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Classics of Public Administration, Seventh EditionJay M. Shafritz, Albert C. Hyde

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2

P a r t O n e

EARLY VOICES AND THE FIRST QUARTER CENTURY

| 1880s to 1920s |

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W ritings on public administration go back to ancient civilization.1 The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians left considerable advice on the techniques of management and adminis-tration. So did the civilizations of China, Greece, and Rome. Modern management tech-

niques can be traced from Alexander the Great’s use of staff 2 to the assembly-line methods of the arsenal of Venice;3 from the theorizing of Niccolo Machiavelli on the nature of leadership4 to Adam Smith’s advocacy of the division of labor;5 and from Robert Owen’s assertion that “vital machines” (employees) should be given as much attention as “inanimate machines”6 to Charles Babbage’s con-tention that there existed “basic principles of management.”7

The history of the world can be viewed as the rise and fall of public administrative institutions. Those ancient empires that rose and prevailed were those with better administrative institutions than their competitors. Brave soldiers have been plentiful in every society but they were ultimately wasted if not backed up by administrators who can feed and pay them. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman orator, is usually credited with first saying that “the sinews of war are infinite money.”

Rome, like Egypt, Persia, and other empires before it, conquered much of the ancient world (well, at least that centered around the Mediterranean) because it had an organizational doctrine that made its soldiers far more effective than competing forces—and because its legions were backed up by a sophisticated administrative system of supply based on regular if not equitable taxes. The Roman Empire only fell when its legions degenerated into corps of mercenaries and when its supply and tax bases were corrupted. Napoleon was wrong. Armies do not “march on their stomachs,” as he said; they march on the proverbial backs of the tax collectors and on the roads built by administrators. Regular pay allows for discipline. Strict discipline is what makes a mob an army. And a disciplined military, obedient to the leaders of the state, is a precondition for civilization. This is the classic chicken and egg problem. Which comes first—effective public administration or an effective military? The rise and fall of ancient Rome proved that you could not have one without the other.

Early bureaucrats in ancient Rome and modern Europe literally wore uniforms that paralleled military dress. After all, the household servants of rulers traditionally wore livery. It indicated that the wearer was not free but the servant of another. Government administrators are still considered ser-vants in this sense; they are public servants because they, too, have accepted obligations that mean they are not completely free. Indeed, until early in the twentieth century many otherwise civilian public officials in Europe—most notably diplomats—had prescribed uniforms.

Both victorious soldiers and successful managers tend to be inordinately admired and dispropor-tionately rewarded as risk takers. True, the specific risks and rewards are different; but the phenom-enon is the same. They both may have to put their careers, and sometimes significant parts of their anatomy as well, “on the line” to obtain a goal for their state or organization. Notice again the military language for “the line” originally referred to the line of battle where they faced the enemy. This is why line officers today are still those who perform the services for which the organization exists. This is the direct link between the Roman centurion and the fire chief, hospital director, or school principal. Life on the line is still a daily struggle.

It is possible to find most of the modern concepts of management and leadership stated by one or another of the writers of the classical, medieval, and pre-modern world. However, our concern is not with this prehistory of modern management but with the academic discipline and occupational specialty that is U.S. public administration.

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4 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM AND MERIT IN GOVERNMENT

“Any city in the present state of municipal advancement and progress which has no provision for civil service is as much behind the times as a city without electric

lights, telephones or street cars.”—Board of Freeholders, City of Kansas City

The American City (1911)American public administration did not invent the concept of a creating a public service that would be based on merit. Would-be reformers of American government in the late nineteenth century not only borrowed from the European experience but also were fond of noting that possessing such systems was an essential step in “enlightenment” for the United States if it was to develop as a civilized nation. The first real steps toward creating a modern state of public administration in the United States were taken following the Civil War and at the heart was the struggle to limit the spoils system of rewarding political party members with government job appointments as opposed to establishing a civil service system where appointments and tenure were based on merit.8

While federal civil service reform is generally dated from the post–Civil War period, the political roots of the reform effort go back much earlier—to the beginning of the republic. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to face the problem of a philosophically hostile bureaucracy. While sorely pressed by his supporters to remove Federalist officeholders and replace them with Republican par-tisans, Jefferson was determined not to remove officials for political reasons alone. He maintained in a letter in 1801 to William Findley that “Malconduct is a just ground of removal, mere difference of political opinion is not.” With occasional defections from this principle, even by Jefferson himself, this policy was the norm rather than the exception down through the administration of Andrew Jackson. President Jackson’s rhetoric on the nature of public service was far more influential than his adminis-trative example. In claiming that all men, especially the newly enfranchised who did so much to elect him, should have an equal opportunity for public office, Jackson played to his plebeian constituency and put the patrician civil service on notice that they had no natural monopoly on public office. The spoils system, used only modestly by Jackson, flourished under his successors. The doctrine of rota-tion of office progressively prevailed over the earlier notion of stability in office.

Depending on your point of view, the advent of modern merit systems is either an economic, political, or moral development. Economic historians would maintain that the demands of industrial expansion—a dependable postal service, a viable transportation network, and so on—necessitated a government service based on merit. Political analysts could argue rather persuasively that it was the demands of an expanded suffrage and democratic rhetoric that sought to replace favoritism with merit. Economic and political considerations are so intertwined that it is impossible to say which fac-tor is the true origin of the merit system. The moral impetus behind reform is even more difficult to define. As moral impulses tend to hide economic and political motives, the weight of moral concern undiluted by other considerations is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, the cosmetic effect of moral overtones was of significant aid to the civil service reform movement, because it accentuated the social legitimacy of the reform proposals.

With the ever-present impetus of achieving maximum public services for minimum tax dollars, business interests were quite comfortable in supporting civil service reform, one of a variety of strate-gies they used to have power pass from the politicos to themselves. The political parties of the time were almost totally dependent for financing on assessments made on the wages of their members in public office. With the decline of patronage, the parties had to seek new funding sources, and American business was more than willing to assume this new financial burden—and its concomitant influence.

Civil service reform was both an ideal—an integral symbol of a larger national effort to establish a new form of more responsive government; and an institutional effort—a series of internal reforms

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Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s | 5

intent on creating new bureaucratic authority structures. Historians have sought to capture how the “Progressive Era” reflected the interplay between reform movements at the federal level and state and local governments in the context of political and social changes occurring after the Civil War.9 Civil service reform was integral to that vision for change and viewed as embracing, in the words of one of the early reform champions, Dorman Eaton, “certain great principles which embody a theory of politi-cal morality, of official obligation, of equal rights, and common justice in government.”10

Dorman B. Eaton had been appointed chair of the first Civil Service Commission established by President Grant in 1871. When the commission concluded unsuccessfully in 1875, Eaton went to England at the request of President Rutherford Hayes to undertake a study of the British civil service system. His report—published as a book in 1880 with the title Civil Service in Great Britain: A History of Abuses and Reforms and their Bearing upon American Politics—obviously advocated the adoption of the merit system in America. His book enumerated the principles the civil service system would entail, as the listing of brief excerpts illustrate:

1. “Public office creates a relation of trust and duty of a kind which requires all authority and influ-ence pertaining to it to be exercised with the same absolute conformity to moral standards, to the spirit of the constitution and the laws, and to the common interest of the people . . . .

2. In filling offices, it is the right of the people to have the worthiest citizens in the public service for the general welfare, . . . .

3. The personal merits of the candidate—are in themselves the highest claim upon an office . . . .4. Party government and the salutary activity of parties are not superseded, but they are made purer

and more efficient, by the merit system of office which brings larger capacity and higher character to their support” . . . .11

When President Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by an insane and disappointed office-seeker, the movement for civil service reform would finally produce legislative results. Eaton would be prominent in providing the language for the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a federal civil service system based on merit. Under the act, a civil service commission was established and a class of civil service was created where employees would be hired through open competitive examinations and promoted and retained based on merit. Thus, at the federal level, progress toward implementing reform was gener-ally measured in terms of the percentage of government employees who were in the classified service. While the Pendleton Act did not make civil service mandatory for all federal agencies, coverage under civil service would grow from 10 percent in the 1880s to nearly 70 percent between the world wars.12

However, the relatively rapid categorization of federal positions under civil service was not all that it seemed to be. Frederick Mosher noted in his examination of the public service that the ranks of the civil service were largely concentrated in entry-level employees. Indeed, the requirement that entrance to federal service “be permitted only at the lowest grade” was specifically removed by the Congress cre-ating “an open civil service with no prohibition of what we now call lateral entry.”13 Within two decades of its existence, the Civil Service Commission would be bemoaning the lack of upward mobility and promotions for the talented workers they felt had been selected for employment under civil service, a situation Mosher notes that would not be remedied until the 1940s. Thus it was relatively easy for a federal agency to accept civil service as the new norm because it applied to entry-level hires and did not preclude an agency from appointing—via lateral entry—higher-level employees of their own choosing.

