10
“Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!” yelled the impetuous young lawmaker as he stormed the rostrum seeking recognition. The high-pitched voice with a patrician New York accent belonged to Theodore Roosevelt, just twenty-four years old and two years out of Harvard College. He now represented the Twenty-First Assembly District in New York City. Within weeks he made his presence felt, bringing youthful exuberance and brash moralism to the chamber. One of his fellow lawmakers described him as “a ball of dynamite” with the fuse burning, which annoyed some colleagues and puzzled others who were accustomed to the more sedate cadence of legislative business. Roosevelt’s biggest target in 1882 was the impeachment of a sitting state supreme court judge, a campaign launched through his membership on the Committee on Cities. He accused the judge of illegal use of funds and complicity in Jay Gould’s efforts to acquire the Manhattan Railway Company on the cheap. The committee majority refused to recommend impeachment, a decision rumored to be leveraged by bribes. Roosevelt’s attack on the purported connivance between a public official and a notorious entrepreneur was the cause célèbre of the session and won accolades from his Republican colleagues, who supported him for the speaker’s chair in the next session.1
A Democratic majority in the New York Assembly in 1883 blocked Roosevelt’s chances of gaining the speakership, but he spearheaded the enactment of a civil service commission for state employees, the first among the states. Democratic governor Grover Cleveland rallied a sufficient number of his party to join the Republicans in passing the measure. Roosevelt returned to the assembly in 1884 for his third consecutive term. This was unusual at the time. Rotation of legislative representation was the norm, and roughly three-quarters of state representatives were first-termers.2 Although Republicans regained the majority in the 1884 assembly, Roosevelt lost his bid for the speakership. He settled for chair of the Committee on Cities, which gave him a platform to push for reforms. For weeks he commuted from the capitol in Albany to New York City, where he headed an investigation of its administrative practices, probing unauthorized fees collected by office-holders and the police. This highly publicized fact-finding venture paid off, as the legislature adopted most of his recommendations, which included greater appointment power for the mayor as well as restrictions on taxes and indebtedness for the city.3
Roosevelt’s crusade against the spoilsmen—politicians allied with businessmen who preyed on the government for personal financial benefit—was frequently cited as evidence of political corruption during the Gilded Age. Roosevelt’s published accounts of ethical lapses that he saw or suspected during his legislative career reinforced the indictment of Gilded Age politics, a view prominent among the well educated and well heeled. English scholar James Bryce drew on Roosevelt’s articles to profile local politicians. “The State legislatures,” Bryce opined, “are not high-toned bodies.” Though he conceded that some New England and midwestern states had a tradition of sending “good men” to their legislatures, this was not the case for big-city states like New York, where, Bryce wrote (quoting Roosevelt), the “worst legislators . . . are usually foreigners of little or no education, with exceedingly misty ideas as to morality.” A standard interpretation of American politics for several generations, Bryce’s American Commonwealth reiterated a belief widely held among pundits of the time and historians thereafter: that state legislatures were sinkholes of bribery and extortion, under the thumb of party bosses, and composed of inexperienced, unqualified lawmakers. This toxic mixture allowed corruption, badly drafted laws, and “too much legislation.” Article titles such as “The Blight on Legislatures” and “The Menace of Legislation” illustrate how contemporary writers propagated the theme. Urban politics was thought to be even worse.4
The ethical quality of legislative politics in New York was regarded as among the lowest in the country.5 Yet behind such stinging indictments lay some contravening realities. Writing about his experience in the legislature, Roosevelt acknowledged, “there is at Albany a little home rule parliament which presides over the destinies of a commonwealth more populous than any one of two-thirds of the kingdoms of Europe.” Its business affected “a magnitude of interests” in the state.6 During Roosevelt’s stint at the capitol in Albany, the state created a railroad commission, inaugurated bank inspections, established a bureau of labor statistics, formed a state civil service commission, took the first step toward creating Adirondack State Park, established a dairy commission to set milk standards, enhanced the administrative authority of New York City’s mayor, and imposed debt and tax limits on the city. Later in the 1880s New York enacted an inheritance tax, required the inspection of factories on behalf of workers, created a board of labor arbitration, regulated trust companies, mandated that firms pay employees’ wages in money (rather than credit at a company store), and required state exams for the licensing of physicians.7 Putting aside, for a moment, the question of the administration of these enactments, the record clearly shows that New York exercised its civic authority broadly. This juxtaposition between the indictment of Gilded Age politics as tone deaf to societal problems and the incremental expansion of state capacity is the central paradox of governance during the late nineteenth century.
GOVERNING AMERICAN CITIES
A reading of the platforms of the major political parties only hints at how America was governed during the Gilded Age. Describing this process requires an examination of lawmaking, administration, and judicial adjudication across the three levels of government, but especially local government, which shouldered responsibility for most public functions. Summarizing this record poses challenges, not only because of the great number of jurisdictions in the United States but also because of the evolving scale and scope of their activities. Here we must be content with a condensed summary of these trends. Policymakers at all levels during the Gilded Age expanded civic involvement in society, spent more public money, and initiated improvements in public administration. This history contradicts the traditional claim that government acted as little more than a night watchman in the late nineteenth century.
