Part 21 (1/2)

The only inst.i.tutional safeguard is to separate as absolutely as it is possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates. The two should be parallel but quite distinct bodies of men, recruited differently, paid if possible from separate funds, responsible to different heads, intrinsically uninterested in each other's personal success. In industry, the auditors, accountants, and inspectors should be independent of the manager, the superintendents, foremen, and in time, I believe, we shall come to see that in order to bring industry under social control the machinery of record will have to be independent of the boards of directors and the shareholders.

3

But in building the intelligence sections of industry and politics, we do not start on cleared ground. And, apart from insisting on this basic separation of function, it would be c.u.mbersome to insist too precisely on the form which in any particular instance the principle shall take. There are men who believe in intelligence work, and will adopt it; there are men who do not understand it, but cannot do their work without it; there are men who will resist. But provided the principle has a foothold somewhere in every social agency it will make progress, and the way to begin is to begin. In the federal government, for example, it is not necessary to straighten out the administrative tangle and the illogical duplications of a century's growth in order to find a neat place for the intelligence bureaus which Was.h.i.+ngton so badly needs. Before election you can promise to rush bravely into the breach. But when you arrive there all out of breath, you find that each absurdity is invested with habits, strong interests, and chummy Congressmen. Attack all along the line and you engage every force of reaction. You go forth to battle, as the poet said, and you always fall. You can lop off an antiquated bureau here, a covey of clerks there, you can combine two bureaus. And by that time you are busy with the tariff and the railroads, and the era of reform is over. Besides, in order to effect a truly logical reorganization of the government, such as all candidates always promise, you would have to disturb more pa.s.sions than you have time to quell. And any new scheme, supposing you had one ready, would require officials to man it. Say what one will about officeholders, even Soviet Russia was glad to get many of the old ones back; and these old officials, if they are too ruthlessly treated, will sabotage Utopia itself.

No administrative scheme is workable without good will, and good will about strange practices is impossible without education. The better way is to introduce into the existing machinery, wherever you can find an opening, agencies that will hold up a mirror week by week, month by month. You can hope, then, to make the machine visible to those who work it, as well as to the chiefs who are responsible, and to the public outside. When the office-holders begin to see themselves,--or rather when the outsiders, the chiefs, and the subordinates all begin to see the same facts, the same d.a.m.ning facts if you like, the obstruction will diminish. The reformer's opinion that a certain bureau is inefficient is just his opinion, not so good an opinion in the eyes of the bureau, as its own. But let the work of that bureau be a.n.a.lysed and recorded, and then compared with other bureaus and with private corporations, and the argument moves to another plane.

There are ten departments at Was.h.i.+ngton represented in the Cabinet.

Suppose, then, there was a permanent intelligence section for each.

What would be some of the conditions of effectiveness? Beyond all others that the intelligence officials should be independent both of the Congressional Committees dealing with that department, and of the Secretary at the head of it; that they should not be entangled either in decision or in action. Independence, then, would turn mainly on three points on funds, tenure, and access to the facts. For clearly if a particular Congress or departmental official can deprive them of money, dismiss them, or close the files, the staff becomes its creature.

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The question of funds is both important and difficult. No agency of research can be really free if it depends upon annual doles from what may be a jealous or a parsimonious congress. Yet the ultimate control of funds cannot be removed from the legislature. The financial arrangement should insure the staff against left-handed, joker and rider attack, against sly destruction, and should at the same time provide for growth. The staff should be so well entrenched that an attack on its existence would have to be made in the open. It might, perhaps, work behind a federal charter creating a trust fund, and a sliding scale over a period of years based on the appropriation for the department to which the intelligence bureau belonged. No great sums of money are involved anyway. The trust fund might cover the overhead and capital charges for a certain minimum staff, the sliding scale might cover the enlargements. At any rate the appropriation should be put beyond accident, like the payment of any long term obligation. This is a much less serious way of ”tying the hands of Congress” than is the pa.s.sage of a Const.i.tutional amendment or the issuance of government bonds. Congress could repeal the charter. But it would have to repeal it, not throw monkey wrenches into it.

