Boundaries of the State in US History 9780226277813

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Boundaries of the State in US History

Boundaries of the State in US Histor  y

Edited by

J a m e s T. S p a r r o w W i l l i a m J . N o va k Ste p h en W. S aw y e r

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

James T. Sparrow is associate professor of history and Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. William J. Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Stephen W. Sawyer is chair of the History Department and cofounder of the History, Law, and Society program at the American University of Paris. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­27764-­6 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­27778-­3 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­27781-­3 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boundaries of the state in US history / edited by James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-27764-6 (cloth : alkaline paper)— ISBN 978-0-226-27778-3 (paperback : alkaline paper)— ISBN 978-0-226-27781-3 (e-book)  1. United States—Politics and government.  2. Federal government—United States—History.  I. Sparrow, James T., editor. II. Novak, William J., 1961– editor.  III. Sawyer, Stephen W., 1974– editor. JK411.B68 2015 320.473'049—dc23   2015003894 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

C o ntent s

j a me s t . s p ar row, w il l iam j. novak , an d st ep hen w. sawyer Int r o duct i o n

/1

Pa r t I : T h e S tat e a n d t h e Wo r l d

/ 17

g au th am r ao

/ The Early American State “In Action”: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–­1860 / 21

One

steph e n w. saw y e r T wo

/ Beyond Tocqueville’s Myth: Rethinking the Model of the American State / 57 c. j. alvar ez T h r ee

/ Inventing the US-­Mexico Border / 79 jam es t . spar row

Four

/ Rumors of Empire: Tracking the Image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century / 101 jason scott sm ith

Five

/ The Great Transformation: The State and the Market in the Postwar World / 127

P a r t I I : T h e S t a t e a n d C i v i l S o ci e t y

/ 153

t r ac y stef f es Six

/ Governing the Child: The State, the Family, and the Compulsory School in the Early Twentieth Century / 157 g abr iel n. rosen be rg

Se v en

/ Youth as Infrastructure: 4-­H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America / 183 el isabe th s. cl e m e ns

Eight

/ Good Citizens of a World Power: Postwar Reconfigurations of the Obligation to Give / 209 om ar m . m c rober ts

N i ne

/ The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State: Black Religion and the Negotiation of Church/State Boundaries during the War on Poverty / 233 rober t c. l ie ber m an

T en

/ Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEOC, and Civil Rights Enforcement / 259 r ic h ar d r . joh n

/ From Political Economy to Civil Society: Arthur W. Page, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Reframing of the Past in Post–­New Deal America / 295

E l e v en

w il l iam j. novak C o nc l u s i o n

/ The Concept of the State in American History / 325 Acknowledgments / 351 Contributors / 353 Index / 355

Introduction J a m e s T. S p a r r o w, Wi l l i a m J . N o va k , a n d St e p h e n W. S aw y e r

The development of institutionalized public power—­“the government,” or “the state”—­has once again become an important subject of inquiry in the history of the United States, preoccupying an ever-­growing number of theorists, historians, and social scientists. American historians now routinely invoke the concept of “the state” when discussing governmental power, par­ ticularly within the precincts of political history. Social scien­tists working in the fields of comparative politics and American polit­ical development (APD) continue to devote much effort to accounting for the defining features of the American state. Despite this veritable renaissance in the study of the American state, important interpretive problems and historical difficulties remain. Accordingly, the essays in this volume aim to push the his­tory of the state to a new level of conceptualization. References to a singular “state” in American history have always been troubling to those who know the maddening plurality that characterizes the institutions of American public life. It is the multiplication of authority, not its reduction to one singular, centralized sovereign that most distinguishes American statecraft. Tens of thousands of governmental units share power in the United States, from local school and zoning boards, which regulate the necessities of local communities, to the several states and regional authorities (for example, the New York–­New Jersey Port Authority), which preside over economies that can equal those of other nations, to towering federal institutions and sprawling agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, some of which dwarf the national bureaucracies of even the largest empires and nation-­states of the last century. Yet if “the state” seems to indulge an overly synthetic monism, alternative terminology reduces public power in America to the false humilities

2  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

of an unreflective nominalism. Concepts such as “the government” or “the polity” fall short of capturing the distinctly coherent, formative, and structured assemblage of public power that has held the United States together and allowed it to project extraordinary national power both at home and abroad. The sheer fact of American state power is indisputable. Indeed, it is frequently taken for granted that the United States is an “indispensable nation” whose intercession in major global problems has profoundly shaped the lives of its own citizens and the geopolitical order for over a century. While this has been evident since World War I, the pattern of effective statecraft goes back even further, as some of these essays show. So much for a lack of state capacity. As a dynamic new wave of scholarship on the state has recently demonstrated, these and other actions could not have been accomplished by a weak or ineffectual state.1 The state’s presumptive weakness, or apparent invisibility, is largely conceptual—­the consequence of looking in the wrong places for the organization of power. One might be tempted to claim that this blind spot was inherited from the Founders—­except for the fact that by design, the original frame of government provided a durable guarantee of robust fiscal and military powers as well as administrative and regulatory authority. Nor can one look to the alleged antistatism of “bumptious” early America busting out of its English braces, or to the lawless frontier society imagined to have left European civilization and its restraints behind. Rather, throughout the nineteenth century, local governments drew on vibrant legal and political traditions that provided abundant authority for almost constant intervention in community life.2 Current events—­from a boundless war on terror to a stunningly gen­ erous, if blinkered, governmental response to the recent financial crisis—­ have only conspired to underscore this lesson. The capacity unobtrusively to monitor, intercept, record, archive, and analyze virtually any North American (if not global) telecommunications under the National Security Agency’s surveillance program could not have been accomplished without a formidable, preexisting regulatory, legal, and technological infrastructure (and one that extended well beyond the official confines of the federal government).3 The renaissance of interest in the American state has been exacerbated by the broadly shared realization after September 11, 2001, that existing scholarly frameworks for coming to terms with modern American state power were inadequate. This awakening has also been academically propitious. Current events have facilitated a rapid rise and convergence of

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  3

important social-­scientific debates surrounding the nature of the mod­ ern state and American political development that have been gestating for decades. Within the last few years, this convergence has produced a rich array of new monographic work on the history of American political institutions and statecraft that has appeared at an astonishing rate. Across the social sciences, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists have been discovering a state that seems with every major publication to shake a stable sense of just what this state is. From the Art of Not Being Governed to The Unsustainable State, from infrastructural to police powers, from the role of party politics to the web of state and civil society, the revolution in state studies now beckons almost every student of modern politics, economy, and society.4 The lessons to be drawn from this vast new literature, however, remain somewhat elusive. Scholarship on the American state still lacks an overarching conceptual framework that could lend an interpretive coherence to these varied enterprises across the social sciences. To date, conceptual frameworks remain incomplete, heterogeneous, and frequently in conflict with each other. The problem of the American state is particularly confounding because it is both a historical and a historiographical construct. We have collectively assembled this volume in the hope that, after this period of fruitful rediscovery, it is now possible to approach the scholarly study of the American state with a new coherence and commitment. Before turning to this task, however, it is necessary to clear away a few misconceptions. Popular mystification stretching back to the origins of the American political tradition lies at the heart of the difficulty of properly theorizing and historicizing the American state. Whether the figure haunting popular imagination was King George of Revolutionary days, the Octopus of the Populists, or the ZOG of contemporary conspiracy theorists, a problematic animism or anthropomorphism has produced a widespread misperception that “the state” is a unitary historical agent endowed with a coherent, perhaps malign motivation, will, and objective. The tendency to think in monstrous metaphors goes back at least to Hobbes’s Leviathan, if not earlier.5 What scholars of the state in US history must account for is Americans’ persistent and peculiar susceptibility to this kind of state thinking, for it lies at the root of much historical misinterpretation. The ghost of Continental absolutism continues to haunt American po­ litical thought much as it did the thought of our English political fore­ bears, shrouding the lessons of American state history for the modern polity. One of the deepest sources of obfuscation has been the liberal

4  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

fantasy of an exceptional and stateless American past. Much like Hobbes’s “state of nature,” Locke’s “social contract,” and Smith’s “invisible hand”—­ all of which are often invoked to define “nature’s nation” in a loop of analytical circularity—­this antediluvian world of statelessness never existed. By viewing natural liberty as inherently constitutive of American society, and implicitly or explicitly positing the origins of that liberty in distance from or antagonism to government power, this point of view can only see antistatism and freedom locked in an endless struggle with tyranny and European statism.6 Compounding the effects of this classic liberal exceptionalism, a latter-­ day Weberianism rooted in the European state-­building tradition has made it difficult for scholars to see the state when it fails to conform to certain ideal-­typical configurations, which, of course, were themselves historically bounded.7 In his foundational works of organizational sociology, Weber provided abundant intellectual resources for comprehending the growth of state power and its roots in social relationships. Alas, a particular subset of those insights has calcified into a received wisdom about what the state is, and it has come to resemble something of a Prussian “tank”: unstoppable, impenetrable, autonomous, mechanically bureaucratized, and manned by a regimented officialdom driving it down undeviating tracks. A less ominous but equally apt metaphor would be the image of a weaponized filing cabinet fixed on the rails of “progress.” Pierre Fix-­Masseau’s image of the state as a locomotive incarnating “Exactitude” has continued to undergird our per­ceptions of what a state “should” be—­just as it has nourished the idea that the United States never had such a thing. A suppler, less reified concep­ tion of the state is needed to grasp the fluidity and flexibility—­the historical reality—­of American public power. A final distorting influence is the presumption that the state is defined by (or definitive of ) modernization, which has introduced errors of teleology and periodization. This view typically receives reinforcement through a tendentious reading of Hegel that conflates the evolving coherence and comprehensiveness of governmental power with the progress of Western history toward its indubitable end.8 The teleology at the heart of much of the modernization theory of the second half of the twentieth century—­particularly the neoliberal triumphalism attending the turn of the millennium—­has not been helpful in reckoning with the development of the American state. As scholars have historicized economic development and the project of “Third-­World” modernization, they have provided much more sophisticated accounts of the American state simply by analyzing what it was doing to the world and to itself during the Cold War.9

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  5

Given this fourfold obstacle to clear-­sighted conceptualization of the democratic state—­the state as monster, the state as tyrant, the state as autonomous bureaucracy, and the state as modernity itself—­it is not surprising that it has been so difficult for scholars to acknowledge the efficacy of the American state, despite its many forceful interventions at home and abroad. Complicating matters further, the very ideology of democratic self-­ government seems to have relied on the opposition between predatory state and liberatory society—­particularly in conceptualizing the people’s own sovereignty imagined as a fate outside of time, locked in eternal struggle against the retrograde forces of “history” personified by “the king” and the great imperial powers. Consequently, historicizing the state in all its pluralistic variegation is the first analytical as well as empirical step necessary to reconceptualize what an adequate history of the political should look like for the United States. Rather than searching for some timeless, unitary essence of the state, historians and social scientists would be better served by searching for the state in the concrete and historical sites where power originates. The essays in this volume do just that by embracing a pragmatic philosophy of history and turning away from the abstract, metaphysical question of what the state is, focusing instead on the more practical, historical question of what it does. Oppositions such as weak states versus strong states or state versus civil society or domestic versus international politics all tend toward a reification of the state as an end in itself, at the expense of a more empirical and historical explanation of how states are able to accomplish their specific ends. In this volume, we present a sequence of essays that search for common ground by locating the origins of public power in struggles over categorical, juridical, or societal salients that have produced the political within an ostensibly democratic frame of contention. Rather than revisiting questions of autonomy, bureaucratic capacity, or networks of expertise, which have received so much attention in the existing scholarly literature on the American state, these essays focus on boundaries that have defined and framed state power. This is not to say that autonomy, bureaucratic capacity, or networks of expertise are irrelevant or ill-­conceived objects of study—­far from it. But they are by now well studied, and the disproportionate focus on them has arguably reached a point of diminishing returns. Furthermore, this appropriation of Weberian categories lends a static quality to historical analysis. It tends to take power as a given, as something to be “captured,” channeled, or redirected, rather than explaining how the state is able to summon power. Such a merely refractory conceptualization

6  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

of the state does not adequately account for the dynamism, vitality, and flexibility of American power—­an American power that could defeat three empires, subdue a continent, overcome the cataclysm of civil war, unleash the Gilded Age, build an overseas empire, fight a global war (twice), propose a structure for world governance, and broadcast market society after 1945 without destroying the market mechanism. A satisfactory model of the American state must account for its mutability and dynamism as well as its momentum and durability; it must specify where and how the differential of new power was generated, thus ineluctably altering the conditions of political possibility that followed. In other words, such a model must be fundamentally historical. In an attempt to develop a conceptually coherent approach to historicizing the state, the essays in this volume explore boundary conditions, where the limits of government authority have revealed the principles of its operation. Focusing on boundary conditions allows us to move beyond a refractory view of the state, to probe the ways in which state power has been constitutive of politics and indeed of social categories themselves. Rather than positing a state that was a mere forum for the clash of contending interests or electoral behaviors, each essay historicizes in its own way the institutionalization of power in and through the state. It was the historical formation of institutions created by democratically contending interests and factions that generated the modern American state as a distinctive modality of rule, thereby producing—­not merely reflecting—­the ever-­shifting currents of pub­lic power that have directed the course of US history.10 A great and understudied source of the American state’s dynamism has emerged along the limits or boundaries of public authority. Indeed, it would appear that these boundaries were not simply loci of visibility, but were themselves generators of power. The power of the state may be said to have been precisely this infrastructural capacity to summon social power—­in the sense indicated by Michael Mann—­for projection beyond the confines of its societal origins (whether that was in the family, the local community, the region, or the nation) by legitimately inscribing or reinforcing the bound­ ary of public and private authority for effective use.11 By delineating and manipulating strategically chosen boundaries—­for example, those separating “private” contractors, litigants, and voluntary organizations from “public” agencies; or those divorcing “America” from “the world” through hardened distinctions between republic and empire, native soil and foreign land, citizen and alien, legal and illegal immigrant, American and un-­American, lawful and unlawful combatant—­political actors could organize imbalances of

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  7

force and social power into extraordinary configurations of state authority with enormous consequences for the course of American history.

In search of this new analytical vantage point privileging political contention at the boundaries of power, the essays in this volume are organized around two broad areas where the new scholarship on the state is at its most dynamic: “America in the world,” and “civil society.” These are also, not coincidentally, constructions that have sometimes blinded historians to the persistent development of governmental efficacy. The first category, “the world,” articulates the external boundary that has until recently been defined in sharp relief against the domestic doings within the nation. As the following essays make clear, the US government has functioned in, and been profoundly formed by, a broader world whose myriad inhabitants—­ ranging from multinationals, NGOs, international organizations, and states, to ambassadors, immigrants, and refugees—­ shaped the nation-­ United States even as they were shaped by it. The second category, “civil so­ ciety,” sets the internal boundary that has circumscribed “the social” since the days of Tocqueville. By definition it is counterposed against the state, even though civic organizations’ legal status and public responsibilities are authorized, when not subsidized or even directed, by the state. Both categories, “the world” and “civil society,” have served as foils, alternately spurned and valorized, operating in the service of American exceptionalism. The two terms naturalize a pair of exceptionalisms that have proven ideologically central to the project of building the American state. The exceptionally dynamic “crusading state” has been portrayed as jealously retaining its independence from the sordid “entanglements” of power politics to spread the blessings of liberty throughout the world.12 The exceptionally “limited” American state has been imagined as perpetually held at bay by citizens jealous of their liberty.13 These are the two most durable masks worn by the Janus-­faced state Ira Katznelson identified in Shaped by War and Trade.14 By historicizing both categories, we seek to marshal empirical evidence, analytical precision, and historical context in order to think freshly about the state—­rather than fall into the trap of thinking with the ideas and categories bestowed on us by state builders and other ideological entrepreneurs.15 One of the most vibrant areas of scholarship in recent years has centered on locating “America in the World,” the thematic focus of the first section of the volume. The essays in this section examine the formation of

8  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

American government outside national territory—­the conceptual container within which most APD and US history have until recently confined themselves. Just as internal boundaries, such as the line demarcating state from civil society, were more apparent than actual and even served to generate state power when configured properly, so too did external boundaries prove formative in marshaling state power for extraterritorial projection. These five essays look at sites where state authority attended the movement of subjects and the projection of power across and beyond geopolitical borders, in empire, diplomacy, war, and international economic development. The first essay, by Gautham Rao, reveals not only that the early American state intervened far more robustly in the economy and society than has commonly been assumed, but also that this development was a response to the challenges of launching a new nation into a dangerous world dominated by imperial powers. The fledgling American republic could not survive without a robust maritime economy that depended on a seafaring labor force vulnerable to the hazards of the high seas. This basic fact, in turn, required pooling the medical risks incurred by sailors so they could visit doctors secure in the knowledge that their “hospital money” entitled them to affordable care. Consequently, the federal government provided an early health care system for merchant mariners through a network of Marine Hospitals. In the late eighteenth century, these hospitals provided services according to a paternalist logic of local responsibility for dependents. As the system expanded and the Treasury centralized control over the dispensation of this entitlement, it increasingly rejected cases where sailors could not demonstrate their productivity. This critical intervention, designed to provide budgetary discipline after the war of 1812 and serve the ideological needs of an emerging market society, simultaneously heightened federal discipline of local hospital administrators and customs officials, even as it was driven by the crescendo of antistatist politics in the 1820s. For sailors who could no longer contribute to the maritime economy, this was certainly no “Age of Good Feelings.” While concrete realms of policy such as those pertaining to health care and maritime trade provided one arena for the American state’s formation in the broader world, other, less concrete realms may have been equally important in shaping its influence. In tracing the insinuations of the American state into the world, sometimes the least tangible salients of power, such as those involved in the conceptual distinctions of political theory, have proven the most consequential. Certainly this was the case for the United States’ international influence as a model of liberal governance. As Stephen Sawyer shows in chapter two, even the most “foreign” political theory—­the thought

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  9

and political leadership of Adolphe Thiers, French minister throughout the 1830s and ‘40s and then the first president of France’s Third Republic—­drew on readings of American government that circulated well beyond US borders. American civil society impressed him, not for the limitations on state power that his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville rhapsodized, but rather for the efficacy and extension of influence it afforded public authorities. Engaging French debates over republican governance in the July Monarchy and later the Third Republic, Thiers, like Tocqueville, drew on American models of liberal state practice, from the regulation of associations in civil society to the Lincoln administration’s use of emergency power and fiscal policy in the recently concluded Civil War. Unlike Tocqueville, Thiers saw the vibrant society of the United States as a garden cultivated by the judicious use of selective, but effective, state power. Similarly consequential conceptual work was at play in the production of a far more concrete border—­namely, the one separating the United States from Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century. As C. J. Alvarez’s essay demonstrates, the line demarcating US from Mexican territory after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was largely conceptual and would require decades to take material form in the barren landscape of the arid borderlands. The border was produced as much through the interaction of governments as by their demarcation. Indeed, its existence required an interchange between nations and governments that had not existed before the two abutted each other following the 1848 war. To police the dangerous and destabilizing borderlands between states, which could take on aspects of the “state of nature” under the wrong circumstances, the US and Mexican governments borrowed each other’s techniques, coordinated activities, and otherwise collaborated to produce the boundary that became the border. Whereas constructing a functioning border encouraged the tacit cooperation and even interdependence of two putatively sovereign states, the challenge of ensuring the very survival of democratic governance in a dangerous world absolutely depended on it in the alliance that defeated the Axis powers in World War II. In his essay James Sparrow tracks the influence of an extended political debate in Congress and mass politics that shaped the terms in which formative international commitments during the 1940s could be justified as legitimate. Employing a venerable blend of antistatist and anti-­ imperial rhetoric to scapegoat England, the main partner in US global ambitions, anti-­British complaints, rumors, and conspiracy theory all played off the conceptual boundary between republic and empire, insinuating that the Roosevelt administration intended to subordinate the former to the latter in service to British war aims. Although they were often articulated

10  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

with disingenuous intent, rumors of empire had the surprising effect of au­ tho­rizing international institutions within an exceptionalist frame that dampened multilateralism, warped American comprehension of the challenges decolonization posed, and defused the transatlantic influences of postwar socialism back in the United States. Even as the task of projecting US state power globally had the effect of shutting down the multilateral and social-­democratic projects of the New Deal, it relied on another legacy of the New Deal, the TVA, to provide a model and organizational resource for allies and client states seeking to pursue American-­style economic development in the postwar period. But as Jason Scott Smith discusses in his essay, this process was directed by “private” figures like David Lilienthal, former head of the TVA and multinational pioneer; David Rockefeller, whose family had long blended private wealth and initiative with public mission overseas; and Henry Kaiser, New Deal dam builder turned postwar international contractor. Such “consul­ tants,” and the multinational private firms and organizations they directed, together acted as a kind of parastate to the US foreign aid regime extended to counter Soviet-­fostered revolution throughout the emerging “third world.” By the late postwar period these firms, sustained by a rich ecosystem of US foreign aid and military “advising,” played a critical role in building the infrastructure of global neoliberalism that would eventually undermine state autonomy even as it continued to rely on an escalating military presence overseas. Far from being antagonistic, the state and the market were thoroughly interpenetrated and formed a global fabric that knit together the world for better or worse by the end of the century. The essays in the second section of this volume turn from “the world” to “civil society” in an attempt to denaturalize the internal boundary whose sanctity has been presumed to define the American state. The historical case studies presented here all illuminate the close historical interrelationship between government and civic organizations that was updated for the twentieth century—­when one might say that American civil society came into its own and went global. The catch is that American civic organizations were able to do so thanks to their partnership with government at all levels. Likewise, American government at all levels came to rely on civil society and associational initiative to attain policy objectives that often remained beyond its authority or capacity. The boundary between civil and public authority was thus generative, inspiring actors on both sides of the divide to think big. Over time it produced flows of influence, expertise, information, and personnel that made the boundary somewhat spurious in practice.

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  11

Nowhere has the influence of civil society seemed more obvious than in the history of education, where local communities and their civic leaders have consistently acted to shape the curricula, activities, and policies of primary and secondary schools. From the teaching of evolution, to the morning recitation of the pledge of allegiance, to desegregation and busing, to the grassroots mobilization of the Christian Coalition in local school board elections, the organized “push back” of local communities has made this most local unit of the American state seem to be the least autonomous. Yet as the essay by Tracy Steffes shows, schools provided the mechanism for some of the most intrusive and coercive kinds of governance available to the American state—­precisely because they seemed to be creatures of localities and civic organizations. Policies like compulsory attendance did more than round out the child protection provided by other reforming institutions like juvenile courts or child labor laws. Schools were the largest single budget item for most states in the early years of the twentieth century. Despite its status as the most robustly local unit of governance within the American system, the school was increasingly structured by policies determined in state capitals, and those policies had teeth and universality because of the movement toward compulsory attendance. Regular and universal school atten­ dance instilled a set of habits and a responsiveness to state authority among budding young citizens that could be inculcated by no other institution. By way of the local school, state officials inserted themselves into families as well, gaining access to children and their rearing. This robust and intrusive capacity to mold young lives was not only the work of state education officials or legislatures, but also involved state court judges whose rulings authorized the expanded oversight entailed by compulsory attendance, as well as local school officials and families whose reliance on and compliance with school policies wove school-­based governance into community life. The community school may have remained a hallmark of the localism built into the federalist system, but it also became a decentralized and universalized site for the implementation of government policies that could be quite intrusive, as for example in the case of physical exams, inoculations, and guidance counseling. Civic organizations have also played important roles in the growth of state and federal government. In a process that led as much as it followed the extension of federal power, civic organizations like the 4-­H Club and the Red Cross modeled practices and ideals of “good citizenship” at home and abroad, and in the process helped shape policy domains (agriculture, development and charity, relief ) that were absolutely essential to the global

12  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

extension of US power in the twentieth century. Both organizations, the two essays by Gabriel Rosenberg and Elisabeth Clemens show, inaugurated their formative pattern of partnership with the state in the Progressive Era, and both made themselves central to the institutional mechanisms by which the federal government projected its power within and beyond national borders. Through intimate practices of cooperation, self-­care, and publicity, Rosenberg argues, the USDA was able to orient and attach young volunteers to projects that would act “in lieu of the state and on behalf of capital in the agricultural hinterlands” during the Progressive and interwar years. Clemens shows that the Red Cross relied on another, related kind of seduction—­that of exercising public authority in a realm of policy (relief ) that had been aggrandized by the New Deal, and providing the expertise and organizational infrastructure necessary to extend relief overseas during and after World War II. In both cases, infrastructural power grew not only from the federal government’s “penetration” of the countryside or the charitable organization—­both organizations were authorized by the federal government, through policy (4-­H) or national incorporation (Red Cross)—­but also, perhaps more decisively, through the initiative, flexibility, and social networking of civic leaders and organizations. The Red Cross and the 4-­H were not the only civic organizations with important roles in the welfare state. Omar McRoberts shows how central black churches were in the War on Poverty, with its extraordinary reliance on local community organization. Churches had long been involved in the delivery of public relief. But in the case of the War on Poverty, the radical decentralization of service provision and leadership produced an administrative and leadership vacuum within which black churches could provide vital infrastructural power. The mobilization of civil society for state building extended well beyond the welfare state in these years. In the case of equal employment opportunity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as Robert Lieberman’s essay discusses, virtually every aspect of the law’s mandate was realized through actors in civil society—­in this case, by litigants whose suits were encouraged, advised, even directed by the EEOC, which had to address a vastly expanding backlog of complaints with severely restricted budgetary and personnel resources. By unleashing the myriad complaints, energies, and legal resources of an aggrieved citizenry, the EEOC and its litigants produced a policy of affirmative action that had real teeth whose bite employers soon came to fear. While the bureaucratic work and political cover provided by civic associations has been absolutely essential to American state building, it is the conceptual work done by these “voluntary organizations” (and by the

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  13

category of “civil society” they arrogate) that has proven most consequential. When the “consensus” historians of the mid-­twentieth century wrote about the exceptional qualities of American society, they grounded their exceptionalism in a liberal essentialism (lamentable to some, laudable to others) that wrote the state out of US history, or made it into a comic foil for the heroic ascent of individuals, parties, civic organizations, and private enterprises that together made the United States into a liberal juggernaut. As Richard John’s essay documents, this interpretive bent was not simply the by-­product of a native Tocquevillian mentality. It was sponsored, through generous funding, by corporate philanthropists literally seeking to rewrite American history in their favor. By funding and molding the precursor to the Warren Center at Harvard, John shows, Arthur Page of AT&T succeeded in advancing a goal dear to the hearts of both liberals and conservatives during the Cold War: writing the American state out of history—­or worse, defining it in opposition to an essentially liberal American society that was always recapitulating the Founders’ struggle by revolting against tyranny plotted by a sinister, encroaching state. When we drop the presumption of this opposition between state and society, as William Novak’s concluding essay urges, and look for the state in society, both the theory and the practice of American statecraft come more easily into view. Comparing the historiographical trajectory of political history to the revitalization of legal history by way of a disenchanted, critical-­ realist, postmetaphysical scholarly turn, he notes how productive it has been for scholars in the latter disciplinary realm to dispense with the fiction of a strict separation between law and society. Instead of taking formal categories of a pure and autonomous realm of law as given, cordoned off from the politics, economics, and cultural and social struggle, these scholars have demonstrated how much more can be explained when legal actions are placed in a full historical context. The essays in this volume have adopted a fundamentally historical approach to the study of the American state because only by historicizing the evolving construction of what has been called “the state” can we attain a true understanding of the theoretical implications of this development. By training our focus on sites where the boundary conditions of public power were contested and negotiated, at all levels of action ranging from the most concrete to the most abstract, not only do we hope to open up new empirical and methodological horizons for the history of the American state, but we also look to discover the historical uses of emergent categories of state power that can explain their subsequent dominance in thought and action. Without such an approach, scholars of the American political tradition run

14  /  James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer

the risk of simply recapitulating the winners’ categories from past political battles, instead of devising a new and genuinely historicized optics of politics that can see through the boundaries, conceptual and literal, that were erected by the state builders of days gone by. The state as a construct has never been stable, much less universal or inevitable. Rather, it has been constantly improvised and adjusted in an ongoing experiment whose future is entirely open-­ended—­for better and for worse. Such a historical object requires scholarly flexibility and an attention to contingency, irony, and the varied uses to which seemingly immutable and monolithic forms may be put. As John Dewey observed, “The state must always be rediscovered.”16 We hope this new attention to the many bound­ aries of American state power advances that aspiration.