The public workhorses in the Gilded Age were the local governments, especially the cities, which grew faster than rural areas. Between 1870 and 1900 the urban population increased more than 200 percent, adding 20 million people. The number of big cities (with at least 50,000 inhabitants) more than doubled to 78 major municipalities; by 1920 the count had risen to 144. The expanding urban population, much of it made up of recent immigrants, raised the population density in cities, a situation that bred an array of problems that were minor or nonexistent in rural areas. The crowding of urban environments elevated the difficulty of providing fresh water, disposing of sewer waste and garbage, maintaining usable thoroughfares, and ensuring reliable intracity transportation. Additional obligations included providing police and fire protection, schools, and recreational areas; assisting the infirm and indigent; and implementing policies for the development of real estate. How well a city addressed these challenges affected its ability to attract and maintain businesses and taxpayers.
The Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1889, “The two great needs of this city are pure water and pure air.”8 Ample clean water, the editors recognized, was critical to urban life. At the household level, water was used for drinking, cooking, and washing, while at the municipal level, water flushed away horse dung and urine from city streets and extinguished fires, a constant hazard in nineteenth-century cities. By the 1880s bacteriologists had discovered that toxic microbes bred in polluted water, offering a new inducement to supply clean water and to discard wastewater in a sanitary manner.
Boston illustrates the evolution of urban water policy. The city embarked on a program of publicly supplied water in the 1830s and expanded its availability in subsequent decades. The city created Chestnut Hill Reservoir in 1871 and connected it to Wachusett Reservoir in 1898 in one of the largest water projects in the nation. The discharge of pollutants into rivers, which were a source of drinking water, concerned the Massachusetts Board of Health, which was established in 1869. In 1875 the state legislature instructed the board to institute antipollution procedures. The Boston Health Department (created in 1873) became the administrative arm of the state board. The outbreak of cholera and smallpox epidemics in the 1880s led the legislature to give the state board additional authority; it hired a bacteriologist to test water sources and required cities that were planning sewer systems to file reports with the board. In 1895 the state created a metropolitan water district for the Boston area, with the authority to issue bonds for the construction of water facilities. In 1890 Boston spent a third of its budget on water, streets, and sewers, suggesting that state and urban governments had recognized the connection between water quality and public health.9
New York established a city board of health in 1866, an agency that became a model for the nation. It was among the first to hire a bacteriologist, who reported in 1889 that tuberculosis (TB), a scourge of working-class residents, was caused by a bacterium and was preventable. The New York Board of Health mandated the inspection of dairy herds for the TB bacillus in 1896, and the following year it required doctors to report cases of the disease. By 1910 the city’s TB rate had fallen substantially. The New York and Massachusetts city-state partnerships in public health influenced local jurisdictions elsewhere in the country. By 1900 most large and midsized cities and thirty-nine states had boards of health. Garbage collection had begun in many cities, and they increasingly turned to engineers to oversee these activities or to consult about methods of keeping the urban environment clean.10
Progress in creating a healthy city was slow, however, as boards lacked sufficient enforcement powers and fiscal pressures limited their budgets. Some groups, particularly immigrants and physicians, resisted the imposition of health regulations; antistatist thinking and racism hindered reform in the South. Despite these countervailing pressures, most cities had public water facilities by 1900 and had embarked on sewer and storm drainage projects. Water infrastructure and public health campaigns, along with regulations concerning food adulteration, street paving, and garbage collection, produced positive dividends for urban health. Mortality rates, especially for infants, dropped substantially in the first decades of the twentieth century, well before the medical profession had a major impact on extending longevity. By 1900 America’s large cities were at least as healthy as Europe’s.11
The legal doctrine of state police powers enabled local governments to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Efforts to ensure clean water clearly fell within this purview, as did policing and firefighting. Police departments, the primary units charged with protecting city neighborhoods, enlarged their forces during the late nineteenth century, although policing practices changed only incrementally and remained a highly politicized arena of municipal government. State lawmakers in Massachusetts transferred the management of Boston’s police department to a commission appointed by the governor in 1878. Fire protection evolved in a different context, as a burning building constituted a clear and dramatic danger. Pressured by insurance companies and city businesses, fire departments became more professional and better equipped to extinguish fires, thanks to mobile steam engines, alarm systems, fire hydrants, and building codes. Losses due to fire damage fell during the era.12
Education was the other major function of local governments. Public support of education was decentralized in more than 100,000 schools, whose student populations doubled between 1870 and 1900. The number of teachers, who were increasingly female, kept pace with the surge of students, who generally stayed in school longer in 1900 than in 1870. Three policy trends marked the direction of public education: state laws requiring compulsory education (in seventeen states by 1900), the creation of high schools, and state-based requirements for teacher certification. Statewide coordination of education policy was accomplished by establishing boards of education (in twenty-eight states by 1900). Despite these steps toward state oversight, education remained firmly lodged in local hands.
Funding for schools, police and fire protection, water and sewer infrastructure, and other urban functions raised the cost of municipal government. Borrowing to finance infrastructure projects saddled some cities with large debts. Figure 10.1 plots city spending for Boston and Cleveland during the Gilded Age; expenditures rose over the long run but dropped or slowed during depression years, notably in the mid-1870s and 1890s. The downturn following the Panic of 1873 had a large impact on financial outlays, as city after city retrenched its spending in response to declining revenue. Middle-class residents, who were property owners and thus the principal taxpayers for urban governments, blamed fiscal imbalances on improvident financial management, including corruption, and demanded restraint. The depression of the 1870s spurred a wave of state constitutional revisions and statutes that limited cities’ borrowing capacity and imposed tax limits. By 1881 fifteen states had set debt ceilings on local governments, and twenty-four had restricted their investment in railroads. Constitutional revisions limited New York City debt to 10 percent of the assessed value of property, the chief source of urban revenue, and limited property tax rates to 2 percent of assessed value. In 1894 New York State extended these limitations to all its cities and counties. Fiscal restrictions helped municipalities weather the economic downturn of the 1890s better than they had in the 1870s. Over time, however, local restrictions increased the pressure to expand the fiscal role of the state government.13
Figure 10.1. Boston and Cleveland expenditures, 1870–1905. Sources: Charles Phillips Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 351; Charles C. Williamson, The Finances of Cleveland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), 243, appendix C.
