Leadership Quote by Arthur Capper

Capper is warning that “efficiency” can be a Trojan horse. The line reads like a procedural caution, but its real target is the seductive promise that government works best when power is gathered into a single, streamlined chain of command. “Concentrating of responsibility” sounds virtuous - who doesn’t want someone clearly accountable? - yet Capper flips it: the very act of centralizing authority manufactures the conditions for bureaucracy to harden, self-protect, and outlive the problem it was meant to solve.

As a Midwestern Republican who lived through the Progressive Era, World War I mobilization, the New Deal, and World War II’s massive federal expansion, Capper is speaking from a moment when the American state was scaling up fast. New agencies, commissions, and administrators promised expertise and coordination; they also threatened to pull decision-making away from local life and elected bodies and into permanent offices with their own incentives. His word choice matters: “creation” implies bureaucracy isn’t inevitable, it’s built - often intentionally - as the administrative infrastructure of centralized responsibility.

The subtext is classic small-r republicanism: diffuse power or watch it calcify. Capper isn’t arguing for chaos; he’s arguing that managerial clarity can become democratic fog. Once responsibility is “concentrated,” citizens no longer confront a neighbor-politician they can pressure, but a system that answers complaints with procedure. The danger isn’t just red tape. It’s the quiet conversion of political choices into administrative routine, where nobody feels responsible precisely because responsibility was supposedly assigned.