The Great American Bureaucracy

FEBRUARY, 1931

BY LAWRENCE SULLIVAN

I

IN the mad haste to procure war supplies it escaped the Quartermaster Corps that there might be little or no demand for triple-A shoes in the A. E. F. As it turned out there was a great scurrying for enough 10-D’s and 11-F’s to go around, but when the shooting was over there were in stock at the Washington General Supply Depot some 30,000 pairs of triple-A’s, in all sizes. The shoe manufacturers had allocated sizes and lasts to the army according to the accepted trade scale of normal distribution, forgetting for the moment that the United States Army was a highly selective group in which big feet were a pride and joy.

Under a provision of the new Budget law authorizing the transfer of surplus supplies from one branch of the government to another, General Charles G. Dawes, in 1923, assigned 200 pairs of the triple-A’s to the District of Columbia Training School. But it is not the triple-A feet, apparently, which stray from the straight and narrow path into such institutions. The surplus stocks were in lighter demand there than in the Army.

Quite by coincidence a railroad yardman in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard of the midget shoes, wrote that he could wear a triple-A last, and offered to pay cost and express charges on half a dozen pairs. Because the situation was a bit unusual the Chief of the Division of Surplus Supplies, Quartermaster Corps, presented the knotty problem to the office of the Judge-Advocate-General. There was, it transpired at length, no provision in law for the sale of surplus materials save by public competitive bids.

Two months ago George S. Wilson, Director of Public Welfare, who administers all correctional institutions in the District of Columbia, appealed to the Secretary of War to have the shoes formally condemned, so that they might be ripped apart and the leather used in his occupational-therapy shops. The processes of condemnation, however, are unusually complex, requiring reviews, O.K.’s, approvals, and countersigns on every floor of the War Building. The triple-A’s, consequently, still are on hand. Once a year they are dusted, counted for inventory, appraised, recatalogued — against that glorious day when a third of the United States Army shall step up en masse to demand their Cinderella boots. The oldest of the lot have been on hand thirteen years, but the newest only eleven.

Nor is this instance of complete bureaucratic stagnation the exception to the rule. It is, rather, symptomatic of the wasting disease which is upon the entire Federal establishment, particularly virulent in Washington, but dangerous in such far-away places as the Governor-General’s office in Manila, the Assay Office in Nome, the Post Of lice in New Rochelle. Wherever encountered, bureaucracy is always the same — governmental functions administered without human imagination, without flexibility, shamefully deficient in those qualities of ingenuity, accommodation, and energy so necessary to accomplishment of the work of the world. It is, however multit udinous or widely scattered its manifestations, that form of government which moves by the letter of hundreds, even thousands, of laws until administrative functions become ridiculously and inextricably involved — and then collapses. It is a form of institutional creeping paralysis, all the more insidious because it does not strike a staggering blow, like a heart attack, and thus summon the physician; but instead slowly devitalizes the body cells of the administrative organism in myriad Divisions, Bureaus, Sections, and Offices, until there remains only the emaciated hulk of the Civil Service rolls, stimulated to a new lease on life every winter by the activities of the House and Senate committees on appropriations.

Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

II

How the bureaucratic system takes the minds of vigorous, well-educated men and numbs them with regulations, formalities, and disciplinary patterns was strikingly revealed last winter by an incident aboard one of Uncle Sam’s battleships on the high seas. When the parrot-fever epidemic became alarming, the Chief of Naval Operations, at the suggestion of the Surgeon-General, issued a General Order to all ships and shore stations that pet birds — and every ship carries from one to a dozen — should be jettisoned.

It so happened that aboard a certain man-o’-war was a ‘guest parrot,’ a costly bird with a most unusual vocabulary. The property of a well-known Boston society matron, the parrot had been farmed out to a young commander for the cruise, while its owner sojourned in Florida.

The General Order to sink all parrots without trace presented the question whether the Navy should throw overboard the property of a most estimable citizen. Approaching his captain with this nice point of law, the young commander was referred to the Senior Medical Officer, who was persuaded to disinfect and inoculate the bird and isolate it on the ship beyond all possible routine contact with the crew.

As a matter of form, the captain reported this solution to the Bureau of Navigation. Next morning, in faraway Washington, the wireless report was carried promptly to the office of the Surgeon-General. There officers immediately challenged the efficacy of the method. With a long report from the Surgeon-General the case was submitted to the Chief of Operations. Consternation reigned among the admirals. At length the Judge-AdvocateGeneral was asked for a ruling. Whereupon the best legal minds of the Navy hastily concluded that there was no precedent under which the government might be held responsible for damages should the parrot be thrown overboard for the benefit of the service.

