Newspaper Page Text
N the bureau of supplies and accounts
o’, .the United States navy at Washing
ton some surprising changes have
been made in the past year in methods
of doing business. The bureau is the
business office of the navy. Also it is
the butcher, the baker, the banker, the
tailor and the grocer of the navy. It
pays out some $145,000,000 a year. It
saves Jack’s money for him and the
I savings bank it operates has deposits
aggregating $253,000. It operates two great clothing
factories, one at Brooklyn and the other at Charles
ton, S. C. In another aspect it is one of the biggest
purchasing agencies in the country.
So remarkable have been its achievements in the
twelvemonth that many requests have come to it
recently from business establishments, public and
private, for information as to its new methods.
The spirit behind the change is that of a boyish
looking, wide-eyed, ever-smiling officer, who, jusl
forty-five years old —and he does not look it —holds
the rank and draws the pay of a rear admiral, he
being paymaster general of the navy and chief of
the bureau. Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan he is
to outsiders. Mr. McGowan is the form of address
he insists upon within the bureau. But in the navy
generally, by all ranks and all grades, he is dubbed,
behind his back of course, Sammy McGowan.
In the 14 months he has been paymaster general
he has made over his bureau. What is more, he has
secured the hearty and enthusiastic support of the
entire force. That, to anyone who knows how any
government organization is wedded to precedent, is
amazing.
Somewhat given to the making of epigrams in his
instructions, oral and written, Admiral McGowan
has uttered two that give a hint of the predominat
ing ideas behind his reforms. “Make it bureau with
a small b and navy with a big N,” is one, and
“Remember that the stores exist for the fleet, not
the fleet for the stores.’’
The paymaster general and his bureau of supplies
and accounts have their offices in the great pile
known as the state, war and navy building, on
Pennsylvania avenue, flanking the White House on
the west. When the building was erected some
forty years ago it was the largest office building
in the world. Each corridor in it has the appear
ance of a battalion of barrooms, for each of the
many corridor doors has its middle two-thirds
masked by a shutter door. The rooms are all inter
communicating.
The paymaster general’s office is the end one in
a suite of five rooms. Across the hall are seven
more rooms. In the navy annex building, in a street
near by, are some more offices of the bureau.
When Paymaster General McGowan took over the'
job he inaugurated at once a clean-up campaign,
Down from the walls came the dusty old pictures.
Bookcases and file cases went out. Current and
absolutely necessary bureau files went into one
room in a set of steel vertical containers, for
general purposes, and in the purchasing end,
across the hall, they likewise were reduced.
Private libraries also went out. Upstairs the
navy department maintains a splendid naval li
brary, and this is available for all purposes.
“Abolish roll-top desks,” was the word. Where
fiat-top desks were not available the department
carpenters took off the roll tops. Since then
standard office furniture has been adopted for
the entire bureau.
All intercommunicating doors in the suites
were taken off the hinges. Walls were painted
in light colors. Then the chief of each room or
division chief was required to put his desk in
the middle of the room with his force grouped
about him. Now the paymaster general can
stand in his room and look down the line and
see exactly what is going on.
But that isn’t exactly the point. The object
is not to keep an eye on the people so much as
it Is to convey the idea of unity. The division
chief who, sequestered in his own little nest,
might be tempted to write a letter to the chief
next door, doesn’t do it under these conditions.
He says, “Say, Bill, how about so and so?" or
goes over and discusses it at close range.
Stationery in use was reduced to the fewest
possible simple kinds.
On a shelf handy to the paymaster general’s
hands is a book some 14 inches long by 18 inches
■wide. In it is all the information that once oc
cupied a big flieroom. This information pertains
•to the present duty and availability for sea or
shore duty, as the case may be, of all of the 230
officers making up the pay corps.
The pages of the book are faced with trans
parent celluloid. When a pay officer is sent on a
cruise his name and the essential date are in
scribed on a typewritten slip and inserted at the
bottom of the section devoted to pay officers on
sea duty. Place by place the slip moves up au
tomatically, and in this way one may observe
at a glance who is due for shore duty and who
for sea duty as, under the law, for every two,
yeirs of shore duty a pav officer must take three
years of sea duty.
