| Final Entry, Biography of W. Whyte 04/14/01
Biography of William Pinkney Whyte
Tocqueville would note “This ceaseless agitation which democratic government has introduced into the political world, influences all social intercourse.” It was in this era that William Pinkney Whyte would help shape the “new civilization” with a long political career. It began with the influence of early fundamental republicanism.
Ratified in the 18th century, the new American Constitution would be embraced in the 19th century. For as George Washington’s Farewell Address was to mark the unselfish role of anti-partyism and "deference" as a republican virtue, the Age of Jackson with its pro-active suffrage and partisan voting was to mark the age of a new culture of liberal reform, social egalitarianism and modern democracy.
Raised in an environment where daughters of the revolution were to instruct their sons in the “principles of patriotism”, William Pinkney was tutored by R. M. McNally, who had been Napoleon Bonaparte’s private secretary. At age 18 he was employed by Peabody, Riggs and Co. as a clerk, and by age 20, he was working for the law offices of Brown and Brune in Baltimore where he stayed for a year before entering Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar when he returned two years later to study under Judge John Glenn, former director of the collapsed Bank of Maryland
In 1847, barely 23 years old and newly married to Louisa D. Hollingsworth, daughter of a well known Baltimore merchant, William Pinkney Whyte was elected as a Democrat to a seat in the House of Delegates from Baltimore City where he served for one term before returning to his law practice in 1851. There, his hopes for a dignified private life as a lawyer were notto be realized.
The Democratic Party nominated him for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which was only narrowly lost. In 1853 they nominated him as their candidate for Comptroller of the Treasury, and he won the election.
The 1850s found Maryland amid a transition from agriculture to manufacture; from slave to free, from southern charm to northern determinism. Mineral wealth and resources from the West were needed for industry on the Atlantic seaboard, and huge investments in internal improvements were made by the State to connect the state by canal, road and rail. Some of the richest deposits of bituminous coal lay between the Pennsylvania boarder and the Potomac's north branch, an area twenty-five miles deep by five miles wide. As soon as the General Assembly chartered the B&O and the C&O, corporate management organized itself to mine Maryland coal.
In October 1850 the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal reached Cumberland. By 1852, rails linked the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River with the help of financing by George Peabody, a New Englander with London banking ties. Financing also came from Johns Hopkins, a Quaker merchant with interest in developing the B&O. Other railroads followed to cross the state.
On the water, Maryland was building ships, lighthouses and ports. The Baltimore Clipper added to a vibrant transatlantic sailing tradition with ships built for speed, tonnage and commerce that became world reknown. On the Eastern shore working vessels were built for fishing, oyster harvesting and pleasure.
Because of its industrial labor market,however, Baltimore was attracting immigrants from free-states and northern states alike, but mostly from Europe. By 1850, the city reached a population of 170,000. It would shape the politics of Maryland.
Along with most industrial northern cities, most of the new immigrants were active abolitionists. Maryland however, was predominatly an agricultural state with a long tradition of tobacco growing that was labor intensive.
The nation was changing from a rural community to one in which more than half of all Americans lived in cities. Millions of immigrants were flooding into America searching for opportunities and freedom such that modern historians are yet to analyze the full metamorphosis that occurred in the cities of the 19th century. For one historian, A. Jacobson, the overarching struggle of the era was the ongoing struggle between America’s dynamic industrial capitalism and the needs of the nation’s republican institutions: American industry needed markets for its output, raw materials to keep its engines running, and cheap labor to man those engines. Further, intellectuals, statesmen, and many in the public at large also believed that their country’s democracy - its republican “virtues” (espoused by George Washington) needed protection from foreign immigrants, or “barbarians”. In Baltimore, it was this polarity of interests that caused tension.
Far from a city of “barbarians”, Baltimore was populated predominantly by hard working Irish immigrants who filled the ranks of the industrial workforce. They constituted the popular majority who supported the Democratic party and the tenets of egalitarianism . William Pinkney Whyte’s paternal grandfather, Dr. John Campbell White, had come to America as a physician in 1798 following the Irish rebellion in which he had taken part.
Also in Baltimore was a large population of Germans who contributed largely to the scientific and "objective imperative" of mechanization and specialization that would reform conventional moral disciplines. New disciplines and enlightened educational institutions were created like Johns Hopkins, Clark, and Chicago.
