Dwight Waldo

Administrative Theorist for our Times

Richard Stillman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429751127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the early postwar period until his death at the turn of the century, Dwight Waldo was one of the most authoritative voices in the field of public administration. Through probing questions, creative ideas, and novel insights, he perhaps contributed more than any other single figure to the development of public administration as a discipline in the mid-20th century, from his classic, masterful debut The Administrative State (1948) to his last published book, The Enterprise of Public Administration (1980). In this new look at Dwight Waldo's writing, Richard Stillman offers a representative selection of Waldo's most important works alongside introductory essays to help a seasoned public administration scholar as well as the novice student alike appreciate and comprehend Waldo's remarkable contribution to this critical field of study.

Selections have been chosen for their ability to speak to current and ongoing concerns of the field in the 21st century as well as for their utility, readability, and importance. This anthology provides new generations of readers with a fresh look at the work of this prolific, profoundly influential author, while offering both administrative scholars and practitioners renewed access to many of his hard-to-find works. This book will be required reading for all those interested in public administration as a field of inquiry and practice.

1
Dwight Waldo

Administrative Theorist for Our Times

Richard Stillman

In the 1946 film classic, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) is granted a unique gift by the Guardian Angel Clarence (Henry Travers): to witness what life in his hometown, Bedford Falls, would be like if he had not lived. His brother, Harry (Todd Karns), would have died as a boy in a sledding accident, never becoming a WWII ace Navy fighter pilot; Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) would have gone to jail for misplacing the Building and Loan Bank funds; the evil Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) would have taken over the Bank, which financed low cost homes for the poor, buying up the town for profit, turning it into a slum, and renaming it Pottersville; George’s wife, Mary (Donna Reed), would end up a spinster librarian; and his own Mother, Ma Bailey (Beulah Bondi), an embittered widow. Of course, the Orwellian nightmare morphing cheerful Bedford Falls into woebegone Pottersville convinces Bailey not to jump off the bridge and commit suicide. Rather, he returns to his family and is celebrated as the hometown hero. This popular Christmas Story can be understood on many levels, but most of all the tale is a stark reminder how one individual makes a difference in so many lives around him. Humans are not isolated actors but intricately interconnected with others, influencing in innumerable, unpredictable directions “the web of life”.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is an apt metaphor to describe what 21st century Public Administration Thought would be without Dwight Waldo’s intellectual contributions. Indeed it is hard to envision American Public Administration today without him. He was the indispensable scholar for the field. There would be no thorough conceptualization of the modern administrative state without his book, The Administrative State (1948); no prolonged struggle to define and comprehend public administration’s fundamental meaning; nor basic insight into administrative thought as ideas and study (PA) distinct from administrative practice and institutions (pa); far less appreciation of administrative history, development, and its profound influence over modern life; no Waldo/Simon Debate to underscore how Public Administration is chock full of values and why value choices matter to what happens in public administration; the “New Public Administration” would never have been sponsored and hence would not exist; nor an eleven year Public Administration Review editorial tenure that so profoundly enlarged, enriched, and basically recast America’s leading journal of record for advancing the field; nor lengthy essays probing seminal big questions involving dichotomous relationships between politics and administration, bureaucracy and democracy, civilization and administration technologies, ethics and the public service, or about the future and past that broadened our perspectives on public administration; and the list could go on—and on. Much as George Bailey discovered, Dwight Waldo writings suggest repeatedly that civilization and society decisively depend upon how individuals work together for promoting “the common good”, i.e. public administration. As the fictional Bailey also learned, Waldo taught us that civilization turns on human capacity to interconnect—or fail to do so—and at the root of it all is public administration, a very human, non-technocratic, vital enterprise that incorporates both study and action. Ultimately, as George Bailey came to realize when he chose life not death, contemporary society, especially administrative sciences, would be vastly poorer, even fundamentally different today without Dwight Waldo’s rich, enduring legacy of scholarship.

Before embarking upon a lengthy survey of Waldo’s academic contributions and their lasting significance, let’s step back and remind ourselves: who was Dwight Waldo? What was his personal background that shaped his professional outlook as a teacher and scholar? What were his seminal concepts? Where did they come from, grow, and evolve? Why do his uniquely creative 20th century ideas continue to influence today’s administrative sciences? Who were his critics as well as his own limitations? His professional and intellectual legacy?