Notes 1. William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–­72; Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gary Gerstle, Unsteady Colossus: The Rise and Troubled Decline of Government in America from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2015); Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman, “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61 (2009): 547–­88. 2. Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: The Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 3. Jill Lepore, “The Prism: Privacy in an Age of Publicity,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013. 4. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, The Unsustainable State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5. Perhaps much earlier: see David Wengrow, The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 6. For an early and still classic articulation, consult Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 7. For a brilliant anatomization of this tendency and a productive agenda for correcting it, see King and Lieberman, “Ironies of State Building.” 8. Francis Fukuyama tried to reapply Hegel in the most literal possible fashion in his End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), (un)ironically recapitulating the developmental Kennedy-­era liberalism of Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Politics Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). 9. Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction

Boundaries of the State in US History  /  15 of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 10. This approach is inspired by the history of social categories that scholars of race and gender have performed with such brilliance in recent years. Although it has been centrally concerned with power that scholarship has not, on the whole, placed state formation at the center of its analytic framework. In too many cases, the old view of the state as an epiphenomenon of more fundamental structures of power has prevailed. For important examples of work that has begun to correct that blind spot, consult Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); Alice Kessler-­Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mai Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-­Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 11. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. (1986; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). In addition to Mann’s useful conception of social power, Michel Foucault’s rich notions of governmentality and biopolitics are also helpful in broadening our vision of the political. For a more extensive discussion of these possibilities, see Stephen Sawyer, William J. Novak, and James T. Sparrow, “In Search of the Democratic State,” Tocqueville Review (forthcoming 2015); and Stephen Sawyer, “Foucault’s Theory of the State,” Tocqueville Review (forthcoming 2015). 12. See, for example, Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Knopf, 2012), 4–­5; see also Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2006). 13. A prime example of this school of exceptionalism is Richard Epstein, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 14. Ira Katznelson, “Rewriting the Epic of America,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 15. As Pierre Bourdieu has insisted, the first task for any historian of the state must be to avoid being thought by the state. Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’État (Paris: Seuil, 2012); Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” trans. Loic Wacquant and Samar Farage, Sociological Theory 12, no. 2 (1994): 1–­18. 16. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–­1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 256.

Pa r t O n e

The State and the World

Until very recently, the great preponderance of US historians and scholars of American political development (APD) reflexively cordoned off “the world” from “America,” thereby reaffirming the nationalist (and exceptionalist) frames that have dominated professional history and much of social science since their inception in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, “the world” and “America” have been posited as opposites since John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon of 1630. But in recent years, the extrinsic dynamics of American state development have come to the fore as globalization has exerted its influence on the scholarly imagination. This vantage on state development was articulated by many of the essays in the important volume Shaped by War and Trade, though no systematic literature has developed out of it as of yet.1 Histories of the emergence of human rights and neoliberal globalization; postcolonial studies of empire; the transnational forays of immigration and world history; inventive methodologies deployed by the “new” international, diplomatic, and military histories—­all of these innovative fields have pushed students of US history to break out of national boundaries. Yet only recently has this rich body of scholarship begun to push scholars to attempt more comprehensive statements about American state building in the world.2 The broad historiographical move to provincialize the nation is an especially propitious one for the study of the American state, since it was in many fundamental respects a child of world politics.3 Yet this aspect of American state building has been one of the most overlooked in APD and American political history. From beginning to end, American political development and state formation unfolded within an interplay between “domestic” dynamics, such

18 / Part One

as commercial expansion and settlement; “foreign” pressures and considerations, including trade and tariff policy designed to fund and feed the nascent economy; and immigrations flows feeding labor supplies into a growing nation. Far from being the native product of the American genius for free institutions, the American state has been formed by influences from beyond its shores from the very beginning. Incubated in the swelling hinterlands of a mercantile empire, born and fostered in revolution against the same, establishing independence and self-­government through a declaration whose first objective was to obtain recognition under international law, the American state has been an emerging experiment in the organization of political power capable of sustaining independence in a dangerous world.4 The search for a state capable of sustaining some constellation of liberty at home while preserving independence abroad informed the Continental race to form an “empire of liberty” that pushed back three rival European empires while asserting a primacy of American interests within the Western Hemisphere by the antebellum period. The intense competitive and existential pressures of the Civil War, the Gilded Age scramble for colonies, the effective Thirty Years’ War spanning World War I and World War II, and the Cold War, all only further intensified the interplay of international and domestic, global and local pressures shaping the American state.5 To break from the exceptionalism that has turned the history of American state building inward on itself, the essays in this section seek to reconceptualize the construct of America in or versus the world, recognizing instead that the national boundary (whether literal or virtual) was a historical site constructed to garner legal, economic, and political advantage for a congeries of actors pursuing concrete projects under public auspices. National power was an improvised shield against empire in the revolution through the early republic. Well into the twentieth century, empire remained a power-­conjuring foil for American politics at home and abroad. By the twentieth century, national power became naturalized via the ultimate romantic mythical construct, “the national interest,” as national boundaries thickened and assumed solidity over time. Immigration policy and border control not only provided the ultimate legal and embodied foundation for national identity but also served as a powerful geopolitical tool shaping relations among nations and allowing for polity-­ strengthening circulations of labor, ideas, and goods. Drawing the boundary between the nation and the world literally conjured national power, even as the incoherence of the construction constantly threatened destabilization and internal subversion.

The State and the World  /  19

Notes 1. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Note that some of the studies mentioned in note 5 below have come out of this project, or from the students of its principals. 2. Some exceptions that suggest the moment is ripe for this kind of history include Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Bartholomew Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 3. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 4. Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–­1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2002): 39–­64; Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–­1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-­Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and the United States Empires, 1880–­1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–­53; Kramer, Blood of Government; Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979); Bartholomew Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2013); Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-­Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

One

The Early American State “In Action”: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–­18601 G a u tham R ao

The grand return of the state in American historiography is now visible even in the study of the colonial era and early American republic. This is due to the sharp demise of the “myth” of the United States’ “stateless past,” which diminished the importance of governmental institutions as subjects, agents, objects, and contexts, and which once loomed large over main narratives of early America.2 The United States’ federal government has been a particularly fecund venue for nineteenth-­century American historians to identify the state at work. This research agenda is not without its own normative agenda. Since theorists of the state have long fetishized central governmental action as a metric for state activity, historians of the United States’ long nineteenth century have quite rightly argued that the very presence of an active federal government between the creation of the American republic and World War I reveals a comparatively strong early American state. The depth of these scholars’ discoveries can only be summarized here: the early federal government produced a “communication revolution” through the agency of the United States Postal Service; federal improvement programs prodded a complementary “transportation revolution.” Some years ago, Paul Wallace Gates and his students made the federal government’s General Land Office an indispensable part of the story of American westward expansion. More recently, several scholars have reshaped this narrative by focusing on the federal government’s coercive civil and military Indian policies. The federal government is also seen to have played an important role in the economy through patent administration and tariff policy. Federal pensions to veterans of the Revolutionary War and then, on a far more massive scale, to Civil War veterans, established a foundation of what would later become the welfare state.3 The federal government’s activities in these arenas must, of course, be

22 / Gautham Rao

considered alongside national political parties and federal jurisprudence—­ two institutions that were considered important institutional actors even when scholars saw precious little of an early American state at all. This chapter turns to the story of the Marine Hospitals, the federal government’s first public health care program, to uncover another robust realm of federal activity in the earliest years of the United States. Beginning in 1798, the federal government used a small tax on merchant mariners’ wages to fund a national network of medical institutions, ranging from federally operated hospitals in a few cities, to leased hospital wards in other cities, and contract arrangements with individual physicians in smaller ports. The secretary of the Treasury, in tandem with federal customs officials on the waterfront, operated the network under congressional supervision. Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of United States’ merchant mariners received some manner of care in these Marine Hospitals. Historians have established that the Marine Hospitals were an im­portant institutional precursor of federal health care policy as well as the private hospital movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Insti­tutional historians have also argued that the Marine Hospitals were the center­piece of the federal Public Health Service until the late twentieth century.4 Yet the story of the federal Marine Hospitals of the early republic is more than a mere case study that adds depth to an emerging scholarly paradigm of the early American state. I argue that the political economic origins and design of the Marine Hospitals provides a new vantage point on how the federal government operated in the early American republic.5 During the Federalist era, Congress created the Marine Hospitals to emulate a basic feature of the early British imperial state and political economy: fostering a “nursery of seamen” to man commercial vessels and naval vessels alike. In short, the Federalists committed the federal government to protecting a maritime labor force to achieve similar commercial and military feats as had Great Britain in centuries past. With this mimetic, imperial vision came a decidedly British, imperial brand of central administration. The federal Treasury, like its British predecessor, would closely count tax revenue, while ceding to federal officials on the ground the discretion to adapt “hospital” arrangements to local needs. The federal Marine Hospitals thus signal an early, erstwhile orientation of federal policy and political economy toward the commercial means and ends of empire that had sustained the British Empire since early modernity.6 The commercial orientation and local governance of the Marine Hospitals and the early federal government was not exclusive to the Federalists,

The Early American State “In Action”  /  23

though. The Marine Hospitals came into existence in 1798. The presidential administration of Thomas Jefferson enlarged the network throughout the expanding republic without much change to the local discretionary gover­ nance that had emerged under the Federalists. It was only after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent demise of an Atlantic commercial system rooted in centuries of interimperial conflict, that many began to question the political economic wisdom of the Marine Hospitals and the administrative legitimacy of localized governance. Politicians, statesmen, and jurists of the Jacksonian era and beyond who sought to reform or abolish the Marine Hospitals, however, found themselves up against a formidable opponent in the persistent political economy and central governance that had ruled English-­speaking North America since the Glorious Revolution.

Fabricating Public Power over Property and Persons The US Constitution of 1787–­88 granted the federal government formal powers over a vast arena of public activity embracing taxation, finance, war making, and market regulation. Yet the nature and meaning of these powers would be decided in practice. In at least one area—­the maritime labor market—­the early federal government would develop broad powers over property and persons that had not been explicitly anticipated in the Constitution. Maritime labor constituted a significant moral and economic problem in eighteenth-­century American life. On one hand, as a commercial nation the United States depended for its survival on the exis­ tence of a robust maritime labor force to fetch goods, and thereby wealth, from European, West Indian, and Asian ports and to send goods back. Yet maritime labor was notoriously scarce and fragile. Thus at the turn of the nineteenth century the federal government devised a network of medical facilities to preserve and maintain this crucial maritime labor force. But “preserving” sailors was far more intrusive than it sounded. To justify its intervention into the maritime labor market, the federal government first needed to imagine sailors as a class requiring the aid, protection, and manipulation of public law and authority. This coercive project—­in effect the creation of a dependent class—­was necessary because sailors were believed to be incapable of caring for themselves. By the mid-­1790s it was clear that the United States was a commercial nation whose path to prosperity lay in lucrative foreign markets. American ports buzzed with activity as sailors loaded and unloaded tons of valuable commodities from a venerable fleet of sloops and schooners. Domestic

24 / Gautham Rao

agriculture and raw goods found ready, lucrative markets in England and mainland Europe. American vessels returned from abroad with foreign manufactures and foodstuffs—­from linens to wines—­that satisfied the United States’ voracious demand. Foreign commerce was so significant, noted a prescient Pelatiah Webster, “that no sources of wealth can flourish and operate to the general benefit of the community without it.”7 Getting to these foreign markets, however, was a problem. Merchants complained about maritime labor shortages and the “very high price of labour [sic]” on the docks. Mariners of other countries accepted “1/2 the wages give to the American seaman,” lamented a government official. The maritime boom had pushed sailors’ wages to nearly double their pre-­Revolutionary levels. Concluded one Federalist editor, “Unless a supply of them is preserved, no wealth will be able to procure them.”8 Preserving an adequate maritime labor force was a priority from the very beginnings of the United States. Public concern over sailors’ well-­being began during the 1780s as revolutionary Americans took a second stab at creating a new republic. “As a nursery of seamen,” wrote Alexander Hamilton of commerce in 1788, “it now is, or . . . will become a universal resource.” The point came at a crucial juncture in the argument of Federalist 11 as Hamilton advocated federal policies to stimulate long-­distance commerce. Commerce fostered maritime laborers; maritime laborers carried commerce throughout the globe; maritime laborers, as they shepherded goods throughout the world, also unconsciously partook in naval drills, for maritime navigation remained the same in peace and in war. The existence of a “nursery of seamen” was thus a prerequisite to commercial prosperity as well as “the establishment of a navy.” The merchant sailor was a crucial actor in Hamilton’s political blueprint of a new, distinctly commercial republic.9 As was Hamilton’s penchant, he borrowed the “nursery of seamen” from recent Anglican political economy. Since the late seventeenth century, Great Britain had embarked on a “fiscal-­military revolution” to give the state adequate capacity to extend imperial commerce and dominion.10 Creating a pool of sailors for merchant and naval services—­“the very pillars of any common-­wealth”—­and devising tools to maximize sailors’ labor was a central project in this revolution. In theory, commerce alone should have attracted men to the seafaring life. But in practice other measures became necessary. The infamous press gang, for instance, forcibly transformed subjects into sailors.11 Like the press gang, the “Marine Hospital” of the Stuart period—­the Royal Greenwich Hospital founded in 1694, and the “Sixpenny” Hospital in Liverpool four decades later—­served the British state. As a group of solicitous sailors explained, these hospitals were

The Early American State “In Action”  /  25

ostensibly “their Charity,” as the hospitals took care of men who had been “disabled for future Service.” But one seaman’s charity was a political economists’ gold. Whitehall viewed the hospital as a method “for the Encrease [sic] and Encouragement of Seamen.” If men knew that the state would care for them and their families in case of “ruin,” they would be more likely to become sailors. As an incentive for men to become sailors, the British marine hospitals were a means to the end of creating a “nursery of seamen.”12 That sailors’ hospitals would stimulate and buoy the maritime labor force also occurred to close observers of commerce and government in the early national United States. As early as July 1789, Congress explored creating “hospitals for sick and disabled seamen” in tandem with “the regulation of harbors.”13 In the late 1790s the Boston Marine Society, a private charitable association of retired merchants and navigators, floated a proposal to construct a “Marine Hospital.” Others sought a hospital for sailors in “Washington in the State of Virginia.” North Carolina Federalist Hugh Williamson, during a lengthy disquisition on “protection to American commerce,” and “the increase of American seamen,” recommended that “hospitals should be erected . . . at every port of entry . . . for sick and infirm seamen.” “While we attempt to increase the number of native seamen for the extension of commerce and general prosperity of agriculture,” he concluded, “we should be solicitous to protect and cherish this useful class of our fellow-­citizens.”14 Alexander Hamilton’s April 1792 “Report on Marine Hospitals” echoed these same themes. Sailors were “a very useful . . . class of the Community.” “Navigation and trade” were directly “concerned in” providing “protection and relief” to merchant sailors. And like the old Greenwich Hospital, Marine Hospitals would stimulate the rise of a nursery of seamen by “conducing to attract and attach seamen to the country.” Thus the first secretary of the Treasury recommended “the establishment of one or more marine Hospitals in the United States.”15 In these swirling winds of economic concern and political economy, nobody bothered to question whether or not it was right for government to impose itself upon the marketplace of maritime labor and commerce. There was a strictly legal case to be made that since “the regulation of commerce belonging exclusively to the National Legislature,” and since sailors were a part of this commerce, that the “General Government” was responsible for regulating the maritime labor force. But such a broad interpretation of the federal government’s regulatory powers had not yet entered the mainstream of American jurisprudence. And no other class of labor, despite its

26 / Gautham Rao

importance to national prosperity, was considered subject to national authority. Why was it possible to consider such measures toward merchant sailors? Importantly, the political economic vision of hospitals for sailors drew upon a broader sociolegal understanding of the sailor as a dependent person, whose physical person required protection. In the eighteenth-­century world merchant sailors were considered a partly free, partly dependent class of labor. Their dependent status owed to the shipmaster’s disciplinary authority over the sailor’s body. The shipmaster’s authority, part of a regime of “disciplinary paternalism,” was based on the basic master-­seaman relationship. In this relationship, sailors owed a term of service to the merchant vessel, and they owed obedience to the master of a vessel. Masters possessed authority to compel disobedient sailors to perform the duties expected of them, in the ways expected of them. Captains were analogized to “masters . . . of servants,” “fathers . . . of children, and even “kings . . . of subjects.” To be sure, this legal formula was daily the subject of a dynamic struggle in which shipmasters and sailors negotiated authority and conditions at sea. But even as mariners developed a distinct, powerful class consciousness, their legal status as dependents only hardened throughout the eighteenth century.16 Mariners’ dependent legal status was most clearly inscribed in admiralty law, which governed maritime labor and commerce. English law strived to maintain the master-­seaman relationship. The law stood ready to reinforce masters authority in the instance that sailors “disobey the master, &c. obstruct service,” or “Make a confederacy . . . that they will not work but at such times, for such price, or not finish what others begun.” Conversely the admiralty had frowned upon “Masters who do not pay wages to the mariners,” or who were unnecessarily cruel in correcting mariners.17 Preserving the master-­seaman relationship also stood at the heart of even the earliest admiralty jurisprudence in the United States. “Law and reason” prescribed the duties of masters toward mariners: a “seaworthy” vessel, “sufficient provisions,” and fair treatment. But “the master has a right to correct a refractory, disobedient mariner.”18 But dependence also gave sailors certain protections. Shipmasters had a legal duty to care for seamen who fell sick or suffered injury at sea. When a sailor became incapacitated, the captain was obligated, whenever the ship anchored in a foreign port, to send sailors ashore and pay their hospital bills. “The charge should not be thrown on the sailor,” opined Judge Richard Peters in Swift v. The Happy Return. Rather, “it ought to be borne” by the ship itself. Why was this? Peters cited three intersecting “interests”

The Early American State “In Action”  /  27

behind the duty to care: “humanity,” “justice,” and “commerce.” At sea, and far from home, the sick sailor was physically incapable of maintaining himself. Since the mariner was already dependent on the master, it fell to the latter to procure proper medical care. This was only just because ancient legal authorities—­“The Law of Oleron”—­demanded these measures, and had done so for about five centuries. And finally, the interests of commerce were involved because a master who failed to exert the duty to care might, in the case of “infectious disease,” risk the lives of the entire crew and, subsequently, the vessel and its cargo.19 Admiralty law also rendered the sailor’s physical personhood as legitimate object of government protection. “When mariners enter into articles for a voyage,” argued Philadelphia district judge Richard Peters in 1789, “they do not thereby put themselves out of the protection of the laws, or subject their limbs and lives to the capricious passions of a master.” True it was that in “the relation between a master and his servant,” “a discretionary authority is allowed by law to the master.” But “nothing is more frequent than the intervention of the civil power to dissolve this connection,” whenever the master acted with “severity and cruelty.” “Humanity” demanded nothing less.20 Some years later, Peters’s court—­and most likely Peters himself—­used a case of excessive punishment of a sailor to elaborate why such government protection was necessary. Merchant mariners, “with all their too numerous faults, are considered by all maritime nations objects of national concern” because they “are deemed the sinews . . . of naval power, strength, and security.” Concluded the court, without “this intrepid and hardy class of men, under national government and direction, commerce might be annihilated.” Thus “they are encouraged and protected by all the maritime laws.”21 Admiralty jurisprudence of the 1790s held out the most glaring justifications of government intervention in the master-­seaman relationship, and government action to protect sailors’ persons. With great ease, the courts had legitimated government control over the sailor’s personhood. They had only a little less difficulty asserting the government’s duty to protect the sailor’s property, and specifically, his wages. Mariners’ wages, proposed Richard Peters, “must be viewed on a more extensive scale, than as it affects the interests of individuals.” Due to the peculiarities of maritime labor, “where mariners are unfortunate and faultless” by injury, and at the whim of merchants and masters, it was “for the great and general interests of commerce” that the law protect sailors’ wages from unnecessarily “severe forfeitures and punishments.” Where private contracts failed to protect sailors’ earnings, “law and reason” would.22

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According to Judge Peters, disputes over sailors’ wages had appeared “so often” in admiralty courts by 1801 that judges felt a diminishing need “to enter into any further discussion of it.” “General principles” came to govern these cases, such as rules that sailors’ misconduct justified some garnishment, while desertion justified total garnishment. Simply put, “under the marine law the contract for seamen’s wages is, from the nature of the case, in some measure contingent” upon the material facts of the case, and more importantly, on the judge’s understanding of those material facts. Over the course of the 1790s, federal judges became accustomed to distributing wages as they saw fit. This was best, concluded the District Court of Pennsylvania—­and most likely Richard Peters. Indeed the cases were often short. But if they were not, “it will be most beneficial, both for commerce and the seamen, that they should leave their affairs in the hands of an agent, and prosecute their employment at sea.” The sailors, in other words, should return before the mast, where they belonged, while law and reason dealt with more complicated matters.23 As the early proposals for Marine Hospitals reveal, admiralty judges were not the only ones who conceived of the public’s ability to regulate sailors’ private property. Likewise the Boston Marine Society’s petition to the Treasury Department called for a “a Small Tax on Seamen for the support of said Hospital.” Alexander Hamilton embraced this concept in his 1792 report. “A fund for the purpose,” he wrote, would “be most conveniently derived from the expedient suggested in the abovementioned Memorial,” which was “a contribution by the mariners and the seamen of the United States, out of their wages to be regulated by law.” There was a tension here between voluntarism and coercion. The funds were at once a “contribution” by individuals, presumably acting on their own volition. But Hamilton and the Boston Marine Society advanced a system of taxation by which “law” extracted ten cents a month from mariners’ wages. In this sense the proposed Marine Hospital tax was a hybrid system of voluntarism and compulsion. Sailors were thought incapable of making such complex calculations as to save up for a rainy day. But the public, accustomed as it was to protecting the sailor, and handling his purse, could take charge. As one treatise writer would recall, the taxes “compel seamen to contribute somewhat in the day of their prosperity towards their own relief.”24 Hamilton had great confidence in the promise of law to produce a mechanism by which the government could compel merchant mariners to make these contributions for Marine Hospitals. “Effectual regulations for this purpose may,” concluded Hamilton, “without difficulty be devised.”

The Early American State “In Action”  /  29

The tax would “be reserved, pursuant to articles,” or as part of the mariners’ labor contract, “by masters of vessels, and paid to the collectors” of customs at the customhouses. By building the hospital taxes within maritime labor contracts, the government would impose upon the authority structure of the master-­servant relationship in order to extract the taxes required to fund the proposed hospitals. This was not the first time that the federal government proposed to interfere with maritime labor contracts. The Merchant Marine Act of 1790 required captains and merchants to preserve in writing all contracts made with sailors to protect the latter from fraud and abuse. But the withholding of individuals’ wages? This was a remarkably coercive and interventionist role for public power in the 1790s.25 But for most Americans who considered these proposals, the mechanism of a hospital tax, coercive as it was, likely appeared rather innocuous. This owed to Anglo antecedent. Costs of the Greenwich and aptly named Sixpenny Hospital were defrayed by similar transactions, as ship owners or captains withheld “six pence per mensem out of their Salaries and Wages.” For Hamilton and his revolutionary brethren, this structure of taxation, mediated as it was by private relationships between merchants, masters, and seamen, had appeared far different from other parliamentary taxes directed at the colonies. Some colonists believed that “it was not a tax” at all because it was not designed to produce revenue. Rather, as Hamilton put it, “contributions” were collected to protect a dependent class.26 By the late 1790s early national society had adopted and Americanized old stereotypes of sailors as dependents, rationales for protecting sailors persons, and sociolegal mechanisms for appropriating sailors’ property. This last concept—­the proposed withholding of mariners’ wages to fund a Marine Hospital—­anchored new legislation that appeared in Congress in April 1798. “After some conversation on the subject of the Marine Hospital” in the Committee on Commerce and Manufactures, the House was asked to approve a clause that would best secure “support . . . from the whole body of sailors of the United States.” that every owner or master of a vessel arriving from a foreign port into any port of the United States, shall, before the vessel is permitted to be entered, pay—­cents per month during their voyage, for every man who he has on board his vessel, which he shall be authorized to retain out of their wages.

