Dwight Waldo 1913–2000

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 the 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 "failed his way upward in life." For example, he would say that he accepted a graduate assistantship at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln because he failed to find a high school teaching position. When he finished his master's degree, the 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 the East, which seemed exciting, given that he had few options. At Yale, Professor Francis Coker suggested that he look into the literature of public administration from the angle of American political theory. Waldo admitted that he first viewed the materials with distaste, even as "nonsense," hardly equal to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. But the more he studied, the more he found political theory of seminal significance to public administration. This association formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as The Administrative State (1948, 1984). With the publication of The Administrative State, the pre-war POSDCORB world of public administration would never be quite the same. The Administrative State endures as one of the most important works in the intellectual development of public administration. Like many major intellectual accomplishments, The Administrative State functions at several levels. It is a demarcation point in the transition in the United States from the orthodoxy of the era of the scientific-administrative management of the 1920s and 1930s to the heterodoxy of the 1940s and thereafter. It is also a link between what The Administrative State calls "the public administration movement," encompassing both thought and action in the first half of the twentieth century, and the broader realms of political theory and the history of ideas. Perhaps most significantly, it is an introduction to a distinctive form of inquiry and logic, the 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 the Waldonian approach, administrative thinking is as much an iterative process as a search for settled principles or findings. The Administrative State reviews the background of the development of the federal government as an active agent in shaping the American economy and society in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the ideological framework of American public action: the belief in democracy and democratic ideals; fundamental law; a doctrine of progress; the gospel of efficiency; and faith in science. This foundation, coupled with the reorganization and redirection of government in the early twentieth century, based on the progressive movement, formed American public administration as a distinctive form of political theory and of politics. In the research for The Administrative State, Waldo found that an orthodox public administration ideology had developed between the early 1900s and the late 1930s. At the heart of this ideology, were: 1) democracy and efficiency (or bureaucracy) were thought to be synonymous or at least reconcilable; 2) the work of government was thought to be divisible into two parts, decision and execution, or the 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) the values and practices of business management can be generally applied successfully to governmental administration. …