1 And thus with all records. No effort has been
spared to reduce them all to the simplest and
most graphic form. The messenger force was
reorganized and a squad told off to act as express
messengers. This insures speed in the move
ment of papers from d«sk to desk and to the
secretary’s office. No paper remains more than
16 minutes awaiting transmission.
One of the very first things Paymaster General
voiii: ' /
1W» V i^ ~ J
'W^ - /
\ HL / /
^<__x^
^yz^z^z? ^zz^z^z^GfoKazr
McGowan did was to put a stop to promiscuous
letter writing. The true bureaucrat dearly loves
to write letters. He thinks he is at his best
when he is writing letters for the chief to sign,
division heads dictating many of the letters
which take the bureau chief’s signature. It grati
fies the soul of the bureaucrat to grow arrogant
and sarcastic in such dictation.
Nothing of that sort is tolerated by Admiral
McGowan. He insisted that letter writing be re
duced to a minimum and that nothing unkind or
contentious be put into a letter, especially to
another co-ordinate bureau. After his first gen
eral remarks on the subject he followed it up
with an “intrabureau order,” intrabureau orders
being one of his methods of reaching the person
nel of his organization.
But the striking changes in the service have
been worked in the detail of the machinery first
of accounting and then of supplying. Aboard
each one of Uncle Sam’s fighting craft is a pay
officer, the ship’s business manager. Each ship
has a base or home station at some navy yard.
At each navy yard is a storehouse, presided over
by a pay officer. It is the business of this store
house to provide for the ships attached to it.
Then there are fuel stations —coal and oil —also
under jurisdiction of the pay corps, for the pay
corps buys everything, save arms and ammuni
tion, needed by the ships and their personnel.
At present there are in the custody of the store
keepers general supplies worth $22,000,000, ex
elusive of fuel; $4,000,000 worth of clothing, and
$3,000,000 worth of provisions. The problem is
not alone to supply immediate needs, but to be
ready to supply emergency needs.
Just as an army moves on its belly, so is a
navy department on its supplies. When a por
tion of the fleet was dispatched the other day to
Santo Domingo it required a lot of things not
ordinarily carried. It got away promptly because
those particular things were forthcoming without
delay.
Always the bureau is in the market buying in
huge quantities on bids and under rigid specifica
tions, for delivery at the most advantageous
points. Two simple record books contain all the
data on current bids which have been opened,
and these are always open to public inspection.
But the characteristic of the purchasing system
is the simple and graphic methods used in keep
ing information up to date on existing stocks of
fuel and supplies and on current prices. Much
of this information is reduced to charts on sec
tional paper. Thus a simple chart tells in figures
and lines up to within 12 hours the exact quan
tity of coal and fuel on hand at any supply sta
tion, and another gives the same Information
as to the amount on‘board any ship of the navy.
THE BULLETIN. IRWINTON. GEORGIA.
method of securing and charting this information
become that it requires little labor and its cost,
by comparison with the results achieved in as
sisting in intelligent buying, is remarkably low.
Other charts, corrected daily, keep the bureau
informed as to the amount of stocks on hand
in every detail, not only at the storehouses but
on the ships as well. Since the navy through its
extensive wireless system is in constant com
munication with every ship afloat, the task of
keeping up these charts is not so difficult as it
seems.
Or the bunch of cards making up a ship’s com
prny also is producible on the instant.
Machines have reduced the amount of work in
the accounting section more than 50 per cent.
There are refinements of cost keeping in a mili
tary establishment that are not known in a
private establishment, for all expenditures must
conform to some specific item of an appropria
tion bill, and appropriations for the naval estab
lishment are found in three different appropria
tion acts.
Roughly speaking, 3,000,000 separate accounts
must be kept properly to meet the requirements
of the law and to furnish the information as to
costs, gross and detailed, needed. Imagine a
ledger with 3,000,000 accounts!
