The cult of Luther Gulick, which finds its apotheosis in this blog, has now attained the ultimate — its own merch. Here, modeled by our own Steven Calco and just in time for the annual NASPAA Conference of leaders of schools of public affairs, is the authentic Gulick T-shirt (not that the modest and fastidious dean of public administration would ever have been caught dead wearing one). But we like to think he’d enjoy the tribute after all.
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.”
If you were Luther Gulick looking for a scientific method of choosing good public servants, whom would you turn to?
Albert Einstein, of course.
Gulick did exactly that in 1934, writing the renowned mathematician and physicist for advice on behalf of the Commission of Inquiry on Public Service Personnel at 302 East 35th Street.
But, Einstein confessed, when it came to civics he was no Einstein.
He was then at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, having fled Germany the year before (yes, a migrant!), following Hitler’s election to the German chancellorship and seizure of absolute power. With Jews an immediate target of the Nazis, Einstein was on a death list, his books burned in the street by frenzied mobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Gulick was a growing world authority in his own right — preeminent government reformer, chief of the influential Institute of Public Administration and advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt going back to his pre-Presidential days in the Albany state house.
Ever since his formative years in the nineteen-teens at the Training School of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Gulick was preoccupied by problems of management, organization, and public service. How should society go about choosing and grooming its leaders?
In 1934, he put the question to Einstein. Alas, we don’t have a copy of Gulick’s letter — at least it has not yet turned up in the 700 boxes of Gulick papers and Institute of Public Administration records now processed and being partially digitized at the IPA Collection at Baruch’s Newman Library Archives.
But we have the original — a very valuable signed original! — of Einstein’s answer, typewritten from Watch Hill, R.I., on June 22, 1934. From it, we can deduce the question Gulick asked.
Esteemed Sir,
My knowledge of local conditions is by far insufficient to justify my participation in the effort you envision. I must even openly confess that I do not believe in any mechanical methods for selecting suitable men for public office. However it may be set up, success always depends on the ability and honesty of those who have to make the choice.
Respectfully yours,
A Einstein
Too bad. But we are consoled by something that popped up on the Internet. When searching information on Einstein in 1934, we found another signed Einstein letter from the same year that Amazon is offering for sale — for $27,500!
http://www.amazon.com/ALBERT-EINSTEIN-AUTOGRAPH-LETTER-SIGNED/dp/B00JDTYYVU
Last December we posted on the miserably underpaid New York police of 1913, with the inevitable consequence of graft. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/12/the-poor-police-of-a-century-ago/
Well, what a difference four decades made.
Our archival team digitizing key printed materials in Baruch’s Institute of Public Administration Collection under a Carnegie grant — Deborah Tint, Hilary Clifford and Sarah Rappo — highlighted a striking find: a 1952 IPA study of NYPD and Fire Department salaries and career practices. From it, a different picture emerges. By then, as the IPA’s forerunner Bureau of Municipal Research had recommended in 1913, pay had risen appreciably, reaching levels almost comparable to today’s — but other serious problems remained.
The 1952 study was part of the effort to modernize New York City government by the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey (a yawner of a name perhaps designed to mask its revolutionary mandate.) Of course, the committee’s director was Luther Gulick.
In 1913, as we wrote, New York’s rookie cops were earning about $800 a year — in today’s dollars about $19,186. That, as we noted, was less than their cost of living, meaning, no doubt, that they were making up the different somehow, probably illicitly. (Today’s officers start out at $44,744, including benefits.)
But by 1952, the IPA study reported, police officers were starting at $3,725 and going up to $4,780 (in today’s dollars $33,544 and $43,044, respectively) — leading the nation in police and fire salaries. And it wasn’t because New York was the most expensive city. Far from it. Out of 34 U.S. cities in 1950, with Seattle the most expensive, New York ranked close to the bottom — 25th.
Cops made more in uniform than in previous jobs, and they had more vacations and sick leave than employees in private industry. In fact, the study found, through the Depression and early 1940s, police captains were earning more than doctors or lawyers, although the situation reversed during and after World War II.
Policemen and women — females having joined the ranks in 1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Police_Department — also earned more than most other city employees. And the others couldn’t retire after only 20 years with substantial pensions, or even three-quarters pay for service-connected disabilities (which an inordinate number of members, then, as now, seem to incur.)
And yet the NYPD was rife with problems, the study found. There were no educational requirements — applicants needed only write and read English “understandingly.” The written test questions could easily be crammed-for. There were long delays between the exams and appointments. Medical tests were perfunctory. Background checks were haphazard. Of 4,000 applicants appointed in 1947, “character questions” were raised in 249 cases. Only 50 would-be cops were dropped. The other 199 survived, with a total of 267 various charges on their records. Furthermore, the police commissioner had wide discretion on appointments and promotions, opening the way to favoritism and politicking.
Rotten apples in the department didn’t have to worry. “Disciplinary action has reached the vanishing point,” the study found. From more than 5,000 charges brought against officers in 1928, by 1950 the number had dropped by 90 per cent. From close to 90 dismissals in 1937, fewer than 10 officers were dismissed in 1950.
Whether drunk on duty, firing their weapons while drunk, assaulting civilians, or disappearing from their posts, officers were rarely punished. Awards, on the other hand, were dispersed with abandon.
And surprisingly the IPA found, police work at the time was less dangerous than widely thought. In fact, death rates showed that agriculture, construction, mining and quarrying were all more hazardous than policing. Accidents among the police were less frequent — and less severe — than in the city’s purchasing department.