Civil service reform was also an important issue for state and local governments. While only three states (Massachusetts in 1883, New York in 1884, and Ohio in 1902) passed legislation that required civil service for municipalities, adoption of civil service reform was widespread. But a distinction about the means of adoption should be made especially where it concerns the importance of requiring civil service procedures by law. Some assessments of the adoption of civil service reform during the first quarter of the twentieth century conclude that the Pendleton Act was a weak statute in that it did not require federal agencies to classify their positions under civil service and did not mention state and local governments. Another interpretation of the fact that only three states enacted statewide legisla-tion on civil service reform would be that it reaffirms the “relative autonomy” that most cities enjoyed from higher governmental authority, be it federal or state.14

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6 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

Still, over 200 cities adopted civil service reform by the 1930s, the majority from states that did not have a mandatory state statute. The National Civil Service Reform League, which regularly reported on which states and municipalities had adopted the “competitive system,” noted in their 1911 report six variations for adoption of civil service from charter provisions to popular votes establishing local commissions.15

Thinking back on the premises of civil service reform and the promise of the merit system could not be more instructive, especially now, when some states and local governments have moved away from civil service. In 1996, the State of Georgia passed legislation terminating civil service coverage for new state employees. Other states, notably Florida, South Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, and North Dakota, have followed suit.16 In a 2006 survey of state reform efforts, 28 of the 50 states were identified as having expanded the numbers of “at-will employees” or public sector workers who are not under the protection of civil service guidelines.17 Public administration has always been in a debate about how to make the public workforce more responsive and productive—only this time it is the bureau-cracy and over-protectionism of the civil service that is the target of reform.

CALLING FOR A NEW DISCIPLINE ON RUNNING A GOVERNMENT

While Alexander Hamilton,18 Thomas Jefferson,19 Andrew Jackson,20 and other notables of the first century of the republic have dealt with the problem of running the administrative affairs of the state, it was not until 1887 that we find a serious claim made that public administration should be a self-conscious, professional field. This came from Woodrow Wilson’s famous 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration.” Although it attracted slight notice at the time, it has become customary to trace the origins of the academic discipline of public administration to that essay.

While Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) would later be president, first of the American Political Science Association, then of Princeton University, and later of the United States, in the mid-1880s he was a struggling young instructor at Bryn Mawr College for Women. During this time he worked on several textbooks now long forgotten; wrote fiction under a pen name (but it was all rejected); and wrote a political essay that remains his most enduring contribution as a political scientist. On November 11, 1886, Wilson wrote to the editor of the Political Science Quarterly to whom he had submitted his article.21 Wilson asserted that he had very modest aims for his work, which he thought of as “a semi-popular introduction to administrative studies.” He even said that he thought his work might be “too slight.” Ironically, one hundred years later, the American Society for Public Administration would launch a Centennial’s Agenda Project to identify the critical issues for the field and cite the publication of Wilson’s essay as “generally regarded as the beginning of public administration as a specific field of study.”22

In “The Study of Administration,” Wilson attempted to refocus political science’s study of govern-ments. Rather than be concerned with the great maxims of lasting political truth, he argued that politi-cal science should concentrate on how governments are administered. This was necessary because, in his words, “It is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”

Wilson wanted the study of public administration to focus not only on personnel problems, as many other reformers of the time had advocated, but also on organization and management in gen-eral. The reform movement of the time, which had already secured the passage of the first lasting fed-eral civil service reform legislation, the Pendleton Act of 1883, had a reform agenda that both started and ended with merit appointments. Wilson sought to move the concerns of public administration a step further by investigating the “organization” and “methods of our government offices” with a view toward determining “first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or energy.” Wilson was concerned with organizational efficiency and economy—that is, productivity in its most simplistic formulation.

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Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s | 7

By authoring this essay, Wilson is also credited with positing the existence of a major distinction between politics and administration. This was a common and necessary political tactic of the reform movement because arguments that public appointments should be based on fitness and merit, rather than partisanship, necessarily had to assert that “politics” were out of place in public service. In estab-lishing what became known as the politics-administration dichotomy, Wilson was really referring to “partisan” politics. While his subtlety was lost on many, Wilson’s main themes—that public adminis-tration should be premised on a science of management and separate from traditional politics—fell on fertile intellectual ground. The ideas of this then-obscure professor eventually became the dogma of the discipline and remained so until after World War II. While the politics-administration dichotomy would be later discredited, his ideas are still highly influential and essential to an understanding of the evolution of public administration.23

THE CASE FOR A POLITICS-ADMINISTRATION DICHOTOMY

A more carefully argued examination of the politics-administration dichotomy was offered by Frank J. Goodnow (1859–1939) in his book, Politics and Administration, published in 1900. Goodnow, one of the founders and first president (in 1903) of the American Political Science Association, was one of the most significant voices and writers of the progressive reform move-ment.24 To Goodnow, modern administration presented a number of dilemmas involving political and administrative functions that had now supplanted the traditional concern with the separation of powers among the various branches of government. Politics and administration could be distinguished, he argued, as “the expression of the will of the state and the execution of that will.”

Reprinted here is Goodnow’s original analysis of the distinction between politics and adminis-tration. Note how even Goodnow had to admit that when the function of political decision making and administration was legally separated, there developed a “tendency for the necessary control to develop extra-legally through the political party system.” The articulation of the politics-administra-tion dichotomy also reflected the next phase in the emergence of American public administration. Whereas the first phase before World War I focused primarily on the evils of patronage and spoils systems and eliminating corruption in municipal government, the second phase would emphasize the growth of public spending and the ascendance of the “new management” in government. City manag-ers, executive budget systems, and centralized and accountability-driven administrative systems were all key reform themes.25

SELF-GOVERNMENT AND THE PROBLEM OF MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION

As public administration struggled to establish its identity, it was aided greatly by the progressive reform movement that sought to raise the standards of honesty in government and to enlarge the level of public services provided to citizens, especially in American cities. While the term has its origins in religious concepts that argued for the infinite improvability of the human condition, rather than ordained class distinctions, by the end of the nineteenth century it had come to mean a responsibility of classes for one another and a willingness to use all government and social institutions to give that responsibility legal effect.

To a large extent the movement was a reaction to Social Darwinism, Charles Darwin’s concept of biological evolution applied to the development of human social organization and economic policy. The major influence on American Social Darwinism was the Englishman, Herbert Spencer, who spent much

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of his career on the application of concepts such as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” to his ideas of social science. American Social Darwinists, generally speaking, occupied a wide range of theo-ries, from an absolute rejection of the idea of government intervention in social development (meaning let the poor fend for themselves) to elaborate methods of developmental influence that could affect the various races into which they believed all humans, even Europeans, were divided (meaning let’s educate the poor only well enough so that they can be servants and factory workers). The progressive movement was to a large extent an antidote to, and the repudiation of, this doctrine of Social Darwinism.

In the United States, the progressive movement was most associated with the search for greater democratic participation by the individual in government, and the application of science and special-ized knowledge and skills to the improvement of life. Politically, the movement reached its national climax in 1911, with the creation of the Progressive Party as a break between the Republican Party professionals, who backed the incumbent, William Howard Taft, and the Republican opponents of political machine politics and party regularity, who nominated former Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. The split in the Republican Party caused the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to be elected in 1912. Wilson in fact represented many of the programs the progressives had supported (banking reforms, antitrust laws, and business regulation), but he did not support many of the progressive interests in national social policy.

The progressives got their name from their belief in the doctrine of progress—that governing institutions could be improved by bringing science to bear on public problems. It was a disparate movement, with each reform group targeting a level of government, a particular policy, and so on. Common beliefs included that good government was possible and that the cure of the evils of democracy is more democracy (per a quote from H. L. Menchen from his book in 1926, Notes on Democracy). At the national level, they achieved civil service reform and introduced the direct pri-mary, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. At the local level, they spawned the commission and council-manager forms of government. It was the progressive influence that initially forged the fledgling discipline of public administration.

As public administration struggled to establish its identity, it was aided greatly by the progressive reform movement that sought to raise the standards of honesty in government and to increase the level of public services provided to citizens, especially in American cities. This effort was further fueled by reform-oriented journalists—the “muckrakers” who publicized both the corruption found among city political machines and the deplorably inadequate living standards and levels of poverty of the working classes, especially among immigrants.26

While the progressive movement sought to offer solutions to many vexing social problems, these problems were often first identified and dug up by the muckrakers. This was President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, taken from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for a journalist who wrote expo-sés of business and government corruption. Some of the most famous muckrakers were Lincoln Steffens who, in The Shame of the Cities (1904), found many big cities “corrupt and contented”; Ida M. Tarbell who exposed the monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller and forced the breakup of Standard Oil; and Upton Sinclair whose exposure of the poisonous practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Today, any-one who writes an exposé of governmental corruption or incompetence might be called a muckraker, although they prefer to be called investigative journalists.

The effort to control corruption would be realized with the passage of civil service reform legislation and the creation of stronger city charters and city management systems. Efforts to assist the poor and needy would take much greater effort and in fact would follow a different track entirely. Indeed, it was the settlement movement, based on an English model where social-minded upper-class groups would establish “settlement houses” for the poor and live with them in a group setting. The first settlement houses were tried in New York City in the mid-1880s, but the best-known model opened its doors in 1889 in Chicago at Hull House. The founder was a remarkable 29-year-old woman, Jane Addams27(1860–1935), who would lead this movement and provide a unique American definition to the idea of providing a social setting for immi-grants to escape the poverty cycle and succeed by their own efforts.

