Richard Spencer Childs

• Richard Spencer Childs
• Born: May 24, 1882
• Died: September 26, 1978

Municipal reformer, regarded as the father of the short ballot movement and the council-manager form of municipal government, was born in Manchester, Connecticut, the only child of Nellie White (Spencer) Childs and William Hamlin Childs. William Childs was a self-made man who began his career as a traveling salesman. He later joined his father and brother in the hay, grain, and feed business. In 1886, he took over the firm of J.T. Robertson, which manufactured soaps, including the cleanser Bon Ami. Realizing the financial possibilities of Bon Ami, he persuaded a wealthy cousin, William Henry Harrison Childs, to invest $50,000 in the product. Richard Childs remembers hearing his father say to his mother: “Bon Ami isn’t like the hay, grain, and feed business; this is going to be big.” The firm of Childs & Childs was a great success, and in 1882 William Childs moved his family into an elegant home in Brooklyn, New York. William Childs, as well as being successful in business, was also active in political and civic causes, and was an ardent supporter of Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1916.

After attending the Union Grammar School in Manchester, Connecticut, and the Polytechnic Preparatory School in Brooklyn, Richard Spencer Childs was graduated from Yale University in 1904. While still at Yale, he became interested in the election of Seth Low, the Republican Fusion candidate for Mayor of New York City. He read every article he could on the campaign and made a special trip from New Haven to vote in the election. Childs was later to write: “I was well prepared for I had followed the campaign day by day with eager attention. . . . When I unfolded my ballot, I saw only four candidates whose names meant anything whatever to me. . . . Gulping down my shame, I voted ‘Republican’ wherever I found it.” Consequently, he voted blindly for fifteen out of nineteen candidates. He realized, he was to recall, that “the trouble with our municipal governments was not the voters’ apathy. . . . The trouble was that the ballot was too long,” because it forced voters to vote by party. “I had to take a chance on party voting. They had me. I was forced to play into the machine’s hands.” Although not the first to realize that the long list of candidates for public office made voters victims of political machines, he was the first (having inherited the public relations genius that had enabled his father to earn millions with Bon Ami) to make the American public aware of that fact. In 1909, Childs, a prolific writer, published his first article, “The Short Ballot,” which appeared in The Outlook. This, according to a tribute to Childs in The New York Times of December 11, 1954,”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.” In 1909, using his father’s money, he formed the Short Ballot Association, persuading Woodrow Wilson to be its president, while Childs acted as secretary. The short ballot reduces the number of offices to be filled through election; in essence it centralizes government responsibility in a small number of elected officials, who appoint other officials. From 1911 to 1920, Childs edited a bimonthly leaflet, The Short Ballot Bulletin, which served as an important source of ballot information for the press. It was during this period that he coined the slogan “if it doesn’t democ it isn’t democracy!” It was his way of saying that the proposals should be judged on their popular content. Childs’s lifelong crusade to educate the American public resulted in the steady decline of the long ballot, and the acceptance by political theorists of the short ballot as sound doctrine.

Proud though he was of this accomplishment, Childs was even prouder of another: the acceptance of the council-manager form of municipal government. In this system, a nonpartisan board or council sets policy and a professional administrator operates a city’s business; the mayor is largely a ceremonial figure. “Richard Childs,” according to historian Robert Caro, “was the very model of the scientific management reformer. Seeing politics in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ . . . he had determined to remove the possibility of evil from municipal government in the United States and make it efficient, economic and businesslike.” He began working for the city-manager plan in 1910. By 1976, it had been adopted by 2,500 cities. Alfred Willoughby of the National Municipal League wrote that it “is the prevailing form of government for all U.S. cities over ten thousand population.” The New York Herald Tribune wrote that the council-manager plan had “been widely praised as the most workable way of running a city by both political scientists and voters in the communities where it has been tried.” Childs is quoted as saying: “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, [New York], to 1914, when City Manager Henry M. Waite in Dayton [Ohio] began startling the country by the progressiveness of his administration.”

Childs himself felt that perhaps his most significant accomplishment was his role in the career of Robert Moses. In 1920, at a crucial moment in young Moses’s life, when he, then an idealistic young reformer, was facing the prospect of unemployment, Childs gave him a post that elevated him to a new importance in the reform movement. Childs had just formed the New York State Association, an organization designed to duplicate at the state level the functions of the Citizens Union; the union rated the city’s legislators, acted as a watchdog over city spending, and published a bulletin that provided civic-minded citizens with the information they needed to play their proper role in city government. He selected Moses to be the association’s administrative head. Childs delighted in telling friends: “I am the man who gave Bob Moses his first job.” Although this statement was inaccurate, Childs did put Moses into daily contact with the old giants of the New York City reform movement. More important, his tact, diplomacy, and charm smoothed over many quarrels Moses had with them and enabled Moses to keep his ties with them.

Although Childs was a very successful businessman, reforming municipal government was his first love. He “headed up at one time or another just about every civic organization in the city.” He was president of the National Municipal League for fourteen years, of the City Club of New York for twelve years, and he was chairman of the Citizens Union for six years. When he received the La Guardia Memorial Association Award in 1954, Newbold Morris, chairman of the association said: “Mr. Childs’ extraordinary record of devoted public service establishes him as an outstanding figure in the long, uphill fight for better municipal government.”

Childs began his business career as an advertising executive with the Erickson Company and remained with this firm until 1918. From 1911 to 1920 he was general manager of the family business, the Bon Ami Company. From 1921 to 1935 he was assistant to the president of A.E. Chew, an export firm. In 1929 he became director of the American Cyanamid Company, and from 1935 to 1944, he served as vice president of the Lederle Laboratories.

Richard Childs married Grace Pauline Hatch of Chicago on June 15, 1912. She was the daughter of Asel Farnsworth Hatch, a prominent Chicago corporation lawyer well known for his philanthropic work. They had three daughters, Virginia, Mary, and Nancy Jane. He died at ninety-six of the complications of old age.

There is no biography of Childs, but there are references to him in the following books: R. A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974); J. P. East, Council-Manager Government: The Political Thought of Its Founder, Richard S. Childs (1965). Childs’s own books include: Civic Victories: The Story of an Unfinished Revolution. (1952); Short Ballot Principles (1911); and Unfinished Political Reforms (1977). See also Current Biography, September 1955; Nation’s Business, December 1971; The New York Times, December 11, 1954, May 24, 1962, and December 25, 1978; and Virginia Town & City, June 1976.