(Part II): a Short History of Public Administration Service, 1933-2003 Mordecai Lee

Mordecai Lee Trying to Professionalize Expert Knowledge (Part II): A Short History of Public Administration Service, 1933-2003 Mordecai Lee Introduction, Overview and Scope American public administration history has tended to focus on the creation and institutional mat- uration of the field as an area of professional practice and as an academic discipline. Some of the signal events and small coterie of activists involved in them include Louis Brownlow’s Public Administration Clearing House (PACH) in Chicago, Luther Gulick’s Institute of Public Admin- istration (IPA), which was the organizational successor to the seminal New York Bureau of Mu- nicipal Research, Clarence Ridley’s International City Managers’ Association (ICMA), Charles E. Merriam’s Social Science Research Council and its Committee on Public Administration (CPA/SSRC), the report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management (aka the Brownlow Committee, with Gulick and Merriam as members) in 1937, and the founding of the American Society for Public Administration in 1939. Yet, the historical literature has not been as detailed when it comes to the full run and then demise of some of these cornerstone entities. Pioneering actions are trumpeted, but the long fat tail of institutional entropy tends to be less noted, if at all. For example, there does not seem to be much detailed attention in the literature to PACH’s later life through to its dissolution in 1956, to the Institute of Public Administration through to its formal dissolution in 2004, nor to the landmark training programs of the National Institute of Public Affairs (NIPA), which by the 1970s had atro- phied into a minor organization and then merged into the National Academy of Public Administra- tion. During this period, some of the good-government activists were rank and file citizens attracted to the goals of cleaning up government corruption. They often were associated with the National Municipal League and the National Civil Service Reform League. Their goals and activities tended to be controversial, political, and oft-times oriented to voters, such as for or against referenda on municipal charter revisions or state constitutional conventions. 28 Public Voices Vol. XV No. 1 Trying to Professionalize Expert Knowledge (Part II): A Short History of Public Administration Service A different cluster of good-government activists focused on the substantive work of civil servants and the operations of government agencies. The focus of these reformers was on the professionalization of public administration (Plant 2015). In particular, this group emphasized that its interest was wholly nonpolitical and nonpartisan. Promoting effective and efficient government was a value-free goal, they said, completely separate from politics and controversy. This stipulation ech- oed the so-called scientific management movement founded by Frederick Winslow Taylor, namely that there was only a one best way to do anything. The difference between political controversy and apolitical management was a key distinction for the grants officers of the Rockefeller philanthropic funds. The family was keen to overcome its negative reputation deriving from the predatory and monopolistic practices of its founder, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and his business, the Standard Oil Company. Funding research and other initia- tives to raise the quality and efficiency of civil servants was an appealing goal. Who could argue with that? Conversely, causes that were political and partisan were to be kept at arms’ length (if not farther) and never funded. The 1937 annual report of the Rockefellers’ Spelman Fund captures concisely how the fund differentiated between politics and administration. It had “no partisan political objectives, but is concerned solely with the problems involved in the administration of pol- icies already decided upon by its beneficiaries.”1 Hence Rockefeller grants provided major underwriting for efforts to professionalize and depoliti- cize public administration (Roberts 1994). The family’s only condition was that the new field of public administration be clearly seen as a nonpartisan, nonpolitical and non-controversial profession, wholly separate from the messy world of politics. This condition was the cause of the 1914 reorganization of the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York City (Lee 2013). After that, the Bureau largely disappeared from the headlines except when it issued major, but eye-glazing and technocratic, reports identifying ways to improve the efficiency of city and state government in a specific area of bureaucratic activity such as accounting, budgeting, and contracting. By the mid- 1920s, the Rockefellers’ funding role was well-established and significant to the emergence of the purported science and profession of public administration. But some of the standard pieces of the new profession were still missing, such as associations for practitioners and an organization for faculty interested in the subject. Another missing component was an institutionalized framework for the creation of knowledge to improve practice and the dissemination of such knowledge. Such a venue was viewed as an essential element to round out a true profession of public administration. This article is an organizational history of Public Administration Service (PAS) (not “the”2), one of the central professional venues for expertise, advice and information dissemination to benefit the practice of public administration. Its organizational roots had begun modestly in 1926 with the Municipal Administration Service (MAS). MAS dissolved in 1933, followed immediately by PAS’s establishment as a component of Louis Brownlow’s PACH in Chicago (Lee 2017). PAS later moved to the Washington, DC area and gradually shrank, closing its DC office in 2002, sput- tering on for a few more years as PAS Associates. The intent here is to summarize the life cycle history of PAS. In all, the history of PAS serves as something of a synecdoche of the professionalization of American public administration as a whole, its rise, golden years, and slow demise. Public Voices Vol. XV No. 1 29 Mordecai Lee There has been little published in the academic literature on the entire organizational history of PAS, except mostly passing references and citations of PAS publications. Three informal histories of PAS were published by authors who had been associated with it (Sitkoff 1983; Newland 1984; Henry 2009). Given the largely blank slate from historians, this inquiry seeks to be an initial sketch of the organization’s history. As an exploratory examination, it is, by necessity, unable to include a detailed examination of the content, value, quality, and impact of the several hundred PAS reports and publications. That is an extensive topic which covers many academic literatures and disciplines and is beyond the possible scope of an exploratory effort. Helping Construct the New Profession Public Administration, 1933-1956 Brownlow, as chairman of PAS’s Governing Board, worked to make PAS many things to many people, including a research center, a consulting service, and a publishing house. (The birth of PAS is recounted in Lee 2017.) The scope of those activities would be as extensive as his view of what public administration encompassed, namely a broad profession engaged in the entire panoply of governmental operations including both line and staff functions. For example, in 1935 PAS listed itself as providing consulting in general administration, personnel, police, public welfare, fire, public works, municipal utilities, and public libraries (Ridley and Nolting 1935, 346-70). The initial transitional funding for setting up PAS came from the funds the Spelman Foundation had already provided for the general operations of PACH. A year later, Spelman granted PAS $25,000 to serve working capital for the new corporation. Brownlow also wanted PAS to get off to a fast start. He quickly chose Donald Stone, research director for ICMA’s now-disbanded research operation, as PAS’s director of consulting and research and Charles Ascher, one of his aides in PACH, to head the PAS publication program. The initial Board of Directors consisted of eight members, six representing the organizations affiliated with (what was called) the Chicago group (PACH, ICMA, American Municipal Association, American Public Welfare Association, Municipal Finance Officers’ Association, and American Legislators’ Association) and two representing the organizations which had sponsored PAS’s quasi-predecessor, the Municipal Administration Service (National Municipal League and Gov- ernmental Research Association). Considering that it was the summer of 1933, just after FDR’s 100 days, there was an emergency need for the professionalization of public administration in the new alphabet agencies of the (first) New Deal. Roosevelt was creating “instant” organizations and he wanted them to expend funding as fast as possible as an antidote to the Great Depression. The President was not attentive to details of administration, but certainly he and his lieutenants understood that the conservative coalition in Congress was watching closely and would be eager to complain about unaccounted spending, lack of appropriate paperwork or books that did not balance. Therefore, during its initial years, PAS was something of the New Deal’s consulting firm, ready to establish the basics of good management in the hurly-burly atmosphere of these new agencies. For example, the Public Works Administration (PWA),

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