Raymond Blaine Fosdick (1883-1972), lawyer, public servant, and author, was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a high school principal. Of Puritan descent, Fosdick began his higher education at Colgate College but transferred to Princeton, where one of his intellectual idols, Woodrow Wilson, was president. Fosdick received his B.A. degree in 1905 and his M.A. in 1906 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. New York Law School granted him the LL.B. degree in 1908, after which he went to work for New York City Mayor George B. McClellan. At first assistant corporation counsel, Fosdick two years later became commissioner of accounts.
The next notable event in his life came when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on behalf of the Rockefeller Bureau of Social Hygiene, asked him to make a broad study of police organizations in Europe. On the basis of a few previous meetings, two connected with an investigation of the white-slave traffic in prostitutes and one with a Bible class, Rockefeller had singled out Fosdick, a green attorney, for a demanding project. Fosdick immersed himself in the task and in 1915, European Police Systems was published. From his autobiography, Chronicle of a Generation:
My itinerary took me to practically every large city in Europe except those in Russia …. In every city I visited I tried to see the police in actual operation …. The outstanding impression I received from my study in Europe was that police administration there was a distinct career which attracted the best brains obtainable …. Its elaborate training schools for recruits had no counterpart in the United States.
Fosdick’s compliments continued to flow and American police appeared amateurish in comparison. Naturally, the topic stirred immediate interest at home but gathered an even larger audience in Europe. An acute observer and fluent writer, Fosdick had proved his worth to such an extent that Rockefeller asked him to write a companion volume, American Police Systems, published in 1920. This time Fosdick visited seventy-two cities and, with what must have seemed a poison pen to the American police, indicted the whole system of law enforcement in this country:
In America the student of police travels from one political squabble to another, too often from one scandal to another. He finds a shifting leadership of mediocre calibre . . . there is little conception of policing as a profession or as a science to be matured and developed.
Hardly finished yet, Fosdick continued:
Every police department is a graveyard of projects and improvements which, had they been developed to maturity, would have reconstructed the police work of the city …. We have, indeed, little to be proud of.
He did explain, however, that in European cities the volume of crime was much lower and therefore more manageable. European populations were more homogeneous and less inclined to crime caused by assimilation barriers. With less crime to combat and people tied through kinship, European police could achieve a higher standard of professionalism. No matter, the word was out that, according to Fosdick, American police were decidedly inferior to European.
Criminal Justice in Cleveland, published in 1922, did not soften the blows dealt by the earlier topics. Fosdick had joined ten other writers, such as Felix Frankfurter and Roscoe Pound, to conduct a “scientific study” of criminal justice in that city. Fosdick had, if anything, sharpened his criticism:
Lack of intelligence and imagination in Cleveland’s police work is shown in the ragged character of the internal arrangements of the department…. Inadequate equipment adds to this appearance of raggedness . . . . Official lethargy lies behind much that is distressing in this picture.
Cleveland and other American police departments (guilty in absentia) bristled at his denunciations, but the glaring public attention was impetus enough for most police departments to start on the uphill road to improvement.
Once again Rockefeller convinced Fosdick to take on a challenging project. He was to make a thorough study of how various countries of the world handled the sale of alcohol. In collaboration with Albert L. Scott, Fosdick wrote Toward Liquor Control, published in 1933. It presented the arguments for and against selling liquor through regulation by license or through a state authority system (preferred by Fosdick and Scott), though they admitted that no system was “final.” Rockefeller’s specific request for studies of the liquor business in Canada and certain European countries filled the appendices. The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933, and this topic written in anticipation of repeal, relieved much of the workload police had shouldered during the thirteen years of Prohibition.
Fosdick’s substantial contributions to policing were only one side of his career. He lived a long life full of other accomplishments and honors. In 1916, he rode with “Black ” Pershing in Mexico against Pancho Villa. In 1917, he observed military training methods in Canada, England, and France. What he learned went into Keeping Our Fighters Fit (1918), written with E. F. Allen, a topic made necessary because America had not fought in a full-scale conflict since the Civil War. After World War I, President Wilson chose him to represent the United States at the League of Nations; Fosdick resigned when the Senate failed to ratify the Covenant (1920). By 1930, he had been elected trustee of seven prestigious public service organizations: the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Rockefeller General Education Board, the International Education Board, the Spelman Fund, the Brookings Institution, and the National Institute of Public Administration. In 1936, he became president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board. Entrusted with nearly $200 million dollars, he administered the money prudently, much of it going for educational grants and disease prevention research.
The author of fourteen topics, Fosdick struck people as ”a good conversationalist, genial, witty, and generous.” Of course, his having been at the center of so much turbulent history enhanced his storytelling. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal and two doctorates, accorded the rank of commander of the French Legion of Honor, elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a member of the American Philosophical Society, he had much to be proud of. Tragedy befell him in 1932 when his first wife shot and killed their two children before taking her own life. At the apogee of his public career in 1936 he married a second time, to Elizabeth Miner.
