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Revealing the overlooked agency that transformed presidential personnel management and modern federal governance.

A Presidential Civil Service offers a comprehensive and definitive study of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM). Established in 1939 following the release of Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee report, LOPM became a key milestone in the evolution of the contemporary executive-focused civil service.

The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science.

Roosevelt’s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt’s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency.

The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee’s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency’s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead.

Roosevelt’s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt’s LOPM.

A recent study published in the Journal of Library Administration draws a sobering conclusion: the accelerated exodus of library workers from the profession in the last several years is partially due to strained relationships between staff and their managers. Often, administrators and managers operate within structures that may encourage or enable poor managerial practices. This volume shines a light on a different path forward for the field, one that focuses on the people who work in libraries and how their managers can support them with empathy and skill.  Stemming from insights presented at the Conference on Academic Library Management (CALM), the contributors illustrate what person-centered management looks like in practice and point the way toward implementing this approach at readers’ institutions. This book

• incorporates a variety of institutional perspectives, including community colleges, technical and special colleges, liberal arts institutions, and large research universities;
• defines the concept of person-centered management in the context of libraries and explains why it offers such a valuable framework for improving workplace conditions;
• demonstrates why lack of workplace satisfaction and the low morale experience of library staff is often tied to the culture created by management;
• discusses building person-centered systems, interacting with student employees, setting healthy boundaries, and practicing reflection and self-care;
• shares positive, proactive management practices that create space for criticism, sharing of lived experiences, and a willingness to investigate and, if needed, make changes to the status quo; and
• explores such key topics as communication, working virtually, mentorship, intellectual humility, shared leadership, and many others.