Despite conflicts over taxation, urban governance progressed during the Gilded Age. Contrary to Bryce’s conclusion that city government was a “conspicuous failure,” historian Jon Teaford titled his comprehensive study of municipal governance Unheralded Triumph. Compared with their European counterparts, American cities were superior or equal in areas such as water systems, streetcar service, fire protection, public parks and libraries, and education. But US cities, Teaford wrote, fell short on support of the poor, slum clearance, and, until the last years of the period, police professionalism.14 Wrestling with formidable challenges during the late nineteenth century, city officials managed to improve urban environments.
EXPANSION OF STATE GOVERNANCE
City governments operated under rules adopted by the state legislature. Before the Civil War most of these bodies convened annually. Beginning in the 1840s a movement to restrict meetings resulted in legislative sessions that convened in alternate years and were limited to a certain number of days. No state that entered the union after the Civil War scheduled annual legislative sessions. By 1900 only six state legislatures met every year. Twenty-one states convened their lawmakers biennially and limited meetings to sixty days or less. Virtually all these states paid their lawmakers a daily rate. Most New England, mid-Atlantic, and midwestern states, which included nearly half the nation’s population, convened their legislatures annually or biennially, without limits on session length, and all paid their legislators a salary. Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois, whose policies influenced lawmakers elsewhere, were in this category. Empire State lawmakers met annually for four months on average and received a salary of $1,500. At the other end of the spectrum, Wyoming’s legislators stayed in Cheyenne no more than forty days every other year and received $5 a day.15
Despite their more permissive schedules, some northeastern states—notably, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey—had the most malapportioned legislatures in the country. New York City was shortchanged in its allotment of seats in Albany. Boston and Chicago, however, received more equitable treatment. Urban growth after the Civil War skewed the apportionment of representation among legislative districts. This inequity was especially prevalent in state senates, many of which allotted at least one lawmaker to every county, regardless of its population. Rural advantages in malapportioned chambers probably blocked numerous proposals, especially those concerning industrial workers.16
Most state lawmakers were elected as either a Republican or a Democrat, came from a middle-class background, and served one term. The majority party selected the leaders and committee chairs in each chamber. Only a rudimentary staff, mainly clerks for selected committees, assisted lawmakers. Many state lawmakers were attorneys, which helped resolve the technical problems of drafting legislation, although critics complained about poorly written bills. Despite operating under tight schedules, receiving minimal compensation and little staff assistance, and being subjected to close scrutiny by newspaper editors and lobbyists, America’s citizen-based legislatures produced an abundance of laws—far too many in the eyes of some critics. On a select number of issues, political party served as the reference for lawmakers’ decision-making, but the majority of issues were settled by nonpartisan voting alignments, often by unanimous consent.17
State lawmakers reviewed a plethora of proposals, many of which were routine and some of which blazed new pathways. Classifying significant policy decisions into several broad domains suggests the uses of state authority during the Gilded Age.18 Two such domains concerned governmental processes and public finance. Conspicuous in these categories were provisions that limited taxing and borrowing by local governments (see table A.3 in the appendix). Related to these restrictions was the veto power that allowed governors and mayors to prune specific appropriations from spending bills. Massachusetts was the first state to create a tax commission, and its first assignment was to ensure fair property assessments across the state. Election procedures were reformed, principally through laws that mandated secret ballots (printed ballots, marked in private), voter registration, and regulation of campaign finances. Proponents of female suffrage argued that granting the ballot to women would reduce political corruption, but that argument failed to convince most male lawmakers.
State-mandated social policies included compulsory education, mainly in the North and West, and racial segregation in the South. Numerous statutes set moral standards, such as restricting the availability of alcoholic beverages. Some states let localities decide whether to allow the sale of liquor (local option laws), a compromise that permitted state legislators to avoid taking a definitive position on prohibition. Some laws extended benefits for specific groups, such as veterans and the physically impaired, or for specific purposes, such as the creation of recreational areas. New York’s Adirondack State Park (1883) and Revere Beach in Massachusetts (1896) pioneered the development of state recreational spaces.
Acting under the advice of medical experts and pressure from civic reformers and urban officials, legislators established state boards of health (in most states before 1900) and gave them the authority to set water standards and direct the construction of new water facilities, including the installation of sewers. Statutes that made it illegal to adulterate foods were common by the 1880s in the northern states, although their scope and enforcement remained rudimentary during the Gilded Age. Building codes and tenement regulations adopted during these decades were similarly weak. More effective was the licensing of health care providers such as doctors, pharmacists, and dentists. Professional organizations used these licensing panels to establish quality standards, which afforded their members occupational protection.
Public demands for security stoked support for better police and fire protection, mainly in cities. The depression of the 1870s and ensuing labor conflicts produced statutes that restricted vagrancy (directed in part toward unemployed tramps) and revitalized the militia. Illinois enacted an antiriot and anticonspiracy statute in the wake of the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago; the city responded by enlarging its police department. Laws providing for parole addressed the number of inmates in state prisons, which was growing faster than the population as a whole.19
Conscious that blue-collar workers made up an increasing proportion of their constituents, legislators in northern states established bureaus of labor statistics and boards of arbitration, the latter designed to mediate labor disputes. Laws limiting the number of hours worked by women and children in factories appeared by the mid-1880s; other statutes mandated the payment of wages in money (rather than company scrip), the regulation of sweatshops, and the adoption of standards affecting mine safety and pay. Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and California adopted regulations concerning factory workers by 1889. The catch was a shortage of inspectors to ensure compliance with the law. A second hurdle was the hostility of some state courts.