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Hull House would be credited with an impressive list of first accomplishments, from establishing the first public playgrounds, public kitchens, and citizenship preparation and special education classes in Chicago to helping bring about the first juvenile courts and public employment bureaus. Addams herself would be a national figure who helped shape the American social work movement. She would be awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1931. Out of all her work about political and social reform—for she saw them as inexorably intertwined—a 1904 address is included that was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1905, “Problems of Municipal Administration.” Unlike Woodrow Wilson’s plea for searching for new ways to run government because of the complexities of the time, Addams was highly critical of the founders, those men of the eighteenth century who had no real idea of (or empathy for) “the difficulties and blunders which a self-governing people was sure to encoun-ter.” In her address she lays out a different vision of self-governance and what the roles of government, its administrators, and its citizens should be.28

THE IMPACT OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

At about the same time Woodrow Wilson was calling for a science of management, Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915) was independently conducting some of his first experiments in a Philadelphia steel plant. Taylor, generally considered the “father of scientific management,” pioneered the development of time and motion studies. Today, scientific management is frequently referred to as pseudo-scientific management because of its conceptualization of people as merely extensions of machines—as human interchangeable parts of a large impersonal production machine. Premised on the notion that there was “one best way” of accomplishing any given task, scientific management sought to increase output by discovering the fastest, most efficient, and least fatiguing production methods. The job of the scien-tific manager, once the one best way was found, was to impose this procedure on the entire workforce. Classical organization theory would evolve from this notion. If there was one best way to accomplish any given production task, then correspondingly, there must also be one best way to accomplish a task of social organization. Such principles of social organization were assumed to exist and to be waiting to be discovered by diligent scientific observation and analysis.

Strangely enough, while Taylor’s 1911 book Principles of Scientific Management29 is the work for which he is best known, the credit for coining the term scientific management belongs not to Taylor but to an associate of his, Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941). Brandeis, who would later be a Supreme Court justice, needed a catchy phrase to describe the new-style management techniques of Taylor and his disciples when he was to present arguments that railroad rate increases should be denied before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Brandeis and his associates dramatically argued that the railroads could save “a million dollars a day” by applying scientific management methods. The highly publicized hearings begin-ning in 1910 caused a considerable sensation and vastly expanded Taylor’s reputation. Ironically, Taylor was initially opposed to the phrase, thinking that it sounded too academic. But he quickly learned to embrace it. So did the rest of the country. In the first half of the twentieth century, scientific management was gospel and Frederick W. Taylor was its prophet.30 Taylor’s greatest public-sector popularity came in 1912 after he presented his ideas to a Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management. A portion of that testimony is reprinted here.

Taylor’s comprehensive statement of scientific management principles was focused on what he called the duties of management. These duties included:

1. Replacing traditional rule-of-thumb methods of work accomplishment with systematic, more scientific methods of measuring and managing individual work elements

2. Studying scientifically the selection and sequential development of workers to ensure optimal placement of workers into work roles

3. Obtaining the cooperation of workers to ensure full application of scientific principles4. Establishing logical divisions within work roles and responsibilities between workers and

management

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What seems so obvious today was revolutionary in 1912. Taylor himself even insisted in his Principles of Scientific Management that “scientific management does not necessary involve any great invention, nor the discovery of new or startling facts.” Nevertheless, it did “involve a certain combination of ele-ments which have not existed in the past, namely, old knowledge so collected, analyzed, grouped and classified into laws and rules that it constitutes a science.”

BUDGETING REFORM AS A CORNERSTONE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Perhaps the other most significant early scholar of public administration along with Frank Goodnow (remember that Woodrow Wilson abandoned scholarship for politics) was William F. Willoughby (1867–1960). He was a member of the Taft Commission of 1912, which issued the first call for a national execu-tive budgeting system, and later director of the Institute for Governmental Research, which would become part of the Brookings Institution. He also had a key role in writing the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which would finally accomplish the objectives of the Taft Commission by establishing an executive budget system at the national level along with the Budget Office and the General Accounting Office.

Willoughby wrote widely on the myriad issues of public administration. He believed that public administration had universal aspects that were applicable to all branches of government.31 His early public administration text32 was the first of a trilogy covering all three branches of government.33 But it is his early work on budgetary reform that is of special interest. Writing in 1918, he outlined developments that were leading to the creation of modern budget systems in state governments. In an excerpt from The Movement for Budgetary Reform in the States,34 Willoughby argues that budget reform would involve three major threads: (1) how budgets would advance and provide for popular control, (2) how budgets would enhance legislative and executive cooperation, and (3) how budgets would ensure administrative and management efficiency. Rather prophetic when you consider such public financial headlines on taxpayer’s revolts from “Proposition 13” movements to grassroots tea party protests, and other forms of expenditure and revenue limitation laws (thread 1: popular con-trol); continued infighting and increasing gridlock between the executive and legislative branches over budgetary control, deficits, and balanced budgets (thread 2: executive-legislative cooperation); and the effectiveness or lack of it in overburdened budgeting systems in maintaining managerial practices (thread 3: management effectiveness).

These early voices—Wilson, Goodnow, Taylor, and Willoughby—all had profound influences on the development of public administration. To begin with, they identified many of the critical themes that would be permanent parts of the field of study that is modern public administration. But to an even greater extent, they were prophetic voices, writing at a time when government employment and expenditures were still at very modest levels. At the turn of the century in 1900, federal, state, and local governments included slightly more than a million employees combined. Total govern-ment outlays were less than $1.5 billion or just over 3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. By the 1920s, government employment would triple and expenditures would be at just less than $90 billion or about 12 percent of GDP.35 Modern public administration would be founded on a scope that was without precedent in the United States’ brief experience. In short, public administration was to be a field of study, not about a function or an enterprise, but rather about an entire major sector of what would grow to be the largest and most influential economy in the twentieth century.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND THE NEW ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

The aftermath of World War I marked the beginning of this change process for public administration. At the conclusion of all previous wars, the U.S. government had quickly returned to basic minimal

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levels. However, this time the scope and influence of government in U.S. life would not diminish. The United States was changing from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial nation. This required a considerable response from public administration because so many new functions and programs would be established. The number of paved highways would increase tenfold in the 1920s. Cities would install traffic management systems, and states would impose driving tests. As the population became increasingly urban, vastly expanded programs would be needed in public parks and recreation, public works, public health, and public safety. Public administration as an activity was booming throughout the 1920s. The federal government’s response to the Great Depression of the 1930s would make public administration all the more pervasive as part of American life.36

Public administration theorists, such as Dwight Waldo,37 Vincent Ostrom,38 Nicholas Henry,39 and Howard McCurdy,40 have described the pattern of development within public administration within public administration after the First World War as a period of ortho-doxy. The tenets of this orthodox ideology held that “true democracy and true efficiency are synonymous, or at least reconcilable,”41 that the work of government could be neatly divided into decision making and execution, and that administration was a science with discoverable principles. The initial imprint of the scientific management movement, the progressive reform political movement, and the politics-administration dichotomy became central focuses for pub-lic administration as both a profession and a field of study.

A critical linkage for the study of administration was its concern, indeed almost obsession, with organization and control. By definition, control was to be built into organizational structure and design to assure both accountability and efficiency. In fact, early management theorists assumed that organization and control were virtually synonymous. Remember that traditional administrative notions were based on historical models provided by the military and the Roman Catholic Church, which viewed organizational conflict as deviancy to be severely punished. When government units were small, less significant, and relatively provincial, the management of their organizations was less consequential. However, as the size, scope, and level of effort increased, pressures for better organi-zation and control mounted. Under the influence of the scientific management movement, public administration became increasingly concerned with understanding bureaucratic forms of organiza-tion. The division of labor; span of control; organizational hierarchy and chain of command; reporting systems; departmentalization; and the development of standard operating rules, policies, and proce-dures became critical concerns to scholars and practitioners in the field.

Bureaucracy emerged as a dominant feature of the contemporary world. Virtually everywhere one looked in both developed and developing nations, economic, social, and political life were extensively and ever-increasingly influenced by bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy, while often used as a general invective to refer to any organization that is perceived to be inefficient, is more properly used to refer to a specific set of structural arrangements. It may also be used to refer to specific kinds of behavior patterns that are not restricted to formal bureaucracies. It is widely assumed that the struc-tural characteristics of organizations correctly defined as “bureaucratic” influence the behavior of individuals—whether clients or bureaucrats—who interact with them.

THE THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY

Contemporary thinking along these lines begins with the work of the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). His analysis of bureaucracy, first published in 1922 after his death, is still the main point of departure for all further analyses on the subject. Drawing on studies of ancient bureau-cracies in Egypt, Rome, China, and the Byzantine Empire, as well as on the more modern ones emerg-ing in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weber used an “ideal-type” approach to extrapolate from the real world the central core of features characteristic of the most fully developed bureaucratic form of organization. Weber’s “Bureaucracy,” reprinted here, is neither a description of reality nor a statement of normative preference. It is merely an identification of the major variables or features that characterize bureaucracies. The fact that such features might not be fully present in a

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given organization does not necessarily imply that the organization is nonbureaucratic. It may be an immature rather than a fully developed bureaucracy.

Weber’s work on bureaucracy was not translated into English and made generally available until 1946. Still, his influence was phenomenal. Usually credited with being the “father” of modern sociol-ogy, Weber’s work emphasized a new methodological rigor that could advance the study of organiza-tions. Weber himself played a crucial role in helping to write a constitution for the Weimar Republic in Germany just before his death in 1920. The experience of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, certainly not attributable in any way to Weber, added perhaps another point of support to Woodrow Wilson’s contention that it is harder to run a constitution than to frame one. Yet the clarity and descriptive quality of Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organizations provided both orthodox theorists and critics with a reference point from which to debate both the good and bad effects of bureaucratic structures.