Seeing Life From a Peculiar Angle of Midwestern Values

A thumbnail sketch of Dwight Waldo’s life begins in 1913, DeWitt, a farm-village of 500, in southeast Nebraska. DeWitt was a simple, no-frills, Grant Wood sort of community in which to be reared and raised. Most homes at that time were heated with wood or coal; few were electrified or possessed telephones; radio, TV, and the internet were in the distant future; outdoor water pumps and outhouses were common; horses and buggies dotted the dirt roads; and communal barn-raising, planting, and harvesting part of everyday life. DeWitt’s only other illustrious son is William Petersen, the inventor of the vise-grip wrench. Waldo’s parents, like most Midwesterners of that era, never completed high school, but they were hard-working, family-centered, church-going, dedicated to improving their lot and the lives of their five children. His father worked long hours at several jobs, farming, part-time local Marshall, raising livestock, running a livery and dray service, possibly a jack-of-all-trades. Dwight’s only early claims to fame were winning second place in a beautiful baby contest and as a teenager, winning first place in hog-calling at a county fair, hardly an auspicious beginning for America’s most noteworthy 20th century administrative scholar.¹

Bland, perhaps at first glance, these typical Midwest roots imbued Waldo with important personal traits that would stay with him as well as set him and his scholarship apart from others: first and foremost, would be an incredibly disciplined work ethic. Few of his contemporaries matched his consistent academic productivity during a forty year career, nor his drive and focus upon advancing original scholarship in such a wide array of administrative topics. Yet, he remained self-effacing, even shy, or as some Midwesterners would say, “He’d never put on airs.” Such attributes would bring sincere professional respect because when he promised to deliver, no matter how busy, he would do so on schedule and more often than not brilliantly. He was never smug or off-putting as some academics, but rather his quiet, introspective, unthreatening personality attracted, befriending a wide spectrum of disparate individuals, from which he learned, plus enhanced his status over time as an open-minded, illustrious academic leader, even role-model for some in the field. He made few personal enemies. Some of his harshest critics, such as Herbert Simon, wound up eventually as his friends. And if you were lucky to get to know him as a close friend, he would convey a wicked sense of humor, often teasing and pun-filled, that endeared him to many. The Midwest up-bringing also instilled a sure sense of who he was. He once claimed he never understood those who had to take a mid-life year or more off to find themselves. Clearly he knew who he was, or in David Riesman’s words typified, an “inner-directed individual”. Such hard-headed rootedness provided incredible strength and self-assuredness during long years of solitary library research or surviving fierce academic battles as “the young radical” in the field.

Another Midwest characteristic that pervaded his career and writing was his keen sense of balance. He never embraced extremes, but always sought a middle ground, not necessarily a compromise, more of curious ongoing quest to see all sides of problems accurately, fairly judging strengths and weak points, often ending up with novel insights at the center point without a firm statement of conviction. This tendency to find “the muddled middle” would infuriate his critics at times: “Waldo, come on, tell us the answer!” He never would but often only raised more questions, thereby opening up new perspectives, broaching other arguments to address, while at the same time provoking further exasperation and befuddlement from those seeking quick, simple responses. Such determined, plain-spoken honesty plus balanced skepticism became a personal trademark. His gentle fairness as well as even-handed academic reputation brought him professional respect plus increasing leadership responsibilities throughout his career. At times such pronounced quiet reticence hid his genuine ambition to “get at the truth”, “to say things as precisely as possible”, and “to move forward”. In a vast, complex, rapidly changing field of public administration, more than most Waldo became well-aware of the difficulties of arriving at “the answer” or “the truth”. Hence, his writings express the tentative, the limits, as well as the complexities of grasping “it”. This pronounced ambivalence also turned him into his own best critic because he would be the first to admit something when he did not know, what he did not know or why he did know how to advance any further.²

