolent deed of violence must be done to a power in the community noted principally for sycophantic approval of the administration in power, an utter lack of either conscience or ideas, and “patent insides”—the county official newspaper. The cheap “boiler-plate” weekly must go the way of old Dobbin and in its place will come some means yet to be devised, for putting out official advertising that really advertises and furnishing news that is not only “fit to print,” but worth the while.
When these mechanical essentials of an efficient local democracy shall have been acquired the county will be in a position to formulate a genuine program of service. As to the ingredients for the same a few suggestions may be in order:
PUBLIC HEALTH
Contrary perhaps to general opinion, the rural sections of the country are not conspicuously free from a public health problem. All the squalor, bad housing and contagion is not in the crowded city tenements. Rural citizens have perhaps much more to learn about pure milk and water, for instance, than their city brethren. But the public health movement has struck the country districts. It seems to have come principally by way of the nation wide attack on tuberculosis. During the past six or seven years there has been a remarkable campaign for institutions for the care of persons afflicted with this malady. It is something entirely distinct from the idea of caring for the pauper sick, for it has been found difficult to persuade many people in need of proper treatment to go to an institution to which a long-standing stigma is attached. New York now has such special institutions in about half of its counties. In the South, North Carolina has made more important progress than any other state. Ninety of its hundred counties have part-time county physicians, while the other ten have county health officers devoting their entire time and energies to the preservation of public health and the prevention of disease. The standard for the selection of these officers is very high.
Wisconsin has enacted a statute authorizing the board of supervisors of any county to employ a graduate trained nurse whose duties are:
“To act as a consulting expert on hygiene for all schools not already having medical inspection either by physician or visiting nurse, to assist the superintendents of the poor in their care of the poor in the county who are in need of the services; to give instruction to tuberculosis patients and others relative to hygiene measures to be observed in preventing the spread of tuberculosis; to aid in making a report of existing cases of tuberculosis; to act as visiting nurse throughout the county and to perform such other duties as a nurse and hygienic expert as may be assigned to her by the county board.”
That the spirit of the new public health movement is taking hold to some extent in Minnesota is the testimony of a local authority[27]:
“Koochiching County has the first and only county health organization in the state. The county commissioners and the county school board there see the economy of hiring a medical man to preserve the health of the community and to keep the children in school the maximum number of days each term.
“Furthermore, they have chosen a health officer with a proper point of view; one who believes that a health department should be an educational agency more than a police bureau; one who reserves the ‘police club’ for exceptional emergencies, but who is ever ready to instruct and convert. In Koochiching County the authorities are laying the foundation for a type of citizenship that is not only going to grow up healthy, but will be so well informed that it will observe sanitary laws and insist upon proper health safeguards. A county health organization similar to the one in Koochiching County, or a better one if it can be afforded, is needed in every Minnesota county, southern as well as northern, but particularly in the pioneer district.”
The public health movement in counties is by no means limited to the cited states.
COUNTY PLANNING
An example full of suggestive possibilities for almost any locality comes to us from Westchester County, N. Y. It is a district which is partly suburban and partly rural and has had very little unity excepting a political one. The lines of railroad travel run not to a common center within the county but to the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. This situation the Westchester County Chamber of Commerce set about to alleviate at least in some degree by means of a county physical plan which would facilitate communication between sections and possibly tend to distribute population more evenly. The plan calls for a carefully thought-out system of roads, parks and sewers. It is a private undertaking, but cities have official planning commissions; why not counties? What could better serve as the starting point for a broad, comprehensive program for a modernized county to undertake?
COUNTY LIBRARIES
Quite as fundamental to the welfare of the rural county as turnpikes and bridges is the awakening of its intellectual life. The school system is becoming everywhere more highly centralized, so that educational policies and administration are controlled from the state capitol. But the schools only meet the demand in an elementary limited way, leaving the adult population and the graduate of the common and high schools for the most part unprovided for. The United States Commissioner of Education has discovered that “probably seventy per cent. of the entire population of the country have no access to any adequate collection of books or to a public reading room. In only about one third of the counties of the United States is there a library of five thousand volumes or more. In only one hundred of these do the villages and country people have free use of the libraries.”
In 1901 an Ohio county through a legacy left by one of its citizens was enabled to meet this deficiency at least partially by establishing the first county library. It has grown rapidly and now has not only a central building but a number of sub-stations. The county is said, as a result of this beginning, to have experienced a general awakening which has been evidenced in good county pikes, county parks and a hundred other tangible ways.
Following the example of Ohio, county library laws were passed in Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Maryland, Oregon, Nebraska and New York. California has twenty-seven county libraries.
THE PUBLIC DEFENDER
Throughout Oklahoma and in Los Angeles county a humanitarian public opinion has manifested itself in the erection of a new county office, that of public defender. The purpose of this new institution is to put the impecunious litigant actually as well as legally on an equal footing with his opponent, whether he be a defendant in a criminal action or a party to a civil suit. Hitherto the law had prescribed that every defendant should have counsel, even if it be at the state’s expense. But the lawyers assigned to this somewhat thankless task (in a pecuniary sense) were either young and inexperienced or too busy with more lucrative practice to give the “charity” cases the attention they deserved. Under the new system the salaried defender is a man comparable in his ability to the district attorney; he gives his entire time to the county and has a number of assistants. The defender serves also as an investigator for the court and often in this capacity discovers circumstances which justify the judge in mitigating sentence. Incidentally, two years experimentation with this office in Los Angeles has shown that a considerable saving can be made as against the old method of employing various lawyers in private practice.
