Luckily for scholars, Luther Gulick was an avid accumulator — the files bulge with his saved drafts, correspondence, travel itineraries, expense accounts and souvenirs from a lifetime (close to a century, amazingly) in the public sector.

So, of course, when he heard that cities across the nation were issuing their own currency called scrip during monetary shortages in the Great Depression, he set about collecting that too.

Scrip has a long history but it was notably used in mining towns and other remote communities far from banks, notoriously as a way of keeping workers indebted to company stores. Scrip is everywhere in Las Vegas — you’ve heard of chips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

In 1934, the Municipal Finance Officers Association wrote Gulick with a description of the kinds of scrip being issued.

Intrigued, he started collecting samples. At least once — possibly short of change himself — Gulick offered to pay with…stamps!

Gulick’s efforts paid off. Here are samples of scrip he assembled:

(And don’t the miss the digs at would-be Socialist Governor Upton Sinclair of California — scrip dollars of “The Red Currency”…”good only in California or Russia.”)

At 5 a.m. on Jan. 6, 1937, Luther Gulick was already hard at work, writing a message on governmental reorganization that President Roosevelt would deliver to Congress six days later.

(Like, no pressure, right?)

How do we know? Because the files have a copy of Gulick’s frequently revised “confidential” draft, with his handwritten note: “1st draft of President’s message by LG/Jan 6 -5-9 AM.”

It was the culmination of a momentous effort throughout 1936 by Gulick, Louis Brownlow and Charles Merriam –the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, known as the Brownlow Committee –to simplify the chaotic dis-organization of the federal bureaucracy, as FDR struggled to lift the nation out of the Great Depression and prepare for the growing threat posed by the fascist dictatorships overseas.

So here’s the point: take a look at Gulick’s draft above. See how he struggled with the right language to put in FDR’s mouth (or pen). “…trough of the depression…” etc.

Now take a look at the message, as Roosevelt sent it to Congress Jan. 12, 1937 (and reproduced by The New York Times).

Sound familiar?

The reorganization bill of 1937 failed. The Republicans denounced it as a power grab and defeated it.

Sound familiar?

But Roosevelt persevered and won passage of a watered down bill two years later. What the bill lacked, he made up for by administrative edit. And then he gratefully presented a ceremonial signing pen to Gulick, who preserved it in his safe.

The note — and pen — turned up in the collection.

 

In the second decade of the 20th century the Bureau of Municipal Research was riding high. The group had survived the attacks of Tammany Hall and its reputation was spreading throughout the United States. Local civic groups began creating their own Bureaus based on the New York model; however, lacking experience, they increasingly turned to the original for expertise.

Members of the New York Bureau were frequently lent out on projects and many quickly obtained high positions in other cities, permanently leaving New York. This drain was one of the reasons that Dr. William Allen, one of the founders of the bureau, decided to create a school program to provide training to public administration professionals. Mary Williamson Averell Harriman,  widow of the railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman (who was one of the earliest supporters of the Bureau), agreed to contribute $40,000 — about $1 million today — to the cause, leading to the birth of the Training School for Public Service in 1911.

The School aimed to train men — women were only added later — to administer public business, improve the methods used in government service and to generally advance the fields of political science, accountancy, engineering, law, public hygiene, school administration, journalism, medicine and any other fields that related to public service.

In the first year, 485 applications and inquiries were received from 106 cities in 25 states. The first class, of 25 students, included eight studying finance (either Ph.D’s or already engaged in some sort of business), a lawyer, an army engineer, a sanitary engineer, a civil engineer, a school superintendent and two recent college graduates.

Admission was based on certain minimums including “…good physical condition, able to do exacting work under continuous pressure,” as well as  “habits of industry, force of character, and a genuine interest in public affairs.” Also vital: “Courtesy, tact, good address, maturity, discriminating judgement, and ability to command respect and confidence…”

New York City was to be a giant laboratory in which these hopeful public servants were going to hone their skills. However at first no formal curriculum was contemplated. Each student was under the general supervision of the director of field work and was also assigned to one of the men in the Bureau for supervision in the particular field work.

There was no set length of time the students were required to spend at the school, most doing between one and two years. Eventually a more rigid two-year program was formulated where the students split their time between theory received in a class or lecture setting and the practical portion where they worked alongside a member of the Bureau, on assignments and projects.

The program was not for the faint of heart or those not ready to hit the ground running.

When a new student first entered the program, he was given an assignment right away. If he failed to perform his first task satisfactorily, he had to withdraw from the School. The thoroughness and follow-through required of the students made the program unique.

