Luther Gulick spent much of his career in Washington, reorganizing the executive branch for President Franklin Roosevelt in later years of the Depression, overseeing military production and refugee relief during World War II, and planning the postwar peace. So it was fitting for three members of our Baruch Library Archives team to travel to Washington on Monday, Oct. 17, to tell the story of…well, Luther Gulick in Washington, as well as Luther Gulick in Japan…and New York… and Germany….

Never ones to miss a chance to promote our historic Institute of Public Administration Collection and Luther Gulick Papers, we jumped at an invitation by Prof. Brian J. Cook of Virginia Tech to deliver a web and oral presentation at the Marvin Center of The George Washington University on the figure we call “The Man Who Loved Government.”

What better time, in fact, three weeks before a momentous national referendum on the role of government and who was fit or unfit to lead it?

And to our delight, who turned out for the occasion but four members of the Gulick clan?

Here’s the leaflet that went out:

Co-sponsoring the event at George Washington’s Cloyd Heck Marvin Center

were the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration and its director Kathryn Newcomer https://tspppa.gwu.edu/, and Administration & Society http://aas.sagepub.com/, the scholarly journal edited by Dr. Cook. https://profiles.spia.vt.edu/bcook/

Joining us there were Denny Gulick, Luther’s nephew (a son of Luther’s baby brother Sidney Jr.) and Denny’s wife, Frances, both math professors at the University of Maryland; and Lisa and Leslie Gulick, granddaughters of Luther — their father was Luther’s son Luther Jr.

Leslie is a retired physician, and Lisa is Assistant Commissioner of Planning, Research and Policy in the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development.

We made a point of bringing down one of the Gulick tee-shirts we had made up for last November’s annual conference, in Brooklyn, of NASPAA, the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration  — here’s Ralph displaying it:

and we presented it to Denny, the senior Gulick there:

(That’s Lisa, on the left; Leslie and Frances next to Denny.)

We looked for Denny’s father, Luther’s brother, in this photo of the missionary family from 1901.

That’s young Luther on the right. But it turned out that Sidney Jr. was not yet born — he came along a year later.

Ralph talked about Gulick’s achievements and the treasures of the collection (highlighted in earlier posts). Things like the signed letter from Albert Einstein, and the vintage posters and maps.

Jessica discussed the ongoing digitization process,

using high-tech equipment like our ATIZ book-scanner

and Steven described the processing and organization of the collection, and access procedures for scholars and researchers.

(He’s not in the Washington photos because he took the photos.) But we found one of him anyway.

All we can say is, too bad the Acela wasn’t around in Luther’s day.

Luther Gulick was instrumental in mobilizing industry to fight World War II, so it’s no surprise the IPA Collection includes a good sampling of vintage war posters from 1944. Collectors prize these originals.

But we were particularly struck by this one calling on patriotic Americans to “Back the Attack” by investing in War Bonds — Uncle Sam needed the loans to pay for the war.

The captions, interestingly, put a pricetag on the particular military equipment the money would buy. An Army jeep cost $1,165 in 1944 dollars — that would be the equivalent of about $15,942 today. A walkie-talkie? $200 — $2,737 today. A flamethrower? $950  — $13,000 today. All the way up to a medium tank, $57,570 ($787,835 today); a motor torpedo boat, $500,000 ($6.8 million today); and an LST, or landing ship tank, $2 million ($27.3 million today).

But those price conversions seriously misrepresent the skyrocketing costs of military equipment since. That’s largely a function of the increasing sophistication of modern weaponry. But it’s also attributable to what the D-Day hero and postwar President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned was the appetite of the military-industrial complex.

So an armored Humvee (a grown-up jeep) will today cost as much as $600,000. An Abrams M1 tank, $8.5 million (still perhaps a bargain compared to the top-of-the line French AMX-56 at $12.6 million.) A Seawolf class nuclear submarine will run you $3.5 billion (again, the French have a pricier version in their Triomphant class sub at more than $4 billion each). And the latest American aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is coming in at more than $13 billion. With two sister carriers, the trio will set American taxpayers back at least $42 billion.

Whew!

Well, war (and peace) is expensive. World War II (apart from the horrific loss of life) cost more than $4 trillion in today’s dollars, as we noted in a previous post. https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/09/the-cost-of-war 

But not all war equipment is costlier today. Cell phones are cheaper than walkie-talkies. And you can buy yourself a flamethrower these days for under $1,800.

https://throwflame.com/products/flamethrower/

How quaint it all seems back then!