A few days later the proper amount that masters would “retain out of their wages” was fixed at $0.20 per month. The rest of the bill was now made “conformable to this principle.”27

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But once debate began in earnest, the taxing mechanism drew skeptical cries from critics: why would this tax on a single class work? Would not a tax on “a single order of men” have the effect “to drive our seamen out of the country”? From there the critics broadened the angle of attack. Federalist Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts, who led this vocal minority, bemoaned the premise that sailors were “incapable of taking care of themselves.” And where they could not, sailors, like “sick and disabled persons of every description,” could rely on “the laws of reason and charity.” In short, Sewall rejected outright the paternalist paradigm toward maritime labor that eighteenth-­century Anglo-­American society had developed, and early national America had refined.28 It fell to the quixotic Edward Livingston of New York to rebut these heresies. For Livingston, the seemingly complex questions about taxing mechanisms, political economy, and the appropriate role of government hinged on the fact of the sailor’s status. Livingston “did not believe the people themselves,” meaning the sailors, “would object to the tax in question.” This was because he knew that those “in this class of men . . . would not object to so trifling a sum as twenty cents a month for so valuable an object.” It was not merely because the sum was “trifling.” Rather, it was because the sailors simply did not care about such things. “A sailor,” he continued, “is concerned only for the present, and is incapable of thinking of, or inattentive to, future welfare.” Not only does this render the sailor “a proper object for the care of Government.” But it also meant that the sailor would be willing to put the matter of his person and well-­being in the hands of government. “Whilst he can provide an asylum,” concluded Livingston, “by the sacrifices of a few gills of rum, he will not scruple to do it.” Livingston’s ally, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, added a corollary: in his view, seamen would not even notice that the government was tinkering with their wages. After all, they “would not pay the tax themselves, as it would be considered as wages.” As captains withheld wages the sailors themselves never underwent the physical act of paying taxes.29 The day after Livingston’s and Pinckney’s arguments—­and not without last minute histrionics by Sewall and others—­the House approved what would come to be known as the Marine Hospital Act by a vote of fifty-­nine in favor to twenty-­seven against. As promised the law made it mandatory for shipmasters “to retain out of the wages of . . . seamen” on board their vessels $0.20 per month. Captains were then to pay over these sums, along with a list of the sailors who had paid the tax, to the local customhouse. Customs officials were charged with spending these funds to provide “temporary care” for sick and disabled mariners, while sending any surplus to

The Early American State “In Action”  /  31

the federal Treasury Department to join a fund for the future construction of permanent “hospitals.” For about the next two centuries, this brief piece of legislation would be the spine of governmental efforts to protect sailors’ well-­being.30 Of course, throughout the 1790s the merchant mariner was nowhere to be found in the debates and discussions that led to the Marine Hospital Act. This was because, for the architects of the 1798 law, the sailors and their consent were largely irrelevant. True it was that they were important and valuable to society. But by 1798 merchant sailors had become somewhat unique objects of public power. The durable image of Jack Tar, the paternal twists and turns of legal doctrine, and finally the enactment of a national law that gave the public the right to garnish sailors property to protect their well-­being—­all of this suggested that the merchant mariner was a depen­ dent class in American society. Law and governance would do what the sailor could not. This occurred to no less an authority as Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, editor of the nation’s leading medical journal and shortly bound for the United States Senate. He had loudly cheered the use of “the authority of the General Government” to create hospitals for the protection of “the youngest and stoutest seamen in the merchant service.” Some time after the Marine Hospital Act became law, Mitchill would boast that “the excellency [sic] and utility of this regulation is universally admitted; and the seamen of the United States are daily experiencing the advantages of it.”31

Administration and Statecraft, 1798–­1816 The legal creation of the Marine Hospitals triggered an explosive expansion of public authority in the early republic. The federal government claimed the authority to place institutions for the care of “sick and disabled seamen” in ports throughout the country. From the vantage point of political economy these institutions aimed to fulfill the government’s paternalist designs for maritime labor. But on the ground, on the waterfront, and in the Marine Hospitals, more proximate forces such as class, race, and local governance shaped the interaction between merchant sailors and the state. In the first decades of the nineteenth century it was thus difficult to speak of a “system” of Marine Hospitals. Rather, a loose network of hospitals, each with a different appearance, different ordering norms and rules, but connected by the same fiscal spine, quietly took root and expanded in the United States. The incredible variation of Marine Hospitals from port to port was partly by design. Where the British had centralized their hospitals at the bustling ports of Greenwich and Liverpool, the United States dispersed Marine

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Hospitals throughout the country. The Marine Hospital Act “authorized” the president to commission “directors of the marine hospital [sic]” wherever necessary. These “directors,” who were most often the collectors of the customhouses, bore the broad charge “to provide for the accommodation of sick and disabled seamen” with only “general instructions” from the president.32 This was much how the federal government worked in the early republic: Congress passed vague laws and local federal appointees, often the collectors of customs, “filled up” the details based on their own personal discretion.33 But the Marine Hospital Act was especially superficial, failing even to explain whether customs officials would be compensated for administering the Marine Hospitals. “The collection of the duty on seamens [sic] wages will be attended with some trouble,” conceded secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr., as the program began in late 1799. “The object being humane and benevolent,” however, he presumed would “intrust [sic] your attention.”34 Due perhaps to the vagaries of the law, it took a few years for the customhouses to grow accustomed to collecting, and merchant mariners and shipmasters to grow accustomed to paying, the new Marine Hospital taxes. This in itself should not have been surprising. In colonial times officials in Great Britain had angrily noted the colonial customhouses’ scant collection of hospital taxes.35 But after 1799 the collectors of customs did a bit better incorporating collection of Marine Hospital taxes into waterfront governance—­itself of relatively recent vintage. When a ship arrived in port, the captain brought a box of papers to the customhouse, such as the ship’s manifest from which customs duties were calculated, and a “return of seamen.” The latter document listed the “whole number employed,” the “names of seamen, and time for which they have been respectively employed,” and finally, “sums retained out of Seamens [sic] Wages, to be paid over to the Collector.” In keeping with Congress’s design, the seamen themselves never saw these “sums,” as they passed directly from the ship captain to the customhouse. Even this simple transaction, however, was subject to great “variances,” as Boston collector Henry Dearborn put it. Such variances appeared “trifling” to Dearborn. But they added up over time. In 1804 secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin complained that due to “evasions of its payment,” the hospital tax was but three-­fifths of what it should have been.36 The initial difficulties in collecting the Marine Hospital tax likely owed to something other than merchant mariners’ resistance against the withholding system. In Rhode Island, for instance, “the seamen agreed” to allow ship captains to pay hospital money to the customhouse even in instances

The Early American State “In Action”  /  33

where they brought a suit for wages against the ship captain. As one attorney informed the district judge, the mariners “have deducted it accordingly in all their settlements.” Instead, the “difference in amount of Hospital money collected arises from the variance of mode in which the masters of vessels make their returns,” attested Boston collector Benjamin Lincoln. This too went back to the ambiguities of the Marine Hospital Act, which called only for a withholding to be made “at the rate of twenty cents per month.” Some masters “charge a whole month where a few days are wanting others [sic] are more correct in their estimate,” noted Lincoln.37 A second quirk in the Marine Hospital Act of 1798 also contributed to the early dilemmas. As interpreted shortly after its passage, the law allowed local customhouses to spend collected hospital money as needed, forwarding only surpluses to the federal treasury.38 In 1802 secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin agitated for a “more general application of the Fund,” in which the collectors of customs would send all collections to the Treasury, where it was then redistributed to ports as needed. This fiscal switch would have profound consequences for the Marine Hospitals and public health care in the early republic, as is discussed in the next section. But for the moment it suffices to say that with the Treasury controlling the purse, collection of the Marine Hospital tax instantly added up. “The fund appeared, upon the whole, calculated to afford relief where it was most wanted,” concluded Gallatin.39 Gradually, however, collection of the Marine Hospital tax began to follow a clear pattern. Once a master had paid the sailor’s hospital money over to the customhouse, the customs officials added the sailor’s name to “a book in the office,” or “Marine Hospital book.”40 By the letter of the law, evidence of the sailor’s name in this “Marine Hospital book” determined the sailor’s entry into a Marine Hospital. It was a basic matter of entitlement. As Congressman Charles Pinckney of South Carolina had observed during the 1798 debates over the Marine Hospital Act, it was “only reasonable and equitable that these persons should pay for the benefit which they were themselves to receive, and that it would be neither just nor fair for other persons to pay it.”41 Lurking just beneath the letter of the law, however, were paternal practices that further mediated the sailors’ status of entitlement. In addition to having his name in “the book in the office,” explained Boston collector Henry A. S. Dearborn, sailors also required “a certificate from the captain they sailed with or the owner . . . to enter the hospital.” These “certificates” were actually hastily scrawled on loose scraps of paper. Despite their rumpled appearance, however, these informal chits bore great authority. In

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1809, for instance, a shipmaster named Hosea Brooks asked the collector of customs in Savannah, Richard Wall, “to give to William Stratton a Cirtificut [sic] to go into the hospital.” “You will,” promised his master Brooks, “find his name on the seamans [sic] list which you have of the Sloop Betty.” The master’s paternal authority was borne out also by additional advocacy on behalf of the seaman. “He has been sick on board ever since the day I was at the Custom house [sic]” before the Betty’s voyage. “I have no convenient place for him here,” pleaded Brooks. Any further time on board “will be very unpleasant for him.” “He is a townsman of mine,” attested Brooks, and “I should have come and seen you my self if I was able.” Like pension applications and patronage requests would in the future, the master’s certificate established the seaman’s entitled status by narrativizing identity, pain, and suffering. “I think he ought to have a claim or a right to the Hospital until he recovers,” wrote New Jersey shipmaster James Bishop of one of his sailors. Unlike solicitations for other entitlement programs, however, this chit embodied the sailor’s dependent status—­even his request for care was inscribed by the master’s authority.42 The ailing sailor often brought the shipmaster’s certificate with him to the customhouse, where—­as Captain Brooks had put it—­a second “Cirtificut” was required for the sailor to gain entry to a hospital. The customhouse’s certificate was another performance of authority. Customs officials, or physicians in the customhouse’s employ, inspected the sailor’s body to determine the extent and severity of sickness or injury. This encounter was deeply influenced by class and status. Customs officials were local notables whose official position often owed to some combination of personal wealth, military fame, professional accomplishment, and political power. For these local elites, such as Beaufort, North Carolina, merchant turned customs collector H. M. Cooke, the sailors standing before them were “the unfortunate”—­a distinct, pitiable “class of the community.” These “unfortunate men” appeared at the customhouse “battered, mangled, bruised, and exhausted,” recounted Cooke. “The objects which present themselves,” lamented the Brahman collector of Boston, Henry A. S. Dearborn, “are such as humanity shudders at, for they are generally in the most extreme sloth and notwithstanding being ragged, penniless and diseased.” For men such as Cooke and Dearborn, the act of evaluating these broken men, and asserting authoritative control over a dependent’s physical person, was bound up in the dictates of charity and humanity.43 With a certificate from the customhouse, a sailor such as “PT” could now enter a Marine Hospital: “You will receive into the US Hospital PT an American Seaman [sic] brought here in the . . . Ship Jenny from England.”44

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Where no hospital existed the sailor presented himself to a local physician who, as in the case of Dr. Tobias Watkins of early republican Baltimore, had contracted to “provide a good and convenient house” to receive “all sick and disabled seamen which the Director . . . shall in writing direct to be admitted.” Marine Hospital physicians pledged to “furnish . . . good and wholesome meat drink washing lodging groceries and small stores commonly given to the sick,” and of course all “medical advice medicine surgical aid and advice nurses and all other necessary attendance.” In smaller ports sick seamen were boarded in private residences, where the physician made daily rounds. “I found it was a private institution,” recalled mariner Jacob Dunham of a Gulf Coast “Marine Hospital” in the 1840s.45 Particularly in smaller Northern ports, private boarding house arrangements brought the state into the lives of individual women. Like Herman Melville’s character “Handsome Mary” in Redburn, many women were the “business personage” in nineteenth-­century boardinghouses. During the early 1820s in Providence, Rhode Island, customs officials made over half of boarding­ house hospital contracts with local women. Many were repeat players, such as one Rebecca Richmond, who earned $2.50 a week—­and close to $200 from boardinghouse contracts in 1820. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of these dynamics and encounters, though distant from the world of formal law and authority, were structured by Marine Hospital contracts.46 Marine Hospitals in larger ports rented space from charitable insti­ tutions—­either wards in municipal hospitals or almshouses. This was a matter of convenience as municipal and state authorities maintained extensive facilities to care for sick indigents and beggars. Sailors, however, were wage laborers, and thus marked, for instance in the “commodious” Savannah poorhouse, as “pay patients.” In contrast to “pay patients” were “paupers,” who were admitted “at the discretion” of a local committee. As “pay patients,” the sailors were admitted solely for medical purposes. Paupers, on the other hand, could be compelled to labor in the hospital “as the steward or matron shall require.” Even as the poorhouse received indigents and paupers, however, its medical facilities had been “reared chiefly for the protection of seamen,” and would treat upwards of three hundred sailors per year. This arrangement seemed to work nicely for cities with sufficiently large alms-­or poorhouses, such as Savannah, where collector of customs A. S. Bullock gave “great credit” to the “Commissioners of the Poor House . . . for their management of the institution.”47 That local circumstance so deeply influenced the nature and function of Marine Hospitals in the early republic meant, necessarily, that parochial

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prejudice and social mores would also loom large over the daily goings-­on in these facilities. This was especially true when it came to black sailors. The Savannah poorhouse “admitted whites only.” In Cincinnati, “a law of the state prohibits any coloured person being received” in any state hospital or other health-­related institution.48 The Baltimore Marine Hospital—­a distinct “House” established by Dr. Tobias Watkins in 1807—­maintained order by segregating “white men” into “two large rooms,” and “coloured [sic] men” into a “third room.”49 Race was perhaps most important in Charleston, where black sailors were considered a public menace and banned from the waterfront. They were also prohibited from the Marine Hospital and were placed instead in the horrific Charleston poorhouse. This was most likely the “neat and clean order” that so impressed the municipal board of health, after visiting “the Marine Hospital, the Poor House and Work House.”50 In large ports such as New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York, where the federal government rented entire wards for the care of seamen, class seems to have played a prominent role in hospital affairs. Even as patients, sailors used strategies that were typically used to interfere with the labor process—­and challenge authority—­at sea, but instead to interfere with hospital procedure. Sailors’ who resorted to “rough talk,” a staple of maritime culture, were considered “very cross” to hospital employees, and even “turned out” for “sassiness.” As sailors lied to shipmasters to facilitate or slow down specific tasks, they often lied to convince hospital staff that they were well enough to depart, or on other occasions, feigned illness to extend their stay. “So goes imposters,” noted the dour Duffe. Drink, the sailors’ “respite from the rigors of an often punishing life,” was also a presence in the Marine Hospitals, despite concerted efforts to prohibit it. Where no alcohol was available inside the hospital, sailors were known for “jumping the fence,” only to return “grog-­ey [sic].”51 Finally there was theft. Sailors were as known for their generosity among themselves as they were notorious for pilfering from the vessels they served. In the hospitals, too, they made a “pretty haul” of goods belonging to nonsailors.52 As a result of the sailors’ resistance, physicians tightened discipline within the hospital walls. Importantly, many of those who operated Marine Hospitals were the most prominent physicians in their city and beyond. In the Charlestown Marine Hospital, for instance, physicians typically had strong connections to Harvard University’s medical faculty.53 These physicians had little tolerance for sailors’ shenanigans. As early as 1800, Castle Island Marine Hospital physician Thomas Welsh established stringent “Regulations for the Hospital for the relief of sick and disabled seamen in the harbour of Boston.” “No gambling of any kind is to be allowed in the

The Early American State “In Action”  /  37

hospital,” read one rule. No patient was allowed to go “beyond the limits” of the hospital “without leave obtained therefor. [sic].” Convalescing sailors who were able to be “employed” were required to “perform such reasonable service as the surgeon shall direct” in order to remain a patient. Beyond any formal statute, Marine Hospital physicians’ rule-­making powers—­what booster William Barton would call “police and domestick arrangements of such hospitals” in 1814—­structured the social order of life within this variant of the Marine Hospital. “It has always been well conducted since the first day it was opened for the reception of seamen,” concluded the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1853.54 Due to the incredible flexibility of the Marine Hospitals to local custom, culture, and practice, these institutions were mainstays of the maritime labor market by the 1820s. The hospitals cared for a class of laborers that would otherwise place great strain on local charity and resources. In 1820 the Boston Marine Hospital treated 545 patients, with nineteen fatalities. That same year, throughout the country, the Marine Hospitals “relieved” upwards of 4,000 sailors. By the 1830s, the hospitals were admitting close to 6,000 sailors, and by the 1850s, over 10,000. The project of constructing a national “nursery of seamen,” begun decades before in the revered pages of the Federalist, was alive and well by the age of Jackson.55

Administration and Statecraft, 1816–­35 By the 1820s, however, the Treasury Department’s control over federal purse strings increasingly influenced policy and practice within the Marine Hospitals. Through a series of administrative rulings, Treasury officials exerted growing control over who would be admitted and what care Marine Hospitals would provide. As the federal government made entitlement a question of national rather than local practice, it imparted a new, ideological dimension to the relationship between government and the person and property of the sick and disabled sailor. Entitlement, once mediated by local structures of power, now depended on national standards, the most important of which was national value. Only those seafaring bodies considered capable of contributing to the national good were entitled to receive the benefits of a system to which they had contributed throughout their lives.56 The involvement of the Treasury Department began during the profound economic crisis of the War of 1812. Wars and attending geopolitical crises restricted commerce and caused severe contractions in the maritime labor market. Patients flooded the Marine Hospitals. Meanwhile, the decline of commerce meant that hospital tax admissions had dried up. Collectors of

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customs like New York’s David Gelston suddenly faced fiscal disaster and called for “additional provision for sick & disabled seamen.” For Gelston, already $3,000 over budget, it was unreasonable to expect that “twenty cents PM [per man] will be by any means adequate to the demands that will be made for their necessary support.” Thus Gelston, and other collectors and Marine Hospital physicians, hands outstretched, turned to the federal government for help. Their efforts were handsomely rewarded, as Congress appropriated $60,000 for the Marine Hospitals from 1813 to 1815.57 After the conclusion of the War of 1812, however, the extra funds for the Marine Hospitals did not stop. Savannah collector Archibald Bullock pleaded that hospital taxes were insufficient to pay for large numbers of “that valuable class of our people” admitted to the hospital. Motivated by “policy & feeling,” Bullock requested an additional $1,000 in federal aid. He received $4,000. A year later, Bullock upped the ante by requesting “an annual allotment of seven thousand dollars” to “defray the expense of that Institution.” In the final tally Bullock got only a portion of what he wanted, but a clear pattern had emerged: the federal government was open for business, and the collectors of customs rushed to take advantage.58 But the federal government’s fiscal generosity was not without conditions, especially a growing scrutiny about how this and all Marine Hospital revenue would be spent. Growing official interest in the financial details of government operations was due in large part to the politicization of federal governance during the so-­called Age of Good Feeling. Governmental organization and expenditures had come to constitute the terrain of partisan politics. In the Treasury Department, officials faced great pressure to reconcile inevitably growing budgets with increasingly shrill antistatism. Thus in the wake of the War of 1812, “retrenchment” became the watchword of federal politics. And the very same Treasury Department that offered to increase Marine Hospital funding now took a hatchet to federal expenditures, including those of the Marine Hospitals. The burden was now on recipients of federal money to prove that, indeed, they deserved further government generosity.59 Beginning in 1820, the Treasury distributed rules to local Marine Hospital officials that delineated who deserved care, and what type of care. The latter issue was easier to decide. As Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford explained in 1821, the text of the Marine Hospital Act of 1798 clearly stated that “the object of the law was solely to afford temporary relief to sick and disabled seamen,” meaning that sailors were to be admitted, treated, and then returned to the waterfront. The “trifling sum authorized to be collected from each seaman, is, of itself, conclusive evidence that nothing

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more was intended.” Crawford also turned to old administrative rulings as authorities, such as Oliver Wolcott’s 1799 circular suggesting the hospitals were meant only to afford “temporary relief.” Administrative precedent gave historical legitimacy to Crawford’s interpretation of the Marine Hospital Act. The federal government had always intended the hospitals to function as triage stations for maritime laborers, rather than nursing homes for the permanently disabled.60 But Secretary Crawford’s appeal to the original meaning of the Marine Hospital Act underscored that, in the years since 1798, contrary practices without legal justification were the “principles which have governed the collectors of some of the ports for a number of  years.”61 Most local officials even entertained different definitions of what constituted a merchant sailor. “The law is silent on the subject,” reported Philadelphia collector Jonathan Steele in 1814. Thus Steele persuaded his counterpart in Little Egg, New Jersey, that it was “improper to charge Hospital money to crews of Privateers, as those crews sail without wages,” so “there is nothing from which the Hospital money could be derived.” Crews on privateers “only bargained . . . for a share of prizes” ensnared by private armed vessels making depredations on enemy shipping during wartime. But where crews “have contracted for stated wages Hospital money is paid.” In Mobile, collector Addin Lewis sought to expand the definition of “sick and disabled seaman” to embrace government officials who worked on board patrol vessels. In Boston, due either to “a defect in the law” or “a practical construction given . . . which exempts the crew [sic] of vessels” of different types, “in several instances” the customhouse did not collect hospital money.62 Thus Crawford unleashed a barrage of rulings to uproot these loose practices, beginning by attempting to define who was and who was not a sailor. Productivity was the crux of Crawford’s definition. He argued that whenever sailors “become permanently incapable of providing for themselves, they are legitimate objects of the poor laws, and must be provided for as other poor.” Mariners’ status as mariners depended on the individual’s ability of “providing for themselves.” As soon as the mariner became incapacitated, in other words, he was no longer a mariner but merely one among the many “other poor.” And as such this individual, stripped as he was of his seafaring identity, was no longer entitled to care in the Marine Hospital. “All persons of this description now in the hospital must be discharged,” ordered Crawford in 1821.63 For Crawford, the correlation between entitlement and productivity could be measured by the sick and disabled mariner’s prospects for recovery. First, sailors who would not recover were no longer sailors at all, and were

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therefore no longer entitled to care from the Marine Hospitals. “No seaman afflicted with mania,” or mental disorders, were to “be allowed the benefit of the Hospital for any period, however short.” Second, Crawford excluded any sailor with an “incurable” medical condition, such as the loss of a limb. The effect of these regulations, concurred Boston’s Henry A. S. Dearborn, was that patients were “discharged when cured or when it is ascertained they are incurable . . . from the Physicians.” This would prevent the Marine Hospitals from becoming “Invalid Hospitals, like the British Marine one at Greenwich and the French military one in Paris.”64 Crawford also sought to exclude a third type of sailor from entitlement to care at the Marine Hospitals: the “transient sailor,” who moved by land between ports in search of work, or who alternated seasonally between agriculture and seafaring. If sailors “chose to straggle by land from one port to another,” he informed one customs official, then they were mere landlubbers and as such “ought to be considered and treated as paupers,” not sailors. Crawford’s rule added a moral dimension to his emphasis on preserving only productive maritime laborers. If an individual calling himself a sailor was sane and “curable,” but not honestly and gainfully employed in the maritime labor market, he lost his entitlement to the Marine Hospital. That these men paid taxes to defray the cost of their own medical care in case of injury was irrelevant because, in Crawford’s view, the moment they pondered wage work on shore they became idle and ceased being sailors. Such a narrow definition of the sailor coldly ignored the realities of the working poor in the early republic, where steady work was rare, and where seasonal opportunities buffeted workers between farm and landing.65 The Treasury Department’s encroachment into the previously locally mediated matter of mariners’ entitlement to the Marine Hospitals did not go unchallenged. But Crawford was not moved. If his “narrow” rules would not do, then purely subjective criteria “must control the conduct of those charged with the execution of the law.” “The question then presented is,” he continued, “whether the executive officers of the government are to deliberately and knowingly apply public money without authority, and to objects to which it has not been appropriated,” merely because localities had not made provision for “the poor, the halt, the blind, the insane?” It was a simple matter of ensuring the Marine Hospitals “to be administered according to law, and with strict impartiality.” For this customs officials were to “consider the regulation” as “the rule of your conduct, from which there is to be no departure.”66 What Crawford failed to appreciate, however, was that the demands of medical practice could not fit within his administrative rules of “strict

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impartiality.” As Boston Marine Hospital physician David Townsend explained, men could only be deemed “incurable” after “all remedies known in practice to be adapted to their complaints have been faithfully applied and proved inefficient.” It was “oft times prove[n] premature” to declare a patient “incurable on his application for admission.” New York physician Christopher Prince concurred. “Very few” applicants were clearly incurable and “they are always sent to the almshouse.” But “there are as many as twenty taken in every year who prove to be incurable; this is ascertained by physicians” after varying amounts of time—­“some nine months, some six, and four.” The category of “incurables,” which Crawford had woven into the administrative rules governing treatment in the Marine Hospital, was largely unworkable at the level of medical practice.67 Despite the practical difficulties of the new, centralized administrative rules, customs and hospital officials gradually and begrudgingly adopted them. The effects were immediately noticeable. In New York, Christopher Prince noted that “in compliance with my instructions, I am under the necessity of rejecting many who have been exposed, and actually have become the victims of an untimely death.” The governors of the New York hospital lamented that the new restrictive rules of admission to the Marine Hospital forced suffering sailors, especially those with “venereal infection,” to “absolutely perish” on city streets or, as state officials observed, “to be taken to our almshouse.” Some of these men, as the hospital suspected, were also “eject[ed] from the doors of the hospital,” as evidenced by Prince’s private list of “Seamen Discharged” on evidence of venereal disease.68 Sailors protested the “hardship and cruelty” of the Treasury Department’s new rules. A “regulation has been made, and rigidly executed . . . that no more than sixty seamen can be received into the New York hospital!” “The result of this system” was that mariners “who have paid hospital money for twenty years and more . . . out of their slender and humble earnings, for their whole active lives,” were “compelled to ask for relief at the doors of the hospital, and to ask in vain.” In the sailors’ view, “justice” meant that any sailor who paid the hospital tax was entitled to care at the Marine Hospital. On the contrary there was Crawford’s “system,” where entitlement was determined by administrative fiat. This was “the result of cold, unfeeling, and sordid calculations, unbecoming a free and enlightened country.”69 The “calculations” that so troubled merchant mariners seeking entry to the Marine Hospitals also undoubtedly scared many already within the hospitals. To comply with the Treasury Department’s rules, customs and hospital officials investigated patients to determine whether—­even after admission—­they remained entitled to care. In the Charlestown Marine

