Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, leading administrative reformers remained committed to pursuing “executive reorganization.” By rearranging agencies and bureaus in the federal executive branch based on function and major purpose, they hoped to create a more efficient national administration—one with the capacity to enact national policies.^{Footnote 1} By the mid-1920s, executive reorganization had assumed a position, alongside civil service reform and the national budget system, of the unfinished third pillar in a sort of holy trinity of “good government.” This was the theme struck by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover when he addressed the national meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1925:

Hoover made these remarks at a moment when the executive reorganization movement was at an ebb, less than a year after leaders in Congress had defeated an ambitious reorganization plan proposed by the administration of Warren G. Harding. In an attempt to build on the success of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, Harding tried to use the Congressional Joint Committee on the Reorganization of the Administrative Branch of the Government to advance his own vision of executive reorganization. Harding succeeded in placing his personal representative, Toledo attorney Walter F. Brown, at the head of the committee, allowing the president to direct its activities. However, despite broad support from a bipartisan group of elite reformers, the joint committee disbanded in 1924. Its recommendations—endorsed by Harding as well as Calvin Coolidge—never came to a vote. With his speech in 1925, Hoover hoped to breathe spark back into the cause.

The arcane details of debates about reorganization have sometimes concealed the high stakes involved. Although the topic has not attracted much attention from nonspecialists, scholars interested in the development of public administration at the national level have placed executive reorganization at the center of the history of the modern American state. Should the U.S. Forest Service be located within the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior? Should the Corps of Engineers remain in the Department of War or be moved to Interior? Such questions generated controversy for much of the twentieth century, and the outcome of these debates would help determine the reach, touch, and strength of the national government. They would help determine whether a president could exert his will in Mississippi and Montana as well as Manhattan, or whether a congressmen could intervene to defend local prerogatives.

The movement for executive reorganization had its roots in the early twentieth century, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s exploratory Keep Commission and building momentum with William Howard Taft’s more exhaustive Commission on Economy and Efficiency, but most historical accounts have emphasized the New Deal as the key inflection point. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a group of experts from the emerging academic discipline of public administration studies to form his Committee on Administrative Management. This committee, known as the Brownlow Committee—after its leader, public administration pioneer Louis Brownlow—recommended a series of reforms that would make it easier for the president to manage the federal bureaucracy from the top. After the committee’s initial proposals provoked opposition in Congress, a compromise plan was enacted in 1939. Among other reforms, the 1939 Reorganization Act created the Executive Office of the President of the United States, one of the most consequential steps in the development of the modern American administrative state. Scholars have tended to view modern, executive-centered reorganization, which focuses on building managerial “efficiency” to allow for effective presidential control over the executive branch, as an innovation of the Brownlow Committee’s academic experts. Additionally, FDR’s embrace of those experts’ recommendations has been seen as part of the president’s effort to regain the initiative after the Supreme Court struck down the National Recovery Administration. This interpretation has led scholars to view attempts to enact executive reorganization before the Brownlow Committee as examples of a Congress-centered reorganization, which focuses on budgetary savings—or “economy”—as a means for legislative control over the executive, giving Congress the power to cut and prune the branches of national administration.^{Footnote 3}

However, there is reason to question this simple before-and-after story. Scholars who have taken the time to examine earlier episodes have challenged the idea that pre–New Deal reorganization proposals were marked by a focus on “economy” over “efficiency.” In the early chapters of his authoritative volume, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1996, Peri Arnold argues that the reorganization plan advanced by the Harding administration was in fact an early example of executive-centered reorganization and therefore a clear precedent for the New Deal–era Brownlow Committee as well as the post–World War II Hoover Commissions.^{Footnote 4} Barry D. Karl found something similar after reexamining the relationship between Roosevelt’s earlier activities as governor of New York and his later work with the Brownlow Committee. Although Karl’s 1963 monograph, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal, established the dominant interpretation, he eventually revised his earlier portrait of FDR as uninterested in administrative concerns and in need of instruction from the academic experts on the Brownlow Committee. Instead, Karl acknowledged that FDR came into the presidency with his own ideas about executive reorganization, and those ideas shaped the Brownlow Committee’s inquiry. “He had not only accepted all its recommendations,” Karl explained, “he had helped design them.”^{Footnote 5}

This article builds on the findings of Arnold and Karl by examining a previously unnoticed reorganization campaign launched in response to Herbert Hoover’s 1925 Chamber of Commerce speech. With Hoover’s encouragement, the National Civil Service Reform League—the nation’s preeminent good-government organization—attempted to build support for a revival of the Harding reorganization plan. In the process, the league enlisted the support of a bipartisan committee of elite reformers, a group that included Franklin D. Roosevelt.