Numerous scholars have argued that legislative actions in the Gilded Age tended to bestow benefits, sometimes labeled “distributive policy.” To the extent the states enacted policies that helped businesses and producers, the concept has merit. State law allowed corporations to establish holding companies (so they could legally do business in more than one state) and eased the rules for the incorporation of banks. Lawmakers helped farmers, dairymen, and stockmen by creating dairy and cattle commissions and setting standards for the marketing of agricultural commodities. States authorized agricultural experiment stations (essentially research bureaus, usually located at state colleges) and created state departments of agriculture. Federal financial grants to agricultural experiment stations beginning in 1887 stimulated additional legislative action on this front. Helping farmers and real estate developers was good politics, especially for land reclamation promoters in Florida and on the West Coast. Merchants welcomed laws that improved water transportation, such as harbor development in Boston and in Portland, Oregon. A number of states enacted laws for forest management.20
Legislation that assisted private enterprise, often written by the beneficiaries themselves, seldom generated widespread criticism. In contrast, legislation that regulated industry tended to rub the raw nerves of members of the affected sector. However, there was wide support for state action on some commercial subjects, especially concerning railroads and banks. Banking standards were approved by many northern state legislatures. Railroad laws swept through the country in the 1870s and 1880s, resulting in oversight commissions; some had the power to regulate rates (e.g., Illinois), and others merely collected data and used publicity to police the industry (e.g., Massachusetts). Some states adopted antimonopoly laws beginning in the late 1880s, when the issue of trusts and big business appeared in the public consciousness. Other measures regulated insurance companies to ensure general standards of operation. Thus, although the legislative record contained numerous instances of distributive policy, states also regulated commercial enterprise, albeit often with a gentle hand. Regulation of business generated furious pushback from middle-class legislators, well-heeled lobbyists, and the courts. But many members of these groups stood behind laws that regulated social behavior and dictated uniform community values.
NATIONAL GOVERNANCE
Congress was the primary policymaker in the national government. Most members of the House of Representatives were part-time lawmakers with minimal legislative experience. Between 1875 and 1890, 48 percent of House members were first-termers. As late as 1883, a majority of representatives were serving their first terms. Offsetting congressional inexperience was the fact that a large majority of House members had served in some other government position prior to their election. More than half the representatives had practiced law before arriving in Washington. Legal knowledge was helpful because members of Congress had minimal staff assistance before the 1890s; the congressional Legislative Reference Service was authorized in 1914.21
Political parties had the greatest influence in preparing Congress for business. The majority party selected the leadership positions in each chamber, including the chairs of committees.22 Party leaders also had the means to keep the legislative mills working if the minority party proved obstructive, a frequent occurrence during the Gilded Age. Party cues provided policy positions on some issues, particularly civil rights, tariffs, the admission of additional states, and procedures for operating Congress. Party had a lesser impact on railroad regulation, money and currency, and the administration of government, including territorial offices. Lawmakers filed four times more bills at the end of the century than in the 1870s, yet the number of days in session remained constant, averaging 360 through each two-year congressional cycle. Handling this increased business without lengthening the congressional calendar prodded lawmakers to consider making the legislative process more efficient.23
Despite periods of obstructive partisanship, legislator inexperience, meager staff assistance, and powerful antistatist bias, Congress enacted important laws. Some of these decisions concerned traditional functions such as territorial organization, relations with Native Americans, the distribution of land, taxation and tariffs, overseas commerce, the postal service, and the army; a web of actions revised many statutes during the late nineteenth century. At the same time, Congress carved out new areas of activity. Every administration from Grant’s through McKinley’s expanded the national agenda (see table A.4 in the appendix).
The construction of a “new” navy illustrates how one of the traditional functions evolved. Tethered to sails and wooden hulls, the US Navy became outmoded after the Civil War. By the early 1880s the United States’ ranking among the world’s naval powers, which had adopted steam-powered vessels, steel hulls, and modern rifled guns, had dropped conspicuously. European imperialism and the expansion of overseas commerce convinced some Americans that the nation had to keep pace with Europe. Beginning in 1883 President Chester Arthur (who had replaced the slain Garfield) and the secretary of the navy persuaded a cost-conscious Congress to fund the construction of three steel-hulled cruisers. National lawmakers approved eight more “protected” cruisers between 1884 and 1889, one of which was the Maine, later designated a second-class battleship. In theory, the new vessels were limited to a defensive range close to the American coastline. During the first Cleveland presidency, lawmakers approved the construction of full-scale battleships and allowed them to steam in most waters. Naval modernization continued through the administrations of Harrison, Cleveland (second term), and McKinley. By 1898 the US Navy, with four modern battleships (and more under construction) and several fortified cruisers, easily overwhelmed Spanish defenders in Manila Bay and around Cuba. By 1900 the US Navy ranked fourth in the world. America’s victory in the Spanish-American War led to the annexation of the Philippines as a colony, a case of how the “march of events” produced an unintended consequence.24
Legislation on internal subjects also added new policies to the national agenda. Expanded benefits and new services were approved, including pensions for Union Civil War veterans and their widows (which became the largest category of federal expenditures in the 1890s) and postal delivery to urban addresses (1863) and rural homes (1896). The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) sponsored a variety services, including seed distribution, research on the eradication of crop and cattle diseases, and, beginning in 1887, extension of subsidies to state agricultural experiment stations. As settlers moved west, lawmakers established the US Geological Survey (1879) to inventory natural resources and permitted presidents to set aside forest reserves. Congress had already created Yellowstone National Park (1872), and it added several more preserves before 1900. It established the Bureau of Labor in 1885, approved cash grants to state universities in 1890, and created the Coast Guard. The United States also assumed control of immigration, first by banning Chinese entrants (1882) and then by supervising the admission of all immigrants (1891).
