Every July 4th, Americans celebrate 1776, the birthday of signing the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and freedom from Great Britain. Likewise, 1787 marks the origins of the U.S. Constitution and 1789, its formal ratification, as well as the start of the U.S. government with the inauguration of George Washington as president.

Some may add 1865 as a noteworthy year that ended the Civil War and brought about the permanent unification of the nation, or 1933, the beginning of the New Deal, as other seminal founding dates for our contemporary government. Most, however, would be perplexed by any claim for the significance of 1914 other than the start of World War I, a monumental European tragedy with little importance for the U.S. until we chose to engage in that bloody warfare across the Atlantic in 1917.

So what’s so special about 1914? The first gathering of the City Manager’s Association (as ICMA was then called) occurred in Springfield, Ohio, convened at the invitation of the city of Dayton’s first manager, Henry Waite.

From ICMA historic records, here is Richard Vogel’s description of how this first meeting was quietly initiated: “Technically, Waite had made the suggestion in response to a letter written to him by the newly appointed manager of Amarillo, Texas, H.M. Hardin. Hardin had also written to Charles Ashburner, the first city manager in the United States, then serving as city manager of Springfield, Ohio.

“Following up Waite’s recommendation, a letter was sent to all 31 city managers inviting them to join the formation of a professional association. It was agreed that the initial meeting would be held in Springfield, Ohio, and of the 17 managers responding to Hardin’s letter, 8 were able to be present.”

An Inauspicious Gathering

That gathering was hardly as memorable or auspicious when compared to the 55 Founding Fathers meeting in Philadelphia during the hot summer of 1787 to write the U.S. Constitution. The managers’ conference minutes contained no legendary debates over the meaning of federalism, separation of powers, enumerated powers, natural rights, and the like.

It resulted in no famous Federalist Papers, Anti-Federalist Papers, nor lasting framing documents of any sort. Rather, the first ICMA minutes read more akin to a typical Rotary or Elks meeting.

Along with pleasant dining, light off-the-cuff banter was exchanged. For example, when asked how he handled his relationship with the city council, Manager Hardin of Amarillo, Texas, bluntly replied: “I care for them to meet only once a month; that’s often enough. That’s to allow the bills and monthly payroll to be paid.”

Hardin then added with a touch of ironic Texas cowboy humor that he felt fortunate he only had three councilmen to “herd together” once a month. How many city and county managers in 2014 wish they publicly could say something like that, but must regrettably in today’s media-drenched environment bite their tongues?

So again, what’s so special about 1914? Why make a fuss over that year, given the long forgotten, even trivial content of the first ICMA conference? Indeed, doesn’t such an assertion sound outrageously ridiculous, maybe downright idiotic, to even dare compare that event with forging the U.S. Constitution?

Here, some historic perspective is necessary. Recall that in 1887, President Woodrow Wilson, then a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, published an essay for a new journal, Political Science Quarterly, describing the emerging field of public administration.

His was the first article on this subject written in America. Its central argument, paradoxically pronounced on the very date of the Constitution’s centennial, stressed that the age of constitution writing was over; now Americans needed to learn how “to run a Constitution,” that is, to study public administration. Vast, profound socio-economic-political crises challenged the written document’s very survival.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the most radical transformation in all of American history. We suddenly shifted from a largely frontier, rural, self-sufficient farming society—isolationist, and sparsely populated—to a decentralized nation.

In the blink of an eye, we became a country that was urbanized, inviting mass migration from abroad, rapidly spawning new technologies, industrialized, aggravating at times the deadly confrontations between labor and management, and fostering international trade that for the first time brought international involvement.

A Strange New World

At home, America saw vastly increased democratic participation of numbers and varieties of groups and individuals never before engaged in the governing processes, not to mention the resulting immense complexity and sheer size of governmental growth essential to make society operate.

During this era, interest groups formed and pressed government on behalf of their members, especially farmers, labor, business, and veterans. In turn, nationwide networks of these pressure groups led to the formation of new, significantly expanded federal executive departments or “cliental departments” devoted exclusively to serving their interests, including the departments of agriculture, labor, commerce, and pensions, which was the largest of all federal units.

At the 1893 Chicago meeting of the American Historical Convention, Frederick Jackson Turner read to his fellow historians one of the most influential scholarly papers in U.S. History, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in which he argued ominously that the frontier had disappeared and with it marked "the closing of a great historic moment."1

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz—published by L. Frank Baum in 1900—people felt themselves whisked to a distant foreign land lacking familiar cultural reference points to the past or future. Profound transformational forces demanded overnight new generalist management expertise; vast, impersonal organizational structures; and increased ethical responsibility and accountability at all levels of American government in order “to run a constitution” for its second century.

In short, as President Woodrow Wilson’s prophetic essay proclaimed in 1887, we needed to learn and do public administration. Or, what Don Price, dean of what is now the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard (1958–1968), would later refer to as the necessity for developing America’s unwritten constitution, or the real administrative stuff that makes modern government work and society tick today.