A FIRST TEXTBOOK FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

While Woodrow Wilson provided the rationale for public administration to be an academic discipline and professional specialty, it remained for Leonard D. White (1891–1958) to most clearly articulate its preliminary objectives. A U.S. Civil Service commissioner from 1934 to 1937, White spent most of his career at the University of Chicago.42 In the preface to his pioneering 1926 book Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, the first text in the field, he noted four critical assumptions that formed the basis for the study of public administration: (1) administration is a unitary process that can be studied uniformly, at the federal, state, and local levels; (2) the basis for study is management, not law; (3) administration is still an art, but the ideal of transformance to a science is both feasible and worthwhile; and (4) the recognition that administration “has become, and will continue to be the heart of the problem of modern government.”43 Reprinted here is the preface and first chapter from White’s 1926 book, which, through four decades and four editions, became one of the most influential of public administration texts.44

White’s text was remarkable for its restraint in not taking a prescriptive cookbook approach to public administration. He recognized that public administration was above all a field of study that had to stay close to reality—the reality of its largely untrained practitioner base that still professed great belief in the art of administration. Even more interesting, his work avoided the potential pitfall of the politics-administration dichotomy. Defining public administration as emphasizing the managerial phase, he left unanswered “the question [of] to what extent the administration itself participates in formulating the purposes of the state”45 and avoided any controversy as to the precise nature of administrative action.

CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT INDIVIDUALS AND BEHAVIOR

The emphasis in White’s introductory textbook in public administration was decidedly macro—an economic term often used to describe how overall government systems and their parts interact. In these early days, there was also great concern about micro issues: how individuals within organizations operated and how decisions were made. Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933)46 made significant contri-butions in public administration’s quest to understand how organizations worked. Indeed, one might say that she was a major voice for what today would be called participatory management. She wrote about the advantages of exercising “power with” as opposed to “power over.” Her “law of the situation” was contingency management in its humble origins. Reprinted here is her discussion, “The Giving of Orders,” which draws attention to the problems caused when superior-subordinate roles inhibit the productivity of the organization.

Follett was one of the first to focus on the theory of individuals within organizations. By the late 1920s research was under way at the Hawthorne experiments (to be discussed in more depth in the

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next section) by Elton Mayo (1880–1949)47 and his associates from the Harvard Business School. This major examination of traditional scientific management principles sought to confirm the relationship between conditions and management interventions in work environment and productivity but ended up launching the human relations approach.48 The Hawthorne experiments would confirm Follett’s suggestions that workers were more responsive to peer pressure than to management controls and that factories, indeed all work settings, are above all social situations.

NOTES

1. For histories of ancient public administration, see William C. Beyer, “The Civil Service of the Ancient World,” Public Administration Review 19 (spring 1959); Michael T. Dalby and Michael S. Werthman, eds., Bureaucracy in Historical Perspective (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1972); E. N. Gladden, A History of Public Administration: Volume 1. From the Earliest Times to the Eleventh Century (London: Frank Cass, 1972).

2. William W. Tam, Alexander the Great (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956); Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

3. Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1934).

4. See Machiavelli, The Discourses (1513) and The Prince (1532). For a modern appreciation, see Anthony Jay, Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).

5. See Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Chapter 1. 6. Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a Welsh industrialist, social reformer, and utopian socialist who was

one of the first writers to consider the importance of the human factor in industry. His model factory communities, New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in Indiana, were among the first to take a modern approach to personnel management. For biographies, see J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribner’s, 1960); Sidney Pollard, ed., Robert Owen, Prophet of the Poor (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1971).

7. Charles Babbage (1792–1871) is the English inventor best known as the “father” of the modern com-puter; but he also built upon the assembly line concepts of Adam Smith and anticipated the scientific management techniques of Frederick W. Taylor. See his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1832).

8. The two most definitive histories of the first era of civil service reform remain Paul Van Riper’s History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson, 1958) and J. Shafritz’s Public Personnel Management: The Heritage of Civil Service Reform (New York: Praeger 1975).

9 Two especially insightful histories are William E. Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy 1830–1900 (Harvard University Press, 1982) and Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement 1865–1883 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

10. Dorman Eaton, Civil Service in Great Britain: A History of Abuses and Reforms and Their Bearing upon American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880).

11. Eaton pp. 3–4. 12. See Chapters 1 and 2, Personnel Management in Government, 5th, edition by J. Shafritz et al. (New York:

Marcel Dekker, 2001) for an overview of the progression of civil service coverage in both the federal and state and local sectors.

13. Frederick C. Mosher, Democracy and the Public Service (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 69. 14. This particular assessment, in addition to being a superb methodological illustration of neo-institutional-

ism, has an excellent summary history of early civil service adoption efforts: Pamela S. Tolbert and Lynne G. Zucker, “Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform 1880–1935,” Administrative Science Quarterly 28, no. 1 (March 1983): 22–39.

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15. This early accounting is according to Albert De Roode, “Civil Service Reform in Municipalities,” The American City Vol. IV Jan 1911 pp. 20–25.

16. Perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of the state civil service trends over the last decade is Civil Service Reform in the States edited by J. Edward Kellough and Lloyd Nigro (State University of New York Press, 2006) with chapters devoted to eight different state reform experiences by different authors.

17. These trends were reported in a recent symposium in Review of Public Personnel Administration, June 2006: “Civil Service Reform Today,” edited by James S. Bowman and Jonathan P. West.

18. See Lynton K. Caldwell, “Alexander Hamilton: Advocate of Executive Leadership,” Public Administration Review 4, no. 2 (1944); Lynton K. Caldwell, The Administrative Theories of Hamilton and Jefferson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944); Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

19. See Lynton K. Caldwell, “Thomas Jefferson and Public Administration,” Public Administration Review 3, no. 3 (1943); Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

20. See Albert Somit, “Andrew Jackson as Administrator,” Public Administration Review 8 (summer 1948); Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954).

21. Wilson’s letter was reprinted in Political Science Quarterly (December 1941). 22. James Carroll and Alfred Zuck, “The Study of Administration” Revisited: Report on the Centennial

Agendas Project (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Public Administration, 1985). 23. For accounts of the influence of Wilson’s essay, see Louis Brownlow, “Woodrow Wilson and Public

Administration,” Public Administration Review 16 (spring 1956); Richard J. Stillman, “Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration: A New Look at an Old Essay,” American Political Science Review 67 (June 1973); Jack Rabin and James S. Bowman, eds., Politics and Administration: Woodrow Wilson and American Public Administration (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1984). However, revisionist scholars have contended that Wilson’s influence was far more a post–World War II than a contempo-rary phenomenon. Paul Van Riper notes that none of the early public administration scholars cited Wilson’s essay. In “The American Administrative State: Wilson and the Founders—An Unorthodox View,” Public Administration Review 43 (November–December 1983), Van Riper writes: “In reality, any connection between Wilson’s essay and the later development of the discipline is pure fantasy! An examination of major political and social science works of the period between 1890 and World War I shows no citation whatever of the essay.” Then how did Wilson’s essay become so influential? According to Daniel W. Martin, “The Fading Legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” Public Administration Review 48 (March–April 1988): “My simple answer, although too simple an answer, is the glowing reprint of Wilson’s article in the December 1941 Political Science Quarterly. It was a masterwork of public relations, complete with a photo static copy of Wilson’s tentative letter of submission.” Thereafter, Wilson’s essay, cited only modestly in the interwar period, grew to its current influence.

24. For appreciations, see Charles G. Haines and Marshall E. Dimock eds., Essays on the Law and Practice of Governmental Administration: A Volume in Honor of Frank J. Goodnow (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935); Lurton W. Blassingame, “Frank J. Goodnow: Progressive Urban Reformer,” North Dakota Quarterly (Summer 1972).

25. Leonard White comments extensively on the new management in his monograph on social trends in the United States as part of a series commissioned by the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, charted by President Hoover in 1929. See Trends in Public Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933).

26. There are any number of excellent historical and social works science on the progressive reform era in the late nineteenth century in the United States, but Martin J. Schiesl’s work, The Politics of Efficiency (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), provides a superb contextual assessment of municipal reform from an administrative perspective.

27. Jane Addams’s works are extensive—she was a prolific writer and lecturer. Her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House—perhaps her best-known book—is still in print today. Most

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scholars would chose her 1902 work, Democracy and Social Ethics (most recently reprinted by the University of Illinois Press, Urbana in 2002), as her first major work—the book that pushed her into national prominence. For the reader who wants a broad selection of the range of Addams’s works there is The Jane Addams Reader edited by Jean Bethke Ekstain (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

28. For an interesting comparative examination of the settlement movement exemplified by Jane Addams and of the Municipal Research Movement led by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and other champions of the city manager movement such as Henry Bruere, see Camilla Stivers, Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era (Lawrence Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

29. Frederick W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Bros., 1911). Taylor’s other major book is Shop Management (New York: Harper and Bros., 1903).

30. For biographies, see Frank Barkley Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Bros., 1923); Subhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).

31. Marshall Dimock, “W. F. Willoughby and the Administrative Universal,” Public Administrative Review 35 (September–October 1975).

32. William F. Willoughby, Principles of Public Administration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1927). 33. The other two were Principles of Judicial Administration (Washington, D.C.: Brookings

Institution, 1929) and Principles of Legislative Organization and Administration (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1936).

34. William F. Willoughby, The Movement for Budgetary Reform in the States (New York: D. Appleton and Company for the Institute for Government Research, 1918), pp. 1–8.