The national government took tentative steps to regulate commerce. Taking a cue from state oversight of railroads, Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in 1887. The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) authorized the Justice Department to prosecute firms that deliberately restrained commerce. Both areas engendered extensive litigation, which initially hamstrung regulation. In 1891 the United States inaugurated the inspection of imported meat. Currency and the money supply followed a zigzag path throughout the Gilded Age, with fiscal liberals advocating inflation, largely through the monetization of silver. Conservatives sought to drive federal paper currency (greenbacks) out of circulation but not notes issued by the private national banks, and they wanted to base the country’s currency solely on the gold standard. This complex matter produced divisions among lawmakers, sometimes along regional lines.
Although broad managerial intervention into the economy lay in the future, Washington established significant precedents in this direction during the Gilded Age. Its actions touched five major functions: national security and immigration control, resource management, economic services and individual benefits, commercial regulation (including business monopolies and railroads), and the governmental process. The last category included legislation that created an appeals court system, established the Department of Justice, and passed the Civil Service Act of 1883, which eventually brought the large majority of federal employees under a nonpartisan merit system. Judicial impediments were among the reasons cited by contemporary critics who faulted the national government for not acting more boldly, especially with regard to business and labor. Despite its modest efforts to control the private markets, Congress did enlarge its statutory intervention into society during the late nineteenth century. These steps raise the question: how well did officials administer these new responsibilities?
ADMINISTRATION
Assessing administration is handicapped by a scarcity of pertinent records and scholarly studies, especially for state and local governments. Nevertheless, the available evidence allows some rough generalizations. All cities and most rural areas supported schools and a police presence, the two functions that accounted for about half of all public employees in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Schoolteachers and staff (the vast majority hired by local governments) outnumbered all federal employees by fourfold in 1870 and nearly twofold in 1900. These differences may have been even larger because of undercounts; many teachers, particularly women, were part-time employees, while others taught in one-room schools that may have escaped notice. States established boards of education and state superintendents’ offices that assisted teacher preparation and designed criteria for obtaining teaching certificates. Cities funded free high schools. High proportions of school-age children were enrolled in public schools, and the school year got longer during the late nineteenth century. America’s public schools, supported primarily by local taxes, were among the best in the world and were instrumental in producing a highly literate population.25
Policing, especially in large cities, warrants a mixed assessment. The challenges facing municipal police rose as populations increased and urban space became denser. To cope with these changes, Boston’s police force expanded from 500 in 1870 to 1,241 in 1900; the cost of the city’s policing rose sevenfold during these decades. With this expansion came organizational reforms such as pensions for retirees, starting in 1878. New York City had taken this step a decade earlier. Chicago’s force totaled 4,000 in 1913. Depressions taxed the capacity of urban police because economic slowdowns increased unemployment. Some of the jobless turned to petty crime and, occasionally, organized protests; others turned up at the local police station for a bowl of soup and a roof overhead for the night. Economic stress and fear of the “dangerous classes” among more affluent residents fueled demands for greater control over workers and minorities, groups accustomed to police brutality. After 1900 police turned their attention to solving crimes rather than merely maintaining social stability. Formation of a national organization of police chiefs facilitated a discussion of common problems across various jurisdictions.26
City administrators also managed streets, health policy, building inspections, public works such water service, public libraries and parks, transportation facilities and other utilities, taxation, audits of public spending, and debt management. All these functions required staff, whose numbers grew during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Cynics sneered that more city workers simply showed that political bosses were inflating the public payroll with sinecures, perpetuating the “extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement” of American cities, as James Bryce put it.
Graft and fraud enriched some urban (and county) political machines around the turn of the century, but Bryce’s indictment is exaggerated. As Rebecca Menes has argued, most city bosses were careful not to alienate middle-class taxpayers and businesses—the groups that made their livelihoods possible. Structural factors limited the range of options available to city bosses. Open borders allowed capital to migrate out of a city to the suburbs or some other urban location. Voters could oust urban officeholders; the bond market could cut off funding for infrastructure projects. Moreover, state lawmakers placed constitutional and statutory limits on city taxation and indebtedness, which constrained fiscal possibilities. Despite these restraints, city bosses got things done, responding to the needs of the poor and immigrants as well as middle- and upper-class urbanities.27 Both the bosses and elitist reformers turned to professionals and experts when dealing with technical matters such as health, engineering, education, libraries, firefighting, and park landscapes. Many city administrators gained decades of experience in their jobs. Despite ethical lapses and the tendency for civic improvements to proceed incrementally, America’s cities registered substantial achievements by the end of the century.28
State governments also expanded their administrative activities. An indicator of this trend was the creation of boards, agencies, and commissions to monitor and in some cases regulate social and economic activities. The pattern began at midcentury and accelerated after 1870. By 1900 New York had eighty-one administrative boards, Oregon sixty-two, Massachusetts fifty-six, and Illinois thirty-four. Most important were boards of health (thirty-five states), railroad commissions (thirty-two states), and bureaus of labor statistics, all of which had regulatory functions. The Massachusetts Board of Health, for example, had numerous responsibilities, including ensuring clean water and proper sanitation, enforcing the food and drug laws, and inspecting dairies and slaughterhouses. It also licensed physicians and medical schools, collected health data, and promulgated health standards. Many boards of labor statistics were charged with enforcing factory laws and investigating employee issues, such as the garnishment of wages for debt. Railroad commissions had a wide variety of oversight missions; the Illinois commission claimed it was responsible for enforcing 294 laws. Some railroad commissions set rates, even after the federal Interstate Commerce Act (1887) went into effect. Other commissions were essentially fact-finding agencies, although their findings could have regulatory effects.29
The effectiveness of state administration varied. Some states failed to create administrative agencies; for example, few bureaus of labor statistics existed in the South. Managers of most regulatory bureaus complained of understaffing and underfunding. Courts undercut the force of statutes designed to protect workers, especially in New York and Illinois.30 Some social regulations were widely ignored by both the public and law enforcement officials. Carrie Nation’s famed destruction of saloons indicates that the prohibition of alcohol was not working in Kansas. The campaign to eliminate the liquor business was the Achilles’ heel of law enforcement in the Gilded Age.