While the public defender will doubtless acquire greatest importance in city counties, rural communities will not fail to provide opportunities for his services.
AN IDEALIZED POORMASTER
For another piece of successful experimentation we must again revert to Westchester County, N. Y., this time to the work of V. Everit Macy, the superintendent of the poor elected in November, 1914. Mr. Macy entered upon his public duties, a man of wealth and long experience in social welfare work. He found the poor administration of the county at its political worst: petty graft in commitments and the purchase of supplies, an archaic almshouse, a notable absence of informing records, neglect of proper medical examinations. He began at the source of the trouble by eliminating “politics,” in the making of appointments, by the simple expedient of requiring applicants for positions to state their qualifications. In time he had surrounded himself with a group of trained social workers, men and women who, according to one observer,[28] “are as unlike the staff commonly found with a poor-law officer as the faculty of a university is unlike that of a one-room country school.” The simple recital of a few of his achievements in his first two-year term presages, perhaps, the county of the future as somewhere in sight of its highest efficiency as a humanitarian agency. Mr. Macy systematized records, required physical and medical examination of all inmates, weeded out mental defectives and sent them to custodial institutions, started competitive bidding in the purchase of supplies (saving $18,000 in the first year), improved the diet of inmates and their general level of health, tripled the amount of produce raised upon the county farm, made the hospital a preventive agency instead of a place for treating cases suffering obviously from disease.
The superintendent’s basic interest, by the way, is the ultimate causes and prevention of poverty, and to this end he has instituted investigations and records of the habits, occupations and every other matter concerning the inmates that might throw light upon their present condition.
In the handling of children’s cases, his work has been particularly effective. To begin with, unnecessary commitments, which had been encouraged by the fee system prevailing in New York, have been prevented. And during the first year of the term 311 children ceased to be public charges, some of those previously committed having been transferred to state homes, some having been placed in foster homes, but the far greater number, 239, having been returned to their relatives. Inasmuch as the annual cost to the county for each committed child was $237, the public saving accomplished through this systematic, intelligent handling of the child problem was over $17,000.
Before Mr. Macy’s first term had expired he had so far won the confidence of the board of supervisors and the public in general that they accepted plans for centralizing the public welfare work of the county in a great plant for which nearly $2,000,000 has already been appropriated. Within the confines of this new establishment will be accommodated the almshouse, the county hospital and the county jail. The office of superintendent of the poor, in the meantime has been abolished (January 1, 1917) and a new officer to be known as the commissioner of charities and correction, and having greatly extended jurisdiction, will take his place.
It is a new conception which Mr. Macy has given us of the once melancholy job of the poormaster and he has new revelations of the possibilities of his position in store.
CITIZEN ORGANIZATION
But movements for better rural health, better library facilities, better physical development and for a better conception of public humane obligations do not spring out of the air. Always they are the product either of some personal initiative or some organized effort. Does any county clearly lack that element of citizen leadership? Then the obvious need of the county is to bridge that gap. The rural population of America suffers (the word is all too weak) for the lack of a public community sense. Every “average” rural citizen is a unit, he does not travel in droves—so much for his independence. On the other hand, he has not fully learned the art of coöperation and legitimate compromise. The end of this condition, however, will doubtless come by way of his growing realization of a community of private interest developed through such special organizations as county chambers of commerce, boards of trade and county agricultural associations.
Sometimes such bodies, founded with the idea of promoting a common material advantage, as, for instance, by enhancing the value of local real estate or attracting capital to local industries, discover by a gradual process that the government is an indispensable leverage to achieving the particular ends in view and that existing government is a decidedly ineffectual instrument. It was through such a metamorphosis that the Chamber of Commerce in Westchester County, N. Y., progressed in its program of county planning, to a study of and attack upon the faulty system of taxation, to plans for a revision of county government and finally to an active interest in county home rule through constitutional revision. County chambers of commerce are also doing much to beat down the barriers of distrust that have existed between the farmer and the business man. By a commingling of the two in a common organization both have often come to an understanding of their mutual interest in good roads, good schools and all the other appurtenances of a developed community.
COUNTY STUDY CLUBS
An interesting effort to stimulate a healthy county consciousness through a different intellectual means is being undertaken in North Carolina. Under the auspices of the University of North Carolina “home-county clubs” have been established in many counties and, according to the prospectus, the members “are bent upon intimate, thoughtful acquaintance with the forces, agencies, tendencies, drifts and movements that have made the history we study to-day, and that are making the history our children will study to-morrow.” The club studies are mainly concerned with rural problems. Each county is compared with itself during the last census period, “in order to learn in what particulars it has moved forward, marking time or lagging to the rearward.” But also it is compared with other counties of the state, in every phase of the study, in order to show its rank and standing.... “Meanwhile the state as a whole is being set against the big background of world endeavor and achievement.”
Such are just a few of the signs of the broadening of rural community life. To plan, to put before the public for discussion and approval, and to execute just such projects as these is the constructive opportunity of the county of the future. It is a program which will tax the county’s citizenship and statesmanship. It is the county’s real “politics.”
[27] Dr. I. J. Murphy of the Minnesota Public Health Association.
[28] See Winthrop D. Lane, “A Rich Man in the Poor House,” Survey, Nov. 4, 1916. Reprinted in pamphlet form by the County Government Association, White Plains, N. Y.