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The Quest to Bring “Business Efficiency” to the Federal Executive: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Civil Service Reformers in the Late 1920s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2019
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- Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2019
Footnotes
This article benefitted from critical feedback at three stages. David Hammack and Peter Shulman helped shape my early, tentative interpretations. David Stebenne and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer provided useful comments on preliminary arguments presented at the Business History Conference. Finally, generous suggestions from the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Policy History allowed me to bring this article to its final form. Primary research for this article was made possible by support from several institutions: the American Heritage Center, in Laramie, Wyoming; the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, in West Branch, Iowa; the Roosevelt Institute, in Hyde Park, New York; the Friends of the Princeton University Library; the “History Project” of the Joint Center for History and Economics; the Rockefeller Archive Center, in Sleepy Hollow, New York; and the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University.
References
NOTES
1. The best overview of executive reorganization from the nineteenth century to the 1990s is Peri Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996, 2nd ed. (Kansas, 1998). Also essential for its analysis of the post–World War II reorganizations is Grisinger, Joanna L., The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (New York: Cambridge, 2014).Google Scholar
2. Hoover, Herbert, “200 Bureaus, Boards and Commissions! The Administrative Branch of the Government Needs Complete Overhauling. As Important as Civil Service Reform and the Budget,” Nation’s Business 13 (5 June 1925): 9–10.Google Scholar
3. In emphasizing the importance of the Brownlow Committee, most accounts of executive reorganization during the New Deal have followed the interpretations advanced in Karl’s, Barry D. pioneering monograph, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). See alsoGoogle Scholar Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government (Cambridge, Mass., 1966);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Moe, Ronald C., Administrative Renewal: Reorganization Commissions in the 20th Century (Lanham, Md., 2003);Google Scholar Brian Balogh, Joanna Grisinger, and Philip Zelikow, “Making Democracy Work: A Brief History of Twentieth-Century Federal Executive Reorganization,” Miller Center Working Paper in American Political Development, University of Virginia, 22 July 2002; Weir, Margaret, “The Federal Government and Unemployment: The Frustration of Policy Innovation from the New Deal to the Great Society,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States: Studies from the Project on the Federal Social Role, ed. Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda (Princeton, 1988), 149–90.Google Scholar
4. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 52–80.
5. Karl, Barry D., “Constitution and Central Planning: The Third New Deal Revisited,” The Supreme Court Review 1988 (1988), 185.Google Scholar For a rare and remarkable example of a scholar revising his earlier interpretations, see particularly 183–89 and 197. Karl directly acknowledges the evolution of his own arguments at several points, such as 187 and 188, where he writes: “Contrary to what I argued some years ago, the Reorganization Act of 1939 did not give Roosevelt what he wanted in 1937 by a long shot.”
6. Few historians have noticed the ubiquity of appeals to “business efficiency” in these years. A notable exception is Stevens, Rosemary, A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding and the Making of the Veterans Bureau (Baltimore, 2016); andGoogle Scholar Stevens, “The Invention, Stumbling, and Reinvention of the Modern U.S. Veterans Health Care System, 1918–1924,” inVeterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United States, ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville, Fla., 2012).
7. Catherwood, Robert C., “The United States Government: The Greatest Industrial Concern in the World,” Public Personnel Studies 3 (June 1925): 170.Google Scholar
8. The term “associative state” was coined by Ellis Hawley in “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–40. For a more intensive examination of Hoover’s efforts to build a cooperative relationship between government and business, see Berk, Gerald, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900–1932 (New York, 2009): 219–48; andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Sawyer, Laura Phillips, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the “New Competition,” 1890–1940 (New York, 2017), 149–95.Google Scholar In contrast, Peri Arnold emphasizes Hoover’s interest in reorganization. See Making the Managerial Presidency, 64.