These shortcomings must be measured against the trend of greater state intervention into community affairs after the Civil War. The creation of administrative boards represented an important step toward state administrative centralization, a process that continued into the twentieth century. Board members, many of them leaders in their fields, drew on their expertise to advocate solutions for emerging problems. Adding to their creditability was their affiliation with national organizations of civil engineers, public health officials, firefighters, teachers, and librarians, bodies that were active by the 1880s.31 National officials tapped the experiences of state agencies when the federal government expanded its supervisory agenda.32
Washington has traditionally received poor grades for its administrative efforts before 1900. Some agencies, especially the General Land Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Pension Office, were riddled with inefficiency and scandal. Staffing of these offices was dominated by partisanship and patronage appointments, which, according to reformers, impeded effective policy management. A prime example was the New York customhouse, noted for financial mischief and kickbacks. Congress perpetually resisted division heads’ requests for more staff, confident that better administration could be achieved by working more efficiently without spending more money. Nevertheless, as national functions grew, so did the federal workforce, which increased from 51,000 in 1870 to 239,000 in 1900. Twenty-one thousand federal employees worked in Washington, DC, at the end of the nineteenth century.33
About half of all federal employees worked for the postal system, which maintained offices at virtually every jurisdiction in the nation. The military accounted for another quarter of the federal workforce. A large fraction of the remaining federal workers handled routine assignments, which led Daniel Carpenter to call the national establishment in the nineteenth century a “clerical state.” The Washington-based workforce grew slightly faster than federal employees elsewhere, as officials hired more clerks, messengers, and laborers. The pace of their work slackened in the summer, when offices closed early and many managers escaped the capital’s oppressive heat and humidity. Theodore Roosevelt spent the summers at his Long Island home and sojourned in the Rocky Mountains when he was a federal civil service commissioner. While serving as assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt was put in charge of the department while his boss summered on Cape Cod in 1898, as the Spanish-American War unfolded.34
Political practice and theoretical know-how constrained efficient administration. Because patronage jobs were the lifeblood of partisan electoral organizations, members of Congress bombarded executives with requests for appointments. Whether Democrat or Republican, lawmakers kept a close watch on executive departments, meddled in policy minutiae, and jealously guarded their oversight prerogatives over administration activities. Both parties disliked bureaucracies, holding to the notion that any citizen could perform administrative duties. Congress followed through on this thinking by underfunding administration requests for more staff. Even if Congress had been open to advice from best-practices literature, there was hardly any available: research and theory in public administration did not appear until the twentieth century. Conversely, concepts derivative of laissez-faire economics, pervasive among judges and many entrepreneurs, inspired a set of federal court decisions that stripped the ICC and the Sherman Antitrust Act of their regulatory teeth. The fee system of compensating certain public officials lingered throughout the nineteenth century, a practice that worked against administrative neutrality.35
The pace of administrative action was also slowed by premodern office conditions. At the start of the Gilded Age, electric lights, telephones, duplicating machines, vertical file cabinets, and calculating and tabulating machines did not exist. The typewriter was not widely used until the end of the 1880s. Compounding these technical obstacles was insufficient building space in Washington. The commissioner of the General Land Office reported in 1880 that its records were stored in the corridors of buildings scattered around town, requiring that documents be carried to places with sufficient lighting to read them. Administrative buildings lacked central heating and indoor plumbing. It took years for all the offices to be connected by telephone (invented in 1876). Arguably, the premodern office that relied on handwritten documents and the personal delivery of messages conveyed by telegraph or mail was just as responsible for blunting administrative efficiency as were fraud and corruption.36
Modern policy implementation (and evaluation) relies on the collection and processing of pertinent information. This critical dimension of governance was in its infancy during the Gilded Age, when the first data-processing devices became available. The Hollerith tabulating machine (which sorted and counted punch cards) first tallied the numbers from the 1890 federal census. Electric power (which drove the Hollerith tabulator and illuminated work spaces) became available by the end of the period. Administrative advances by large corporations impressed some political leaders, and President Cleveland called for the “application of business principles to public affairs” in his first inaugural address (1885). The Cockrell Committee, a congressional body charged with investigating administrative practices, recommended in 1888 that the federal government adopt office techniques used by businesses and banks. Although blocked in their efforts to apply modern economic thinking to railroad regulation, ICC commissioners campaigned for data collection and uniform accounting, advancing a program begun in the states. By the end of the century the US Census Bureau was a model for massive data collection.37
