Marshall E. Dimock

The Restorative Qualities of Citizenship.

The starting point and center of the administrative art is the citizen being served. Even in democratic governments which are sensitive to currents of public opinion, however, this fact is often not sufficiently noted. The reason? Administrators and their critics tend to become too introverted and intent on minutiae. Management becomes a game, not a constant reaching out to human needs and their great diversity.

The Study of Administration.

It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration. It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true. “It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” Was this said only yesterday? No, Woodrow Wilson clearly saw the importance of governmental administration half a century ago. “Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.” Yet democracies have badly neglected administrative principles and structural improvements. “Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement. … English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight—not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism. … We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

Government Corporations; A Focus of Policy and Administration, II.

The government corporation has become a familiar device of public administration all over the world; and yet in some countries, and especially in the United States, uncertainty as to its distinctive purpose and underlying principles seems to grow, rather than to diminish, as the public corporation becomes older and more extensively used. Lack of interest and research cannot be blamed, because in recent years the degree of concentration in this area has probably been relatively as great as in any other sphere of political science. The basic explanation is that administrative formulas and management principles are rarely, if ever, capable of immunization against group pressures and public policy controls, which bend administration to their own designs, sometimes in conformity with what the impartial experts consider sound principle and practice, but just as often in knowing disregard of such considerations and in a determined effort to support their own interests and economic viewpoints.

Lawyers and Managers Look to the Future

Irrespective of the fortunes of national politics, the United States is obviously going to have a number of major problems to solve during the next few years. Among these, domestically, are the national debt, inflation, modernization of plant, foreign trade deficits, chronic unemployment, and distribution of the national income as business becomes increasingly automated. People cannot buy the products of efficient machines if they do not have jobs. Internationally, we have to

The Objectives of Governmental Reorganization

IT IS a fair question to ask whether all the attention that has been given to governmental reorganizations in recent years has been worth the time and effort. Reorganizations seem to come in waves, in cycles; in recent years the press has been full of reorganization talk, sometimes creating the illusion that reorganization is a kind of revivalism in governmental reform, fervid while it lasts, but short-lived. Too frequent surveys by outside experts keep government in a continuous state of turmoil and uncertainty, and so much emphasis may create public expectations which cannot be lived up to. If care is not exercised, this new profession of the organization expert may fall into disrepute. Herbert Emmerich found that in a short space of time around 1949, when both the Hoover Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government and the Rowe Commission for Reorganization in Puerto Rico rendered their reports, over half of the forty-eight states also created commissions or special committees to make comprehensive surveys of their administrative apparatus.l In part, of course, this newest wave of reorganization reform may be explained by taxpayer worry over the high cost of government, the dislocations stemming from the expanded functions of a government fighting a