Third, a surprising disproportionate share of Waldo’s generation of Public Administration intellectual leaders came from Middle America: i.e., James Fesler and Stephen Bailey from Minnesota, Herbert Simon and John Gaus from Wisconsin, Louis Brownlow and Ferrel Heady from Missouri, Paul Appleby from Iowa, Robert Dahl from the Dakotas, and Don Price from Kentucky. Few reflected on their origins, but when they did, their retrospectives were positive, even though at times restricted by limited means and moral strictness.³ As Waldo notes, for example, DeWitt had only a small lending library, with much of which that was considered “literature” consisted of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books. He also admits, “I was reared in a rather strict Methodist environment: nothing frivolous, such as fishing or playing ball on Sunday, no smoking drinking, gambling, or dancing at any time.”⁴ Nonetheless, he never hints of any unhappiness. Those views contrast sharply with several leading Midwest novelists of that era who skewered the small-town, claustrophobic, materialistic, and prejudicial culture. For example, think of the writings of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson. Not only did public administrative scholars (and they were mostly white male) seem more favorably attached to the milieu from which they sprang, but all were immersed in the Judeo-Christian culture, especially Protestantism. Not that any including Waldo exhibited explicit or pronounced religious belief. Instead, their personal values and expressed ideas individually developed a sophisticated morality that derived from small-town Protestantism, such as a faith in a potential for human progress, democratic rule, appreciation of community, material well-being, respect for individual liberty, the rule of law, importance of ethical conduct, etc. Above all, Waldo’s writings reflect a strong commitment to a singular communal definition of “the public” as opposed to “publics” guiding Public Administration. Like many academic leaders of his generation within this field he raised an ingrained localized sense of the welfare of the whole to a far broader public-regard on the national stage. In Waldo’s work one finds such moral attributes at one time or another examined, questioned, yet never fundamentally challenged. Like many of his public administration contemporaries, he increasingly became devoted to the cause of “Public Administration”. More often than not, explicitly and implicitly, that moral idealism was rooted in religiously inherited ethics but in secularized form and collectively advanced from the grassroots to the national stage in order to promote good government as well as “the good society”.

Finally, his Midwest origins shortly after the dawn of the 20th century were closer in cultural affinities to the prior two centuries of American Life than life that would unfold in the nation during his lifetime spanning the rest of that century (1913–2000). It is hard to imagine a more different boyhood growing up in an isolated, largely self-sufficient, self-governed, rural village compared to the one in which Waldo would spend most of his career working, reflecting upon, and astutely analyzing, namely the growth and development of an immense, impersonal, complex modern administrative state. The informal, mid-America, small town community that he so intimately knew during his first eighteen years quickly and permanently was transformed by massive forces of urbanization, industrialization, immigration, communications, technological change, and global involvement. Was it accident or good luck or both that he was born in the sparse country-side to move into and witness firsthand the rapid growth and vast impacts of big government and public administration throughout the United States? The shock of change, as experienced by many in his generation, was no doubt great, yet for Waldo it encouraged his profound intellectual thirst to understand its meaning, sources, and influence on his times. Such distant roots in time and place provided a unique vantage point from which to witness and comment upon the advent of modernism or, as Henry Luce labeled it, the rise of “The American Century”. No transformation of the political, economic and social landscape could have been sharper during any stage of American History than the timeframe in which he lived. To be sure, Waldo ultimately became “the insider”, the admired administrative commentator. However, his DeWitt birthplace provided a particular platform from which to observe such cataclysmic cultural shifts. As a result, his scholarship throughout subtly conveys “an outsider perspective”, always looking in, looking around, a bit perplexed, astonished by what he witnesses, even more surprised by how far he rose up from his humble beginnings to observe, criticize, and reflect upon civilization’s fundamental metamorphosis. At times there was a twinge of remorse. He once spoke in later life how he learned as a teen to skin cattle and plow fields but then at that age if he had only studied foreign languages or been educated abroad, how much more he could have contributed as a scholar? Though, one might respond, if he (Waldo) had lived and studied abroad, learned other languages, and was exposed at an early age to far broader intellectual horizons, would he have understood as well and written as clearly about the rise of the American Administrative State and its enormous influence throughout society without first witnessing and experiencing life from the peculiar angle of Midwestern small town values?