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Hospital near Boston, these investigations often resulted in summary expulsion. In October 1826, for example, one patient was dismissed after it was discovered he had recently been a resident at the “Charlestown Alms House, no further medical assistance being necessary.” Another was “discharged by order of the Collector for insanity.” Despite being admitted and treated for fifteen days, a mariner described specifically as a “negro” was turned out for being “not unwell.” And finally sailor “R. W.” was dismissed after four days after it was decided that he had “no claim on the benefits of the hospital.” In practice, Crawford’s law meant that the Treasury Department, through its officer corps, shaped not only who was entitled to care, but also medical care itself, in the Marine Hospitals.70 The Treasury Department’s increasingly centralized control of the Marine Hospitals marked a substantial erosion but not disappearance of the old, discretionary authority of local customs officials and hospital physicians to “fill up the details” of vague legislation. Physicians and customs officials could dispatch a “Special Permission” to plead on an unentitled sailor’s behalf to the secretary of the Treasury. In these requests local officials advocated for sick sailors, just as shipmasters had done in the “certificates” that once entitled sailors to treatment. But as occurred in the case of a sick and destitute “Captain Pickle” of Philadelphia, these requests ultimately lay in the hands of the Treasury. The captain was “well known” at the Philadelphia customhouse and had long paid hospital taxes, but “for the last two years he has not been to sea.” Could not the Treasury make an exception and allow him care? Four days later the Treasury Department denied Barker’s plea, “as by the regulations for the administration of the Marine Hospital fund Captain Pickle would not be entitled to relief.” Local officials could manipulate language and tug at heartstrings on sailors’ behalf. But in the end, as in the case of Captain Pickle, the power to decide who was entitled to care, and who was not, rested in more distant, powerful hands.71 In the age of Jackson, even amid a rising tide of antistatism, few worried that the federal government had waded too deep into the governance of the Marine Hospitals. Rather, amid an institutional turn in sociomedical thought, and due to the exigencies of the market revolution, most believed that the federal government had not gone far enough. As commerce followed watercourses deep into the frontier, western pioneers—­like their Atlantic forebearers—­envisioned the Marine Hospitals as the optimal solution to the old and persistent problem of maritime labor.72 The arrival of keelboats, flatboats, and steamships at inland river ports brought not only valuable commodities but also scores of broken mariners. Unlike local paupers, whose families and misfortunes were well known to

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these river communities, the arriving sailors were insalubrious strangers. They were “of New York, of Pennsylvania, of Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and North Alabama, as well as of Kentucky”—­everywhere, it seemed, but from home. And it was also undeniable that these sick strangers performed valuable labor. Their productivity and unfamiliarity made these sailors unfit for the poorhouse. Rather, they were “well worthy the aid of the nation.” “The only efficient remedy for the great and increasing mortality among the enterprising navigators,” argued a group of Indianans in 1832, was a “National Hospital, with national funds, and administered by national functionaries.” A federally operated Marine Hospital was “indispensable” to commerce, confirmed Chicago memorialists in 1845.73 Undoubtedly the south and west, in the throes of liberal individualism, clamored for Marine Hospitals to duck responsibility for sick merchant mariners.74 “Sick seamen from on board vessels bound from New Orleans, Mobile, and other ports in the bay of Mexico, are often put ashore here, without any adequate provision being made for their support and maintenance,” complained residents of Key West in 1841. One such sailor “died in the heart of town—­there being no hospital to remove him to.” This spectacle, and others like it, embarrassed the aesthetic sensibilities of antebellum Americans in at least two ways. First, dying sailors would “swell so greatly our mortuary returns” and tarnish the city’s image, worried one Memphis resident in search of fodder for booster pamphlets. A sailor falling ill and dying in the streets was also unsightly. As a North Carolina customs official observed, Marine Hospitals were perhaps best “far removed” from the center of town where “sick sailors” would be received, “recover . . . and be discharged.” Federal Marine Hospitals preserved the ideological purity of local towns; civil society would not be burdened with the duty to care for seafaring strangers who could not, it seemed, care for themselves.75 Due to widespread public support, the federal government drastically expanded the Marine Hospitals beginning in 1837. Remarkably, the number of Marine Hospital arrangements grew from thirty-­seven in 1823 to seventy in 1836 to ninety-­five in 1858.76 As the hospitals grew, so did the role of the Treasury Department and the federal government. Even the slightest possible transgression of Treasury Department rules required collectors of customs to “report the fact” and await “further instructions” from the nation’s capital. Consider the case of a Marine Hospital physician in Columbus, Georgia, who charged “more than what your directions to your agents allow in ordinary cases.” The physician believed that “some deviation” from federal rules was sometimes necessary because otherwise nobody would care for these sailors, for whom no other provisions existed. Yet this doctor

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would be left holding the bag, as would many others who departed from the letter of administrative laws from the Treasury Department. The Treasury, admitted Secretary Levi Woodbury some years later, was sometimes compelled “to restrict the assistance in respect to many who have been taxed.” Only through such “vigilance” had the Marine Hospitals been “so administered to assist many more for the same amount than . . . formerly.”77

Conclusion: Marine Hospitals and the Early American State In the early American republic, the Marine Hospitals brought the federal government into the lives of hundreds of thousands of mariners and merchants involved in overseas and interstate commerce. But to at least one distinguished observer, the hospitals, and by implication the federal government, had become dangerously oversized. In October 1856, associate justice of the US Supreme Court Robert Cooper Grier lamented the vast reach of the Marine Hospitals while riding circuit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. In Buckley v. Brown, a federal revenue official had demanded and collected hospital money from a canal pilot boat operator, seemingly in direct contradiction to an 1846 statute that specifically exempted those “employed in navigating canal boats” from the Marine Hospital tax. It was understandable that port officials were confused, explained Grier, because “the revenue laws passed by Congress have become so numerous and complicated.” It was time to sort out the purpose of the Marine Hospitals and to decide once and for all who was, and who was not, obligated to support and entitled to care at the hospitals. Canal boat operators worked in the nation’s interior, argued Grier, and “there is nothing of a maritime character about this mode of transportation, save the boat.” The crew of a canal boat, down to the “boy who drives the mule, have probably never seen the sea.” These laborers are then “astonished to find that, as soon as their boat touches brackish water, it has become the subject of a new code of laws.” This metamorphosis “converted into mariners” the otherwise landlubbing crew, and vested into them “an interest in the marine hospital [sic] fund.” For Grier, enough was enough. Congress had acted to rescue “trade” from “custom house exactions.” He would not permit customs officials to effectively “annul an act of congress [sic]” by collecting hospital money from “these very persons and things” the 1846 law protected.78 Grier’s apprehension about a metastasizing federal establishment was unmistakable. Anxiety about the “market revolution” that had overtaken American society in the preceding decades undoubtedly fueled Grier’s screed. His contrast between those employed in “the internal trade of this

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country,” exempt from the Marine Hospitals, and those in “maritime” employ, rightful subjects of the program, suggests that the Marine Hospitals were appropriate for the older Atlantic commercial marketplace but not the new frontier economies of the American West. This dichotomy was a familiar theme for the United States’ economic boosters who foresaw a future of prosperity in western expansion, while recalling an inchoate Atlantic economy wracked by economic panic and transnational instability.79 Yet Grier’s lament ran afoul of the reality that the Marine Hospitals were expanding, and expanding rapidly, in the very western towns that seemed so distant from the weathered entrepôts of the old Atlantic marketplace. Grier’s inability to make sense of the Marine Hospitals reflects nineteenth-­century Americans’ difficulty of comprehending a federal government that worked at the margins of society, through a complex machinery of state, local, and sometimes private actors. In this way, argues historian Brian Balogh, the early American state was “hidden in plain sight.”80 Grier’s dismay about the ostensibly ineluctable force of federal taxation suggests that by the era of the American Civil War, the federal government’s taxing powers had become not only legitimate but also quite formidable. It was a remarkable thing in itself that Congress had to statutorily restrict customhouses’ collection of the Marine Hospital taxes to “maritime” workers. Indeed, some ten thousand “seamen” had received care at Marine Hospitals in 1856. But the bigger issue was the revenue, not only in the Marine Hospital program but also in the sum total of the federal government’s taxing ability. As for the hospitals, sailors had provided $153,946.65 in taxes in the year Grier ruled in Buckley v. Brown. This number paled in comparison to the $64 million pulled in by the customhouses, while federal land offices netted almost $9 million.81 From the end of the War of 1812 to the first shots of the Civil War, the federal revenue trend lines pushed into fiscal territory once unimaginable in the times of Hamilton and Gallatin, as the Treasury reported tax hauls totaling $33 million in 1831, $52 million in 1851, and $56 million in 1860. What had occurred, then, was that the American tax state had come into its own. To be sure, this tax state was a distant relative of the modern fiscal regime that coalesced after World War II. It was a relative nonetheless. Thus the tariff would remain the political economic backbone of federal finance for the remainder of the long nineteenth century.82 Although the story of the Marine Hospitals in the early republic does not quite illustrate the emergence of this early tax state, it does shed light on the venue in which, and the granular process by which, it came about. At the customhouses of the early republic, negotiated authority on the waterfront

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between federal officials and merchant capitalists helped legitimate the federal taxing power. Thereafter, administrative and judicial reformers sought to centralize the administration of revenue laws to maximize the federal purse and also to produce greater uniformity and ostensible equity for officials and citizens alike. At the Marine Hospitals, this unfolded to a great degree on the backs of the individuals who had paid their fair share of taxes, only to see regulations hinder their entitlement to previously promised medical care. At the customhouses, it was merchant capitalists who suffered from increasingly punitive doctrines regarding tax collection and administration. Most notably, the Supreme Court advanced what would come to be known as the Wood doctrine that had the effect of strengthening customs officials’ legal tools to prosecute crimes against the revenue. Congress passed laws that changed minor aspects of customs law on an annual basis—­sometimes, in fact, more frequently. The Wood doctrine stated that the passage of a new law did not implicitly repeal every part of a previous law, thus enabling customs officials a choice of punitive statutes, one more stringent than the other, to enforce tariff measures. This did not escape Grier, who complained in Buckley v. Brown about resilience of superseded statutes that demanded “the highest duty, the largest fees, or the severest penalties.” It was as if these were “incapable of being repealed.” In his survey of federal administration in the Jacksonian era, legal historian Jerry Mashaw thus argues that “a culture of administrative legality” had come to pass.83 Grier’s complaint about a tangle of “contradictory statutes” that pertained to the customs and Marine Hospital establishments also raises an important point about the nature of administrative practice in the early American state. In the case before him, Congress had passed a brief—­one paragraph—­vague act that aimed to exempt a class of employees—­canal boatmen—­from the Marine Hospital tax, but had failed to specifically define to whom the exemption applied beyond the generic formulation, “owner or owners, master or captain, or other persons employed in navigating canal boats without masts or steam-­power.” A customs official narrowly interpreted this statute, without guidance from the Treasury, and seemed to defeat Congress’s intent in enacting the exemption. Subsequent litigation brought the cause before the federal judiciary, which, in Buckley v. Brown, clarified both the intent of the statute and the appropriate administrative practices to make operative that intent. This was how federal statutes worked in theory and practice in the early republic: Congress enacted excessively broad statutes, local officeholders seized upon discretion to give meaning to those statutes, and oftentimes a multiplicity of conflicting or diverging local practices took root before, or if, the judiciary or the Treasury found it necessary to impose

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some manner of uniformity. In this study of the Marine Hospitals, cultural constructions weighed heavily on customs officials as they decided on basic questions as to who to admit for care. When the Treasury centralized rules for admission to the Marine Hospitals, it required an enormous exertion of institutional energy to contest and undo the old, local, customary means of administration. In the early American state, then, statutory interpretation occurred on the periphery of the state, was subject to any number of local influences, and shaped to a great extent the operation of federal policy. The inherent tension between a coalescing tax state and powerful local administrative custom points to a third important theme in the story of the early American state: centralization. After the War of 1812, the Treasury Department attempted to dictate as closely as possible how customs officials should interpret and implement legislation pertaining to the Marine Hospitals. In so doing, the Treasury was trying to close the distance between center and periphery by pulling the latter closer to the former. In an 1833 case, the federal circuit court in the Southern District of New York declared that a customs official was a mere “ministerial officer: he acts under the instructions of the Secretary of the Treasury, who is expressly authorized to give instructions, as to the due enforcement of the revenue laws.” The Tariff of 1842 specified that customs officials were obligated to “execute and carry into effect all interactions of the Secretary of the Treasury,” and that the secretary’s opinions “shall be conclusive and binding.” Importantly, however, the administrative and judicial impetus to centralize federal offices on the periphery would not come to fruition until the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state in the twentieth century. As historian Andrew Wender Cohen argues in his evocative account of antismuggling efforts in late nineteenth-­century America, neither public outcry, nor heightened vigilance, nor even draconian sentencing was sufficient to “guarantee that the laws would be effective,” especially in the growing nation’s youngest hinterlands. For the early American state, centralization was a crucial and pressing imperative, but, most importantly, it constituted governmental institutions as arenas of conflict and contest.84 From the purview of the early American state, then, the Marine Hospital program was not an anomaly. In their institutional design and administration, the hospitals fit squarely within the main themes of early American statecraft—­associative structure, tax and revenue power, local influence, and contested centralization. Where the Marine Hospital program did prove anomalous, however, was in its longevity. The bureaucratic transformation of the American state in the twentieth century left behind it an institutional wreckage as the individual income tax return surpassed the customhouse, as

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a sprawling system of federal bureaus and field offices disappeared, and as modern administrative law turned the tables in the lengthy American contest over governmental centralization. But the Marine Hospitals functioned until the late twentieth century until they succumbed to Reagan-­era cuts to social policy. It was not without irony that a federal program borne of the Federalists’ imperial ambitions, that so epitomized the means and ends of the early American state, became a victim of the conservative assault on the New Deal order.85

Notes 1.

I would like to thank Law and Social Inquiry for granting me permission to reuse portions of my previously published article, “Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Health Care, and the Early American State,” which appeared in vol. 37, no. 3 (2012). 2. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–­43. 3. For a review of this literature, see Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (1997): 347–­80; and Mark R. Wilson, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Insti­ tutional Growth and Structural Change,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–­ 1920), ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–­35, 697–­705. For an excellent synthesis, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the communications revolution, see Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The United States Postal Service from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). On the transportation revolution, see John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). The best works on the General Land Office are Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–­1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Daniel J. Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Two fine studies of federal Indian policy are Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: The United States Indian Service, 1869–­1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and C. Joseph Genetin-­Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). On patent administration, see B. Zorina Khan, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyright in American Development, 1790–­1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and on the tariff, see Brian Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). On veterans’ pensions and the welfare state, see Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge:

The Early American State “In Action”  /  49

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). See John Odin Jensen, “Bulwarks against a Human Tide: Governments, Mariners, and the Rise of General Marine Hospitals on the Midwestern Frontier, 1800–­1900” (PhD diss., Carnegie-­Mellon University, 2000); Ronald Hamowy, Government and Public Health in America (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007); Bess Furman and Ralph Chester Williams, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 1798–­1948 (Washington, DC: National Institutes of Health, 1973); Laurence F. Schmeckebier, The Public Health Service: Its History, Activities, and Organization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1923). See also my previous studies of the Marine Hospitals: Gautham Rao, “Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Healthcare, and the Early American State,” Law and Social Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2012): 627–­56; Rao, “Sailors’ Health and National Wealth,” Common-­Place 9, no. 1 (2008), http://www.common-­place.org/vol-­09/no-­01/rao/; Rao, “The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law, and Commerce in the Age of Revolution,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008). On the maritime orientation of British imperial political economy, see N. A. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986). Imperial governance hinged on complex negotiations between office­ holders and communities. See Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of  Virginia Press, 1994). For a more focused study of the local, accommodationist tactics of imperial office­ holders in North America, see Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Empire in the Atlantic World, 1664–­1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government, illustrates American state builders’ conscious attempts at emulating imperial political economy. For focused studies on the British Empire’s coercive practices aimed at producing a docile body of maritime labor, see Brent S. Sirota, “The Church: Anglicanism and the Nationalization of Maritime Space,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 196–­217; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-­American Maritime World, 1700–­1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Pelatiah Webster, A Dissertation on the Political Union and the Constitution of the Thirteen United States of North America . . . (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by T. Bradford, 1783), 28. Generally, on the significance of foreign trade in the 1790s, see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–­1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1961); Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, History of the American Economy, 8th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Dryden Press, 1998), 151; Claudia D. Goldin and Frank D. Lewis, “The Role of Exports in American Economic Growth during the Napoleonic Wars, 1793 to 1807,” Explorations in Economic History 17, no. 1 (1980): 6–­25. Alex Macomb to Oliver Wolcott Jr., October 26, 1796; Daniel Clarke, quoted in Timothy Pickering to Oliver Wolcott Jr., March 13,1800; Reel 6, Papers of Oliver Wolcott Jr., Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress (hereafter LC). Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 179, 270. John Fenno, Plan for Establishing a General Marine Society throughout the United States and System of Regulation Therein . . . (Philadelphia: Printed

50 / Gautham Rao by John Fenno, 1794), iv, 7. On high wages, see also Walton v. The Neptune, 29 F. Cas. 142 at 145–­46 (1800). 9. Alexander Hamilton, “Number XI,” in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1788; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1987), 131–­32. 10. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–­1783 (New York: Knopf, 1988); Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-­Military State in Eighteenth-­ Century Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2009); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 11. William Petty, Political Arithmetic . . . (Glasgow: Printed and sold by R. and A. Foulis, 1751), 23–­24. Considerations on the Nurseries for British Seamen (London, 1766), 1. On the significance of maintaining a “nursery of seamen,” see also Henry Pollexfen, A Discourse of Trade, Coyn, and Paper Credit (London, 1697), 122; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1887), 2: 610; and more broadly, Gerald S. Graham, Sea Power and British North America, 1783–­1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). On the press gang, see Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 241. For other disciplinary techniques aimed at preserving naval manpower, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–­18th Century, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 361, 359, 510. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2003), 67. 12. “William III, 1696–­7: An Act to Enforce the Act for the Encrease and Encouragement of Seamen. [Chapter XXIII. Rot. Parl. 8 & 9 Gul. III. p. 8. nu. 1.],” The Case of the Poor Sailors of the English-­Navy, in Respect to their Hospital at Greenwich (S.I., 1705), 1. Richard Brooke, Liverpool as It Was during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century, 1775 to 1800 (Oxford, 1853), 66–­67. See also Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames . . . (London, 1800), 515–­17; Pierre Jean Grossley, A Tour to London (London, 1772), 42–­48; Allyn G. Forbes, “Greenwich Hospital Money,” New England Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1930): 520. 13. Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 1st sess. (July 20, 1789), 685. Robert Straus, Medical Care for Seamen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 22. 14. Nathaniel Spooner, Gleanings from the Records of the Boston Marine Society: Through Its First Century, 1742 to 1842 (Boston, 1879), 37–­38. Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Marine Hospitals,” April 17, 1792, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 11: 296n2. Hugh Williamson, Annals of Congress, 2nd Cong., 2nd sess. (November 16, 1792), 692–­93. 15. Hamilton, “Report on Marine Hospitals,” 11: 295. 16. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 207, 243. 17. John Cornyns, A Digest of the Laws of England, 4th ed. (London, 1800), 1: 376–­77. 18. Dixon v. The Cyrus, 7 F. Cas. 755 at 757 (1789). Rice v. The Polly & Kitty, 20 F. Cas. 666 at 667 (1789). On early US admiralty, see Stephen B. Presser, “A Tale of Two Judges: Richard Peters, Samuel Chase, and the Broken Promise of Federal­ ist Jurisprudence,” Northwestern University Law Review 73, no. 1 (1978): 34–­40; William R. Casto, “The Origins of Federal Admiralty Jurisdiction in an Age of Privateers, Smugglers, and Pirates,” American Journal of Legal History 37, no. 2 (1993): 117–­57. 19. Swift v. The Happy Return, 23 F. Cas. 560 at 561–­62 (1799). The leading British case in this area was Chandler v. Greaves, 2 Hen. Bla. 606 (1792). On the duty to care, see

The Early American State “In Action”  /  51 Theodore W. Dwight, Commentaries on the Law of Persons and Personal Property, Being an Introduction to the Study of Contracts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1894), 333. 20. Rice v. The Polly & Kitty at 666–­67. 21. Whitton v. The Commerce, 29 F. Cas. 1126 (1798). The decision is not attributed to any judge, but Peters was the foremost authority on admiralty law in the United States and handled most admiralty cases in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. See Richard Peters, Admiralty Decisions in the District Court of the United States for the Pennsylvania District . . . (Philadelphia, 1807), iv–­v. 22. Walton v. The Neptune at 145. Dixon et al. v. The Cyrus, 7 F. Cas. 755 at 757 (1789). See also, Edwards v. The Susan, 8 F. Cas. 355 (1795), Whitton et al. v. The Commerce, 29 F. Cas. 1126 (1798) 23. Henop v. Tucker, 11 F. Cas. 1139 at 1141, 1142. Howland v. The Lavinia, 12 F. Cas. 739 at 740 (1801). Woolf v. The Oder, 30 F. Cas. 600 (1802). 24. Spooner, Gleanings from the Records of the Boston Marine Society, 37. Hamilton, “Report on Marine Hospitals,” 11: 295. Henry Flanders, A Treatise on the Law of Shipping (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1853), 158. John Fenno’s General Marine Society was to be funded through an outlandish mix of charity and taxation, including a tax on sailors’ “monthly wages.” Fenno, Plan for Establishing a General Marine Society, 7. 25. Hamilton, “Report on Marine Hospitals,” 11: 295. 1 Statutes At Large 131 (1790). 26. An Act to Enforce the Act for the Encrease and Encouragement of Seamen, 257. John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 171. 27. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess. (April 6, 9, 1798), 1377, 1383. 28. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess. (April 10, 1798), 1386, 1389, 1390. 29. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess. (April 10, 1798), 1388 (Livingston), 1387 (Pinckney). 30. 1 Statutes At Large 605 at 605–­6 (1798). 31. Samuel Mitchill et al., “Memorial to the United States Congress,” Medical Repository 2, no. 4 (1799): 462–­63. Mitchill, “Pilots to Pay Hospital Money for Their Apprentices,” February 22, 1804, American State Papers. Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 7: 571. 32. 1 Statutes At Large 605 at 606 (1798). 33. Wayman v. Southard, 23 U.S. 1 at 43 (1825). On statute law in the early republic, see Jerry L. Mashaw, “Recovering American Administration: Federalist Foundations, 1787–­1801,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2006): 1256–­344; Rao, “Creation of the American State.” 34. Oliver Wolcott Jr., to Benjamin Lincoln, October 6, 1799, M178, Reel 7, NARA. See also John Smith, Washington, to HPD, December 29, 1801, Correspondence, 1800–­ 1809, Henry Packer Dering Papers, New York Public Library (NYPL). 35. See John Swift to Henry Hulton, Boston, Board of Commissioners, March 21, 1770, Vol. 10, Philadelphia Customs Records, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The tax was collected effectively in Boston, however. See Joseph R. Frese, “Henry Hulton and the Greenwich Hospital Tax,” American Neptune 31, no. 1 (1971): 192–­216. 36. Return of Seamen, Brig Barbara Stephen, April 27, 1802, Box 1, Folder 1, New York Custom House Records, 1792–­1896, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL. Benjamin Lincoln to Joseph Anderson, June 13, 1805, Letters from the Collector, 1805–­12, Entry 11, RG36, NARA–­Waltham. Albert Gallatin, “Amount and Application of the Marine Hospital Fund,” January 13, 1804, American State Papers, 7: 538. The Treasury Department complained about paltry collections to the

52 / Gautham Rao

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

customhouses as well. See Wolcott to Allen McLane, Wolcott to Benjamin Lincoln, and Wolcott to David Custin, July 20, 1799, Reel 1, M175, NARA–­College Park. Asher Robbins, Newport, to Benjamin Bourn, District Judge, January 21, 1801, Asher Robbins Papers, 1794–­1812, Clements Library, University of Michigan. 1 Statutes At Large 605. Benjamin Lincoln to Joseph Anderson, June 13, 1805. This was Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr.’s interpretation; Wolcott to Robert Purviance, May 24, 1799, Spec. Ms. Coll. Baltimore, Special Collections, Columbia University Library. Gallatin to Thomas Jefferson, February 16, 1802, American State Papers, 7: 490. Gallatin, “Amount and Application of the Marine Hospital Fund,” 538. 2 Statutes At Large 192 at 193 (1802). According to one account, this oversight was performed by “a single clerk” until 1871. Straus, Medical Care for Seamen, 38. Henry A. S. Dearborn to Albert Gallatin, March 30, 1812, Letters from the Collector, NARA–­Waltham. William Jones to Joseph Anderson, April 16, 1827, Port of Phila­ delphia, Letters Sent by Naval Officer, volume 1, 1814–­1829, RG 36 #1056, NARA–­ Philadelphia. Annals of Congress, 5th Cong., 2nd sess. (April 10, 1798), 1387. Henry A. S. Dearborn to Albert Gallatin, March 30, 1812, Letters from the Collector, NARA–­Waltham. Hosea Brooks to Richard Wall, June 16, 1809, Savannah-­Letters Received, Box 2, Folder 1, RG36, Entry AC062401, NARA–­Atlanta. James Bishop to James Parker, January 3, 1831, Box 1, Folder 4, RG36 Entry 970, NARA–­New York. H. M. Cooke to Secretary of the Treasury, April 14, 1833, Letters Received from Collectors of Customs, M174, Reel 1, NARA–­College Park. Dearborn to Albert Gallatin, March 30, 1812, Letters from the Collector of Boston, 1805–­1812, Entry 11, RG36, NARA–­Waltham. On the social standing of collectors of customs, see Rao, “Creation of the American State,” 76–­85. On Cooke, see Agnes Rust Gordon Smith, Back When and Now (San Angelo, TX: Anchor Publishing, 1976), 161–­62. David Gelston to Unknown, December 3, 1814, Loose Scrap, Entry 96D, Seamen’s Admission and Discharge Books, New York Hospital, 1810–­1817, volume 1. New York State privacy laws prevent use of the sailor’s real name. Memorandum of Agreement between Gabriel Christie and Tobias Watkins, July 23, 1807, Port of Baltimore, Records of Marine Hospital Inspections, 1807–­1810, RG 36, #1195n, NARA–­Philadelphia, 229. Jacob Dunham, Journal of Voyages (New York: By the author, 1850), 229. See also Ebenezer Beriah Kelly, An Autobiography (Norwich, CT: John W. Stedman, 1856), 12, 83. From 1819 to 1821 the Providence customhouse made forty-­seven boardinghouse contracts with locals, twenty-­seven of which went to women. Eleven of these twenty-­ seven women had multiple contracts, whereas only seven of twenty men—­one of whom was the hospital physician Levi Wheaton—­had multiple contracts. Hospital Reports of Sick Seamen, 1809–­1830, United States Custom House, Providence, MSS 28 SG 1, Series 18, Sub-­Series H, Box 1, Folder 5. Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1849; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 131. Walter J. Fraser Jr., Savannah in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 280. Rules and Bye-­Laws, of the Savannah Poor House, 24. A. S. Bullock to B. W. Crowninshield, September 18, 1818; Bullock to William Crawford, June 1, 1820, A. S. Bullock Letter book, Perkins Library, Duke University (Durham, NC). John Grimes to A. S. Bullock, January 19, 1811, Savannah-­Letters Received.

