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.

Protecting and preserving slices of history — or even identifying what you’ve come across — isn’t always easy.  Take the long, and curled up, photo that project archivist Alex Gelfand found recently in three pieces. Trying to flatten it was one big challenge. Another has been to identify the people and setting. It’s most likely the staff of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research around the time it morphed into the Institute of Public Administration in 1921. From the fashions and other clues, it’s probably the 1920s, or conceivably the 1910s.

Luther Gulick, the Institute’s guiding light until his death in 1993 at nearly 101, is easy to spot. He’s the handsome, square-jawed one standing in the left rear between the two windows.

That may be his mentor, eminent historian Charles Beard, the director of the Bureau’s Training School, standing at the extreme right in the photo below.

As for the others, who knows?

Even photographing the photograph proved daunting. That’s Barry Spector of the Museum of Public Relations — another prize collection at the Baruch College Archives — behind the camera in the photos below. And Alex’s hand gesturing at bottom left. (Of course, before he would actually touch the photo, he would don archivist’s white cotton gloves.)

We’ll post any answers we come across.

Whatever you think of President Obama, the American taxpayer is getting him  cheap compared, say, with a predecessor like Franklin D. Roosevelt.

According to a document prepared for the President’s Committee on Administrative Management — that’s FDR, by the way — the nation’s Chief Executive was paid $75,000 in 1936. That translates to $1.28 million in today’s dollars. (No wonder he wanted to serve four terms.)

Mr. Obama (like every President since 2001) gets a measly $400,000, plus a $50,000 annual expense account, $100,000 in non taxable travel funds, and $19,000 for entertainment. That’s been the pay Congress set 13 years ago and the White House occupants, both of them, haven’t gotten a raise since.

Notice, too, that the president of General Motors (Alfred P. Sloan at the time) made $324,505 in  1936 — equivalent to $5.5 million today. (Meanwhile he was battling unionists in “the strike heard round the world” who were struggling to organize the auto industry for better pay and working conditions.)

http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/businesshistory/February/flint.html

The current (also embattled) CEO of GM, Mary T. Barra, gets a salary of $1.6 million plus incentive pay of $2.8 million, but with other boons may end up banking $14.4 million, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

But even at the (relatively) meagre pay, there are no shortage of eager aspirants  for the White House job.

Concern over the sorry state of American schooling is nothing new. Back in 1939, The Advisory Committee on Education — which Gulick served after reorganizing the federal bureaucracy for FDR — examined spending disparities around the country and came away aghast. It found a 500 percent gap between the states in dollars spent per child in 1935-6.

New York came in second, at $ 74.28 a year — equivalent to $1,290 today. California beat New York by 39 cents. (Nevada came in a close third, but its population was hardly comparable.) Arkansas brought up the rear, at $12.16 — about $211 today.

Today we’re spending way more — over $19,000 per student in New York — a 15-fold increase over nearly 75 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/23/new-york-student-spending-census_n_3322237.html

But guess what? There are still huge disparities. Utah spent the least — $6,212, less than a third of New York’s figure.

And when it comes to generating private money to support local schools, one rich district in San Diego, CA., raised 80 times more than a nearby poor district.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/us/nations-wealthy-places-pour-private-money-into-public-schools-study-finds.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C{%222%22%3A%22RI%3A18%22%2C%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22}

What would Gulick’s Advisory Committee on Education say to that?

Luther Gulick spent much of 1936 working with two colleagues as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management (“the Brownlow Committee”) to reorganize the federal government.

http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/kmayer/408/Report%20of%20the%20Presidents%20Committee.pdf

There was little doubt reform was sorely needed. Virtually every federal entity reported directly to the Roosevelt White House, making for an administrative nightmare.

Gulick and colleagues came up with a five-point program: give the President six top assistants to work with the federal agencies; strengthen the budget office and personnel services; professionalize and expand the civil service; consolidate the more than 100 various agencies, boards, commissions etc., into 12 major departments; and create an independent Auditor General who would monitor expenditures and keep the Executive accountable to Congress.

As it was, Congress, alarmed at the dictatorial excesses across the globe and fearful of adding to Roosevelt’s already sweeping powers, bridled at passing many of the changes Gulick & Co. advocated. The first reorganization bill failed, and when a version finally passed in 1939, it contained few of the measures the President and Brownlow committee had sought. But undaunted, FDR used his executive authority to implement them anyway. By that time, the war clouds were so ominous, Congress made little objection.

Even with so many big issues to grapple with, Gulick typically found time to track down and write an anonymous correspondent for what was then called News-Week magazine (articles at the time carrying no bylines) in praise of his “very intelligent article” on the reorganization. He turned out to be Edward Ware Barrett, later chief of the overseas news and features division of the Office of  War Information, and still later, Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (when this blogger attended in the 1960s — small world department.)

By 1937, as if reorganizing the federal government had not been enough, Gulick plunged into a study of the federal role in education. It had begun as an inquiry into the federal role in vocational education, but FDR decided quickly that the issue was broader than that.

Gulick was soon caught up in a new bureaucracy that required work-related federal travel to be paid by Works Progress Administration vouchers.

And, by the way, did anyone catch the name of Gulick’s secretary?

Emily E. HULICK! How weird is that?