And yet we should do the subject less than justice were we not to recall an historical adventure that befell the county in the period of its coming of age, when it was assuming something like its typical American form.

It was about the time of the Revolution when the atmosphere was particularly uncomfortable for “tyrants” and for every created thing that could be given the semblance of “tyranny.”

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over those States.” So ran the Declaration of Independence, and if it was not a precise statement of fact, it was at least an accurate gauge of the fighting public opinion that was making political institutions. King George’s “frightfulness” seems to have been chiefly and most concretely brought into the public eye in the colonies by the acts of “swarms of officers” that had been sent over “to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

From the point of view of the British Empire, it was a stiffening up of the colonial administration to make effective the Navigation Acts, the Stamp Acts, and similar measures. But it had come too late. Through a century and a half the spirit of independence had grown firmer and firmer and the colonists’ sense of identity with the British Empire had sensibly diminished. So that when the imperial revenue collectors began to “swarm” on their shores, the colonists were goaded into a smashing antimonarchical mood. It was no mere temporary fit of rage, and when physical violence of the Revolution was over, the intellectual upheaval steadily gathered new force through the influence of men of the Jefferson school. One of the feats to which the statesmen of the Revolution devoted themselves was devising means for preventing future “swarms” and the “tyranny” they brought with them.

What irritated them more than all else was the fact that these imperial agents were not colonially selected and controlled. But now the people had replaced the king. They would now select the officers. A happy thought! But how to work it out; that was the question.

It is easy enough to pick flaws in their handicraft, but it should be borne in mind that the architects of the nineteenth century American democracy were working in the dark without models or precedents and without established principles of organization. It is easy now to look back and say: “You carried your ‘democracy’ too far. It would have been not only enough, but infinitely more effective to have let the people select simply the legislative or ‘policy-determining’ officers and subordinated the administration to them. The thing to do was to control the source of power. If you had been careful to separate ‘politics’ from ‘administration’ you would have saved our generation a whole world of political woe.”

But the fact is that the then existing institutions had come into being as a patchwork development to meet successive new needs. As for local government, there was so little of it and it ministered to such elementary wants that very few serious questions of policy ever rose within its jurisdiction. Moreover, the officers who came in time to have regulative or semi-legislative functions, seem to have been from the beginning, concerned with the details rather than the policies of government. This was true of the justices of the peace in Virginia, the selectmen in the New England town, the supervisors in New York, and the assessors in New Jersey. There was no choice except between selecting and controlling (or trying to control) administrative officers and foregoing any part whatever in local affairs.

It is of course not to be understood that no local officers were elected before the Revolution. Massachusetts had always had its town “selectmen” and even as early as 1854 each county elected its treasurer and, beginning at a somewhat later date, the county lieutenants. Supervisors were created as elective officers in New York in 1691, but they were executive and representative officers from the very start. And the same may be said of the town assessors in New Jersey (1693) and the county assessors in Pennsylvania. But the real precedent for “electing everybody” was set in Pennsylvania in 1703 when the sheriffs were first chosen by the people—a step which was followed in 1726 by the establishment of elective county commissioners.

But immediately after the Revolution the new notions of democracy began to work more aggressively. Virginia now organized counties and its constitution stipulated that officers not otherwise provided for should be elected by the people. Sheriffs and coroners were made elective under the New Jersey constitution and New York took away the governor’s power of appointment and vested it in a council of appointment, which was composed of the governor and four senators chosen by the legislature.

There were cross-currents in this movement, however, and both in the Northwest (under the ordinance of 1787) and in Kentucky and Tennessee, county officers established in the closing years of the eighteenth century were made appointive, in the one case by the governor and in the other by the county judges. But in the new constitutions of Ohio (1802), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818), the elective principle worked without a hitch. Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri followed. By 1821 the passion had seized New York State, and sheriffs and county clerks were thereafter elected by the voters of the counties.

In Virginia at the constitutional convention in 1829-30, local government was the subject of an acrimonious discussion, with the Jeffersonian influences seeking to break down the established power of the self-perpetuating justices, who were charged with inefficiency, and establish in their place the New England town system. But Madison and Marshall, who were both members of the convention, successfully upheld the existing order. By the middle of the century both Virginia and Kentucky succumbed to the democratic influence and there was a complete reaction from the appointive system. New York extended the elective idea to district attorneys and county judges, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire in due time made similar alterations.

