Administrative Reform and the Rise of the Efficiency Movement

In the United States, the search for economy and efficiency in the organization, function, and processes of federal government stretches back to the country's formation, with over two hundred administrative investigations conducted between 1789 and 1909.¹⁷ The golden age of the efficiency movement took place against the backdrop of the Progressive Era (1890–1920)—a time when a push for reform in all sectors of political and social life was coupled with a desire to increase efficiency in operations through scientific methods. Public sector reformers viewed government as both a cause and a solution to the problems of corruption, patronage, and the system of political bosses.¹⁸ As the reach of government expanded at the turn of the twentieth century, reformers sought improvements in the organization and method of its administration, including in the areas of budgetary process, spending, accounting, and personnel practices. One of the first areas of government administration to come under sustained scrutiny was that of political patronage (the so-called spoils system). The assassination of President Garfield in 1881 by a disgruntled office-seeker acted as a catalyst for reform and led to the creation of the civil service merit system.¹⁹ The subsequent Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 provided for a national Civil Service Commission to administer public employment and created a system in which the awarding of federal civil service positions was principally based on open competitive exams.²⁰

Indeed, the Progressive Era ushered in a series of “increasingly comprehensive and methodologically searching explorations into the business and business methods of the Federal Government.”²¹ Such broad-scale investigations (encompassing congressional initiatives, public commissions, and presidential task forces) included the Cockrell Committee (1887–1889), the Dockery-Cockrell Commission (1893–1895), the Keep Commission (1905–1909), the Commission on Economy and Efficiency (Taft Commission) (1910–1913), the Joint Committee on the Reorganization of Government Departments (1921), the President's Committee on Administrative Management (Brownlow Committee) (1936–1937), and the Senate Select Committee on Investigation of Executive Agencies of the Government (Byrd Committee) (1936–1937).²²

At the state level, the rapid expansion of state responsibilities and the increasing cost of state services in the early twentieth century led to a concern that government was tackling its duties in a way that encouraged administrative bloat.²³ Additionally, the concern existed that the efficient operation of state services was being hindered by high turnover rates of public employees and by a government machinery that had created a system in which agency functions overlapped, administrative work was duplicated, inadequate provision was made for the supervision of staff, work processes were unstandardized, and unnecessary records were created.²⁴ Efficiency thus became the “watchword” of state government during the Progressive Era, with efficiency implying a “new level of rationality, planning, and expertise, which would ensure more effective services, preferably at lower costs.”²⁵ Echoing developments at the federal level, the creation of civil service commissions at the state, city, county, and municipal levels increasingly tackled the issue of making government more efficient and businesslike.²⁶

As part of the process of streamlining government administration, one area of emphasis was personnel reform including the “establishment of scientific classification of public employees, and on the establishment of adequate and uniform rates of compensation.”²⁷ Taken as a whole, however, it was “tinkering with the administrative structure and rearranging departments and commissions” that was perhaps the “favorite pastime” of the state reformers.²⁸ Following on the heels of the Taft Commission, state commissions were created to investigate economy and efficiency, and between 1911 and America's entry into the Great War, fifteen states had established such investigations.²⁹ Although action was not always forthcoming consequent to these commissions, numerous states did pursue administrative reorganization in the form of statutory change and, less typically, in the form of constitutional revision.³⁰ Efforts to create clear lines of authority from the governor to newly reformed administrative agencies also accompanied the turn to efficiency. A key figure was the political appointee, holder of a higher-level agency position, involved in policy-making, and to whom the merit system did not apply.³¹ With such a concentration of power within the state executive branch came the attempted curtailment of the reach of the state legislature, local governments, courts, and independent boards of trustees. Yet, such centralization of power did not happen without resistance. Special interest groups feared that a rotation of political appointees to head state agencies would actually hinder the continuity of state services and bring in a leadership lacking in requisite professional knowledge.³²

The first comprehensive administrative consolidation occurred in Illinois in 1917, backed by investigations by an efficiency and economy committee created by the general assembly four years prior.³³ Campaigning on the issue of state administrative reorganization, businessman turned Republican governor Frank O. Lowden championed the passage of a Civil Administrative Code to consolidate the approximately 125 independent administrative Illinois agencies (including various offices, bureaus, governing boards, and commissions) into nine executive departments headed by gubernatorial appointees.³⁴ The legislatures in Idaho and Nebraska adopted similar civil administrative codes in 1919, and in California, Ohio, and Washington in 1921. The legislatures also put into effect administrative reorganization plans (either completely or in part) in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Vermont in 1923, and in Minnesota and South Dakota in 1925. Reorganization plans involving constitutional revision came into effect in Massachusetts in 1919, in New York in 1927, and in Virginia in 1928.³⁵

This move for efficiency went hand-in-hand with the search for expertise to help research, assemble, and render pertinent data with the goal of transforming the running of the state apparatus. These efforts included a push to professionalize the business of legislating, with a number of states creating state legislative reference services, where librarians were put to work to “gather information on policy issues and aid lawmakers in drafting statutes.”³⁶ Politicians also drafted outside experts to their cause, with governors seeking “sound technical advice” on the operation and organization of state government.³⁷ In the search for administrative expertise, government reformers turned to a new cadre of university-trained experts, many of whom were already plying their trade in the private sector.

Administrative reform had taken on an academic hue by the late nineteenth century. Woodrow Wilson was one of the earliest American academics to take an interest in the field of government administration, introduced to him by economist and social reformer Richard T. Ely. In his touchstone article, The Study of Administration, Wilson decreed that the object of administrative study is to “discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost.”³⁸ Wilson also weighed in on the perennial question of the relationship between administration and politics, clinging to the notion that while politics “set the tasks for administration,” “its motives, its objects, its policy, its standards” should be considered bureaucratic and not political in nature.³⁹

Wilson was on perhaps less contentious ground in his assertion that the field of public administration is akin to that of the field of business.⁴⁰ Yet, the principles espoused by both these fields of management science demonstrate their different theoretical and intellectual underpinnings. While the roots and principles of public administration were embedded in public law (constitution, statutes, and case law), the private sector had long embraced an entrepreneurial business culture, and associated corporate behavior theories, that proved controversial when applied to government agencies and programs.⁴¹ Yet, during the Progressive Era, a clear symbiosis existed between the two realms, with the business sector helping to bring private-sector habits into government work, including into the area of administrative reform.

