Excerpt from The Dethronement of City Boss: Being a Study of the Commission Plan as Begun in Galveston, Developed and Extended in Des Moines, and Already Taken Up by Many Other Cities, East and West What is now becoming generally known throughout the country as the Des Moines plan of municipal government is at once a combination of the approved features of all the best American city charters of recent origin and the concrete result of one American city's earnest efforts, covering more than half a century, to work out the problems of its own administration. The form of government by commission was frankly appropriated from the charter of Galveston. The provision for the recall of unsatisfactory officials was borrowed from Los Angeles. The broader referendum was an enlargement of a right long possest by all cities under an Iowa statute. The initiative was also an existing right, which, together with the protest, was adopted as a result of both general and local discussion. The charter of the city of Dallas, Texas, perhaps most directly suggested the referendum and initiative. The elimination of partizanship from city elections was effected locally, but unquestionably because of convictions nurtured in several decades of nation-wide agitation of the question. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.