A graduate who attended part time between 1912 and 1916 remembers being given an assignment to attend the meeting of the City Council. Having only recently arrived in New York, the neophyte first had a difficult time locating City Hall. Once there, he saw that the only business transacted by the Council that day was passage of one resolution appropriating $25,000 for paving a certain street.

The student submitted a report on everything he’d heard and thought that ended the assignment. The Bureau quickly disabused him. The next day he was sent to look for the street mentioned in the resolution to see if it indeed needed paving, or even existed.

The street was even more difficult for him to find than City Hall, but he eventually succeeded, reporting that the street had never been paved before.

However the assignment continued, the next task being a trip to the city clerk’s office to search the records on the street. There the student discovered that the street had been “paved” — and paid for– every year for the past 25 years! With this evidence of chicanery in hand, the Bureau made sure that the street was finally paved for real and the student could finally put that assignment to rest.

The Bureau aimed to build an amiable atmosphere between its staff and the students since they spent long periods of time working together. With this view in mind, various bonding events were staged.

A more formal mechanism for interaction and socialization was the creation of a social club whose members went to the theater, played games, and went on various outings together.

The Training Schools also issued its own newsletter, although it appears to have been relatively short lived. Searching for an appropriate motto for their new institution, one of the students suggested the following ditty:

“A wise old owl lived in an oak

And the more he saw the less he spoke

While the less he spoke the more he heard

Why can’t we all be like that bird?”

 

The publication contained informational pieces mixed with humor,  a sampling of which may be found below:

Naturally the school attracted a high caliber of students many of whom went on to be leaders in their fields. Luther Gulick, who spent a better part of the century working at the Bureau and later the Institute of Public Administration, started out as a humble student at the school in 1916 while attending Columbia University (some institutions of higher education began giving academic credit to students to attended the Training School).

Another notable graduate was Robert Moses who, like many other students, ended up working in the Bureau itself after finishing up his training.

By the 1920s, various universities had began to develop their own public administration systems and with the attention of the Bureau starting to concentrate more and more on national issues, the school was transferred to Syracuse University, becoming the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

And this brings the tale full circle: in 2010, the City University of New York appointed a new president of Baruch — Mitchel B. Wallerstein, then dean of the Maxwell School!

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/CUNY_release.htm

A timely post on this Veteran’s Day:

When the US declared war on Germany in 1917, Luther Gulick, then 25 and a newlywed, tried to enlist in the air corps but was denied for poor eyesight. According to his friend Lyle Fitch, Gulick then enlisted in the army and was sent to Washington to work in the State Council for National Defense compiling (what else?) statistics.

With draft-evasion bedeviling President Wilson, Gulick also worked on what he freely called “a propaganda campaign” with the press to get American boys to sign up for service “and the registrations came flooding in.” Then another crisis erupted — the flu epidemic. So many soldiers were stricken, Gulick reported, “we even wondered whether we could win the war.”

Luckily, Gulick and his bride Helen lived in a fairly remote area on Connecticut Avenue and commuted to work by bicycle, with the newspapers taking note.

He found time to help two visiting Czech patriots, Jan Masaryk and Edvard Benes, write a constitution for their homeland. Their brave plan later fell victim to Hitler and, in the postwar Communist takeover, Stalin.

Gulick witnessed the parade of the first Armistice Day a year after the war ended on 11/11/11/– the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. In a letter to his sons, Gulick much later remembered: “Mother and I stood on the steps of the War and Navy Building, directly across from President Wilson, and watched him review the parade. I will never forget how tired and sad he looked.”

It was hardly the end of Gulick’s wartime contributions. In World War II he served FDR in a host of agencies supervising military production and manpower and after victory consulted at Nuremberg and helped negotiate reparations from Germany and Japan.

Oh, and he got back a piece of equipment loaned to the war effort.

One of the recently discovered items in the collection is an old photo album with images and descriptions of various police boxes throughout Great Britain — part of a study on policing practices outside New York. (Fans of the show “Doctor Who” will be familiar with the Tardis, a blue police box used by The Doctor to travel through time and space, as well as his constant exclamation: “it’s bigger on the inside.”)

Police boxes were small communication centers from which officers could call headquarters and members of the public could get in touch with police in case of an emergency before the widespread availability of portable two way radios.

Although cities in the United States experimented with police boxes, they had a relatively short life compared with their cousins across the  Atlantic. Below are just some examples of what could have been…