The IPA offered a lot of recommendations, many of which were stymied by the increasingly powerful police and fire unions.
The NYPD cracked down on abuses. But following decades revealed just how far the department still had to go.
Abortion…fornication…bastardy…buggery…sodomy…miscegenation…seduction — all were reportable sex offenses apart from rape in the America of 1930. We know this from a fascinating volume that turned up in the IPA Collection that we are now digitizing for widespread academic and scholarly access.
Before 1930, the nation had few reliable ways of assessing the threat posed by crime — a menace that Prohibition would soon magnify to epidemic proportions. But that year the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), founded in 1894, began collecting crime statistics from its members to hand over to J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation (it wouldn’t be the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935) for what became the highly-regarded Uniform Crime Reporting Program. https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr
There was, however, one big hitch. Back in 1930, states had wildly varying statutes defining crimes and their various degrees. Before a national census could be compiled, there would have to be a consensus of what constituted reportable crime.
That daunting task was overseen by (of course!) Bruce Smith, America’s leading police expert from (of course!) the Bureau of Municipal Research and successor Institute of Public Administration. And those acknowledged as assisting included (of course!) Smith’s longtime mentor and associate, Luther Gulick. Their efforts were codified in the aforesaid volume called “Uniform Crime Reporting: A Complete Manual For Police.”
This was the second edition of a book that had first appeared the year before and was included in the extensive IPA library acquired by Baruch College, along with thousands of files from the Bureau of Municipal Research and personal papers of Gulick.
So what does it tell us?
The effort to compile a reliable set of national crime statistics goes back to at least 1871 when the National Police Convention met in St. Louis. Foreign countries like France, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, Holland, Denmark and Turkey “submitted data which were considered of value” while an inquiry to U.S. states “yielded practically nothing.” Little happened over the next half century but in 1927, the IACP formed a Committee on Uniform Crime Records. Still, police departments balked at submitting data, fearing that a rise in crime figures would be held against them. Advocates noted that health authorities were not held liable for outbreaks of disease, and by 1929 a system for uniform reporting was outlined in the first edition of the manual. The Government would furnish the monthly forms “with return envelopes requiring no postage,” Hoover wrote in the Preface, adding, “the cooperation of peace officials is earnestly requested.”
Smith and IACP grappled with the thorny problem of standardizing the counting and definitions of crime. Most measurements of crime started with people arrested. But what about unsolved crimes? The book suggests the benchmark: offenses known to the police. One thief could burglarize a dozen apartments, or a dozen thieves could burglarize one. How to count those? How many crimes were “cleared by arrest?” A single arrest could solve dozens of crimes, while dozens of arrests might solve one. How many crimes were solved by convictions? The police usually didn’t know — the judiciary kept those records. What about crimes in the rural countryside? Who kept those figures?
And what was a crime anyway? The states each had complicatedly nuanced legal definitions of murder and manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault and larceny. They were widely divergent on felonies and misdemeanors. In Delaware, felons were usually whipped — but misdemeanants were often punished more harshly, with longer imprisonment. New Jersey had no felonies — only misdemeanors and high misdemeanors. Possessing burglar’s tools was a felony in half the states, a misdemeanor in the others.
The description of crime and punishment circa 1930 was eye-popping. Abortion was a misdemeanor in Nebraska and Oklahoma, a felony almost everywhere else. Seduction, widely punished as a felony, was only a misdemeanor in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, as was sodomy, elsewhere usually a felony. Indecent exposure was a felony in Oregon, a misdemeanor in most other states.
In Arkansas, Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Vermont, “concealing the death of a bastard,” a child conceived out of wedlock, was a felonious homicide. Seventeen states, including New York, also punished as felonious homicide the killing of a person in an out-of-state duel. Challenging someone to a duel, “posting as a coward,” and serving as a second or surgeon at a duel were felonies almost everywhere.
In Montana, it was a felonious homicide to fire a gun or missile at a stagecoach, and a felony to exhibit a motion picture of a train robbery.
The dividing line between petit and grand larceny was $5 in Maryland (worth $69.78 today) and $500 in Rhode Island.
“Indecent liberties” were considered harshly punishable as rape in New York and Connecticut and a dozen other states and territories. (The Philippines and Hawaii were still territories then.) So was “publishing the name of a woman attacked” in Florida and South Carolina. “Assault with intent to commit the infamous crime against nature” was a felony in New Jersey, Nebraska, Nevada and Utah.
It Oklahoma, it was rape to have sexual intercourse with a woman “under belief the accused is her husband, such belief being induced by artifice practiced by him…”
Other sex crimes on the books in various states that the IACP recommended reporting as lesser offenses, so-called Part II Classes, included: abduction and compelling to marry, adultery and fornication, bastardy, bigamy and polygamy, buggery, incest and marriage within prohibited degrees, intercourse with an insane, epileptic or venereally diseased partner, miscegenation, prostitution and sodomy.
Other such lesser offenses included lotteries, “riot, rout or affray”, blasphemy, vagrancy, desecrating the flag, “displaying red or black flag,” violation of quarantine and prize fights.
It’s a wonder that Smith and the IACP managed after all to compile the reporting forms that today constitute the widely respected Uniform Crime Reporting Program. But even now, the FBI says, it is “undertaking a wholesale redesign and redevelopment of the system.”