Writing the One-of-a-Kind Scholarly Classic

Waldo liked to joke that “he failed his way upward in life”. He claimed he only wanted to be a high school English teacher. At first he attended Nebraska Wesleyan, but because tuition was expensive, he enrolled his second year at Nebraska State Teachers College, in Peru, to study education as a career. There were no teaching jobs available after graduation in 1935. So the next best thing was graduate school. He obtained scholarship at the University of Nebraska where he earned his MA in 1936 in English, still aiming for secondary teaching, but again no jobs. Once more he cast his net out for scholarship opportunities elsewhere and a string of accidents encouraged him to think about graduate work in political science. Several possibilities opened up. In the end he chose Yale because it was in New England, Ivy League, clearly the antithesis from rural Nebraska—and its scholarship paid better. Yet, when he finished his dissertation there in 1942, at the start of World War II, with wartime mobilization underway, again the market for teaching opportunities was sparse. Next he landed a job in Washington, through a good friend … and so on … ever failing his way upward!

The reality of Waldo’s life was much more complicated—as is true for all. Likewise accidents reshape everyone’s lives. Certainly the Great Depression and then World War II closed off secondary teaching opportunities for Waldo, just as those events redirected aspirations for so many others. What his “failing upward” narration about his own career trajectory neglects to mention, partly in jest and partly from modesty, is that Waldo was bright, hard-working, ambitious, serious, well-trained in English prose, with abundant self-confidence, certainly striving to make his mark on the world. Thanks to the rapid expansion of government and higher education, abundant new opportunities beckoned for the talented for a first time. The United States badly needed, eagerly sought out, and quickly promoted merit wherever located. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, the new alphabet federal agencies created to fight the Great Depression and later World War II sucked up capable men and women, like Waldo, regardless of background into lofty positions of public influence. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower symbolized for many the mind-boggling rapidity of steep career assent from dirt-poor Midwest beginnings to top-level world leadership, thanks to hard work, merit, and certainly a measure of good luck.

The University of Chicago’s political science department, under the energetic leadership of Charles Merriam, developed during the 1920s and 1930s a stellar political science faculty.⁵ Thanks to ample Rockefeller funds, Chicago would recruit, educate, and then graduate many leading postwar academics in the field. Although he was admitted to its graduate program, Chicago’s expressed advocacy of “the new science” of political science, empirically based and scientifically committed, did not appeal to Waldo. Yale’s Political Science in that day, on the other hand, was oriented towards political history, normative theory, institutional and comparative government, especially emphasizing Great Britain. Yale’s graduate humanistic, Anglo-American curriculum was traditional, even considered somewhat old-fashioned by 1930s standards when Waldo entered. Here under the guidance of his faculty advisor and doctoral dissertation chair, Francis Coker, Waldo took classes that taught politics from rapidly vanishing historical, normative perspectives within mainstream social sciences, one that by postwar American political science would appear unique precisely because it was so antique. More off-beat, perhaps daring, Waldo chose a dissertation topic that traditional human-ists generally “looked down upon” (many still do), namely the emerging ideas of expertise in democratic theory. The topic was considered too practical, too job-oriented, too modern, unrelated to serious “high toned” traditional political theory. Few except Coker were interested in that subject, but no one discouraged Waldo’s exploration which entailed diligent library research over 18 months. Waldo read everything available in the well-stocked Yale Library on the fledgling but rapidly expanding topic of American Public Administration, which ended up as his classic, The Administrative State (TAS), but with the original official dissertation title, “Theoretical Aspects of the American Literature of Public Administration”.

As the opening lines of the preface succinctly set forth its aim:

“This is a study of the public administration from the viewpoint of political theory and the history of ideas. It seeks to review and analyze the theoretical element in administrative writings and to present the development of the public administration movement as a chapter in the history of American political thought.

“The objectives of this study are to assist students of administration to view their subject in historical perspective and to appraise the theoretical content of the literature. It is hoped that this book may assist students of American culture by illuminating an important development of the last half century.”⁶

Note that Waldo refers to “the public ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Dwight Waldo: Administrative Theorist for Our Times
• Part I What Is Public Administration?
• Part II Alternative Approaches to Public Administration
• Part III The Historical Context of Public Administration
• Part IV The Cultural Context of Public Administration
• Part V The Two Enduring Challenges in the Field: Politics/Administration and Ethics in the Public Service
• Part VI Public Administration Education
• Part VII The Future of Public Administration
• Bibliography: Chronological List of the Publications of Dwight Waldo
• Publications on Dwight Waldo
• Index