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Books > History > American history
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Progressive Cities - The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Paperback)
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Progressive Cities - The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901-1920 (Paperback)
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Although the commission government movement is often treated by
historians as an element of the reform surge of the Progressive
Era, this is the first full-scale study of the origins, spread, and
decline of the commission idea. Commission government originated in
Galveston, Texas, where business leaders conceived the plan as a
temporary measure to speed recovery from the great hurricane of
1900. Other cities in Texas and across the nation soon followed; by
1920, about 500 municipalities had adopted the plan in which
elected representatives serve as heads of city departments and,
collectively, as a policy-making body. Beginning with Galveston and
Houston and Des Moines, Iowa, Bradley Robert Rice presents detailed
case studies of the earliest commission cities and shows how the
plan was developed and modified to suit each community's needs. He
goes on to chronicle the adoption of the commission plan by other
cities across the country that strove for "businesslike efficiency"
as a reaction against corruption and machine politics in urban
government. Most commission charters included a wide-ranging
package of municipal reforms, such as the short ballot, at-large
representation, nonpartisanship, civil service, and direct
legislation. Yet Rice shows that the commission plan generally
offered little in the way of social reform to accompany its
reorganization of municipal government. Applying a model of
innovation diffusion, the author analyzes how and why the new form
of city government spread across Progressive Era America. He also
thoroughly explores the relationship between the commission plan
and other Progressive Era reforms and reports on the reasons for
its decline from both a social and a practical perspective.
Progressive Cities is described by Professor Bruce M. Stave, editor
of the Journal of Urban History, as "a sound piece of work which
should make a useful and worthwhile contribution to the existing
scholarship on urban reform and should appeal to an audience which
cuts across disciplines: history, political science, urban studies
and urban planning."
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