In the states west of the Mississippi the tendency to put all the county officers in the elective class was assumed from the start to be the only method of insuring popular control.

“The rule of the people” at last captured the whole country, except Rhode Island, where even the sheriff is still appointive.[2] The movement was at its height during the long period of democratic control from Jackson to Buchanan, and it had behind it the powerfully stimulating spirit of the new West. It was the conception of practical, direct, but superficial thinkers and politicians. To be sure, the particular appointive system in use in New York and other eastern states under the earlier constitutions had behaved badly. The Jacksonians leaped headlong at the conclusion that the trouble lay in the idea of appointment per se. Other alternatives they did not for a moment consider, but with an air of supreme finality declared that “the people must rule”—by electing as many officials as could be crowded on the ballot.

The fact also that the county possessed no satisfactory appointing power left no other course but to let the people undertake the intricate work of an executive. So that through the passing of the years that single course has materially multiplied the number of elective officers—the people themselves, enamored with the dogma that “the cure for democracy is more democracy” looked on complacently while complication has been heaped upon complication.

In the almost unique opportunity for a simplified government which has been presented to the people of any county, they have strenuously and successfully resisted the change. Such an instance happened a few years ago in the county of San Bernardino, California. The people had already adopted a county charter in which the powers of the county were vested in a single small board of elective officers somewhat on the commission plan now in use in many American cities. It was regarded by many as the highest type of modernized county organization adopted up to that time anywhere in the United States. But in the interval that elapsed between the adoption of the charter and its going into effect, someone discovered (or thought they discovered) that the people were about to be deprived of their ancient liberties and that a local oligarchy was about to be erected. Soon petitions were in circulation and this perfectly good charter, which had been adopted but never tried out in practice, was amended so as to nullify the very principle of organization which pointed to greater simplicity and a better fixing of responsibility.

For nearly a century popular government has been galloping down the highway that leads to governmental confusion. Nowhere does the record state that because the people elected long strings of officers, the people therefore controlled those officers. All the while the services which government could render have become more and more numerous and the public needs of the people more pressing. And all the while too, the filling and holding of office for office sake has been vested with exaggerated importance, so that the county more perhaps than any other civil division has been the home of fictitious political “issues.” At regularly recurring intervals the nation-wide county system has been shaken to its foundations over the private futures of their local Tom Joneses and Tom Smiths. One of these respective gentlemen must leave his growing law practice and sacrifice his time to his county by serving papers for the county judge or prosecuting criminals before the Grand Jury. And none but the people is competent to judge which of the two it shall be.

Is the district attorneyship to be filled? Then, properly speaking, there would seem to be nothing to do but to search for the highest technical ability in sight and place it above the influences of any consideration but that of preserving the civil rights of the whole people. It is a simple criterion, around which no “issue” could properly arise. But popular government has regularly and almost universally thrown the selection of the public prosecutor over into the political arena, where tests of fitness for specific duties count not half so much as a good campaign speech or the ability to swing a township into the Republican or Democratic column.

In the same way many sheriffs might have set before them the plain duty to obey the rigid prescriptions of the statutes. But American democracy has all but universally decreed that sheriffs shall be selected after the manner of discretionary, policy-determining officers. As for the coroner, who would suppose that his grim services could be made the subject of interested, intelligent popular discussion? But the coroner, in a majority of states, is on the “ticket,” a subject ostensibly for the citizens to weigh in the balance with a view to the fittest selection. And then the ballot nearly always bears the candidates for the office of county clerk. He, like the sheriff, has his duties minutely described in the laws, to the dotting of an “i” and the crossing of a “t.” But in the estimation of many good citizens it is of supreme importance that a good Republican or a deserving Democrat should be placed in the office, in order, presumably, that the office forms may be arranged for the filing cases according to the historical doctrines of one or the other of the national parties.

Never was there a serious movement to elect United States marshals or district attorneys. Other and more satisfactory methods of selection have been employed. But for the analogous officers in the states, nothing but popular choice would satisfy the temper of the young American republic.

[2] By the legislature.