In the United States, the rise of efficiency experts, and their associated work in state government, ties directly to the growth of various business disciplines including scientific management, management consulting, and cost accounting. Although related, each field has its own “professional and ideological origins.”⁴² Predominantly employed in the manufacturing sector, scientific management took hold in the late nineteenth century, lasting as a commercial enterprise up through the mid-1920s.⁴³ Early pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor viewed scientific management as a “true science,” with knowledge based upon a systematic study of work and of work practices, codified into “clearly defined laws, rules, and principles.”⁴⁴ The result was the creation of volumes of scientific data that was then available to management for the planning process.⁴⁵

Cost accounting formed the bridge between the fields of scientific management and management consulting.⁴⁶ From the turn of the twentieth century up through the late 1920s, cost accountants worked in tandem with industrial engineers to create benchmarks for manufacturing and thus minimize production and distribution costs. While the early practitioners of scientific management were primarily concerned with industrial relations, “problems of bureaucratic organization” were the purview of the early management consultants.⁴⁷ At the organizational level, the need for management consultants was tied to the perceived advantages to administration of bringing in independent experts who specialized in complex areas of knowledge. The growth of management consultancy was also tied to particular endogenous forces including the development of the American economy during the Progressive Era, as well as to New Deal regulatory changes (1933 Glass-Steagall Banking Act) that prohibited lawyers, accountants, and engineers from continuing to act as corporate consultants.⁴⁸

Griffenhagen and Associates

Born in the heyday of the Progressive Era and aligned with the rise of scientific management techniques, efficiency experts sought to meld modern business methods to public administration, in the process creating a more “scientific government.”⁴⁹ Prominent efficiency experts of the time were Chicagoans Edwin O. Griffenhagen and Fred Telford. Griffenhagen's and Telford's early professional careers were defined by their pioneering work as part of the Chicago civil service reform movement, their participation in the Progressive Era phenomenon of local government efficiency bureaus, and their association with the rise of a system known as the “Chicago plan.” During the period 1907 to 1916, a network of Chicago businessmen, professionals, academics, clubs, and reform and good government organizations fomented reform in response to the rapid rise in the city's population and the accompanying inadequacies of city services, the fragmentation of the power and authority of local government, and the endemic corruption of the city council and of city administration.⁵⁰ In particular, reform was pursued through the auspices of the City of Chicago's Civil Service Commission and in line with the “efficiency plan” devised by attorney Robert Catherwood. The plan proposed a staff of efficiency examiners to screen appointments, monitor employee performance, and study the organization of work within city departments.⁵¹

Griffenhagen became involved with reform work in 1910 at the age of twenty-four when he was hired as an “expert on organization” for the newly formed Efficiency Division of the Civil Service Commission.⁵² With an initial operating budget of $23,000 and a staff of five full-time employees, the work of the Efficiency Division was channeled through a Clerical and Accounting Section (charged with “enhancing the professionalization of the city's personnel system”) and a Technical Section (charged with “identifying inefficient operations in city agencies”).⁵³ As the division set about reforming Chicago's civil service system and investigating the methods of city administration, the staff adopted the rhetoric and methods of scientific management as a means of bolstering credibility for their work.⁵⁴ In Griffenhagen's area of personnel management, the work of the division centered on regularizing public personnel administration (with an emphasis on transferring decision-making power from the “corrupt” line managers to the properly educated and trained staff of the Civil Service Commission), as well as on duties classification and on salary standardization.⁵⁵ While his colleague, Efficiency Engineer in Charge Jacob Lewis Jacobs, devised an efficiency rating for employees, Griffenhagen created a dictionary classification (classification by titles of positions) and salary grading system for city employees.⁵⁶ Griffenhagen left the Civil Service Commission in 1911 and briefly served as the superintendent of employment for the Civil Service Commission of one of Chicago's independent park districts (South Park), where he pursued similar reform policies.⁵⁷ Fred Telford continued Griffenhagen's work for the Civil Service Commission, hired as the assistant chief examiner in 1913, a position he held for about eighteen months. Telford later went on to study the classification, works, and methods of the seven commissions operating in Chicago at the time (the United States Civil Service Commission, the State of Illinois Commission, the City of Chicago Commission, the Cook County Commission, and the Lincoln Park, South Park, and West Park Boards).

While government efficiency bureaus pursued reform, management consultants were also eager to create a market for business-driven reform in both the public and the private sectors. The somewhat porous boundaries between the public and private sectors at the time allowed businesses to absorb the skills and expertise of civil service staff. Along with J. L. Jacobs and Company, the pre-eminent Chicago firm of consulting engineers and employment advisers of the time was Arthur Young and Company. Scottish accountant and lawyer Arthur Young and his brother Stanley founded Arthur Young and Company in Chicago in 1906 as one of the first public accounting firms in the country. Rapid industrialization, the rise of corporate forms of ownership and corporate mergers, the creation of a distinct management class, and the introduction of federal corporate taxation helped to establish a market for professional accountants with accountancy work expanding from handling bookkeeping, bankruptcies, and liquidations to that of auditing corporate financial statements and establishing accounting systems to track revenues and expenses.⁵⁸ In 1911, Young organized a separate management and industrial engineering department to expand the services on offer to the corporate sector and hired Griffenhagen to run the department. Major clients included those in commercial, industrial, financial, and public utility businesses.⁵⁹ Griffenhagen and his colleagues slowly parlayed the firm's experience of working with private industry into government contracts, advertising that the firm could bring the best practices of “modern,” “progressive” privately controlled businesses to the public sector.⁶⁰ Griffenhagen's department built its business primarily around personnel issues, with staff working to create duties classification and salary standardization for the public service.⁶¹ The push for administrative efficiency during the Great War and the economic conditions that followed gave further impetus to the classification and salary standardization movement and thus provided further employment opportunities for the firm. Fred Telford joined Griffenhagen's department at the time when a number of civil service commissions hired Young and Company to handle the technical work of classification, including major projects for the Dominion of Canada, the City of Montreal, and the government of the United States.⁶²

