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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 - 3. The North and the South
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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 437
strong and impartial administration. A fourth trend, having the same
effect, is centralization. Public control is gradually moving from munici-
palities and counties to the states and from the states to the federal govern-
ment. It is hardly necessary to point out that the New Deal during the
’thirties has speeded up all these trends.
America is thus, finally, well on the way to building up an Independent
administration. Its rising importance is reflected in higher social prestige
of public officials as their tenure and economic security are becoming pro-
tected. Public service is beginning to become a professional career which
can attract intelligent, well-trained and ambitious youths. A visitor to
America who compares attitudes of the late ’twenties with those of the
early ’forties notices a great change within this short space of time. It Is
possible to envisage a very different system of government within a couple
of decades: the common people in America are coming to realize that a
capable and uncorrupted bureaucracy, independent in its work except for
the laws and regulations passed by the legislatures and the continuous
control by legislators and executives, is as important for the efficient work-
ing of a modern democracy as is the voter’s final word on the general
direction of this administration.
Although this is the trend in government, America is still far from the
goal. This is particularly true in local administration. It is more true in
rural than in urban regions, and more true in the South than in the North.
Tremendous changes are under way, but they have not yet meant much
for the masses of Negroes, since most of them live in regions where the
protection of an Independent administration and of objectified administra-
tive rules are much less developed than in the country at large. And as we
shall find, Negroes are disjranchised more completely in the very localities
where the vote is important because administration is lax,
3. The North and the South
In the North Negroes have the vote like other people, and there is
nowhere a significant attempt to deprive them of the franchise.* To the
foreign observer the fact that practically nobody in the North thinks of
tive rules since they would illegally modify the law. As a result, the individual official had
to use his own personal judgment when the law did not apply to new or odd types of
cases. This obviously allows for discrimination. When administrative rules can adjust
abstract laws to new situations, there is much less opportunity for individual officials to
insert their own biases, and so there is much less discrimination in the individual case. It
is not the rules emanating from Washington that are discriminatory in the meaning important
to the individual citizen, but rather the arbitrary practices of individual officials who apply
the laws to concrete cases.
The only major exceptions—and even these are not restricted to Negroes—SLit the cases
of gerrymandering and the failure to redistrict in some Northern cities. (Sec Chapter
jSection 4.)
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