Dwight Waldo 1913–2000

Abstract

The Early Years Dwight Waldo was born in 1913 in DeWitt, Nebraska, into a farming family of five brothers and sisters. He claimed his two most important boyhood achievements were winning second place in a baby contest and winning a hog-calling competition. After high school, Waldo went to Nebraska Wesleyan College later transferring to Nebraska State Teachers College in Peru because it was less expensive. He intended to become a high school teacher but when he graduated no teaching jobs were available. Waldo often described his career as a series of opportunities in which he his way upward in life. For example, he would say that he accepted a graduate assistantship at University of Nebraska-Lincoln because he to find a high school teaching position. When he finished his master's degree, job market was still unpromising so he failed upward again by accepting a scholarship to attend Yale University. Why Yale? According to Waldo, it was because he had received a scholarship and had never been to East, which seemed exciting, given that he had few options. At Yale, Professor Francis Coker suggested that he look into literature of public administration from angle of American political theory. Waldo admitted that he first viewed materials with distaste, even as nonsense, hardly equal to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. But more he studied, more he found political theory of seminal significance to public administration. This association formed basis for his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as The Administrative State (1948, 1984). With publication of The Administrative State, pre-war POSDCORB world of public administration would never be quite same. The Administrative State endures as one of most important works in intellectual development of public administration. Like many major intellectual accomplishments, The Administrative State functions at several levels. It is a demarcation point in transition in United States from orthodoxy of era of scientific-administrative management of 1920s and 1930s to heterodoxy of 1940s and thereafter. It is also a link between what The Administrative State calls the public administration encompassing both thought and action in first half of twentieth century, and broader realms of political theory and history of ideas. Perhaps most significantly, it is an introduction to a distinctive form of inquiry and logic, Waldonian approach to public action. The Waldonian approach is a form of analytic pluralism that involves a continuous process of examining antinomies or contrasting propositions to discover what remains of a proposition after it is tested against an opposing one. In Waldonian approach, administrative thinking is as much an iterative process as a search for settled principles or findings. The Administrative State reviews background of development of federal government as an active agent in shaping American economy and society in first half of twentieth century. It examines ideological framework of American public action: belief in democracy and democratic ideals; fundamental law; a doctrine of progress; gospel of efficiency; and faith in science. This foundation, coupled with reorganization and redirection of government in early twentieth century, based on progressive movement, formed American public administration as a distinctive form of political theory and of politics. In research for The Administrative State, Waldo found that an orthodox public administration ideology had developed between early 1900s and late 1930s. At heart of this ideology, were: 1) democracy and efficiency (or bureaucracy) were thought to be synonymous or at least reconcilable; 2) work of government was thought to be divisible into two parts, decision and execution, or politics-administration dichotomy; 3) execution or administration is, or can be made, a science based on firm scientific principles for administration which can be discovered and applied; 4) values and practices of business management can be generally applied successfully to governmental administration. …