PROPOSING AN EXECUTIVE GAZETTE
The committee on department methods, known to the public as the Keep commission, was the agency through which, about seven years ago, President Roosevelt hoped to reorganize and energize the government service in Washington.
The Keep commission organized for helpers twelve so-called assistant committees, their total membership being about seventy, all supposed to be experts in the several branches of inquiry assigned to them.
On one of these assistant committees, the one on "The organization of editorial work and an official gazette," the writer had the honor to serve.
We held more than one hundred meetings, and examined as witnesses almost if not quite every man and woman who had any official relation with the work of preparing manuscripts for printing. We learned after a while that the President wanted an official gazette, and expected us to devise the means of creating it. I think that nearly all the members from the start deemed the scheme impracticable and chimerical. It became clear that it would be a costly enterprise, and we could not find any department that had the money for it.
Soon after this Mr. Keep left Washington, and the Keep commission, though nominally still living, dwindled rapidly, and brought forth little if any more fruit.
The members of the assistant committees were left stranded, with desks full of unprinted manuscripts as the only results of their prolonged labors. From one of these desks I have withdrawn the report of a subcommittee of the assistant committee on the organization of editorial work and an official gazette. Though it was written half a dozen years ago, it seems that an element of interest yet remains in its proposal for the publication, as an alternative to the impracticable official gazette, of an executive gazette. This proposal has not had any exploitation whatever.
In the hope that it may in this way be brought to the general notice of persons interested in the methods of publication and preservation of the historical records of the government it is now offered for the consideration of the American Library Association.
The London Gazette, which is the model most generally thought of when the term official gazette is used, was begun in 1665, and may be looked upon as a survival of the pre-newspaper age, for though there were newspapers before the Gazette, they bore little resemblance to what we now know by that name, and the daily press—the significant part of the press of our day—was not born till a generation later. We may assume that when the Gazette was begun its semi-weekly issues were sufficient to carry all the official information that the government of that day wished to offer to its subjects. But this long since ceased to be true. The English government now has a host of publications which do not appear in either of the three Gazettes—London, Edinburgh, and Dublin—of the United Kingdom, nor in any of the multitude of gazettes which are issued in the various British dependencies, from Canada and Australia to Borneo and the Andaman Islands. The country has outgrown the London Gazette, and by its growth has been forced into that specialization and subdivision of its official publications which we see even more notably in our own country. No doubt for the Andaman Islands a monthly gazette covers the whole ground, everything being printed in it and no occasion being found for any other official publication whatever. This may be true of many small countries, but it is not conceivable for a great and growing country like ours.
The specialization of official publications seems to be an inevitable result of the growth of public interests and the public service. By recent methods documents are printed relating to special branches of the public service and sent only to those employed in such branches. Economy of both time and labor as well as economy in printing are thus promoted. This subdivision is carried out with much minuteness. The Daily Bulletin of the Railway Mail Service, relating solely to the affairs which its title indicates, is printed in Washington in an edition of 1,500 copies and supplied to all offices in the department and sent out to the different division superintendents throughout the country. These superintendents extract from it the matters which affect their divisions and redistribute these parts to their subordinates in general orders. Thus everybody in the postal service gets that information and those orders which he needs and he does not get and consequently does not waste any time upon that information and those orders which he does not need. The hydrographic office's weekly, Notice to Mariners, containing only the latest information as to aids and hindrances to navigation, would seem to be a sufficiently specialized publication to be supplied to sailors without further ado. Part of the edition is issued in the complete form, but economy and efficiency are further promoted by additional subdivision. The weekly publication, not a large one to begin with, is split into many parts, often a dozen or a score, and one of these leaflets is supplied to the mariner who needs information as to those waters only into which his own voyage will carry him. The Yearbook of Agriculture, the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum, the American Historical Association, the Chief of Engineers, the Chief of Ordnance, the Bureau of Education, and other publications which are made up of distinct papers or chapters that permit of separate publication, are split up and each chapter or paper printed in a pamphlet by itself, so that the authors and others who ask for copies of special papers may have these alone and the cost of supplying them with whole volumes thus be saved. Even pamphlets of moderate size, like the bulletins of the Department of Agriculture which report the proceedings of the conventions of official agricultural chemists, economic entomologists, and other bodies of government specialists, are split into fascicules with which the popular demand for information on special parts of the work of these scientific bodies may be met at least cost.
