Cases in Public Policy and Administration

From Ancient Times to the Present

Jay M. Shafritz,Christopher P. Borick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317349693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Writing the perfect complement to their bestseller, Introducing Public Administration, Shafritz and Borick highlight the great drama inherent in public policy -- and the ingenuity of its makers and administrators -- in this new casebook that brings thrilling, true life adventures in public administration to life in an engaging, witty style.

Drawing on a unique assortment of literary, historic, and modern examples, Cases in Public Policy and Administration exposes students to public administration in practice by telling the tales of:

• How Thurgood Marshall led the legal fight for civil rights and made it possible for Barack Obama to become president
• How the ideas of an academic economist and a famous novelist led to the recession that started in 2008
• How Al Gore really deserves just a little bit of credit for inventing the Internet
• How the decision was made by President Harry Truman to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan in order to end World War II
• How the current American welfare state was inspired by a German chancellor
• How a Nazi war criminal inadvertently provided the world with a lesson in bureaucratic ethics
• How Napoleon Bonaparte encouraged the job of chief of staff to escape from the military and live in contemporary civilian offices
• How an obscure state department bureaucrat wrote the policy of containment that allowed the United States to win the Cold War with the Soviet Union
• How Dwight D. Eisenhower was started on the road to the presidency by a mentor he found in the Panamanian rain forest
• How Florence Nightingale gathered statistics during the Crimean War that helped lead to contemporary program evaluation.

CHAPTER ONE

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Scientific Management

HOW THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS DETECTIVE WAS A PIVOTAL INFLUENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF U.S. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

PREVIEW

Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus are his only rivals to having the world’s most instantly recognizable silhouette. Almost everyone in the literate world knows that a deerstalker cap on the head, a drooping pipe in the mouth, a short-caped overcoat on the shoulders, and a magnifying glass in the hand mean that Sherlock Holmes is afoot. The demand for Sherlock Holmes stories, both original and derivative, has been unrelenting ever since this intellectual action hero first appeared in London’s Strand Magazine in 1891. Untold numbers of novels, stage plays, films, radio dramas, and television programs have used the Holmes character both seriously and in parody. However, the following case offers something that has never been seen before: Sherlock Holmes coming to life and taking his place on history’s stage.

FROM FICTION TO HISTORY

This is a true story about something that is fundamentally untrue, the career of Sherlock Holmes. How can there be a true story about a fictional character invented by an amiable country doctor and alive only in the imaginations of his fans? “Elementary, my dear reader,” as Holmes himself might say.

The truth of this story lies not in the existence of the character but in the influence the character has had on real events and real people. This is a case of a fictional detective being so influential that he has moved beyond the realm of literature and into the reality of history. A few years after the Sherlock Holmes character was first presented to the public, he came to life not as a living individual but as a force in human events. As you will see, there is nothing supernatural afoot.

Although it rarely happens, it is unquestionably true that fictional characters can play critical roles in historical events. Perhaps the most telling single example of this phenomenon is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This depiction of the cruelty of slavery did much to create the political climate that led to the U.S. Civil War of 1861–1865. Consequently, when wartime President Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe for the first time in 1863, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin specifically as abolitionist propaganda, to influence the national debate over slavery, but Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) did not have any such high motives in mind when he conceived Sherlock Holmes. The author was a struggling young physician with few patients and consequently a lot of time on his hands. His marginal medical practice gave him the free time to write a story about a new kind of detective, one who would treat crime as physicians treated disease: by combining modern science with ancient logic.

CONCEIVED AS POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT

Conan Doyle’s goal was simply to write a popular entertainment that would supplement the income from his medical practice. In this he would be bitterly disappointed—if only initially. He had already published more than two dozen short stories, but he was unable to interest a regular publisher in the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel, A Study in Scarlet. After several rejections, his only option was to sell it outright to a magazine—for only £25, less than $3,000 today. Thus Holmes made his debut as one feature among many in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887—hardly an impressive start for what would become the single most popular and best-loved literary creation of all time.

