Knitting the Sinews of Federalism: The Origins of the Public Administration Clearing House and the Invention of American Intergovernmental Relations

Ben Merriman, University of Kansas

The Public Administration Clearing House (PACH), founded at the University of Chicago in 1930, was a service organization for government-serving administrative and research organizations. It aggregated an astounding amount of talent by systematically reinvesting its resources into growing dozens of cooperative intergovernmental organizations. PACH was at the core of a dense network that evolved modern arrangements of fiscal federalism: by 1936, it was the headquarters for five of the six groups that were to dominate post-War intergovernmental relations. Most of the administrators who designed and carried out federal executive reorganization in the late 1930s—the basis of the modern managerial presidency—had also been leaders in PACH or its constituent organizations. The role of PACH in the broader development of American government is badly underappreciated, in part because its founder, Louis Brownlow, prevented publication of two major insider histories. The Interwar flows of social scientific expertise and private philanthropy to Chicago are well-studied. But this paper addresses a different question: where did PACH’s organizational design come from, and how did the two most important of its original constituents, the ICMA and the American Municipal Association, move to Chicago? Drawing from a range of material, including two major sources of archival records not subject to Brownlow’s sanitization, this paper shows that PACH was an emulation and expansion of a consortium model developed at the University of Kansas. By the mid-1920s, Kansas hosted five public administrative organizations operated under the personal union of Chicago alumnus John Stutz, who later privately brokered the move of ICMA and AMA to Chicago. Earlier Kansas experience shows that PACH’s eventual importance in federal government was an unintended outgrowth of what began as very successful “horizontal” intergovernmental model, mobilized for national service in response to the exigencies of the Depression and Roosevelt’s need for skilled administrators.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 8. US Political Movements