W. F. WILLOUGHBY AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE UNIVERSAL

Perhaps the outstanding feature of William Franklin Willoughbys contribution to American public administration was his systematic insistence that administration is a universal. As such it is as much applicable to the legislative and judicial realms as to the executive departments. No other scholar, to my knowledge, has staked out this position and developed it so rigorously as did Willoughby. I propose to explore the reasons for his taking such a govermentwide view of administration, to say something about his contributions and significance, and to speculate on how his early orientation might serve the interests of the profession and the country today and in the future. Before turning to these matters, however, I should like to set forth the logic of his argument which automatically entailed his regarding administration as a universal of all three branches of government. The main outlines of the thesis are found in The Government of Modern States. In this book, as he did in all his writings, Willoughby favored an analytical rather than a descriptive approach because it does at least two things: it causes one to think clearly and consistently; and secondly, it provides a practical framework for dealing with issues and minutiae which would otherwise soon become distorted and confused. He also distinguished the political state from the government which administers it. The state is a juristic concept relying on sovereignty and lawmaking jurisdiction over its entire domain, external as well as domestic. But since the state is merely a concept, it cannot administer anything itself and must rely upon its government. The government serves common needs that no other institution is competent to undertake. Whether a government is a monarchy or a representative government, its work divides naturally into three parts: the lawmaking function, and the executive and judicial functions, both of which are inextricably related because their intent is to give practical operational effect to the law. Administration is the central ingredient in the whole of governmental operation because all three departments are subject to a common necessity which is to organize, operate, and fulfill distinctive roles which require rationality and cooperation. And since the entire governmental process starts with the legislature, the effectiveness with which the lawmaking branch operates sets inevitable limits to how much the executive and the judiciary may accomplish. The common obligation of all three branches is, therefore, to serve societys needs within the framework of law set down by fundamental documents and juristic agreements. In short, administration is the universal, and its utility consists in the fact that if all three branches are not well-organized and practical, not much of consequence is likely to be achieved by any one of the three. Willoughbys appreciation of this is reflected in his trilogy: Principles of Public Administration (1927), Principles of Judicial Administration (1929), and Principles of Legislative Organization and Administration (1934). It is difficult to say who among his predecessors influenced Willoughbys thinking. His brother, Westel Woodbury Willoughby, clearly did because they were close and thought through their positions together. W. W. Willoughby, reflecting the biases of the time, had little use for the substantiality of public administration as a scholarly field, compared with law; but he was inordinately proud of his brother and applied himself assiduously to understanding this new field, even though it was not his natural bent. W. F. Willoughby, on the other hand, was highly competent in public law and had an interest in fundamental concepts equal to his brothers, although he never made a deep study of general political theory and of oriental theory as his brother did. The only other scholar who influenced Willoughby deeply, so far as I know, was Woodrow Wilson. There were at least two professional links: Wilson had done his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins and had taught there; later they were both to be at Princeton. There is also evidence that Wilsons book, The State, may have influenced him to write The Government of Modern States, although the two are quite dissimilar in their rigorousness. Also influential, because frequently quoted, was Woodrow Wilsons Congressional Government and the writings of several British authors, some of whom he got to know when he, his brother, and Samuel McCune Lindsay went to Britain and, in conse-

The Creative State: Emergence of the Service State

The creative state, about which I wrote in 1937, is one in which its citizens take a positive rather than a negative orientation toward the opportunities of representative government. Creativity is the use of imagination, insight, and synthesis to solve complex problems which defy solution if they are approached segmentally. Creativity is also innovative, a break with the bureaucratic past, as demonstrated by a number of writers in a number of fields Beveridge in science, McClelland in psychology, Koestler in literature, and many others but I will not stop here to review what they have concluded.** For a number of reasons the concept of the creative state is more appealing today than it was 35 years ago. The theory of representative government is undergoing a searching criticism and change. Consider, for example, Holton Peter Odegards book, The Politics of Truth. Or the need to find a reconciliation of the newer and older

Government Corporations@@@Accountability and the Business State: The Structure of Federal Corporations

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Historical Development Creating Federal Corporations The Executive Congress, and Corporations Federal Corporation Finances The Courts and Federal Corporations The Business State Select Bibliography Index

Labor's Part in War and Reconstruction.

Nothing is of greater importance to national defense than the morale of those who do the actual work, the men who pump the petroleum, roll the steel, build the ships and planes. An ounce more of spirit along the assembly line is worth more than a correspondingly higher percentage of armaments in a clash of troops. This is because modern wars are won by industrial strength, a fact that we are almost tired of hearing repeated, but the truth of which we are observing with every passing month of the present war. War industries require raw materials, trained leadership, and sufficient funds to support the costly effort. A nation needs all of these. But all depend for their success upon the efficiency and ardor of designers, foundrymen, and machinists. Do they put their minds and backs and hearts into their work? Or do they merely go through the motions? Organized labor may be fitted into a war economy in one of several ways. The workers can be virtually enslaved, as in Poland, and forced to labor with armed sentries standing over them. This method has never proved very efficient. Another way, which Hitler and Mussolini are using, is to appeal to the emotions of patriotism, to work men into a frenzy which must then be sustained. This plan is successful only so long as the tide of battle is consistently favorable; when it changes, the effect is not unlike the day after a New Years Eve party. The third approach is that which the United States and Great Britain have evolved, the method of satisfying labor that the rules which apply in peace-time will not be jeopardized during war-time-a program of voluntary co6peration in which labor itself engenders the fighting spirit which wins

American Administrative Law in 1931.

An analysis of administrative law cases which federal and state courts decided during 1931 reveals some exceptionally interesting problems and tendencies. These will be considered under the following main headings: (1) the separation of powers and administrative action, (2) principles regulating administrative determinations, (3) conclusiveness and appeal, (4) the law of officers, (5) the liability of officers, (6) community liability, and (7) the remedies against abuse of power.