Tenure should be for life, with provision for retirement on a liberal pension, with sabbatical years set aside for advanced study and training, and with dismissal only after a trial by professional colleagues. The conditions which apply to any non-profit-making intellectual career should apply here. If the work is to be salient, the men who do it must have dignity, security, and, in the upper ranks at least, that freedom of mind which you find only where men are not too immediately concerned in practical decision.

Access to the materials should be established in the organic act. The bureau should have the right to examine all papers, and to question any official or any outsider. Continuous investigation of this sort would not at all resemble the sensational legislative inquiry and the spasmodic fis.h.i.+ng expedition which are now a common feature of our government. The bureau should have the right to propose accounting methods to the department, and if the proposal is rejected, or violated after it has been accepted, to appeal under its charter to Congress.

In the first instance each intelligence bureau would be the connecting link between Congress and the Department, a better link, in my judgment, than the appearance of cabinet officers on the floor of both House and Senate, though the one proposal in no way excludes the other. The bureau would be the Congressional eye on the execution of its policy. It would be the departmental answer to Congressional criticism. And then, since operation of the Department would be permanently visible, perhaps Congress would cease to feel the need of that minute legislation born of distrust and a false doctrine of the separation of powers, which does so much to make efficient administration difficult.

5

But, of course, each of the ten bureaus could not work in a watertight compartment. In their relation one to another lies the best chance for that ”coordination” of which so much is heard and so little seen.

Clearly the various staffs would need to adopt, wherever possible, standards of measurement that were comparable. They would exchange their records. Then if the War Department and the Post Office both buy lumber, hire carpenters, or construct brick walls they need not necessarily do them through the same agency, for that might mean c.u.mbersome over-centralization; but they would be able to use the same measure for the same things, be conscious of the comparisons, and be treated as compet.i.tors. And the more compet.i.tion of this sort the better.

For the value of compet.i.tion is determined by the value of the standards used to measure it. Instead, then, of asking ourselves whether we believe in compet.i.tion, we should ask ourselves whether we believe in that for which the compet.i.tors compete. No one in his senses expects to ”abolish compet.i.tion,” for when the last vestige of emulation had disappeared, social effort would consist in mechanical obedience to a routine, tempered in a minority by native inspiration.

Yet no one expects to work out compet.i.tion to its logical conclusion in a murderous struggle of each against all. The problem is to select the goals of compet.i.tion and the rules of the game. Almost always the most visible and obvious standard of measurement will determine the rules of the game: such as money, power, popularity, applause, or Mr.

Veblen's ”conspicuous waste.” What other standards of measurement does our civilization normally provide? How does it measure efficiency, productivity, service, for which we are always clamoring?

By and large there are no measures, and there is, therefore, not so much compet.i.tion to achieve these ideals. For the difference between the higher and the lower motives is not, as men often a.s.sert, a difference between altruism and selfishness. [Footnote: _Cf._ Ch. XII] It is a difference between acting for easily understood aims, and for aims that are obscure and vague. Exhort a man to make more profit than his neighbor, and he knows at what to aim. Exhort him to render more social service, and how is he to be certain what service is social? What is the test, what is the measure? A subjective feeling, somebody's opinion. Tell a man in time of peace that he ought to serve his country and you have uttered a pious plat.i.tude, Tell him in time of war, and the word service has a meaning; it is a number of concrete acts, enlistment, or buying bonds, or saving food, or working for a dollar a year, and each one of these services he sees definitely as part of a concrete purpose to put at the front an army larger and better armed, than the enemy's.