While this campaign—much like the Harding reorganization campaign—ultimately failed, this story shows that, during the 1920s, executive-centered reorganization was favored, not only by academic experts, but also by a broad group of elite reformers motivated by what people at the time called “business efficiency.”^{Footnote 6} In the years after World War I, it was common to compare the federal government to a large, national, vertically integrated, multidepartmental business firm. As Robert Catherwood, president of the National Civil Service Reform League, put it in remarks delivered shortly after Hoover’s speech on reorganization, “take the first half dozen biggest industrial concerns in the country, put them together, and the United States is a bigger industrial concern than the lot of them.”^{Footnote 7} Use of this metaphor was common among reformers of all stripes. For observers such as Hoover and Roosevelt, one logical implication of the business-government analogy was to enact executive-centered reorganization to give the president an efficient administrative structure akin to that of a modern corporation. This episode also shows that the Harding reorganization effort was not merely an isolated foreshadowing of later efforts, but part of a continuous effort by administrative reformers that spanned the entire New Era. This further suggests that the Brownlow Committee is best understood not as the first triumph of the emerging field of academic public administration, but rather as the culmination of a long-established reform agenda based on old-fashioned notions of “business efficiency” and “good government.”

After the defeat of the Harding administration’s reorganization plan in 1924, many administrative reformers remained committed to the idea of executive reorganization, and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover was one of its most persistent champions. Popular focus on Hoover’s conservatism and scholarly focus on his pursuit of “associative” cooperation between business and government has overshadowed his interest in pure administrative reform in this period.^{Footnote 8} This interest arose from his background in business and government. Before the war, Hoover had been an executive in a British mining firm before starting his own consulting firm. His experience as an engineer made him sensitive to questions of mechanical efficiency, and sympathetic to the mechanical analogies often employed by administrative reformers. His time as an executive and consultant also gave him direct insight into the importance of managerial efficiency and the impact that faulty organization could have on a business enterprise. Throughout his business career, Hoover had maintained close relations with leading administrative reformers, and his commitment to their agenda was solidified during his tenure as U.S. Food Administrator during the war.^{Footnote 9}

Hoover was a notorious workaholic who routinely declined speaking engagements. However, breaking with his usual practice, Hoover agreed to address the annual meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on May 21, 1925, using the occasion to give the major policy speech of his tenure as Commerce secretary, choosing executive reorganization as his theme. The speech was widely quoted in newspapers, distributed as a self-published booklet, and published in the June 5, 1925, edition of the Chamber’s magazine, Nation’s Business, under the title “200 Bureaus, Boards and Commissions! The Administrative Branch of the Government Needs Complete Overhauling. As Important as Civil Service Reform and the Budget.”^{Footnote 10}

In the speech, Hoover decried the divided responsibility created by the scattering of similar administrative functions and services in government’s hodgepodge arrangement of bureaus and agencies. “There is not a single successful business organization in the country that confuses such functions the way we do in government,” Hoover said, using the business-government analogy favored by administrative reformers. He also made clear his preference for executive-centered rather than Congress-centered reorganization. His goal was not merely budget reduction or “economy,” he explained, but to increase functional efficiency in order to enable national policymaking. “The divided responsibility with absence of centralized authority prevents the constructive and consistent development of broad national policies.”^{Footnote 11}

The day after this speech, Harry W. Marsh, secretary of the National Civil Service Reform League (NCSRL), wrote to Hoover’s personal secretary, Harold Phelps Stokes. “I have just read the report of Hoover’s speech before the Chamber of Commerce and am very much impressed by it,” Marsh wrote. “It strikes me that we have in this speech the very thing, put in concrete form, that we have been looking for as a subject for new and increased activities of the League.”^{Footnote 12}