Any publication, by whatever name or in whatever form, which undertook to include all of these and the other and almost innumerable specialized publications of the government, and to have itself supplied to all who now receive the existing publications, would of necessity be of enormous bulk and be printed in an enormous edition, and it seems to your committee that it must break down of its own weight. We think it absolutely essential to the success of an official gazette that all of these specialized class publications should be most rigorously excluded from its pages. Specialization seems to be a natural and proper development of the public printing, and it would hardly be practicable, or wise if practicable, to arrest it.
For these reasons, your committee, in casting about for material which might properly and usefully be carried in an official gazette, should one be issued, has endeavored to choose that only which is of interest to all classes and not alone to any one class, whether in or out of the public service. The list which represents the judgment of the committee in this respect is still very long. We have not suggested the discontinuance of any publication on account of its inclusion in a gazette, because in all the letters we have received from public officials, and all the questions we have asked them, we have not yet found one who is of opinion that any publication now existing can be superseded by publication in a gazette without injury to the public service.
Opinion among officials as to a gazette is radically divided, the number for and against appearing to be about equal, though the adverse argument appears to be the stronger. Opinion in the committee is also widely divided, and we are unable to make a unanimous recommendation on the desirability or feasibility of issuing a gazette on the model of the London Gazette or of any other official gazette known to us.
Your committee, however, thinks it a duty to submit for consideration an alternative plan, based on a suggestion offered in one of the official letters received in reply to its inquiries. This alternative is an executive gazette, to contain all of the official papers and messages of the President and such other occasional matters of special and immediate importance as the President may think it advisable to have officially published. Such matter might perhaps at times be drawn from the diplomatic correspondence with other governments or from reports made by American ambassadors, ministers, or consuls, or from the findings or rulings of commissions or other official bodies or other sources for which no special method of official publication is now provided.
The weight of this suggestion lies in the fact that every word officially put forth by the chief executive is of universal interest and of historical import, and no official vehicle for its complete and authentic publication is now provided. It is printed in the Congressional Record, in the newspapers, on separate sheets, in the collected volumes of statutes, and sometimes not at all. These publications are so scattered and each different kind so incomplete that the most industrious librarian or other collector can never be sure that he has all. When the congressional compilation of the messages and papers of the Presidents from Washington to McKinley was made the originals were gathered from all sorts of public documents and old newspaper files and miscellaneous sources. When it chanced that some of the old papers were preserved in public offices the compilers—especially at first—did not know where to look for them. That compilation as finally made is commendable, but nobody can say that it is complete. It served, however, to demonstrate—what indeed all students knew before—that there is no place where all the official utterances of the head of the government may certainly be found. If they were all to be printed in one publication—if the faith of all Presidents were pledged that all official papers should be given publicity in one known publication, and if that publication were so published by volume and number that any historical student or collector might know to a certainty when he had secured all of these publications, then it seems to your committee that something of real moment would have been accomplished.
It is true that the publication of presidential messages in an executive gazette would contradict the unanimous opinion of the committee that any sort of an official gazette should be wholly colorless from a partisan point of view. Still, it seems of high state importance that all of the official utterances of the chief executive, without exception, should be collected and published in some known and accessible place. Whether this consideration is of more or less importance than that of keeping a gazette free from partisanship the committee does not undertake to decide. It submits the suggestion without expression of opinion on its own part.
The adjourned session of the government documents round table was called to order by Chairman Godard at 12:15 p. m. on Friday, June 27th. Mr. Carr, reporting for the special committee, reported certain resolutions, which were unanimously adopted and referred to the Council with the request that they be officially adopted by the Association and copies of the same be transmitted in official form to the joint committee on printing, the public printer, and the superintendent of documents.[12]
[12] For text of these resolutions see minutes of the Council, page 256.