So the more you are able to a.n.a.lyze administration and work out elements that can be compared, the more you invent quant.i.tative measures for the qualities you wish to promote, the more you can turn compet.i.tion to ideal ends. If you can contrive the right index numbers [Footnote: I am not using the term index numbers in its purely technical meaning, but to cover any device for the comparative measurement of social phenomena.] you can set up a compet.i.tion between individual workers in a shop; between shops; between factories; between schools; [Footnote: See, for example, _An Index Number for State School Systems_ by Leonard P. Ayres, Russell Sage Foundation, 1920. The principle of the quota was very successfully applied in the Liberty Loan Campaigns, and under very much more difficult circ.u.mstances by the Allied Maritime Transport Council.] between government departments; between regiments; between divisions; between s.h.i.+ps; between states; counties; cities; and the better your index numbers the more useful the compet.i.tion.

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The possibilities that lie in the exchange of material are evident.

Each department of government is all the time asking for information that may already have been obtained by another department, though perhaps in a somewhat different form. The State Department needs to know, let us say, the extent of the Mexican oil reserves, their relation to the rest of the world's supply, the present owners.h.i.+p of Mexican oil lands, the importance of oil to wars.h.i.+ps now under construction or planned, the comparative costs in different fields.

How does it secure such information to-day? The information is probably scattered through the Departments of Interior, Justice, Commerce, Labor and Navy. Either a clerk in the State Department looks up Mexican oil in a book of reference, which may or may not be accurate, or somebody's private secretary telephones somebody else's private secretary, asks for a memorandum, and in the course of time a darkey messenger arrives with an armful of unintelligible reports. The Department should be able to call on its own intelligence bureau to a.s.semble the facts in a way suited to the diplomatic problem up for decision. And these facts the diplomatic intelligence bureau would obtain from the central clearing house. [Footnote: There has been a vast development of such services among the trade a.s.sociations. The possibilities of a perverted use were revealed by the New York Building Trades investigation of 1921.]

This establishment would pretty soon become a focus of information of the most extraordinary kind. And the men in it would be made aware of what the problems of government really are. They would deal with problems of definition, of terminology, of statistical technic, of logic; they would traverse concretely the whole gamut of the social sciences. It is difficult to see why all this material, except a few diplomatic and military secrets, should not be open to the scholars of the country. It is there that the political scientist would find the real nuts to crack and the real researches for his students to make.

The work need not all be done in Was.h.i.+ngton, but it could be done in reference to Was.h.i.+ngton. The central agency would, thus, have in it the makings of a national university. The staff could be recruited there for the bureaus from among college graduates. They would be working on theses selected after consultation between the curators of the national university and teachers scattered over the country. If the a.s.sociation was as flexible as it ought to be, there would be, as a supplement to the permanent staff, a steady turnover of temporary and specialist appointments from the universities, and exchange lecturers called out from Was.h.i.+ngton. Thus the training and the recruiting of the staff would go together. A part of the research itself would be done by students, and political science in the universities would be a.s.sociated with politics in America.

7

In its main outlines the principle is equally applicable to state governments, to cities, and to rural counties. The work of comparison and interchange could take place by federations of state and city and county bureaus. And within those federations any desirable regional combination could be organized. So long as the accounting systems were comparable, a great deal of duplication would be avoided. Regional coordination is especially desirable. For legal frontiers often do not coincide with the effective environments. Yet they have a certain basis in custom that it would be costly to disturb. By coordinating their information several administrative areas could reconcile autonomy of decision with cooperation. New York City, for example, is already an unwieldy unit for good government from the City Hall. Yet for many purposes, such as health and transportation, the metropolitan district is the true unit of administration. In that district, however, there are large cities, like Yonkers, Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Bayonne. They could not all be managed from one center, and yet they should act together for many functions.

Ultimately perhaps some such flexible scheme of local government as Sidney and Beatrice Webb have suggested may be the proper solution. [Footnote: ”The Reorganization of Local Government” (Ch. IV), in _A Const.i.tution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain_.] But the first step would be a coordination, not of decision and action, but of information and research. Let the officials of the various munic.i.p.alities see their common problems in the light of the same facts.