Peter James Madgwick - American City Politics

First published in 1970

This edition published in 2007
Routledge
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1970 P. J. Madgwick

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

American City Politics
ISBN10: 0-415-41771-6 (volume)
ISBN10: 0-415-41930-1 (subset)
ISBN10: 0-415-41318-4 (set)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-41771-6 (volume)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-41930-7 (subset)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-41318-3 (set)

Routledge Library Editions: The City

First published 1970

by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane

London E.C.4

Printed in Great Britain

by Northumberland Press Ltd

Gateshead

P. /. Madgwick 1970

No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism

ISBN o 7100 6807 7

4 Four political roles

I am convinced of the pedagogic justification for small books on large subjects. At the same time I am aware that such books depend on the work of many others, who have laboured at making large books on smaller subjects. So my first and deepest debt is to those American scholars whose work I have drawn on. The names scattered through the text indicate my greatest creditors. Those who pursue these references will discover much fine scholarship, graced by some notable examples of elegant, forceful and readable prose.

I am also indebted to several administrators in Washington DC and New York for making so welcome a wandering British academic. I am grateful to Miss Judy Morton, formerly a Research Officer in this Department, for allowing me to consult some of her own work on the City Manager, and to Miss Sandra Winterhalder, a graduate research student, for reading the manuscript, and pointing out some of its more remediable defects.

Finally, I must offer my thanks to my wife for a good deal of typing and even more forbearance.

P.J.M.

A note on terms

There are a number of terms which students will know or quickly pick up; but one or two may lead to confusion.

Charter: constitution, or basic law.

Planning: connotes comprehensive planning of total community services, not just the physical layout.

Zoning: the regulation of land-use and development (thus planning in the narrow sense).

Merit or civil service systems: appointment and promotion by formal procedures based on competitive assessment of professional competence, usually by examination.

Patronage: power to award appointments, contracts and other favours; used (i) to secure politically compatible policy advisors and high executives (ii) to reward party workers (iii) to secure support (iv) for personal profit. While the whole system is open to corruption, the first three objectives are accepted elements in American politics.

Administration: may refer, according to context, to the Government (especially the Executive) as in the Nixon Administration; and is not restricted to civil servants.

Official, professional: are used about elected officers like

the Mayor, and not confined to career civil servants.

Labour: trade unions.

Suburbs: places regarded as suburbs are often farther out of the city centre than in Britain.

Middle class: as a general reference is more inclusive than in Britain: if you are not middle class you are poor.

Metropolitan: see p. 2.

Machine: see p. 8.

Reform : see p. 9.

The attraction of American local politics for the political scientist is that there is so much of it. For the local government of 200 million people spread over half a continent in 90,000 legally separate units produces a fascinating variety of types of governmental structure and political processes. The difficulties of making general statements of any validity and significance about such a multiplicity of activity are formidable. To forsake the analysis of a single tree for the description of the wood is hazardous indeed, not least because it assumes that the trees make up a wood. Conceivably the totality of activity is as diverse as say, an amalgamation of a cricket match, a baseball game, an investiture and a space-shot. It is true that no city or group of cities may stand alone as a representative example of American city government. No one can ever judge the quality of local government in the United States by his experience with one or two units (Dahl, 1967, 180). However the limits to the scope of generalization are not entirely disabling.

Fortunately, the literature, though biased towards the North Eastern United States, is wide ranging; and a judgement of quality (as distinct from an understanding of structure and process) is not a dominant purpose in this study. Nor is the national reference of prime importance. The object is not so much to encapsulate American local government, as to illumine kinds of local political activity in America. The concern is as much with parts of the wood, and sometimes with individual trees, as with the whole amorphous and cacophonous wood. Hence, the use of some, most, sometimes, usually and similar approximations may perhaps be justified where approximation is illuminating, exactness impossible and silence pedagogic-ally useless (or frustrating anyway).

The term city itself is the first approximation. In the USA it has precise meaning only in constitutional law, indicating a particular division of local government. Here it is used in the imprecise but generally accepted sense of an urban as distinct from a rural area, characterized by large numbers of people, living in proximity, mainly engaged in industrial and commercial activity and interacting socially in some ways so as to form a large, if rather tenuous and shadowy, community. (But that word is an approximation, too.) Most such areas are legally cities, but stray into the surrounding area, like British cities. When this results in a cluster of population around, and related to, a city of at least 0,000 inhabitants, the area is officially described as a standard metropolitan statistical area, or a metropolis, or in planners polemical, the Spread City. In i960 there were 212 SMSA's containing 63% of the population of the USA. The smallest city mentioned in the text is Oberlin (Ohio) with 8,000 people; the largest is New York City (with 8,000,000). Most of the cities considered here are larger than 50,000, and there are many references to the very largest cities of over half a million inhabitants. This is not a disproportionate emphasis in relation to the number of people living in these cities; but it is necessary to bear in mind the large number of smaller cities, and the high standing of small cities in the American ethos.