In 1920, while some of this work was underway, Griffenhagen and a number of his colleagues (including Fred Telford) had taken over the industrial engineering department of Arthur Young and Company. Operating under the name of Griffenhagen and Associates, Ltd., with premises at 116 South Michigan Avenue, the firm continued its role as industrial engineers and employment advisors for the private and public sectors.⁶³ For the private sector, the firm advertised its services (provided by an individual staff member or by a group) to any organization contemplating “improvements in organization or methods of procedure,” and desiring “counsel or assistance in problems of management, business organization, industrial relations, production control, cost accounting, or office system.”⁶⁴ With regard to public sector work, the staff were touted as bringing an “impartial, experienced, outside point of view, a thorough familiarity of the best methods of privately conducted industry, an understanding of the problems peculiar to the public service, and a real enthusiasm for the cause of administrative reform.”⁶⁵ Whether operating as counselors, advisers, directors of investigations or installations, or as a staff of technical assistants, the expertise of the firm could be engaged for a fixed payment or via a per diem or monthly fee.⁶⁶ In the first decade of its existence, the company reorganized numerous corporations, utilities, and banks and was responsible for tackling reorganization projects for various states (South Carolina, 1920–1922; Maryland, 1921; and Georgia, 1921–1922), and cities (including Montreal, 1919; Baltimore, pre-1922; Philadelphia, 1920; and Chicago, 1923).⁶⁷

Georgia Politics in Play

Georgia was one of at least thirty-eight states that pursued administrative reform in the period from 1900 to 1937, with such reforms generally initiated by the governor.⁶⁸ The political conditions in Georgia that supported reform took time to develop. A form of representative government has been in existence in Georgia since 1751, with its legislative body, the general assembly, being in continuous operation since the state revoked its status as a colony of Great Britain in 1777.⁶⁹ While the legislature initially had the power to select a governor (constitution of 1789), the model quickly turned to that of a popularly elected head of the executive branch (constitution of 1798). While the state constitutions in place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries curtailed the power of Georgia's governor, subsequent state constitutions and state statutes reversed that trend. In Georgia, the full-time nature of the governorship (compared to a part-time legislature), the degree of control the governor had over the state budget, and the provision of a portion of state revenues to the governor's discretionary budget strengthened gubernatorial power.⁷⁰

Georgia had seen a succession of Democratic governors since the beginning of the Progressive Era: William J. Northen (1890–1894), William Y. Atkinson (1894–1898), Allen D. Candler (1898–1902), Joseph M. Terrell (1902–1907), Hoke Smith (1907–1909, 1911), Joseph M. Brown (1909–1911, 1912–1913), John M. Slaton (1911–1912, 1913–1915), Nathaniel E. Harris (1915–1917), Hugh Dorsey (1917–1921), and Thomas W. Hardwick (1921–1923). The political ambitions and associated political platforms of these governors shaped the development of state government, but none more so than Governor Hardwick's. Trained as a lawyer at the University of Georgia, Hardwick carved out a career in state and national politics as a state legislator (Georgia House of Representatives, 1898–1902), U.S. congressional representative (1903–1914); U.S. senator (1915–1919); and Georgia governor (1921–1923). Hardwick fit the mold of governors of the time, who campaigned “not primarily as nominees of a political party but as leaders of a policy crusade.”⁷¹ Hardwick campaigned under the aegis of retrenchment and a “sweeping out the capitol” program that sought economy and efficiency in the running of state government.

In the early 1920s, the Georgia Department of Archives and History was almost swept away in the wake of Hardwick's program, and every twist and turn in the saga was caustically laid out in a political satire, The Ballad of the Broom, written by Lucian Lamar Knight.⁷² Knight (1868–1933) was a fellow student of Hardwick's at the University of Georgia. Like his cousin, newspaper man Henry W. Grady, Knight made a name for himself as an orator and as a historian and writer of popular rather than academic repute.⁷³ Like Hardwick, Knight had begun his professional life as an attorney (working in Macon and then in Atlanta) before taking up a position in 1892 as editorial writer and literary editor for the Atlanta Constitution. In 1902, he quit the newspaper to enter the Presbyterian ministry, completing theological work at Princeton University (where he was a pupil of Woodrow Wilson) and subsequently serving as an associate pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. After a sojourn in California for health reasons, Knight returned to Georgia full-time in 1908, serving as associate editor of the Atlanta Georgian. In 1910, he became literary editor and vice president for the publisher Martin and Hoyt Company.

While Hardwick's professional energies were squarely directed toward politics, governing, and the law, Knight's seemingly peripatetic professional life coalesced around a love of Georgia and Georgia history, and a desire to preserve the documentary sources that could memorialize the history of the state and of southern (white) exceptionalism. The seeds of the establishment of the Georgia Department of Archives and History were planted in 1913 when an executive order from then Governor Brown appointed Knight to the position of compiler of state records.⁷⁴ The post, once held by former governors Allen D. Candler and William J. Northen, positioned Knight as preserver and publisher of the state's most important historical records of the colonial, revolutionary, and Confederate periods. Yet Knight had even grander ambitions for the office. In 1916, he began to work in earnest to get legislation passed to transform the Office of Compiler of State Records into a full-fledged Department of Archives and History, similar to institutions that had already been founded in Alabama (1901), Mississippi (1902), South Carolina (1905), North Carolina (1907), and Arkansas (1907).

