Administrative History of the United States

• Date: 01 November 2000
• Published date: 01 November 2000
• DOI: 10.1177/00953990022019560
• Author: Jos C. N. Raadschelders
• Subject Matter: Articles

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / November 2000Raadschelders / ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY OF THE U.S.

Although certainly not mainstreamto the study of public administration, administrative his-

tory in the United States has quite a tradition. In this article, the development of the study of

the history of American government is traced in fivephases and discussed against the back-

groundof political and social change in society. The various studies areevaluated in terms of

the themes, the nature, and the approach.Combining the “history as history” and the “his-

tory as advocacy” approaches would clarify why administrativehistory ought to be a stan-

dard element in our research and teaching.

ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY

OF THE UNITED STATES

Development and State of the Art

JOS C. N. RAADSCHELDERS

University of Oklahoma

What we have inherited is what we have selected, which means what we

have not chose to disregard.

—S. E. Finer (1997, p. 385)

The first, and great desideratum of history,is truth; the second, just reflec-

tions on it.

—James Fennimore Cooper (1839; as quoted in White, 1954, p. ix)

1. INTRODUCTION: DOMINANT

AND DORMANT FOUNDATIONS

For a country in which people at large are believed to be so much ori-

ented on the present, and even more, on progress and the future, it is

remarkable to see how much interest there is in the United States for gen-

eral history (the highlights as presented by the History Channel) and for

personal history (e.g., the growth of genealogy). More specifically,among

social scientists the interest in history is slowly (and surely?) increasing,

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ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY, Vol. 32 No. 5, November 2000 499-528

© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

and administrative history or the history of government is one of the

growth areas. With respect to administrativehistory, stereotype has it that

the study of public administration is and ought to be concerned with devel-

oping usable knowledge surfacing in a problem-solving mind-set.

Research in the past 10 to 15 years refutes that stereotype, for judging by

the growing number of monographs and articles, administrative history

appears to draw more attention (for some figures on the development of

articles on administrative history in the 1973 to 1992 period, see

Raadschelders, 1998b, p. 28). Whether this observation tells more about

my hopes for the future place of administrativehistory in mainstream pub-

lic administration (after all, few textbooks to date provide little historical

context) or whether it is actually true cannot really be appreciated until a

few decades from now.In this article, I will make the case that the admin-

istrative history of the United States has quite a tradition, one of at least a

century, which is about as early as when this avenueof research emerged

in Europe. In fact, Americans were among the first to recognize the impor-

tance of a systematic study of administrative history.The two main ques-

tions addressed in this article are the following:

1. What body of knowledge is available from which we can draw and

expand? and

2. Howhas the political and social environment (the Zeitgeist) influenced the

study of administrative history of the United States?

Combining the first and second questions, we will not only recognize

the gaps in our knowledge, but—just as important—we will also see how

the development of particular themes within this field of research was

highly related to specific time contexts. The historiography of administra-

tive history of the United States could not be understood if not explicitly

linked to the dominating political and social environment of the various

periods. The same is true, of course, for any other country, but state-of-

the-art articles on the administrative history of specific countries usually

do not pay much, if any, attention to the second question (Raadschelders,

1998b, p. 4). With respect to this second question, Finer’s recent remark,

quoted at the opening of this article, is very pertinent in general and

500 ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / November 2000

AUTHOR’S NOTE:The author wishes to express his gratitude to Aimee Franklin (Univer-

sity of Oklahoma), Charles T.Goodsell (VirginiaPolytechnic Institute and State University),

Richard J. Stillman II (University of Colorado), and anonymous reviewers for their com-

mentson an earlier version of this article that was presented in a senior scholar session at the

60th annual conferenceof the American Society for Public Administration in Orlando, April

10-14, 1999.