During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the National Civil Service Reform League led the campaign to replace the existing “spoils system” with the “merit system.” Under the merit system, prospective federal employees would have to prove their eligibility by passing a civil service examination. This, civil service reformers believed, would weaken the grip of the so-called “spoilsmen” who dispensed federal positions to reward political service. The NCSRL formed in 1881, shortly after the assassination of President James A. Garfield, who had been a supporter of civil service reform. Garfield’s death at the hands of a disgruntled office-seeker made him a martyr for the cause and, as the nation mourned, the NCSRL worked to leverage outrage over the assassination into popular support for a civil service law proposed by Senator George Pendleton, Democrat of Kentucky. The 1883 Pendleton Act introduced the merit system to the American public service. At first, however, the new law covered only a limited number of positions. The NCSRL took on the mission over the next half century to bring more positions under the law’s provisions.^{Footnote 13}

Many prominent citizens—including presidents, cabinet members, business leaders, and jurists—appeared on the NCSRL’s letterhead over the years. By the 1920s, however, the league was losing funds and membership, and struggling to attract a new generation of supporters. Largely thanks to the league’s efforts, the merit system had expanded dramatically during the Progressive Era, giving many the impression that the work of civil service reform had already been done. At the same time, the NCSRL was facing a challenge from a new generation of academic scholars of public administration who viewed the genteel league as a throwback to a bygone era. In a mid-1923 letter to members, the NCSRL’s president, William Dudley Foulke, issued a desperate plea to members:

By Spring 1925, the NCSRL had formed a three-person “committee of young men”: Arthur W. Procter (age 36), a New York attorney and accountant with experience in administrative reform organizations; Robert Wood Johnson (age 32), a vice president at Johnson & Johnson; and Catesby L. Jones (age 35), a Wall Street attorney originally from Savannah, Georgia.^{Footnote 15} This committee held a series of meetings in June and July “to ask for suggestions as to the most fruitful lines of activity for the League to pursue” from prominent policymakers and policy advocates in New York and Washington, D.C. Their schedule included a meeting with Herbert Hoover on June 4, a week and a half after the secretary’s Chamber of Commerce speech on reorganization.^{Footnote 16} During that meeting—and following up on the suggestion already made by the league’s secretary to Hoover’s personal secretary—Hoover suggested to Proctor, Johnson, and Jones that, if the league was considering expanding its activities, it ought to consider joining the effort to bring about executive reorganization. The committee embraced the idea, and within a week Marsh reported back to Stokes that the council of the NCSRL agreed.^{Footnote 17}

The league was slow to make progress, however, and the new initiative did not begin to move beyond initial discussions until October 1925, when Marsh secured a brief meeting with Hoover in Washington. NCSRL officers had been discussing a campaign to secure funding for “a survey of the government departments.”^{Footnote 18} When Marsh met with Hoover, however, Hoover told Marsh that no such survey was necessary. “I found, somewhat to my surprise, that Hoover did not expect us to make the elaborate kind of a survey which I had believed he wanted,” Marsh reported to the chairman of the council of the league, Arthur Kimball. “As a matter of fact, these government bureaus have been studied and surveyed in extense by all sorts of agencies.”^{Footnote 19}

Hoover explained to Marsh that, thanks to the investigations of the Institute for Government Research, the National Budget Committee, and the failed Joint Committee on Reorganization, there was no need for a new survey. Reformers could simply revive the plan proposed by Harding, which had included forming a new “Department of Education and Welfare,” changing the name of the Post Office to the “Department of Communications,” and eliminating most of the independent establishments in the government by folding them into existing departments.^{Footnote 20} The plan had also included a proposal to remove the Bureau of the Budget from Treasury and place it within the office of the President—a reform that would eventually be enacted in 1939.^{Footnote 21}

The real problem, Hoover explained, was to build public opinion that could put pressure on Congress. Despite broad elite support for executive reorganization in these years, the subject seemed to inspire general indifference among voters. “Reforms of this kind are the result of the hardest kind of work in the closet,” ex-president Taft had complained in 1915. “They cannot be exploited in headlines. They tire the audience. Those who effect them must generally be contented with a consciousness of good service rendered, and must not look for the reward of popular approval.”^{Footnote 22} Taft’s assessment was echoed ten years later by the Wall Street lawyer and financier John T. Pratt, chairman of the National Budget Committee, a corporate-elite pressure group that had played a key role in securing passage of the 1921 Budget Act and had also promoted a plan for executive reorganization that provided the blueprint for the Harding plan.^{Footnote 23} Pratt had expended a considerable amount of his personal fortune in an effort to build public support for executive reorganization. “It is at best not a popular subject,” Pratt said, “and I believe it would be a very difficult matter to create any great public demand for reorganization.”^{Footnote 24}