35. Solomon Fabricant, The Trend of Government Activity in the United States Since 1900 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952), pp. 11–24.

36. For explanations of the growth of government during the 1920s, see Geoffrey Perret, America in the Twenties: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 251–252, 426, 429, 431, 463, 490.

37. Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration (New York: Ronald Press, 1948), pp. 206–207.

38. Vincent Ostrom, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, rev. ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974), p. 36.

39. Nicholas Henry, Public Administration and Public Affairs (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 8–9. 40. Howard E. McCurdy, Public Administration: A Bibliographic Guide to the Literature (New York: Marcel

Dekker, 1986), p. 22. 41. Waldo, The Administrative State, p. 206. 42. For appreciations of White’s varied intellectual contributions to public administration, see John

M. Gaus, “Leonard Dupree White 1891–1958,” Public Administration Review 18 (Summer 1958); Herbert J. Storing, “Leonard D. White and the Study of Public Administration,” Public Administration Review 25 (March 1965).

43. Leonard D. White, Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. viii. 44. The fourth, and last, edition would be published in 1955. 45. White, p. 2. 46. For her collected papers, see Henry C. Metcalf and Lyndall Urwick, eds., Dynamic Administration:

The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942); for an appreciation of her contributions, see Elliot M. Fox, “Mary Parker Follett: The Enduring Contribution,” Public Administration Review 28 (December 1968).

47. For a biography, see Lyndall F. Urwick, The Life and Work of Elton Mayo (London: Urwick, Orr and Partners, 1960).

48. The definitive account of the studies themselves is to be found in F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939).

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11

The Study of Administration

Woodrow Wilson

I suppose that no practical science is ever stud-ied where there is no need to know it. The very fact, therefore, that the eminently practical sci-ence of administration is finding its way into college courses in this country would prove that this country needs to know more about administration, were such proof of this fact required to make out a case. It need not be said, however, that we do not look into college pro-grammers for proof of this fact. It is a thing almost taken for granted among us, that the present movement called civil service reform must, after the accomplishment of its first pur-pose, expand into efforts to improve, not the personnel only, but also the organization and methods of our government offices: because it is plain that their organization and methods need improvement only less than their person-nel. It is the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy. On both these points there is obviously much need of light among us; and only careful study can supply that light.

Before entering on that study, however, it is needful:

I. To take some account of what others have done in the same line; that is to say, of the history of the study.

II. To ascertain just what is its subject matter. III. To determine just what are the best meth-

ods by which to develop it, and the most clarifying political conceptions to carry with us into it.

Unless we know and settle these things, we shall set out without chart or compass.

I

The science of administration is the latest fruit of that study of the science of politics which was begun some twenty-two hundred years ago. It is a birth of our own century, almost of our own generation.

Why was it so late in coming? Why did it wait till this too busy century of ours to demand attention for itself? Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of gov-ernment, and is of course as old as govern-ment itself. It is government in action, and one might very naturally expect to find that government in action had arrested the attention and provoked the scrutiny of writ-ers of politics very early in the history of systematic thought.

But such was not the case. No one wrote systematically of administration as a branch of the science of government until the pres-ent century had passed its first youth and had begun to put forth its characteristic flower of systematic knowledge. Up to our own day all the political writers whom we now read had thought, argued, dogmatized only about the constitution of government; about the nature of the state, the essence and seat of sovereignty, popular power and kingly prerogative; about the greatest meanings lying at the heart of government, and the high ends set before the purpose of govern-ment by man’s nature and man’s aims. The central field of controversy was that great field of theory in which monarchy rode tilt against democracy, in which oligarchy would have built for itself strongholds of privilege, and in which tyranny sought opportunity to make good its claim to receive submission from all competitors. Amidst this high warfare of principles, administration could command no pause for its own consider-ation. The question was always: Who shall make law, and what shall that law be? The other question, how law should be administered with Source: Political Science Quarterly 2 (June 1887).

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never before our own day did they assume such ominous proportions as they wear now. In brief, if difficulties of governmental action are to be seen gathering in other centuries, they are to be seen culminating in our own.

This is the reason why administrative tasks have nowadays to be so studiously and systemat-ically adjusted to carefully tested standards of policy, the reason why we are having now what we never had before, a science of administration. The weightier debates of constitutional principle are even yet by no means concluded; but they are no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration. It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.

Here is Mr. Bagehot’s graphic, whimsical way of depicting the difference between the old and the new in administration:

In early times, when a despot wishes to govern a distant province, he sends down a satrap on a grand horse, and other people on little horses; and very little is heard of the sa-trap again unless he send back some of the little people to tell what he has been doing. No great labour of superintendence is pos-sible. Common rumour and casual report are the sources of intelligence. If it seems certain that the province is in a bad state, sa-trap No. 1 is recalled, and satrap No. 2 sends out in his stead. In civilized countries the process is different. You erect a bureau in the province you want to govern; you make it write letters and copy letters; it sends home eight reports per diem to the head bureau in St. Petersburg. Nobody does a sum in the province without some one doing the same sum in the capital, to “check” him, and see that he does it correctly. The consequence of this is, to throw on the heads of departments an amount of reading and labour which can only be accomplished by the greatest natural aptitude, the most efficient training, the most firm and regular industry.1

There is scarcely a single duty of govern-ment which was once simple which is not now complex; government once had but a few mas-ters; it now has scores of masters. Majorities for-merly only underwent government; they now conduct government. Where government once

enlightenment, with equity, with speed, and without friction, was put aside as “practical detail” which clerks could arrange after doctors had agreed upon principles.

That political philosophy took this direc-tion was of course no accident, no chance preference or perverse whim of political phi-losophers. The philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, “nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought”; and political philosophy, like philosophy of every other kind, has only held up the mirror to contem-porary affairs. The trouble in early times was almost altogether about the constitution of government; and consequently that was what engrossed men’s thoughts. There was little or no trouble about administration—at least lit-tle that was heeded by administrators. The functions of government were simple, because life itself was simple. Government went about imperatively and compelled men, without thought of consulting their wishes. There was no complex system of public reve-nues and public debts to puzzle financiers; there were, consequently, no financiers to be puzzled. No one who possessed power was long at a loss how to use it. The great and only question was: Who shall possess it? Popu-lations were of manageable numbers; prop-erty was of simple sorts. There were plenty of farms, but no stocks and bonds: more cattle than vested interests.

I have said that all this was true of “early times”; but it was substantially true also of com-paratively late times. One does not have to look back of the last century for the beginnings of the present complexities of trade and perplexities of commercial speculation, nor for the portentous birth of national debts. Good Queen Bess, doubtless, thought that the monopolies of the sixteenth century were hard enough to handle without burning her hands; but they are not remembered in the presence of the giant monopolies of the nineteenth century. When Blackstone lamented that corporations had no bodies to be kicked and no souls to be damned, he was anticipating the proper time for such regrets by full a century. The perennial discords between master and workmen which now so often disturb industrial society began before the Black Death and the Statute of Laborers; but

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might follow the whims of a court, it must now follow the views of a nation.

And those views are steadily widening to new conceptions of state duty; so that at the same time that the functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number. Administration is everywhere put-ting its hands to new undertakings. The utility, cheapness, and success of the govern-ment’s postal service, for instance, point towards the early establishment of govern-mental control of the telegraph system. Or, even if our government is not to follow the lead of the governments of Europe in buying or building both telegraph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in some way it must make itself master of masterful corporations. The creation of national commissioners of railroads, in addition to the older state com-missions, involves a very important and deli-cate extension of administrative functions. What ever hold of authority state or federal governments are to take upon corporations, there must follow cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Such things must be studied in order to be well done. And these, as I have said, are only a few of the doors which are being opened to offices of government. The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change; and “the idea of the state is the conscience of administration.” Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them.

This is why there should be a science of administration which shall seek to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusinesslike, to strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown its dutifulness. This is one reason why there is such a science.

But where has this science grown up? Surely not on this side of the sea. Not much impartial scientific method is to be discerned in our administrative practices. The poisonous atmo-sphere of city government, the crooked secrets of state administration, the confusion, sine-curism, and corruption ever and again discov-ered in the bureaux at Washington forbid us to believe that any clear conceptions are as yet

very widely current in the United States. No; American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this sci-ence. It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign rev-olutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of gov-ernment; whereas, to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of gov-ernment. If we would employ it, we must Americanize it, and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, prin-ciple, and aim as well. It must learn our consti-tutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much free American air.

If an explanation be sought why a science manifestly so susceptible of being made useful to all governments alike should have received attention first in Europe, where government has long been a monopoly, rather than in England or the United States, where government has long been a common franchise, the reason will doubtless be found to be twofold: first, that in Europe, just because government was indepen-dent of popular assent, there was more govern-ing to be done; and, second, that the desire to keep government a monopoly made the monopolists interested in discovering the least irritating means of governing. They were, besides, few enough to adopt means promptly.

It will be instructive to look into this matter a little more closely. In speaking of European gov-ernments I do not, of course, include England. She has not refused to change with the times. She has simply tempered the severity of the tran-sition from a polity of aristocratic privilege to a system of democratic power by slow measures of constitutional reform which, without pre-venting revolution, has confined it to paths of peace. But the countries of the continent for a

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through which it promises to pass in all the rest. The first of these periods is that of absolute rul-ers, and of an administrative system adapted to absolute rule; the second is that in which consti-tutions are framed to do away with absolute rul-ers and substitute popular control, and in which administration is neglected for these higher concerns; and the third is that in which the sov-ereign people undertake to develop administra-tion under this new constitution which has brought them into power.