Baltimore city was also home to a population of nearly seven thousand Jews who had settled there by mid-century, amongst them leading bankers like the Cohens who added to the economic health of the community. The city was vibrant with merchants and clothiers like Ettings, Friedenwalds, Hutzlers, Hamburgers, Levys, and Sonneborns.
Absent from the politics of Maryland during the administration of a scandalous Governor Philip Thomas, William Pinkney Whyte would step into his role as Comptroller during the Administration of Governor Enoch Louis Lowe (1850-1853) whose two predecessors, Governors Pratt, and Thomas (Francis, cousin of former Phillip Thomas) had attempted to retire the State’s debt and institute reform that produced the newly ratified state constitution. Maryland was in need of modernization.
The need was great for an increase of elected public officers, including the Comptroller, four Commissioners of Public Works, and a Commissioner of the Land Office. Also to be elected popularly were all Judges, Sheriffs, County Commissioners, Clerks of Courts, Registers of Wills, States Attorneys, Surveyors, Justices of the Peace, Constables and Road Supervisors. Senatorial terms were fixed at four years, and a census reapportionment for seating delegates in the lower house gave each county no less than two members, with four for Baltimore.
Social reform pervaded the city as it would the nation, and many new measures were approved by an electoral majority in Maryland. One change came by appeal to the General Assembly for the “obliteration of ancient barbarism - imprisonment for debt” and funds for the mentally ill.
Other changes were necessary: At the start of William Pinkney Whyte’s term as Comptroller in 1853 a legislative Committee on the Colored Population pointed to an increase in the Negro population of 164,445 of whom 90,368 were slaves. It declared “That the two races must ultimately separate, the Committee do not doubt.”. Within the next decade, this issue would rend the nation, and nowhere was a state more divided than Maryland.
During his terms of office as Comptroller, (1853 to 1855) William Pinkney Whyte implemented a system quoted in the General Assembly as
“One of admirable character, and that the details of the office have been so simplified that mistakes or confusion hereafter in the official business of the Comptroller’s office is almost impossible. The careful arrangement of the official vouchers and the uniform precision in all the details of the office evince not only the wisdom of the Constitution in providing the safeguard to the Treasury, but also show the successful manner in which the objects of the Constitution and the several acts of Assembly referring to the department have been observed by Mr. Whyte, the late incumbent.”
By the end of his term of office in 1855, William Pinkney Whyte did not seek re-election. Two years later, the Democratic Party again nominated him for Congress. He was defeated and protested the corruption of an election system clearly out of control, but the U.S. House of Representatives refused to concur with a report submitted by the Committee on Elections recommending that he be seated. His protest however, would help reform future elections. By 1857, Whyte retired from public life, and for good reason.
In 1858, civil law and order was so threatened by mob protest that prominent Baltimore business and professional men including clerks and skilled workers formed a City Reform Association led by slavery opponent George William Brown.
The Governor of Maryland was a democrat, Thomas Watkins Ligion: He attempted to reform elections. In the General Assembly, he faced a coalition of Whigs and American Party men, rooted in habits of the past.
Since the 1830s, private groups of elite planters and traditionalists, whose agricultural economies had sustained the state for a century and a half, met to discuss the threat to old ways that accompanied the influx of immigrants. Confused, mistaken by change and an impending civil war, they asked themselves what had happened to the former influence of the native born. Secretive about their meetings at their lodges, these nativists answered all questions with “I know nothing”: As in the nation, Maryland would have internal conflicts of interest.
The “know Nothings” were a product of a fast moving industrialized world in which the telegraph changed the contours of time and space. In Baltimore, the new faces of immigrants, race and religion displaced their security, if not subvert their moral and religious impulse into reform impulse such as abolitionism and temperance which was entered wholesale into the political theater. Such political expressions of egalitarianism threatened deferential republicanism, many of who came from rural regions where their economic and social stability was still slave and labor intensive. The Whigs and Know-Nothings merged to become the American Party, and often included in their ranks, the elite industrialists of the north.
These traditional values however, would find little sympathy in Baltimore where political activism engendered the egalitarian aspirations of newly enfranchised workers and recently arrived immigrants emerging as the new middle class in new social environments and experiences, such as parlor centered homes; embellished commercial and professional workplaces: In Baltimore, notions of liberalism was represented by a political activity that enlarged individual freedom
Indeed partisanship seemed essential to man’s identity, as it did for W Pinkney Whyte. But in these times of chaos, "participatory democracy" spilled from the parlors to saloon brawls and street riots, such that politics tarnished the social respectability of patriotic civic participation, and many good men withdrew from the republican political process, including William Pinkney Whyte, who devoted the Civil War years to his law practice and his family.
