Mr. Walter Drost, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, used this collection before it was processed for general use. These are the comments of Mr. Drost after he viewed the manuscripts:
In the person of William H. Allen the historian of social institutions will find a point of contact between the reform movement for “efficiency” in government and the movement for “efficiency” in education, particulars as the latter applied to the organization, management and finance, and to the curriculum.
Allen dealt in facts; indeed, his creed to justify payment for services rendered was upon “what facts are worth.” Facts were the end-product of his municipal reform efforts and facts identified for him the means of the educational process and in consequence became the object of his textbook evaluation. Facts were, for Allen, the means to efficiency.
William Harvey Allen was born in LeRoy, Minnesota on February 9, 1874. His father, John D. Allen, was the town's pioneer hardware dealer and a member of the Minnesota Legislature from Mower County in the years 1878 to 1882. William Allen attended the public schools of LeRoy and, from 1887 to 1891, Northfield Academy at Northfield, Minnesota. In 1891 he enrolled in Carleton College but left the following year to teach the “higher room” of a Minnesota small town school. After two years of teaching experience he entered the University of Chicago (in 1894), and was graduated with the A.B. degree in 1897. Allen remained at Chicago for two years of graduate study in economics under Thorstein Veblen and James L. Laughlin. During this period he spent some time in study at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig. He left Chicago to accept a fellowship in economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1899 and received the degree Doctor of Philosophy there in 1900. His dissertation, “Rural Sanitary Administration in Pennsylvania,” was done in the Department of Political Economy under Simon N. Patten.
Allen accepted appointment as Instructor in Public Law at the University of Pennsylvania for the following academic year. In January, 1901, he was also appointed co-editor, with Prof. L.S. Rowe, of the “Municipal Department” in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Allen continued as co-editor for the next two years.
In September, 1901, William Allen moved to Jersey City as Secretary of the New Jersey State Charities Aid Association. There he founded in February, 1902, the New Jersey Review of Charities and Corrections, as the official publication of the Association. Early in 1903 he accepted appointment as General Agent of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a social welfare agency dating back to 1843. The A.I.C.P. organized the Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children in 1906 and Allen was named secretary of the Committee under the general chairmanship of circa C. Burlingham.
The New York Bureau of Municipal Research came into existence in 1907 as an outgrowth of a New York reform party under G. Fulton Cutting, The Citizen's Union, and Allen. Frederick Cleveland and Henry Bruere were named managing directors; Allen in the capacity of Secretary, responsible for publicity. He chose as his media a four to six page post-card size weekly bulletin under the banner Efficient Democracy. In content it was an accumulation of short “squibs” in varied type-face. During the years of his association with the Bureau of Municipal Research, 1907-1914, the budgetary problems and accounting procedures of municipal government were matters of first concern to Allen. In 1911 he organized the Training School for Public Service within the Bureau to provide field training in government research to candidates through participation on Bureau projects. Of the students enrolled in the “School” over the three year period, 1911 to 1914, many became leaders in municipal reform movements of the subsequent two decades.
Wisconsin's newly created Board of Public Affairs engaged the Training School for Public Service to conduct a survey of rural schools in 1911, the normal schools in 1912, and the State University in 1914; all under Allen's supervision. While the normal school survey was in progress the Trustees of the Bureau engaged Abraham Flexner to conduct a survey of the Training School itself, and a year later, while Allen was in Wisconsin conducting his survey of the University, the Bureau was reorganized excluding both Allen and the “Training School.”
Allen returned to New York from Wisconsin in the fall of 1915 to organize the Institute for Public Service. The Institute came under the exclusive endowment of Julius Barnes, wheat magnate of Duluth and New York, whose funds were augmented only by such services as the organization was able to sell. During the period from 1915 to 1924 the Institute concentrated on the problems of the schools. The publications of the Institute followed the familiar four to six page, post-card size format under the titles, Public Service, High Spots of Education, and Educational Review of Reviews. The Public Service Bulletins continued to appear through the years as a weekly or biweekly publication until Allen's death in 1963.
Barnes withdrew his support of the Institute in 1923, and its activities continued on a self-sustaining basis. During the next several years Allen turned his attention to inequities of assessment, particularly as Rockefeller properties in New York City appeared to be under-assessed.
The economic depression in the years of the Thirties sharply curtailed the activities of the Institute. For three of these years, 1934 to 1937, Allen was employed as Secretary of the Municipal Civil Service Commission of New York City and was able to devote his time to the Institute only in “after-hours.” During this period he managed to keep up the regular publication of Public Service, but little else. In the 1940's Allen became interested in “high spotting” the teaching of history and civics in America. The Volker Fund of Kansas City subsidized the Institute for Public Service from the late Forties through the Fifties in support of a continuing project of auditing school textbooks for the facts presented therein. This was Allen's last major project.
The papers of this collection are technically those of the Institute for Public Service, but in actual fact they are those of the Institute's only director, William H. Allen. They were “thinned” once, in the late 1920's, when the offices of the Institute were moved from midtown to downtown Manhattan. Several of the items carry Allen's notation or underline in ballpoint suggesting some editing or sorting in the post World War II period. A considerable amount of material relates to New York City municipal politics, to Allen's relations with the Volker Fund and to various school projects, notably World War I indoctrination material and to a current events paper for classroom use in the early Twenties. His correspondence with former students of the Training School for Public Service, over a period of a quarter of a century, offers interesting insight into the municipal reform movement. Correspondence with William McAndrew, Superintendent of Schools for Chicago; A. E. Winship, editor of the Journal of Education; Lewis R. Alderman of the Portland, Oregon schools; and Julius Barnes helps supply perspective to the educational controversies of the day. To this may be added other files relating to Allen's long standing feuds with George Strayer, William Maxwell, and Charles Judd. Some of the most interesting material is found in manuscripts of chapters for a projected autobiography prepared initially in the early Forties.
Much of the material for the period before 1915 remained in the files of the Bureau of Municipal Research when Allen parted company with that organization. In 1950 he tried to recover these files of letters but was informed that the Bureau had destroyed them. The material in the collection from this early period is therefore more selective and more closely tied to Allen's personal career. Included is a large file of clippings from his public utterances on behalf of the New Jersey State Charities Aid Association, The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children, and the Bureau of Municipal Research. There is considerable material relating to New York philanthropic efforts, notably those of George H. Schrader and Mrs. E. H. Harriman and to Allen's contacts with the Charity Organization Society. There are also extensive clipping files reflecting a wide range of public reaction to Allen's books in behalf of the efficiency movement. And, as one might expect, the files relating to the University of Wisconsin Survey and the reorganization of the Bureau of Municipal Research are large and detailed.