These innovations produced incremental improvements in federal administration, which grew in managerial complexity as Washington took on more responsibilities. New federal agencies were formed, including the Department of Justice (1870), Coast and Geodetic Survey (1871), Civil Service Commission (1883), Bureau of Labor Statistics (1885), Immigration and Naturalization Service (1891), and Office of Road Inquiry (1894). The USDA (awarded cabinet status in 1889) created divisions for National Forests, Chemistry, Animal Industry, Dairy, and Entomology. All these units had regulatory assignments. The USDA also housed the Office of Experiment Stations, which administered federal grants for agricultural laboratories in the states, as well as the Weather Bureau. By 1899 most positions in the USDA and 45 percent of all federal employees were subject to civil service regulations.38
Both the USDA and the US Postal Service, which launched rural free delivery in 1896, worked to build their reputations as efficient organizations and nurtured a cadre of governmental experts that advocated policy enhancements. The diffusion of administrative units occurred in the Foreign Service, which maintained 300 consuls and thirty consuls general who coordinated international commercial relations by the turn of the century. The Pension Office sent checks to nearly a million Union military veterans and their dependents in the 1890s, an outlay that accounted for two-fifths of the federal budget. This proliferation of governmental units documents the development of federal organizational specificity between 1870 and 1900 (see table A.5 in the appendix).39
Federal administrators turned to experts in certain fields to fill many of these positions. The USDA, which became known as a client agency (especially for farmers), acquired a reputation as a science center, hiring PhDs in an age when advanced degrees were a rarity. Dr. Charles W. Stiles, a physician educated in Germany and France, was hired as a consulting zoologist in the USDA’s Bureau of Animal Industry; he went on to discover that hookworms were the cause of lethargy among southerners. Cleveland Abbe, who joined the Army Signal Service in 1871 as a meteorologist, headed the Weather Bureau for forty-five years and lectured at Johns Hopkins University. Harvey W. Wiley, who headed the USDA’s Chemistry Division between 1883 and 1912, led the battle for national food and drug regulations. In addition to the USDA, experts were employed by the Naval Observatory, Coast and Geodetic Survey, Patent Office, Smithsonian Institution, and Office of Education, among other agencies.
Many of these talented individuals stayed in federal service for decades, bringing expertise and a long institutional memory to their agencies. Alevey Adee, who began as a clerk drafting state papers and eventually became chief of the Diplomatic Bureau, worked for the State Department for forty-seven years. The head of the Library of Congress held his position for forty years. The top officer cadre of the navy and army were careerists, retiring with pensions.40 Federal judges also achieved long tenures. The median length of service as a justice of the US Supreme Court in 1887 was ten years; Stephen J. Field and John Marshall Harlan sat on the high court for thirty-four years, and Samuel Miller served for twenty-eight years. Many state supreme court jurists also held their seats for many years.
Assessments of Gilded Age administration that go no further than Boss Tweed’s misdeeds in New York City, the Whiskey Ring scandals in the Grant administration, or corruption in the General Land Office distort history. Scandal and inefficiency clearly marred the era, but administrative improvements inched forward as the century closed. Even before theories of public administration had been formulated, the public sector had registered some important achievements, such as improved health in the nation’s cities and applications of science in the USDA. Ideas and inspirations arising from the influence of corporate organizations and university experts, technical innovations that aided office work, and pragmatic experimentation at the state and local levels nurtured the administrative reforms that blossomed during the Progressive Era.
WAS THE GILDED AGE LAISSEZ-FAIRE?
The traditional interpretation of Gilded Age politics leveled a stern indictment. Three charges constitute the heart of this unflattering assessment. First, critics stressed corruption, epitomized by city officials’ and legislators’ shakedown of corporations for favors. As journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd expressed it, Standard Oil “has done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.”41 Corruption dovetailed with a second theme, excessive partisanship, wherein political parties pursued power and advancement for their own advantage, not the public interest. And third, critics faulted policymakers for embracing laissez-faire. Broadly construed, laissez-faire is a philosophy that advocates minimal exercise of civic power, particularly with regard to the regulation of business and the protection of workers. The intertwining of laissez-faire theory with a corrupt and partisan politics produced a governmental regime that Henry Adams opined was “poor in purpose and barren in results.”42
Was Adams right? The answer depends on one’s angle of vision. The case for laissez-faire can be found in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian interpretation of American republican principles, in the prominence of classical economic theory, and in judicial decisions. The classic rendition of American republicanism embraced limited government, the protection of individual rights (liberty), equality of treatment and the avoidance of special legislation for favored groups, suspicion of bureaucracy, and restriction of national action to the enumerated powers in the Constitution. Among prominent late nineteenth-century politicians, Grover Cleveland came closest to embodying these precepts, although all presidents gave them lip service. The Democratic Party stood closer to the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian credo than the Republicans did, yet most citizens accepted the general tenor of nineteenth-century republicanism.