The Early American State “In Action”  /  53 48. Fraser, Savannah in the Old South, 280. Charles Larrabee to William Duane, Au­ gust 28, 1833, Collectors Letters, Reel 2. 49. Records of Marine Hospital Inspections, 1807–­1810. James Mosher to Samuel Ingham, June 4, 1830, Treasury Correspondence, Reel 3. On the Baltimore Marine Hospital arrangements, see Eugene Fauntleroy Cordell, The Medical Annals of Mary­ land, 1799–­1899 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1904), 58–­59. 50. In 1841, for instance, the City Burial Ground reported twenty fatalities from the Marine Hospital, all of which were white men. Black fatalities came from the poorhouse, work house, and infirmary. See the Charleston Southern Patriot, October 13, 1841, and October 10, 1842. Charleston City Gazette, September 25, 1823. 51. March 31, April 2, 1844, Diary of James Duffe, New York Historical Society (New York, NY). Account of Bedding & Other Articles Received, November 23, 1820; July [n.d.], 1820; September [n.d.], 1820, U.S. Marine Hospital Records, Charlestown, Records, 1820–­1827, Countway Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 166–­67, 191, 207. 52. Duffe Diary, March 31, 1844; see also April 2, April 5, April 6, 1844. In New York, “Disorderly” was one of the outcomes listed on patient records submitted to the federal government, e.g., entries for “JT” and “RM,” December 3, 7, 1819, Seamen’s Admission and Discharge Books, volume 1. 53. “Chelsea Marine Hospital—­Medical Intelligence,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 47 (January 1853): 530. John W. Trask, The United States Marine Hospital (Washington, DC: Federal Security Agency, Public Health Service, 1940), 64, and generally, 62–­70. The elite world of medicine is well represented in Gerald N. Grob, Edward Jarvis and the Medical World of Nineteenth-­Century America (Knoxville: University of  Tennessee Press, 1978), 9–­38. 54. Thomas Welsh to Benjamin Lincoln, n.d., 1800, reprinted in Trask, United States Marine Hospital, 64, and see generally, 62–­70. Ibid., 19. William Paul Crillon Barton, A Treatise Containing a Plan for the Internal Organization and Government of Marine Hospitals in the United States (Philadelphia, 1814), ix. “Chelsea Marine Hospital—­ Medical Intelligence,” 530. 55. “The United States Marine Hospital at Chelsea, Near Boston,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 12 (February 1835): 46; Trask, United States Marine Hospital, 64, and see generally, 92. The national number of sailors treated in 1820 is an estimate; Alba Edwards MS., p. 110, National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health (Bethesda, MD). 56. On the “power of the purse” in federal politics, see Max M. Edling, “‘So Immense a Power in the Affairs of War’: Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (April 2007): 287–­326; James E. Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–­1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). 57. David Gelston to Albert Gallatin, April 17, 1812, Box 6, Folder 2, David Gelston Papers, G. W. Blunt White Library (Mystic Seaport, CT). See also Charles Simms to William Jones, May 13, 1813, Treasury Correspondence, Reel 1. 58. A. S. Bullock to William H. Crawford, May 26, 1817; Bullock to R. Cochran, November 25, 1817; Bullock to B. W. Crowninshield, September 18, 1818, A. S. Bullock Letterbook. In 1822, Crawford approved another one-­time payment of $2,500 to Bullock for Marine Hospital expenses; William H. Crawford to A. S. Bullock, August 8, 1822, Savannah-­Letters Received.

54 / Gautham Rao 59. On Americans’ paradoxical relationship with the state, see Balogh, Government Out of Sight; Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On budgetary politics in antebellum America, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19–­32; J. H. Powell, Richard Rush: Republican Diplomat, 1780–­1859 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942), 207–­12. 60. William Crawford to Collectors of Customs [Circular], April 26, 1821, reprinted in “Marine Hospital—­Sick and Disabled Seamen,” January 27, 1789, H. Doc. 63, Congressional Serial Set, 19 Cong., 2 sess., vol. 151, p. 6. Oliver Wolcott Jr., to Collectors of Customs [Circular], May 24, 1799, Treasury Letters Sent, Roll 1 (emphasis in original). 61. William H. Crawford, Report of the Secretary of the Treasury (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1822), 4 (emphasis added) (hereafter 1822 Marine Hospital Report). 62. Jonathan Steele to Silas Crane, July 28, 1814, and August 3, 1814, Correspondence, 1790–­1896, Little Egg Harbor, Record Group 36, Entry 1011, Box 4, Folder 5 (National Archives, New York, NY). Joseph Anderson to Addin Lewis, December 12, 1820, Mobile-­Correspondence and Papers, Record Group 36, Entry AC063101, Box 1, Folder 1820 (National Archives, Morrow, GA). Henry A. S. Dearborn to Joseph Anderson, January 16, 1821, Boston Collectors Letters. 63. William Crawford to John Steele, April 3, 1821, in 1822 Marine Hospital Report, 8; William Crawford to James McCulloch, April 3, 1821, in ibid., 9. The ability to earn a wage increasingly defined independence in this era. See Robert J. Steinfeld, “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1989): 364. 64. William H. Crawford to Collectors of Customs [Circular], April 16, 1821, in 1822 Marine Hospital Report, 9. Henry A. S. Dearborn to Crawford, February 12, 1821, Boston Collectors Letters. Contemporary medical thought considered mental illness to be curable. See David J. Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002), 129, 133–­35; Grob, Edward Jarvis, 41, 51. 65. William H. Crawford to James H. McCulloch, August 20, 1821, Treasury Letters Sent. On the often-­seasonal nature of maritime labor in the early republic, see Vickers with Walsh, Young Men and the Sea, 204–­13, 270. Crawford’s critique of transient sailors corresponds with a broader critique of “idleness,” e.g., John Yates, “Report of the Secretary of State in 1824 on the Relief and Settlement of the Poor,” Assembly Journal, February 9, 1824, reprinted in David J. Rothman, ed., The Almshouse Experience: Collected Reports (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 952, 968. 66. Crawford to McCulloch, April 25, 1821, in 1822 Marine Hospital Report, 10. A similar administrative transformation occurred in the Philadelphia municipal poor relief during the 1820s. See Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Welfare and the Poor in the Nineteenth-­ Century City: Philadelphia, 1800–­1854 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), 61, 153. 67. David Townsend to Henry A. S. Dearborn, February 12, 1821; Christopher Prince to Jonathan Thompson, February 7, 1821, in 1822 Marine Hospital Report, 15, 14. On the difficulty of determining if a patient was “incurable,” see Grob, Edward Jarvis, 126. 68. Prince to Thompson, October 10, 1821, in 1822 Marine Hospital Report, 19. Memorial of the Board of Governors of the New York Hospital, January 13, 1820, ASP C&N, II: 416. Yates, “Annual Report, 1013. “Seamen Discharged by Advancing Money to Get Them to Their Places of Permanent Residence” (n.p., on the back cover), Seamen’s Admission and Discharge Books, vol. 3.

The Early American State “In Action”  /  55 69. Memorial of the Seamen of New York (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1822), 3–­4. On merchant sailors’ notions of their moral and material contribution to American nationhood in the early republic, see Matthew Taylor Raffety, The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 70. These records are stored in Account of Bedding & Other Articles, U.S. Marine Hospital Charlestown Records, 1820–­27. 71. J. L. Barker to Samuel D. Ingham, February 4, 1833; Ingham to Barker, Febru­ary 8, 1833, Collectors Letters, Reel 3. In Boston, Collector H. A. S. Dearborn had a rec­ ord of seventy-­one for seventy-­one with his “Special Permission” requests. List of Collectors Special Permissions to Remain More than 4 Months, 1819–­1824, U.S. Marine Hospital Charlestown, Records 1820–­27. 72. On this institutional turn, see Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 129–­53, 208–­88. On the social crises that attended the market revolution, see Joshua D. Rothman, “The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America’s Market Revolution,” Journal of American History 95 (December 2008): 651–­677; Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the Morality of the Market,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–­1880, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University of  Virginia Press, 1996), 74–­97. 73. Memorial of Citizens of the United States Engaged in Commerce on the Western Waters, December 18, 1830, reprinted in “National Hospital on Ohio River, Indiana,” January 16, 1832, H.doc.66, Congressional Serial Set, 22 Cong., 1 sess., vol. 217, pp. 1–­ 2. Report of the Committee on Commerce, February 14, 1845, reprinted in “Marine Hospitals,” February 14, 1845, H.rp.124, Congressional Serial Set, 28 Cong., 2 sess., vol. 468, p. 2. 74. For many communities, municipal poor relief was reserved for local residents only. See Elizabeth Wisner, Social Welfare in the South from Colonial Times to World War I (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 25–­28. 75. Petition of the Inhabitants of Key West, n.d., reprinted in “Marine Hospital at Key West,” April 2, 1844, H.rp.396, Congressional Serial Set, vol. 446, 28 Cong., 1 sess., p. 2. Thomas Singleton to Levi Woodbury, September 18, 1837, in “Report from the Secretary of the Treasury,” December 11, 1837, 314 S.doc.8, Congressional Serial Set, 25 Cong, 2 sess., vol. 314, 12–­13. On paupers and social welfare in the frontier West, see Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–­1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 76–­109, 120. 76. Alba Edwards Papers, MSB183, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD). On the expansion of the Marine Hospitals in the late antebellum era, see Jensen, “Bulwarks against a Human Tide,” 94–­156. 77. Levi Woodbury to Levi Coffin, June 5, 1840, Marblehead Custom House Records, 1870, MSS 922, Baker Library, Harvard Business School (Boston, MA). 1789–­ Hallenbeck to Duane, July 23, 1833. Levi Woodbury to Joel B. Sutherland, Janu­ary 20, 1836, in “Change in System of Marine Hospitals,” December 19, 1839, S.doc.8, Congressional Serial Set, 26 Cong., 1 sess., vol. 354, pp. 1, 5. See also Eddy v. Capron, 4 R.I. 394 at 395–­400 (1856). 78. Buckley v. Brown, 4 F. Cas. 566, 567, 568 (October, 1856). 9 Stat. 38 (1846). 79. On the many anxieties ushered into American society by the “market revolution,” see Rothman, “Hazards of the Flush Times,” 651–­77; Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished

56 / Gautham Rao Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 106–­76. 80. Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 11. 81. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, on the States of the Finances, for the Year Ending June 30, 1856 (Washington, DC: O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 5, 594. 82. Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–­ 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10–­12. On the rise of the modern English tax state, see P. K. O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–­1815,” Economic History Review, new series, 41, no. 1 (1988): 1–­32. For a fine account of the maturation of the American tax state, see Ajay K. Mehrotra, Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877–­1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For revenue figures, see Historical Statistics, Table Ea584–­87. 83. Wood v. United States, 41 U.S. 342 (1842). Jerry L. Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 223. 84. Tracy v. Swartwout, 35 U.S. (35 Pet.) 80, 94–­95 (1833). 5 Stat 548 at 566 (1842). Andrew Wender Cohen, “Smuggling, Globalization, and America’s Outward State,” Journal of American History 97, no. 2 (2010): 384. 85. On the bureaucratic and administrative transformation of the American state, see James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Joanna L. Grisinger, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics since the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). On conservative attack on the New Deal, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–­1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

Two

Beyond Tocqueville’s Myth: Rethinking the Model of the American State S t e p h e n W. S aw y e r

Sheldon Wolin opens his commanding intellectual biography on Alexis de Tocqueville with the consensual claim that “Alexis de Tocqueville has become a fixture in contemporary American political discourse, both within the academy and outside.”1 He might have added that Tocqueville’s contrast between American and French politics has found an equally enduring place in social science literature and beyond. Indeed, Tocqueville’s claim that the French and American administrative apparatus “resemble one another as much as a dead man resembles a living being”2 has been a tacit assumption across histories of the French and American states. Tocqueville’s divergent appreciations of the American and French states in the nineteenth century are not surprising. Almost the entirety of his career as a political theorist and historian took place in a French political context that was mired in the Sisyphean task of achieving a sustainable and moderate modern liberal democracy. The brief experiment with a democratic republic in France from 1848 to 1852, to which he contributed directly by serving on the constitutional committee, did little to assuage his concerns, filled as it was with civil unrest and then the slow consolidation of power by Louis Napoleon. Nor, of course, did he live to see the American Civil War. He thus had little evidence to prevent him from imagining that the Jacksonian United States discovered in his famous transatlantic trip had given birth to a lasting, although not unproblematic, democratic model. The broad outlines of  Tocqueville’s assessment of the American state have been well established. The United States provided a model of democratic life to the extent that, there, democracy was not the product of state power but ensured by a vibrant social and cultural life, bolstered by associations, freedom of the press, and a robust participation in local government. “Laws, habits and customs (moeurs)” were the essential ingredients of American

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democracy, not the state. Since the Revolution, the Tocquevillian—­and widely accepted—­narrative continues, the French chose the dialectically opposed path, consistently placing the state at the heart of the modern polity. The French Revolution “created an ideal society in which people were without any other aristocracy than civil servants, a singular and all-­powerful administration, leader of the state, tutors of private individuals.” 3 Because of this fascination with the elephantine “aristocratic” state, the French remained under the unrelenting threat of tyranny. “What can public opinion do,” Tocqueville lamented, “when each citizen is equally impotent, equally poor, equally isolated and has only his or her individual weakness to oppose the organized strength of the government.”4 Without the aggregating forces of civil society, which he insisted were independent of the state, modern governments would accumulate an unlimited power over isolated individuals and unleash a modern tyranny. Thus within Tocqueville’s assessment of American and French politics, there was also a broader theory of the relationship between democracy and the state: democracy thrives when states stumble. Or for Tocqueville, as Wolin writes, “the democratic state is a contradiction in terms.”5 And yet the growing awareness among historians that Tocqueville’s assessment of the American state was more myth than fact encourages us to look elsewhere in our attempts to reconcile America’s stateless past with its present superpower. William Novak has provided the clearest formulation of Tocqueville’s myth of the American state, writing: “The idea of a weak American state originated in some classic sources and analyses. Alexis de Tocqueville’s comparative emphasis on individualism, associationalism, localism, and administrative decentralization led him to underestimate the power of the state in America. Although many of  Tocqueville’s prophecies concerning democratic and despotic trends have relevance today, his forecast concerning American state development was largely inaccurate.”6 This essay is part of a larger attempt to explore writers and historians who uncovered a very different American state in the nineteenth century. By focusing on other interpretations of the American state—­especially among Tocqueville’s contemporaries—­it attempts to puncture the reigning myth of nineteenth-­century American statelessness from the oblique angle of Europe at the same time that it gives voice to those observers whose interpretations more satisfactorily reconcile the past and present of American public power and its legacy across the world.7 Indeed, it is striking the extent to which Tocqueville’s vision of US politics has trumped all other visions of the American state abroad during this formative period. Tocqueville was in fact part of a larger trend in looking

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to the United States to understand French political life. And while he has undoubtedly become the most famous of those nineteenth-­century liberals to appreciate American democracy, he was hardly alone.8 Moreover, outside of his contributions to the Chamber of Deputies in the 1840s, and specifically his reports on Algeria, as well as to the short-­lived constitution of the Second Republic, it would be safe to say that he was more of a political sage than a major player in the actual politics of the nineteenth century. It has been widely accepted that he was not a strong influence on liberalism as it developed in the 1850s and ‘60s in France when the country developed the theoretical outlines of a liberal democratic state that would come to fruition in the Third Republic and establish the framework for a Republican state in France.9 This appraisal does not to discount the power of his ideas or the extent to which they have continued to reinforce stories both Americans and French tell themselves. But it should introduce a word of caution about the disparity between his twentieth-­century postwar prominence and his actual importance for understanding the history of the American model in the world. It should also invite us to explore the plethora of other liberal voices that provided a very different interpretation of the American democracy, one that paid far more attention to the American state as a central force in maintaining liberal democracy. Principal among these nineteenth-­century French liberals was Adolphe Thiers. Born eight years before Tocqueville in 1797, Thiers enjoyed an extraordinary popularity in the nineteenth century, when he published two widely read multivolume histories, The History of the French Revolution (that scandalized Tocqueville) and The History of the Consulate and Empire, selling by some estimates over one million copies of the latter. Immediately following the revolution of 1830, to which he contributed, he participated in the successive ministries of the July Monarchy (1830–­48). At thirty-­three, he held his first position as undersecretary within the Ministry of Finance, by thirty-­five he was appointed minister of the interior, followed by minister of agriculture and head of the government in 1836 and 1840. After 1840, he continued to serve in the legislature of the subsequent regimes, saving his most important political appointment for the end of his career when after the collapse of France’s last engagement with a Bonapartist empire, he became the first president of the French Third Republic and only the second Republican president since the French Revolution of 1789. Thiers was a constant of French politics, and his voluminous writings, correspondence, and parliamentary speeches have left a complex picture of a deeply committed French liberal who was incessantly entwined with the key political questions and governance of his day. No doubt the bloody

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and unwavering response he brought upon the Paris Commune of 1871 has permanently tarnished his image with a deep ambivalence in Republican history. But for all of his bloodletting, there is little doubt that he was a conservative, if dangerous, pillar of nineteenth-­century French political life and a central figure in the establishment of a liberal state in France. It has generally been assumed that Thiers was largely fascinated by English constitutionalism. His well-­known statement on constitutional monarchy, “the King rules, but does not govern,” has been interpreted as a commitment to the British parliamentary system. And yet while Thiers did demonstrate a consistent affinity for the British system of rule, he also demonstrated a strong interest in American government. In a key speech given to the National Assembly in 1851 as Louis Napoleon planned his coup d’état, Thiers outlined his acceptance of the Republic born in 1848, admitting that he had been misled in his previous models of liberal government. He explained that while he had been convinced of the supremacy of the English model of constitutional monarchy before the consolidation of the Second Republic, he was ready to rally to the republic’s cause because of the American example. “What I have to say is so difficult, delicate and important that I beg you not to interrupt me,” he began. I never dreamed of anything more than the form of liberty that can be found in England and its Monarchy. For me, this was the most liberal form of government, that which brought together to the greatest extent the two necessary conditions for my support, order and liberty. But, I misinterpreted the great and beautiful model that America has provided . . . 1848 arrived. Oh! Did I experience profound regret? You know what I told myself? Not that I had been wrong to believe that the form of the English Monarchy was the most liberal in the world; but that, in spite of the excellence of this form, the destiny of modern nations was leading them toward the American form rather than the English form of government. . . . Yes, I told myself that perhaps I had been mistaken and that while I had been correct in preferring the English form, perhaps our European societies were driven by the force of circumstances to the American form.10

These words stand in startling contrast to Tocqueville’s analysis at the end of his Democracy in America where he wrote: “When I imagine the current state of Europe, its great peoples, its populous cities, its formidable armies, the complexities of its politics, I can’t imagine that the Anglo-­Americans themselves, could be transplanted with their ideas, their religion, their customs [moeurs] onto our soil without considerably modifying their laws. But

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we can imagine a democratic people’s organizing themselves differently than the American people.”11 For Tocqueville, European soil was incapable of reproducing specifically American democratic institutions because the laws and moeurs of the United States were so different from those of Europe. It was no doubt possible to achieve democracy in Europe, Tocqueville argued, but it would only be achieved by reinforcing democratic laws and customs that were specifically European. Institutions were of little effect. Thiers, however, was far less convinced that the American form of government could not be established in Europe. Thiers did not place the same emphasis on the United States as a form of democratic society, but was more committed to exploring what he called the American form of government. The question is, then, just how did he understand American government and its potential contributions to the creation of a liberal state in France? What emerges in response to this question is a very different vision of the American state and its role in achieving liberal democracy.

Civil Society and the Liberal State One of the pillars of  Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy was his argument that associations were vital for American democracy and the stability of democratic life more generally. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations,” he argued, comparing this to the French case where “at the head of any new undertaking . . . you would find the government.” This argument appeared in the second volume of Democracy in America, which appeared in 1840, one year after he entered the French legislature. Indeed, Tocqueville’s theory of civil and political associations was written within a specific context of vast debates on the role of associations in French democracy. In particular, it was Adolphe Thiers who had led the liberal charge in this debate, arguing for the importance of civil and political associations but also insisting on the role that the state should play in structuring them. These debates had been launched in the early July Monarchy when Tocqueville left for the United States. They then came to a head after his return while he was drafting his masterpiece in 1834. While they served as the political backdrop for the writing of his chef d’oeuvre, he did not participate directly because he was not yet a member of the legislative body. The debates turned on the government’s desire to limit political association in the context of the powerful wave of popular activism that continued to gain momentum after the revolution of 1830. Extensive civil and political unrest had continued to threaten the solidity of the regime since its inception. As

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a result, the July Monarchy (1830–­48) looked to limit the number of individuals that could join any given political association to twenty. To defend this claim, Thiers presented his vision of the relationship between the state and associational organizations in a liberal democratic context. In so doing, he provided a very different perspective from Tocqueville. As the cornerstone of American democracy, associations served primarily two purposes for Tocqueville. First, they were to serve as intermediary bodies that could limit the reach of the state. Outside the state’s control, they also protected the citizens from any excessive reach of the state. Second, they also provided a “school” for learning how to participate in democratic society. In both cases, they protected and cultivated democratic customs within individuals by grouping them together with their fellow citizens. Tocqueville argued in the second volume: “if the men who live in democratic countries did not have the right nor a taste to unite toward political aims, their independence runs a great risk, but they can conserve their wealth and their intelligence; as long as they do not have the right to associate in ordinary life, civilization itself is in peril.”12 Thiers shared Tocqueville’s conviction on the importance of associations: “We have spoken extensively about the spirit of association; we have stated that it is a great principle of civilization, a principle respected by all governments and that we are going to do it serious harm. No, gentlemen, we recognize that the principle of association is founded on the nature of man; that individual men are weak and that men associated with others are powerful. It is by putting men next to men, generations next to generations that we will produce the marvels of civilization.”13 The deep similarities in language suggest that both men were in agreement on the importance of associations and their role in strengthening society and cultivating “civilization.” Where they differed, however, was in their understanding of the proper relationship between these associations and the state. Thiers recognized the social power of associations and the importance of their development, but in his view social power was not opposed to the state or completely outside of state regulation. In his discussion of mutual aid societies, for example, he staked out a classical liberal position insisting that the state had few resources and that much of the mutual aid needed to be provided by private individuals: “Whatever the state may do is of minimal importance next to what men can do for themselves. What the state can do is infinitely limited.”14 However, this did not imply that the state was to take a simple laissez-­faire position, leaving the poor to be managed solely by private initiative. It meant to the contrary that the state had an important role to play, but could only play that role through cooperation and contracting certain services to private associations.

