Sometimes, when we open a messy box, an item emerges which leaves everyone puzzled. One such object was recently discovered at the bottom of a particularly chaotic container.

Out of this box came a hefty envelope addressed to Leeds Gulick, Luther’s brother. The contents of the envelope was a mysterious white powder, which was quickly isolated.

Our guess is that it is either salt or sugar that dates back to the late 1920s or early 1930s. We hope to test the powder sometime in the future to confirm our hypothesis.

Even before Pearl Harbor, Luther Gulick in FDR’s Washington was planning for the peace he knew would have to come someday — after the war that he was sure would embroil the US. With the coming of the war, Gulick worked on military production but never stopped thinking about the peace. In February 1943 he wrote a prominent Austin physician, C. Hansford Brownlee, some of his ideas about demobilization planning to re-employ and educate the millions of American soldiers who would be coming home. Brownlee knew that Glulick had been offered and turned down the presidency of the University of Texas and he passed Gulick’s ideas on to a man he knew well in Washington — Lyndon B. Johnson, then a young Congressman from Texas’s hardscrabble Hill Country.

Johnson wrote Gulick himself, showing him Brownlee’s flattering letter, suggesting he (LBJ) had also taken note of Gulick’s work.

Gulick then answered Johnson directly, suggesting that if the Congressman shared his concern about post-war planning he might get in touch with Charles Eliot of the National Resources Planning Board, grandson of the late president of Harvard.

This would all culminate, towards the end of World War II, in a landmark piece of legislation — the GI Bill.

By the time Luther Gulick got to the War Production Board in 1942, he already had a quarter-century’s worth of administrative experience, starting with the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. Here are his 11 rules of effective  management, including… AVOID COMMITTEES!

As if Luther Gulick and the War Production Board didn’t have enough to worry about in the dismal first year of fighting after  Pearl Harbor, a well-meaning businessman, Joseph Anthony Marcus, came forward in September 1942 with a disturbing complaint: coastal shipyard workers were being housed in the most abysmal conditions. Hundreds of war plants and shipyards were unable to attract workers because of the wretched housing, often no more than windowless shacks without plumbing . “No housing, no workers,” Marcus wrote. “No workers, no ships and no tanks and no guns.” He urged the War Production Board to set up a Construction Division with a War Housing Bureau. “The time has come to throw off the gloves and deliver some real punches.”

To enforce his message, Marcus enclosed a clipping from an editorial in the Washington Post that called it  “Scandal No. 1.”

Gulick initially blew him off, insisting that “our office deals entirely with organizational problems and not with personnel.” But he soon relented and met with Marcus, who turned out to be quite a character. A Russian expert with the American Radiator Company, he had spent years in the U.S.S.R. after the Russian Revolution and spoke Russian, Ukrainian, German and Spanish, among some other languages. He was on friendly terms with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, former New York Governor and relief czar Herbert Lehman, Senator Robert F. Wagner and Speaker Sam Rayburn, and had worked in the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Justice, and Agriculture, among others. And after the Great War, he was relief and reconstruction director in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

To buttress his case on behalf of the shipyard workers, Marcus sent Gulick 17 heartrending photos. Here are some of them. Note the lack of windows and the primitive outhouse (with liquor bottles).

What was done to remedy the problem will require some scholarly research.