We don’t usually publish guest posts on this blog but we’ll make an exception here, not just because the contributor is family — the Baruch College archivist Sandra Roff — but because the subject is literally close to our hearts and does connect to the progressivism of Luther Gulick and the Bureau of Municipal Research.
So imagine our surprise and delight to find that the Library Archives where we’re preparing the Gulick Papers and IPA Collection for preservation and wider scholarly distribution is a former home of none other than McClure’s Magazine, that icon of muckraking that published Ida Tarbell’s expose of the Standard Oil Company and many other journalistic classics. True. Long before Baruch moved into the renovated William and Maria Newman Library at 151 East 25th Street in 1994 — 99 years before, in fact — it was built for the Metropolitan Street Railway Company as a power station burning coal to generate electricity for trolley cars running on the Lexington Avenue Cable Road north to 105th Street. You can still see the oversize portals. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/baruch_campus_exhibit/evolution.html
The railway company leased space in the building to other businesses, among them the magazine and publishing enterprise Sam McClure founded in 1893 and relocated from downtown in 1896. McClure’s offices were on the sixth floor, a flight above from where I’m writing this, and now part of Baruch’s computer center. Alas, the building was completely gutted for its renovation, so there’s not much hope of finding, say, an old locked closet stuffed with Lincoln Steffens’s notes for “The Shame of the Cities.” McClure’s moved out for larger quarters on 23d Street and Fourth Avenue (now Park) in 1904. But we bask in the aura, nonetheless.
Oh, and the Gulick connection? The years when McClure’s was resident here coincide with the formative years of Robert Fulton Cutting’s Citizens Union and its Bureau of City Betterment, which became the Bureau of Municipal Research where Gulick and Robert Moses and the momentous effort to invent a new science of honest, effective, accountable and professional government got their start.
Almost 75 years before Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man, succumbed to unexplained injuries after an unexplained encounter with the Baltimore police, touching off rioting, Luther Gulick dispatched his top police expert to survey the Baltimore Police Department’s organization and crime-fighting skills. The department had long resisted hiring what it called “colored police” but in 1937 had surprisingly taken into the ranks an African-American woman, Violet Hill Whyle, followed by four African-American men.
The IPA’s expert, Bruce Smith, widely regarded as the preeminent police authority in America, landed in Baltimore in 1941 — and quickly stepped into a racial quagmire.
Here’s the tale as told today in an op-ed article in the Baltimore Sun:
“No question he was the leading reformer of the 20th century.” Wow! Talk about a legacy!
So pronounced Kenneth J. Meier, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, at an “Ode to Luther Gulick” symposium at New York University on Dec. 4, 2009. And thanks to an audio transcript of more than two hours, it’s preserved for posterity. http://wagner.nyu.edu/podcasts/130
The salute, at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, brought together leading academics in public administration and political science, united in veneration of a pioneering civic leader, social scientist and organizer par excellence who transformed modern government, making Democracy work.
Simon had faulted Gulick for his foundational principles of public administration, as outlined in the hugely influential anthology Gulick compiled with the British management expert Lyndall Urwick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndall_Urwick
The book, “Papers on the Science of Administration,” opened with Gulick’s iconic essay, “Notes on the Theory of Organization”
In his essay, Gulick discussed the division of labor — how to divide tasks for maximum effect — and the span of control: how many workers can be managed by a supervisor, depending on the scope of the work. He warned against overtrust in experts —caveamus expertum, keep experts on tap not on top. And, most memorably, he coined the signature acronym of public administration — POSDCORB for the key functions of Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Coordinating, Reporting and Budgeting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSDCORB
Simon derided such pithy formulations as “proverbs of administration,” dismissing them as empty and meaningless as contradictory pairings like “Look Before You Leap” and “He Who Hesitates Is Lost.” Instead, he formulated a new science of decision-making based on sociology and psychology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Behavior
The dispute, too complex for easy summation here (and to tell, the truth, we ourselves have trouble wrapping our minds around this) left Simon as the fresh new face of modern public administration and Gulick as the orthodox and outmoded old guard. Gulick himself realized he had opened himself up for criticism by underplaying the role of politics and strategy. But over the years his reputation recovered, as scholars like Thomas H. Hammond of the Political Science Department at Michigan State University argued that Gulick was less vulnerable to Simon’s critique than commonly portrayed.
For sure, Gulick’s defenders were out in force at the NYU symposium in 2009. Leading off was Prof. Daniel Williams of Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, who had then just succeeded in securing the archives of the expiring Institute of Public Administration, including the records of its predecessor Bureau of Municipal Research, and the Gulick papers, for the Baruch Library Archives. He had not yet examined all 700-plus cartons of the collection, he said, “but even if half turn out to be duplicates, the other half will be an amazing trove.”
