Continuing an Alternative View of Public Administration

• Author: John Thomas McGuire
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Date: 01 January 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095399710386304

Administration & Society

43(1) 66 –86

© 2011 SAGE Publications

DOI: 10.1177/0095399710386304

http://aas.sagepub.com

386304AAS43110.1177/00953997103

86304McGuireAdministration & Society

© 2011 SAGE Publications

1State University of New York

Corresponding Author:

John Thomas McGuire, P.O. Box 139, 170 North Street, Dryden, NY 13053

Email: mcguirj@tc3.edu

Continuing an

Alternative View of

Public Administration:

Mary van Kleeck and

Industrial Citizenship,

1918-1927

John Thomas McGuire1

Abstract

This article argues that from 1918 through 1927 prominent social scientist

and reformer Mary van Kleeck (1883-1972) pursued an alternative theory of

public administration enunciated by women reformers in the early 1900s. van

Kleeck continued to support the theory through her idea of industrial citizen-

ship, through which labor and capital would work as equals. Two new forums

for her idea—the International Taylor Society and Herbert Hoover’s Special

Committee on Business Cycles—did not prove satisfactory, so van Kleeck

helped promote the successful passage of a 48-hr bill for working women in

New York by 1927 through social justice feminism.

Keywords

Mary van Kleeck, alternative theory of public administration, industrial

citizenship, 1920s, social justice feminism

When one considers prominent women involved in public reform in the United

States during the early 20th century, the names of such individuals as Frances

Perkins and Florence Kelley immediately come to mind (but see Burnier,

McGuire 67

2008). Yet Mary van Kleeck (1883-1972) also occupies an important niche.

Two different decades attest to her continuing, widespread influence. In the

1910s, as director of the new Industrial Studies department of the R ussell

Sage Foundation (RSF), van Kleeck not only helped pioneer industrial studies

through her groundbreaking investigations but also assisted in promoting

major labor legisl ation passed in New York, part of an agenda the largest of

its kind before the advent of the New Deal (Buenker & Kantowicz, 1988). In

the 1930s, van Kleeck oversaw numerous studies at the RSF that sparked

considerable debate in the areas of unemployment and crime, worked to radi-

calize the field of social work, and helped draft the Frazier-Lundeen bill, a

countermeasure to the Social Security Act. Not surprisingly, most aspects of

van Kleeck’s long and influential career have been extensively examined (e.g.,

Hendrickson, 2008; McGuire, 2006; Selmi & Hunter, 2001). But one period

remains relatively unanalyzed: her reform activities from 1918 through 1927.

This article argues that during the years examined, van Kleeck pursued an

alternative view of public administration, one enunciated by the women’s

reform community.

As Stivers (2000, 2002) has argued, the usual interpretation of public admin-

istration in the early 20th-century United States as a process centered on the

scientific pursuit of knowledge presents too narrow a focus. Scholars, she

persuasively contends, must also consider the substantial contributions of

women reformers to the growth of the administrative state. This argument

builds on the previous work of such scholars as Sklar (1993) and Skocp ol

(1992) who have demonstrated how in the late 19th-century women reformers

became concerned about industrial labor conditions and urban health and

safety, adopted the maternalist rubric of “municipal housekeeping,” and formed

cross-class coalitions. By 1910, the ideas of social justice and the improvement

of lives promoted by women reformers became an important part of the evolv-

ing administrative state through such precedents as model playgrounds and

special education classes (Stivers, 2000, 2002). College professor and social

work pioneer Sophonsiba Breckinridge aptly expressed this alternative view

of public administration in 1927 when she stated that “in political and domestic

organization, human well-being under conditions of justice, freedom, and

equality, are the objects sought, and business organization can never be the

guide to truly successful organization” (Stivers, 2002, p. 121). But although

Julia Lathrop successfully adopted this alternative view as the first director of

the Children’s Bureau, the increasing rhetorical emphasis of male reformers

on scientific objectivity to deflect criticisms of adopting “feminine” policies,

and the 1919 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, whose apparent legal

guarantee of equality deprived women of their right to claim distinctive views

on public policy, led to the decline of the social justice–oriented view of public