{"value"=>"<p>The records of the fourteen permanent administrative departments and their research special committees span forty years and are rich in content. Appointed by the Executive Council to investigate and report on the prominent social, political, and economic issues of the period 1901-1941, the departments generated records that are indispensable for the study of conservative political activism and reform.</p> <p>The departments studied industrialism as an organizing agent, investigated socialism as a subversive force, examined the problems tied to immigration from China and southern Europe, considered the need to protect American interests in the Pacific, and explored the development in both the theory and the practice of profit-sharing in the United States. The departments also designed surveys on the question of social, political, and economic progress in the United States since the 1870s, and on specific social welfare issues such as old age dependency. The first progress survey, begun in 1912, was carried out by the Industrial Economics Department, and the second in 1923 by the Current Economic and Political Movements Department. In 1914 the Industrial Economics Department surveyed the socio-economic effects in the United States of the war in Europe. In 1925 the problem of old-age dependency was examined by Gertrude Beeks Easley and the Industrial Welfare Department. In the same year the Industrial Relations Department studied the key social and economic differences between the anthracite and bituminous coal industries, the former monopolistic in nature, and the latter critically over-productive.</p> <p>Among the heads of departments were Vincent Astor (Astor Trust Company), William Baldwin (Otis Elevator Company), Gertrude Beeks Easley, Samuel Gompers (American Federation of Labor), the financier and industrial organizer George W. Perkins, the civic worker, Maude Wetmore, and the economist Edwin R. A. Seligman.</p>"}