Our  IPA Collection and Luther Gulick Papers continues to yield archival gold. The latest find is a 1974 monograph by Rowland A. Egger, an eminent professor of politics and public affairs, and emissary of President John F. Kennedy. Egger, a Texan who died at 71 in 1979, was prominent at the University of Virginia and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and served as a special representative of JFK to Bolivia in 1961.

In 1974, Egger delivered his paper, “The Period of Crisis — 1933 to 1945” to a meeting of what was then called the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA). Today it’s still NASPAA but it now stands for the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration. http://www.naspaa.org/

Its annual conference is taking place next week, Oct. 14-17, at the Brooklyn Marriott, which gives this post a timely peg. http://www.naspaa.org/AnnualConference/index.asp

At the conference, Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, a host and mainstay of NASPAA, will distribute a brochure and leaflet on the IPA Collection and Gulick Papers. IPA Leaflet

The 1974 conference, at Syracuse University, celebrated a milestone — the 50th anniversary of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, successor of the Training School for Public Service that Mrs. E.H. Harriman and the New York Bureau of Municipal Research founded so momentously in 1911. And where Gulick got his first education in public policy.

What caught our eye was something Egger said about Gulick in that 1974 paper. He was writing about the President’s Committee on Administrative Management (PCAM), the triumverate of chairman Louis Brownlow, Gulick, and Charles Merriam that laid out a crucial reorganization of the executive branch in 1937.

As we noted in this blogpost from last year, until then federal agencies were directly reporting to the White House, causing mayhem. After Congress grudgingly passed the reorganization (or much of it), a streamlined organizational chart insulated President Roosevelt from routine decisions, creating what scholars recognize as the powerful modern presidency. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/11/fdrs-ghostwriter/

But Egger went further. In his paper he called PCAM’s innovations “the first comprehensive reconsideration of the Presidency and the President’s control of the executive branch since 1787, and is probably the most important constitutional document of our time.” (My emphasis.)

There were other insights in Egger’s paper. He wrote of “the five authentic social revolutions” (up to 1974) that transformed the Republic since its founding: the war of independence; Jacksonian Democracy; Lincoln’s salvation of the Union; Roosevelt’s muscular federalism that threw the massive resources of the government behind a struggling citizenry; and the egalitarian dictates of the Warren Court.

Egger wrote of the management revolution as well, particularly the years 1933-1937 “marked by extraordinary development and experimentation in public administration, especially in the national government.” The POSDCORB formulation of Gulick and his co-author Lyndall Urwick was getting “a run for its money” and the planning innovations of the era would be studied for decades to come. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2015/04/ode-to-luther-gulick/

Egger highlights the reversals as well, particularly the nation’s calamitous slide back into Depression in 1937 when Roosevelt applied the economic brakes too soon. In a replay of 1929’s Black Tuesday, eight years later, almost to the day, the stock market took another sickening dive. Wisely, Roosevelt, prodded by that champion of government intervention John Maynard Keynes, quickly reversed course, abandoning budget-balancing and pumping new federal billions into the economy, narrowly averting disaster. A prolific author, Egger wrote and contributed to numerous books on government and public administration. .http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARowland%20Egger

Let’s end with a lovely tableau from 1933, the coming of the New Deal, as cited by Egger from Edmund Wilson’s memoir, “The American Earthquake.”