Those governments are now in the lead in administrative practice which had rulers still absolute but also enlightened when those mod-ern days of political illumination came in which it was made evident to all but the blind that governors are properly only the servants of the governed. In such governments administration has been organized to subserve the general weal with the simplicity and effectiveness vouchsafed only to the undertakings of a single will.

Such was the case in Prussia, for instance, where administration has been most studied and most nearly perfected. Frederick the Great, stern and masterful as was his rule, still sincerely professed to regard himself as only the chief servant of the state, to consider his great office a public trust; and it was he who, building upon the foundations laid by his father, began to orga-nize the public service of Prussia as in very ear-nest a service of the public. His no less absolute successor, Frederic William III . . . in his turn, advanced the work still further, planning many of the broader structural features which give firmness and form to Prussian administration today. Almost the whole of the admirable sys-tem has been developed by kingly initiative.

Of similar origin was the practice, if not the plan, of modern French adminis-tration, with its symmetrical divisions of territory and its orderly gradations of office. The days of the Revolution—of the Constituent Assembly—were days of con-stitution-writing, but they can hardly be called days of constitution-making. The Revolution heralded a period of consti-tutional development—the entrance of France upon the second of those periods which I have enumerated—but it did not itself inaugurate such a period. It inter-rupted and unsettled absolutism, but did not destroy it. Napoleon succeeded the

long time desperately struggled against all change, and would have diverted revolution by softening the asperities of absolute government. They sought so to perfect their machinery as to destroy all wearing friction, so to sweeten their methods with consideration for the interests of the governed as to placate all hindering hatred, and so assiduously and opportunely to offer their aid to all classes of undertakings as to ren-der themselves indispensable to the industrious. They did at last give the people constitutions and the franchise; but even after that they obtained leave to continue despotic by becoming pater-nal. They made themselves too efficient to be dispensed with, too smoothly operative to be noticed, too enlightened to be inconsiderately questioned, too benevolent to be suspected, too powerful to be coped with. All this has required study; and they have closely studied it.

On this side of the sea we, the while, had known no great difficulties of government. With a new country, in which there was room and remunerative employment for everybody, with liberal principles of government and unlimited skill in practical politics, we were long exempted from the need of being anx-iously careful about plans and methods of administration. We have naturally been slow to see the use or significance of those many vol-umes of learned research and painstaking examination into the ways and means of con-ducting government which the presses of Europe have been sending to our libraries. Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in statute, but has also become awkward in movement. The vigor and increase of its life has been altogether out of proportion to its skill in living. It has gained strength, but it has not acquired deportment. Great, therefore, as has been our advantage over the countries of Europe in point of ease and health of constitutional development, now that the time for more careful administrative adjust-ments and larger administrative knowledge has come to us, we are at a signal disadvantage as compared with the transatlantic nations; and this for reasons which I shall try to make clear.

Judging by the constitutional histories of the chief nations of the modern world, there may be said to be three periods of growth through which government has passed in all the most highly developed of existing systems, and

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20 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government. It has been more concerned to render government just and moderate than to make it facile, well-ordered, and effective. English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legisla-tive oversight—not of progress in govern-mental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism. Consequently, we have reached a time when administrative study and creation are imperatively necessary to the well-being of our governments sad-dled with the habits of a long period of constitution-making. That period has practi-cally closed, so far as the establishment of essential principles is concerned, but we can-not shake off its atmosphere. We go on criti-cizing when we ought to be creating. We have reached the third of the periods I have mentioned—the period, namely, when the people have to develop administration in accordance with the constitutions they won for themselves in a previous period of strug-gle with absolute power; but we are not pre-pared for the tasks of the new period.

Such an explanation seems to afford the only escape from blank astonishment at the fact that, in spite of our vast advantages in point of political liberty, and above all in point of practi-cal political skill and sagacity, so many nations are ahead of us in administrative organization and administrative skill. Why, for instance, have we but just begun purifying a civil service which was rotten full fifty years ago? To say that slav-ery diverted us is but to repeat what I have said—that flaws in our constitution delayed us.

Of course all reasonable preference would declare for this English and American course of politics rather than for that of any European country. We should not like to have had Prussia’s history for the sake of hav-ing Prussia’s administrative skill; and Prussia’s particular system of administration would quite suffocate us. It is better to be untrained and free than to be servile and sys-tematic. Still there is no denying that it would be better yet to be both free in spirit and

monarchs of France, to exercise a power as unrestricted as they had ever possessed.

The recasting of French administration by Napoleon is, therefore, my second exam-ple of the perfecting of civil machinery by the single will of an absolute ruler before the dawn of a constitutional era. No corporate, popular will could ever have effected arrangements such as those which Napoleon commanded. Arrangements so simple at the expense of local prejudice, so logical in their influence to popular choice, might be decreed by a Constitutional Assembly, but could be established only by the unlimited authority of a despot. The system of the year VIII was ruthlessly thorough and heartlessly perfect. It was, besides, in large part, a return to the despotism that had been overthrown.

Among those nations, on the other hand, which entered upon a season of constitution-making and popular reform before adminis-tration had received the impress of liberal principle, administrative improvement has been tardy and half-done. Once a nation has embarked in the business of manufacturing constitutions, it finds it exceedingly difficult to close out that business and open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration. There seems to be no end to the tinkering of constitutions. Your ordinary constitution will last you hardly ten years without repairs or additions; and the time for administrative detail comes late.

Here, of course, our examples are England and our own country. In the days of the Angevin kings, before constitutional life had taken root in the Great Charter, legal and administrative reforms began to proceed with sense and vigor under the impulse of Henry II’s shrewd, busy, pushing, indomita-ble spirit and purpose; and kingly initiative seemed destined in England, as elsewhere, to shape governmental growth at its will. But impulsive, errant Richard and weak, despi-cable John were not the men to carry out such schemes as their father’s. Administrative development gave place in their reigns to constitutional struggles; and Parliament became king before any English monarch had had the practical genius or the enlight-ened conscience to devise just and lasting forms for the civil service of the state.

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Article 1 | The Study of Administration | 21

consequently it could be gotten at; though it was his disadvantage that that mind learned only reluctantly or only in small quantities, or was under the influence of some one who let it learn only the wrong things. Now, on the con-trary, the reformer is bewildered by the fact that the sovereign’s mind has no definite local-ity, but is contained in a voting majority of sev-eral million heads; and embarrassed by the fact that the mind of this sovereign also is under the influence of favorites, who are none the less favorites in a good old-fashioned sense of the word because they are not persons but precon-ceived opinions; i.e., prejudices which are not to be reasoned with because they are not the children of reason.

Wherever regard for public opinion is a first principle of government, practical reform must be slow and all reform must be full of compromises. For wherever public opinion exists it must rule. This is now an axiom half the world over, and will presently come to be believed even in Russia. Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional govern-ment must first educate his fellow-citizens to want some change. That done, he must per-suade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion will-ing to listen and then see to it that it listen to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opin-ion in its way.

The first step is not less difficult than the second. With opinions, possession is more than nine points of the law. It is next to impos-sible to dislodge them. Institutions which one generation regards as only a makeshift approxi-mation to the realization of a principle, the next generation honors as the nearest possible approximation to that principle, and the next worships as the principle itself. It take scarcely three generations for the apotheosis. The grandson accepts his grandfather’s hesitating experiment as an integral part of the fixed con-stitution of nature.

Even if we had clear insight into all the polit-ical past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly

proficient in practice. It is this even more reasonable preference which impels us to discover what there may be to hinder or delay us in naturalizing this much-to-be-desired science of administration.

What, then, is there to prevent?Well, principally, popular sovereignty. It is

harder for democracy to organize administra-tion than for monarchy. The very completeness of our most cherished political successes in the past embarrasses us. We have enthroned public opinion; and it is forbidden us to hope during its reign for any quick schooling of the sover-eign in executive expertness or in the condi-tions of perfect functional balance in govern-ment. The very fact that we have realized popular rule in its fullness has made the task of organizing that rule just so much the more dif-ficult. In order to make any advance at all we must instruct and persuade a multitudinous monarch called public opinion—a much less feasible undertaking than to influence a single monarch called a king. An individual sovereign will adopt a simple plan and carry it out directly: he will have but one opinion, and he will embody that one opinion in one com-mand. But this other sovereign, the people, will have a score of differing opinions. They can agree upon nothing simple: advance must be made through compromise, by a compound-ing of differences, by a trimming of plans and a suppression of too straightforward principles. There will be a succession of resolves running through a course of years, a dropping fire of commands running through a whole gamut of modifications.

In government, as in virtue, the hardest of hard things is to make progress. Formerly the reason for this was that the single person who was sovereign was generally either selfish, ignorant, timid or a fool—albeit there was now and again one who was wise. Nowadays the reason is that the many, the people, who are sovereign have no single ear which one can approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish with the selfishnesses, the ignorances, the stubbornnesses, the timidities, or the follies of several thousand persons—albeit there are hundreds who are wise. Once the advantage of the reformer was that the sov-ereign’s mind had a definite locality, that it was contained in one man’s head, and that

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22 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

appointment; we must go on to adjust execu-tive functions more fitly and to prescribe better methods of executive organization and action. Civil-service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as a public trust, and, by making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike. By sweetening its motives it is rendering it capable of improving its meth-ods of work.