9. The peculiarities of mining-corporation governance also help to explain the ease with which Hoover moved into politics after the war. Mining concerns were organized in a slightly different manner than corporations in other capital-intensive industries, with financiers playing a stronger role in oversight and governance. This put Hoover into close proximity with Wall Street elites, which perhaps explains why Hoover was already so well known on Wall Street and among the administrative reformers by the time he was named Food Administrator by Woodrow Wilson. The organization of mining firms is outlined in Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 121–27.Google Scholar
10. Herbert Hoover, “200 Bureaus, Boards and Commissions!” 9–10. Drafts of the speech can be found in box 514, “Reorganization of Government Departments, 1925,” Commerce Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa (hereafter “HHPL”). Hoover arranged for the speech to be printed in booklet form with the title “Reduction of Waste in Government by Reorganization of Executive Departments.” Receipts in Hoover’s papers show that he printed and distributed (at his own expense) at least 15,000 copies. See box 41, “(2) 486 (1) Chamber of Commerce of U.S. Address 13th Annual Meeting May 21, 1925,” Hoover Statements-Background, HHPL.
11. Herbert Hoover, “200 Bureaus, Boards and Commissions!”
12. Harry Marsh to Harold Phelps Stokes, 22 May 1925, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
13. For an assessment of the NCSRL’s role in late nineteenth-century American political development, see Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982), 64–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The papers of the NSCRL are split between Cornell University Library and the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
14. William Dudley Foulke to Harold Phelps Stokes, 30 July 1923, box 3, folder 69, Harold Phelps Stokes Papers, Yale University Library.
15. Proctor had published a well-regarded book, Principles of Public Personnel Administration (New York, 1921) and had served as a staff member for the Institute for Government Research, the Bureau of Municipal Research, and the Taft Commission on Economy and Efficiency.
16. Harry Marsh to George McAneny, 30 December 1927, box 7, folder 1927, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library. Harry Marsh to Harold Phelps Stokes, 22 May, 1925, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library; Robert Wood Johnson, Catesby L. Jones, and Arthur W. Procter, “Brief Report,” 30 June 1925, box 429, “National Civil Service Reform League, 1924–1928,” Commerce Papers, HHPL. In addition to Hoover, the young men also met with William F. Willoughby of the IGR; Luther Steward, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees; Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon; Herbert Brown, director of the Bureau of Efficiency; and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
17. Harold Phelps Stokes to Harry W. Marsh, 10 June 1925, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
18. Marsh to Stokes, 3 October 1925, box 429, “National Civil Service Reform League, 1924–1928,” Commerce Papers, HHPL.
19. Marsh to Arthur Kimball, 9 October 1925, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
20. Joint Committee on Reorganization, Reorganization of the Executive Departments, 67th Cong., 4th sess., 1923, S. Doc. 302, 3.
21. “Memorandum Describing the Reorganization Plan Recommended by the President and His Cabinet,” Walter F. Brown Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, 83–84; Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 71–73.
22. Taft, William H., “Economy and Efficiency in the Federal Government,” Saturday Evening Post (February 6, 1915), 4.Google Scholar
23. See Tarbert, Jesse, “Corporate Lessons for Public Governance: The Origin and Activities of the National Budget Committee, 1919–1923,” in “Berle X: Berle and His World,” special issue, Seattle University Law Review 42 (January 2019): 565–89.Google Scholar
24. Pratt to Swan, 11 November 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
25. See “Statement of Purposes of the National Civil Service Reform League with Respect to Simplification of the Administrative Branch of Federal Government,” box 7, folder 1926, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library; also in box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
26. Harold Phelps Stokes to Harry W. Marsh, 20 May 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
27. They were invited by NCSRL executive committee member, Samuel H. Ordway, who was a New York State Supreme Court Justice.