A curt, summary order flashed instantly from the great radio station in Arlington (copy to Commander in Chief of the Battle Fleet) directing the insubordinate captain to proceed at once to the execution of the General Order. But before this momentous decision had been reached in Washington the battleship had put in at the Canal Zone for oil. There the custodian of the hapless bird deposited his charge with an Army Sergeant, until he should cable directions for shipment to Boston. When the captain flashed back to Arlington (copy to Commander in Chief of the Battle Fleet) that the parrot had been landed, the admirals curled their moustaches with wonted poise. Once more they breathed easily as they waited, in expectant mood, for the next instance of someone down the line who had been slow, dull, stupid, or inefficient about Orders.

A first-hand account of this incident was contained in a personal letter from one of the battleship’s officers, but subsequent inquiry at the Naval Intelligence Office brought forth the answer that diligent search failed to disclose record of any such communications.

More often than not, the hierarchy of bureaucracy thus is able to conceal from the public gaze the more grotesque postures of its General Orders, but occasionally even the most ridiculous incidents find their way into the record, through the annual House of Representatives’ committee hearings on departmental appropriation bills.

There was, for example, the case of Frank H. Lovette, Assistant Secretary of the Federal Radio Commission, who appeared before the Appropriations Committee last February to ask for additional stenographic help in the Personnel and Supply Section. The official transcript of his testimony on the point reads in part as follows: —

They need stenographers and typists, as they are much behind with their work. I might cite the case of an eleven-cent item that could not be paid because of the Comptroller-General’s decision. In that case at least six or sewn letters were exchanged in reference to the question of what should be done. There was no way around it.

Why, the citizen inquires, did not the Chief of Section, before he wrote the fifth or sixth letter to the General Accounting Office, scrape up eleven cents in postage stamps, pay the bill, and so end the discussion? Ah, yes; but the citizen docs not know the systems of bureaucracy. He overlooks the fact that before the Chief of Personnel and Supplies could get five twos and a one from the Finance Division he would have had to present a voucher, approved by the Chief Clerk and countersigned by the Commissioner charged with direct supervision of the Supply Section. This voucher, in turn, would have been rejected by t he General Accounting Office. There was, as Mr. Lovette so naively put it, ‘ no way around it.’

As the Radio Commission blindly stumbles through with its unauthorized eleven-cent expenditure, so does the gigantic Veterans Bureau, largest single unit in the Federal machine, muddle along with its $500,000 general hospital project at Indianapolis.

President Hoover signed the bill authorizing this hospital on December 19, 1929. The Federal Hospitalization Board thereupon took up the labor of selecting a site. Hearings were held in Washington on February 7, 1930. Ten days later the Hospitalization Board announced it would select a site ‘within fifty miles of the city of Indianapolis.’ On February 27, Colonel J. J. Phelan, engineer for the Board, left for Indiana to inspect all proffered sites. On April 24 a subcommittee of the Board was appointed to view the four best sites inspected by Colonel Phelan. On July 14, a few days short of seven months after the authorization had been signed at the White House, the Board formally announced that Indianapolis had been selected.

The sordid picture of political wirepulling behind this inhuman delay is suggested by the fact, developed in the Hospitalization Board’s hearings in February, that every Republican member of the Indiana Congressional delegation opposed the selection of Indianapolis, which is represented in the House by a Democratic Congressman. Not until Congress had adjourned for the summer, it will be noted, was the award announced. During all those months of political jockeying, the Veterans Bureau had on file hospitalization applications from more than three hundred service men throughout Indiana. When completed, the new hospital will provide a hundred and fifty additional beds.

But six months were yet to pass before ground should be broken for the hospital. After approval of the site, the project was turned over to the Construction Division of the Veterans Bureau. Plans were drawn. They were sent to the Indianapolis Regional Office, back again to Washington. Changes were made at the suggestion of the Hospitalization Board. New sketches were prepared and shipped to Indianapolis. Finally approved, the blueprints went to the Specifications Section. The Construction Division called for bids in December, one year after the Congressional authorization, and ground will be broken in January or February. Because work will be retarded during the winter months, the hospital will not be completed until November or December 1931. Two years thus will have elapsed on a sorely needed hospital, construction of which will require nine months. Written by the dead hand of bureaucracy, the final tally on the project will be, ‘Construction work, nine months; administrative functions, fifteen months.’