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  63 The liberty of these associations must be scrupulously respected. They must be free to form, to administer themselves, to dissolve themselves. But, by looking over their statutes, keeping their funds and serving their interests, the state may provide them with services that are within its reach, and which do not extend beyond the limits of intervention indicated by their true principles. By giving the mutual aid societies the status of legal entities, who may operate according to justice and receive gifts and inheritance, an attribute that the state has the right to give or refuse through its cherished laws, the state must maintain the right to revise their statutes and hold their hand to ensure that their statutes are equitable, well-­conceived and protected from all fraud.15

So while the state could not take on the direct cost of providing social security or retirement for the workers, it could provide the legal framework and key statutes, so that associations could work toward redistributing resources. The state facilitated the services the mutual aid societies provided by providing them with a legal structure while not directly intervening. Elaborating a key principle of liberal stateness in the French context, Thiers argued that the state was not opposed to associations that were protected by law; in fact, the state became more capacious through law and associations. Recent work on mutual aid societies in France suggests that Thiers’s reflections on state power and associations spread far beyond the realm of ideas. For example, Christine Adams’s work on “dames de charité” has revealed the key role that national and municipal authorities played in helping and funding “sociétés de bienfaisance” led by women.16 However, she also shows that the government’s contributions to the societies often remained out of public view.17 This did not mean that the state would never provide direct and visible intervention. Revealing a key thread in his interpretation of liberal gover­ nance, Thiers argued that the state should play an important role in times of emergency or crisis. When a city is consumed in flames, or an entire county is inundated, private help takes the lead, goes to work, and individually takes care of a great deal of misery. Beyond this, the state, the most powerful of all, enters in and giving by millions, repairs a portion of the problem, repairing it within the measure of what is necessary and possible. Thus a few years ago, when taking care of those who were flooded by the Loire, the state was able to repair much of the damage, without it taking an important financial toll. . . . There is no danger in such charity because the state can come to the rescue without impeding or violating any of its principles, because the state

64  /  Stephen W. Sawyer may deliver charity without this charity taking place at the expense of the individual.18

Here, and elsewhere in his historical and political works, Thiers insisted upon the role of the state in intervening and acting decisively in exceptional moments of disaster, war, or civil unrest. As a rule, then, the state acted through law and associations while reserving the capacity to act directly and forcefully under necessary circumstances. Comparisons with the conclusions of recent work on the liberal state and civil society in the United States suggest that Thiers’s approach to social security and mutual aid was startlingly similar to some of the actual practices of the US state. Elisabeth Clemens has argued that there were primarily three ways that the civil society and state relationship operated in the United States, what she refers to as “congruence, conflict, and collaboration arguments.” She further suggests that scholars have largely emphasized the congruence and conflict and the expense of collaboration. “A third line of argument emphasizes the potential for cooperation between state and associations. Lacking the concern for the formal congruence between liberal democracy and the internal politics of associations, these analyses explore the division of labor between governments and private or not-­for-­profit organizations. Here, the critical aspects of association-­ state relationships center on delegation of authority, public subsidies or contracts, and formalized arrangements for consultation or policy formation.” She concludes: “Through the cumulation of legislative statutes and judicial decisions, associational life in the United States has become increasingly structured by political outcomes rather than sheltered in some separate civic realm.”19 Much the same may be said of Thiers’s ideas, which insisted upon effective political outcomes instead of regular state intervention or retreat. Moreover, Thiers’s arguments reveal an attempt to formulate these modes of the state-­society relationship into a coherent principle of gover­ nance. For Thiers such a state neither controlled nor completely ignored the social power unleashed through a vibrant civil society. Rather, as he argued, the state accomplished its essential goals through intermingling with civil society: Examine what government actually is? Of what does it consist? You see the numbers that compose it and you see where its force is, one hundred thousand civil servants, some one hundred thousand soldiers. What are these three or four hundred thousand individuals in the midst of 32 million people? It’s

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  65 nothing in terms of numeric force, material force. What makes the force of the government then? Its organization, the cooperation [concert] with which it acts, it is the faculty to give orders and to be obeyed, it is the power to unite in Lyon, in an instant, ten thousand soldiers, a prefect, and generals; to do the same thing in Strasbourg, in Marseille, in Bordeaux, at the very same moment that the government acts in Paris with the same collective harmony (ensemble), with the same vigor. Its force is in its organization, its cooperation, the vigor of collective harmony resulting from association; and this faculty, contains the entirety of the social power [puissance sociale].20

Thiers’s argument on the nature of the state-­society relationship bears three essential claims here. First, he recognized the presence of a great number of civil servants in the French administration. However, he insisted that high numbers of employees and military officials was not in fact what made it a potentially strong state for effectively governing thirty million French. Such an assessment pursues a very different line of argument from the traditional approaches to state development growing out of the Tocquevillian, Marxist, and Weberian state theories that have counted the number of civil servants and military agents as a key indicator of the growth of the modern state. For Thiers, and this was the second point, if the actual size of the state was of little importance, it was because the state’s strength should actually be measured by what he called concert or “cooperation.” It was not so much the ability to hire and enlist greater and greater numbers of individuals in the state’s employ or even to centralize those capacities, but to organize those soldiers and that administration and, most importantly, as he said “to be obeyed.” In short, it was the capacity to achieve the state’s ends through concert rather than the specific ability to accumulate individuals within a centralized state. The third essential claim was that the vigor of this capacity was determined by the state’s penetration into society through “association.” He understood the state’s capacity as, in his own words, a “social power [une puissance sociale].” Although he persisted in his distrust of democracy, Thiers’s arguments on state power did show a deep awareness of its role as a source of social integration. This power did rely on coercion, but it also depended on association and concert. In his work on law and civil society, William Novak has argued that there was a similar state-­society relationship in the nineteenth-­century United States: “Beneath the language of consent and contract, elements of coercion, restriction, and inequality remain irreducible parts of American associationalism.”21 Considering Thiers’s reading of the role of the state in French associationalism, such interpretations of the relationship between

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the state and American civil society may be used to reconsider convergences in liberal democratic state practices between France and the United States. In fact, a certain reversal may be in order in thinking about the construction of a liberal state in France. Building on the growing literature, it would appear that both the United States and France organized state power through civil society. From this perspective, the French state was neither the mythical Jacobin menace abhorred by a key circle of French liberals known as the Coppet Group, including Germaine de Stael, Benjamin Constant, and Alexis de Tocqueville, nor was it a laissez-­faire weak state that allowed civil society to develop freely without interference, as in the dreams of an idealized nineteenth-­century America.22 Rather, this liberal state was built on a constant interaction with and through social organization, albeit oftentimes on the terms of the state. In other words, Thiers’s conception of the state was predicated on the creation of a robust civil society, but the boundary between this civil society and state power could only be drawn in shades and squiggles. Thus it should not be any more surprising that Thiers, like Tocqueville, also defended his vision of the liberal state by looking across the ocean to the American model. “Do you know what we do through associations?” he announced in the parliamentary debates of 1834 while Tocqueville was writing his Democracy in America, I would like to borrow the language of  Washington. In a republic where there is no doubt that all of the rights of man are respected, Washington stated that an opinion formed within an association was artificial and factious; that it was not a natural or true opinion. He said, “Any opposition to the execution of laws, any association whose aim is to bother or hinder the action of government is directly contrary to the fundamental principles that we have established. These associations are designed to organize factions and to give them an extraordinary and artificial strength as well as to substitute for the will of a party a weak minority, which is ambitious and without principles, etc.” As you can see, the head of the republic recognized that in a well-­organized country, the opposition and resistance must be produced by public opinion, through the vote and not by associations where an artificial and false opinion is formed. One that can only be transformed through conspiracy. . . . I insist then. Yes, you have the right to association, but you cannot exercise this right without the intervention of public authorities.23

As in the case of  Tocqueville, it is clear that Thiers invoked Washingtonian ideals toward his own ends. Nonetheless, Thiers did consistently call upon

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the example of the United States to defend his vision of the liberal state in France, in this case, by defending his claim for the intervention of public power into associational life through an analysis of one of the Founding Fathers of American democracy. Thiers was obviously reading from a very different script than the one Tocqueville had set out to establish—­and it was a script that would have direct influence on French policy for much of the nineteenth century. The American state that he was using as an ideal-­type in these debates was one that refused “to idealize civic association and to exaggerate its separateness from state power and other forms of social, economic, and political organization,”24 and, in that sense, it may tell us much more about the actual development of the French state than the work of his contemporaries.

Learning from the American State’s Fiscal and War Powers Alexis de Tocqueville died two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. He therefore did not live to see the extraordinary display of American state power brought forward by this cataclysmic event. Whether or not it would have changed his views on the nature of American government is impossible to determine. Thiers, however, not only watched the unfolding of the Civil War with great interest, he also served as the first executive power of the new republic in 1871 that was to learn from the lessons of American state power as it experienced its own Civil War. Thiers was often accused of drawing lessons for government from historical examples, especially his histories of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. James McPherson has shown that the parallels between the French revolutionary wars and the American Civil War were not lost on Americans of the nineteenth century either. Young soldier, and future president, James Garfield read Adolphe Thiers’s History of the French Revolution in the midst of the Civil War and was struck by “the remarkable analogy which the events of that day bear to our own rebellious times.”25 In many ways this is not surprising. Thiers’s History had staked out a strong position on the Terror. Once again this interpretation marked an important distance between Thiers and Tocqueville. Recounting his first reading of Thiers’s work, a horrified Tocqueville wrote: “the Histoire de la Révolution was peculiarly horrifying and caused a violent hatred of the author. I regarded M. Thiers as the most perverse and dangerous of men.”26 In his own history of the French Revolution, Tocqueville later responded to Thiers, among others, by grounding the Terror in the inherent logic of an elephantine absolutist-­Jacobin state

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and its deep impact on notions of equality and liberty; the Terror was an important and devastating result of France’s overpowering centralized state, he argued. The History by Thiers that Garfield had read, however, proposed a very different approach. For Thiers, the Terror had been the result of the immediate and exceptional circumstances of the war and internal revolt. At the heart of Thiers’s interpretation, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety had taken the only possible action in the exceptional circumstances of total war and domestic rebellion. Thiers would argue that he had done the same in the face of the Commune when he served as executive power to the young republic. So at the end of the American Civil War, however, it was time for the French to find parallels and inspiration in the American example of the war. The struggle of the Civil War, and Lincoln’s unprecedented presidential powers, provided a new perspective on the possibilities of liberal government in France. François Guizot, the great French historian and longtime political rival of Thiers, was quoted as stating of Lincoln, “no monarch was ever strong enough to raise an army of 800,000 to put down a revolt of half his kingdom, and yet more than that number of soldiers have volunteered.”27 Indeed, there was a growing sense that Lincoln had achieved an unimagin­ able victory from within the confines of the American liberal democratic state. This was a lesson that was of particular importance for those liberals who were convinced that Napoleon III’s authoritarian response to the French revolutionary tradition went too far. As a result, the debates on what has come to be known as the “Lincoln dictatorship” found an audience in France as early as 1865. In his speech in honor of Lincoln upon his death, for example, liberal Augustin Cochin explained: “This wise and Christian man looked down in silence like the punishment from above and he made a vow that if . . . the necessities of war gave him dictatorial power, [he] would pronounce the emancipation of the slaves.”28 Similarly, writing as the war drew to a close, a liberal cohort including Édouard Laboulaye, Augustin Cochin, Henri Martin, and Agénor De Gasparin, argued that the Civil War had provided a model for executive power in exceptional circumstances. Focusing on the end of the “Lincoln dictatorship,” they wrote: Following in Mr. Lincoln’s footsteps, he [Andrew Johnson] has understood the necessity of putting an end as speedily as possible to the period of exceptional powers; he has set the example of the head of a government hastening to abdicate all dictatorship and to restore the national liberties in full. We are in a good position to applaud—­we who have consistently predicted that

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  69 you would crown your struggle by thus pardoning the vanquished, disbanding your armies, re-­establishing the regular working of your institutions, and showing the world for the first time a constitution emerging intact from civil war.29

The American state, liberals like Thiers argued, had demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to act, even assuming quasi-­dictatorial powers, while preserving a liberal democratic republic. In contrast, these liberals argued, the Second Empire (1852–­70) had been incapable of understanding the difference between a constitution that served the executive and an executive who served the constitution. Lincoln had proven that it was possible to assume extraordinary powers without undermining the long-­term foundations of the constitutional order. Napoleon III’s defeat, his abdication, and the declaration of a republic in the face of a loss to Prussian troops in 1870, ultimately gave even greater influence to Lincoln’s memory among French liberals. Lincoln’s moral authority and capacity to mobilize the Union toward his cause provided a model for Thiers as he rose to the seat of the executive to become the first president of the Third Republic. The anatomy of the American state was of enough interest to Thiers that he encouraged his French colleague in Washington to pursue one of the first histories of American executive power.30 The influence of the extraordinary powers of the American state became even more influential during the Commune itself in the spring of 1871. During this period, the official newspaper of the French government made regular reports on the international situation that could be of interest to the nation. On April 12, the newspaper chose to highlight a recent decision in the United States: “Washington.—­The House of Representatives has just passed a law rendering the crimes of the Ku-­Klux in the south accountable before federal courts and authorizing the president to suspend Habeas Corpus anywhere that this illegal and dangerous organization exists.”31 Printing this decision was no accident. As the head of the executive power, Thiers was aware of the importance that suspension of habeas corpus was playing in the United States and had played during the Civil War. Building on the moral authority of the American republic, he insisted that those who had chosen to make enemies of the republic could not necessarily be guaranteed all of their rights. The affinity between this situation in the United States and France only gave strength to the govern­ ment’s position.

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As Thiers prepared for the military invasion of Paris and the final assault on the revolutionaries, Lincoln’s presidency was called upon with greater regularity. Thiers regularly argued that the Parisian insurrection was not a legitimate revolution, but a civil war, in which he was responsible for ensuring the unity of France. “What! You think that it is without fear and suffering that I preside during this civil war thanks to the title you have bestowed upon me!”32 He then repeated once again: “the criminal insurrection has brought a civil war on the heals of a foreign war, which is no less harmful.”33 By invoking the idea of civil war, Thiers was attempting to draw a direct parallel between his role as executive and Lincoln’s war powers. Citing the American example directly, Thiers stated: “All attempts at secession, on the part of any portion or the territory will be forcefully put down, just as they were in America—­A. Thiers”34 This influence continued after the war as the United States once again served as a model for Republican réconciliation. “The House of Representatives has adopted a bill of amnesty annulling the withdrawal of political and legal rights to all those who participated in the rebellion.”35 Thiers then echoed this position of reconciliation in a speech to the National Assembly on April of 1871 as he prepared to put down the Parisian revolution: “Those who put down their arms will have their lives saved.”36 But the influence of the American state went beyond the immediate context of the war. Surprisingly enough, France also looked to the United States state as a model for its fiscal authority in the aftermath of the Civil War. With the end of the Franco-­Prussian War and the Commune, the fiscal situation of the French state was desperate. The budget of 1870 was in deficit 645,448,625 out of a total budget of 2,730,156,000 francs, and at the end of 1871, the deficit climbed to 1,005,727,735 francs. The indemnity that France owed Prussia as a result of the Treaty of Versailles was five billion francs, one-­quarter of France’s GDP, to be paid in gold or foreign currency and equal to two years of state revenue.37 Considering the drop in state revenues during the war and the Commune, the total for the double deficit of the two years in June of 1871 was 1,651,176,735. Moreover, Thiers estimated that the cost of the war totaled 7.8 billion, including the reparations that would be covered in large part by a 1.53-­billion-­franc loan from the Banque de France, a five-­billion-­franc loan, and the 325 million for the purchase of railroads in the departments lost to Germany. The total cost of these loans per annum was to be approximately 566 million—­this included 200 million toward an amortization of the loan taken out from the Banque de France. In June 1871, the government proposed an increase in revenue of 446 million in new taxes, but this sum proved insufficient to cover the

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new expenses in the state’s budget and the payouts on the loans. Ultimately, the sum was closer to 600 million out of a budget that was estimated at approximately two billion francs (2,023,215,951), or approximately an overwhelming 25 percent. In this context, the fiscal system the United States developed in the wake of the Civil War was regularly invoked as the model for the French state. In the discussions on indemnities to the cities and departments that had suffered during the war and the rebellion, one legislative member argued: “Let me cite you an example. After this incredible struggle that we call the war of secession in the United States, the question of asking the state for an indemnity was posed. They did not hesitate to respond that no indemnities would be permitted after the war.”38 During the debate on raising taxes, the United States was once again seen as a model. “We must adopt all of these new taxes,” argued another, the national assemblyman, “in order to create a system which is analogous to that of the United States after the war of secession, which cost them 20 billion.”39 He continued insisting that the US government had increased old taxes and created new ones and in so doing paid off a portion of their war debt each year. He cited for example a tax on alcohol, suggesting that in spite of the drastic raise in taxes, the country was still in need of liquor. He then came to what might appear to be a surprising conclusion with regard to taxation, suggesting that it was fundamental to examine “the United States whose example is always cited when we need to find more money.”40 This deputy was not alone in this assessment. Another member of the legislature announced to the chamber: “we never miss an opportunity to invoke the example of America.”41 But what exactly was the nature of this model of American fiscal power? Thiers’s minister of finance also argued for the American model at the beginning of the year 1872 as France continued to look for new resources to pay the war reparations: “Gentlemen, let us take the example that is the most reasonable and the most similar to our own,” he argued, “that of the American nation.” What the minister was particularly interested in was the United States’ capacity to raise armies and funds with great rapidity without creating over the long term a crushing fiscal or military structure: “the American nation does not have enormous military armaments, nor does it have a large army, but they know how to create, in an instant and with an extraordinary effort . . . the necessary force to respond to any eventuality. This is what they did during the war of secession.”42 The American state of the nineteenth century was not a model for its low tax rates but for its ability to raise taxes and armies quickly. This would seem to have been at the heart of the liberal state model that appeared so attractive to the new French government.

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So as the French attempted to found a lasting liberal democratic state in the Third Republic, the idea of a liberal state was ubiquitous. Many liberals who were committed to the Republican cause argued that the United States provided one of the most successful models of fiscal and war powers ever seen in a republic. The fact that the United States had found a militarily and fiscally successful response to rebellion and civil war—­the greatest possible threat to a polity rooted in the people—­only solidified the conviction that the Americans provided an important model for a viable state in a republican regime. From the invocation of extraordinary powers, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the bloody crushing of revolt, to the dismantling of the military mobilization, the fiscal apparatus to pay for the ravages of war, and the ultimate amnesty of the rebels, the American state served as an example in this critical moment of French history.

Conclusion: Toward a Transnational History of Liberal Stateness The verdict is in: the weak state in US history has been a mere myth; in fact, the fiscal-­military might of the American empire depended on a specific but potent form of liberal state power.43 Similarly, an exciting wave of revisionism, focusing specifically on the French state, has emerged over the last fifteen years through arguments that the French state was never straitjacketed by a strict “Jacobin” centralization.44 Rather, French historians have shown that this myth of Jacobinism has simply hidden a whole range of state technologies that have systematically depended on a permeable relationship between the state and civil society.45 These new convergences in the historiography of the American, French, and other European states suggest that there is much to be gained through a comparative and transnational history of the state in France, the United States, and beyond. As historians of the state in France and the United States have recently argued: Current histories of the state increasingly confound traditional oppositions between state and civil society, law and power, center and periphery, strong and weak states. Indeed, the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century democratic leviathans studied in France and the United States are more interesting for the way they depart from rather than conform to reigning models of statecraft that highlight formalization, rationalization, bureaucratization, office-­ holding, and the state monopoly of violence.46

And yet in spite of these promising convergences, the intellectual genealogy shaping our interpretations of the state has remained decidedly

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  73

impoverished, locked into outdated oppositions. This is in part because the opposition between American liberalism and French statism has been at the heart of this dynamic revisionism on state history. The pathbreaking reading of the American state by Stephen Skowronek, for example, built an argument on the opposition between the American and continental states.47 While such a reading cleared a wide pathway toward revisionism on the American state and American political development in general, it did, nonetheless, insist upon the distinction between the French state and the United States state. Ira Katznelson noted this aspect of Skowronek’s argument when he pointed out that Skowronek’s work implicitly drew on Weber’s standard state model according to which, the United States necessarily fell short.48 While much progress has been made in national historiographies, then, in comparative analyses the old tropes return: insisting upon France’s relentless struggle, and systematic failure, to soften a robust and elephantine “Jacobin” state and the United States’ laggard state development. The result has been that the American historiography and a renewed interest in the French state over the past two decades have largely been talking past one another in transnational state histories. Thus, to date, we do not have an intellectual history of the state that allows us to elaborate the transnational conceptual frames through which state and civil society actors operated in the nineteenth century. This chapter has suggested that continental and American social conceptions of the state were hardly as opposed as the extant literature seems to assume.49 It may be that alongside the Tocquevillian paradigm, in which the continental state served as the antimodel and the United States provided a liberal variant, there was a consistent and alternative axis of state building in the nineteenth century, the liberal democratic state. This state tradition was attentive to the successes of the American state and had strong intellectual centers on the European continent.50 Articulating an original response to the demise of classical republicanism and eighteenth-­century liberalism, this tradition consistently sought to balance the tensions between expanded democratization and a liberal defense of individual rights through a theory of the state instead of against it.51 Among the conceptual contributions of this thinking on the state were: (1) Building a collaborative and constructive relationship between the state and civil society in which civil society and the state were not locked in a zero-­sum game. These liberal democratic states sought the development of what Michael Mann has titled “infrastructural power,” in which state power is distributed through civil society to achieve key policy aims. In this case, the robust development of civil society and a more effective state power

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developed simultaneously. (2) They proposed a rights-­based conception of state power in which law was an active force for producing a capacious state and not simply a bulwark against it. In particular, through their positive conception of law, they broke down the barrier between individual liberty and state power. Therefore, both civil society and law were essential forces in spreading state power instead of limiting it. (3) One of the most effective techniques of liberal democratic state power was its ability to hypertrophy and atrophy (both fiscally and militarily) in exceptional circumstances, sometimes through quasi-­dictatorial measures and with startling quickness, but without making long-­term sacrifices to the constitutional order or the rule of law. In France, this final contribution was an essentially modern response to the “excesses” of democracy that only Bonapartism had successfully countered prior to the Third Republic. Thus contrary to Tocqueville’s reading, the United States state was actually an important model of liberal stateness, especially after the wave of European revolutions in 1830 and 1848. The thick veneer of democratization and liberal foundations combined with the capacity to integrate the western territories and maintain the Union in the Civil War made the American case a promising model of state building from the 1830s through the 1870s. That Thiers developed such a vision of the liberal state in France should invite us to recognize the fact that at key moments in the history of European state construction, the American state provided an ideal-­type. In turn, this should also invite us to reconsider how deep and complex the history of the American state in the world may actually be.

Notes 1.

Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 3. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Ancien Régime et la Révolution Française (Paris: Gallimard [folio], 1964, 117. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, ii/1. Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 216. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (Paris: Gallimard [folio], 1986, 463. 5. Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds, 369. 6. William Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–­72, 755. 7. See also Stephen W. Sawyer, “An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Édouard Laboulaye’s Constitutional Thought,” Journal of Modern History 85 (December 2013): 739–­71. 8. The list is long. There was, of course, Tocqueville’s companion during his trip, Gustave de Beaumont, but there were also many others, including Michel Chevalier,

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  75 Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, Édouard Laboulaye, Prévost Paradol, and the French feminist Jenny D’Héricourt as well as the utopian socialists like Étienne Cabet and Victor Considerant to name but a few. 9. Sudhir Hazareesingh points out that Tocqueville’s influence on liberalism during the 1850s and 1860s was almost null because of “the relative weakness of liberalism in France during this period, but it is also perhaps a comment on the intricacy and complexity of Tocqueville’s liberalism, which did not lend itself easily to appropriation by political groups and intellectual currents.” From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 164. 10. Adolphe Thiers, Discours parlementaires de M. Thiers, ed. Marc Calmon (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1879), 9: 104–­6 (hereafter Discours de Thiers). 11. Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-­Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. A bilingual French-­English edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), vol. 2. http:// oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2286#Tocqueville_1532–­02_EN_1008, September 8, 2014. 12. Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2: 107. 13. Discours de Thiers, 2: 257–­58. 14. Discours de Thiers, 8: 546. 15. Ibid., 548–­49. 16. Christine Adams, “In the Public Interest: Charitable Association, the State, and the Status of utilité publique in Nineteenth-­Century France,” Law and History Review 25 (2007): 283–­321. 17. It is worth noting that the hidden nature of this state intervention has direct parallels in the American context. While Brian Balogh has highlighted the importance of the hidden state in the American context, it would appear that this is not a peculiar or exceptional trait, but is better understood as a liberal mode of state power. See A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 18. Discours de Thiers, 8: 510. 19. Elisabeth Clemens, “The Encounter of Civil Society and the States: Legislation, Law and Association, 1900–­1920,” American Political Development Workshop, 6. Claire Lemercier has noted similar modes of state intervention in her recent work on the French state and civil society. 20. Discours de Thiers, 2: 267–­68. 21. William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-­Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Fall 2001): 163–­88. 22. For a different reading of the Coppet group and the French state, see Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé ou la paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 23. Discours de Thiers, 2: 272–­73. 24. Novak, “The American Law of Association,” in Analyzing Law’s Reach: Empirical Research on Law and Society (Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008), 493–­539. (Published under the same title in Studies in American Political Development, see note 21.) 25. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–­4. 26. Quoted in Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution (London: Profile, 2006), 84.