Classical economic theory grew in influence during the late nineteenth century. The essence of this view was that natural laws drove commercial markets, which worked best when left in the hands of private enterprise and when there was competition among businesses. Honoring these principles produced the greatest social and economic progress. Governmental intervention was counterproductive because it interfered with the operation of natural laws—divinely prescribed, according to some—and thus hindered the social good. Firm support of property rights and individual liberty, the theory held, would expand the public good. Wide segments of elite opinion makers and judges subscribed to both classical economic theory and traditional liberalism, which decried “class” legislation that conferred benefits on selected individuals. These ideas helped create a mentality that opposed protection for workers, regulation of business, and welfare measures for nonveterans.43
Corporate attorneys and judges frequently drew on classical economics to frame their legal briefs and court rulings. Although the US Supreme Court rejected most constitutional challenges to federal legislation and state statutes, by the mid-1880s the justices displayed increasing hostility to business regulation and taxation. The Supreme Court struck down an Illinois law that regulated railroad rates in the state (1886), declared the income tax portion of the 1894 tariff act unconstitutional (1894), invalidated the federal antimonopoly case against the nation’s largest sugar manufacturer (1895), and prevented the ICC from setting rates for railroads (1897). The high court also upheld the federal government’s prosecution of Eugene Debs, leader of the Pullman strike, for violating a court injunction (1895), a decision that sent him to prison. And in one of the most famous (infamous) cases of the age, Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) upheld racial segregation by southern state governments.44
These and other rejections of federal laws in the 1890s earned sharp rebukes from critics, who labeled judicial laissez-faire “conservative” and out of date. Some state supreme courts received similar rebukes. Illinois and New York had reputations for striking down regulatory, pro-labor, and tax laws. Massachusetts and Virginia, by contrast, displayed no judicial hostility to state action. But delegates in numerous states proceeded in the spirit of leading legal theorists such as Thomas M. Cooley and John F. Dillon, curbing state and city budget powers by constitutional provisions that set debt limits and prohibited the repudiation of debts. Although Americans have often written their political complaints into state constitutions, it warrants repeating that state courts upheld the vast majority of laws whose constitutionality was challenged.45
Courts did disallow some legislation, especially business regulations, pro-labor laws, and tax measures. Several dynamics were responsible for this judicial negativity. For one, the output of statutes increased during the 1880s and 1890s, with numerous provisions affecting economic activity and finance. In addition, third-party challenges to the political establishment, notably by Greenbackers, Populists, and assorted labor parties, worried conservatives. Mainly composed of WASP elites, the legal establishment cast a jaundiced eye on third-party “radicals.” Finally, as legal historian Michael Les Benedict has theorized, the legal profession became alarmed at legislators’ tendency to enlarge the powers of bureaucrats, a step that threatened traditional judicial prerogatives. American courts operated largely on the basis of the common law, which had built up a complex case-by-case legal artifice designed and interpreted by lawyers and judges. Attorneys were prominent among the critics of too much legislation and badly drafted statutes. Motives are difficult to untangle and, to some extent, are irrelevant in the face of explicit actions. Whatever the causes, the US Supreme Court gained a reputation in the 1890s and the Progressive Era for limiting the reach of government. Corporations played a role in this trend, as entrepreneurs had both the incentive and the funds to hire talented attorneys to challenge policies they disliked.46
Although courts displayed laissez-faire tendencies and legislators exhibited hesitancy on controversial subjects, these actions represent only one side of the story. Conversely, the actions of cities, states, and the national government document an incremental expansion of civic intervention. Government regulated more, spent more, hired more employees, and launched new administrative agencies between 1870 and 1900. State and federal courts usually consented to statutes if their legal foundations rested on state police powers. By these criteria, the era should be regarded as a transitional period during which the increased use of political power spurred pushback from conservatives and traditionalists.
James Bryce, the scholar who was so influential in establishing the template for the Gilded Age, recognized this transition. Americans may not have a “theory of the state,” he wrote, yet the states were engines of policy innovation. Laissez-faire was given lip service, but “economic theory did not stop” governmental invention because American lawmakers were “practical men.” To document his contention, Bryce included a table in the first edition of The American Commonwealth that recorded the legislative actions of six states, the United States, and Great Britain in seven policy areas ranging from public health to labor laws. The American states, he observed, exceeded Parliament in the scope of their actions in four categories. Bryce conjectured that most lawyers and economists missed this development because it had been so gradual.47
Nonetheless, the minimalist image of the Gilded Age survived long after Bryce’s death. Historians are largely responsible for the longevity of the laissez-faire thesis. During the Gilded Age influential historians adopted a nationalist perspective on the nation’s history, celebrating the emergence of the national state and slighting the states and cities. An alternative perspective arose in the early twentieth century with the advent of “progressive” history by scholars such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard, who traced the political influence of environment and economic class. From the 1930s through the 1960s, leading American historians were New Deal liberals who applauded robust governmental action. They agreed with the Progressive historians who castigated the Gilded Age for corporate domination, boss rule, and disregard for farmers’ and workers’ interests. Charles and Mary Beard called the Gilded Age the “age of negation” that awaited Progressive Era reform. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s Growth of the American Republic, one of the most successful college textbooks on American history, rehashed classic indictment themes. Richard Hofstadter embellished the political horrors of the period in “The Spoilsmen,” a chapter on the Gilded Age in his influential classic The American Political Tradition. The “captains of industry,” Hofstadter wrote, “bought legislatures.” Castigating the Gilded Age was a convenient jeremiad to discredit laissez-faire approaches to American governance.48 Little if any space was devoted to the positive uses of power.
A second reason that historians misread the Gilded Age stems from their style of history. The progressive and liberal historians who wrote about the period relied heavily on the writings of elites and civil service reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt and Edward Godkin, the conservative editor of the Nation. Contemporary critics were fond of depicting state and local governance as inept, tarnished by corruption, and stymied by partisanship and laissez-faire mentalities. Nonnational history was demoted to second-rate status, resulting in a political portrait oriented largely around presidents. So, while it is true that economic management under national supervision remained minimal until the 1930s, it is false to conclude that the power of the American state as a whole did not grow during the Gilded Age.