While not a politician by training, temperament, or inclination, Knight understood that to keep his political appointment and to achieve his dream of founding a permanent historical agency, he would need to align certain constituents to his cause and to cultivate and develop the interest of key political power players in the state. To aid him in his plans, he helped found the Georgia Historical Association (GHA) in 1917. The association brought together historians, leaders of women's patriotic organizations, and other interested parties to advocate for the collection and preservation of state records, and thus for the formation of a Department of Archives and History.⁷⁵ Knight first outlined his plans to create a permanent state archives (a place to preserve the state's “immortal things”) in a letter to then-governor Nat Harris in June 1916. Noting that the cost involved would be negligible, Knight solicited the governor's support to start the ball rolling.⁷⁶ Later that year, he brought Senator Thomas Hardwick into the fold. Knight laid out his ambition to follow in the footsteps of North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama and found a central depository at the state capitol to preserve the important historical records of the state. Knight asked that Hardwick write a “friendly letter” endorsing the proposed legislation. Knight sought to hasten Hardwick's endorsement by noting that he already had the support of ex-Governors Brown, Slaton, and McDaniel, Governor Harris, and Governor-Elect Dorsey, as well as the backing of judges of the supreme court and court of appeals, of patriotic organizations (Daughters of the American Revolution and United Daughters of the Confederacy), and of Confederate veterans.⁷⁷ Hardwick responded in favor of the plan, letting Knight know that he could count on his help with the matter.⁷⁸

With the entry of the United States into the Great War in April 1917, the plans to create the department could easily have been derailed. Yet, Knight continued to work behind the scenes to mobilize support for the cause of history and to gather information to help in the realization of his plans. Among his confidants was Thomas McAdory Owen, director of the Department of Archives and History for the State of Alabama, from whom he sought information about appropriations and the allotment of state funds.⁷⁹ Despite this progress, it was also a trying time for Knight as he dealt with rumors that incoming governor Hugh Dorsey was preparing to remove him from the Office of Compiler of State Records.⁸⁰ In an effort to preempt such an outcome, Knight wrote to Dorsey laying out the crisis facing Georgia's historical records—a situation in which “old records are disregarded . . . sometimes crowded into dark corners . . . sometimes packed into boxes for storage . . . sometimes inadvertently fed to the furnace.” Knight described his efforts to date to found a Department of Archives, noting that a bill was in place, along with a plan to bolster its chances of passing.⁸¹ While acknowledging that Dorsey might have someone else in mind for the office, Knight made it clear that if his work was valued, he should be allowed to stay on as compiler of state records, a position that would help bring a Department of Archives to fruition.⁸² Though noncommittal in his reply, Dorsey conceded that he had “not yet seriously considered the proposition” of appointing anyone else to the position.⁸³

Knight's advocacy efforts appeared to pay off. On July 3, 1917, a resolution in the house led to the formation of a joint committee to inquire into the conditions of the state archives and to recommend appropriate legislation.⁸⁴ Three weeks later in a speech to the assembly, Governor Dorsey tipped his hand and threw his support behind the formation of a state archives.⁸⁵ The following day, the joint committee presented its findings, recommending that a sum of money be appropriated so that important state records could be brought together and housed in the state capitol under the control of the compiler of state records. Following the report, a house resolution sought to appropriate $2,000 for the protection of Georgia's archives.⁸⁶ Yet, Knight himself quickly and decisively imperiled his best-laid plans. While the joint committee was at work, a letter Knight wrote under the auspices of the Georgia Historical Association had garnered much attention following its publication in the Atlanta Constitution. Addressed to Thomas Hardwick and Hoke Smith, the letter roundly criticized the senators for their lack of support for President Woodrow Wilson's war measures.⁸⁷ In clashing fiercely and publicly with the Georgia senators, Knight allowed the political momentum that he had so carefully cultivated to slip away.⁸⁸ Unrepentant of his defense of Wilson, Knight renewed his attack on Hardwick the following year in his annual address before the GHA.⁸⁹ Reflecting on the episode in his address, Knight argued that it was the duty of the association to concern itself not only with the past but also to “relate itself vitally to the present.”⁹⁰ Despite this setback, Knight renewed his lobbying efforts in the offices and halls of the assembly during the legislative session of 1918. With the help of his usual cadre of supporters, a bill to establish a Department of Archives and History was finally passed.⁹¹ Georgia's Department of Archives and History was formally authorized on September 10, 1918. A newly created State Historical Commission handled oversight of the department, with a membership including the governor, Hugh M. Dorsey, and the heads of departments that were to contribute records to the archives.

Out Comes the Broom

There was once a little Governor, who owned a famous broom,

With which to clean the capitol—to sweep out every room,

“First, I'll raid the grand old archives—I will butcher needless facts,

For, a real State historian, to me, of danger smacks

And besides I must admit it, in this good old Empire state,

It will cook my goose forever, if he keeps the records straight.

Yes, I dread the Truth of History, and, in truth, 'tis my conviction,

That, to guild my dark biography, I need a Star of Fiction.”

—Lucian Lamar Knight, The Ballad of the Broom, 1922⁹²

Operations of the Georgia Department of Archives and History began on January 1, 1919, in the state capitol building with a staff of three (Knight, a stenographer, and an African American porter, Charlie Justice) in addition to Knight's wife, Rosa, who worked as an unpaid volunteer. Knight faced significant obstacles in his first year on the job. Challenges included securing state funds to pay back a loan of $2,000 that Knight had taken out to outfit the archives, defending the department's allocation of $7,200 before the Georgia legislature (at a time when, as Knight noted, Wisconsin was appropriating $30,000 per annum for its Department of Archives), and getting an act passed in the general assembly to repeal a provision limiting the continuance of the department (approved August 18, 1919).⁹³ The election of Thomas W. Hardwick as governor of Georgia in 1921 was an important turning point for the fortunes of the Georgia Department of Archives and History. Sensing that trouble was on the horizon, Knight reached out to Hardwick upon news of his election but Knight's efforts to mend fences with the incoming governor, and ex officio chairman of his department, proved futile.⁹⁴

Echoing earlier battles between historian Alexander Samuel Salley Jr. and Governor Coleman Livingston Blease over the fate of the nascent state archives in neighboring South Carolina, Knight and Hardwick engaged in a pointed struggle over the future of the department.⁹⁵ Entangled with the rhetoric of administrative reform, Hardwick and Knight put forth differing notions for how the effort to dismantle the state archives should be understood. Knight understood Hardwick's program of reform as a solely political act. Knight believed Hardwick to be driven by animus and self-interest, and to have little reason to help secure a historical record that might ultimately hold him politically accountable. In contrast, Hardwick hewed to the notion that his “sweeping out the capitol” program constituted the objective pursuit of effectiveness, efficiency, and economy in state government. In this scenario, state agencies could be impartially assessed in terms of their value to the state (the degree to which agencies aligned with the core responsibilities of state government) and the economy and efficiency with which they carried out their associated work.

