Municipal Research Bureaus
Despite the consistent muscle and support lent by the chambers to structural reformers, the municipal research bureau personified the post 1900 approach to structural reform. It was the Municipal Research Bureau that formally, and scientifically applied scientific management to Big City policy-making, management and administration. Research Bureaus asserted, as did scientific management, that ”the technical side of running a government could be analyzed and developed on a factual basis in the same way as a business.”.[1] The first municipal research bureau, established in 1906-07 New York City was funded by Carnegie, Rockefeller and Mellon.[2] In Big City after Big City the corporate elite from the very largest of that city’s private sector stepped up to the plate to ensure their jurisdiction’s place in the Big City hierarchy—in this case competing to prove they too could professionalize, modernize and make more efficient and honest their urban governance.
…the organizers of the New York Bureau viewed the corporation as a model for reorganizing municipal administration. They believed … ‘that the technical side of running a government could be analyzed and developed on a factual basis in the same way as a business’. They advocated centralized decision-making along the lines of the corporate pattern and hoped to apply Frederick W. Taylor’s idea of scientific management to city government.[3]
So, Philadelphia, for example, set up a pilot in 1908 and permanently founded, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia in 1912. The Economy League at its formal announcement was described as:
a local agency of a few private citizens who employ experts in what may be called municipal knowledge to examine municipal affairs, with a view to getting rid of antiquated, clumsy, slipshod or extravagant ways of doing things and substituting as far as possible, modern ones — system, precision, competency, and economy — not the economy which merely saves by reducing expenses, but which, rather accomplishes a desired result along the simplest and best lines.[4]
Chicago set up an Efficiency Division within its Civil Service Commission (1910-1916) and its corporate elite founded the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency (1910-1932), the state of Massachusetts established its Commission on Economy and Efficiency in 1912.
The typical municipal research bureau supported more than NML model structural reforms. Bureaus pursued a robust agenda including research/analysis of the region’s resources and challenges “with a goal of promoting sound public policy and increasing the region’s prosperity“. Research bureaus established formal linkages with universities and the larger Policy World. Also, Municipal Research Bureaus applied efficiency and scientific management principles to policy implementation. In 1912, the first director of the New York City Bureau of Municipal Research (Henry Bruere) published a book applying efficiency principles to municipal management. In 1913 after reform mayor John Purroy Mitchell was elected, he appointed Bruere as his “chief of staff” and tasked him with creating a municipal civil service system. Bruere using the Municipal Research Bureau as his staff, assigned the task to a promising young staff member, Robert Moses. Moses thereafter crafted a civil service system for New York City following careful scientific management principles with each position’s elements precisely defined and assigned a mathematical grade.[5]
Another area of municipal research bureau concern was budgetary practices. Again, the New York Bureau of Municipal Research wrote a municipal budgeting handbook and sent it to 300 municipalities. Additional research generated by the bureau’s experts also diffused across the nation. Newly elected President Taft created the first presidential commission on municipal budgets and appointed the President of the New York Municipal Research Bureau as its chair.[6] In short, the New York City Municipal Research Bureau was the cutting edge of Progressive structural reform—so, let’s take a gander at how it played Progressive politics in the Big Apple. After all, if you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere?
[1] Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800-1920 (University of California Press, 1977)
[2] Bruce D. McDonald III, “The Bureau of Municipal Research and the Development of Professional Public Service“, Administration and Society, November 2010; see also, Norman N. Gill, Municipal Research Bureaus (Washington D.C., 1944); Jane Dahlberg, New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Pioneer
[3] Mohl, the New City, op. cit. p. 118.
[4] Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (1912), Philadelphia Economy League (www.economyleague.org)
[5] Dennis R. Judd, The Politics of American Cities (2nd Ed) (Boston, Little, Brown & Co, 1984) , pp. 99-100. Moses, by the way, was a recent graduate of the NYC Municipal Research Bureau’s Training Institute.
[6] Handbooks of Management Accounting Research, Volume 3, Edited by Christopher S. Chapman, Anthony Hopwood, and Michael D. Shields, p. 1079.
Ron W. Coan 