Campaigns and elections had degenerated to mob rule in Baltimore, such that the State could hardly be brought into alignment with Lincoln’s Union.
As Union troops made their way through Baltimore amid street rioting and uncertainty, Maryland entered the civil war divided and with much acrimony.
From a national perspective, as one of the oldest colonies of the nation, Maryland had been nursed on a tobacco economy that was financed by Europe where the custom of slave owning was acceptable. But located next to the heart of a National government bent on industrialization, tensions mounted between the state and the Federal government, and voters were bullied at the polls to elect Republicans as state leaders who committed 46,000 troops to the Union. From Maryland 20,000 troops however, volunteered for the Confederate south.
After the war, Maryland was faced with a Reconstruction program reserved for secessionist states. Disenfranchised, divided and developing haltingly for a modern world, it elected a Democratic “machinery” that produced leaders like Gorman, and Raisin whose brand of "lodge democracy" played a central role in party organization. During these years William Pinkney Whyte remained out of politics, wondering perhaps as he witnessed the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; the doing and undoing of state constitutions and mob riots of one-party rule, if the new republic would survive.
In 1868 William Pinkney Whyte nominated Horatio Seymour for President as delegate to the Democratic National Convention. On July 14th, upon the invitation by Governor Swan, Whyte was sworn in to complete the term of office in the United States Senate vacated by Reverdy Johnson who resigned for an appointment as Minister to the Court of St. James.. He made left his mark in the highly contentious Congress in December when President Andrew Johnson sent his annual message to Congress to be read. The civil war was over, but the wounds were still raw. Congress, differing from the President over Reconstruction issues, and following an unsuccessful attempt by Radicals to impeach him, made a motion to dispense with further reading of the President's address. As biographer Frank F. White, Jr. describes
"Whyte rose to defend Johnson, calmly and fearlessly pointing out to his colleagues that the President of the United States was doing his constitutional duty and that Congress had no other alternative except to listen to him. Johnson's detractor withdrew his motion so that his message was read without further incident."
. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Maryland was being overtaken by industrial growth, labor reorganization, professional development and consumerism. The pressure for reform was inevitable.
In 1871 The Democrats nominated him for Governor, and he won the election by 15,000 votes. He was sworn inaugurated on January 10, 1872 and served for slightly more than two years.
Governor Whyte was evidently the first Governor to enjoy the newly built mansion since the old had been sold to the Naval Academy. During his tenure as Governor, the Board of Public Works, reorganized under a Constitutional Convention three years previously in which a standing Committee on Public Works was created to handle all affairs of internal improvements, began to receive offers for the exchange of state bonds for B & O preferred stock. According to biographer Alan Wilbur, "These offers to exchange bonds for railroad stock continued sporadically into 1876, and sizable amount of preferred stock of the B & O was sold in this manner - most of it to Robert Garrett and Company. Minutes of meetings show exchanges amounting to over $430,000 being approved in May 1971 alone. Shortly thereafter, the County of Allegheny was redistricted to become Garrett County. The board also appointed railroad and canal directors. His administration is noted for comments that he made about agriculture to be in "competition with the agriculturists of the West, and…. to turn our lands to other and more remunerative culture".
The South's postwar economic transformation profoundly affected the course of Reconstruction politics and its ultimate collapse, for as the "Black Code's illustrated, state governments could play a critical role in defining property rights and restricting the bargaining power of planters and laborers. However, Whyte supported the Colored Normal School for the education of freemen even though the state differed with the Federal government over black suffrage. Further, he conceived of a Board of Immigration. And established the State Board of Health and a House of Correction. His term however, was the last of an era of state autonomy, for in the Civil Rights Law of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, the federal government had established a national principle of equality before the law, investing itself with the authority to enforce the civil rights of citizens against violations by their states.
In Baltimore, where industrialization, characterized by modern historians as the defense of the family and community against the force of industrial growth, was causing massive dislocations, frequent depressions and widespread unemployment, as it was nationwide. These conditions were experienced by diverse, often "antagonistic groups with unequal capacities for shaping public choices."
The continuous theater of politics allowed men to vote as a method of engaging in this conflict between public and private values with reform movements, torchlight parades, party politics, and crusades. Labor unrest was manifested in class conflicts, ethnicity and religion. Industrial production absorbed laborers - and produced consumers - who now became enfranchised with public interests as individuals, separate from traditional ties, producing the Gilded Age suffragists. Moreover, the character of forming "organizations" ultimately produced a centralized national economy. As overseas markets developed, Maryland became a leading industrial state, especially in shipbuilding.