On the surface, the political tenor in the state and the state's fiscal condition made it easy for Hardwick to campaign under the progressive notion of administrative reform. Hardwick's predecessor, two-time governor Hugh M. Dorsey, had championed the need for state fiscal reform, including the need to regularize the state system of budgeting.⁹⁶ As Dorsey stepped down as governor, Georgia was facing a prolonged period of fiscal contraction and deflation following the Great War. The agricultural sector in Georgia had been particularly hard hit, afflicted by falling commodity prices and the devastation caused to cotton crops by the introduction of the boll weevil. A growing deficit due to the failure to collect a large percentage of anticipated state revenue compounded the state's financial distress. Meanwhile, state spending was on the rise. State agencies sought increased appropriations, while the state was increasingly responsible for financial obligations that included pension arrears to Confederate veterans and payment arrears to teachers in the state's common schools. In the meantime, Georgia was lagging behind other southern states in its support of a number of essential state services, including service in the area of higher education.⁹⁷

Elected to the governor's office on November 2, 1920, Hardwick began his term on June 25, 1921.⁹⁸ In addressing the assembly barely two weeks into his gubernatorial term, Hardwick joined a cohort of governors whose messages resonated with “admonitions regarding economy; suggestions of the need of cooperation; comments on the state institutions, the burden of taxation, [and] the deserts of agriculture.”⁹⁹ Hardwick set the stage by outlining the state's grave financial condition, which included a projected budget deficit of over $3.5 million. In an attempt to balance state income and outgoings, Hardwick called for an increase in revenue, accompanied by cutting appropriations to the bone. Hardwick also introduced his long-term plans to increase revenue, which included the introduction of a graduated state income tax system in place of the state tax on property. As a means of immediate relief, Hardwick proposed the creation of a special fund from discounted rental income from the state's railway property. In addition, he sought to levy a tax on receipts of bottlers and manufacturers of soft drinks, one cent a gallon on gasoline sales, and a poll tax on all newly enfranchised female citizens.¹⁰⁰

When it came to unexpended appropriations, Hardwick recommended that the “pruning knife” be applied across the board with due regard to economy, maintaining the efficiency of state services, and eschewing any form of favoritism. Yet, favoritism there was, especially in terms of how Hardwick understood state governance and what were deemed essential and nonessential state services. Viewing fragmentation as the enemy of effective state government, Hardwick urged the legislature to consolidate certain “useless” state boards that had proliferated during the war years, or dispense with them altogether. He leveled particular criticism at boards and commissions in the educational, humanitarian, and charitable sectors, which Hardwick viewed as engaged in paternalistic activities unnecessary to the conduct of “legitimate and proper” state business.

Under the aegis of his retrenchment program, Hardwick singled out the Department of Archives and History for closure. In its stead, he recommended that the records and papers of the department be transferred to the state library and that its work be devolved to the state librarian.¹⁰¹ In calling out the office as an “absolute sinecure,” Hardwick placed the mission of the department, and Knight's work as its leader, at the periphery of state business. With Knight out of the country on a three-month leave of absence, it was up to the press to provide the most vocal commentary on Hardwick's program. The Atlanta Constitution viewed the proposal to close the department as a “step backward,” buying neither the argument of efficiency nor of economy. Instead, the press touted the importance of the department to the history of the state and deemed the proposed closure a “false economy” given that the department's annual appropriation amounted to only $7,200.¹⁰² Failing to achieve much traction in the court of public opinion, Hardwick sought to pursue his platform of reforms with the help of the state legislature.

Established by virtue of law, the general assembly alone had the power to repeal the law under which the Department of Archives and History had come into existence. Thus, attempts to abolish the department played out in both the senate and the house during July of 1921. Bills were introduced to amalgamate the department with the state library, and, when these efforts failed, legislation was introduced to repeal the act that had established the Department of Archives and History.¹⁰³ When all efforts failed, Governor Hardwick stated his intent to veto the section of the appropriations act affecting the department.¹⁰⁴ Yet, the political tide remained against the governor, and the legislative session of 1921 ended with the defeat of an amendment to cut funding for the state archives in half.¹⁰⁵ Hardwick expressed his anger at the outcome to sometime political ally Senator Tom Watson, declaring that the legislature had “disappointed him woefully” in showing “no disposition to abolish useless boards and offices” and once again singling out Knight's job as a waste of state money. Defiant in defeat, Hardwick noted that friends in both houses were being rallied to continue the fight, and he urged Watson to cover the issue in his newspaper, the Columbia Sentinel. ¹⁰⁶ Watson was a fair-weather friend at best. Not four months into Hardwick's tenure, Watson attacked Hardwick's administration for failing to live up to campaign promises to root out inefficiency and bring economy to state government. However, Watson did single out Knight as an “official deadbeat,” noting that he was costing the state $8,000 per annum as holder of the office of keeper of archives. Echoing Hardwick's sentiments, Watson advised the public that the archives could just as easily be under the administration of Maud Cobb, the state librarian.¹⁰⁷

The Arrival of the Efficiency Experts

So the engineer came to us—came out the West afar,

Aye, and up the stairs he mounted, like a brave young Lochinvar.

Now, the paid-guest of the Governor, he lengthened out his stay

And of all the state-house spaces, he did make a grand survey

Hold, there seems to be an error here! That statement might have fitted.

