Mordecai Lee - Fdrs Budgeteer and Manager-In-Chief: Harold D. Smith, 1939-1945

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FDRS BUDGETEER AND
MANAGER-IN-CHIEF

Harold D. Smith, 19391945

MORDECAI LEE

Cover image: Harold D. Smith, Director, Bureau of the Budget (19391946), undated. Image 51-P-27, Folder 51.14, Portraits of BOB and OMB Directors, Still Pictures 192177 (General), Record Group 51 (Office of Management and Budget), Still Pictures Branch, National Archives II, College Park, MD. Credit: National Archives.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2021 State University of New York

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Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Lee, Mordecai, 1948 author.

Title: FDRs budgeteer and manager-in-chief : Harold D. Smith, 19391945 / Mordecai Lee.

Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021024216 | ISBN 9781438485331 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438485355 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Harold D., 18981947. | Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 18821945. | United States. Bureau of the BudgetOfficials and employeesBiography. | BudgetUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Finance, PublicUnited StatesHistory1933- | World War, 19391945FinanceUnited States. | United StatesPolitics and government19331945.

Classification: LCC HJ2051 .L398 2021 | DDC 352.4/80973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024216

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Abbreviations

Preface

It was November 1944. President Franklin Roosevelt had just, incredibly, been reelected to an unprecedented fourth term. As was the custom for presidential appointees, Budget Director Harold D. Smith submitted a pro forma letter of resignation. This routine act derived from the traditional political custom giving a reelected president a clean slate to reconstruct and revitalize his administration in preparation for a new term in office. Yet Smith has become a largely forgotten figure in contemporary history.

The motivation for this book was curiosity and proximity. The curiosity came from hearing so much about Smith during my doctoral studies in public administration in the 1970s at Syracuse Universitys Maxwell School. His writings about the importance of budgeting seemed to be reprinted in so many anthology textbooks and on nearly every course reading list. Then he seemed to largely disappear from literature. I wondered about that. The sense of proximity came from running across him so frequently in my previous examinations of some of the other original entities of the new Executive Office of the President (EOP), which FDR had created in 1939 based on the recommendations of the Brownlow Committee. Without any particular grand design, I had profiled the Office of Government Reports and its director, Lowell Mellett (2005); the Liaison Office for Personnel Management and its head, William McReynolds (2016a); and the Office for Emergency Management and its officer, Wayne Coy (2018a). In all three cases, the close working relations that these three officials had with Smith stood out as one of their key levers of power. Their names appeared regularly in Smiths daily calendars for meetings, phone calls, and working lunches. If Smith and BOB were working on something relating to their jurisdictions, whether these be budgets, reorganizations, executive orders, or the like, Smith made sure his EOP counterparts would always be consulted. Generally, if any had a major reservation, Smith and BOB would hold off on any final action until their concerns were dealt with. I wanted to know more about him and the agency he had molded nearly from scratch. Again, I wondered why he seemingly became largely overlooked in the more recent literature. With this inquiry into Smith and his BOB, I have now unintentionally profiled the leaders of four of the six original units of FDRs Executive Office of the President. The other two were the White House Office (consisting of the six administrative assistants [AAs] to the president who were expected to have a passion for anonymity) and the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). The former entity would be impossible to profile because it was not an