Accordingly, league leaders decided to focus on a public relations campaign in favor of reorganization. However, despite the project’s reduced scope, it ultimately took more than a year to take the first step. Leadership did not produce a manifesto for its campaign until May 1926. When it finally appeared, however, the statement was a forceful call for executive-centered reorganization:

In consultation with Hoover’s office, the council of the League decided that the best course of action would be to form a special reorganization committee, comprised of prominent citizens who had shown an interest in the problem of executive reorganization. On May 20, 1926, Harold Phelps Stokes sent a list of Hoover-approved names to NCSRL secretary Harry Marsh. Stokes’s list included the former Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes; former Secretary of War, Henry Stimson; Harvard Business School dean, Edwin F. Gay; and St. Louis wholesaler-turned-philanthropist, Robert S. Brookings. Despite his own role in persuading the NCSRL to take up the cause of reorganization, Hoover was careful to avoid leaving his own fingerprints on the project. Back in 1922 and 1923, during discussions of the Harding reorganization plan, Hoover had aroused the ire of other cabinet members who felt that the Secretary of Commerce was using reorganization to feather his own nest. In the letter to the NCSRL conveying Hoover’s recommendations, Stokes cautioned Marsh that “Mr. Hoover will much appreciate your consulting him in the matter but would naturally not want to be put in a position of dictating any committee make-up, or having invitations sent as in any way coming from him.” At the same time, however, Stokes made sure to convey Hoover’s enthusiasm about the NCSRL’s new project. “Surely the League will be doing a great service to the cause of good government and really effective civil service reform if it takes up vigorously the government reorganization fight,” Stokes wrote. “If there is anything we can do to help, let me know, and be sure to drop in to see me the next time you are down as there are several phases of this I should like to talk over with you.”^{Footnote 26}

The first two members to join the League’s committee were Hughes and Stimson.^{Footnote 27} A year earlier, they had been co-chairs of Al Smith’s commission to reorganize the government of New York State.^{Footnote 28} Some historians have seen their work on the New York State reorganization as evidence that Stimson and Hughes favored strong governing institutions at the state level, but not at the national level.^{Footnote 29} However, Hughes’s and Stimson’s support for the NCSRL’s effort illustrates their commitment to building administrative capacity in the federal government.

Having secured these two prominent Republican corporate lawyers, the NCSRL planning committee next approached the two leading Democratic lawyers on Wall Street: John W. Davis and Frank L. Polk, partners in the firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. Davis had been Solicitor General and Ambassador to the Court of St. James under Wilson, and Democratic presidential nominee in 1924. Polk was Under Secretary of State in the Wilson administration and led the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in 1919. Their invitation to join the committee was sent by NCSRL member Charles C. Burlingham, another prominent Democratic corporate attorney, who explained to Davis and Polk that “Secretary Hoover wishes the National Civil Service Reform League to prepare a plan for the reorganizations of the Departments, Boards, Bureaus and Commissions of the Federal Government, looking toward the readjustment and consolidation of their work.” Accepting the invitation in a longhand note scrawled at the bottom of Burlingham’s letter, Davis replied with an arch reference to the failed efforts of the Harding administration: “A large order! What has become of the reorganization plan so valiantly prepared by Walter Brown of Ohio?”^{Footnote 30}

Hughes, Stimson, Davis, and Polk were meant to form the core of the new reorganization committee.^{Footnote 31} However, the committee was not complete until after another round of invitations was sent out at the end of October 1926.^{Footnote 32} Hoover himself was also invited to serve on the committee, but did not join officially until December 1926. That invitation was sent on behalf of the NCSRL by Hoover’s former personal secretary, Harold Phelps Stokes, who had left Commerce during the previous year for a position on the editorial board of the New York Times (he had also been a long-standing member of the NCSRL). As Hoover’s new secretary explained to Stokes, the Secretary of Commerce still wished to avoid any appearance that the NCSRL’s reorganization committee was his committee:

Nearly two years after Hoover’s speech, the League was finally ready, on May 12, 1927, to publicly announce the formation of its reorganization committee. League leaders had hoped that Hughes or Stimson might serve as chairman, but neither was available due to overseas engagements. Instead, the group was to be led by George McAneny. Active in Manhattan government, McAneny had also spent five years as the business manager of the New York Times. He had gotten his start in public life by serving as secretary of the NCSRL at the turn of the century, where he had worked closely with his mentor, Carl Schurz, one of the founders of the civil service reform movement and a relative-by-marriage to McAneny’s wife. McAneny was well known in New York City as a man of action, but he had not yet played a prominent role in politics outside the five boroughs.^{Footnote 34}