28. See Chiles, Rob, The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressives, and the Coming of the New Deal (Ithaca, 2018), 64–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29. See, for instance, Henretta, James A., “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America,” Law and History Review 24 (Spring 2006):CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30. Charles C. Burlingham to John W. Davis and Frank L. Polk, 1 July 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
31. Harry Marsh to Robert McC. 2 Marsh, June 1926, and Marsh to Burlingham, 16 July 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library; and Harry W. Marsh, “Chronological Steps to Be Taken in Organization of Activities on Government Reorganization,” 22 December 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
32. See letters from Thomas W. Swan to Norman Davis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John T. Pratt, Walter S. Gifford, James F. Curtis, Edward Bok, Richard Hooker, Julius Rosenwald, and Mary Burnham, 29 October 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library; Thomas W. Swan to George McAneny, 10 November 1926, box 7, folder 1926, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library.
33. George Akerson to Harold Phelps Stokes, 26 November 1926, box 577, “Stokes, Harold Phelps, 1923–1927,” Commerce Papers, HHPL. For his acceptance, see Hoover to Marsh, 4 December 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
34. Harry Marsh to Arthur Kimball, 14 March 1927, box 49, folder CCb8, NCSRL Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
35. See “Aim to Fight Waste in Federal Bureaus,” New York Times, 12 May 1927.
36. The four with executive experience were Robert S. Brookings, John V. Farwell, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The four publishing executives were Edward W. Bok, Edwin F. Gay, George McAneny, and Edwin T. Meredith. The four corporate lawyers were John W. Davis, Charles Evans Hughes, Frank L. Polk, and Henry L. Stimson. James F. Curtis was not a corporate lawyer, but he was a law partner of Raymond Fosdick. Norman H. Davis was a diplomat and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
37. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 81–227, and Grisinger, The Unwieldy American State.
38. As he insisted to an associate in 1924: “I have accomplished practical things along the lines of business administration.” Roosevelt to Emmet, 24 September 1924, quoted in Freidel, Franklin Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954), 142.
39. Freidel’s portrait of FDR in The Ordeal was quickly superseded by Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), andGoogle Scholar Leuchtenburg, William, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago, 1958).Google Scholar
40. Freidel, The Ordeal.
41. For FDR’s 1919 budget committee testimony, see House Select Committee on the Budget, National Budget System, 66th Cong., 1st sess., 1919, 654. “Harvard Union Speech” (speech file 114), 26 February 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Master Speech File, 1898–1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; quoted in Freidel, The Ordeal, 16. Roosevelt to R. Walton Moore, quoted in “Would Americanize Government First,” New York Times, 9 March 1920. Typescripts of this letter can be found in the National Civil Service Reform League Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, box 34, folder Na-11, and in the R. Walton Moore Papers at the FDR Library in Hyde Park. The NCSRL committee’s meeting with Roosevelt is mentioned in Marsh to Stokes, 22 May 1925, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell.
42. On the proposed budget, see memorandum enclosed in Harry W. Marsh to George McAneny, 21 March 1927, box 7, folder 1927, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library, also in box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
43. Kaplan to McAneny, 9 January 1929, box 8, folder 1929, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library.
44. Report on National Civil Service Reform League, 23 November 1926, box 6, folder 31, FA313 Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Civic Interests, Rockefeller Archive Center. Rockefeller gave the NCSRL $1,000 a year from 1922 through 1930, when his contribution decreased to $500 a year. See Kaplan to McAneny, 6 December 1928, and McAneny to Rockefeller Jr., 29 December 1928, box 7, folder 1928; Thomas Appleget to McAneny, 18 January 1929, box 8, folder 1929; Arthur Packard to McAneny, 4 February 1930, box 8, folder 1930; and Packard to McAneny, 15 January 11931, box 8, folder 1931, George McAneny Papers, Princeton University Library.
45. The BPPA’s bylaws stipulated that its five-man advisory board would include one representative of the NCSRL. On the BPPA’s founding, see Rockefeller to William F. Willoughby, 24 July 1922, box 40, folder 316, FA313 Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Civic Interests, Series D, Rockefeller Archive Center; Memorandum of Mr. John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s gifts to the Institute for Government Research,” 7 February 1923, box 40, folder 315, FA313 Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Civic Interests, Series D, Rockefeller Archive Center; and Institute for Government Research, “A Descriptive History of the Bureau of Public Personnel Administration,” 17 March 1925, box 40, folder 316, FA313 Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Civic Interests, Series D, Rockefeller Archive Center.
