THE FEDERALIST: A STUDY IN ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY

_ by Leonard D.White '14. The Macmillan Company, 1948,538 PP-> $6.00.

Leonard D. White '14, Professor of Public Administration at the University of Chicago, is one of the most illustrious Dartmouth men now active in American academic life. For a quarter of a century Professor White has been one of the two or three most influential and challenging scholars working in the difficult, but highly important field of public administration. In this, the latest in his long list of publications, Mr. White begins a systematic study of the history of public administration in the United States—a work that may well become one of the classics of political science.

The present volume deals with administrative developments under Washington and Adams between 1789 and 1801, that crucial period in which it was to be determined whether the experiment of the new American Union would succeed. Our Founding Fathers had proved at Philadelphia in 1787 that their political genius extended to the construction —on paper—of a great constitutional system. But whether they could make that system work in practice—whether their genius extended to the art of management—was another matter. That "the Federalists" were equally successful in devising and employing administrative techniques necessary to the successful operation of the new national government ernment is the thesis of this volume. In telling this all-important story for the first time, a story that is just as vital to an understanding of the triumph of the American state as is the oft-told story of the constitutional period, Professor White has done a job that will not need to be done again. His thorough mastery of the original sources and his generous, but always-pertinent quotation of documentary material are outstanding qualities of this work. Yet with all of its emphasis upon scholarship and thoroughness it is always a lively and readable book.

Dartmouth men will take pride in the fact that a good part of this book was written in Baker Library in recent summers when Professor White was a welcome visitor to Hanover. They will also find interesting the account on page 313 of the career of John P. Ripley, one of Dartmouth's first sons to enter the administrative service. Fortunately, the judgment pronounced upon him by a superior "Ripley will not do"—is not one which has been applicable to those Dartmouth men who have followed him in public administrationamong whom Leonard D. White has been conspicuously successful, both in active administration and as a scholar of the administrative process.