On September 23,19…, in Roscommon county in the Southern Peninsula of Michigan, the county clerk called the local officials together at the court house. Of the county administrators, the sheriff, treasurer, prosecuting attorney, circuit court judge, register of deeds, health and welfare administrators, and highway engineer were present. Many of the township supervisors had managed somehow to reach the court house in spite of the streams of refugees pouring northward from the destroyed industrial cities of southern Michigan. Already the county was bursting with new and unforeseen problems of public administration. The traffic jam on U. S. highway 27 from Lansing northward was something beyond the memory of the oldest living inhabitant. Near Houghton Lake, this traffic was jammed by another stream which had followed U. S. 23 northward from Saginaw and Bay City, turning inland at Standish by way of state highways 76 and 55 to connect with U.S. 27. The flight of stampeding and determined refugees was flowing like a river through the county seat of Roscommon and ever northward toward Cheboygan and Mackinaw City at the tip of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

“This meeting was called,” said the clerk, “to discuss how we can handle this emergency. One of the state police officers who has been on reconnaissance with a deputy sheriff will tell us what we are up against in this area. For 36 hours our telephone and telegraphic communications with Washington and Lansing have been out. We are on our own and must make the best of a terrible emergency.”

The Illinois Constitution of 1870 prohibited the State legislature from enacting local or special laws incorporating cities, towns, or villages, or changing or amending the charter of any town, city, or village. In 1872 an act was passed, providing for the government of all cities in the State of Illinois. In 1875 Chicago abandoned its special charter, and accepted the provisions of the general law of 1872. This law, with a series of amendments, has continued for a generation as the fundamental law of the city of Chicago. The very rapid growth of the city, however, in territory, in population, and in the complexity of its municipal interests has rendered the law of 1872 wholly inadequate for the present needs of the great metropolis. Widespread agitation in regard to this subject led to the initiation, in 1903, of a constitutional amendment authorizing the State legislature to enact special laws regarding the government of Chicago, providing that such laws should not go into effect until approved by the voters of Chicago. This amendment was adopted by the people of Illinois in November, 1904, after a vigorous campaign had been carried on in its favor by the citizens of Chicago. The legislature of 1905 met very shortly after the adoption of this act, so that a complete charter could not be presented to them. A bill providing for a new system of municipal courts, and abolishing the old “justice shops,” was prepared, however, by a citizens' committee; was presented to the legislature, and passed. A committee of the city council also drew up a proposed charter for the city, which was introduced into the State legislature, but of which only a small fragment was finally enacted. The term of the mayor was extended from two years to four; provisions were made enabling the city to secure the interest on its public deposits; and some other minor powers were contained in this rump charter. These acts were voted upon in November, 1905, and approved by the people. So far, however, as comprehensive legislation was concerned, very little had been accomplished, except the establishment of the new courts.

In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure and Legislative Reorganization Act. In this legislation, Congress purposefully provided for itself a prominent role in the administration of the federal government. David Rosenbloom writes that the “… purpose of this book is to explain how and why Congress adopted that role, its underlying coherence, [and] its durability … for seemingly ever-increasing congressional involvement in federal administration …” (p. ix). The author maintains that Congress was uneasy about this endeavor but was forced by the “federal administrative state” to reposition itself. Some even believed that Congress' place in the constitutional scheme-of-things had been altered. For example, it was asserted that Congress was abandoning constitutional principle if it allowed unelected governmental administrators to make rules (i.e., administrative law). The 1946 legislation has resulted in a merger between Congress and the federal bureaucracy. The author contends that federal agencies became “extensions” of Congress' authority to make law. In addition, this legislation resulted in the view that the administration of the bureaucracy was no longer to be seen as the private preserve of the executive branch of government. The concept of “legislative-centered public administration” is used to describe the results of this legislation.

Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card offers a methodologically rich and convincing account of the impact of subtle race cues in contemporary American politics. Although her thesis is a controversial one, Mendelberg develops a careful and cogent argument that racial attitudes can have a substantial effect on candidate evaluations—provided that candidates craft a racial appeal that appears to be about something other than race. She argues that the success of implicit antiblack appeals, ones juxtaposing visual references to race with ostensibly nonracial verbal messages on issues such as crime or welfare, are due to four “A” factors: ambivalence about racial stereotypes, accessibility and priming, awareness of one's reliance on racial attitudes, and the ambiguity of the racial cue.

The principal, indeed the desperate, task of democracy is to maintain itself; its second, to improve and refine itself. It is well to conceive our problem in practical terms, as it tends to sharpen and limit the inquiry; and, in a sense, part of the answer, at least, lies in the terms in which the question is posed. The problem is not an exercise in theory, but is urgently practical. So is the answer. But as all political science teaches, though it may come in institutional and psychological devices, in the background, promising and perhaps mocking, there is also the metaphysical element. And the last is inescapable. For this question needs solution: What Marxism is to Soviet Communism, and what Racialism is to the Nazi State, is X to Democracy. What is X?

For we cannot assume that uncultivated men and women, unshaped by their institutions that already exist, or without a doctrine, can operate the democratic form of government. If that were so, nobody would have thought of education. If the instinctive response of mankind to its social problems were democracy, or ineluctably something else, the political scientist could happily surrender his Ph.D. and close his college doors.

Within the last five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has added decisions of greater importance to the case law of religious freedom than had been accumulated in all the years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The importance of two of these recent decisions rests upon the subordination of freedom of action based on sectarian beliefs to the restrictions of society as a whole. In one of the two cases, the law of society was a board of education order that school children participate in the flag salute exercise on pain of expulsion from the public schools; in the other, it was peddlers' license tax ordinances. Because neither of these decisions has been accepted as a firmly rooted precedent, it will be well to examine them in the light of the history of the federally secured right of religious freedom and in the light of the immediate public reactions to them.

A considerable proportion of the early emigration to the thirteen original colonies was undoubtedly due to a desire to escape religious persecution in England and on the Continent. Those colonists, however, were as insistent that their own particular form of religion be adhered to as their oppressors had been. The story of Roger Williams, who was expelled from the colony of Massachusetts because of his non-conformist views and who established the colony of Rhode Island as a sanctuary of religious tolerance, and that of Ann Hutchinson, who also was exiled from the Bay Colony for a like reason, are monuments to the intolerance of the Puritans.