The Legislature of 1874, according to Elihu Riley in his History of the General Assembly of Maryland, elected William Pinkney Whyte to the be United States Senator from Maryland, "restoring Maryland.to the dignity it once held." His term began in 1875, but before taking his seat, he would successfully defend the State's claim to a boundary dispute with Virginia as counsel to the Commission to resolve a boundary dispute.
William Pinkney Whyte served for six years in the Senate of the United States Congress: 1875 to 1881. Whyte early took the position to speak on the stability of the currency. (Footnote here the online reference made for Number 5 Re the Ohio Patent dispute).
Whyte opposed the creation of the Electoral Commission of 1876. The following year, he served as a member of the commission which prepared the bill under which the District of Columbia would be governed for nearly one hundred years. Remarkably, Whyte opposed the "Roach Subsidy Scheme" in 1879 which would have subsidized shipbuilders with government funds. Whyte objected to the proposal on constitutional and economic grounds and protested against the inequity of the entire subsidy principle.
Whyte did not seek reelection in 1880. His wife became ill, and his disagreements with Maryland's other Senator Arthur Pue Gorman was patent. The following year, he was voted Mayor of the City of Baltimore without opposition. He served two terms and retired in 1883 to return to his law practice, during which time his wife Louisa died. In 1887 the Democratic State Convention nominated him for the position of Attorney General which he won over a Republican candidate by 10,000 votes. He held the office until 1891, arguing new points of criminal law that reflected a half a century of changes in American society.
In 1892 he remarried Mary McDonald Thomas, and in 1898 Baltimore Mayor William T. Malster appointed Whyte to be a member of the commission to revise the City's Charter. At the turn of the century, he was named City Solicitor, a post he held for three years during which time he guided Baltimore through the steps by which it would dispose of its interest in the Western Maryland Railroad.
He thought he could retire from public life in 1903, but when Pue Gorman died in June 1906, Governor Warfield appointed Whyte to fill the vacancy in the Senate of the United States Congress left by Gorman.
When the Democratic State convention met in 1907 to adopt the primary system of conduction election, Whyte was enlisted. Thus until his death in 1908, William Pinkney Whyte, grandson to one the first Vice Presidents of America, served in politics less to promote special interests as to develop constitutional frameworks and stable foundations.
According to regional and national newspapers, William Pinkney Whyte was known as "Maryland's Grand Old Man", and was regarded with deep personal affection in the State, and was remembered nationally as sympathetic with the South, having served honorably in public office for sixty-two years. He was buried in the Emmanuel Protestant Episcopal Church.
Bibliography
1 Glen C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin Rude Republic: Americans and their politics in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, 2000. (P16).
2 See Also Richard P. McCormick, The Second Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1966); and William E. Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything: Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860” in Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860, (College Station, Tex., 1982); and, Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987). See also, Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983)
3 Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, Cornell University Press, 1980. (p287)
4 See Frank F. White, Jr., The Governors of Maryland 1777-1970 (Annapolis: The Hall of Records Commission, 1970), 179-183.
5 Robert J. Brugger, Maryland: A Middle Temperament 1634-1980, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988 (p230)
6 historians like Michael L. Krenn, Alan Trachtenberg, Robert Wiebe, Richard Hofstadter, Walter LaFeber, Gabriel Kolko
7 Review by Michael L. Krenn of Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and abroad. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
8
9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
10 James H. Fitzgerald Brewer, “Democracy to Mobocracy, 1835-1860” The Old Line State: A History of Maryland, Hall o f Records Commission State of Maryland, 1971.(p71)
11 Ibid., p (73)
12 Insert reference from website, next online…
13 Insert newspaper accounts that apply…
14 Altschusler and Blumin…(p9)
15 Frank F. White, Jr., The governors of Maryland 1777--1977 (Annapolis: The Hall of Records Commission, 1970), 179-183
16 Alan M. Wilner, The Maryland Board of Public Works, Hall of Records Commission, Department of General Services, Annapolis, Md. 1984, (p62)
17 In that a comprehensive struggle over the shaping of a new labor system followed the civil war for economic survival in the south, new labor rules were set up to resume production : President Jackson in 1865 established a comprehensive system of vagrancy laws, criminal penalties for breach of contract and other measures known as the "Black Codes"
18 Eric Foner, "Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction" The New American History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1997 (p100)
19 Richard L. McCormick, "Public Life in Industrial America" The New American History, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1977, (p108)
Thank you Emily. (04/11/01)
I am working on a final report for the history of the Comprtoller's activities up to, and including Whyte's term of office. It will be posted in a few days,but I'm offline and have to find a public place to insert a disk (which is hard to find!).