46. On the BPPA’s move to Chicago, see Guy Moffett to Beardsley Ruml, Memorandum on “Civil Service Assembly of the United States and Canada,” 16 September 1929, box 44, folder 552, FA063 Spelman Fund of New York, Rockefeller Archive Center. On the formation of the PACH, see “Memorandum to the Members of the Board of the Public Administration Clearing House,” 26 December 1930, box 65, folder 695, FA063 Spelman Fund of New York, Rockefeller Archive Center, and Frank O. Lowden to Beardsley Ruml, 31 December 1930, box 65, folder 695, FA063 Spelman Fund of New York, Rockefeller Archive Center.
47. Barry Karl and Stanley Katz gave a preliminary assessment of these developments in two often-cited essays: “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19 (Summer 1981): 236–70; and “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Dædalus 116 (Winter 1987): 1–40. For more recent interpretations that explore the complexities of the foundations’ evolving role, see Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie, “Politics and Partnerships,” in Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. Elisabeth Clemens and Doug Guthrie (Chicago, 2010); and David C. Hammack and Helmut K. Anheier, A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations (Washington, D.C., 2013).
48. Report on National Civil Service Reform League, 26 February 1932, box 6, folder 31, FA313 Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Civic Interests, Rockefeller Archive Center.
49. See Tarbert, Jesse, “Reconsidering Progressive Era Opposition to Foundation Activity: The Farm Demonstration Project Controversy,” HistPhil (8 August 2016) https://histphil.org/2016/08/08/reconsidering-progressive-era-opposition-to-foundation-activity-the-farm-demonstration-project-controversy/Google Scholar
50. For Rockefeller’s response to the Farm Demonstration controversy, see Jerome Greene to Charles Van Hise, 31 August 1914, box 26, folder 294, RG 1.1, Ser. 200, Rockefeller Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center. See also Senate Select Committee, Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony, vol. 9, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, S. Doc. 415.
51. Pratt to Swan, 11 November 1926, box 7, folder AAb7, NCSRL Papers, Cornell University Library.
52. Hoover, Herbert, “The President’s News Conference of December 29, 1931,” and “Statement on Economy in Government,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Herbert Hoover, 1931 (Washington, D.C., 1976), 49–654.Google Scholar
53. See Krock, Arthur, “Hoover Asks Power to Unite Bureaus; Democrats Opposed,” New York Times, 18 February 1932;Google Scholar Myers, William Starr and Newton, Walter H., The Hoover Administration: A Documented Narrative (New York, 1936), 177–78.Google Scholar
54. Herbert Hoover, “Special Message to the Congress on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch,” 9 December 1932, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Herbert Hoover, 1932–33 (Washington, D.C., 1976), 882–91; “House Lines Form to Block President on Reorganization,” New York Times, 9 January 1933; “Democrats Decide to Bar Regrouping,” New York Times, 14 January 1933; Putney, Bryant, “Reorganization of Federal Administrative Agencies,” Editorial Research Reports 1936, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1936), 187–204.Google Scholar
55. For more on the politics behind FDR’s Economy Act, as well as its long-run consequences, see Ortiz, Stephen R., Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New York, 2010).Google Scholar
56. On reorganization efforts during the New Deal, see Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 81–117. For an account of the resistance to FDR’s reorganization proposals, see Margaret Weir, “The Federal Government and Unemployment: The Frustration of Policy Innovation from the New Deal to the Great Society.”
57. On organizational changes in the business sector during the 1920s, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).Google Scholar On changes in the voluntary sector, particularly the 1928 reorganization of the Rockefeller-funded philanthropies, see “Finding a Footing,” Rockefeller Foundation, https://rockfound.rockarch.org/finding-a-footing. On the voluntary sector more generally, see Hammack and Anheier, A Versatile American Institution.
58. Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning,” 174.
59. On the Hoover Commissions, see Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 118–227, and Grisinger, The Unwieldy American State.