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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
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436 An American Dilemma
the election of the representative bodies either, these bodies cannot be
expected to give them redress against the officials. No representative will
see any immediate reason to please a disfranchised group, and laws and
regulations will be drawn up without their interests being represented. If
the system becomes corrupted, the odds are placed even more definitely
against a poor group without political voice.
Not until very late did forces appear on the American scene trying to
reverse the trend. They capitalized on the general mistrust against
‘‘politics” in America and on the value attached to keeping things “out
of politics,” which, paradoxically enough, have been as prevalent as the
tendency referred to of increasing the direct electoral controls. The civil
service reformers obtained their first success when Congress in 1883 enacted
a federal civil service law.® States and municipalities have been following
the federal government, but the reform is far from consummated. Never-
theless, a professional and fairly independent administration is taking shape
in America, and the explanation is primarily the increase in volume and
scope of public activity, as public control and social reform proceed. The
intricacies and complexities of administration have been increasing, steadily
raising the demands on the executors of the public will for professional
training and impartiality. The continuation of the old practices is simply
impossible, since they threaten a complete breakdown in the management
of public affairs.
There have been two other trends which, while apparently opposing
each other, actually do not because they both make the administration
more independent and less arbitrary. On the one hand, there has been
a tendency to write the laws in such a way that the mutual obligations of
government and citizen are more specifically defined. For example, the
trend of social security legislation has been from the vague promise of
government to do something for “paupers” to the legal provision for
definite compensation to every specified person when he becomes a certain
age or subject to certain disabilities, such as unemployment. It is not left
to biased officials to decide what shall be done. On the other hand, as
public interest increasingly comes to embrace new fields of social life—for
instance, the labor market—the type of detailed laws of the past are
giving way to more abstract laws which give the administration greater lee-
way in making rules to meet new situations but which also force it to lay
down such rules rather than to let individual officials use their arbitrary
judgments.** Both these trends are helping to build up an independent,
‘This success was partly an accident: support for a civil service system did not become
widespread until President Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker in 1881.
® Some have argued that this has also made it more possible for discrimination to enter.
The fact is, however, that it is under the old type of law—detailed and complicated—that
discriminatioiii C9jfi best j^oyrish. Under jthe older type of Jaw, there coyjd be few adminjsjirar
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