Here the cards and mechanism have come in to
the extent that half the number of men needed
15 months ago are now required to do the work.
In addition a great deal of new work has been
taken on.
The use of new card punching machines is re
sponsible for the larger economies.
The machine is so arranged that it sorts the
punched cards, arranges them in proper groups,
ascertains the totals of the figures indicated by
the punched holes and prints on a sheet the
results. It is accounting reduced to mechanism.
Os course the usual machines, such as adding
machines and the like, are part of the equipment.
In fact the whole trend of the reforms in this
section has been to reduce everything to a
mechanical basis.
The result is great economics in operation, in
creased efficiency, increased accuracy and in
creased speed. To the casual observer the strik
ing thing is the disappearance of books. Few
indeed are the books in sight, remarkably slim
the files. In other words, the accountancy sys
tem has been reduced to the simplest dimensions.
Ask any man, officer or civilian, in the estab
lishment how the whole organization has been
made over in such a time, and he instantly will
tell you that Sammy McGowan did it. And then
he will grow confidential and tell you what he
esteems is the secret of the whole accomplish
ment, the spirit that McGowan has put into his
entire force. “We don't tolerate grouches.” your
informant will say. “We all belong to the Don't
Worry club and McGowan is its president.”
Another thing this paymaster general has done
is to establish in Washington, with the approval
of the secretary of the navy, a school for navy
pay officers. These officers are appointed from
civil life on a competitive examination. They go
into the service equipped with a good academic
education, but with no knowledge of the navy
and its -needs. Hence the new service school,
which has in this year’s class 15 young officers
who are being trained in their new profession.
Admiral McGowan himself is a product of
civilian training. When he secured his appoint
ment in the pay corps in 1894 he was a South
Carolina newspaper man who had worked his
way through college and law school by running
a brick yard and serving as a ticket agent at a
railway station. Maybe there he got the training
which has made him a great business executive.
The fact that he has spent most of his naval
career at sea accounts for his insistence that the
fleet and not the bureau is the thing ever to be
kept in mind.
When he left the Atlantic fleet to go ashore as
paymaster general his commanding officer,, Ad
miral Badger, said of him, “He has made the pay
department of the fleet a smoothly working mil
itary machine.”
That is the ideal he holds up to hln bureau
and corps: "Make it a smooth running military
machine."
r, W AJW \i/M(
’2UILRUYG B
The selection of the time
for ’restocking thus is al
most automatically sug
gested.
A small card-filing case
contains a remarkable ex
hibition of prices current.
Charted on cards are the
market price movements
for seven years, week by
week, of important sta
ples. For example, the
butter card shows a well
defined curve for each of
the seven years, indicat
ing the weeks when but
ter is high and when low.
As these curves closely
parallel, a glance at it
shows when is the most
advantageous time for
buying butter in quantity
and storing it.
So systematized has the
SENATE PASSES
STOVALL BILL
Radical Temperance Measure Is Passed
By Practically Unanimous
Vote In Senate
IS NOW UP TO^ THE HOUSE
Lawrence and Pickett Cast Only Votes
Against Measure —A Synopsis Os
The Bill
Atlanta. —The senate Monday morn
ing reconsidered its action in adopt
ing Senator Pickett’s amendment to
the Stovall prohibition bill. This
amendment, through error, prohibited
the sale of any drink that contained
less than one-half of one per cent
alcohol, but made it legal to sell
drinks containing more than that pro
portion. The amendment as it now
stands prohibits the sale of any
drink containing more than one-half
of one per cent of alcohol.
The senate has also passed the
W’alker-Eakes bill, which repeals near
beer, locker club and brewery license
tax laws.
The Stovall anti-shipping bill was
also passed. This bill provides that
a person may receive and have in
his possession at his home every 30
days not more than one gallon of
vinous liquor, one gallon of spirituous
liquor or 48 pints of malt liquor.