But the Governor's own department was from Freddy's list omitted.

“Politics!” in rage, the House declared. “Bunkum!” the Senate hinted, And they both ignored the document;—it wasn't even printed.

Oh, it made the little Hamlet mad! But what was he to do?—

He was check-reined by the Solons, who could read him through and through.

—Lucian Lamar Knight, The Ballad of the Broom, 1922

In the fall of 1921 and the early months of 1922, the attacks on the department continued unabated, with rumors reaching Knight that efficiency engineers from the firm of Griffenhagen and Associates were being brought in from Chicago to bolster support for another attempt at merging the department with that of the state library.¹⁰⁸ Once again, Knight attempted to head off trouble by seeking appeasement with his main critics, Governor Hardwick and Senator Tom Watson. In a plea to the senator, Knight declared himself neither a sinecure nor a deadbeat, asking Watson to call off his dogs and to save his ammunition for “the real grafters and real enemies.”¹⁰⁹

With the state legislature failing to embrace his efficiency model, Hardwick moved to import outside experts in an effort to bring legitimacy and traction to his program of reforms. He did not have to look far to find experts with the right national and, indeed, international pedigree. Griffenhagen employee Fred Telford was already plying his trade in Atlanta, having been hired by Mayor James Key to help the city sanitary department create a more efficient and economical system of garbage collection.¹¹⁰ However, the firm's work in the neighboring state of South Carolina likely convinced Hardwick of the efficacy of hiring outside experts to help shape his legislative agenda. In South Carolina, Griffenhagen and Associates had been hired in 1920 as part of a statewide tax reform movement led by State Senator Niels Christensen. Initially working as outside experts for a Joint Special Committee on Revenue and Taxation, the firm surveyed the structure and administration of South Carolina state government and endorsed new sources and forms of tax revenue. When the state's economic downturn turned public opinion against increased taxes and state appropriations, tax reform (and the associated work of Griffenhagen and Associates) was recast in the language of “economy and consolidation.”¹¹¹ The firm (including staff members Fred Telford, Hugh Reber, W. T. Middlebrook, and G. R. Haigh) were rehired as technical experts, this time for the newly formed Joint Legislative Committee on Economy and Consolidation. The committee's charge was to study the organization, operating procedures, personnel, and expenditures of South Carolina state government, with a particular focus on the fifty departments, boards, institutions, and commissions that made up its executive branch. During the summer and fall of 1921, the firm operated as the “investigate staff” for the committee, providing expertise in the area of “accounting and finance, office management, social welfare, institution management, education, engineering, and organization.”¹¹²

On March 30, 1922, Hardwick announced that Griffenhagen and Associates (under the direction of Fred Telford and Hugh J. Reber) had been hired to survey a number of Georgia state agencies to determine if they were functioning properly and to prepare recommendations for improvement if deficiencies were found.¹¹³ According to Hardwick, the survey was to lead to the establishment of a business system for the administration of state affairs that was “as economical and efficient as the business affairs of all successful corporations.”¹¹⁴ The governor tapped the state contingent fund to pay for the firm's services, a cost that would total over $3,500 after all salary, travel, and clerical expenses were paid.¹¹⁵ Although Hardwick had to limit the survey to a small number of state departments, bureaus, and commissions, he declared his intention that funds would subsequently be appropriated to extend the survey to all state departments.¹¹⁶ True to his word, he singled out boards and commissions in the educational, humanitarian, and charitable sectors for review (Department of Archives and History, Department of Public Welfare, Training School for Boys, Confederate Soldiers Home, Confederate Roster Commission, Academy for the Blind, State Library, and State Library Commission), along with certain key state agencies (Department of Agriculture, Department of Public Printing, and Department of Public Health). Reports were also to be made into the auditing and fiscal system of the state and on office space in the state capitol.

Telford's work began on April 10, 1922. By the end of the month, Hardwick was already touting the fact that early reports indicated that “substantial savings could be made in several departments without crippling their efficiency.” While he reported that some departments needed drastic changes, Hardwick was no doubt pleased when Telford named the State Library as one of two state entities singled out for praise.¹¹⁷ Eleven weeks into the process, Telford filed a partial report with the governor, where among his recommendations he called for a state auditing and accounting system to keep a check on public spending on personnel and procurements.¹¹⁸ In seeking sweeping changes to the running of state government, he singled out the administration of the Department of Agriculture for its mismanagement and waste. The report accused the department of doing little in the way of planning and budgeting, with the result that it was spending $100,000 more per annum than necessary to carry out its duties.¹¹⁹

In response to the report, and a subsequent attack on the Department of Agriculture by A. O. Blalock (candidate for commissioner of agriculture and father of the governor's private secretary, Brack Blalock), Commissioner of Agriculture J. J. Brown went on the offensive. Brown declared that Griffenhagen and Associates was hired for “politics, not efficiency,” claiming that its work was “a subterfuge specifically for the purposes of trying to concoct campaign material” to get Blalock elected.¹²⁰ In his defense, Brown made public letters from the state treasurer (S. T. Carter) and comptroller general (Walter E. Duncan) of South Carolina denouncing the work of Griffenhagen and Associates in their state. Carter asserted that the firm's work had gotten little traction with the South Carolina state legislature. He questioned the firm's competency in carrying out the survey, accusing the staff of advocating radical changes despite spending little time getting to know the work of various state agencies or talking to key staff. Carter described some of the suggested changes to South Carolina state departments as “so absurd that the whole thing was looked upon as a huge joke.” Duncan's letter dismissed Telford and Reber as “unworthy of confidence,” claiming that their methods and services resulted in no cost savings to the people of South Carolina.¹²¹ Hardwick fired back, releasing to the public the rebuttals from Telford and from the South Carolina chairman of the Joint Legislative Committee on Consolidation and Efficiency, State Senator Neil Christensen. Telford dismissed his South Carolina critics as showing a “surprising disregard of facts.” While Christensen made the case that the state legislature had adopted the firm's work, achieving a net reduction in appropriations of around $750,000.¹²²