The committee’s lineup as it was announced in 1927 (see Table 1) provides some insight into the political coalitions and alliances that supported national administrative reform in the mid-1920s. Notably, there were no academic scholars of public administration. The only professor on the list was Dean Gay of Harvard Business School. In fact, the committee was comprised overwhelmingly by men with significant experience in the business world.^{Footnote 35} Of the seventeen members, only three could be said to lack significant business experience, although even these men were not ignorant of business: Charles Francis Adams III (treasurer of Harvard and a noted yachtsman), Archibald B. Lovett (a private lawyer and judge from Savannah, Georgia), and Matthew Woll (vice president of the American Federation of Labor). Four members had general experience as business executives, four had been executives in the publishing industry, and four were prominent Wall Street lawyers—men with detailed working knowledge of some of the nation’s largest corporations.^{Footnote 36}

Table 1.

Committee on Executive Reorganization, National Civil Service Reform League, announced May 12, 1927

Source: “Aim to Fight Waste in Federal Bureaus,” New York Times, May 12, 1927.

In the longer-run story of administrative reform, the most significant members of this committee are Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. The future presidents’ involvement in discussions of executive-centered reorganization in the mid-1920s suggests that their later efforts—Roosevelt through the Brownlow Committee, and Hoover through the post–World War Two Hoover Commissions—were the product of a commitment that spanned each man’s entire public career.^{Footnote 37}

Like Hoover, Roosevelt seems to have drawn his ideas about administrative organization from his experience in both government and business, but while Hoover’s cosmopolitan career as a mining executive is well known, FDR’s business-related associations are less so. During the mid-1920s, Roosevelt himself seems to have viewed his business experience as a key part of his background.^{Footnote 38} And, in these years, FDR was widely known as a business-friendly supporter of executive reorganization and executive-centered administrative reform. However, while this aspect of Roosevelt’s pre-presidential career was emphasized by his early biographer, Frank Freidel—two of Freidel’s chapters on FDR in the 1920s are titled “Toward More Efficient Government” and “Businessman”—subsequent studies did not maintain this emphasis.^{Footnote 39}

After earning his law degree from Columbia University, Roosevelt had worked as an associate with the Wall Street firm Carter, Ledyard & Milburn during the years when it represented Standard Oil in its antitrust suit. Later, after a brief time in the New York State Assembly, FDR gained experience on the front lines of the business-government relationship as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I. During the 1920s, he was a successful vice president at a Wall Street bond house (where he traded on business connections made during the war), name partner in a small corporate law firm, and interested in a variety of investment schemes and business ventures.^{Footnote 40}

FDR repeatedly put himself on record as a supporter of executive-centered administrative reform in these years. During debate on budget reform in 1919, FDR was the only member of the Wilson administration to support the Wall Street–backed National Budget Committee’s proposal to place a new budget bureau in the office of the president rather than in the Treasury. In February 1920, in a speech at the Harvard Union, Roosevelt argued that the United States should “make our government as efficient as we would conduct our own private individual business.” In March 1920, the New York Times printed his letter to Representative R. Walton Moore, Democrat of Virginia (who would be named to the Joint Committee on Reorganization at the end of the year). In the letter—several typescript copies of which are preserved in the NCSRL reorganization committee files—FDR proclaimed his support of executive reorganization in a formulation that nicely encapsulates the agenda of business-minded administrative reformers of this era. “I believe America stands, as a whole, for business efficiency in the conduct of its affairs,” the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy wrote. “In this respect,” FDR asserted, “the Congress of the United States and the executive departments of the Government need Americanizing more than any of our other institutions.” Roosevelt also served on the advisory board of the Institute for Government Research’s Bureau of Public Personnel Administration, an organization devoted to sharing administrative expertise between leaders in business and government. In 1925, when the NCSRL’s committee of young men met with selected policymakers and policy advocates to consult about the league’s future plans, one of their first meetings (before Herbert Hoover) was with FDR.^{Footnote 41}

