By Mike McGrath
In the early fourteenth century, the commune of Siena commissioned the artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti to paint three frescoes on the walls of the Palazzo Publicco, the building where the governing Council of Nine met to manage the affairs of the Sienese city-state. Visitors to Siena today can see the fading wall paintings if they take a walking tour that includes the Palazzo, which houses the city’s Civic Museum.
The first fresco is an allegorical painting that lists the “Virtues of Good Government,” namely “peace, fortitude, prudence, magnanimity, temperance, justice, and the common good.” The second fresco shows the “Effects of Good Government on Town and Country.” In that painting, happy, productive citizens are going about their daily lives in an environment of peace and plenitude. The city looks prosperous, shops are open, a school is in session, and people are literally dancing in the streets. Outside the city’s walls the fields are green and well-tended.
On another wall is the “Allegory and Effects of Bad Government on Town and Country,” and it’s not a pretty picture. A demonic tyrant with fangs and horns lords over a ruined city with crumbling walls and broken windows. Lady Justice is bound and gagged on the floor as two thugs grab a woman and drag her through the street in open daylight. The fields surrounding the city are drought-stricken and barren. It is a scene of utter ruin.
The demon with horns and fangs may have been a bit of artistic license, but later in the century, the Sienese republic was taken over by a vicious tyrant: Pandolfo Petrucci. According to the historian Jacob Burckhardt, he enjoyed rolling “blocks of stone from the top of Monte Amiata without caring what or whom they hit.” Petrucci, who governed with the guidance of an astrologer, kept the citizens in line with the occasional political murder. His main accomplishment, in Burckhardt’s view, was to avoid being poisoned by Cesare Borgia.
The moral of these frescos is not subtle. It does not reflect the cynical sophistication of the sixteenth century Florentine philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. For Lorenzetti, good government was one thing and bad government another, as different—the fresco suggests—as the difference between paradise and perdition.
“Good government” is a term that, in years past, reform advocates frequently used to convey a common set of attitudes about institutional design and principles of effective, ethical governance. Ideas that transcended partisan loyalties and interests. The National Civic League was founded by “good government” reformers in the late nineteenth century after the effects of bad government in our cities were documented by writers such as Lincoln Steffens and James Bryce.
In these polarized times, I have begun to wonder: do our political leaders still believe in the idea that there are simple and universal virtues associated with good government and obvious evils that come from bad government? Are there still agreed-upon norms and principles that transcend partisan allegiances? If so, what are they?
There once was a time when civic activists, elected officials from both major parties, civil servants, business leaders and political scientists would meet at a National Conference for Good City Government. Together they would discuss and explore the latest ideas on everything from the regulation of dairies to model systems for election administration.
Their ideas would be researched, analyzed and published in the National Municipal Review (the original name of this publication) as booklets distributed by the League. Throughout the country, local nonpartisan citizen leagues would organize and convene to promote these new ideas, many of which were duly adopted and incorporated in local home rule charters.
The last annual conference on good government was held in 2018, only by that time, the name of the event had changed to the “National Conference on Local Governance.” The substitution of the term “governance” for “government” suggested three insights on the part of League’s board and staff.
First, that the organization’s original mission—improving the technical side of the governing and management of municipalities—had been achieved in important respects, so it was now possible (and advisable) to broaden the mission.
The second was the insight that local decision-making and planning efforts worked best when there was cross-sector collaboration and meaningful and more direct ways of engaging ordinary community members. This insight was the impetus for the League’s Community Assistance program.
The third was a growing gulf between members of the public and their governments and a decline in levels of trust for public institutions.
By the 1980s, when the Civic League officially changed its mission, the public’s familiarity with and interest in the “good government” reform tradition in American politics was disappearing down the memory hole as the World War II generation of pragmatic, reform-minded governors and members of Congress aged out. Among them were moderate progressives like Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, who served as the National Municipal League President from 1970 to 1972, and Michigan Governor George Romney, author of a 1965 Civic Review article called, “Reform Without Crisis.”
Governor Alfred E. Driscoll, who served as League president from 1962 until 1970, wasn’t a household name like Romney or Scranton, but as governor of New Jersey in the 1950s, he embodied the spirit of pragmatic, nonpartisan reformism that flourished during an earlier era. A stalwart of Arthur Vanderbilt’s “clean government” movement, he skillfully outmaneuvered the state’s legendary party boss, Frank Hague, in a successful effort to modernize New Jersey’s antiquated constitution. Among other things, the new constitution reformed the judiciary, outlawed segregation in the public schools, guaranteed collective bargaining rights in the private sector, and established a merit system for state employees.”
The merit system was one of the most consequential (and successful) good government reforms of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reform movements. It established nonpartisan civil service standards for hiring and promoting government employees. Before the municipal reform movement of the Progressive Era, city departments were often staffed by employees who may or may not have had any relevant training for the jobs they were awarded but were instead selected based on their loyalty to party or individual leaders. Some, like George Washington Plunkitt, the oft quoted “Sage of Tammany Hall,” received multiple paychecks without ever showing up for work.
But civil service reform did not begin at the local level. In 1881, President James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled patronage seeker, an act that shocked the nation and persuaded Congress to pass the Pendleton Act, which established the first merit system for federal government employees.
During the early twentieth century, municipal governments began to adopt similar provisions as part of a package of reforms that included administrative centralization, smaller city councils, nonpartisan elections, and professional city managers. This organization led the way in that effort with its annual conferences and Model City Charters.
Considering the success of the merit system in improving the quality of government performance, it is worrisome to think that the principle of having nonpartisan standards for the ethical and effective administration of government services would face a serious challenge, but in recent years many things once considered unimaginable have entered the political mainstream.
Take, for instance, Heritage Foundation’s 900-plus page manifesto known as “Project 2025.” Among the many ideas introduced in the document is a proposal to use executive power to exempt tens of thousands of federal jobs from civil service standards and protections. The goal would be to replace career civil servants with political appointees who could be hired and fired at the discretion of the president. This would be, in my opinion, a short road to the long-term ill effects of bad government.
Losing the collective expertise and professionalism of thousands of public servants would be very disruptive. Making unelected public employees loyal to a single party or individual instead of the public good would lead to higher levels of mismanagement and corruption. If such a plan were to succeed, it might well lead to similar efforts to undermine the merit principle in state and local government.
Regardless of whether the proposals of the Heritage Foundation are ever put into practice, the very existence of such a document from one of the country’s most influential think tanks illustrates how far we have departed from the tradition of bipartisan good government reformism—an ethos that influenced public administration curricula and research organizations for generations. The proposals of Project 2025 are reminiscent of an earlier period of American history when a “spoils system” mentality pervaded all levels of government.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, there was a lot of media attention given to Project 2025, an omnibus description of conservative policy goals. As the editor of a nonpartisan publication with a legacy of promoting good government practices and structural reform, I would like to draw special attention to the section on staffing the federal government. It would be a mistake, an act of political atavism, to replace thousands of public sector professionals with party loyalists. Let’s not go back to the bad government days of entrenched party bosses and incompetent, place-seeking public employees.
As Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU recently wrote:
“[Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government] is a reminder that good government is characterized by Justice, Concord, Peace, and Wisdom while bad government is animated by Division, Avarice, Fury, Vainglory, even Tyranny. When good government reigns, all is well. When bad government plagues the realm, the Tyrant usurps the power of the people, and the citizens suffer.”
Mike McGrath is Director of Research and Publications at the National Civic League and Editor of the National Civic Review.
