Cutting through the red tape
I combed through my sketchbooks to share my collection of doodles about committees, red tape, bureaucracy, and more. And I did it all by myself.
Committees
Congress’ committees had committees — and it was a giant mess.
Founding Father Robert Livingston stepped in to propose a more streamlined approach.
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Committee of Postponed Matters
Best committee name ever? Discuss.
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“Committees take the punch out of war.”
Sign in Lord Beaverbrook’s office (Minister of War Production under Winston Churchill)
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“I am not a committee man. I am the cat who walks alone.”
I hear you, Lord Beaverbrook.
Red tape
“The most intolerably slow of all men who ever adored red tape.”
Theodore Roosevelt on Charles Lyman, a fellow police commissioner. Nobody insults like Theodore Roosevelt. Nobody.
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“‘Red tape’ is killing men at Montauk, and … the man at the head of the War Department is so incompetent to do the cutting that teh situation must continue… until the last possible victim is dead or a new head is found to grapple with the problem.”
New York Times, reporting on opinions of former Army apologists.
Bureaucracy
Zachary Taylor had no patience for the “bureaucratic pettyfogging” of the higher-ups in the military.
He believed they focused too much on the tiny, insignificant details.
Etc.
“… nothing in them worth the time consumed in the perusal of them…”
John Quincy Adams felt bombarded with unnecessary communications.
__________
“They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”
Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, on a couple of his colleagues.
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Roosevelt was “kicked upstairs” to keep him out of trouble.
Outraged insurance companies and their powerful lobbyists hoped the meddlesome Governor Roosevelt would be safer as an impotent VP. Oops. That backfired.
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“My idea is that we must centralize ideas but decentralize execution.”
Herbert Hoover as head of the Food Administration… winning the war through food. And also a reduction of bureaucracy.
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“A locomotive bottomside up on the tracks with the wheels revolving at full speed.”
General Arthur MacArthur, describing his boss, General Otis (in the words of Robert Merry, “always in motion, he seldom moved forward”.)
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“I saw the necessity of quitting a wreck, which could not but sink all who would cling to it.”
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison on Edmond-Charles Genêt… and his meddling in U.S. politics.
The doodles and cures in this post were inspired by the following books:
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, by Robert W. Merry
Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest, by K Jack Bauer
John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life, by Paul C. Nagel
Herbert Hoover: A Life, by Glen Jeansonne
The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, by Lindsay M. Chervinsky
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, by Joseph J. Ellis