Grafting a brand-new, informal, unwritten administrative constitution into the formal written one came piecemeal, gradually, with little fanfare, mostly from grass-roots experimentation that bubbled upwards to state and federal levels: a civil service system here, a regulatory agency there, a line-item budget or innovative zoning and planning arrangement developed elsewhere.

The City Management Movement

What today we recognize as integrated systems were, around the turn of the century, devised by hit-and-miss, trial-and-error local initiatives, without a comprehensive model on how these disparate parts would fit together into the whole. Enter the city management movement, spurred largely by the energetic work of one long-forgotten but necessary individual, Richard Childs.

Shortly after graduating from Yale and inspired by the progressive reform fever epidemic at the dawn of the new century, in 1906 Childs enthusiastically took up the cause of short ballots as a method for eliminating boss rule and municipal corruption.

Childs was employed full-time as a young advertising account executive in New York City. As a part-time hobby, he opened up a short ballot office to spread the word nationally about the benefits of this particular technique to increase direct grass-roots democracy plus rid cities of boss rule.

At the same time, a small town in western Virginia—Staunton, population 11,336, whose only claim to fame was being the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson—was becoming increasingly crippled by government paralysis. The city operated then with no full-time employees, but governed itself with an unwieldy, bi-cameral, 22-member city council, divided into 30 legislative committees that oversaw direction of city functions.

Staunton Hires a City Manager

Effective decision making and quick program implementation, however, became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, given the obvious complexities of Staunton’s jerry-built, self-governing apparatus, not to mention its clear lack of in-house expertise to undertake such work. What should be done?

Here, a remarkable institutional innovation occurred driven by practical empirical necessity. In 1908, the Staunton City Council passed an ordinance to hire “a general manager” responsible for all municipal executive work. Charles Ashburner, an experienced civil engineer, was hired as Staunton’s first general manager to address the city’s seemingly intractable, daunting public issues.

It wasn’t only necessity, however, but also accident that sparked the birth of the council-manager form of government. Childs, by chance, spotted a newspaper article praising the Staunton experiment. He creatively saw its potential significance and application in cities everywhere when merged with his enthusiasm for short ballots and commission government comprising small governing councils of elected officials.

He quickly combined and publicized these ideas throughout America through his short-ballot office in New York City. Drawing on his remarkable ad-man’s skills, he surreptitiously generated enormous national attention on the council-manager plan as the most advanced, efficient form of local government.

Childs liked to refer to himself as “the minister” who married the manager plan with the commission form of government. In reality, he was the quintessential progressive reformer, inspired by the belief of furthering greater direct democracy (i.e., through short ballots and small nonpartisan councils) and more efficient government (i.e., with trained, full-time managers in charge of running municipal administrative functions).

A single institutional remedy, the Model City Charter, Childs fervently argued, would sustain grass-roots democracy in face of overwhelming socioeconomic-political challenges confronting urban America. Later, he advocated much-the-same-style model charters for counties and states.

Birth of Public Professionalism

So back to the question: Why was 1914 so critical, not just for birthing ICMA, but also modern U.S. government in general? Why not select 1908, when Staunton hired Ashburner as its first manager?

Or 1915, when the National Municipal League—now called the National Civic League—officially adopted its first Model City Charter with the council-manager plan as its centerpiece?

Dates of 1908 or 1915 pale in importance compared to 1914. The founding of ICMA brought a revolutionary intellectual shift: For the first time in American history, permanently advanced public professionalism, characterized by the application of full-time general management expertise, a corporate professional identity, and ethical responsibility upwards from the grass-roots was embraced throughout all levels of American government, even to its very pinnacle, the U.S. presidency.

How did the 1914 founding of ICMA spawn this silent, yet profound, revolution that spread public professionalization throughout our entire government?

First, ICMA developed a new generalist public management expertise for local government. This novel conceptual framework later moved upward and outward throughout American government.

To be sure, by 1914, other public professional groups were emerging: educators, military officers, and the like, but their work was largely conceived of as advancing specialized applied knowledge skills within their respective fields. City managers, by virtue of their uniquely defined functional positions, had to become, in theorist Paul Appleby’s memorable phrase, “specialists in things general.”2

Learning about this new subject came slowly, mostly from trial by fire on the job. Firsthand experiences were informally shared at early ICMA conferences (recall Manager Hardin’s “herding” commentary).

In 1919, the City Manager Bulletin (now Public Management (PM) magazine) began monthly publication on such vital but uninspired topics as “Separate and Combined Sewers,” “Elements of Budget Making,” and “A Rating System for Policemen.”

Here signaled the modest beginning of sharing nationally in print “what works as leading practices.” Later in the 1920s, ICMA created standing committees to develop manuals for standard administrative practice on various common core management topics, including budgeting, personnel, and so on.

Promoting Management Knowledge

A decade later, ICMA made a lasting contribution to the development of generalist management knowledge by codifying and publishing its famed Green Book Series as a basis for training on the job, as well as for educating those planning to enter the profession.