I'm not sure that I'm applying to a third category here though, since it is superimposed and improving upon the draft of White's official terms of office, with improvements on the first draft as per Professor Papenfus' suggestions of the last class. Further, I shall polish his biography, which is another category.
OK class. I get it now. The third category was a journal. Sorry! So I'll copy this into my journal entry.
04/08/01
Public History Website:
I browsed the publichistory.net website yesterday.
It is a very impressive website, fast, efficient and truly informative. It's the kind of place I could use because it is so simple, direct and well organized. However, for public use, I would probably recommend at little more "storefront showmanship", and add some flare to "sell" the wonders of public history.
Websites today have gone a long way to making themselves quite entertaining. History is not exactly a commodity, but there is a responsibility to make it look interesting, documentary-like, while maintaining the standards of historical integrity. />
The Mdsa page, I think, is very interesting: It opens with an intreaguing map, almost like a mystery map to a lost treasure, and sustains interest with the color and variety that makes our history so "adventurous". It is accessible and easy for the public to follow and to enjoy.
Technology of webpage design today has so many wonderful options that there is no excuse for flat one-dimentional pages. By the same token, too much "stuff" on a page is unsuitable for history.
I guess the real challenge is how to sustain the decorum, interest and credibility of history with the need to compete for non-profit fundraising and dollars. Williamsburg, after all, is part history, part tourism!
The website is a great place to start from. The possibilities are endless...I would probably be a little more "solicitous to fundraising", as if I were competing with a museum for the public's attention: There would be much that needs to be throught through in designing such a page, beginning with a list of criterion that addresses exactly, what the goals are for public history in this day and age.
Considering the competition, the possibilities, and the growth potention of this medium, public history web sites present some very interesting questions. I would be most interested in exploring them.
Journal for Gloria Chamberlin
Review of Wilner:
The Maryland Board of Public Works:
A History
The Maryland Board of Public Works: A History by Alan M. Wilner is a remarkable account of the politics, economics and development of the State of Maryland. By describing the shaping of a Maryland’s Board of Public Works, her officers, function and finances, Wilner shows the history of a state growing from the early administrative tasks of managing limited infrastructure, or “internal improvements” to a modern state.
Beginning with the General Assemblies who directed the Board of Public Works, Wilner examines the proceedings from the General Assembly that relate to the Board of Public Works. He describes the various officers, their functions and delegated tasks, elected regions, special interests and responsibilities as they met their obligations of their era. His method makes for a clear progression of development analysis.
By focusing on the evolution of the Board of Public works, Wilner sheds light on early government grappling with public and private ownership, investments, private and public interest, collective tax, conflicting and regional differences, elective processes, war, debt, industry, demographic expansion and geography. Moreover, Wilner not only describes the people put in the position of trust and management, (as well as the debate, effort, professional conflicts and personal inflections) but their success and failures that propelled Maryland through its early history.
Emerging from the Revolutionary war in which an existing debt which had been mainly contracted by the Provisional Convention the state issued bills of credit to be legal tender in Maryland, as were bills issued by the Continental Congress. Although such tender was customary for the early colonies, in Maryland the process to refinance, raise revenue, retire debt fell upon the early Board of Public Works right up to the 1980s where a modern Board had official oversight over a vast array of fiscal planning for a large and complex state government. Thus it was in the management of monies that the Board of Public Works were brought to oversee the development projects of the state.
The first wave of internal improvements called for a transportation systems that would link demographic expansion of the West across to the State’s navigable waterways, hence they invested in an east west network of transportation modes that included the building of railroads, turnpikes, and canals. In order to accommodate each region, an equitable arrangement for each geographic region was included. The General Assembly directed that a group of elected officers act as a Board of Public Works to represent the state’s interests in these projects, expecting high returns. Since they were financed by capital stock the Board had oversight of the projects, variously and together, with the private companies building these facilities who also had their own interests to support.