The Stovall substitute prohibition
bill, which is known as the Anti-Sa
loon League bill, has the following
provisions:
It specifies under “prohibited liquors
and beverages,” every brand or spe
cies of intoxicants known in the cata
logue and limits alcohol to one-half of
one per cent. It especially prohibits
all substitutes for whisky or beer.
It prohibits the sale or keeping on
hand of forbidden liquids, but pro
vides that this does not affect the so
cial serving of such beverages in pri
vate residences in ordinary social in
tercourse.
It draws such stringent regulations
about associations or clubs as to ren
der it impossible for a locker club to
exist.
It provides that the keeping of li
quors except in a dwelling is prima
facie evidence of illegal purpose.
It provides that all places where
liquor is kept or sold are declared pub
lic nuisances.
It provides that the possession of a
federal liquor license is prima facie
evidence of guilt.
It provides immunity for witnesses
whose testimony incriminates them
selves.
It ’provides that judges must in
struct every new grand jury on the
prohibition law.
It provides that sheriffs shall once
a month secure from the federal in
ternal revenue collector the name of
every receiver of a federal license and
publish such names for two weeks in
the county newspaper. Failure to do
this brings a fine of SSO to SSOO or
the chaingang for six months.
It provides that the sheriff shall
furnish the solicitor general with the
names of liquor license holders and
the solicitor general shall take active
steps to convict such persons. Failure
on the part of sheriff or solicitor gen
eral brings a SSOO fine.
It provides that no property rights
in forbidden liquors exist and the
state may declare all such liquors and
their receptables contraband and de
stroy them.
Governor Issues Proclamation
Atlanta.—Gov. Nat E. Harris issued
his Thanksgiving proclamation, citing
the many blessings which Georgia en
joys and declaring Thursday, Novem
ber 25, a legal holiday, to be observ
ed in thankful recognition of these
blessings: The proclamation is as
follows:
“I, Nat E. Harris, governor of Geor
gia, by virtue of the power given by
the law r of said state, do hereby ap
point Thursday, November 25, 1915,
to be a day of thanksgiving and pray
er to God, and do declare it a public
holiday. Let all our people refrain
from their usual occupations and
work; let them assemble at the
places of worship and give thanks to
the Giver of all good things for Hfs
mercy and goodness to us during the
past year, praying for a continuance
of His favor and forgetting not pray
ers for our brothers in other lands
who are suffering trials and hardships
from which we have been spared.
“In witness whereof, I have here
unto set my hand and caused the seal
of the executive to be attached.
“Done at the capitol, in the city
of Atlanta, this, the 6th day of No
vember, in the year of our Lord, one
thousand nine hundred and fifteen,
and of the independence of the United
States the one hundred and fortieth.
(Signed) “N. E. HARRIS,
“Governor.”
Soft Drink Bill Introduced
Atlanta. —Judge W. W. Stark of
Jackson has introduced a “soft drink”
bill in the house, which provides that
it shall be unlawful for any person,
firm or corporation in the state of
Georgia to sell or offer for sale any
beverage or beverages made form any
patent formula used as an imitation
or substitute for intoxicating drinks
containing any quantities of caffeine
whatever. Any violation of the pro
visions of this act shall constitute a
misdemeanor.
§ DOINGS AROUND
L STATE CAPITAL |
Georgia Can Make Fortune In Bamboo' i
Atlanta.—lt took a man from thd fl
New England states to discover st •
Georgia asset, of which but little hast ;
ever been heard, Governor Harris has
received from William Breester ot •
Springfield, Mass., a letter calling at
tention to a bamboo grove w’hich he
recently saw in Chatham county. Mr.
Breester believes bamboo of the sort
he saw growing in Chatham has a
great commercial future, such a value
upon the market, in fact, as w'ould I
make Georgia a serious rival of Ja- /
pan, which, so far, has been the great-(
est bamboo-producing section of the'
world. I
For Navigation Os Chattahoochee I
Atlanta. —Data which has been in
the course of preparation for some
time past dealing with the opening
. of the Chattahoochee river, has been
completed. It has been submitted to
Percival M. Churchill, special engi
neer in charge, with headquarters in
Atlanta, and will be forwarded at
once to Gen. Dan C. Kingman, chief
engineer of the United States army.
