New Machines

STATES & CITIES

Heart of the political thunderstorm of 1936 is the question: Can anything be done under the different and often contradictory laws of 48 states to solve the major problems of farm, labor, social security, crime, conservation, relief? Last week the centre of that storm was over Chicago and, like the centre of many a storm, it was a dead calm. Democrats and Republicans, sitting side by side in conference, tackled that highly charged question. Yet there was hardly a flash of political lightning, for their object was not to get elected but to get results, not to break political heads but to try a new invention in practical government.

In 1923 a blond, square-jawed Denver lawyer became a member of the Colorado Senate. Henry Wolcott Toll had been educated at Williams College, at Harvard and University of Denver Law Schools, and there was then nothing much to distinguish him from hundreds of other young lawyers elected to state legislatures. After two years in Colorado's Senate he was thoroughly disgusted at the ignorance in which state legislators were obliged to make laws --ignorance of the laws, investigations, researches, and legislative experiments of other states. In 1925, at his own expense, Henry Wolcott Toll sent letters to all 7,500 legislators of the 48 states. Outcome was the American Legislators' Association, of which all 7,500 legislators are ex officio members.

For the next five years most of that Association was Henry Wolcott Toll. He published a paper, The Legislator, and conducted a large correspondence, all to ameliorate the magnificent isolation and indifference to each other which state legislatures had maintained since 1789.

Gradually the work of the Legislators' Association won recognition. The American Bar Association patted it on the back. Finally, in 1930. Mr. Toll got financial aid from the Spelman Fund of New York. He moved the headquarters of his Association to Chicago, set it up in a two-room office near the University of Chicago. Today the Capitol of the U. S. is still in Washington, D. C., but so far as the states individually have any point of contact, it is Mr. Toll's office building in Chicago. There now are the headquarters of 17 organizations serving local governments (e. g., Civil Service Assembly, Public Administration Clearing House, U. S. Conference of Mayors, National Association of Tax Assessing Officers). Presently Rockefeller money is to erect a $500,000 building on Chicago's Midway to house these secretariats, a sort of League of Nations Palace for the local governments of the 48 states.

Meanwhile Mr. Toll, whose hobby had now become his job, went on to other tasks. In 1933 he formed the Council of State Governments, with the idea that each State should at least contribute "a stenographer's salary" ($1,000 to $5,000 a year depending on the size of the State) to maintain an organization for interstate cooperation. Only nine states so far are paying members of it, but last week at the Shoreland Hotel near the University of Chicago, 86 representatives of 33 states assembled to put a new piece of the Council's governmental machinery in motion.

The U. S. Constitution provides that states may make compacts or agreements with one another provided Congress ratifies them. Best example is the compact setting up the Port of New York Authority which links New York and New Jersey together with four bridges and the Holland Tunnel. As a State Senator, Mr. Toll served in the negotiations for the Colorado River Compact which was to divide water power and water rights from Boulder Dam among seven Western states. He soon learned that states seldom agree, because they have no machinery for negotiation. The Colorado River Com pact was ten years in the making. The negotiators were unofficial representatives; their tentative agreements were often repudiated by their governors or their legislatures; when negotiations were begun again a new set of unofficial representatives would appear and all discussion had to start again from the beginning.

The Council of State Governments undertook to remedy this situation. Its proposal was that each state should by law create a Commission on Interstate Cooperation. Each state commission was to consist of three parts: five executive officials representing the Governor; five state Senators; five state Representatives. The ten legislators were to form standing committees on interstate cooperation, to which all bills for such co-operation are automatically referred. Thus the negotiators of compacts or understandings for uniform laws are responsible for them in committee and on the floor, and thus the Governor through his appointees is committed to them in advance, thus dozens of hitches are eliminated.

In March 1935, New Jersey became the first State to pass such a law. Year ago, when the first General Assembly of Commissions on Interstate Co-operation was held, New Jersey and Colorado were its only members. Last week the second General Assembly found 14 states with such Commissions, all of them, except Colorado and Nebraska, from east of the Mississippi. In addition, twelve other states which have not yet formally adopted the plan have standing committees on interstate co-operation in one or both houses of their legislatures. Seven other interested states sent delegates to last week's convention.

Already in the few months that such commissions have existed they have gone quietly to work. Most active have been the commissions of the three adjoining States of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, which have had no less than ten meetings since last November on labor compacts, anti-crime measures, highway safety, milk control, stream pollution and water supply, relief for jobless transients, use of the waters of the Delaware River basin. No noteworthy compacts have yet been made, but legislative programs have been worked out and the wheels of co-operation have been started turning.

Said Mr. Toll to the delegates who assembled in Chicago: "There is only one way in which we can reduce this pressure for centralization [of government], and that is by devising effective machinery through which the state governments can engage in a constructive and aggressive campaign of co-operation for better, modern integral government."

His sentiments were echoed with approval by Franklin Roosevelt's uncle, Frederick A. Delano, who, as chairman of the President's Committee on National Resources, was there to lend the meeting his advice.

Only dissatisfaction among the delegates was that the machinery was merely being oiled instead of put to use at once. When the question rose of how to get each state to chip in its "Stenographer's salary." up bounced State Senator Ralph Gilbert of Kentucky. Said he: "Gentlemen, I am a busy man. I didn't want to come to this meeting because I was so busy at home. We've had a lot of fine talk here about cooperation, but high sounding phrases aren't enough. I can get $5,000 from my legislature if I can show them what it will do for them. I have on my hands the immediate problem of the whiskey tax. The distillers threaten to move to Indiana and Illinois if we levy even a 5-c- tax. I heard the same threat at the meeting of the Indiana legislature last fall. Will the gentlemen from Indiana and Illinois meet with me on this problem right now?"

That noon at luncheon twelve representatives of the three states got down to brass tacks on whiskey taxes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.