To the county in most of the states has also been committed from early times, the obligation to carry forward what is now generally recognized as one of the greatest of unifying, nationalizing, civilizing factors in this or any time—highways. Through these avenues of communication the people of the wilderness were to break their solitude, establish common understandings and give value to the products of the earth by creating markets for their distribution. Over the highways access was to be had with schools and churches.
From the colonial period and well down into the nineteenth century, the construction and maintenance of roads was, in diminishing degree, a private enterprise, operated by turnpike companies primarily for the benefit of their stock-holders rather than that of the public. Gradually road making came to be regarded as a public function, at first in respect to the repairs upon the private toll roads and then in original construction. In the year 1913 the amount which counties of the country spent upon their highways had mounted to $55,514,891.
To the fulfillment of this great function the county brought those weaknesses of governmental organization, that lack of equipment, that defective loyalty to the service of the whole people which have been described heretofore. The erection of a road system was a demand for broad, foreseeing knowledge and appreciation of the needs of the whole county, high technical skill in the art of road making and adequate financial arrangements. The county supplied none of these.
What the county did supply and how it supplied it may be worth the recital, even though in these days of the “good-roads” movement the state government is constantly stiffening its hold upon highway matters.
To begin with, the whole public road function is rooted, historically, in the tradition of the people’s infinite political versatility and infallibility. The true democrat of the nineteenth century never doubted his ability to select and control the human agents for executing a technical and difficult engineering problem, which has baffled the resources of modern specialists. And so, to this day, the management of road construction and care over a great portion of the country is entrusted to a farmer, a blacksmith, a plumber or some other species of layman who has sufficient popularity with his neighbors and the county chairman to get himself chosen as town supervisor. In some states the rôle of road manager is played by the somewhat better equipped county surveyor, who, however, like the supervisor, is picked in the majority of cases because of his vote-getting qualities rather than for any technical training.
Under these circumstances the roadmaster is apt to enter upon his public duties with a sense of his obligation not to the whole community and its ultimate interest, but to those articulate sections of the people who are most likely to make themselves felt on the next election day. As a certain highway engineer illustrated the situation: “Here’s $10,000 to spend on roads. Here also is Jeff Browning up on Nut Creek, who wants quite a little road work done. Of course, Jeff lives fifteen miles from the county seat, and there’s fifteen miles of bad roads between his place and town, but Jeff voted the whole settlement for me, and he has some idle teams, and we’ll just help him along by spending some money at his place.” It is one of the familiar processes of practical politics and the imagination should have no difficulty in picturing any number of equally accommodating transactions.
Quite as serious an aspect of road control directly by elective officers is that it gives too great and too convenient an opportunity for layman advice and prejudice to bear upon a technical problem. One curious idea which is prevalent in middle western rural districts is that a road, in order to be a road, must be on a section line, regardless of the contour of the land, the convenience of users of the highway or the character of the soil. The engineer above quoted tells of a very bad hill about two miles north of Poplar Bluff, Mo. “The grade,” says Mr. Edy, “must have been something like twelve per cent. in places. It was estimated that by going around this hill, a grade of six per cent. could be obtained, increasing the distance but slightly, and traversing almost worthless ground. The owner, however, would neither give nor sell a right of way, holding that unless the road were maintained ‘on the line’ it would not be a real road. Something like $400 was spent on this bill in an effort to make it passable, when half that amount would have made a permanent road in a new location.”
Of course, when the organization of the county gives to Jeff Browning and the philosopher of Poplar Bluff the predominating influence in road affairs, there can be nothing in the way of a county road policy or road plan that is based upon the economic and social needs of the whole people. The system enthrones petty rural sectionalism and narrowness and condones a form of graft which is without doubt as vicious in principle as the stealing of a street railway franchise. Where the township supervisor is the responsible official the case is at its worst for it means just so many more executive units to be watched, just so many more standards of road construction, just so many more independent road plans.
The “business” end of county road administration is often weighted down to earth with the same sublime faith in the wisdom of the average citizen. Rarely have counties maintained anything that approximated adequate records of cost or serviceability of their roads and bridges or data upon which they could construct a satisfactory policy of construction, if indeed their governing bodies have dreamed of the need or the value of such aids. Even of so highly developed a community as Monroe County, New York, in which the City of Rochester is situated, it could be said concerning the office of highway superintendent that “the only record now kept is a bill book in which are entered all claims against the county highway fund which are paid through the superintendent’s office, all payrolls and all claims for personal service.”[12]
Much the same lack of appreciation for facts was revealed in a cruder way in a grand jury investigation during 1912 of the methods of the Board of Commissioners in Darke County, Ohio, where it was discovered that minutes were rarely read and contracts were voted twenty at a time and sometimes without the formality of a vote, in direct violation of the law.