On-the-job training was also fostered by early city and county managers, continuing to this day in the form of internships and mentoring programs. Remember that most early managers were trained as engineers—in 1924, less than 3 percent came from public administration backgrounds.

Engineers thrust into city management posts quickly learned, often to their astonishment, that managerial work required a different education—the, generalist public management that ICMA initiated and developed from scratch.

To be sure, higher education helped, but that was after the fact when the Maxwell School was founded in 1924 and the University of Southern California in 1929. The then popular scientific management thinking invented by Frederick Taylor3 that focused upon maximizing workplace efficiency also served as a critical early catalyst to ICMA managerial training.

Yet, generalist public management ideals rapidly expanded into something far broader and more significant, advancing public ideals, thanks to disseminating ICMA’s burgeoning publications.

In particular, two additional vital elements of public professionalism that ICMA also fostered and infused throughout the field separated its generalist public management ideas from Taylorism: 1) the promulgation of a corporate public identity, and 2) the ethical responsibility to serve the entire public.

From its first meeting, ICMA defined local public management as a unique occupational identity, separate from politics, business, or other vocations, demanding advanced education, with shared norms that can be learned both in the classroom and by apprenticeships on the job.

Like traditional professions of law and medicine, theirs served an equally necessary societal role of advancing and maintaining good government at the grass roots. And, like law and medicine, ICMA would cultivate a strong corporate identity with its annual conferences, publications, permanent headquarters, able staff, and governance by elected members. This identify included its own professional elites who would speak forcefully and authoritatively on behalf of the membership as well as the broader profession.

ICMA fused ethical responsibility to serve the public into general management ideas and practices by the ratification of its first Code of Ethics in 1924. Here, the professed ideals and objective moral standards of the new profession were clearly and succinctly stated.

At the same time, ICMA put teeth into its Code by revising Article 8 of its Constitution to establish a formal mechanism to expel members for misconduct: “On the written request of ten or more active members setting forth a just case, any member of this Association may be expelled….” This served as an explicit oversight method to ensure individual compliance to the profession’s stated ideals.

Over the past nine decades, both the Code of Ethics and its enforcement mechanisms have undergone many revisions and significant refinements, but commitment to ethical responsibility remains at the core of ICMA’s belief of what effective public management should be all about.

This newly “gelled” generalist public management thinking, nurtured by ICMA, bubbled outwards to influence professionalization of other local occupations in planning, public works, and the like, as well as upwards to the state and federal levels, even to the very top, the U.S. presidency.

President Roosevelt in 1936 appointed Louis Brownlow, a former city manager, to chair a commission to recommend the reorganization of government. Ultimately, the Brownlow report, The President’s Committee on Administrative Management, brought about the first major reconceptualization of the American presidency since Washington’s inauguration.

For the first time in U.S. history, the president assumed responsibility for a new demanding public role, beyond that of commander in chief, party leader, chief diplomat, and so forth. Now, he served as general government manager, empowered by a White House executive office staffed with the essential tools of modern management, including personnel, budgeting, and more.

Prior to this, President Roosevelt had few assistants, mostly assigned to the White House from other federal departments. Here, the work of ICMA would permanently transform the highest office in the land. Although “the managerial presidency” became a pejorative label in the 1970s, some scholars suggest that without the fundamental reconceptualization and reorganization of the presidency, America would never have won World War II, the Cold War, or become the major global superpower of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A Must for the Future

Are these powerful generalist public management ideals and ideas that ICMA gave birth to starting in 1914 still necessary in 2014?

Think for a moment: Would any of the well-publicized failures of American government since the dawn of the 21st century have occurred if a generalist public manager had been at the helm?

Would 9/11 have happened if a general manager had made sure that CIA and FBI professionals had coordinated their intelligence work or even those within both field and headquarters of the FBI communicated effectively?

Could more have survived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit if a nonpartisan, experienced city manager had been in charge of emergency preparations? Or at the Federal Emergency Management Agency?

Could the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and its devastating impact on the American economy been avoided if a generalist public manager had been put in charge of integrating and supervising the existing fragmented, inchoate regulatory structure?

Was the launch of Obamacare a failure due to the lack of capable generalist government managers so essential to planning, directing, and coordinating 54 contractors that set up the complex networks for the program?

No doubt many more examples can be added, but my point is that American government suffers from too little, not too much, of “the stuff” that ICMA quietly yet persistently pioneered! Where are you, the Charles Ashburners, Louis Brownlows, and their kin? America urgently needs so many more of you today!

ENDNOTES

1 The Frontier in American History (1920),ÊFrederick Jackson Turner, pp. 1–38. Richard Stillman is a professor of public administration, University of Colorado, Denver (richard.stillman@ucdenver.edu).
2 For the best study of Paul H. Appleby's life, work, and scholarly contributions, read: Roscoe C. Martin, editor,ÊPublic Administration and Democracy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965).
3 Frederick W, Taylor, The Principles ofÊScientific Management (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1919).