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PENDLETON HERRING, 1903-2004
Fred I. Greenstein & Austin Ranney

PG [ 1 | 2 ]

Pendleton Herring, a pioneering student of American politics and influential foundation executive, died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on August 17, 2004, at the age of 100. He had two successive careers, first as a leading political scientist, then as head of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a capacity in which he played a major part in fostering the burgeoning of the social and behavioral sciences in the post-World War II years.

Herring also had a strong commitment to public service. During the war, he worked with the Bureau of the Budget as an advisor on the Records of War Administration and on advisory committees for the army, navy, and air force. He was awarded the Navy Citation and Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1946. His most important public contribution was as the principal advisor to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal’s associate Ferdinand Eberstadt in a study of the feasibility of unifying the armed services. The Eberstadt report was a major determinant of the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency.1

Edward Pendleton Herring was born on October 27, 1903 in Baltimore, Maryland. (He later dropped his first name.) Herring had a formative early political memory of being taken to the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913. He received his A.B. in English in 1925 and Ph.D. in political science in 1928 from the Johns Hopkins University. He embarked on a graduate education with a view to entering the diplomatic corps, an interest sparked by his world travels as a mess boy and cook on merchant ships during college vacations. During his graduate studies, Herring was taught constitutional law by Frank J. Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association.

When the time came to select a dissertation topic, Herring proposed an interview-based study of the activities of lobbies in the nation’s capital. When the earlier Johns Hopkins graduate student Woodrow Wilson had conducted the study published in 1885 as Congressional Government, he did not see fit to visit Capitol Hill. Herring’s proposal, he recollected in his APSA oral history, prompted a deliberation on the part of the faculty about whether interviewing “came under the rubric of scholarly research.” He reports that after being given a go-ahead, “I simply wandered around the congressional corridors as if I were the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland . . . I remember distinctly knocking on a very large door that was opened by a little man with a florid countenance. He invited me in, and it was only after we had been talking for some time and he had likened lobbyists to coyotes that I realized he was John Nance Garner.”2 Herring’s dissertation, which was published in 1929 as Group Representation Before Congress, has taken a place alongside Peter Odegard’s Pressure Politics (1928) and E. E. Schattschneider’s Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (1935) as the foundation of the study of pressure groups as a field of political science. It also paved the way for field studies of political behavior in Washington and other settings.

Herring was a member of Harvard University’s Department of Government from 1928 to 1947, and secretary of Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration from 1936 to 1947. During his years at Harvard, he published six books, each of which had a significant impact. Following Group Representation Before Congress, he published Public Administration and the Public Interest, an early analysis of the interactions among government agencies and their clienteles, and Federal Commissioners: A Study of Their Careers and Qualifications, an exploration of the backgrounds of the members of federal regulatory commissions. Both appeared in 1938.

Herring’s next two works were more general in scope and impact. Presidential Leadership: The Political Relations of Congress and the Chief Executive (1940) is a searching analysis of the presidency in action. The Politics of Democracy: American Political Parties in Action (1940), remains a principal source of ideas and inspiration for those who hold the view that the United States needs a politics of moderation and consensus rather than one of sharp choice between irreconcilable alternatives and that the pragmatic, decentralized parties of American tradition are more likely to meet that need than the unified, disciplined British-style parties admired by advocates of “responsible party government.” Herring’s final book, The Impact of War: Our American Democracy Under Arms (1941), is an account of the military buildup that was in progress in the period before Pearl Harbor and an early contribution to the study of civil-military relations. It was this work that brought Herring to the attention of Eberstadt.

After the war Herring resigned from Harvard to join the staff of the Carnegie Corporation. In 1948, he became president of the Social Science Research Council, founded in 1923 to promote the organization and funding of social science research. Herring held the SSRC presidency from 1948 to 1968. In those twenty years the Council became the prime organization shaping the nature of research in most of the social sciences. At the beginning of Herring’s presidency the annual budget of the SSRC was under $500,000. When he left office it was nearly $2 million.

Under Herring’s leadership, the growing resources of the Council were used to pursue two main goals. The first was to improve the quality of social science knowledge by encouraging researchers to acquire more and better data, analyze them by more rigorous quantitative methods, and develop systematic theories with predictive power. The second was to focus and report research in ways that would make it accessible to public policy makers. The Council worked mainly through committees of scholars, chosen and encouraged by Herring and his staff. Among the more noteworthy were the committees on mathematics in social science research, economic stability, and biological bases of social behavior. In Herring’s own discipline, the committee on political behavior and its derivative committees on comparative politics and governmental and legal processes played key roles in the “behavioral revolution” that transformed political science beginning in the 1950s.

PG [ 1 | 2 ]