The part of the report made public on the Department of Archives and History made clear that Griffenhagen and Associates had little ammunition with which to recommend specific economies. Instead, the firm focused on the question of whether the work undertaken by the department was worth the time and energy of the state. The report noted that Knight and his staff had already collected, classified, and indexed most of the historical materials in the possession of the state agencies, thus making the case that the department's primary duty had been met. Telford made clear that whether or not such work could continue to scale (to include the publication of these historical records, for example) depended on what value the state placed on the work and operations of the department. The report imagined three scenarios for the future of the Georgia Department of Archives and History. Given the fact that much material had already been assembled, the first option was to maintain the status quo, continuing the work of the department on a small scale, with a staff consisting of a director and an assistant. The second scenario was based on the premise that the state could not afford to support a separate Department of Archives and History. In this case, the report recommended that the records and the work of classifying and indexing the materials be turned over to the State Library (an agency the report declared to be effectively and economically managed), along with a “small outlay of clerical help” to aid in the process. Finally, the report imagined a scenario in which the state wished to build up and exploit its historical collections and thus follow the example of Wisconsin and New England and provide greater financial support for the running of the archives.¹²³

As the Griffenhagen reports continued to generate controversy in the Atlanta press, Hardwick went before the assembly and reminded Georgians of the dire economic condition of the state—“Agriculture is practically prostrate; business languishes; commerce is halted; the people everywhere, in city, in town and in the rural sections, are forced to apply the most rigid economy to their personal affairs.”¹²⁴ With limited success in raising revenues and reducing state appropriations, Hardwick urged the legislature to maintain a “pay as you go” and “live within your means” mentality, and called for the establishment of a Department of State Auditing to hold state agencies accountable for planning and estimating costs and for expending state appropriations. In seeking to improve the state's financial well-being, Hardwick renewed his call for efficiency in state government through the practice of “rigid economy” and “drastic retrenchment” in public expenditure.¹²⁵ Seeking to give credence to the work being undertaken by Griffenhagen and Associates, Hardwick reminded the legislature that the state had hired “the greatest governmental engineering experts” in the country.¹²⁶ Declaring himself fully behind his efficiency surveyors, Hardwick touted the savings that the firm's preliminary reports had already identified.¹²⁷ Contending that the Department of Archives and History performed “no necessary function” for the state, Hardwick once again called for its demise. Opting for Griffenhagen's second scenario, Hardwick suggested that the department's records could be “well kept” in the State Library with any indexing carried out by a clerk at the cost of $1,500 per annum.¹²⁸

Reporting on the governor's speech for the Atlanta Constitution, journalist James Holloman was among those who questioned the governor's motives in bringing the efficiency experts to Georgia. Holloman was especially critical of Hardwick's decision to bring in outside experts without legislative authority. While not against the hiring of experts per se, Holloman made the case that Hardwick would have encountered less resistance if he had authorized a general efficiency survey of all state agencies under the auspices of a joint legislative committee, with the committee empowered to hire outside experts as needed. Holloman also criticized the political undertones of the selection process and the tone of “political propagandering” in parts of the report. In particular, Holloman implied that Hardwick's political sagacity in going after the Department of Agriculture was suspect, given the “heated pre-election campaign” that had taken place for “the control of this powerful political organization.” He also roundly criticized the decision to exempt the governor's office from the survey, given that a former executive secretary of both Governor Dorsey and Governor Hardwick was in jail on charges of embezzlement and larceny.¹²⁹

Despite mixed reaction in the press to the report and its findings, Knight's anxiety about the future of the department compelled him to seek out further help from influential quarters. Former president Woodrow Wilson and former governor Hugh Dorsey were among those who replied with messages of support, although nothing in the way of promised action. Knight also received offers of assistance to help keep the archives open, including one from the president of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, Mrs. Frederick M. Hayes.¹³⁰ Knight's fears materialized on July 27 when Senator Frank C. Manson introduced Senate Bill No. 272 to repeal the act establishing the Georgia Department of Archives and History.¹³¹ With Knight temporarily out of action due to illness, Rosa Knight and Charlie Justice sounded the alarm at the state capitol. With a successful effort to get the word out to supporters, and Knight's subsequent defense of the department before the judiciary committee, the bill failed to make it out of the Committee on Appropriations and Finance.¹³² In an act of catharsis during the election season later that year, Knight published an epic poem about his battle with the governor, titling it The Ballad of the Broom—A Political Satire. In outlining the story of the governor's attempt to dismantle the state archives, Knight sharpened his prose to unmercifully attack both Hardwick's character and his political acumen.

Hardwick left office the following year, having largely failed to achieve his program of state economy and efficiency.¹³³ It was not the failure of this platform however, but his growing opposition to the Ku Klux Klan as a force in Georgia politics that saw him lose to Clifford Walker in the gubernatorial election. In his farewell speech before the general assembly on June 29, 1923, Hardwick persisted in his call for the Department of Archives and History to be abolished, calling it “neither useful nor ornamental.”¹³⁴ Press reports of the governor's address deemed it “vigorous, characteristic, and generally good.” Yet, in describing the attack on Knight, the press remained firmly on Knight's side. The governor's assessment of the department was characterized as “probably inspired by more prejudice than judgement,” especially since the department was largely maintained at Knight's own personal expense.¹³⁵ Knight's personal response to Hardwick was swift and fierce. He issued a statement defending the usefulness of the department and characterizing Hardwick's position as “an outburst of personal venom.” Seeking to discredit Hardwick's political efficacy, Knight claimed that the governor's own efficiency experts had recommended increasing his department's appropriation, a fact that Hardwick had chosen to ignore. Seeking to claim responsibility for any damage to Hardwick's political reputation, Knight declared that the publication of his ballad had made the out-going governor “the laughing stock of all Georgia.”¹³⁶

The Aftermath

But here I pause in silence dumb—this is the time to weep

For that smooth report of Fred'rick's work, lies in the vault asleep.

