neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Brownlow came to Washington, D.C., as a reporter for two Tennessee newspapers, and made the acquaintance of President
Theodore Roosevelt. He caught the attention of President
Woodrow Wilson in 1914 after being one of the few newspaper reporters to correctly predict that the
German Empire would go to war with
Serbia over the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand (which caused the start of
World War I). From 1917 to 1920, he was president of the commissioners and a vocal proponent of
home rule. He helped guide the city through the
1918 flu pandemic, closing schools and businesses and banning all public gatherings. He also served on the District of Columbia Public Utilities Commission and the District Zoning Commission from 1917 to 1919. Brownlow began teaching political science at the
University of Chicago in 1931, and later that year was appointed director of the Public Administration Clearing House (which he had helped organize in 1930) at the university. He remained the Clearing House's director until 1945. Brownlow became chairman of the Committee for Public Administration of the
Social Science Research Council in 1933, where he worked to bridge the gap between academics and practitioners. The three-person committee consisted of Louis Brownlow,
Charles Merriam, and
Luther Gulick. On January 10, 1937, the Committee released its report. the Committee's report advocated a strong chief executive, including among its 37 recommendations significant expansion of the presidential staff, integration of managerial agencies into a single presidential office, expansion of the merit system, integration of all independent agencies into existing
Cabinet departments, and modernization of federal accounting and financial practices. While he was a member of the Committee on Administrative Management, Brownlow was named an official delegate to the Sixth International Congress of Administrative Sciences in
Warsaw, Poland.
Post-Brownlow Committee Brownlow helped co-found the
American Society for Public Administration in 1940, serving in various executive and advisory capacities to it until 1945. Brownlow was also director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Foundation in 1947, and director of the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation from 1948 to 1953. ==Death==