III

In October 1800, when the seat of the Federal government was transferred to Washington, a weekly journal in the new Capital chronicled that ‘ the whole force of office clerks, totaling 54 persons, and all of the books and papers of the government, in seven small and five large boxes, were transported from Philadelphia.’

The new Federal venture under the Constitution then was a few months more than eleven years old. The population of the territory under its jurisdiction was approximately 5,300,000. The executive branch of the government consisted of the Departments of State, Treasury, War, Navy, and Justice and the Post Office, only three of which — the War, Navy, and Post Office — maintained establishments outside of the capital city.

To-day, with a population increased twenty-three times, the Federal machine is a maze of 10 Departments, 134 subsidiary Bureaus and Divisions, and 35 independent establishments, employing at home and abroad a few more than 800,000 men and women, not including some 160,000 enlisted men and officers in the Army and 90,000 more in the Navy and Marine Corps.

Including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, there are today well over one million names on Uncle Sam’s monthly pay roll. Counting the families of married men and women in the Federal service, Treasury actuaries estimate that slightly more than 2 per cent of the population live directly off the national government. This, of course, does not include some 300,000 pensioners of all wars who are maintained in part by the Treasury at Washington.

Whereas in 1800 only the Customs Agents of the Treasury were empowered to make arrests, there are to-day more than twenty-five different grades of Federal police officers, scattered through seven departments. Then, the national government touched the people only remotely, through State officers. To-day, the Federal bureaucracy reaches into the basement with a booklet on wood storage, into the nursery with a pamphlet on infant care, into the farmer’s barn with instruction on cleaning the cream separator.

Had the Federal organization expanded since 1800 precisely in step with the increase in population, the Civil Service rolls to-day would carry less than 2000 names, instead of more than half a million. Had the government establishment expanded ten times as fast as the population, the Civil Service list to-day would carry 12,000 names. Had it expanded one hundred times as rapidly, the rolls would carry 120,000 names. It has, in fact, expanded more than four hundred times in relation to the population.

Whereas in 1820 there was one Federal employee for every 1173 inhabitants, the ratio stood at one employee for every 180 inhabitants in 1920. In the decade 1890-1900 population increased 20.7 per cent and the Civil Service rolls by 54 per cent. In the following ten years population increased by 21 per cent and the Civil Service lists by 47 per cent. Between 1910 and 1920 population increased by 14.9 per cent and Civil Service by 58 per cent. Since 1920 the number of Federal employees, classified and non-classified, has grown from 597,000 to 800,000, or at the rate of one added worker for every 85 additional population.

What do these figures mean in money? In 1800, Federal appropriations for all services, including postal operations, were $11,000,000, or about $2.08 per capita. In 1850, expenditures were $44,756,000, or approximately $1.93 per capita. By 1900, expenses had advanced to $621,395,000, about $8.20 per capita. For the fiscal year 1930, which ended last June, expenditures, again including the postal service, wrere $4,710,377,376, which is equal to $38.42 for every man, woman, and child enumerated in the 1930 census.

And the ‘seven small and five large boxes’ which accommodated ‘all of the books and papers of the government’ have expanded until the Department of Commerce alone requires to-day a building which cost $17,500,000, which is approximately $2,500,000 more than Thomas Jefferson paid for the Louisiana Purchase. Three months ago the Bureau of Internal Revenue, one branch of the Treasury Department, moved into a new $10,000,000 edifice just off Pennsylvania Avenue. Ground was broken recently for a new Supreme Court building, on Capitol Plaza, to cost $12,000,000. The General Accounting Office, the only function of which is to audit Federal expenditures, is to be housed in a building to cost $4,500,000. During the current fiscal year bids will be asked for a new home for the Post Office Department, to cost, $10,000,000. A like amount has been authorized for new Washington headquarters for the Department of Justice. Notwithstanding the recent completion of a $6,000,000 Administration Building for the Department of Agriculture, that agency of the government still maintains Bureaus and Divisions in twenty-four separate establishments throughout the District of Columbia and near-by Maryland and Virginia.