 

Here’s something you won’t find every day — a 1943 pamphlet about wartime prostitution written by Eliot Ness, director of the Division of Social Protection, Office of Community War Services, Federal Security Agency.

Yes, that Eliot Ness.

Of “The Untouchables.”

http://www.booktryst.com/2012/12/eliot-ness-and-female-untouchables.html

The rare typescript, written (with a racier title) for the U.S.O. and Y.M.C.A. that took care of servicemen and women, turns up in our Baruch Library Archives’s Luther Gulick Papers in three boxes of folders on Public Affairs Pamphlets, an historic experiment in educational publishing, progressive civics and consumerism.

Starting in 1935 and for at least the next half century, through the turbulence of the Depression, World War II, cold war and twilight of Communism, the Public Affairs Committee Inc., at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, financed principally by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, turned out more than 30 million of these colorful little booklets on everything from race relations to how to buy life insurance to making good in college.

They cost 10 cents each in the early 1940s ($1.39 in today’s money) and a $5 subscription ($69.55 today) bought you the entire library of all 70 titles, with hundreds more to come.

And who chaired that committee through 1943 — even as he was called to Washington to oversee small-plant war production and refugee relief?

Of course, Luther Gulick. He remained on the board even after relinquishing the chairmanship to Ordway Tead, of special interest to us here at the City University because he also headed the New York City Board of Higher Education from 1938 to 1953 to supervise what were then four municipal colleges (City College, Hunter, Brooklyn and Queens; CUNY was formed in 1961). Serving with Gulick and Tead on the Public Affairs Committee was another prominent educator, Harry D. Gideonse, president of Brooklyn College from 1939 to 1966.  (He quit over a dispute with the Board of Higher Education which had voted to end the longstanding policy of free tuition.)

The editor, from 1936 to 1986, was Maxwell Slutz Stewart, an editor at The Nation from 1934 to 1947, who died at 89 in 1990.

Besides providing a fascinating snapshot of American homelife, the pamphlet files offer a revealing look at the issues haunting America in a momentous era.

One preoccupation throughout the war was demobilization — known as D-Day (long before the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe). How would the troops be re-integrated into a peacetime economy? Would civilians who escaped service get preference for jobs while soldiers waited overseas to be brought home?

Also high on the list was race.

In October 1943, the committee received the draft of an unsparing look at the Detroit race riot that broke out on June 21, killing 25 blacks and 9 whites, injuring hundreds and causing millions in property damage. Detroit, with its auto plants turning out tanks and planes, was the nation’s most vital war production center, and, as author Earl Brown wrote, “Obviously there was much joy in high circles in Berlin and Tokyo when the news of this riot was first received.” The authorities were remiss in addressing simmering racial grievances and were unconscionably slow in requesting federal troops, Brown wrote.

But nothing stirred an uproar like “The Races of Mankind.”

Co-written for the U.S.O. by the prominent anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene (Regina) Weltfish, the pamphlet which found that the differences between blacks and whites were cultural not biological, stirred up a storm. The U.S.O., calling it a political tract with an agenda offensive to southerners refused to accept it.

To its credit, the Public Affairs Committee stuck by its guns, deploring the U.S.O. position. The Writers Board, including William L. Shirer and Oscar Hammerstein II, also condemned the U.S.O.

But the House Military Affairs Committee denounced the pamphlet, saying wartime was no time for “presenting  controversial issues or promoting propaganda for or against any subdivision of the American people.” The Public Affairs Committee pushed back against this too.

“The Races of Mankind” was eventually published, to minimal circulation, but later banned as subversive. Weltfish was investigated by Congress for “un-American activities”, terminated by Columbia University and blacklisted.

Undaunted, the committee also published “The Negro in America”, editor Maxwell Stewart’s pamphlet summary of Gunnar Myrdal’s groundbreaking racial study, “An American Dilemma.”

Sometimes, the committee was accused of promoting…socialism!

Which Gulick, to his credit, dismissed.

Among the subjects the committee was bold to tackle was wartime venereal disease. This too drew protests.

But Gulick and his committee prevailed.

The pamphlet dispelled the myth that regulating prostitution in supervised brothels was an effective strategy against the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea and extolled the 1941 May Act which gave the federal government the authority to step in and police areas adjacent to military facilities.