76  /  Stephen W. Sawyer 27. Michael Vorenberg, “Liberté, Égalité, and Lincoln: French Readings of an American President,” in The Global Lincoln, ed. Richard Carwadine and Jay Sexton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. 28. Augustin Cochin, Lincoln (Paris: Degorce-­Cadot, 1869), 46. 29. “Letter from MM. De Gasparin, Martin, Cochin, and Laboulaye to the Loyal Publication Society of New York,” trans. Mary L. Booth (New York: Westcott, 1866), 1. Francis Lieber was the chairman of this LPS of New York, and this publication was no doubt aided by the close friendship between Lieber and Laboulaye. 30. “Mon père, qui avait déjà passé environ sept années aux États Unis et qui était intime­ ment lié avec plusieurs des hommes dont le rôle dans les crises politiques de la Secession avait été considérable, commença à rédiger ce volume vers 1872 lorsque la IIIe République s’établissait en France. Une correspondance suivie avec M. Thiers lui avait fait songer à l’utilité qu’il y aurait peut-­être à exposer au public français la théorie du pouvoir exécutif américain, à l’époque où le pouvoir présidentiel tel qu’il s’implantait chez nous allait débuter.” Adolphe de Chambrun, Le pouvoir exécutif aux Etats-­Unis (Paris: Fontemoing, 1873), x. 31. Journal Officiel, April 12, 1871, 528. 32. Discours de Thiers, 8: 201–­2. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. “Toute tentative de sécession essayée par une partie quelconque du territoire sera énergiquement réprimée en France, ainsi qu’elle l’a été en Amérique.” Journal Officiel, April 14, 1871, 566. 35. Journal Officiel, April 15, 1871, 587. 36. Discours de Thiers, 8: 208. 37. Richard Bonney, “The Apogee and Fall of the French Rentier Regime, 1801–­1914,” in Paying for the Liberal State: The Rise of Public Finance in Nineteenth-­Century Europe, ed. Jose Luis Cardosa and Pedro Lains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 92. 38. Journal Officiel, August 5, 1871, 2459. 39. Journal Officiel, July 27, 1871, 2266. 40. Journal Officiel, August 26, 1871. 41. Journal Officiel, February 2, 1872, 750–­51. 42. Journal Officiel, January 30, 1872, 665. 43. See in particular, Balogh, Government Out of Sight; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–­1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gary Gerstle, “The Resilient Power of the States across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance,” in The Unsustainable American State, ed. Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 61–­87; Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Novak, “Myth of the Weak American State”; James T. Sparrow, The Warfare State: Americans and the Age of Big Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 44. The French state has witnessed a vast renaissance since the appearance of three important works published after the late 1970s: Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, Sociologie de l’État (1979; Paris: Hachette, 1983); Pierre Bourdieu’s courses on the state at the Collège de France were held between 1989 and 1992 and have been published in Sur l’État: Courses at the Collège de France (1989–­1992) (Paris: Seuil, 2012);

Beyond Tocqueville's Myth  /  77 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France (Paris: Seuil, 1990). There have been a great number of important works on the French state in France, England, and the United States since. Among them Marc-­Olivier Baruch, Servir l’État français: L’administration en France de 1940 à 1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Marc-­Olivier Baruch and Vincent Duclert, eds., Serviteurs de l’État: Une histoire politique de l’administration française, 1875–­1945 (Paris: La Découverte, 2000); Philippe Bezès, Réinventer l’État: Les réformes de l’administration française (1962–­2008) (Paris: PUF, 2009); Michel Margairaz, L’État, les finances et l’économie, histoire d’une conversion, 1932–­1952 (Paris, CHEFF, 1991); H. Stuart Jones, The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Alain Chatriot, La démocratie sociale à la française: L’expérience du Conseil national économique, 1924–­1940 (Paris: La Découverte, 2002); Quentin Deluermoz, Les Policiers dans la ville (Paris: PUPS, 2012); Jean-­Noël Luc, ed., Gendarmerie, État et société au XIXe siècle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002); Pierre Karila-­Cohen, L’État des esprits: L’invention de l’enquête politique en France (1814–­1848) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008); Paul André Rosental, L’intelligence démographique: Sciences et politiques des populations en France (1930–­1960) (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003); Nicolas Delalande, Les batailles de l’impôt: Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2011); Paul V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–­1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Timothy B. Smith, France in Crisis: The Welfare State, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a thorough bibliographic essay of the literature on the French state over the last decade, see Alain Chatriot, “The Political History of Administration: Forms of the State in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 33, no. 2 (2012): 19–­42. 45. See in particular Alain Chatriot, “La société civile redécouverte: Quelques perspectives françaises,” Discussion Papers, WZB, SP IV (2009): 402; Claire Lemercier, “La France contemporaine: Une impossible société civile,” RHMC 52, no. 3 (2005): 166–­ 79; Steven L. Kaplan and Philippe Minard, ed. La France, malade du corporatisme? XVIIIe–­XXe siècles (Paris: Belin, 2004); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français: La société civile contre le jacobinisme (Paris: Seuil, 2004) 46. William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer, and James T. Sparrow, “Toward a History of the Democratic State,” Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 33, no. 2 (2012): 7–­18. 47. “The unity of the American legal order rested on the vaguely worded constitutional prerogatives of the national government, broadly or narrowly construed, to intervene as the final authority in the affairs of these regionally controlled governments. In contrast, the often acclaimed ‘stateness’ of France was manifested by the legal unity consolidated in the Napoleonic Code and the establishment of the prefectoral system, which brought direct and continuous institutional control from the nation’s governmental center to each territorial unit.” Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 22. 48. “This portrait, implicitly drawing on Weber’s standard for modern bureaucracies, explicitly measured America’s liberal state against a model drawn from France or Prussia, of concentrated sovereignty and capacity as key aspects of modern stateness. On such a standard, antebellum America falls short.” Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political

78  /  Stephen W. Sawyer Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 87. John Brewer and Peter Baldwin’s work on the English liberal state has also opened up a vast field for reconsidering the history of the state that has subsequently been fundamental. And yet many of their arguments on the peculiar nature of the English state emerged out of what they understood as contrasts with the French and Prussian states. Comparative French histories have tended toward similar reifications. 49. Although it is not at the core of her work, Claire Lemercier has provided a compelling argument for similarities in institutional construction in France, the United States, and England and suggested that all three states pursued similar responses to key problems of building a modern state power. See Claire Lemercier, “Sociologie historique des institutions économique dans la France du XIXe siècle,” unpublished manuscript as part of her HDR (Higher Degree Research), “Un modèle français de jugement des pairs: Les tribunaux de commerce, 1790–­1880.” 50. For a study of the American influence on the German state, see Jens-­Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United State, 1776–­1945 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 51. On this point, see Stephen W. Sawyer, “Louis Blanc’s Theory of the Liberal Democratic State,” Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville 33, no. 2 (2012): 141–­63; on the liberal response to classical republicanism, see Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Ira Katznelson and Andreas Kalyvas, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Three

Inventing the US-­Mexico Border C . J . A lva r e z

Like a man bent at fixing himself some way in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable. —­Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, artillery and cavalrymen, diplomats, lawmakers, US Marshals, surveyors, and cartographers worked to build a border between the United States and Mexico where none had existed before. This was partly a racialized project, angling toward the total subjugation of certain groups of Indians. It was partly a political project, designed to lend concrete authority to new and experimental political regimes. And it was partly an economic project, intended to build and safeguard the infrastructure that would move workers and goods back and forth between the two countries. The ultimate goal of all who turned toward the border was to create certainty where there was none, and the path forward, though it was often discordant and steeped in mutual misunderstanding and distrust, was one of US-­Mexico cooperation and collaboration. This chapter describes these multiple projects and argues that in those years the US-­Mexico border was not only mapped literally through cartography, but also was socially and politically invented by both countries as they pooled their infrastructure and police power to define and respond to a common set of threats and desires. The late nineteenth century was a time of disturbing uncertainty between the United States and Mexico, and this uncertainty was felt most acutely in the borderland. No one was sure of the exact location of the international

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divide. Bilateral commissions inaccurately mapped it in the 1850s, then mapped it again in the 1890s, but on both occasions left few markers behind to delineate the line. But imprecise cartography was the least of the region’s problems. Many people living there did not know when they woke in the morning or lay down at night if they would be murdered that day, and at whose hands. The borderland, especially on the Mexican side, had convulsed for decades in fits of killing and retributive killing in which Mexicans and Americans worked together to reduce, sequester, and attack equestrian Indians, mainly Apaches and Comanches, while equestrian Indians relentlessly expanded their raiding territory in a futile effort to prevent their ultimate collapse. This killing forced the United States and Mexico into an ongoing dialogue about policing that ultimately brought the two countries together in their first uncomfortable embrace. Alongside uncertainty about the physical location of the border itself and of life and limb, a great many questions lingered about the stability of Mexican politics, and by extension the volatility of the Mexican state. After its expansionist war with Mexico, the United States passed into its own civil war that consumed many lives and resources. But in spite of the conflict the United States maintained a relatively predictable electoral democracy. Before the 1870s, Mexico did not; neither did Mexico’s southern neighbors, the quintessential “banana republics” that suffered countless political concussions throughout the nineteenth century.1 In the 1870s, Porfirio Díaz, who effectively controlled Mexican politics and development for three and a half decades, from 1876 to 1911, remedied this instability, uncertainty, and unpredictability in Mexico.2 During his regime, known as the Porfiriato, the perceived threats along the border expanded to include not only Indians but anti-­Porfirian dissidents as well. The inability to control either group was an affront to the burgeoning political stability Díaz was trying so hard to maintain and which the United States had geopolitical incentives to support. US and Mexican forces colluded to stamp out these border rebels, both in the interest of preserving Díaz’s government and in the interest of protecting the first glimmers of what would ultimately become the colossus of the US-­Mexico economy. Copper mining in particular, without which the United States could not have been electrified, was a bilateral enterprise, and the demarcation of the line and a transportation infrastructure with which to transport heavy loads of metal emerged as key interests in the borderland. By the 1890s, US and Mexican fear of Indians and rebels had mingled with businessmen’s desires for a more robust economic relationship, and this admixture focused all eyes on the border and how best to secure it.

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This chapter explores the multiple ways in which the US-­Mexico border came into being, and how, once in place, it helped establish bonds between the United States and Mexico that have since proven to be unbreakable. That is not to say that both Americans and Mexicans have at times felt these bonds as shackles, or that the US-­Mexico relationship has always been consensual, easy, or uncontroversial. At least since the end of the US-­Mexican War in 1848, however, the relationship has been pragmatic, designed to serve disparate but interdependent interests on both sides of the line.3 In the pages that follow, I show that this pragmatism is most clearly visible in the collaborative operations of US and Mexican policing organizations. From the late nineteenth century to the present, the border has been inconceivable and nearly illegible without a police presence on both sides of the line. Put differently, the border was invented because organizations were devised to police it. This chapter is also an investigation of some of the questions the US-­ Mexico boundary raises about state power. Relative to Mexico, the United States is usually assumed to be a “strong” state, capable of projecting its power at will, with precision, and successfully, despite foreign and even internal dissent. On the contrary, Mexico is often imagined as a “weak” state, incapable of fully governing or even containing its own population. The history of the US-­Mexico divide and how soldiers and federal police on both sides of the line carved it out reveals this dichotomy to be a false one. To understand the nineteenth-­century borderland, I build on the work of sociologist Michael Mann, who distinguishes between different registers of state power. He separates what he calls the “despotic power” of a state, which revolves around a strong executive whose interaction with other branches of government or society is usually limited or ineffectual, and “infrastructural power,” which is the ability of a state to implement decisions throughout its territory.4 The United States’ version of democracy, with its checks, balances, and veto points, has largely held despotic power in check.5 In Mexico, however, especially since the consolidation of power under Porfirio Díaz after 1876, the state has been exceptionally strong despotically. In this sense, the two countries were each other’s inverse, with the US executive limited by Congress, the judiciary, a free press, and other civic institutions, while in Mexico Díaz tried to shape the totality of politics. Infrastructurally, however, the two countries mirrored each other, especially along the border. Both nations sought to demarcate a definitive borderline in service of economic development and implement police control over that border. In this sense, along the border and especially through policing organizations, the United

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States and Mexico developed infrastructural power in order to share it out of mutual interest and necessity. In short, cartographic borders did not delin­ eate the territory throughout which federal policy was implemented. US and Mexican police power in the borderland was something much more fluid, something that operated across a bilateral, pooled territory. What makes this collaboration especially remarkable is the extreme distances between the border and the centers of power and industry in both the United States and Mexico. Even after the installation of the transcontinental railroad, most of the borderland was not easy country to traverse, or even to reach. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the border was an extreme periphery of both countries, made up of some of the deadliest terrain in the hemisphere. Because it was a fringe zone, however, it was central to the development of national conceptions of territorial and political sovereignty. Along the line itself, these notions were (and continue to be) undergirded by law enforcement and military collaboration. Border policing reveals, at its most literal level, the territorial limits of nation-­states. Although as the line became visible and snapped into focus, so too did the dynamic and flexible operation of state power that, in the case of the United States–­Mexico borderland, functioned as a joint production. The border did not simply absorb state power. Rather, it served as a site where two national governments pooled and coordinated infrastructure and manpower, and in so doing actually generated and amplified state power in both countries.

Policing the Border: Indians Some groups of Indians, especially the Apaches and Comanches, existed within the state but not within the nation. Mexicans and Americans thought of them as fundamentally different and knew them to be extraordinarily dangerous and oftentimes more powerful than either the US or Mexican armies. Cast as enemy combatants, they were hunted and attacked by both countries’ militaries.6 In this way the borderland was racialized, not in a way that delineated Americans from Mexicans, but rather in a way that bifurcated raiding Indians from everyone else. Diplomatic negotiations about the border were tense between the United States and Mexico, but beneath the arguing and complaining on both sides there was a pragmatic merging of minds, for each country agreed that the Indian “problem” was ultimately more important than their bilateral disagreements. US troops moved across the international boundary in pursuit of Apaches, and Mexican soldiers and

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local Mexican officials cooperated to the extent that they could. A crucial factor in the invention of the border was the logic of these cross-­border, racialized, and militarized anti-­Indian campaigns, which helped create a powerful centripetal force between the two governments. In the early 1870s the borderland was in shambles; it had been for de­ cades, and no one knew when the region might be lifted out of chaos. In the winter of 1874, Apaches who had by law but not by force been relegated to a remote reservation in the Arizona territory left that reservation, crossed a borderline that had only inaccurately been surveyed over twenty years earlier, and entered Sonora where they raided and killed people. The Mexican consul in San Francisco, California, was furious at what he considered the perennial inability of the United States to police its Indians and keep them from entering Mexican territory and committing depredations. He claimed, correctly, that the United States could not control them, and that it was “impotent,” unable to arrest either Apache hostilities or Apache movements. 7 Complaints arose in Coahuila (northwestern Mexico), too. There, across the line from Texas, the governor claimed that people lived in a state of “complete insecurity” and blamed the United States for not taking the proper measures to remedy it.8 Fueled by the ongoing controversies over Apaches and other Indian groups, from 1877 to 1879 representatives from the United States and Mexico conducted one of the first formal negotiations about military movements along and across the border. The talks took place in Mexico City between the US minister to Mexico, John Foster, and the Mexican secretary of foreign relations, Ignacio Vallarta.9 Porfirio Díaz had been elected the year before in 1876, and no one yet knew that his presidency would become a thirty-­five-­year affair during which the US government could rely on a predictable, one-­man political system. In light of this uncertainty the US government wasted no time trying to establish as much control over the borderland as it could and as quickly as possible. For two years Foster hammered away at Vallarta, demanding that US troops be allowed to cross the border at will. And for two years Vallarta pushed back against Foster, maintaining that such permission would amount to a violation of Mexican sovereignty and would stir up bad blood. When Vallarta used the word “sovereignty,” which he did regularly over the course of the two-­year negotiations, he deployed it in at least two registers, each of which revealed the ways in which the terms of the US-­Mexico relationship were beginning to crystallize along the borderline. In the most literal sense, Vallarta referred to what the political scientist Stephen Krasner

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has called Vattelian sovereignty, or the authority that a state exercises exclusively within its own borders. The incursion of US troops across the international divide into Mexico clearly violated this notion through the implication that Mexico was unable to effectively control antisocial activities within its own territory and that it needed foreign troops to police what its own government could not. This conception of sovereignty conflicted, however, with another possible meaning of the term, which Krasner calls “interdependence sovereignty.” In this formulation, sovereignty revolves around control not so much of territory but of borders, and what and who crosses them.10 In the 1870s, neither the United States nor Mexico had any semblance of control over the passage of Indians across the international divide. From this point of view, regardless of the borderline itself, both governments had yet to establish, or perhaps even fully comprehend, the ways in which their respective sovereignties would actually become a joint enterprise, forged in large part through policing activity. Despite the argumentative nature of the negotiations between Foster and Vallarta, both men agreed on one thing: they both spoke as if the borderland were at war, and they were referring to Indians. This issue had been raging in the borderland long before they sat down in Mexico City in the 1870s. For seventeen long years between 1831 and 1848, roughly 3,600 people were caught up in a violent fray in northern Mexico. This was a significant number for such a vast and sparsely inhabited place; few population cen­ ters in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and even Durango, Zacatecas, Texas, and New Mexico were untouched in some way by killing and kidnapping among Comanches, Kiowas, and other groups. Indians killed Mexicans at a rate of almost four to one.11 And while Indians were relatively good at capturing Mexicans,12 Mexicans captured few Indians. This power imbalance between indigenous inhabitants and Mexicans and Americans has led some historians to conclude that ever since the region was administered as a Spanish viceroyalty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Comanches were in fact the most powerful force in the region,13 and that the US victory in the Mexican-­American War was due as much to the inadvertent weakening effects of Indian raiding as to American military superiority.14 The aftermath of the punishing first half of the nineteenth century dragged on through much of the second half of the century in the north of Mexico, where, despite the fact that the United States and Mexico had in the meantime gone to war and redrawn the boundary line between the two countries, Indians continued to raid, kill, and abduct with relative impunity. The borderland was not a harmonious place, even aside from Indian troubles. Old feuds, insecurities, and jealousies festered beneath the surface

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of social relations, and the international divide only exacerbated them.15 Vallarta sensed this and argued that the movement, or even the presence of US troops along the border, would stir up “old hatreds” among people living on either side of the Rio Grande and create serious problems among the local population.16 Foster did not care about such regional concerns. He was more interested in the unfettered ability of the United States to exercise its military power and the perceived inability of Mexico to do the same. The US Army sought to thwart the unauthorized movement of Indians throughout the borderland, and Foster accused Mexico of lacking either the volition or the power to halt the depredations in Mexican territory. This inability to police the borderland against Indians was justification enough in the minds of US government officials to authorize cross-­border military maneuvers on a discretionary basis.17 Mexican officials, on the other hand, cared about projecting a hardline stance on territorial sovereignty and establishing Mexico as a legitimate, modern country whose borders could not be crossed casually. After a year of arguing the same points back and forth, Vallarta had still not backed down. He maintained that the idea of US troops crossing the border at the discretion of the War Department was not only offensive to the “territorial rights” of Mexico and the Mexican people, but also to the dignity of the republic.18 While this debate between Foster and Vallarta was largely unproductive at the outset, it set the stage for the US-­Mexico military collaborations of the 1880s and beyond. The discourse also reveals a larger feature of US-­Mexico relations during this period. It shows how the periphery was framed in national terms while at the same time exposing its ungovernability by either nation, creating, through the common goal of anti-­Indian policies, a new bilateral desire to bolster state power through policing organizations. Aside from the brutality and unpredictability of the reciprocal killing among Indians, Mexicans, and Americans, what made these attacks all the more terrifying was that they occurred in places so remote. Transportation infrastructure was sparse or nonexistent on both sides of the border. Mexican northerners had come to rely on their own devices to make lives for themselves in the rough and wild country of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, and other northern states. They were so cut off from the rest of the Mexican polity that their lives of rugged individuality were more similar to Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideal of the American West than anything that actually ever existed west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande.19 They were familiar with violence and its handmaiden, vigilantism.20 This self-­sufficiency grew in large part out of the fact that the Mexican north was joined to the rest of the nation by only the most piecemeal of infrastructures.

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During the viceregal period Mexico City linked itself to the northern outposts in (Alta) California, New Mexico, and Texas through a system of “roads,” which were little more than agreed-­upon paths along which bandits and “Chichimecas” waited to fall upon travelers. After independence, Mexico’s political troubles allowed elites to neglect the north and the people who lived and often fought each other there. By 1877, over half a century since independence from Spain and a year after Porfirio Díaz took office, the Mexican government classified around thirty-­four roads as “federal highways.” These rude highways crisscrossed 5,406 miles of the country, many of them meant for wheeled vehicles.21 Of these thousands of miles, only 330 of them, a mere 6 percent, led to the border. Too roughshod for carts, these conduits allowed only mule trains to pass safely. One short “highway” from Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, to Matamoros was in such terrible condition neither cart nor mule could negotiate it, only pedestrians could.22 In short, the borderland, the people who lived there, and the two countries of Mexico and the United States were isolated by a lack of infrastructure more than anything else. In the 1880s this all changed. In 1880 the Díaz government awarded two concessions to US businessmen to build railroads from Mexico City to the border.23 By 1888 two trunk lines snaked northward from Mexico City, the Central Line that connected to El Paso, Texas, and the National Line that ended in Laredo, Texas.24 These railroads laid the cornerstone of the US-­Mexico partnership. From the 1880s on, the trade relationship grew,25 and the interpenetration of the two countries became more complete. Mexico was gaining both despotic and infrastructural strength as domestic state power became tied irrevocably to one man, Díaz (it was in part his inevitable mortality that helped stir the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s26), and as its infrastructural power was linked, literally, to that of the United States. In this moment the seed was planted for a more complex, sometimes forced, but always-­pragmatic relationship—­one in which the two countries worked closely together and toward the same aims. By the mid-­1880s, as the railroad begat new cross-­border industries and expanded old ones, the imperative to subdue equestrian Indians became paramount for both the US and Mexican governments. The economic infrastructure was to be built atop a policing infrastructure. Porfirio Díaz’s regime had been in place for a decade, the longest in Mexican history, and he and his advisors had become intensely interested in renovating not only Mexico’s infrastructure but also its entire economy and its reputation throughout the world.27 Mexico and the United States had moved beyond the rancor of the Foster-­Vallarta talks several years earlier, and in the borderland the governor

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of Sonora struck up a cordial and collaborative relationship with a US Army general posted in Arizona territory. They were each so intensely interested in arresting the movement of Apaches that US troops began operating in Mexican territory (just as Foster had always wanted) and were assisted in their endeavors by government officials in Mexico who abandoned earlier objections to such incursions into Mexico’s sovereign space. The bilateral policing apparatus that grew out of this collaboration helped carve out the most racialized period in the history of US-­Mexico relations.28 Many “white” people north of the border assuredly looked down upon many people of Mexican descent, but Mexicans were still widely understood to belong to a national citizenry. Few made such assumptions about Indians. The enmity that Americans and Mexicans shared toward Apaches and other related groups brought them together.29 In 1882 the United States and Mexico signed an agreement that authorized the reciprocal movement of troops across the international divide as long as the soldiers were in pursuit of hostile Indians.30 The logic of policing had outstripped the logics of sovereignty and nationality. One illustrative case took place in May of 1886, just as the weather in the Arizona/Sonora borderland was beginning to get lethally hot for the summer. The governor of Sonora, Luis E. Torres, sent a series of telegrams from Hermosillo to the US Army outpost at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. In the first, he assured General Miles Willard that Sonoran troops were under strict orders to act “in perfect accord with [him] in pursuit of savage hostiles who seem now coldest and most decided to fight than ever.” He wrote out of fear, believing that “this time not a moment respite can be given to them or fatal results will come.”31 He was right to be afraid. Three days later, he wrote again to the military outpost in Arizona, reiterating his commitment to give a blanket order to Mexican troops to assist and supply their US counterparts in any way necessary.32 This stalwart support of US troop movements on Mexican soil was all the more remarkable because just five months before there had been a fiasco in Sonora. The 17th Infantry out of Fort Bowie in the Arizona territory had crossed the border into Mexico chasing Apaches in early December. They passed through small towns and were greeted by people exhausted by the killing. They passed, too, through wild and uninhabited regions of the Sierra Madres and did not march during the day. Rather, they traipsed through the rugged mountains under cover of night so as not to be seen by those they pursued. The infantry employed a tried and true tactic of the European colonials: they brought with them Indian scouts, turncoats whose sign-­ cutting skills made them invaluable resources to these war parties. These

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men marched in moccasins alongside soldiers, and occasionally the infantrymen paused along the trail so the moccasins could be repaired. Firing guns unnecessarily was strictly forbidden by the commanding officers.33 But people fired guns anyway. One hundred Apache scouts crossed with fifty US dragoons, and on the way south they took potshots at roaming cattle, killing two cows and wounding four more.34 Although the mayors of the small Sonoran towns were under orders not to allow anyone to sell the Apache conscripts mescal, they did anyway.35 When they reached the town of Huásabas (Guasavas), seven of them rambled into town from camp and harassed the locals until Mexican troops showed up to stop them. They didn’t go quietly. One of the scouts pulled a knife while his cohorts threw rocks at the soldiers, and in turn the soldiers fired.36 That was the version of events that the governor of Sonora relayed to his army counterparts on the US side at least. The US version of the story emphasized the illegal sale of alcohol to the scouts and maintained the depredations on the cattle were the work of outlaw Apaches, not the Apache scouts. As a US officer recounted, “It is well known that the people of this country have suffered almost countless outrages from the hostile Indians, wrongs which seem too readily attributed to this command, which was performing alike a service to Mexico as well as our own land.”37 The assignment of guilt was less important than the fact that the controversy revolved around the alleged uncontrollability and unpredictability of Apaches, even if they were in the employ of the US government. The incident ultimately reached the highest level of diplomatic correspondence between Porfirio Díaz’s minister to the United States and Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state. The nature of the complaint did not revolve around Mexican sovereignty or any violation of Mexican territory, as such grievances had in the past, but rather implicitly lamented Indians having gotten in the way of an otherwise smoothly functioning joint military apparatus designed to hunt other Indians.38 The perceived differences between Mexican and American society were more easily surpassed, at least at the level of military expeditions in the borderland, than the gulf between either society and that of the Indians in their midst. These independent, violent, equestrian Indians ultimately could not sustain their raiding patterns, and their mobility was curtailed by increased collaboration between the US and Mexican militaries. In the 1880s a new racial order was confirmed with the complete military domination of the Apaches. By the late 1880s all the Apaches had been reduced permanently

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to reservations.39 Also by the late 1880s it had become clear that Porfirio Díaz was a president in perpetuity. He had cut his teeth in his first decade in office and his regime was already established as the most predictable and certain in Mexican history. Consequently, the US government vested its interest in his regime’s preservation, especially as capital poured into the borderland.

