The American Civil Service, 1939–1945
| Published date | 01 December 1951 |
| Author | Percival Waterfield |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1951.tb01429.x |
| Date | 01 December 1951 |
The American Civil Service,
1939-1945
By SIR PERCIVAL WATERFIELD, K.B.E.,
C.B.
A
recent
study
of
the Civil Service
of
the United States during the war is here reviewed
in the light
of
British experience.
HIS*
is not a book fortheamateur’s
T
fireside reading. Probably few
even among professional students of
public administration will find it
worth while to plough laboriously
through the mass of detailed facts
which
Miss
Kammerer has collected
in her Chapters
I1
to
XIV.
Most will
find
it
enough to read the introduction
in Chapter
I
;
glance through the
author’s conclusions at the end. of
each succeeding chapter, pausing
perhaps to peruse the story
in
Chapter
VI
(“The New Emphasis on
Loyalty
”)
of Congressional attacks
on individual Federal employees
sus-
pected of subversive views
;
and then
study with care the final chapter.
Here
Miss
Kammerer summarises
the results of her enquiry and balances
the achievements against the failures
of the Federal Administration, and
the Civil Service Commission in
particular, in dealing with the prob-
lems of recruitment, grading, pro-
motion, pay, inter-departmental
transfers, training,
“
personal utili-
sation
”
(Anglice,
the economic use
of
manpower) and the evolution of
<<
employee-relations programmes,’’
while confronted at almost every
point with Congressional controls,
inquiries, and, all too often, obstruc-
tion.
Miss Kammerer notes five achieve-
ments ranking as
<<
permanent con-’
tributions to the improvement of the
Civil Service.” They are: “the
survival of the merit system principles
through the adaptability and flexi-
bility of the personnel system
;
suc-
cess in recruitment for staffing the
expanded Federal service
;
progress in
the building of training programmes
;
realisation of the importance of
employee relations in the public
service
;
and a new recognition of
personnel administration itself
”
(p.
342).
Under the head of
“
unsolved
problems
of
the war years she records
(i) transfer and promotion
:
the
failure to develop “some means
.
. .
whereby individuals with skills to
contribute can be discovered quickly
by the central personnel agency
”
(p.
352)
;
(ii)
“
the handicaps of an
inadequate Federal salary structure
”;
(iii) the failure to control the size of
the Federal Service; and (iv) the
endeavours of Congress to control
subversive elements in the Service,
without defining precisely the mean-
ing of
‘<
subversiveness.”
Instead of examining these state-
ments directly,
I
propose to distin-
guish some of the major differences
between British and American policies
and practice
in
the field covered by
Miss
Kammerer’s book, and in doing
so, to comment incidentally
on
most
of the above statements.
It
is
a
pity
that the author herself attempts
no
such comparison1. The value
of
her
book would have been greatly en-
hanced by a balanced review of
the manner in which the two coun-
tries tackled problems which were
essentially the same for both.
In
the first place, and setting the
tone
for
almost everything that
followed, there was the vital difference
between conscription and voluntary-
ism. In Great Britain the first task
*Impact
of
War
on
Federal Personrel Administration,
1939-1945.
By
Gladys
M.
Xammerer. University
of
Kentucky
Press,
372
pp.
$6.00.
357
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