The novel proved popular enough that it appeared as a book in London in 1888 and in a U.S. edition in 1890. However, Conan Doyle made nothing from these books, as he had been required to assign all rights to Beeton’s. Meanwhile, he went on to new writing projects that did not include Holmes. But then the United States came to the rescue, and Holmes was resurrected.

Because the United States did not have a law governing international copyrights until mid-1891, British authors, who conveniently wrote in English, were easily and frequently pirated. As a result, even though he was not paid for it, some of Conan Doyle’s short stories as well as the first Holmes novel were more widely read in the United States than in Great Britain. While pirates in the publishing trade effectively steal from authors by not paying them with cash, they at least pay them the compliment of selling their work to an expanding audience.

Conan Doyle’s growing reputation, following in large measure from this literary piracy, directly led to a momentous dinner invitation. The U.S. editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, was in England in early 1889 seeking to commission new stories for both the U.S. edition of the magazine and a new English version that would be published simultaneously. Thus he invited two promising young authors to dine with him at the Langham Hotel in London: Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde.

The buttoned-down provincial physician could hardly be more of a contrast to the flamboyant urbane wit long known for his outrageous dress. Nevertheless, the two seemed to get on splendidly with each other and with Stoddart. The dinner was such a success that by its end, each author had agreed to provide a new novel that would be first published in the magazine. Conan Doyle would produce another Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Sign of the Four (1890). His new friend Oscar Wilde, whose great plays were still to come, would create his classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

This literary dinner was a satisfactory feast in every respect. Conan Doyle would later honor and advertise the Langham Hotel by giving it a role in several of his stories, including The Sign of the Four. This is an early example of what Hollywood now calls product placement.

Further food for the imagination is the oft-made suggestion that one of the characters in The Sign of the Four, Thaddeus Sholto, bears a decided resemblance to Wilde in that he described his house as “an oasis of art in the howling desert of South London,” considered himself a man of “refined tastes,” and sought to “seldom come in contact with the rough crowd.” But we mustn’t make too much of this, as Conan Doyle frequently took characteristics from people he knew and assigned them to his fictional characters. This was nowhere more true than with Holmes himself—whose powers of deduction were based on one of Conan Doyle’s medical school professors, Joseph Bell, who could deduce the occupations of patients just by looking at their clothes, posture, complexion, and deformities. For example, someone with a notch in a tooth might be a tailor, because the notch was created by the constant biting off of thread. A man whose trousers were unusually worn down on the inner thigh might be a shoemaker, because that is where he held the shoe as he worked on it. This proclivity for taking a small fact and deducing from it a larger conclusion became one of the best-loved features of each Sherlock Holmes story.

The second Holmes novel enjoyed the same kind of limited success as the first—a respectable reception when it was included in a quality magazine, followed by equally respectable sales when it was published in book form. Nothing foretold the superstardom that was awaiting Conan Doyle’s imaginary friend.

SHERLOCK HOLMES BECOMES A SUPERSTAR

Sherlock Holmes is the star not only of sixty stories (fifty-six short stories and four novels) by his creator, but of countless imitative stories and novels, stage plays, radio dramas, television series, and movies from the silent era onward.

This multimedia powerhouse, unique among literary characters, has spawned an enormous and ever-increasing number of articles and books that analyze his exploits and biography as if he were an actual historical figure. Indeed, today there are thousands of followers of the life and times of Holmes organized into local associations or societies across the globe, ranging from the equivalent of movie star fan clubs to the most serious academic groups. They continue to publish in print and on the Internet everything from trivia to very thoughtful academic papers.

Holmes, whose creator died in 1930, has never been more alive and active than he is today. After a few difficult years finding his audience, Holmes became a literary and cultural superstar in 1891 and has continued to sell well in bookstores and at the box office ever since. What did it? How did a character in two middling successful novels jump to superstar status almost overnight? The inherent merit of Conan Doyle’s prose and the attractiveness of the character are obvious reasons. However, these reasons were fully obvious in the novels, so merit alone is not a sufficient explanation. In modern terms, the character had to be relaunched in a different format using a new medium. The format was the short story, and the medium was Strand Magazine.

