Leonard White

Background

Leonard Dupee White was born in Acton, Massachussets, the son of John Sidney White and Bertha Dupee.

Education

White attended Dartmouth College, receiving the B. S. in 1914 and the M. A. in 1915. He received his Ph. D. from Chicago in 1921.

Career

He began doctoral work at the University of Chicago, and in the fall he embarked upon his teaching career as an instructor in government at Clark University. From 1918 to 1920 White taught political science at Dartmouth and then moved to the University of Chicago as an associate professor of political science. He became a full professor in 1925. When he retired in 1956 he was Ernest De Witt Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Public Administration. Within the field of government, White was primarily interested in public administration. He was one of the first to teach this subject in a university classroom, and even in the early 1920's was becoming a leader among the political scientists who shared this interest. His Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, first published in 1926 and revised in 1939, 1948, and 1955, was the first, and for many years the preeminent, textbook in this field. During his early years at Chicago, White's progress was influenced and aided by the work of his chairman, Charles E. Merriam, who was building up one of the outstanding political science departments in the United States. Merriam was active in Chicago politics, a leader of the American Political Science Association, and a founder of the Social Science Research Council (1923). In some measure all of these activities influenced White's career. In 1929 President Hoover, drawing on the resources of the SSRC, created the Committee on Social Trends. Merriam was the vice-chairman. White, as a member of the committee, reported on the expansion of American government in a chapter on "Public Administration" in the committee's report. Recent Social Trends in the United States (1933). It was also published the same year in a longer form as Trends in Public Administration, one of a series of monographs that resulted from the work of the committee. Meanwhile, White was also involved in Chicago civic affairs. He served on the Chicago Citizens' Police Committee (1929 - 1931) and on the Chicago Civil Service Commission (1931 - 1933). In this work he became a friend of Harold L. Ickes. In 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt needed to appoint a Republican to the United States Civil Service Commission, Ickes, then secretary of the interior, recommended White, and the president concurred. As a commissioner, White was primarily responsible for developing a system of junior civil service examinations, for college graduates only, intended to draw better-educated persons into governmental careers. To help government employees provide better service and advance professionally, he worked with American University to develop a program of in-service training for them. He resigned from the commission in 1937 to return to teaching. Two years later, however, Roosevelt appointed him to the President's Committee on Civil Service Improvement, on which he served until 1941. A few years after that, when the problem of investigating the loyalty of government employees had become acute, White was a member of the Civil Service Commission's Seventh Regional Loyalty Board (1948 - 1950) and of the Commission's Loyalty Review Board (1950 - 1952). White worked with both of the Hoover Commissions on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, the first in 1948-1949 and the second in 1953-1955. In both cases he helped to prepare the report on personnel management, which advocated the creation of a career executive program. It was initiated by executive order in 1957 to help identify, retain, and advance government employees who should be moved into positions of greater responsibility. In all this work, White was expressing a concern for the quality of governmental service, chiefly with reference to personnel problems. The conditions of the times had tended, in the 1920's, to depreciate public service, and thereafter to place more demands and greater responsibility on government. White grappled with the problems inherent in this situation, both as a public official and as a researcher and writer. Two early studies examined The Prestige Value of Public Employment in Chicago (1929) and Further Contributions to the Prestige Value of Public Employment (1932). In numerous articles he discussed practical problems of administration, such as ways of encouraging better-qualified people to go into government service, keeping them in the service, and developing and utilizing their talents most effectively. Although a lifelong Republican, White considered the Taft-Hartley Act's prohibition on all strikes in government service too extreme, and he regarded the loyalty tests of the Truman administration as more reasonable than those of the Eisenhower era. Besides writing many articles, he helped establish the Public Administration Review and served as its first editor (1940 - 1941). White's conviction that the United States could benefit from the experience of other nations led him to write The Civil Service in the Modern State (1930), Whitley Councils in the British Civil Service (1933), and a portion of Civil Service Abroad (1935). Above all, he came to conclude that Americans should understand their own national experience in this field. As he had been a leader in developing the contemporary study of public administration, White became a pioneer in the historical study of American public administration. His four volumes in this field--The Federalists (1948), The Jeffersonians (1951), The Jacksonians (1954), and The Republican Era, 1869-1901 (1958) - were widely acclaimed; the first volume won the Woodrow Wilson Prize of the American Political Science Association; the third, the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history; and The Republican Era received the 1959 Pulitzer Prize in history. White's final scholarly undertaking was to serve as editor of the widely scattered papers of James Madison. His death prevented his completing this project, but his guidelines and procedures set the pattern for the series. White was a member of the University of Chicago faculty for thirty-six years. Although his influence in the university was somewhat restricted by his philosophical disagreements with President Robert Maynard Hutchins, he was the chairman of the Political Science Department from 1940 to 1948 and was the chief architect of the university's faculty senate. He was president of the American Political Science Association in 1944 and of the American Society for Public Administration in 1947. Colleagues remembered him as a man of reserve, but of great goodwill, warmth, and complete integrity. He died in Chicago, Ill.

Achievements

His technique was to study administration in the context of grouped U. S. presidential terms. A founder of the field, White worked at the University of Chicago after service in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt.