City Efficient Movement

The City Efficient Movement was the product of a marriage between two of the most significant phenomena of the Progressive Era: the municipal reform movement and what has been dubbed the “efficiency craze.”

Periodic efforts at municipal reform dating from the early 1870s concentrated on infusing city government with “honesty” and “economy” by replacing “bad” men with “good” and by reducing municipal expenditures, workforces, and “unnecessary” services. A growing number of reformers began to propose more systematic solutions to the burgeoning urban crisis, such as nonpartisan elections, a stronger executive, or the separation of administration from politics. The first comprehensive analysis appeared in 1888 in The American Commonwealth by Lord James Bryce, in which he contended that municipal government was the one conspicuous failure of the American experiment. Bryce blamed that deplorable state of affairs on four root causes: (1) unfaithful office holders who squandered resources and raised taxes to disastrous levels, (2) partisan politicians who enriched themselves, pandered to immigrant voters, and drove conscientious citizens from the political arena, (3) the increasing intrusion of state legislatures into municipal affairs, and (4) structural defects in city government. Bryce's book brought the growing urban malaise to the center of national attention and provided the blueprint for what historians have dubbed “structural reform.” Always implicit in structural reform was the transference of political power from the “masses” to the “classes” and the use of the modern business corporation as an organizational model.

Municipal reform gained irresistible momentum because the severe economic depression of 1893–1897 wrought particular devastation upon the nation's cities. Economic disaster gave rise to a significant cohort of “social reformers” who responded by attempting to lower costs for such vital public services as gas, light, heat, and transportation, redistributing the tax burden onto those most able to bear it, providing publicworks projects for the unemployed, and “humanizing” the urban environment by building parks, playgrounds, and public baths. Their numbers were dwarfed, however, by the growing legions of middle- and upper-class reformers who founded citizens' associations and taxpayers' leagues dedicated to “retrenchment” by eliminating “waste,” cutting costs, and lowering taxes. Their movement was institutionalized with the formation of the National Municipal League (NML) at its First National Conference for Good City Government in 1894. Within the next few years, the NML proliferated into branches in hundreds of cities, established a national network of municipal correspondents, and held several national conferences to analyze the nature and causes of the urban malaise.

In its early stages, the efficiency movement existed in a parallel universe of mechanical engineers. The concept of mechanical efficiency developed out of the application of the laws of thermodynamics to the technology of the steam engine. As engineers strove to upgrade their status from that of trade or craft to profession, they proclaimed scientific efficiency to be the touchstone of their expertise. As machines became ever larger and more powerful, engineers and their industrial employers sought ways to augment their [Page 153]speed, precision, and productivity with a minimum expenditure of energy, time, money, and materials. So bountiful and beneficial were the fruits of enhanced mechanical efficiency that Americans envisioned the machine as a metaphor for society. Efficiency soon became a virtual synonym for progress.

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