The Amazing Miss Burchfield

• Published date: 01 January 2000
• Date: 01 January 2000
• Author: Mary E. Guy
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00058

6 Public Administration Review • January/February 2000, Vol. 60, No. 1

Mary E. Guy is a past president of the American Society for Public Adminis-

tration and a past chair of ASPA’s Section for Women in Public Administra-

tion. She writes extensively about women in the workplace and the differ-

ence that gender makes. She holds the Jerry Collins Eminent Scholar Chair

in Public Administration at the Askew School of Public Administration and

Policy, Florida State University.

Mary E. Guy

Florida State University

The Amazing Miss Burchfield

What goes around, comes around: the woman who once solicited others to produce manuscripts

for

PAR

is now the subject of a manuscript. Laverne Burchfield was managing editor of this journal

for 15 volumes, from 1943 to 1958, and in ASPA’s early days before it had an executive director,

she served as secretary/treasurer for the association and she wrote the proposal that funded the

first executive director. This is her biography—a woman passionately committed to the world of

public service, the world of ideas, and, simply, the world in its natural splendor.

Even in those last days, after the stroke had left her too

frail to live the independent life she loved, she could be

found at the convalescent center surrounded by stacks of

newspapers. A voracious reader who reveled in the world

of ideas, she was in her element during the years she ed-

ited Public Administration Review. Long after she had left

PAR, she looked back at her work and explained that her

position had put her in a dialogue with the best thinkers of

Laverne Burchfield on the steps of 1313 East 60

th

Street, Chicago, 1949

the age as their ideas came fresh off the typewriter (D.

Webster 1999). She was a synthesis person who found

connections among diverse ideas and places. But I am get-

ting ahead of myself. First, who was she?

Who was this person that most of us know of, but few

know well? Through library archives, Internet searches, e-

mails, letters, and interviews with former colleagues and

family, I have uncovered facts about her work that I wish I

had known long ago. If the professionalization of public

administration could be equated with a hurricane, she was

at the eye.

I have read about Lewis Meriam, Leonard D. White,

Louis Brownlow, Charles Merriam, Luther Gulick, David

Lilienthal, Herbert Emmerich, Marshall E. Dimock, John

M. Gaus, Donald C. Stone, William E. Mosher, and the

other luminaries who carved the path that we follow. These

figures worked at the Public Administration Service; cre-

ated the Public Administration Clearing House; crafted the

Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative

Management; breathed life into the Tennessee Valley Au-

thority; created the American Society for Public Adminis-

tration; and generally created the professional infrastruc-

ture that we enjoy today. These names I see in textbooks

on the intellectual history of the field. The name that is

missing is Laverne Burchfield.

She is the person who edited the Tennessee Valley

Authority’s earliest reports; she is the person who edited

the Brownlow Committee report; she is the person who