Lies? Yes, lies. Tread gently then, 'twould be a monstrous blunder,

To wake the dead and start to life the Governor's campaign-thunder.

But—our thoughts now turn to Fred'rick. Where hath the expert flown?

Like the stubborn ghost of Banquo—this one question will not down.

To Chicago hath he sauntered back, his hungry soul well fed,

While, from Georgia's famished firesides, her children cry for bread.

With the Governor's well-earned “Bravo, lad” resounding through his brain

And with Georgia's good tax revenues, to swell his godless gain.

He's back in the grafter's paradise, with golden ducats blest,

Where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

—Lucian Lamar Knight, The Ballad of the Broom, 1922

Lucian Lamar Knight retired from the position of state historian and director of the Department of Archives and History in January 1925. Knight's reputation as a poet, orator, and chronicler of Georgia's history diminished in time as the era of the amateur or gentleman scholar gave way to generations of professional historians. It is his legacy as founder and director of the Georgia State Archives that endures to this day. Thomas W. Hardwick ran unsuccessfully for election to the U.S. Senate in 1922 and 1924, and then left politics to return to a career in the legal profession. Today, he is perhaps best known for appointing Rebecca Latimer Felton as the first woman to the U.S. Senate, following the death of the incumbent, Senator Tom Watson, in 1922.¹³⁷

After leaving the firm of Griffenhagen and Associates in 1922, Fred Telford continued to develop the field of public personnel administration, working with the Bureau of Public Personnel Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the consulting firm of Charles P. Messick and Associates.¹³⁸ While working for the Bureau in Washington, D.C., Telford served as the technical consultant for the American Library Association's Classification of Library Personnel Committee identifying duties and minimum qualifications for over 180 newly formed job classes.¹³⁹ Griffenhagen and Associates continued to ply its trade as consultant in the area of public administration, finance, and education reform. Over the next three decades, the firm's roster of clients highlighted the growing appetite for administrative reform among state, city, and local governments.¹⁴⁰ The firm also exported the American system of administrative reform worldwide, including to the Philippines (1954–1956), Jordan (1956), Venezuela (1959–1960), Nepal (1962), and Indonesia (1963–1964). The firm became a subsidiary of John Diebold and Associates in 1957 and merged with Louis J. Kroeger and Associates to become Griffenhagen-Kroeger in 1960. The Griffenhagen name ceased to be associated with the firm by the late 1970s when then president Edward K. Hamilton (one-time adviser to President Johnson and deputy mayor of New York) founded a new firm of policy, financial, and management consultants, Hamilton, Rabinowitz and Alshule.

The powerful force that brought Knight, Hardwick, and the “Chicago boys” together in the 1920s was administrative reform. At the state level, the long pursuit of administrative reform helped to delineate a proper role for government and to show how administrative machinery needs to be applied in that context. As this article demonstrates, administration has long demanded the values of economy and efficiency. Hardwick brought in outside experts in the belief that they would provide him with a degree of political cover, help bolster public confidence, and provide legitimacy for what he saw as needed change. What Hardwick tried to conceal was the fact that the very nature of reform ensures that the “pure concept of efficiency” is always mitigated “in the light of the value scale of politics and the social order.”¹⁴¹ Thus, others viewed what Hardwick tried to portray as his rational criteria for administrative reform as tainted by politics and by local political rivalries. Accordingly, his reform efforts were seen primarily as a grab for administrative power and control. Knight's great failing was in understanding the reform efforts purely in terms of the local political landscape, rather than as part of larger cyclical political and social forces that call for government to engage in bureaucratic rationalization.¹⁴² Addressing the symptoms and not the cause left the Department of Archives and History vulnerable to further administrative reform efforts, including those attempted during the tenure of Knight's successor, Ruth Blair.¹⁴³

Writing in the 1970s, archivist Samuel S. Silsby asked us to consider why archival programs are “invariably the losers when streamlining or efficiency drives are unleashed in state government.”¹⁴⁴ In seeking to answer his own question, Silsby stated that such a position will prevail if “government archival agencies continue to be seen as solely a cultural resource, administered as marginal luxuries, rather than as inherently fundamental government services.”¹⁴⁵ Silsby thus sought to align the function of archives with that of core government services. This argument is not without precedent, having served as the core of Margaret Cross Norton's vision for the nascent archival profession in the 1920s, a vision in which she aligned the work of the archivist with that of “business efficiency,” calling for the profession to be linked “more closely to centers of political influence and power and less to the scholarly world of the academic historian.”¹⁴⁶ Notwithstanding the need to unpack this argument to examine whether an archives should exist as an administrative, economic, or social good, this historical case study suggests that an even more fundamental understanding is necessary. History shows us that efficiency is the mechanism (the “tool of control”) by which other values are implemented.¹⁴⁷ Thus, this study reiterates that archivists must be deeply engaged in the study of public administration (past and present) and the inherent ideologies that undergird it if we are to have any chance of understanding and meeting the political, social, and economic forces that often seek to undermine the survival of state archival agencies.¹⁴⁸

Of primary concern is understanding how the ordained role that modern government is said to play in the lives of its citizens is constructed, a role that often privileges economic and market-based approaches over notions of accountability, responsiveness, and the social good. It is imperative that archivists understand that efforts at administrative reform are so “deeply embedded” in the “political culture and civic psyche” in the United States that they have been characterized as “natural experiments in governance”;¹⁴⁹ that this process of renewal within the political system has roots in arguments first articulated during the Progressive Era, a time when solutions to government ailments were first linked to management theory and business values; that in the market for reform, the alliance between professional executives and hired experts endures, despite certain fundamental differences in values and goals between the public and the private sectors; that the motives for administrative reform are both political and bureaucratic, and that these competing interests can be uncovered and exploited if close attention is paid to the rhetoric of reform; and, finally, as archivists have long realized, that efforts to achieve such administrative reform will not always succeed, needing, as they do, sufficient political capital and public buy-in to bring them to fruition.¹⁵⁰

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