The Treasury Department occupies a four-story building a block square. The home of the Interior Department, also a block square, is five stories high. The State, War, and Navy Building spreads over a third city block, and the Navy occupies a second building near by which is a quarter of a mile long, with wings, and three stories high. The Labor Department bulges out over the top of an eight-story office building; the Interstate Commerce Commission fills one ten-story building and five floors of another; the Veterans Bureau Building is a nine-story structure so large that the long facade cannot be encompassed by the human eye from any one vantage point. The Government Printing Office occupies more floor space than any of these departments, save the Navy and Bureau of Internal Revenue. There remain, then, only the Capitol, the Senate and House office buildings, the Library of Congress, the White House, Tariff Commission, Patent Office, Federal Trade Commission, and Naval Observatory.

Yet beneath all of these heaps of stone and mortar up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and by-streets there are housed only about two thirds of all those on the pay rolls of the Federal Government.

A statistical expert in the Bureau of the Budget estimates that the seven small and five large boxes which encompassed all the papers in 1800 would not hold to-day sufficient paper clips to run the Federal establishment in Washington for ten days.

IV

The most conspicuous product of the bewildering multiplicity of bureaus and overlapping of so-called governmental functions in Washington to-day is the neo-lobbyist, or Contact Man. Embodying the capacities of sight-seeing guide, house detective, and automobile salesman, this comparatively recent addition to the Capital’s professional directory lives well by his ability to penetrate quickly the maze of red tape and petty bureaucratic formality surrounding every government official. He has at his finger tips such priceless, and otherwise unobtainable, information as that the Weather Bureau is a function of the Department of Agriculture, instead of the Department of the Interior.

Consider the case of the President of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce, who once ventured to Washington to obtain from the Weather Bureau the average rainfall in the Duluth trading area since 1900. Unacquainted in the city, he looked in the telephone book under ‘W’ for ‘Weather Bureau.’ No listing. Happily he remembered the Bureau was in the Department of Agriculture. He turned to 4 A.’ But it was not there. Perhaps it would be under ‘G’ for ‘Government,’ or ‘B’ for ‘Bureau, Weather.’ Wrong again! By calling a bell boy he found the Weather Bureau listed under ‘U,’ for ‘United States Government,’ subhead ‘A,’ for ‘Agriculture, Department of,’ second subhead, ‘W.’

‘A lobbyist,’ an irate witness snapped across the table during a Senate committee investigation last winter, ‘is a person who can taxi down to the Navy Department and walk straight to the Hydrographic Office. He is paid well because he saves time and money for anyone who has business to transact with the government.’

Theoretically it still is true that an ordinary citizen may pack his bag, hop a train for Washington, and transact his own business with the Departments. As a practical matter, however, the foremost business men of the country seldom attempt to do so. The best minds have learned from bitter experience that it is much cheaper to retain a Contact Man in Washington at, say, $10,000 a year, plus office expenses.

The Washington City Directory lists more than three hundred offices of national trade associations, social movements, economic leagues, labor groups, and financial organizations. Every major industry, even unto moving pictures, baseball, and horse racing, maintains its Washington representative. All of this group, nat urally, centre their attention on Congress when legislalion affecting their respective industries is under consideration; but far from being the sinister monsters depicted in the newspaper cartoons, the lobbying craft is, by and large, an assemblage of astonishingly mediocre men, whose principal stock in trade is an up-to-the-minute knowledge of the physical geography of the capital of their native country. As an influence upon legislation or administrative procedure they are, considering their number and the amount of money they spend, amazingly ineffective. Rather, they serve the Duluth Chamber of Commerce by picking up a telephone, asking for Branch 731 in the Agriculture Department, and pleading: ‘Say, Phil, my boss out in Duluth’s got a big idea. He wants the rainfall statistics in the Duluth industrial area since 1900. Will you have your girl copy ’em off and mail ’em to me to-night? I '11 send ’em out by wire first thing in the morning. . . . Yeh, sure, by months, if you got ’em that way. . . . Sure. Thanks, Phil, old man. ... I’ll be seeing you. . . . S’ long.’

The operation is the same if a washing-machine manufacturer in Mason City, Iowa, wants to know how rapidly public laundry equipment is increasing in relation to domestic machinery. It is the same, again, if the President of the American Association of Short Line Railroads wants to know the status of the project in the Interstate Commerce Commission to consolidate the Jerkwater, Landsend, and Walla Walla Railroad with the Northern Pacific System.