However, despite the list of eminent public men who made up the committee, and despite Hoover’s high hopes for his joint venture with the NCSRL, the league’s reorganization campaign never got off the ground. A publicity campaign of the scale that Hoover and league leaders envisioned would be expensive, and the most obvious stumbling block was the difficulty of raising funds toward the committee’s proposed annual budget of $25,000.^{Footnote 42} In January 1929, Marsh’s replacement as league secretary, Elliot Kaplan, made a funding request to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s secretary, Thomas Appleget. “I was surprised to find he was quite familiar with our plan for consolidation and reorganization of the Federal departments,” Kaplan reported back to McAneny, who was by this time serving as president of the league. “He observed that that was a problem of considerable magnitude and wondered how the League could do much toward that end. I explained the establishment of a Special Committee of prominent citizens (all of which information he seemed to have had already) and pointed out the difficulties with which we have been faced.”^{Footnote 43}

In fact, Rockefeller had determined not to fund the league’s reorganization committee before it had even been formed. In response to a preliminary request from the NCSRL in 1926, Appleget had drafted an internal report in which he concluded that the league lacked capacity for the project and, further, “that it would be advisable to combine this League with the Bureau of Public Personnel Administration making one the publishing and aggressive body and the other the research and fact finding body.”^{Footnote 44} This suggestion reflected Rockefeller’s long-standing policy to avoid contributing to organizations whose work might conflict or overlap with other Rockefeller-funded enterprises. At the time, Rockefeller was giving $25,000 a year to the Bureau of Public Personnel Administration (BPPA), which had been formed as a subsidiary of the Institute for Government Research in 1922 to conduct “scientific research” into public personnel administration methods and to serve as a clearinghouse of information and advice to personnel managers in government and in business.^{Footnote 45} Rockefeller’s insistence on well-coordinated support of scientific study of public administration eventually caused the BPPA—after a brief period of operating at the University of Chicago—to be shut down in order to provide a broader field for the Public Administration Clearing House, which was underwritten by the Spelman Fund of New York and directed by the academic public administration pioneer, Louis Brownlow.^{Footnote 46}

In the late 1920s, as Stanley Katz and Barry Karl noted long ago, philanthropic foundations were beginning to assume a leading role in public-sector questions through social science inquiry and the professionalization of academic public administration. In this setting, the NCSRL and its committee of “eminent men” seemed a hopeless anachronism.^{Footnote 47} In 1932, in response to the league’s appeal for an increased contribution from Rockefeller, his secretary, Arthur W. Packard, went as far as to suggest that the NCSRL be replaced entirely and that “merging the activity of the National Institute of Public Administration and the American Political Science Association” would “more adequately” cover “the ground now covered by the National Civil Service Reform League.”^{Footnote 48}

The lack of enthusiasm from Rockefeller and his associates for the NCSRL and its reorganization campaign also reflected their awareness of the political obstacles that would confront any attempt at national administrative reform. Ever since the Farm Demonstration Project controversy of the mid-1910s, Rockefeller had been wary of stirring up opposition from farm-state congressmen.^{Footnote 49} Applying the lessons from that debacle, whenever Rockefeller-affiliated organizations ventured into national administrative reform, they made sure to limit their efforts to “scientific” inquiry and to avoid seeming to advocate specific governmental reforms.^{Footnote 50}

Another experienced hand at business-inspired administrative reform had expressed similar reservations about reformers’ ability to overcome opposition from farm-state congressmen. In late 1926, as the league was putting together its reorganization committee, John T. Pratt, chairman of the Wall Street–affiliated National Budget Committee, shared this concern with Dean of Yale Law School Thomas W. Swan, who was at that time president of the NCSRL. “From my experience,” Pratt wrote, “I am very firmly convinced that nothing can be done along the line of reorganizing the Government, without a great deal of work and without the backing of all possible organizations likely to be at all interested, particularly the farm group.”^{Footnote 51}

The opposition of “the farm group” to the “centralized responsibility” that Hoover and the NCSRL hoped to bring about came into clearer relief after the election of 1930, which allowed Democratic leaders in Congress to finally kill the New Era reformers’ dreams of executive reorganization. As the Great Depression worsened in 1930, 1931, and 1932, congressional leaders began to argue in favor of Congress-centered reorganization in order to cut expenditures and reduce the rapidly ballooning deficit. In response to these calls, President Hoover proposed an executive-centered plan resembling the proposals of the Harding administration and embodying the goals he had tried to pursue with the NCSRL. Hoover emphasized the possible budgetary savings that would result from the reorganization, but in his messages to Congress and in his press statements, Hoover revealed that he retained his old commitment to executive-centered reorganization. For instance, in one early statement, he cited the importance of “having single-headed direction under which policies can be formulated and where they will be much more under public inspection.” He added that his plan “would enable policies in connection with different Government activities to be better developed and better directed.”^{Footnote 52}