At first, it was aspired that revenue raised from such ventures, (rather than from taxes imposed on the population), would pay for other state systems, such as public education. But as the investments failed to yield the desired returns the state was forced to divest and reduce debt. The problems were caused by a procession of internal disagreements including the onset of the war, changing economies, demographic shifting, technological advances and industrialization. Thus the structure of the Board of Public Works evolved from appointments of Commissioners for terms of office who tried both to meet the demands of the General Assembly and that of projects management to an official Board of Public Works to include the Governor, and Treasurer and the Comptroller who in 1864 were to exercise “diligent and faithful supervision of all public works in which the State may be interested as stockholder or creditor” (p52). During those difficult times, Wilner points out that in the Constitution adopted by the Constitutional Convention not only was the first Board of Public Works officially created, but slavery abolished in Maryland.
By 1867, a standing Committee on Public Worlds was created, and during the industrial age, the Board was not only appointed to take care of increasing institutional demands by the State, such as education, public safety and regulation, but financing for the attendant bureaucracy and structures. Wilner gives some enduring accounts of the various agencies that must have tried the patience of the board, such as the activities of the Fisheries Force; the building of a Correctional building, and the development of public schooling and colleges. Other measures were less concrete, such as a budget of $4 million in state bonds for the discharge of Maryland obligation for bounties paid to soldiers who had enlisted in the Union army. (p72).
The management of the early State invested projects were mettlesome and costly. Debt reduction and state interests were an ever increasing pressure on the Board. It was not until the turn of the century that the State was able to divest itself of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, followed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and finally the Western Branch when its stock eventually sold in 1909. While it had a hard time, according to Wilner, of disposing of other major bank and railroad securities owned by the state, its functions had been expanded to take on construction, supervision, acquisition, management, beautification, and regulation. By1902, the legislature created the position of a state auditor for the purpose of examining the books, and authorized it to streamline all state financial bookkeeping. This power was enlarged in 1916, when the General Assembly extended the jurisdiction of the state auditor to include all state offices, departments, boards, commissions, or institutions as “the Board of Public Works may direct."
Wilner shows that the Modern Board of the early twentieth century, which began with a limited function, had grown into a major policy-making entity “exercising a pervasive jurisdiction and influence over the administration of the state government.” (p79) Moreover, the board’s function continued to expand with the growth of the state, along with increasing budgets which were often in debate various political factions dictating their ideology through the “administrative apparatus,” that managed state expenditures. Here Wilner does a commendable job of showing how politics shaped the Board of Public Works.
By1922 a Reorganization Commission placed the board under a division called the Finance Department. The board was now responsible for State Employment and Registration, which controlled the various licensing and commissions of the state in addition to their physical plants and budgets which came under their jurisdiction. Wilner says that during the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit, the board not only dealt with the tasks of management, but fiscal survival, followed later by economic planning to ensure a healthier future economy, adding projectionism to its daily chores. Other responsibilities continued to pile on including state Employment and Compensation budgets and administered as well as insurance management.
Following WWII, the board took control over the state bureaucracy and personnel, including state personnel matters and setting state taxes. Wilner points out that by then the board, with increasing demands by a more sophisticated and complex state, was clearly overburdened: It was selling bonds, overseeing agency regulations, constructing and supervising contracts, approving leases, allocating emergency funds, approving budgets, selling real estate, repairing public buildings (including schools), managing debts, dispensing financial assistance, paying employees, and selecting state investments!
In 1965, Governor Tawes appointed a commission that recommended that the comptroller and the treasurer (and the attorney general) be appointed by the governor, thus losing their coveted independent political base. But as the responsibilities continued to pile up, the board, acting as an arm of the state, was intruding increasingly in traditionally local concern and, as Wilner explains, “the task of enforcing social policy by means of state contracting created a new range of vexing problems for the board.” (p102) Not until allegations of misappropriation, mismanagement and inequities erupted that a task force had to seriously re-evaluate the tasks and function of the board that had grown into the role of virtually administering a state.
Wilner’s history is comprehensive and detailed, including names of the treasurers and officials who added their perspectives to the tasks at hand. But clearly, considering the exponential growth of a complex and diverse state with so many differing demands, he described a government shaping itself, and being shaped by a new nation. To read this account is to watch a political body in action; a private corporate interest develop; a society organize itself; a culture take shape; a people form a community; and a geography balance industry with beauty. There is little Wilner’s work that remains uncovered, and plenty to debate about from his foundational work. Throughout the development of board, however, is the underlying assumption that it was led by thoughtful individuals who did the best they could, and to add biographies and characters of the various Comptrollers will surely enrich an already fascinating odyssey.
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