More important even than the saving in time and energy from the standpoint of the lobbyist’s employer, however, is the consideration that under a bureaucracy one man, one section, one division, — but only one, — has, on a given day, immediate authoritative knowledge of the precise status of a given project. Unless the inquirer has the intuitive faculty for finding the one door among all the doors in Washington which shelters the particular information he seeks at the instant, the knowledge is forever lost. Even Senators many times have tried in vain to trace the whereabouts of specifications for river-dredging projects between the time they left the House Committee on Rivers and Harbors and the time they were returned by the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, approved or rejected. Only a Contact Man who knows the special mechanics of the War Department bureaucracy backward and forward ever could hope to catch a blueprint at any given phase of this brain-splitting process.

On one occasion, some two years ago, it took the Secretary of the Navy four days to find out from his Rear Admiral in charge of the Bureau of Construction and Repair the precise type of engines installed on a certain war craft. When the Secretary’s simple request came back to him it was a packet of papers almost half an inch thick, endorsed, transmitted, noted, and O.K.’d from bureau to section to division and back again. The Admiral’s confidential answer which summarized all this tremendous activity was three lines to the effect that ‘the aircraft carrier . . . is powered by . . . engines of . . . horse-power capacity, manufactured by . . . and installed under Contract No .... by ... & Co.’

Anyone who is personally acquainted with the foremost Navy Contact Man in Washington will testify that he could have got this information over the telephone within ten minutes.

If you ever have occasion to call on the Secretary of the Navy you will be greeted at the top of the central stairway on the second floor of the Navy Building by an armed Marine guard with fixed bayonet. As you approach he will bring his rifle to parade rest, stiffly and with great ceremony, and direct you to Room No. 2054. Here you will be greeted pleasantly by an elderly Sergeant of Marines, in parade dress, who will take your card, inquire your business, ask if you have an appointment, and instantly rate you as important, fuss-budget, chronic complainant, or mere vagrant.

Moving mysteriously across the spacious room, the sergeant will disappear through a doorway, transmit his conclusions to a clerk, who will take the message to the Secretary’s private secretary. If the Secretary is not in a Cabinet Meeting, a Congressional hearing, in conference with the Secretary of State, or reviewing the situation in Haiti with the Commandant of the Marine Corps, he may see you. The chances are ten to one against you, however. More likely the Secretary of the Navy is not the man who has your interest in charge; you want to see the Commissioner of Customs. Or else the Secretary of the Navy is engaged and will see you day after to-morrow at four. Thus, if you happen to be, say, president of a Philadelphia shipbuilding company, you have your choice of sitting in your hotel for two and a half days, or going back to work for a day and returning for the appointment. If you are accustomed to finding an armed guard pacing up and down in front of the offices at which you call you may return day after to-morrow. But if you have not seen a fixed bayonet since training-camp days you will hire a Contact Man, at any cost.

When the garrulous, true-story Contact Man enters the Navy Building, he greets the armed guard with a halfsalute and a smile, walks past the white-haired sergeant, and demands bluntly of the Secretary’s secretary; Ts the boss in, Jim? Could I get in there for just a second? I got a question here about . . .’

‘Yes, he’s in; but don’t take long, will you? He’s working on the budget and wants to send it to the Finance Office before three o’clock.’

The caller uninitiated in the ways of bureaucracy is stymied before he enters the doorway of any government department, for he must explain precisely what he wants before he may pass the information desk or the special departmental police. If he happens to be in search of information or public record which the department or bureau is not anxious to release at the moment, he is dished from section to section by guards, stenographers, switchboard operators, information clerks. He lands in the office of a gentleman who is ‘gone on an inspection trip to the Coast.’

If, upon returning to Philadelphia, the ineffective caller writes indignantly to the Secretary of the Navy to complain that he found it impossible to transact his business with the Government during his recent visit to Washington, he will be honored with a prompt and courteous reply asking why he did not come directly to the Office of the Secretary.

The average citizen drops the correspondence at this point rather than admit the shameful truth — namely, that he found the official corridors of Washington, with their trimmings and adornments of swords, bayonets, rifles, model battleships, and air bombers, slightly more frigid, mysterious, and terrifying than the Grand Caverns of Luray or the Moorish side streets of Andalusia. His reluctance to communicate this truth to the Secretary of the Navy does not alter the citizen’s conviction, however, that the machinery of government to-day, in the terms of normal business intercourse, is beyond the reach of the people of the land.

(Mr. Sullivan will continue his discussion in March)