1884–1968 · U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1933–1945
John Collier ran the Bureau of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt and was the architect of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. In The Indians of the Americas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), page 281, he wrote the earliest wording Popik documents in this family: “Imperfect action is better for men and societies than perfection in waiting, for the errors wrought by action are cured by new action.” That is a philosophy of governing, not a motivational slogan — and no researcher has shown a chain connecting it to the short epigram now pinned on Truman, so Collier should be read as the closest known ancestor rather than the author.