Reformers applauded Hoover’s efforts, but congressional Democrats responded, as New York Times Washington correspondent Arthur Krock put it, with “open hostility.” House Speaker, and future vice president, John Nance Garner, of Texas, called Hoover’s plan “idiotic and astounding.” Krock reported that Democrats in the Senate “feared greater centralization of power in Executive hands if the President should be given carte blanche, such as he asks.”^{Footnote 53} The back-and-forth between Hoover and the congressional Democrats eventually produced the Economy Act, which became law on June 30, 1932. This act gave Hoover the power to reorganize the executive branch through executive orders, but it also gave either house of Congress the power to veto Hoover’s orders within sixty days. With the election season underway, Hoover decided to bide his time in hopes that he would be in a stronger position after November. As it turned out, of course, the results of the election placed the lame-duck president in an even weaker position against Congress. Aware that he faced long odds, Hoover finally submitted his reorganization orders on December 9, 1932. His plan largely resembled the executive-centered proposals offered earlier in the 1920s. Among other provisions, it called for creating a presidential staff office and two new divisions in the Department of the Interior: one for “Education, Health, and Recreation,” and one for “Public Works.” The plan was ambitious. For instance, the public works division would have consolidated all of the federal government’s scattered construction activities into a single agency within the office of the president. This was intended to give the president leverage in counteracting the business cycle through the timing of government construction projects. The Democrats in the House vetoed Hoover’s orders on January 19, 1933, arguing that the president’s plan did not go far enough to eliminate expenditures.^{Footnote 54}

The Republican administrations’ dozen-year quest to enact executive-centered reorganization resulted in a string of defeats, and from the perspective of administrative reform, the election of 1932 was a victory for Congress-centered reorganization. When FDR took office, Congress granted him two years of reorganization authority under a new Economy Act, but the main purpose of the law was to allow drastic cuts in expenditures—particularly in veterans’ benefits.^{Footnote 55} FDR would not attempt a comprehensive, executive-centered reorganization until after the power of southern Democrats was diluted by the electoral gains of northern and western Democrats in 1934 and 1936. However, when he did finally propose such a plan, it was opposed by southern Democrats—just as the Republican plans had been during the New Era.^{Footnote 56}

The story of the NCSRL’s ill-starred foray into administrative policy debates shows that, in the era before the academic discipline of public administration studies was fully formed, modern executive-centered reforms were supported by a broad group of elites motivated by seemingly old-fashioned notions of good government and business efficiency. Elite reformers observed the organizational advances being made in the business sector and in the voluntary sector and attempted to bring national governing institutions in the public sector up to speed.^{Footnote 57} Conspicuous among these reformers were the two future presidents, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. While these two men certainly differed in their approach to economic and social policy—a contrast that has been emphasized by historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Leuchtenberg, and, most recently, Eric Rauchway—when it came to questions of administrative reform, Hoover and Roosevelt were essentially cut from the same cloth. The story here suggests that executive reorganization should be considered part of the policy agenda that comprised what Barry Karl called “a centrist approach that both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt could have agreed upon in the decade before the Crash.”^{Footnote 58}

While the administrative reformers failed to achieve executive reorganization during the New Era, the agenda that they launched would form the basis for more successful efforts during the New Deal and after World War II. The story in this article suggests that the executive-centered nature of the plan drafted in 1937 by the Brownlow Committee was not so much the result of the education that FDR supposedly received from his staff of academic experts, but rather a return to the reform agenda he had pursued for much of his career. Similarly, the story here suggests that the scholarly portrait of Hoover as an ardent “associationalist” does not reflect the full scope of his activities during and after the New Era. Given his persistent efforts in favor of executive reorganization during his years in government, it is not surprising that, after World War II, when the federal executive branch was finally subjected to a thoroughgoing reorganization—with the formalization of a presidential staff office, and something resembling a modern managerial structure—it was done under a commission that bore Hoover’s name.^{Footnote 59}