When municipalities ran out of legal tender in the Great Depression, some came up with a creative solution — they printed their own money, called scrip. If Uncle Sam didn’t recognize it, who cared? It helped desperate people survive.  Luther Gulick collected some prime examples of scrip, coins and bills, which we’re proud to showcase in our Gulick Papers collection. They’re listed in our finding aid here:

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/documents/Gulick_Finding_Aid.pdf

We’ll be showing these and other images of scrip in a talk Oct. 29 at the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street — 90 years to the day after the Stock Market…Cr…Cras…– gosh!, we can’t  bear to say the terrible word.

https://www.moaf.org/events/general/2019-10-29-ralph-blumenthal-on-crash-the-stock-market-collapse-of-october-29-1929-and-the-rise-of-fake-money-scrip

 

 

Of particular interest are some red-baiting spoofs targeting the would-be Socialist Governor of California, muckraker Upton Sinclair, an 1897 graduate of City College, by the way. Sinclair lost his 1934 race but garnered nearly 880,000 votes and, with his EPIC  (End Poverty in California) campaign, left an enduring political and social legacy. (Bernie Sanders, anyone?)

http://depts.washington.edu/epic34/

 

 

Luther Gulick was fittingly the star when the City University’s television show “Urban U” came to the Baruch Library Archives to record a segment on the great civic reformer (1892-1993) who devoted his distinguished government career to “making democracy work.”

CUNY TV host Ari Goldberg and his camera toured our historic Institute of Public Administration Collection and Luther Gulick Papers, focusing on Gulick’s efforts to reorganize the chaotic executive branch for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his World War II relief work, and postwar Reparations missions to Germany and Japan. We even got to show off Gulick’s walking cane (which he mainly used for protection.) The program began airing in June.

This being the 80th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic struggle to reorganize the executive branch, we organized a symposium at the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park on Sunday, April 28, to salute the effort. (June also marks 80 years since Roosevelt hosted the visiting King and Queen of England for a picnic here. It became known as the Hot Dog Summit , or as we like to call it because FDR was so ebullient –Frank, On a Roll). On the reorganization panel we moderated were two eminent scholars, Susan Dunn of Williams College, and David Woolner of the Roosevelt Institute, Marist College and Bard College.

You can watch the program here:

https://totalwebcasting.com/view/?func=VOFF&id=fdr&date=2019-04-28&seq=1&fbclid=IwAR3j36Uf4xWeVB7YoFCsyo3enNba28IFSK-QzefXzkpduW3tedWy2wlwzoQ

This is the speech Luther Gulick wrote for the President in 1937. It would take 2 1/2 more years to pass the reorganization bill, and even then it was drastically watered down by opponents who accused Roosevelt of seeking dictatorial power.

This is the President’s Committee on Administrative Management that planned the reorganization. (L-r, Gulick, Charles Merriam, Louis Brownlow).

This is the mess they were dealing with:

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This is the plan they came up with — a Presidential Secretariat to take burdens off the Chief Executive:

When a bill — just not the one the President wanted — finally passed in April 1939, Gulick received a souvenir signing pen. He put in in the safe. Now it’s one of the treasures of our collection.

We know Robert Moses — Luther Gulick’s classmate in the nineteen-teens at the Training School School for Public Service — from his colossal public works that reshaped New York: Jones Beach, Lincoln Center, the bridges, the parkways, the Queens fairground. We know Moses, too, from Robert Caro’s sharp-edged portrait in “The Power Broker” and the projects that the master builder tried (and luckily failed) to ram through, like LOMEX, the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have obliterated SoHo.

But do we know Robert Moses, the social butterfly? Didn’t think so.

This surprising aspect turns up in our Institute of Public Administration collection detailing the birth of municipal reform by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research in the first years of the 20th century. (See our inaugural post from nearly five years ago: https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/wp-admin/post.php?post=8&action=edit).

Going through the records recently, our eagle-eyed archivist Sarah Rappo spotted a 1930 letter to Gulick from a certain “Paul” at New York University’s School of Commerce. It referenced a document he had come across from the early days of the Bureau that he was passing on to Gulick, along with a suggestion for some kind of reunion.

The document he sent Gulick was also in the files. Undated but probably from around 1916, it was the constitution and by-laws of “the B.M.R. Club” whose purpose was “to provide a means for encouraging the social relations” among the members and officers of the Bureau and its Training School. Unisex, in those days. Women slowly joined the ranks in years to come.

But the most interesting page listed the officers and committees in charge of activities like “Dancing and Cards,” “Billiards and Bowling,” and “Music and Smokers.” And who was Vice-President but…Robert Moses? Was this the same Moses who was increasingly disdainful of the Bureau? “He didn’t feel it was important any more,” Caro wrote. “Investigations didn’t accomplish anything. He didn’t want to count barrels of concrete; he wanted to pour them.” By 1918, Moses was out of the Bureau Social Club and the reform movement, and taking on a direct role in state government, courtesy of Gov. Al Smith.

