for Governor Coolidge, and in New York for Governor Smith, and in Virginia for Governor Byrd, and so on, through a long list of other States, counties, and cities.

Now, my own experience: I have been in the University of Chicago, professor of political science, for years. I was in the city council for some 6 years. The Congressman here will probably remember it. I took part in a good many investigations, inquiries, such as commissions on expenditures and State tax commission.

I was for a good many years on the executive committee of Dr. Gulick's organization, the National Institute of Public Administration. I was asked by President Taft to serve on the 1911 Efficiency Commission, but I did not go on that, nor did I accept some positions offered to me later by President Wilson in Washington, but I kept in touch from the beginning with the organization of the Budget bill which finally went into effect in 1921.

I was a member of President Hoover's Committee on Recent Social Trends. I was with Mr. Gulick and Mr. Brownlow on the Better Government Personnel Commission, which was set up with the blessing of President Roosevelt about 3 years ago, and reported about 2 years ago on the merit system or career service, not in the Federal Government primarily but in Federal, State, and local governments. But my own particular specialty has been politics and political theory. For that reason, if it is agreeable, Mr. Chairman, I would like to speak a little more about the background of this report of ours. The CHAIRMAN. Very well.

Mr. MERRIAM. The report is not merely a set of facts and data. We tried to work it out on philosophy, general principle of action. We went on the assumption that in the United States we have to deal with the fact that democratic government is under fire all over the world, and every effort should be made to improve and tighten up the efficiency of democratic institutions wherever that is reasonably possible.

We find a good many democracies going down. I myself saw the collapse of the German Republic in 1932. I did not see the Italian Republic go down, although I had a good deal of background on that, since I was there nearly a year during the war and was able to forecast some of the troubles that were going to arise.

The Austrian Republic went down. They certainly are hammering hard at France, they are hammering hard at Belgium, they are hammering hard at Switzerland. All over the western part of the European world they are pounding at the democratic governments. The charges are that a democratic government can neither decide anything quickly nor carry out any policy that is agreed upon vigorously and promptly.

Now, it has been my business for quite a number of years to combat these ideas, both here and abroad. We are not unmindful of the situation that as time drifts along and changes occur we will have to adjust our machinery to bring it down to date.

So it was with this in mind, after our preliminary conversations with the President, that the committee started out with the idea of seeing if there were ways and means by which the job of administrative management in the United States Government could be tightened up. We were not charged with the duty of considering how anything might be set up for Congress. That is outside of the refer

ence that we had. Obviously the President would not wish to set up a committee on Congress. That is a matter for Congress to do if they want to make any move.

When we look back over the history of our country-and that has been my job for quite a long while we start with the conclusion which the founding fathers had, that it was their idea to set up a strong Executive. They minced no words in their attempt to establish a powerful executive branch of the Government. They had the experience, everybody knows, in the Articles of Confederation, that the practical head of this Government was a sort of a committee of Congress, and we know that that very nearly went on the rocks.

We know that there was opposition set up against a powerful Executive, more powerful than existed in most of the States at that time. We know that there were sincere people who maintained that the liberties of the people of the United States would be utterly destroyed by the kind of a Presidency they were establishing. We know from reading over the debates in the different States where they discussed the ratification of the Constitution that one of the most commonly occurring arguments of the day was that they were setting up too powerful an Executive.

We know in the same way that there were many other timid souls that thought you could not have any kind of government over as large a territory as the United States. I mean by that the Thirteen Original States. They said we were too big for a democratic republic, that the only kind of republic would have to be a little one, like some place on the hillside in Switzerland where they could all meet together, like a town meeting, as in New England, or in the South, in very small units. There were many objections to a large area of government, a large territorial unit, and the objection of the relatively strong executive.

We tried to bring the executive management down to date. There have been two great steps in the development of the American executive. One was in the adoption of the merit system, now 50 years old. We tried to build up the principle of merit instead of the principle of patronage, and while that principle has never been fully carried out, and perhaps never may be fully carried out, nevertheless, very substantial progress was made 50 years ago, and has been made since that date.