Let me expand a little what I have said of the province of administration. Most important to be observed is the truth already so much and so fortunately insisted upon by our civil-service reformers; namely, that administration lies out-side the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.

This is distinction of high authority; emi-nent German writers insist upon it as of course. Biuntschli, for instance, bids us separate admin-istration alike from politics and from law.2 Politics, he says, is state activity “in things great and universal,” while “administration, on the other hand,” is “the activity of the state in indi-vidual and small things. Politics is thus the spe-cial province of the statesman, administration of the technical official.” “Policy does nothing without the aid of administration”; but admin-istration is not therefore politics. But we do not require German authority for this position; this discrimination between administration and politics is now, happily, too obvious to need further discussion.

There is another distinction which must be worked into all our conclusions, which, though but another side of that between administration and politics, is not quite so easy to keep sight of: I mean the distinction between constitutional and administrative questions, between those governmental adjustments which are essential to constitu-tional principle and those which are merely instrumental to the possibly changing pur-poses of a wisely adapting convenience.

One cannot easily make clear to every one just where administration resides in the various departments of any practicable government without entering upon particulars so numerous

unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconve-niences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.

And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composi-tion than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mould of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe.

So much, then, for the history of the study of administration, and the peculiarly difficult con-ditions under which, entering upon it when we do, we must undertake it. What, now, is the subject-matter of this study, and what are its characteristic objects?

II

The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of poli-tics; it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study. It is a part of political life only as the methods of the counting-house are a part of the life of society; only as machinery is part of the manufactured product. But it is, at the same time, raised very far above the dull level of mere technical detail by the fact that through its greater principles it is directly connected with the lasting maxims of political wisdom, the permanent truths of political progress.

The object of administrative study is to res-cue executive methods from the confusion and costliness of empirical experiment and set them upon foundations laid deep in stable principle.

It is for this reason that we must regard civil-service reform in its present stages as but a prelude to a fuller administrative reform. We are now rectifying methods of

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Article 1 | The Study of Administration | 23

particular application of general law is an act of administration. The assessment and rais-ing of taxes, for instance, the hanging of a criminal, the transportation and delivery of the mails, the equipment and recruiting of the army, and navy, etc., are all obviously acts of administration; but the general laws which direct these things to be done are as obvi-ously outside of and above administration. The broad plans of governmental action are not administrative; the detailed execution of such plans is administrative. Constitutions, therefore, properly concern themselves only with those instrumentalities of government which are to control general law. Our federal constitution observes this principle in saying nothing of even the greatest of the purely executive offices, and speaking only of that President of the Union who was to share the legislative and policy-making functions of government, only of those judges of highest jurisdiction who were to interpret and guard its principles, and not of those who were merely to give utterance to them.

This is not quite the distinction between Will and answering Deed, because the adminis-trator should have and does have a will of his own in the choice of means for accomplishing his work. He is not and ought not to be a mere passive instrument. The distinction is between general plans and special means.

There is, indeed, one point at which admin-istrative studies trench on constitutional ground—or at least upon what seems constitu-tional ground. The study of administration, philosophically viewed, is closely connected with the study of the proper distribution of constitutional authority. To be efficient it must discover the simplest arrangements by which responsibility can be unmistakably fixed upon officials; the best way of dividing authority without hampering it, and responsibility with-out obscuring it. And this question of the dis-tribution of authority, when taken into the sphere of the higher, the originating functions of government, is obviously a central constitu-tional question. If administrative study can dis-cover the best principles upon which to base such distribution, it will have done constitu-tional study, an invaluable service. Montesquieu did not, I am convinced, say the last word on this head.

as to confuse and distinctions so minute as to distract. No lines of demarcation, setting apart administrative from non-administrative functions, can be run between this and that department of government without being run up hill and down dale, over dizzy heights of dis-tinction and through dense jungles of statutory enactment, hither and thither around “ifs” and “buts,” “whens” and “howevers” until they become altogether lost to the common eye not accustomed to this sort of surveying, and con-sequently not acquainted with the use of the theodolite of logical discernment. A great deal of administration goes about incognito to most of the world, being confounded now with polit-ical “management,” and again with constitu-tional principle.

Perhaps this ease of confusion may explain such utterances as that of Niebuhr’s: “Liberty,” he says, “depends incomparably more upon administration than upon constitution.” [Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a German historian.] At first sight this appears to be largely true. Apparently facility in the actual exercise of liberty does depend more upon administrative arrangements than upon consti-tutional guarantees; although constitutional guarantees alone secure the existence of liberty. But—upon second thought—is even so much as this true? Liberty no more consists in easy functional movement than intelligence consists in the ease and vigor with which the limbs of a strong man move. The principles that rule within the man, or the constitution, are the vital springs of liberty or servitude. Because depen-dence and subjection are without chains, are lightened by every easy-working device of con-siderate, paternal government, they are not thereby transformed into liberty. Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional principle; and no administration, however perfect and liberal its methods, can give men more than a poor coun-terfeit of liberty if it rest upon illiberal principles of government.

A clear view of the difference between the province of constitutional law and the prov-ince of administrative function ought to leave no room for misconception; and it is possible to name some roughly definite cri-teria upon which such a view can be built. Public administration is detailed and sys-tematic execution of public law. Every

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24 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

These questions evidently find their root in what is undoubtedly the fundamental problem of this whole study. That problem is: What part shall public opinion take in the conduct of administration?

The right answer seems to be that public opinion shall play the part of authoritative critic.

But the method by which its authority shall be made to tell? Our peculiar American difficulty in organizing administration is not the danger of losing liberty, but the danger of not being able or willing to separate its essen-tials from its accidents. Our success is made doubtful by that besetting error of ours, the error of trying to do too much by vote. Self government does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than house-keeping consists necessarily in cooking din-ner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the man-agement of the fires and the ovens.

In those countries in which public opin-ion has yet to be instructed in its privileges, yet to be accustomed to having its own way, this question as to the province of public opinion is much more readily soluble than in this country, where public opinion is wide awake and quite intent upon having its own way anyhow. It is pathetic to see a whole book written by a German professor of polit-ical science for the purpose of saying to his countrymen, “Please try to have an opinion about national affairs”; but a public which is so modest may at least be expected to be very docile and acquiescent in learning what things it has not a right to think and speak about imperatively. It may be sluggish, but it will not be meddlesome. It will submit to be instructed before it tries to instruct. Its polit-ical education will come before its political activity. In trying to instruct our own public opinion, we are dealing with a pupil apt to think itself quite sufficiently instructed beforehand.

The problem is to make public opinion effi-cient without suffering it to be meddlesome. Directly exercised, in the oversight of the daily details and in the choice of the daily means of government, public criticism is of course a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery. But as superintending the greater forces of formative policy alike in politics and

To discover the best principle for the distri-bution of authority is of greater importance, possibly, under a democratic system, where offi-cials serve many masters, than under others where they serve but a few. All sovereigns are suspicious of their servants, and the sovereign people is no exception to the rule; but how is its suspicion to be allayed by knowledge? If that sus-picion could be clarified into wise vigilance, it would be altogether salutary; if that vigilance could be aided by the unmistakable placing of responsibility, it would be altogether beneficent. Suspicion in itself is never healthful either in the private or in the public mind. Trust is strength in all relations of life; and, as it is the office of the constitutional reformer to create conditions of trustfulness, so it is the office of the administra-tive organizer to fit administration with condi-tions of clear-cut responsibility which shall insure trustworthiness.

And let me say that large powers and unhampered discretion seem to me the indispensable conditions of responsibility. Public attention must be easily directed, in each case of good or bad administration, to just the man deserving of praise or blame. There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible. If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible. But if it be centred in heads of the service and in heads of branches of the service, it is easily watched and brought to book. If to keep his office a man must achieve open and honest success, and if at the same time he feels himself intrusted with large freedom of discretion, the greater his power, the less likely is he to abuse it, the more is he nerved and sobered and elevated by it. The less his power, the more safely obscure and unnoticed does he feel his position to be, and the more readily does he relapse into remissness.

Just here we manifestly emerge upon the field of that still larger question—the proper relations between public opinion and administration.

To whom is official trustworthiness to be disclosed, and by whom is it to be rewarded? Is the official to look to the public for his need of praise and his push of promotion, or only to his superior in office? Are the people to be called in to settle administrative discipline as they are called in to settle constitutional principles?

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Article 1 | The Study of Administration | 25

sympathies divorced from those of a progressive, freespirited people, and with hearts narrowed to the meanness of a bigoted officialism. Certainly such a class would be altogether hateful and harmful in the United States. Any measures calculated to produce it would for us be measures of reaction and of folly.

But to fear the creation of a domineering, illiberal officialism as a result of the studies I am here proposing is to miss altogether the principle upon which I wish most to insist. That principle is, that administration in the United States must be at all points sensitive to public opinion. A body of thoroughly trained officials serving during good behavior we must have in any case: that is a plain business necessity. But the apprehension that such a body will be anything un-American clears away the moment it is asked, What is to constitute good behavior? For that question obviously carries its own answer on its face. Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behavior. That policy will have no taint of officialism about it. It will not be the creation of permanent officials, but of statesmen whose responsibility to public opinion will be direct and inevitable. Bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service of the state is removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be bureaucratic. It would be difficult to point out any examples of impudent exclusiveness and arbitrariness on the part of officials doing service under a chief of department who really served the people, as all our chiefs of departments must be made to do. It would be easy, on the other hand, to adduce other instances like that of the influence of Stein in Prussia, where the leadership of one statesman imbued with true public spirit transformed arrogant and perfunctory bureaux into public spirited instruments of just government.

