Creating Control Systems: Edwin F. Gay and the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, 1917–1919

Business History Review

Volumn 63, Issue 3, 1989, Pages 588-613

  Cuff, Robert D ^a  

^a HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040652350     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: 2044768X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3116041     Document Type: Article

References (109)

1. Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York, 1953) is indicative of a post-Second World War interest among political scientists and economists in the organizational and analytical techniques of planning and control.
2. Emmett S. Bedford, Administration of National Economic Control (New York, 1952).
3. Frederick C. Mosher, Program Budgeting: Theory and Practice, with Particular Reference to the U.S. Department of the Army (Chicago, 1954).
4. Richard A. Musgrave, “Fiscal and Monetary Problems in a High-Level Defense Economy: A Study in Taxable Capacity,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings … 40 (May 1950): 209–22.
5. David Novick, ed., Program Budgeting, Program Analysis and the Federal Budget (Cambridge Mass., 1965).
6. Arthur Smithies, The Budgetary Process in the United States (New York, 1955).
7. Smithies, “Federal Budgeting and Fiscal Policy,” in A Survey of Contemporary Economics, ed. Howard S. Ellis (Homewood, 111., 1948), 1: 174–209.
8. Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York, 1985), 76–79.
9. Charles Hitch, et al., The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
10. Decision-Making for Defense (Berkeley, Calif., 1965.
11. John J. Clark, The New Economics of National Defense (New York, 1966).
12. Gavin Kennedy, Defense Economics (London, 1983).
13. Roland N. McKean, ed., Issues in Defense Economics (New York, 1967).
14. Gregory Palmer, The McNamam Strategy and the Vietnam War: Program Budgeting in the Pentagon, 1960–1968 (Westport, Conn., 1978).
15. Stephen Rosen, “Systems Analysis and the Quest for Rational Defense,” Public Interest 76 (Summer 1984): 3–17.
16. Henry Trewhitt, McNamam: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (New York, 1971).
17. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
18. Oliver Williamson, “Emergence of the Visible Hand,” in Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise, ed. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Herman Daems (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 182–202.
19. Thomas K. McCraw, “The Challenge of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.: Retrospect and Prospect,” Reviews in American History 15 (March 1987): 160–78.
20. Peter B. Evans, et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985).
21. Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1934–1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 1979), 20–21.
22. W. F. Willoughby, Government Organization in Wartime (New York, 1919).
23. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
24. Herbert Heaton, A Scholar in Action: Edwin F. Gay (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 98–99.
25. Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908–1945 (Boston, 1987), 39ff.
26. Steven A. Sass, Entrepreneurial Historians and History: Leadership and Rationality in American Economic Historiography, 1940–1960 (New York, 1986), 29–52.
27. Jameson W. Doig and Edwin C. Hargrove, eds., Leadership and Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government (Baltimore, Md., 1987).
28. Federal Trade Commission, Fundamentals of a Cost System For Manufacturers [1 July 1916] (Washington, D.C., 1916), 6.
29. Hurley's Awakening of Business (New York, 1917).
30. Hurley, “lies at the basis of efficient management” (p. 3).
31. H. L. Gantt, “The Relation Between Production and Costs,” reprinted in Business Statistics, ed. Melvin T. Copeland (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), 543–50.
32. William A. Hathaway, “Internal and External Statistical Needs of American Business,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 16 (June 1918): 1–15.
33. JoAnne Yates describes the evolution of information systems in industrial enterprise in Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, Md., 1989).
34. Cruikshank, Delicate Experiment, 57ff. In 1916.
35. Arch Wilkinson Shaw, An Approach To Business Problems (1914; Cambridge, Mass., 1916), 297.
36. Shaw, Some Problems in Market Distribution, Illustrating the Application of a Basic Philosophy of Business (1915; Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 16–17.
37. Melvin T. Copeland, And Mark an Era: The Story of the Harvard Business School (Boston, 1958), 43–44.
38. Steven A. Sass, The Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Whartm School, 1881–1981 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1982), chap. 5.
39. J. Franklin Crowell, Government War Contracts (New York, 1921), esp. chap. 8.
40. “Government Contracts and Cost Accounting Methods,” American Industries 18 (Sept. 1917): 19–22.
41. Clinton H. Scovell, “Eliminating Interest as a Factor in Costs,” (Nov. 1917): 13–14.
42. Melvin T. Copeland, “Standardization of Products,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society 6 (April 1921): 55–59.
43. A. W. Shaw, “In the Day of Prosperity,” System 31 (Feb. 1917): 123–32.
44. Shaw, “To Checkmate Europe's War-Begotten Efficiency,” The Nation's Business 5 (Feb. 1917): 9–12, 63.
45. Jeffrey J. Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1978).
46. Paul Maxwell Zeis, American Shipping Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1938).
47. James A. Huston, The Sinews of War: Army Logistics, 1775–1953 (Washington, D.C., 1966), 348–54.
48. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921, ed. E. David Cronon (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), 261.
49. Edwin F. Gay, Charles Day, and Lewis B. McBride to Chairman, U.S. Shipping Board, 2 Jan. 1918.
50. Heaton, Scholar in Action, 107.
51. Edward N. Hurley, The Bridge To Fmnce (Philadelphia, Pa., 1927), 101.
52. Raymond Stevens to Wilson, 31 Jan. 1918, Papers of E. M. House, Vance McCormick file, drawer 39, f. 48, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as McCormick Papers).