The committee also published Eliot Ness’s “special manuscript” for the U.S.O. and Y.M.C.A.

Ness had joined the Treasury Department as a Prohibition agent in 1927 and been instrumental in the successful prosecution of Al Capone for tax evasion. When Capone tried to bribe Ness with $2,000 on his desk every Monday morning, and was rebuffed, Ness and his team got their nickname, later exploited in a book, television and film franchise, “the Untouchables.”

From then on, Ness’s life started to sadly unravel. He spent the war in Washington supervising “social protection” and died of a heart attack at home in Coudersport, Pa., in 1957. The Untouchable was only 54.

OK, so we’re taking a little detour around Gulick and the IPA Collection. OK, a big detour.
But we can’t resist. And there is a (loose) connection.

Across from Baruch College and the Newman Library, on Lexington Avenue between 25-26th Streets, stands the historic 69th Regiment Armory, home of New York City’s only official Irish regiment, the Fighting 69th.

http://www.sixtyninth.net/armory.html

The imposing fortress, built from 1904 to 1906 and memorializing battles going back to the Civil War, was notable as the site of the 1913 Armory Show that brought the modern art revolution to America. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~museum/armory/armoryshow.html

It’s also notable for an easily-missed plaque on an outside wall at the armory’s northwestern edge at what was once 104 East 26th Street.

Wow!, we invariably think, trudging past from the No. 6 train, imagine that, Melville living right here for almost 30 years! In fact, we learn from a biography by Laurie Robertson-Lorant (Clarkson Potter/1996) in the Newman Library, the site was a three-story brownstone (since demolished) registered in the name of Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, in 1863. By then, Melville had published nine novels and 16 magazine pieces and sketches, including “Moby Dick” a dozen years before. Still, he was thought of (when he was thought of at all) as a has-been.

If Melville walked east on 26th Street (and he was a great walker!), he passed a carriage factory and ironworks and eventually Bellevue Hospital. To the west loomed the New York and Harlem railroad depot and Madison Square Park  — the “garden,” or arena, wouldn’t rise until 1879. Not that Melville probably cared, but nearby too lay some of the city’s most notorious brothels. http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/seven_sisters_row_west_25th_street

On Sept. 27, 1891, Melville went to bed feeling sick. After midnight he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 72.

Which brings us to our point, via this recent email:

Friends:

September 28th marks the 125th anniversary of the passing of the legendary American author Herman Melville, one of the many notables in our care at The Woodlawn Cemetery.

To recognize his life and legacy we are presenting “Celebrating Melville: Writer for the World,” a collection of readings from his works and musical selections featuring prominent authors, academics and musical artists.

There is no admission charge for this public event which will begin at 2:00 on the afternoon of September 28th in the area of his final resting place. Space is limited. To order your tickets and for more program details, please visit us at www.hermanmelville.org or www.thewoodlawncemetery.org/melville-event-2016

We look forward to greeting you at the event and to celebrating together.

Robert

Robert Kestenbaum, Event Chair
Director of Family Services
The Woodlawn Cemetery
Webster Ave. & East 233rd St.
Bronx, New York 10470
Direct: 718-408-5626
Mobile: 914-879-1809
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.thewoodlawncemetery.org

And the connection to Baruch?

Apart from the proximity of his former home, the Newman Library boasts a robust Melville collection.

And apropos intersecting collections in the Baruch Archives that we just wrote about…

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2016/08/how-nyc-became-nyc/

Eight years after Bernard Baruch’s 1889 graduation from the City College of New York in its original location on Lexington Avenue and 23d Street (it would later become a separate unit named for Baruch), another notable alumnus bade farewell to its ivied walls. Upton Sinclair, soon to write “The Jungle” and other muckraking classics, graduated in 1897.

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2007/upton/upton.html

Why mention this now?

Because the previous post about how Luther Gulick and master publicist Edward L. Bernays engineered passage of the momentous 1960 rezoning of New York overlooked a key document.

On March 24, 1960, as Gulick and co-chair Robert W. Dowling of the Committee for Modern Zoning struggled to overcome a tide of business opposition to tightening the building restrictions, they wrote Sinclair hoping for an expression of support.

Sinclair obliged, scrawling on the bottom of the letter: “A city without zoning is a lunatic asylum without a superintendent.”

Could you ask for a better endorsement than that?