Viewing page 67 of 136
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
36 CURRENT BIOGRAPHY CHILDS, RICHARD S.--Continued of his business career his work as a publicist also began. Upon graduation he cast his first vote and was, in his own words, "mortified" to learn that he had to ballot for nineteen candidates, only four of whom he had ever heard of before. He was astonished by the fact that his father knew no more than he did in this matter. "I decided then that the trouble with our municipal governments was not the voters' apathy," he has said. "The trouble was that the ballot was too long." From an office adjoining that of the advertising agency and with a staff of two, Childs began to advocate a form of ballot which would not "disfranchise" voters by confronting them with candidates for a multiplicity of petty offices. Making use of experience gained from advertising work, Childs began a campaign of pamphleteering, circulating an essay he had written embodying his ideas. "He had been out of college only four years when he published an article in the Outlook called 'The Short Ballot,'" the New York Times commented in an an editorial on December 11, 1954. "This was the beginning of a mission that he pursued with a gift of zeal and a talent for clarity of argument that have not dwindled to this moment." Among the outstanding citizens of the day who gave immediate support to Childs' program were Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes. The Short Ballot Organization, with Woodrow Wilson as president and Childs as secretary, came into existence in 1910. A year later, Childs' book, Short-Ballot Principles, was published. At about this time he read an editorial in which the writer argued that the commission form of municipal government, then coming to the fore, was just like a business corporation. "I sputtered that it was not like a business corporation at all," Childs has said, "for if it were, there would be a manager under the board of directors, instead of having the board members each undertaking the management of a separate department." Shortly after this, Childs had occasion to order the drafting of a bill which would make the commission plan available by local referendum to upstate New York cities. The office of city manager was drafted into the bill at Childs' instigation. However, the idea was rejected. Soon after, Childs read that the Board of Trade of Lockport, New York had appointed a committee to look into the commission plan. He wrote to them saying that they might have the bill, already prepared, to introduce as their own in the 1911 legislature. They accepted, and Childs then offered to write a pamphlet in support of the plan, which he would have printed and mailed at his own expense, over the signature of the Lockport Board of Trade. This also was accepted, and the promotion of the city-manager form of municipal government was under way. The Lockport charter was not approved by the Legislature, but the widespread publicity given to the manager plan led to its adoption by the town of Sumter, South Carolina in 1912. Again, Childs offered to carry the expense of a publicity campaign anonymously, which he did. In 1913, Dayton, Ohio became the first sizable American city to engage a city manager. "After that," Childs has said, "the sweep of the council-manager plan across the country couldn't be stopped. It was all accomplished in the brief period between 1910, when I concocted the plan and planted it in Lockport, to 1914, when City Manager Henry M. Waite in Dayton began startling the country by the progressiveness of his administration." Childs entered his family business in 1911, becoming general manager of the Bon Ami Company. Except for time off as a dollar-a-year man for the War Department in 1918, he was general manager until 1920. He became associated in 1921 with A. E. Chew in the export business, being assistant to the president from 1928 to 1935. In 1929 he became a director of the American Cyanamid Company, and from 1944 to 1947 a member of the general staff. He served as executive vice-president of its subsidiary, the Lederle Laboratories from 1935 until his retirement in 1944. Throughout the active years of his business career, Childs continued his work for the short ballot and the council-manager plan as well as engaging in numerous other civic-reform activities. According to Frederick Woltman of the New York World-Telegram and Sun (January 8, 1955), Childs "headed up at one time or another just about every civic organization of note in the city." Among the numerous positions he has filled are: president (1928-1940) of the City Club; chairman of the Citizens Union; vice-president of the American Political Science Association; and chairman of the board of the Institute of Public Administration. For more than thirty years Childs has served continuously on the council of the National Municipal League; from 1927 to 1931 he was its president and has since been chairman of its executive committee. Since his retirement, Childs is a full-time volunteer worker for the league. In his second book, Civic Victories, (Harper, 1952), Childs explains the objectives of the organization. In general, it aims "to carry toward complete coverage the council-manager plan of municipal and county government . . . simplify the internal organizations, as well as tasks ([curtail] opportunities for mischief) of political party managements . . . get rid of obscure elective offices everywhere and bring the few elective offices that remain into the comparative safety of focused public scrutiny." Commenting on this book, W. D. Ogdon wrote in the New York Times (January 11, 1953) that its "breadth defies brief summary and so does its usefulness. It is practical politics. It should be meat and drink for the college student, the citizen who wants to know how to go about improving his home town, the state legislator who thinks there may be a better way of doing things, but who wants tested ideas." H. S. Buttenheim wrote in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (September 1953): "Here is a book that will be an inspiration to many a young man and woman looking forward to a career in civic or public service; and it will help
