Leonard D. White Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) is recognized as the founder of the academic discipline of American public administration. A native of Acton, Massachusetts, he was a professor at the University of Chicago and a civil servant who held several positions in different levels of government. He received a baccalaureate degree from Dartmouth College in 1914, a master’s degree from Dartmouth in 1915, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1921. He also had honorary degrees conferred upon him from Dartmouth (a DLitt in 1946) and Princeton University (an LLD in 1952). White also had the honor of having the Commander of the Order of Leopold II from Belgium bestowed upon him in 1948. White received the Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association in 1948 for The Federalists (1948) and the Bancroft Prize of Columbia University in 1955 for The Jacksonians (1954).

White’s academic career began at Clark University in Massachusetts, where he was instructor of government from 1915 to 1918. He then served as an assistant professor of political science at Dartmouth College from 1918 to 1920. White then joined the University of Chicago in 1920 as an associate professor of political science. He was promoted to full professor, ultimately holding the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Professorship in public administration until his retirement in 1956 and then serving as an emeritus faculty in political science until his death in 1958. White also served as chair of the Political Science Department at Chicago from 1940 to 1948. He was very active in university governance.

In addition to his substantive contribution to the University of Chicago during his long tenure there, White had tremendous impact in the founding of the academic discipline of public administration in the United States. In 1926 he authored An Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, which was the first textbook published in the field. He was the founding editor of the Public Administration Review. He served as the president of the American Society for Public Administration from 1947 to 1948 and as president of the American Political Science Association from 1943 to 1944. The Leonard D. White Award presented by the American Political Science Association for the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration is named in his honor.

White also was active in government administration, and he served as a U.S. civil service commissioner during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. White also contributed to Trends in Public Administration (1933) for President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends.

In his 1965 article “Leonard D. White and the Study of Public Administration,” Herbert J. Storing wrote of White that he was “concerned with a fundamental contradiction that lay and still lies at the heart of the study of public administration, and that in the work of his later years he provided his best advice on the approach to that study” (38). This maxim calls for attention to the founding and use of the historical method for understanding administrative organization and its values, to what White termed the art of administration. White defined four major assumptions about public administration: that it is a single process and substantially uniform; that it should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law; that it is still primarily an art yet has a significant tendency toward science; and that administration continues to be the heart of the problem of modern government. As Storing remarked, “These assumptions are still perhaps the best concise statement of the foundations of the discipline.”

White’s contributions endure as seminal works to the field of public administration and continue as central works in public management, organization theory, and administrative history. His work on administrative history and the historical development of government organization from its founding principles makes him indispensable to students of public administration and policy.

Bibliography:

Gaus, John M., Leonard D. White, and Marshall E. Dimock. The Frontiers of Public Administration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936.
John, Richard R. “In Retrospect: Leonard D.White and the Invention of American Administrative History.” Reviews in American History 24, no. 2 (1996): 344–360.
Storing, Herbert J. “Leonard D.White and the Study of Public Administration.” Public Administration Review 25 (March 1965): 38–51.
White, Leonard D. Introduction to the Study of Public Administration. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
“Public Administration: Public Administration, 1931–32.” American Political Science Review 27 (June 1933): 433–444.
The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History. New York: Macmillan, 1948.
The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

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