The Quest to Bring “Business Efficiency” to the Federal Executive: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Civil Service Reformers in the Late 1920s

This article benefitted from critical feedback at three stages. David Hammack and Peter Shulman helped shape my early, tentative interpretations. David Stebenne and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer provided useful comments on preliminary arguments presented at the Business History Conference. Finally, generous suggestions from the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Policy History allowed me to bring this article to its final form. Primary research for this article was made possible by support from several institutions: the American Heritage Center, in Laramie, Wyoming; the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, in West Branch, Iowa; the Roosevelt Institute, in Hyde Park, New York; the Friends of the Princeton University Library; the “History Project” of the Joint Center for History and Economics; the Rockefeller Archive Center, in Sleepy Hollow, New York; and the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University.