Particularly valuable, Williams went on, were some 1,000 surveys of governments around the nation and world conducted by the BMR and IPA. “I don’t think there’s any other collection of them anyplace in the world,” he said.
Williams credited the BMR with beginning the centralizing of executive power by strengthening the mayor’s offices at a time in America when cities, not the states or federal government, were “where the action was.” This was an era that produced giants like Gulick, Robert Moses and Charles Beard. The reformers unleashed a formidable weapon: the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 that revolutionized the funding of government and amounted, Williams said, to a “secret Constitutional Amendment.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_and_Accounting_Acting
Another scholar, H. George Frederickson of the University of Kansas, told of meeting Gulick at a professional conference in Philadelphia in 1968, when the nation, and the conference itself, was being torn by anti-war protests, ghetto riots and campus violence. Although 76, Gulick fell in easily with the young anti-establishment rebels, seeing in them perhaps, some echo of his own questioning youth. http://kupa.ku.edu/h-george-frederickson
It was left to Prof. Meier to champion Gulick as a social scientist after all, not the dry theorist or pinched drafter of organizational charts but a robust pragmatist who “attempted to fix real world problems.”
“He didn’t attempt to establish a philosophy of social science but he practiced a consistent philosophy of science,” Meier said. “A science of the artificial, not just how things are but how they might be.”
Contrary to Simon, Meier asserted, “an organization for Gulick was not a machine — it was an organism.”
And Meier quoted what could be Gulick’s best self-assessment, modestly stated, to be sure, of his towering achievement: “My main responsibility has not been the development of a consistent and scholarly intellectual edifice. My job has been to persuade the politically responsible decision-makers to take a sensible step foreword in governmental management. This approach leads more to an optimistic marshaling of concepts and words designed to appeal to the client than a philosophical structure.
The final and perhaps most affecting words came not from an academic but a woman of 83 named Pearl Hack who stood and said: “I met Luther Gulick in 1946. I was 20, a graduate of Hunter.” She was one of five students — and the sole woman — to win a scholarship to study at the IPA with Gulick. “He was dynamic, filled with spirit, a fascinating teacher,” Hack recalled. “Can you imagine what it was like to sit around with five students and Luther?”
“He was a teacher, which to me is the highest role in society,” she concluded. “He was an extraordinary human being, which is number one in my book.”
Another woman with a gripping personal story was in the hall but did not speak. She had an interesting name — Lisa Gulick. An assistant commissioner in the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, she is a granddaughter of Luther, one of five grandchildren. Her father was Gulick’s son, Luther, Jr., a geographer who died in 2000. You will be hearing more about her in subsequent posts.
Ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, after being stricken with polio, with her then-husband, George Balanchine/LIFE
Luther Gulick, as we never tire of telling, was a pioneer of public administration, master planner, urban visionary, statesman and policy strategist, confidant of FDR, and Mayor Robert Wagner, advisor to the Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser and countless other leaders the world over. Gulick’s gift was teaching politicians how to translate their prescriptions for society’s betterment into actual workable programs.
Gulick was lots of things. But a balletomane?
Yes, that too. The files reveal him as an aficionado of the dance, knowledgable and confident enough to share his insights with even George Balanchine. In 1956, Balanchine’s wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, was stricken with polio while on tour in Copenhagen.
Gulick, who had long supported New York City Center, the city’s original performing arts venue, founded by Mayor LaGuardia, frequented the ballet whenever possible and was moved to write Balanchine in sorrow and solidarity with “your battle in Copenhagen.” He took the opportunity to critique a performance of the Ballet Theater that had fallen short – “showy but mediocre” in Gulick’s view.
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* Pas de Deux, is French for a ballet duet. Pas du tout is French for “Not at all.”
Luther Gulick had pretty shrewd political instincts. He disdained President Gerald Ford, largely for his pardon of the disgraced Richard Nixon, whom Gulick HATED, along with his sleazy VP, Spiro Agnew. So when Jimmy Carter ran against Ford for President in 1976, Gulick (a onetime Republican devoted to FDR and the New Deal) sent the Georgia peanut farmer a fan note.
Carter responded, kind of pro forma.
But Gulick’s gushing note three years earlier to another political victor, Mayor Abe Beame, came to haunt him.
By late 1981, Gulick had changed his view considerably, as he wrote Leona Baumgartner, former city health commissioner and a close friend. Now Beame was “our friend” (in quotes) whose “gimmicks” had landed the city in bankruptcy.
Gulick was wrong about something else as well, he noted. Then nearing 90, he said he had never much expected to live into his 80s. In fact he would reach almost 101, having been born (in Japan) the year Grover Cleveland became president and dying the year Bill Clinton took office.