Conan Doyle decided to put his unique character into a series of short stories that, although they would have continuing characters, would be complete in themselves. This avoided the problem so common with the serialization of long novels, such as those of Charles Dickens, that readers might be confused or lose interest if they missed an issue of the magazine.

Within only two weeks, Conan Doyle produced “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) and “The Red Headed League” (1891) and sent them off to the Strand, the most popular general-interest magazine in London. One key to the magazine’s huge circulation was its policy of publishing pictures on almost every page. Thus, when the first Holmes stories were accepted, an illustrator was commissioned to draw scenes for the tales. The stories, with illustrations by Sidney Paget, were an immediate and enormous success. They made the Holmes stories, in effect, an early form of what is now called a graphic novel. Two dozen stories were completed over the next two years. They were then published as collections in two volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893).

The stories became immensely popular in the United States for the same reasons they were loved in England. However, another factor was also at work in the United States. Because of the copyright situation, cheap pirated editions of the collections were readily available. Newspapers as well as magazines freely published the stories, inadvertently giving them an aura of authenticity. After all, they were written as if they were first-person accounts from a distinguished British physician, Dr. John H. Watson. No wonder Holmes was thought to be real! Real or not, within a year of the first stories appearing, Holmes was one of the most famous imaginary faces on the face of the earth.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FAME

This worldwide fame is critical to the premise of this case, because it is Holmes’s early and continuing superstar persona that facilitated one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century: the increase in manufacturing productivity and standard of living brought about through scientific management.

The first escapades of Sherlock Holmes and his friend, Dr. Watson, purportedly the author of the Holmes stories, appeared more than two decades before the theory of scientific management was first presented in 1910. To fully appreciate the significance of these dates, one must first appreciate the impact of Sherlock Holmes in his time. He was big. He was as big a phenomenon in his time as Elvis or the Beatles or Harry Potter in other times. He captured the attention of the international public so much that when Conan Doyle allowed Holmes to die after several dozen stories, he was forced, by popular demand, to resurrect him.

Although Sherlock Holmes never helped to start a war, he was instrumental in jump-starting one of the most pivotal peacetime events in world history. Holmes was the fictional brain behind the real-life business efficiency movement, eventually known as scientific management, of the early twentieth century.

So what has this got to do with public administration? Only that the public-sector version of this movement for business efficiency that grew out of scientific management in turn grew into the emerging field of public administration.

THE FIRST MODERN CONSULTANT

Sherlock Holmes is now so famous that describing someone as “a Sherlock Holmes” has long meant that he is a brilliant detective, just as describing someone as “a Napoleon” has long meant that he is a highly skilled military officer (or, perhaps, merely a short one). Holmes’s fame is important here because of what he was famous for: in his own words from A Study in Scarlet (1887), “I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective.” At first he was a singular figure in plying his trade, but he became the inspiration to untold thousands more who modeled themselves on him: some to detect crime as well as others who would detect and solve business problems.

Today consultants are common. Business and governments hire them for a vast variety of specialized skills—accounting, engineering, computer services, management, and even ethics. The first consultants were oracles, or fortune tellers, in ancient Greece. This same term was adopted by legal specialists in ancient Rome and eventually applied to medical experts in England—the doctors to whom general practitioners sent their patients with problems needing advanced skills. Conan Doyle was just such a general practitioner in England when the first Sherlock Holmes tale was published in 1887.

Because Holmes was the kind of detective to whom other detectives, members of the police as well as private investigators, turned to when they were stumped, Conan Doyle made him a self-described consultant. This is critically important, because Holmes was the first modern consultant of any kind outside the field of medicine.

Obviously, smart people have always consulted, have always given advice. However, Holmes was the first to set up shop—yes, at 221B Baker Street—to sell his brainpower, his ability to theorize rapidly and think creatively, for a living. As he put it in A Study in Scarlet, “I depend upon them [his theories of detection] for my bread and cheese.” Holmes, in effect, created the world’s first self-cons...