The ideal for us is a civil service cultured and self-sufficient enough to act with sense and vigor, and yet so intimately connected with the popular thought, by means of elections and constant public counsel, as to find arbitrariness or class spirit quite out of the question.

administration, public criticism is altogether safe and beneficent, altogether indispensable. Let administrative study find the best means for giving public criticism this control and for shut-ting it out from all other interference.

But is the whole duty of administrative study done when it has taught the people what sort of administration to desire and demand, and how to get what they demand? Ought it not to go on to drill candidates for the public service?

There is an admirable movement towards universal political education now afoot in this country. The time will soon come when no college of respectability can afford to do without a well-filled chair of political sci-ence. But the education thus imparted will go but a certain length. It will multiply the number of intelligent critics of government, but it will create no competent body of administrators. It will prepare the way for the development of a surefooted understand-ing of the general principles of government, but it will not necessarily foster skill in con-ducting government. It is an education which will equip legislators, perhaps, but not executive officials. If we are to improve pub-lic opinion, which is the motive power of government, we must prepare better officials as the apparatus of government. If we are to put in new boilers and to mend the fires which drive our governmental machinery, we must not leave the old wheels and joints and valves and bands to creak and buzz and clatter on as best they may at the bidding of the new force. We must put in new running parts wherever there is the least lack of strength or adjustment. It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to the competitive examinations for the civil ser-vice men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge. A technically schooled civil service will pres-ently have become indispensable.

I know that a corps of civil servants prepared by a special schooling and drilled, after ap-pointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline, seems to a great many very thoughtful persons to contain elements which might combine to make an offensive official class—a distinct, semi-corporate body with

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26 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

It is abundantly safe nowadays to insist upon this actual likeness of all governments, because these are days when abuses of power are easily exposed and arrested, in countries like our own, by a bold, alert, inquisitive, detective public thought and a sturdy popular self dependence such as never existed before. We are slow to appreciate this; but it is easy to appreciate it. Try to imagine personal government in the United States. It is like trying to imagine a national wor-ship of Zeus. Our imaginations are too modern for the feat.

But, besides being safe, it is necessary to see that for all governments alike the legitimate ends of administration are the same, in order not to be frightened at the idea of looking into foreign systems of administration for instruc-tion and suggestion; in order to get rid of the apprehension that we might perchance blindly borrow something incompatible with our principles. That man is blindly astray who denounces attempts to transplant foreign sys-tems into this country. It is impossible: they simply would not grow here. But why should we not use such parts of foreign contrivances as we want, if they be in any way serviceable? We are in no danger of using them in a foreign way. We borrowed rice, but we do not eat it with chopsticks. We borrowed our whole polit-ical language from England, but we leave the words “king” and “lords” out of it. What did we ever originate, except the action of the federal government upon individuals and some of the functions of the federal supreme court?

We can borrow the science of administra-tion with safety and profit if only we read all fundamental differences of condition into its essential tenets. We have only to filter it through our constitutions, only to put it over a slow fire of criticism and distil away its foreign gases.

I know that there is a sneaking fear in some conscientiously patriotic minds that studies of European systems might signalize some foreign methods as better than some American meth-ods; and the fear is easily to be understood. But it would scarcely be avowed in just any company.

It is the more necessary to insist upon thus putting away all prejudices against looking anywhere in the world but at home for sugges-tions in this study, because nowhere else in the whole field of politics, it would seem, can we make use of the historical, comparative method

III

Having thus viewed in some sort the subject-matter and the objects of this study of adminis-tration, what are we to conclude as to the methods best suited to it—the points of view most advantageous for it?

Government is so near us, so much a thing of our daily familiar handling, that we can with difficulty see the need of any philosophical study of it, or the exact point of such study, should it be undertaken. We have been on our feet too long to study now the art of walking. We are a practical people, made so apt, so adept in self-government by centuries of experimental drill that we are scarcely any longer capable of perceiving the awkwardness of the particular system we may be using, just because it is so easy for us to use any system. We do not study the art of governing: we govern. But mere unschooled genius for affairs will not save us from sad blun-ders in administration. Though democrats by long inheritance and repeated choice, we are still rather crude democrats. Old as democracy is, its organization on a basis of modern ideas and conditions is still an unaccomplished work. The democratic state has yet to be equipped for car-rying those enormous burdens of administra-tion which the needs of this industrial and trad-ing age are so fast accumulating. Without comparative studies in government we cannot rid ourselves of the misconception that admin-istration stands upon an essentially different basis in a democratic state from that on which it stands in a nondemocratic state.

After such study we could grant democ-racy the sufficient honor of ultimately deter-mining by debate all essential questions affect-ing the public weal, of basing all structures of policy upon the major will; but we would have found but one rule of good administration for all governments alike. So far as administrative functions are concerned, all governments have a strong structural likeness; more than that, if they are to be uniformly useful and efficient, they must have a strong structural likeness. A free man has the same bodily organs, the same executive parts, as the slave, however different may be his motives, his services, his energies. Monarchies and democracies, radically differ-ent as they are in other respects, have in reality much the same business to look to.

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Article 1 | The Study of Administration | 27

Our own politics must be the touchstone for all theories. The principles on which to base a science of administration for America must be principles which have democratic policy very much at heart. And, to suit American habit, all general theories must, as theories, keep modestly in the background, not in open argument only, but even in our own minds—lest opinions satisfactory only to the standards of the library should be dog-matically used, as if they must be quite as sat-isfactory to the standards of practical politics as well. Doctrinaire devices must be post-poned to tested practices. Arrangements not only sanctioned by conclusive experience elsewhere but also congenial to American habit must be preferred without hesitation to theoretical perfection. In a word, steady, practical statesmanship must come first, closest doctrine second. The cosmopolitan what-to-do must always be commanded by the American how-to-do-it.

Our duty is to supply the best possible life to a federal organization, to systems within sys-tems; to make town, city, county, state, and fed-eral governments live with a like strength and an equally assured healthfulness, keeping each unquestionably its own master and yet making all interdependent with mutual helpfulness. The task is great and important enough to attract the best minds.

This interlacing of local self-government with federal self-government is quite a mod-ern conception. It is not like the arrange-ments of imperial federation in Germany. There local government is not yet, fully, local self-government. The bureaucrat is every-where busy. His efficiency springs out of esprit de corps, out of care to make ingratiat-ing obeisance to the authority of a superior, or, at best, out of the soil of a sensitive con-science. He serves, not the public, but an irresponsible minister. The question for us is, how shall our series of governments within governments be so administered that it shall always be to the interest of the public officer to serve, not his superior alone but the com-munity also, with the best efforts of his tal-ents and the soberest service of his con-science? How shall such service be made to his commonest interest by contributing abundantly to his sustenance, to his dearest

more safely than in this province of adminis-tration. Perhaps the more novel the forms we study the better. We shall the sooner learn the peculiarities of our own methods. We can never learn either our own weaknesses or our own virtues by comparing ourselves with our-selves. We are too used to the appearance and procedure of our own system to see its true sig-nificance. Perhaps even the English system is too much like our own to be used to the most profit in illustration. It is best on the whole to get entirely away from our own atmosphere and to be most careful in examining such sys-tems as those of France and Germany. Seeing our own institutions through such media, we see ourselves as foreigners might see us were they to look at us without preconceptions. Of ourselves, so long as we know only ourselves, we know nothing.

Let it be noted that it is the distinction, already drawn, between administration and politics which makes the comparative method so safe in the field of administration. When we study the administrative systems of France and Germany, knowing that we are not in search of political principles, we need not care a pepper-corn for the constitutional or political reasons which Frenchmen or Germans give for their practices when explaining them to us. If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monar-chist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots. He may serve his king; I will continue to serve the people; but I should like to serve my sover-eign as well as he serves his. By keeping this dis-tinction in view—that is, by studying adminis-tration as a means of putting our own politics into convenient practice, as a means of making what is democratically politic towards all admin-istratively possible towards each—we are on per-fectly safe ground, and can learn without error what foreign systems have to teach us. We thus devise an adjusting weight for our comparative method of study. We can thus scrutinize the anatomy of foreign governments without fear of getting any of their diseases into our veins; dis-sect alien systems without apprehension of blood-poisoning.

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28 Part One | Early Voices and the First Quarter Century | 1880s to 1920s |

are everywhere fostering like methods of government; and if comparative studies of the ways and means of government should enable us to offer suggestions which will practicably combine openness and vigor in the ad-ministration of such governments with ready docility to all serious, well-sustained public criticism, they will have approved themselves worthy to be ranked among the highest and most fruitful of the great departments of political study. That they will issue in such suggestions I confidently hope.

NOTES

1. Essay on Sir William Pitt. 2. Politik, S. 467.

interest by furthering his ambition, and to his highest interest by advancing his honor and establishing his character? And how shall this be done alike for the local part and for the national whole?

If we solve this problem we shall again pilot the world. There is a tendency—is there not?—a tendency as yet dim, but already steadily impulsive and clearly destined to prevail, towards, first the confederation of parts of empires like the British, and finally of great states themselves. Instead of centralization of power, there is to be wide union with tolerated divisions of prerogative. This is a tendency towards the American type—of governments joined with govern-ments for the pursuit of common purposes, in honorary equality and honorable subordination. Like principles of civil liberty

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