STATES & CITIES: New Machines

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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.