53. Arthur Salter, Slave of the Lamp: A Public Servant's Notebook (London, 1967), 78–82.
54. J. A. Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administmtion (Oxford, England, 1921).
55. Report of the War Trade Board (Washington, D.C., 1920), 421–23.
56. William H. Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago, 1982), 152–56.
57. Hurley “named the Committee and made the announcement in the press, without consulting the President. He made no comment upon it at the time.”.
58. Hurley, Bridge, 103.
59. Chandler, The Visible Hand, 191–92. Franklin had earlier fought against Wilson's plans for a government-controlled merchant marine.
60. Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 47–50.
61. Hurley, Bridge, 104.
62. U.S. Shipping Board, Second Annual Report [1 Dec. 1918] (Washington, D.C., 1918), 65.
63. Salter, Slave of the Lamp, 68ff. for a British perspective on the evolution of inter-Allied administrative control.
64. Hurley, Bridge, 104–5.
65. Benedict Crowell and Robert Forrest Wilson, The Road To France (New Haven, Conn., 1921), 2: chap. 26.
66. H. L. Gantt. Gantt's wartime work for the Ordnance Department, navy, and Shipping Board earned him a Distinguished Service Medal.
67. L. P. Alford, Henry Laurence Gantt: Leader in Industry (New York, 1934), chaps. 14–15.
68. Wallace Clark, The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management (New York, 1922).
69. Daniel A. Wren, The Evolution of Management Thought (New York, 1987), 137.
70. Report of the U.S. War Trade Board (Washington, D.C., 1920), 232–33.
71. Heaton, Scholar in Action, 110–13.
72. Horace Secrist, “Statistics of the United States Shipping Board,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 16 (1918–19): 236–47.
73. Hurley, Bridge, 108, 109.
74. Secrist, “Statistics of the United States Shipping Board,” 238.
75. U.S. Shipping Board, Division of Planning and Statistics, Stowage Factors for Ship Cargoes: Space Requirements of Commodities Packed for Overseas Shipment (Washington, D.C., 1919).
76. Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), 67–68.
77. Leo Wolman surveys, “The Statistical Work of the War Industries Board,” in the Journal of the American Statistical Association 16 (1918–19): 248–60.
78. Paul Willard Garrett, et al., Government Control over Prices (Washington, D.C., 1920).
79. Paul W. Garrett, “Money, Prices, Credit, and Banking,” American Economic Review 9 (March 1919): 167–75 for an introduction to the series.
80. Hugh Rockoff, Drastic Measures: A History of Wage & Price Controls in the United States (New York, 1984), chap. 3.
81. Report of the War Trade Board (1920), 246.
82. Robert Cuff, “We Band of Brothers: Woodrow Wilson's War Managers,” Canadian Review of American Studies 5 (Fall 1974): 135–48.
83. Wilson to W. B. Wilson, 1 June 1918, cited in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link, et al., vol. 48 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 139.
84. Z. L. Potter, “The Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 16 (March 1919): 285.
85. Lloyd M. Short, The Development of National Administrative Organization in the United States (Baltimore, Md., 1923).
86. Peri Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1980 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 35.
87. James A. Campbell, “Report on the Shipping Board Contact,” n.d., Records of the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, box 34, in the Records of the Bureau of the Budget, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
88. C. E. Griffin, “Contact with the U.S. Railroad Administration and the Interstate Commerce Commission,” n.d., For an interesting description of the activities of the statistician in private enterprise.
89. Walter S. Gifford [of AT&T], “The Function of Statistics in the Telephone Business,” reprinted in Copeland, Business Statistics, 684–96.
90. Henry S. Dennison refers to the “less sharply defined advisory positions like ‘Economist’ and ‘Statisti-cian,’ in modern firms,” in “Management,” chap. 7 of Becent Economic Changes in the United States (New York, 1929), 2: 495–546.
91. Potter, “Central Bureau,” 279–82.
92. Heaton, Scholar in Action, 132–36.
93. Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning; Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 35–37.
94. Wesley C. Mitchell, “Statistics and Government”, Journal of the American Statistical Association 17 (March 1919): 223–35.
95. Potter, “Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics’.
96. Chauncey D. Snow [Assistant Chief of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce], “Our Statistics of Foreign Commerce and the War”Journal of the American Statistical Association 16 (Dec. 1918): 175–89.
97. Allyn A. Young, “National Statistics in War and Peace,” (March 1918): 873–85.
98. Robert L. Church, “Economists as Experts: The Rise of an Academic Profession in the United States, 1870–1920,” in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, N.J., 1974), 2: 604–6.
99. Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The Statistical Work of the National Government (Baltimore, Md., 1925), 5–6.
100. Paul H. Appleby, Policy and Administration (Birmingham, Ala., 1949), 67.
101. Big Democracy (New York, 1945), 6.
102. Herbert Emmerich, Federal Organization and Administrative Management (Huntsville, Ala., 1971), 8.
103. Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning; Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, chaps. 3 and 4.
104. Larry Berman, The Office of Management and Budget and the Presidency (Princeton, N.J., 1979), chaps. 1 and 2.
105. Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning (Baltimore, Md., 1980).
106. Charles G. Dawes, The First Year of the Budget of the United States (New York, 1923), ix–x.
107. A. Ross Eckler, The Bureau of the Census (New York, 1972), 15–21.
108. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, June 1925 and June 1926, 82–83 and 40–49, respectively.
109. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Louis Galambos, “The Development of Large-Scale Economic Organizations in Modern America” Journal of Economic History 30 (March 1970): 215.