From the penciled name atop the document — “Studensky” — we have an intriguing clue about the identity of the “Paul” who sent Gulick the Bureau material. Paul Studensky was indeed an N.Y.U. economics professor at the time who seems to have been Gulick’s colleague at the Bureau, although his name does not appear on any of the committees. Studensky, sometimes spelled Studenski, had another — extraordinary — claim to fame, as a pioneering Russian-born aviator from the earliest years of powered flight.

Read about Paul Studensky/Studenski:

http://www.earlyaviators.com/estudens.htm

The following blogpost with illustrations was written by Aaron Horvath, a Stanford University doctoral candidate who visited Baruch College’s Newman Library Archives in November to research the early governmental reforms of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and the Institute of Public Administration. We are grateful for his input and gratified he found the Collection so useful.

DEMOCRACY’S ORG CHART (OR, HOW DID PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION LOSE ITS PUBLIC?) 

By Aaron Horvath

The administrative theorists of the early 1900s loved organization charts. Everything — from the hierarchy of their own offices to the operational layout of democratic government — could be outlined in an organization chart. And outline they did.

Organization charts, for the unacquainted, are maps of formal hierarchies and authority within bureaucracies, illustrating how functional divisions of work, distinct departments, work roles, and people are yoked together in these entities called organizations. Though in many ways these charts are works of fiction — in practice, hierarchy and authority often differ substantially from their depiction on paper — they offer telling insights into the administrative assumptions, theories, and fancies of those who create them.

The following images are a series of organization charts produced between 1910 and 1940, by men traveling in the orbit of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (and later, the Institute of Public Administration). As you proceed through these charts, consider which features appear or disappear, which ones move in or out of focus.

Fig 1. Government of the City of New York (New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 1915)

Fig 2. Governmental Organization of the City, County, and School District of Philadelphia (Philadelphia Bureau of Municipal Research, 1924)

Fig 3. Government of the United States (Bureau of Reclamation, 1935)

Fig 4. Federal Agencies Directly Responsible to the President (President’s Committee on Administrative Management [Brownlow, Gulick, Merriam, and others]; circa 1936-1938)

Fig. 5. The Federal Government of the U.S.A. Outline of Structure (President’s Committee on Administrative Management, circa 1937)

Fig 6. Master Organization Chart: The Government of the United States (War Production Board Administrative Division, 1943)

A cursory examination reveals a variety of changes. Different levels of government are depicted, and different levels of complexity are used to delineate the structure of authority. Closer examination, however, reveals more profound changes in the depiction of authority, especially considering the democratic commitments of the governmental entities being described. The public disappeared.

 In the early charts, there is no question who fills the top role. In New York, it’s the “Electorate.” In Philly, it’s more specifically the “Registered Voters [of the] City of Philadelphia.”  But as we move into the 1930s, the public disappears altogether, the top position now filled by the broad “Government of the United States” before immediately dropping to the “Executive Branch.” In the sunburst chart, the President is the sun around which all administrative agencies orbit; the public is not visible. The recommended re-organization chart bears the marks of these predecessors, with an interesting twist — the legislature is granted the highest position on the chart and the most distinctive shape. Following its lines of influence, however, quickly leads to a dead end (I cannot help but wonder the degree to which this is a rhetorical device to mollify congressional concerns surrounding the over-concentration of power in the executive). In the midst of WWII, the visual dominance of the executive is reasserted; the public is still absent.

Of course, images alone make for an imperfect comparison. These are only some of the many governmental org charts produced over this roughly 30-year period; they weren’t all produced for the same ends, and, indeed, the movement away from including the public is not uniform. One can find in Luther Gulick’s papers an org chart of New York City from the 1930s that more closely resembles that of Philly in the 1920s.

Nevertheless, the authority structures mapped in these evolving org charts visually reflect the story found in the voluminous correspondence, memos, reports, papers, and books that these chart makers produced alongside their illustrations of administrative order. Frustrated by the ugliness and inefficiency of politics, optimistic about the promise of objective administrative science, an influential cadre of administrative thinkers began to articulate a new vision of democratic governance, premised less on the contributions of the public and more on effectively administering to the public. What this meant, in practice, was to carry the offices and operations of American government further away from the influence and scrutiny of the American people.

The very ethos of this shifting focus is found in a piece written by Luther Gulick (among whose archival materials five of the above six org charts can be found). In Papers on the Science of Administration (written with the British Taylorist, Lyndall Urwick in 1937), he contends that, in all forms of administration, public or private, “the basic ‘good’ is efficiency,” defined as the “accomplishment of the work in hand with the least expenditure of man-power and materials.” “Efficiency,” he continues, “is thus axiom number one in the value scale of administration. This brings administration into apparent conflict with certain elements of the value scale of politics.” To this end, he highlights the “highly inefficient arrangements like citizen boards and small local governments which may be necessary in a democracy as educational devices,” ultimately concluding that such “interferences” do not “in any way eliminate efficiency as the fundamental value upon which the science of administration may be erected.”

Concerns with the public did not disappear altogether. Though its political authority is diminished, its interventions in government understood as “interferences” with efficiency, the public becomes an end to be served by the state, not a participant in the state itself.  In the haste to advance an apolitical politics of efficiency, the administrative thinkers of the early 20^th century minimized the role of the public as well.