The second big move, some of your gentlemen here present will remember, was in the establishment of the budgetary system, which was an attempt to fix responsibility for the preliminary gathering of the data on the comprehensive budget. That was made the task of the Executive, I need not remind you, with the ultimate responsibility in the hands of the Congress.

Now, it seemed to your committee that a third long step would have to be taken to bring the executive up to date on the side of what we might call administrative management. You can call it administration, you can call it management. Neither of those words is in the Constitution of the United States. But as far as that is concerned, neither are the words "political parties" in the Constitution.

Now, the reason that we were interested in management was that the United States is the country in the world undoubtedly that has made the longest step ahead in administrative management. We

have here the larger units of business oganization, bigger corpora tions, bigger businesses, and we have set the pace in what you would call administration and in management, and in administrative management.

It may well be that the workers of the community have not always obtained the full value that comes out of the administrative managements of big corporations, nevertheless the management is there, and if any country in the world now wants to start out on a largescale piece of management it automatically turns to the United States to see how we do that. The German system, in considerable measure, was copied out of ours. The British, when they tried to organize big-scale business, sent over here, and, curiously enough, when Russia wanted to organize something it sent over here for American engineers, American executives, to show them how to set up various kinds of managerial organizations, using our own people to do it.

That management movement goes back to about 30 years ago, out of the Taylor system, the Emerson system, the application of technology to business, organization of large-scale units, until now we have in the United States, beyond any doubt, the first place in executive organization, and we very justly pride ourselves on being the best managers in the world. I think that claim, with all due regard to the counter-claims of other nations, could be substantiated.

You have also got a good deal of management running down now into agriculture, large scale of organization like the Grange and the Farm Bureau and others. The organized-labor groups are now beginning to take an interest in how they will set up an efficient management of their organizations.

A good deal of progress has been made in the cities and in the States with the organization of administrative management. You have now about 400 managers of cities. Some of those have brought the city administration up to a high level, as in Cincinnati.

A large number of States have undertaken the job of reorganizing their State administrations. We have been over those before here. We know they did it in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and I need not remind Senator Byrd of the work he did as Governor of the State of Virginia. We have been indebted to these States for many useful suggestions. Senator Byrd recoiled somewhat from the paternity of this plan, apparently, but we have the goods on you, Senator, we have your fingerprints, or your blood test, or whatever it is. This child looks to you as its father.

Senator BYRD. You cannot disinherit your own child.

Mr. MERRIAM. You cannot put the bar sinister on this child of yours, you know. We will nail it right on you.

I want to deal just a few minutes more, with your permission, on the general plan, and then we will go back into the practical details. You might raise the question with me: "Are you gentlemen on the President's committee interested in nothing but developing executive management? Is that the only interest you have as American citizens?" Our answer to that is that that was our particular assignment. It was not our task to deal with Congress, and, secondly, not to deal with the courts. Nevertheless, you might say, "Are you not concerned at all with the balance of power as between the Executive and the Congress?" Well, with much timidity, and I trust with due

modesty, we did go out of our way to try to show how the accountability of the Executive to the Congress could be worked out under a system of administrative management on the Executive side. There is a balance of power set up in the Constitution, and there is a relationship, certainly, between Congress and the Executive that we thought had at all times to be most carefully observed and preserved. In one section of this report we dealt with the accountability of the Executive to the Congress. I want to call your attention to the fact that we set up, very tentatively, because we did not want to seem to intrude in any way by offering advice to Congress, but only incidentally and necessarily as a part of our work, we set up tentatively the plan for accountability of the Executive to Congress on three lines: One a line of finance, one a line of civil service, one a line of planning.