From another middle western state comes an illuminating description of the method of awarding bids on bridge construction: “Each competitor submitted his own drawings and an estimate to a board of commissioners, not one of whom had the least technical knowledge or practical experience, but was ‘led away’ generally by the size of the drawing and the accompanying estimate.
“The result was shoddy work, insufficient piers or abutments, piles not driven down to any safe and permanent depth and finally a bridge that was built for appearance, not durability nor permanency. Just as soon as we had a flood bringing down logs, stumps and trees, some of these would strike or swing against the piers and down came the structure, floating away or lodging in the stream, causing a jamb to accumulate, holding up the stream and overflowing land for miles.
“It took many years to get a system where an engineer designed a bridge with details of construction, steel or iron cylinders filled with concrete as piers, and a superintendent of construction who knew his business to take charge of the work.
“Thus we spent thousands of dollars for bridges to be erected simply to see them carried out; in one instance twice. But the cost and failure combined in time brought forth such protests that such a system would not be tolerated longer; but the waste was done and the money practically thrown away.
“In county road repair and construction we were no better. The district boss was elected politically, and of course he rewarded his commissioner friends by working the road fund. He dared not complain of short hours or little done or sitting by the road discussing how to ‘fix the election,’ and usually the work was done just before the nomination and election. The ‘dump of dirt’ was left in a pile, not even leveled; every team avoided it if possible, and when winter then came it was ‘slurry’ and mud. No ditches or outlets for same were made or cleaned out, and if any suggestion was made for improvement, you were told ‘it was good enough before you came and you can get out if you don’t want to stay.’”
In Polk County, Iowa, an investigation in 1912 disclosed the fact that the board of supervisors had paid out $100,000 for contracts without asking for bids. They never required plans or specifications of any bridge to be constructed. Bridges had been ordered without any idea of what they would cost. No guarantee bond was required and bridges were accepted without inspection. Certain companies had been favored to the exclusion of others and the result was that in many counties bridges were built at a cost fifty per cent. higher than their reasonable value.
To the rich opportunities for “turning an honest dollar” which lurked in such systems and in such an attitude on the part of the public officers, the “powers that prey” have been keenly alive. The tale that was told a few years ago, with a multitude of specifications, by a few enterprising farm journals in the Middle West, rivals, except in dramatic quality and the size of the sums involved, the characteristic falls from grace which have been heretofore associated with ward aldermen and legislators hailing from wicked urban districts. It was a serious indictment of county officialdom which is contained in a letter of the chairman of the Roads and Highways Committee of the lower house in Kansas, who wrote in 1913:
“I know there are comparatively few county commissioners who profit personally by the manipulations of the bridge companies but the representatives of the companies are shrewd men who understand thoroughly that the average county commissioner is very jealous of his bridge patronage, and brooks no interference with his handling of the bridge business with a free hand. Consequently the bridge men play this feature to the limit and to their own profit.”[13]
That Iowa was inoculated with the same germ is suggested by remarks of Alson Secor, the editor of Successful Farming:
“The bridge men are not depending upon a lobby at Des Moines, or any state capitol, to put through what they want, or to prevent legislation that will make bridge letting competitive. They work to elect or defeat supervisors. They finance state supervisors’ annual meetings and give the watchdogs of the public treasury that contains your tax money such a good time that the ‘boys’ fall under lasting obligations to the bridge companies.
“Bribe the lawmakers? Oh, no! You can’t say that. It isn’t a bribe to hand a man a line of soft talk, is it? It isn’t a bribe to give a county official a hilarious good time at a summer resort, is it? Or to pay his hotel bills when he attends the state meetings? No—a thousand times no—legally.
“But the bridge men get there just the same. They have for years prevented any legislation that would give them a dollar’s worth of bridge work for a dollar’s worth of taxes.”
So well satisfied were the favored bridge builders with the status quo in Nebraska in 1913 that they are said to have maintained at the state legislature a powerful lobby to oppose by corrupt methods a bill whose one purpose was to require bidders to furnish estimates on uniform blanks. The information thus obtained would have been placed on file at the state capitol and made available to all who might wish to compare the cost of construction in different counties—light would have been let into the operations of the counties in bridge-building matters.
It would seem, then, that the system did have much to do with waste of public funds and inefficiency of every sort and was the basis of a certain amount of corruption, in all the states mentioned. It was not all simply a matter of “good” men and “bad” men. But the breakdown of the county in highway affairs is fast becoming ancient history, not directly, through a process of regeneration, but through forces playing upon the county from without which we will again identify for the present simply as the “good-roads” movement, of which more hereafter.
[12] From an unpublished report of the Rochester Bureau of Municipal Research, 1915.
[13] Successful Farming, June, 1913.