It’s an axiom so grand that it bears repetition: “The noblest motive is the public good.”
The sentence, prominently featured on the seal of San Diego County, has become a fixture of life here. It’s on public buildings, in stationery and newsletters and was submitted as part of a candidate’s biography to help inform voters.
It’s been extolled in political speeches, served as a battering ram in letters to newspaper editors and caught the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he arrived to dedicate the County Administration Center in 1938.
Addressing a crowd of about 25,000, Roosevelt said he especially appreciated the sentiment expressed on the face of the portal.
“If we all carry that motto in our hearts, in every city and community throughout the land, there is no question but that the proper thing, American democracy, will survive,” Roosevelt said from the rear seat of a convertible.
The maxim is carved into the west side of the county building, splashed on the back walls of elevators and affixed to the Board of Supervisors chambers. Recently, it has became a familiar refrain in public testimony, as speakers harnessed its grandeur to urge various board actions.
But what does it mean in an era when people are so often jaded about government? For some it’s merely a contrivance to advance their political agendas, while for others it’s remained an example of public service at its best.
County Supervisor Bill Horn said he believed that some are called to be servants of all; putting the greater good above that of the individual.
“That motto is meaningless if we do not abide by it,” said Horn, the board chairman. “And I think our board’s history of responsible governance is testament to our dedication to it.”
Those who trot out the motto, from union bosses to Republican activists, environmental stewards to health providers, explained their decisions as part rallying cry, part reminder that their interests overlapped with those of the public.
In June, Eric Banks, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 221, turned to the quote in imploring supervisors to dip into their $1.2 billion in reserves. The union representative for thousands of workers questioned whether the county was living up to its basic mission.
“This isn’t a business,” Banks said at the time. “It’s a government.”
More recently, a Republican candidate for supervisor used the phrase as the starting point for his comments. Steve Danon said he wanted to emphasize to board members that relinquishing redistricting duties was not about themselves, but about the greater good of the community and society.
“I wanted to start off with that as the theses, the foundation to remind them that … it may not be best for their district, but it was the best thing for the community as a whole, which is more important,” said Danon, chief of staff to Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-San Diego.
For longtime county employees, the phrase has been compared with “e pluribus unum” on American currency. Chief Administrative Officer Walt Ekard used the county motto in his statement of ethical and legal standards, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis included it in her annual report and Sheriff Bill Gore featured it in his message to young people motivated to pursue a career in law enforcement.
Jennifer Stone, spokeswoman for Supervisor Dianne Jacob, said she especially appreciated its definitiveness.
“You can’t argue with it,” said Stone, who has been with the county for a decade. “You know it’s meaningful because so many people repeat it so often.
“I can see it bouncing off of staffers who hear it daily, but it will never lose its punch with the public.”
Indeed, many in recent years have found significance in the words. Adam Harner, a board-certified physical therapist, quoted the adage to decry an internal complaint that he said led to the sacrifice of county services. W.C. George, in highlighting the downside of proposed privatization of city services, suspected that the maxim was honored more in its breach than its observance.
And Duncan McFetridge, a noted local environmentalist, said the motto hasn’t lost its meaning in its original application, “but what’s lost is any notion of what the hell the ‘public good’ is.”
Gray Brechin, the project scholar of the Living New Deal Project at the University of California Berkeley, has studied scores of structures erected in the span of public building activity launched by Roosevelt’s New Deal.
While they were designed to lift the nation from the Great Depression by providing million of jobs, Brechin wrote, they now speak in a language with which the 32nd president inculcated the country to keep it unified during tough times.
In a recent interview, Brechin said no epigram better summed up the ethos of the New Deal than the one at the County Administration Center that also graces a relief over the doorway of the former Upland City Hall in San Bernardino County.
“That ethos grows out of not only the republican — as opposed to imperial — values upon which the nation was founded, but the fundamentally Christian ideal that it is our and government’s duty to help those less fortunate as well as to enforce justice,” Brechin said.
He said that imperative has been exactly reversed with the rise of anti-government philosophies fostered by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.
“I believe that the inscription has largely lost its meaning since those who once believed in and dedicated themselves to public service are now routinely derided as fools, knaves, and parasites,” he said.
Upon its selection to adorn the civic center building, one resident commented that the motto … “represents nothing in the Heavens above, nor the Earth beneath, but is an object of mirth to you men. Still since it is to cost the taxpayers 1,000 bucks it is nothing to make merry over.”
Regardless, the Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted the county seal in 1937, replacing a version originally selected in 1933.
The motto had long been tied to the Roman poet Virgil. However, in May 1981, San Diego Public Library researchers tracked down two sources attributing the phrase to Sir Richard Steele, a dramatist, politician and magazine editor. A recent book pegged the quotation as an 18th century mistranslation of “vincet amor patriae” by Virgil.
Given the rise of special-interest politics, perhaps appropriate to San Diego is a passage in Plautus’ comedy, “The Captives,” said Ronald Mellor, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles.
“Quid est suávius, quam bene rém gerere, bonó publicó,” Mellor said, which translates to, “What is there more delightful than to manage one’s own interests well for the public good.”
