WHEN EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYBODY

WHEN EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYBODY

There was a time when Americans spoke of the small town as though it were a kind of moral clearinghouse.

Everybody knew everybody. A man could not get too far ahead of his reputation. The banker knew his father. The sheriff knew where he lived. The lawyer had gone to school with his brother. The judge had eaten supper in half the houses represented before his court.

This familiarity was supposed to keep men honest.

Sometimes it did.

Sometimes it merely taught them how to get along.

There is a difference.

In a large city, public business is often impersonal to the point of absurdity. In a small town, it may be personal to the point of danger. The same names turn up again and again. The same lawyers practice before the same judges. The same contractors seek the same public work. The same officers testify in the same courts. The same civic leaders sit on the same boards, attend the same fundraisers, shake hands at the same dinners, and bury one another's parents.

A stranger looking at the arrangement may see a web.

The people inside it generally call it community.

Most of the time, they are right.

But a web and a community are not always opposites.

The trouble begins when ordinary relationships become stronger than ordinary scrutiny.

The sheriff and the prosecutor must work together. The lawyer must return to the same courtroom. The contractor hopes for another job. The newspaper depends upon local advertisers. The nonprofit depends upon grants, referrals, introductions, and goodwill. The public employee who causes trouble in one office may discover that the whole courthouse has an excellent memory.

No conspiracy is required.

Nobody has to meet in a back room.

Nobody has to pass an envelope.

Nobody even has to say what everybody already understands.

Do not make unnecessary enemies.

That rule is older than any courthouse.

It is also one of the quiet enemies of public accountability.

A man can spend twenty years learning which questions are proper, which are tolerated, and which will mark him thereafter as troublesome. A young lawyer learns quickly that today's opponent may be tomorrow's judge. A deputy understands that accusing another officer of misconduct is not merely a professional act. It is a declaration that will be remembered in every hallway he enters afterward.

The citizen sees none of this at first.

He sees offices.

He sees titles.

He sees seals on doors and statutes in books.

He assumes that if Office A fails, Office B will correct it.

Then he begins making telephone calls.

Office A says the matter belongs to Office B.

Office B says it is a civil matter.

Office C says it has no jurisdiction.

Office D wants a written request.

The written request is sent.

Nothing happens.

A second request is sent.

It is forwarded.

A third office replies to a question that was never asked.

Eventually, the citizen learns one of the oldest facts of government: responsibility can be divided so many times that it disappears altogether.

If he continues asking, another thing may happen.

He becomes difficult.

"Difficult" is a useful word.

It may mean abusive.

It may also mean persistent.

It may mean a person who asks for a record twice.

It may mean a person who remembers what he was told last month.

It may mean someone who insists that a public procedure be followed after everyone else has silently agreed that following it would be inconvenient.

Small-town institutions have no monopoly on this habit. Washington has perfected it. State capitals practice it daily.

But the small town adds another ingredient.

Personal memory.

In a county where everybody knows everybody, disagreement does not end when the meeting adjourns.

The lawyer who embarrassed an official at ten o'clock may meet him at lunch.

The sheriff criticized in public may coach the lawyer's nephew.

The contractor whose invoice is questioned may be the man who fixed the courthouse roof.

The prosecutor may have attended school with the investigator.

The judge may have practiced law with half the bar.

Again, none of this proves misconduct.

That point ought to be repeated because careless accusations do more harm than good.

Friendship is not corruption.

Professional acquaintance is not conspiracy.

A conflict of interest is not automatically a crime.

A bad decision is not proof of dishonesty.

But neither should Americans become so frightened of the word corruption that they refuse to examine the conditions in which accountability becomes difficult.

There are many ways for public institutions to fail that require no criminal agreement.

They can fail through laziness.

They can fail through courtesy.

They can fail because one official assumes another has already looked into the matter.

They can fail because nobody wants to embarrass a colleague.

They can fail because a man has worked with another man for thirty years and cannot quite imagine him doing what the complaint says he did.

They can fail because investigating the problem would create more work than ignoring it.

And they can fail because everyone involved knows that after the investigation is over, they must all continue living in the same town.

This is not dramatic corruption.

It is often more durable than dramatic corruption.

A crooked official can be removed.

A culture of accommodation is harder to find because nearly everyone participating in it can sincerely believe he has done nothing wrong.

That is why the small town needs formal safeguards perhaps more than the large city does.

Public records should actually be public.

Proceedings worth remembering should be recorded.

Conflicts should be disclosed.

Public money should be accounted for plainly enough that an ordinary taxpayer can understand where it went.

Complaints should not die merely because the first official receiving them knows the person complained against.

And where local relationships are too close for comfortable review, there ought to be some practical way to bring in someone who does not attend the same dinners.

This should not offend decent public officials.

It should protect them.

A good sheriff should not have to rely upon public trust alone.

A good judge should not have to ask the public merely to believe that personal familiarity made no difference.

A good prosecutor should welcome a system that can show, with records rather than assurances, that a matter received independent consideration.

Government is strongest when citizens are not required to take its virtue on faith.

The American system was never built on the proposition that public men would always behave badly.

It was built on the more sensible proposition that public men are human.

They have friendships.

They have ambitions.

They have grudges.

They have loyalties.

They have bills to pay.

They have careers to protect.

They get tired.

They make mistakes.

They prefer people they know to people they do not.

So do the rest of us.

The answer is not to accuse every courthouse of being crooked.

The answer is to build local government so that it does not matter whether the people inside the courthouse are saints.

That is the purpose of records.

That is the purpose of open meetings.

That is the purpose of audits.

That is the purpose of written procedures.

That is the purpose of appeal.

The dangerous question is not, "Are all these people corrupt?"

That question is too broad to be useful and too serious to be asked carelessly.

The better question is much simpler.

When something goes wrong, can anybody inside the system afford to say so?

If the answer is no, the town has a problem.

It may have nothing to do with organized crime.

It may be something quieter.

Something older.

Something people have mistaken for good manners for a very long time.

Everybody knows everybody.