Since we were proposing in this scheme to set up in the White House three principal agencies of budget, personnel, and planning, we suggested the possibility of three joint committees, or concurrent committees of Congress, dealing with the three overhead or over-all functions of the Executive. The picture in our minds was that if these three agencies were set up right in the White House-as the President himself said, right under his immediate wing-that would give you three new overhead agencies. Then Congress, by checking up on these three overhead agencies, not merely accounting but the other two, taking them under its wing, so to speak, you would have corresponding to the over-all administrative scheme an over-all congressional scheme. And in that way you could keep track of the various bureaus or departments on an institutional level. You could deal with the three branches of the overhead Executive and get the same sort of a watchtower observation of what is going on in the Executive, and the same watchtower effect by a view of Congress through three concurrent or joint committees.

What you would have then would be the President with budget and finance, civil service, and planning, plus three corresponding committees keeping track of those three overhead agencies. If you set up that powerful kind of Executive management review it would afford you the means of getting immediate contact with what is going on in the new overhead set-up.

Representative VINSON. Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Vinson.

Representative VINSON. In the report, or in the bill that has been presented, did you provide for the setting up of the committees, of make suggestions that the three committees be set up?

Mr. MERRIAM. We proceeded very mildly on that point, not wishing to have Congress say, "Well, we did not ask you for any suggestions of congressional organization", but we pointed out how that could be done, in the report.

Representative VINSON. I haven't seen it.

Mr. BROWNLOW. We did set up, in this suggested draft of the bill, a joint committee on accounting.

Representative VINSON. Mr. Brownlow, I know that, but the gentleman refers to three committees.

Mr. BROWNLOW. Only one is in the bill. The three are in the report.

Senator BARKLEY. It is not necessary for the bill to contain the provision for Congress to set up those committees. We can do that without any report.

Representative VINSON. In the bill one committee is provided for. I was not asking whether it is necessary to do it or not. I just wanted to know whether I had overlooked the suggestion about the other two committees.

Mr. MERRIAM. Our recommendation is on page 50 of our report. I can read it. It is just one paragraph:

With respect to nonfiscal affairs, the creation of similar special committees or of a joint committee to keep currently informed of the activities of the three managerial agencies dealing with budget, personnel, and planning, which we recommend should be set up directly under the President, would go far toward lessening the evil effects of the present lack of coordination.

Thus the principle of the accountability of the Executive to the Congress might be made effective in action.

Representative VINSON. I want to say that I just overlooked that, or had forgotten about it.

Mr. MERRIAM. I might say also-I do not know whether it is out of order here to say it-that the principle of legislative predominance in a democratic government has no stronger defenders than the President's committee. Last summer Mr. Brownlow and I were over in the European countries-not at the expense of the Government, Senator-and we attended, in Warsaw, a meeting of the International Institute of Administrative Science.

That is made up mainly, if not wholly, of public officials from the principal European countries. If I may take a minute I can just refer briefly to what Mr. Brownlow and I have always called the battle of Warsaw. There were a number of Fascist governments there that tried to put through a resolution endorsing not merely the organization of the executive branch of the government but also declaring that the executive must have the personal direction and leadership, subordinating the legislative branch of the government to the executive. I myself took up the battle against them, reinforced by Mr. Brownlow and by others of the American delegation, and the struggle or the battle between what was called the American method and the dictatorial systems was observed with much pleasure by representatives from Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Egypt, and what not. We finally won out. We were able to show that in the United States we were not interested at all in that kind of resolution, because we had set up from the very beginning the system of congressional priority. We had no notion of changing it, we were not interested in the slightest degree in discussing the subject. We also succeeded in defeating the resolution and obtaining the passage of quite a different kind of resolution, indicating legislative supremacy, and showing that we were interested in administrative organization subordinate to the general priority of the elected representatives of the people.

Representative GIFFORD. Dr. Merriam, may I suggest something? From your explanatory remarks, and to me somewhat apologetic, that you did not want to trespass upon the field of legislation, that your assignment was not an assignment from Congress, in view of those statements must we infer that you would have written a different kind of report if you had received an assignment from Congress?