Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley are two deceased members of Congress the world loves to hate. Their principal legislative achievement, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, continues to evoke such disapproving adjectives as “infamous” and “notorious.” To most Americans, that act, which incidentally remains the fundamental tariff law of the U.S., conjures up images of rising tariff barriers, beggar-thy-neighbor nationalism, and ruinous trade wars.

In January 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt submitted an ambitious plan for administrative reform of the national government to Congress. Roosevelt's reorganization bill was based on a report produced by the President's Committee on Administrative Management–a panel of three “specialists in public administration” appointed by Roosevelt in March 1936 and led by Louis Brownlow, who was perhaps the best-known expert in the field. The Brownlow recommendations produced intense debate in Congress; and the reorganization proposals were ultimately defeated in March 1938 in what historian William Leuchtenburg has described as “the worst rebuff Roosevelt was ever to suffer” in his twelve years as president. The public aspects of the battle over the Brownlow proposals have already received extensive scholarly attention. Some of the most important skirmishes in this battle, however, were not fought in public, and even after half a century they remain largely obscured from public view. One such skirmish was the contest within the academic community about the recommendations on administrative reform that were to be put before Congress.

One of the United States' most enduring social policy conflicts in the nineteenth century concerned the controversy over the provision of municipal outdoor relief. J In the last third of the century, New York City, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia abolished the program. The actual political struggles over outdoor relief, however, have not been closely studied. Most accounts assume that the fierce opposition of the charity reformers to outdoor relief caused this long-standing social provision to be abolished. Instead of a story of “reform success,” this study of the outdoor relief conflicts in New York City between 1874 and 1898 documents the reformers' long years of frustration and ineffectiveness in the city's relief politics.