With the report of Maj. Earl I. Brown,
engineer in charge of the district, it
will be submitted to the board of en- i
gineers. The information contained >
in the report will govern the board
of engineers in its action relative to ’
the continuance of work on the river.
Livestock Show In Exhibition Cars
Athens. —Starting November 8, an j
exhibit of livestock and feed crops i
started out from the college of agri
culture to be on the road about 160
days and to make about 200 stops. In
this time, and with the number of
exhibitions proposed, practically the
whole state will be covered. Lectur
ers will accompany the exhibits, liter
ature will be distributed and every
possible effort will be made to inter
est farmers of the state in growing
better livestock, more of it and to
grow the necessary feed. The pure
bred stock that will be exhibited at
every stop will be from the most fam
ous herds and breeds of the country.
They will be taken from the college
farm and are expected to speak for ‘
themselves as a demonstration of)
what can be done with pure-bred stock!
in Georgia. Jersey and Holstein cattle
with great records for milk produc
tion, Hereford and short-horn beef cat
tle of the best registered stock in the
country, registered Percheron horses,
Tamworth and Berkshire swine will
be remembered in the exhibits.
Given Damages For Injuries
Tifton. —A verdict was returned by
a jury in the city court of Tifton,
awarding Alvie Thomas, a young
white man, $3,500 damages for inju
ries received while Thomas was steal
ing a ride on a freight train. Thomas
claimed that he was shot in the knee
by John Sturgis, a negro brakeman.
He and J. T. Saunders were beating
their way from Illinois to Florida,
when they were discovered in a coal
car by the negro about one mile south
of Tifton. Thomas claimed that the
negro drew his pistol, threatened him
and then shot him when he tried to
get up, later forcing him to jump off
the train -while it was running be
tween 25 and 30 miles an hour. H»>
asked for SIO,OOO damages.
Confederate Veteran Answers Taps
Tennille. —Tennille’s grand old man,
capt. James D. Franklin, died here
after a short illness. He had spent
his whole life here and had done
more for the town than any other
citizen. He gave sites for the Method
’ ist and Baptist churches, and several
■ years ago when an Episcopal churCh
. was planned he gave land for that
. church, and, together with four mem
, bers of the family, donated, from the
, Franklin estate, the city park. He
was a gallant Confederate veterans.
. Se served in the Twenty-eighth Geor
• gia under command of General Col
. quitt; was captain of his company and
was severely wounded at Olmstee,
. and against at Fort Harrison, near
; Richmond. He has suffered from these
, wound ever since the war. He was
I one of the wealthiest men in this sec
, tion and gave freely to every gooi
। enterprise.
Cattle Breeders To Meet
i Savananh. —A conference of cattle
■ breeders from all parts of the coun
i try and of representatives of western
> packing houses and the bureau of an
imal industry of the department of
■ agriculture will be held at Tampa,
I Fla., during the week beginning Feb
ruary 4, under the auspices of the
' Southern Settlement and Development
■ Organization, according to an an«
! nouncement made here by Robert M.
, Pindell, Jr., state organizer. Prelim
-1 inary arrangements for the confer
• ence, the purpose of which will be to
promote interest in cattle-raising in
the South were made at Jacksonville.
Committees Os Grand Lodge K. Os P.
f Athens.—Grand Chancellor Troy
, Beatty of the grand .lodge, Knights
of Pythias of Georgia, has announced
1 the following grand lodge committees
> for 1915-16: Judiciary committee, J.
t Hicks Fort, chairman, Columbus;r
’ Hawes Cloud, Crawfordville;. J. C.
' Houston, Lawrenceville; finance com
-1 niittee, J. C. Sipple, chairman, Savan
s nah; F. M. Gobert, Milledgeville; E.
s E. Battles, Leia, Ga. Pythian educa
■ tion, Young Harris Fraser, chairman,
i Atlanta; G. E. Brunner, Macon; C. IL
Lowther, Waycross.