Policing the Border: Dissidents The peace, development, and stability of the Porfiriato must be understood in contrast to the tumultuousness of the first half century of Mexican history, much of which was spent fighting, from the Texas secession (1835) to the US-­Mexico War (1846–­48), the Reform War (1857–­61) to the French intervention (1861–­67), to say nothing of the northern Indian depredations. In the backdrop of these internally destructive conflicts was an enormously complex and ever-­changing electoral/imperial system of government. In the fifty-­five years between 1821, when Mexico won its independence from Spain, and 1876, when Porfirio Díaz assumed the presidency, over sixty men served in some capacity as head of state, some as “emperors,” others as part of a “Supreme Executive Power,” and others as presidents. No one knew from year to year what was to come or what bloodshed might accompany it. Looking back at the turn of the century, one Mexican general characterized the years before Díaz as “the monster of anarchy.”40 It is clear that Porfirio Díaz’s government was wholly unique in the history of Mexico, and its willingness to absorb foreign capital and its contiguity with the United States made its geopolitical and economic appeal obvious. In other words, Díaz’s “despotic” power was critical to attracting infrastructural commitments from the United States and stable enough to maintain and extend them. Not everyone in Mexico was soothed by the Porfiriato, however, a fact that concerned government officials in both countries and prompted both, as was becoming their custom, to seek a police response. The ties that bound Mexico to the United States opened the door for new kinds of banditry and antisocial cross-­border movement. Criminals and anti-­Porfirian dissidents stepped into the vacuum left behind by Indians, and new infrastructure helped them move easily back and forth between the two countries. With the Apaches disarmed and isolated in their remote enclaves, the cross-­border policing apparatus that had been established between the United States and Mexico shifted focus from Indian hunting

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to policing political dissidents who posed a threat to the stability of the Porfiriato. As part of this police apparatus, the governments of the United States and Mexico created a new legal regime based on reciprocal extradition and quasi-­overlapping jurisdiction, and in that way moved even closer to each other. Similar agreements had existed before, but in the words of the US secretary of state, they “failed to meet the demands of justice as between two countries with an extended inland frontier, running through sparsely settled and wild country, where acts of violence are not infrequent on either side.”41 In the Mexican Legation there were still echoes of the kinds of complaints it had lodged against the United States in the 1870s. In 1892 a group of bandits fell upon a small detachment of Mexican soldiers patrolling across the border from Texas, and the Mexican minister to the United States blamed the attack on the fact that there were not enough federal troops on the US side to prevent it. Nevertheless, unlike the charges of impotence and abandon hurled at Washington twenty years earlier in reference to Apache depredations, these criticisms were couched within a wider language of shared interests and goals. These raids were now understood, in the words of the Mexican minister, to “interfere so much with the development of the commercial and social relations which both countries are striving to attain for their common benefit.”42 Despite the unlucky military men attacked by cross-­border bandits, Mexico had by the 1890s established a large military border patrol along the Texas border in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas. Between Paso del Norte (Ciudad Juárez), Chihuahua, and Bagdad (Mata­ moros vicinity), Tamaulipas, the Mexican army set up thirteen camps from which patrols fanned out and policed criminal traffic across the river. The lion’s share of the troops mustered around Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Mier, closer to the gulf than the headwaters of the Río Bravo. In and around the river valley 1,884 soldiers and officers camped and worked alongside and atop their 843 horses. They were artillery and cavalrymen, and the Mexican government deemed their combined force “fully competent to protect [Mexican] territory.”43 The military buildup on the Mexican side made it hard for anti-­Porfirian rebels to coordinate their activities. Chief among the dissidents were the “Tereseros,” rebels who followed the teachings of a young female mystic and healer, Teresa Urrea, and who despised and terrorized Díaz’s government in the north. Urrea was only twenty-­three years old in 1896 and had already been living as an exile for four years in various parts of Arizona and El Paso since her forced expulsion from Mexico in 1892. People came from far and

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wide to visit her; it was said she could cure maladies through the laying on of hands. Her popularity among the desperate and forlorn helped establish her as a de facto revolutionary icon, held up as a symbol among those who faulted Porfirio Díaz for the dispossession of rural and downtrodden people. Teresero rebels took refuge north of the border, and from US soil launched attacks on Mexican border towns, including Nogales, Palomas, and Ojinaga. Officials at the Mexican consulate in El Paso charged these assaults to “the sinister instigation of the so-­called Saint of Cabora, Doña Teresa Urrea, and the perversity of her mentor Don Lauro Aguirre.”44 Aguirre, an engineer, newspaperman, and enemy of Díaz, maintained in his writings and in his championing of “Teresita” that the “Mexican Government is a thief an [sic] assassin, and is led by one who was captain of a band of thieves.”45 Rebels who believed the same, both in the thaumaturgical power of Teresa and in the evils of the Porfiriato, reacted against the Díaz regime with the prejudice they thought that regime had directed toward the Mexican people. Theirs was a rustic and violent organization, comprised of men who, according to one historian, had been “honed by centuries of warfare against the Apaches.”46 After one raid around Ojinaga, Chihuahua, they stole back across the line and camped in a cave tucked in the wild and steep Chinati Mountains south of Marfa, Texas. For spoils they hauled with them the severed head of one of their victims.47 Mexico was left with a headless body and a concentration of troops the government believed was only strong enough to prevent rebels from organizing themselves in the north, but obviously not strong enough to prevent actual attacks. The blame for the killings, Mexican officials claimed, lay with the United States. The consul in El Paso believed that “the American government must enact the most efficacious measures possible in order to redouble and set into motion a police presence along this part of the border.”48 Only through a joint and coordinated policing effort could the borderland come under the control of the Díaz regime. Officials in United States were happy to answer the call. Under the auspices of the US Marshals—­one of the first federal law enforcement agencies—­the American W. L. Rynderson tried to infiltrate the Tereseros who were hunkered down in the mountains of Texas. He had heard they were there in a cave, for a group of hunters had come upon it by accident and were greeted by the barrels of eight Winchester repeating rifles protruding from the darkness. When these hunters came back the next day with a posse, they found the dissidents had already decamped, leaving behind prayer cards to Teresa, photographs of her, and the skull of the man whose head they had cut off in the previous assault on Ojinaga. Rynderson learned

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of their movements, motivations, and personal details from contacts at the Mexican consulate in El Paso.49 Although he ultimately failed to do any significant damage to the organization, his attempt shows both a willingness and a desire for government officials from both the United States and Mexico to try to coordinate a security nexus between US federal law enforcement, the Mexican foreign service, and the Mexican Army. What these stories show us about the borderland is that, despite the railroad and the expansion of industry, the most important federal infrastructure on both sides of the border was a constellation of policing apparatuses that worked, to what extent they could, toward common goals. This was possible because a more peaceful and predictable border was in the best interest of both countries as their economic relationship deepened.

Mapping the Border The ostensibly nationalist project of surveying and mapping an international divide seems a logical starting point for a discussion of how a border gets invented. I discuss it last, however, to emphasize that the cartographically precise border became particularly desirable after an interlocking police apparatus had already been created. Mapmaking, then, was an aftereffect of the invention of the border, a way of technologically formalizing what was already in existence. There was indeed an early mapping expedition in the 1850s, just after the US-­Mexican War. It mapped a line (incorrectly in places) through a borderland that had yet to be imagined—­or invented—­by officials in Washington or Mexico City. As a consequence, it was forgotten almost as soon as it was concluded.50 After the war between Mexico and the United States in the late 1840s, while tensions were still high, uncertainty at its peak, and little to no infrastructure connecting the two countries, a few dozen men, both Mexicans and Americans, set out into the heat of the borderland with horses, guns, and astronomical instruments to map the border. Their horses struggled for miles between the rare water holes, and their rifles and astronomical methods were unreliable. Their intention was to survey and mark the freshly minted border between the two countries. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Treaty described in detail where the line ought to be, but out in the wild country of the desert there was as of yet no register of international boundaries, only ocotillos, syenite, greasewood, and red basalt. In these years, the border meant almost nothing.51 It was merely a fantasy of cartography whose existence was imperceptible in the real world.

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The borderland was a hollowed-­out space; Indians left it ungoverned and ungovernable by any national political authority.52 Those men traipsed through that lonely country for eight years, from 1849 to 1857. They covered the 693 miles between El Paso and the Pacific Ocean, not counting the distance accrued on crisscrossing reconnaissances. By the end of this odyssey, they had left behind fifty-­two monuments that delineated the border. At least two of these were over one hundred miles apart, and distances of ten, fifteen, or twenty miles between the others were not uncommon. Of the fifty-­two, only fourteen had any kind of lasting inscription on them, and if a delirious traveler or amateur orienteer were to stumble upon one of these, the only way he might discern in which country he stood would be to read the inscribed text. On the north side of these rare obelisks it read, “Direction of the Line,” and “United States of America.” On the south-­facing side, “Dirección de la Línea,” and “República Mexicana.”53 There were no fences, no walls, no guards. Nothing inscribed upon the ground. Only the chance of stumbling upon a monument in an endless sea of porphyry, volcanic breccia, and nopal. For thirty-­five years these monuments crumbled away to nothing, unobserved, eaten away by wind and rain. Vandals defaced the ones placed close to towns, and out in the open spaces at least forty-­one were little more than pyramidal piles of fieldstones gathered from their immediate whereabouts.54 By the early 1890s, there were no traces whatsoever of several. During these years the US and Mexican armies managed to destroy the autonomy of most of the equestrian Indians that roamed the American southwest and northern Mexico. When the most violent Indians were finally relegated to reservations, new industries took hold along the border. Cattle barons bought up enormous tracts of land that often sprawled into both countries, and if the ranches themselves were not binational, their cattle often grazed across the international boundary anyway. In the 1870s and ‘80s herds of cattle in the borderland had become enormous, with some individual herds topping 17,000 head, and by the turn of the century, almost all of the rangeland west of the Rio Grande was in private hands. By the mid-­nineteenth century, geologists and the capitalists they worked for already knew the ground in Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico was laced with copper. It wasn’t profitable to mine, however, because it was expensive to haul it away and, more importantly, its uses were limited. After 1882, however, when Thomas Edison decided to use copper as the conductor that would electrify North America, more copper needed to be mined. As Phelps Dodge and other companies sunk mines and bought up land throughout

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the borderland, it became more and more important to know exactly which country they were in. Mexico and the United States had different property regimes and legal requirements for the ownership and administration of land.55 When cattle crossed the international boundary in search of food, or when investors dug mines in the vicinity of the border, everyone, including the governments of Mexico and the United States, wanted to know which nation’s jurisdiction applied to the wandering cows and copper.56 The exact location of the international divide mattered more and more, so presidents Chester Arthur and Manuel González created a new International Boundary Commission as the century drew to a close.57 This troop of men, again a binational lot, set out into the deserts to resurrect the old border markers that had tumbled down, erect new ones to fill the yawning gaps between the old, defaced ones and the piles of rubble, and correct the mistakes of their surveyor forebears. They left from the Pacific coast in 1891 with over twenty wagons, barometers, surveyor’s transits, two Würdemann zenith telescopes, two sextants, two artificial horizons, two mean-­time chronometers, two sidereal chronometers, and the requisite military escort to protect against “Indians and other marauders.” Five years later they ended up in El Paso where they footed their 258th monument into the ground. On the way they used stars in the system of the Berlin Jahrbuch to orient themselves. They wandered through the “hopeless des­ ert” of the Papagueria and pulled themselves and their heavy equipment through the Sierra de los Pajaritos, “a confused mass of rocky crags, peaks, flat-­topped mountains with vertical sides, enormous trachyte dykes, steep, narrow ridges, and deep canons, all mingled in startling confusion.” Even the clearest water was sometimes spiked with poisonous minerals and was undrinkable, and crosses atop roughshod graves dotted the landscape.58 They complained of mirages. Out there on the playas and the vast open plains “the mirage continually mocks the traveler with deceptions apparently so real that it is difficult to persuade him that what he sees is a mere atmospheric freak and has no actual existence,” they wrote. One day a band of men from the expedition tracked a herd of antelope in hopes of procuring a source of meat. They followed them for miles, and when they closed enough distance to see the animals clearly, they discovered their prey to be wild horses, roaming the open country. Wanting to see antelope, another man, sweating in the triple-­digit heat, mistook a coyote for one. Some claimed that at “times a jackrabbit would loom upon the desert with the apparent size of a cow, while occasionally the legs of animals would be so comically lengthened as to give them the appearance of being mounted on stilts many feet in height.”59

Inventing the US-Mexico Border  /  95

Finally the border was mapped, though it had already come into exis­ tence before the surveyors set out into the heat. The physical difficulty of access to and passage throughout the borderland, coupled with the rising profitability of the horticultural and extractive industries there, prompted new infrastructural commitments from Washington, DC and Mexico City. It also produced new kinds of bilateral policing and communication. This sense of mission among soldiers, diplomats, and businessmen was first and foremost a pragmatic one, born of the notion that the US-­Mexico relationship was no longer a luxury; it was a necessity.

Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century, the US-­Mexico border existed in ways that it had not before. Many of the uncertainties of the borderland had been annihilated; people felt confident that the fears and dangers that gripped the previous generations no longer needed to govern them. Commercial ties between the United States and Mexico had been established since the 1830s and before,60 though the new and increasingly robust infrastructure in place by the turn of the century deepened those links and gave them an extraregional reach and importance. Before the 1910s and ’20s there was no significant migration back and forth between the United States and Mexico,61 though the extension of railroad from the interior of Mexico to the border would ultimately come to be indispensable to the ballooning of Mexican labor in the United States, which would in turn prompt new versions of the US-­Mexico border policing apparatus. One of the most powerful effects of the invention of the border was not the demarcation of the line itself, but rather the forced interaction between the governments of the United States and Mexico, and by extension, the primacy of policing as a way of comprehending and sustaining the borderland. The international divide in the nineteenth century shows us not only how a line was drawn through the desert by two governments, but how two nations came to a consensus about what the border meant to their respective notions of sovereignty and security, and what constituted threats to that stability. The role of policing organizations as the enforcement arms of each federal government and the ways in which they interacted as a single, cross-­ border apparatus is crucial to this understanding of consensus building. The nineteenth century is often seen through the prism of the US-­Mexico war and what a catastrophe that was for Mexico. The story above does not refute this or claim that Mexico and the United States fell happily into each other’s arms. It does, however, show that from early on the two governments

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grudgingly needed each other, were forced to rely upon each other, forced to ask each other for help. The social, legal, and cultural problem of Indians proved to be a cause greater than the ongoing feuds between the foreign relations branches of the United States and Mexico. Mexican political dissidents, too, galvanized both nations and led them to see the common good in a bilateral policing arrangement in which the United States helped Porfirian Mexico rout its antagonists. Perhaps more than anything, the physical infrastructure and mapping that Americans and Mexicans undertook in the 1880s and ’90s guaranteed that the two countries would move into the future together, joined by iron and steel, and that the language of policing would become the lingua franca of the borderland.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

After the Monroe Doctrine, the US government maintained a largely skeptical, exploitative relationship with the Spanish-­speaking countries of the hemisphere. To track this history of distrustful dependence, see Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-­Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See Friedrich Katz, “The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–­1910,” in Mexico since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). This focus on the pragmatic dimension of US-­Mexico relations builds upon recent scholarship that emphasizes collaboration over unilateralism and mutual interest over US dominion. See especially Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-­Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760–­1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and especially Michael Mann, “The Crisis of the Latin American Nation-­State,” paper presented at the Political Crisis and Internal Conflict in Colombia conference, University of the Andes, Bogotá, 2002, 2. William Novak makes this argument forcefully in William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘  Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008). In the post–­Civil War United States, martial conflict with Indians—­simultaneously quasi-­sovereign “nations” and subnational dependents—­was usually understood in terms of the laws of war set down by the Union Army in 1862. This allowed federal Indian fighters in the borderland to circumvent territorial civil authorities in favor of retaliation and summary execution. See John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012), 335–­38. “México Febrero 18 de 1874, Sección de América, No. 33.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 312, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE), Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada (AHGE). “México Septiembre 9 de 1874, Sección de América, No. 154.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 312, SRE, AHGE. The United States did not yet use the rank of ambassador in the 1870s; this rank was created in 1898. Foster was the head of mission for the United States in Mexico,

Inventing the US-Mexico Border  /  97 officially holding the rank of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, which meant that he did not represent the head of state (Ulysses S. Grant) but nevertheless had full authority to represent the United States and its interests. The Mexican Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores is the foreign relations arm of the federal government. Vallarta was Porfirio Díaz’s first foreign minister and simultaneously the president of the Supreme Court. 10. Stephen Krasner, “Abiding Sovereignty,” International Political Science Review/Revue internationale de science politique 22, no. 3 (2001): 232, 231. 11. Indians killed 2,649 Mexicans during this period, though Mexicans only managed to kill 702 Indians. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-­ Mexican War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), figure A, 318. 12. See James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 13. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 5. 14. See Brian DeLay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-­Mexican War,” American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007); and DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-­Mexican War. 15. For a detailed description of this, see Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–­1912 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 16. “existiendo antiguos odios entre los habitantes de una y otra orilla del Bravo . . .” Legajo L-­E-­1712, Años 1877–­1879, Conferencias Vallarta-­Foster, sobre asuntos entre México y los Estados Unidos de América, celebradas en la Ciudad de México, D.F., para tratar el arreglo de varios asuntos sobre límites, reclamaciones, extradiciones, etc. entre el Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores de México y el Representante de los Estados Unidos de América, SRE, AHGE. 17. “Segundo Memorandum, México, 23 de Agosto de 1877.” Legajo L-­E-­1712, Años 1877–­1879, Conferencias Vallarta-­Foster . . . , SRE, AHGE. 18. “Memorandum, el dia 21 de Junio de 1879.” Legajo L-­E-­1712, Años 1877–­1879, Conferencias Vallarta-­Foster . . . , SRE, AHGE. 19. Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 13. 20. For an analysis of northerners’, especially serranos’, or mountain people’s, famil­ iarity with violence, see Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Cambridge Latin American studies 54–­55, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For the best examination of vigilantism on the US side, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 254–­74. 21. John H. Coatsworth, Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico, Origins of modern Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981), 22–­23. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Ibid., 35. See also Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 24. Coatsworth, Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico, 80, 171. 25. Díaz also established a “free zone” along the international divide in an effort to stimulate border business. See Octavio Herrera Pérez, La zona libre: Excepción fiscal

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26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

y conformación histórica de la frontera norte de México (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2004). John Womack makes this point most clearly in John Womack, “The Mexican Revolution, 1910–­1920,” in Bethell, Mexico since Independence. See Coatsworth, Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico; Katz, “The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–­1910”; and Mauricio Tenorio-­Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation, New Historicism 35 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). There has been much concern in the historical literature about race and Mexican Americans, such as Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–­1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), though I contend that in those years the starkest racial line in the borderland was drawn between Indians and everyone else. Karl Jacoby documents the ways in which Mexicans and Americans banded together to attack Apaches in Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-­Mexico Border, 59. “War Department Signal Service, U.S. Army, telegram to General Miles Willard, 4 May 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 3, RG 393, NARA. “Compañía del Ferrocarril de Sonora, Linea Telegrafica, telegram from Luis Torres to Gens. Nelson and Miles, 7 May 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­ 1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 1, RG 393, NARA. “Camp near San Bernardino, 1st Lieut. Maus to Capt. Roberts, 17th Infantry, Fort Bowie, Feb. 28, 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 3, RG 393, NARA. “Hermosilo [sic], January 8th, 1886, Hon. Gen. Crook, Brig. Genl. U.S. Army, Fort Bowie.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 1, RG 393, NARA. “Camp near San Bernardino, 1st Lieut. Maus to Capt. Roberts, 17th Infantry, Fort Bowie, Feb. 28, 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 3, RG 393, NARA. “Hermosilo [sic], January 8th, 1886, Hon. Gen. Crook, Brig. Genl. U.S. Army, Fort Bowie.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 1, RG 393, NARA. “Camp near San Bernardino, 1st Lieut. Maus to Capt. Roberts, 17th Infantry, Fort Bowie, Feb. 28, 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 3, RG 393, NARA. “M. Romero, Legation of Mexico to Hon. Thomas F. Bayard [Secretary of State], January 25th, 1886.” U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–­1920, Department of Arizona, Apache Campaign, 1886. Box 4, RG 393, NARA. The Yaquis, however, in Sonora continued raids for some time after that. See Evelyn Hu-­DeHart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy, 1821–­ 1910 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). “monstruo de la anarquía,” in General D. Bernardo Reyes, El Ejército Mexicano (Mexico City: J. Ballescá y CA, Sucesor, 1901), 71.

Inventing the US-Mexico Border  /  99 41. “Convention between the United States of America and the United States of Mexico, for the Extradition of Criminals, Concluded February 20, 1885.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 422, p. 499, SRE, AHGE. 42. “Washington, D.C., dec. 14th 1892.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 418, p. 130, SRE, AHGE. 43. “Lagacion [sic] Mexicana. Washington, Enero 12 de 1893 [Mexican troop positions along Texas border].” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 418, pp. 408–­11, SRE, AHGE. 44. “la siniestra instigación de la llamada Santa de Cabora,—­Doña Teresa Urrea,—­y la perversidad de su mentor Don Lauro Aguirre.” “Consulado de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, El Paso, Texas, Número 17, Bandoleros en la Frontera, Diciembre 30 de 1896.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 451, pp. 58–­62, SRE, AHGE. 45. “W. L. Rynderson to Hon. H. C. Ware, U.S. Marshal, San Antonio, Texas, from Las Cruces, N.M., Dec., 28th, 1896.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 451, pp. 63–­67, SRE, AHGE. 46. Paul Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheavals in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 16. 47. “W. L. Rynderson to Hon. H. C. Ware, U.S. Marshal, San Antonio, Texas, from Las Cruces, N.M., Dec., 28th, 1896.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 451, pp. 63–­67, SRE, AHGE. 48. “es de todo punto necesario que el Gobierno Americano dicte las medidas más eficaces para que se redoble y active la vigilancia en esta parte de la frontera.” “Consulado de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, El Paso, Texas, Número 17, Bandoleros en la Frontera, Diciembre 30 de 1896.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 451, pp. 58–­62, SRE, AHGE. 49. “W. L. Rynderson to Hon. H. C. Ware, U.S. Marshal, San Antonio, Texas, from Las Cruces, N.M., Dec., 28th, 1896.” Correspondencia de la Legación Mexicana en Washington, T. 451, pp. 63–­67, SRE, AHGE. 50. See Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States–­Mexico Boundary, 1849–­ 1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 51. See, for example, Karl Jacoby’s discussion of the Arizona-­Sonora border region in the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s. He describes Anglo and other Euro-­Americans as the minority in Tucson, outdone by the influence of the Mexican-­descended population and their cross-­border trading routes that went unnoticed and unregulated by customs authorities. See Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History, 70–­72. 52. Between the years 1831 and 1848, Brian DeLay has found 540 cases in which Indians and Mexicans skirmished to the death. The overall body count numbered just over 3,350, though it is important to note that only rarely did more than ten people die in a single altercation. What this shows is how pervasive, widespread, and totalizing the threat of murder was in Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Durango, Texas, and elsewhere. See DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-­ Mexican War, 317–­40. 53. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-­Making of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891–­1896 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), part I, 17; part II, 173, 178. 54. Ibid., part I, 47–­49.

100  /  C. J. Alvarez 55. Rachel St. John, “Divided Ranges: Trans-­Border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western Mexico-­U.S. Border,” in Bridging National Borders in North America, ed. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 123, 127, 124. 56. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-­Making of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891–­1896, part I, 13. 57. International Boundary Commission United States and Mexico: Treaties, Joint Rules Governing the Commission, Personnel (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 8–­10. 58. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-­Making of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891–­1896, part II, 9, 36, 22, 20, 25, 26. 59. Ibid., part II, 30. 60. Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 61. Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002).

F our

Rumors of Empire: Tracking the Image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century J ames T. S p arrow

During and immediately after the Second World War, as fascist powers smashed established political boundaries around the world only to have their New Order obliterated by military defeat, Americans confronted their own need to reconsider established conceptual boundaries that had long organized their political life. These boundaries, between republic and empire, liberal and conservative, America and the world, were rapidly breaking down under the pressure of events. By joining with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to form the Allied nations arrayed against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the United States had departed from its traditions of aloofness from great power politics, avoidance of a large military establishment, and preference for primarily commercial engagement with international affairs. To prevail in the global cataclysm, the United States would become the very thing against which it had been defined since its origins in revolution against the British Empire: a military superpower of global scope and imperial ambition. Making matters worse, the first friend and closest ally in this endeavor was Great Britain. This was a major sticking point for the Roosevelt administration, which had to sell the alliance to a polity riven by an isolationist politics thriving on Anglophobia and anti-­imperial suspicion. Consequently, it was around conceptual distinctions between republic and empire—­often articulated implicitly, through oppositions between American exceptionalism and British corruption—­that political battles over the terms of engagement with Britain coalesced, reorganizing categorical distinctions between liberal and conservative, and America versus the world, in the process. Historians of the “special relationship” forged between the United States

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and Great Britain in these years have focused their attention on elite sources of American foreign policy, thereby absorbing their subjects’ disdain for the inchoate fray of public debate in mass politics. Yet the massive state building that US extraterritorial ambitions required in the 1940s depended to a surprising degree on an awkward relationship to the British Empire. Britain’s fraught image could expose or even torpedo overseas ambitions as readily as it could cloak or justify them amid the tumult of American political debate. The reliance on Britain as the first and most formative partner—­not to mention tutor—­in the American ascent to globalism was deeply problematic because interwar politics had inscribed not only neutrality but also hatred of England and her empire into public discourse, making its perfidy the common coin of a certain kind of politics.1 American ambivalence about the British Empire was more than adventitious. The United States’ rise to globalism in the 1940s proceeded according to a series of formative transactions between the Americans and the beleaguered British. It began with the destroyers-­for-­bases deal during the Battle of Britain, which elicited extraordinary political opposition despite its provision of strategically vital basing leases situated well within the hemispheric boundaries of the “national interest” as it had been mapped since the time of Monroe. The ambivalence continued through Lend-­Lease, which financed a major portion of the capital investment and contract-­fueled growth of the fledgling military-­industrial complex. Unease also accompanied the creation of a joint strategic command during the wartime alliance, which provided the occasion for building yet another vital piece of state capacity, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the European theater American operations overlaid British installations, first during the Battle of the Atlantic, then in joint operations in North Africa and Italy, and in the British Isles during and after the buildup to D-­day. In the Pacific theater American strategy coordinated with British to shore up former colonial spheres in the Philippines as well as Singapore and Hong Kong. As they pushed back the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific, the United States worked with Great Britain to lay down an archipelago of bases—­and the state capacity to maintain them—­on which its postwar global power would rest.2 A substantial problem of mass politics thus confronted any effort to commit the United States to a long-­term alliance with the British, much less to the broader overseas commitments collectively referred to as “the American Century.” If diplomatic historians have neglected the mass politics of the Anglo-­American alliance, American and British officials at the time certainly did not. This essay draws on the large and systematic body of

Rumors of Empire  /  103

research produced by British and American surveillance of public opinion and debate during the war in order to track the importance of the image of Britain and her empire to the legitimacy of the American offshore state in the period when the international commitments on which the American Century depended were just being established. Delving into the cultural and political associations that linked a persistent undercurrent of anti-­British sentiment to antiadministration politics during World War II, it seeks to trace out the implications of linking American ambitions overseas to the deeply ambivalent image of the British Empire.

The task of burnishing Britain’s public image in America during World War II was, ironically, handicapped from the start by the overwhelming success of England’s public diplomacy in the First World War. British propagandists and censors had been too effective in shaping US opinion between 1914 and 1918. They had prompted a backlash that ranged in seriousness from the easy demagoguery conflating aristocratic Britain with the House of Rothschild and an unnamed host of “war profiteers” who had all dragged the United States into war according to the Nye Committee in the 1930s, to the subtly devastating critique of the very possibility of democratic government laid out in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922). Toward the end of the 1930s, however, the obstacles to cultivating a favorable image of Britain in the United States began to diminish as mounting fascist aggression around the world cast British power in a more favorable light—­ particularly after Britain stood up to the Nazi aggressions against Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, only to face the catastrophe of Dunkirk and endure the relentless bombing of civilians in the Battle of Bri­­tain, which was broadcast nightly over American radio from summer 1940 onward.3 While events in Europe and above all the bombing of Pearl Harbor crystallized a shift in attitudes, that crystallization, and the gradual change in orientation that preceded it, was also helped by a massive propaganda effort. This was directed from New York by the British Information Service and the British Library of Information working in tandem with the British Embassy in Washington, DC, which courted sympathetic administration figures such as Archibald MacLeish, the New Deal stalwart and Librarian of Congress.4 The overriding importance of public opinion was clearly reflected in the extraordinary efforts that Whitehall made to monitor the slightest shifts in public debate regarding American commitments overseas. With their lives on the line, the British understandably monitored US public opinion with

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the greatest precision and attention to variation. The accomplishments of Lend-­Lease and the alliance were too recent, and too vulnerable to the vagaries of the war’s progress, to take for granted. Great Britain’s efforts to influence American politics extended well beyond the realm of mere propaganda. From 1940 onward, the staffs in both New York and Washington also conducted a wide-­ranging research effort that entailed the comprehensive collection and analysis of any political intelligence pertaining to the all-­important relationship between Britain and America.5 The man in charge of analyzing this flood of political intelli­ gence was Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford analytical philosopher and Anglophilic Russian Jew whose postwar lectures in the history of ideas would do much to help reorient liberalism back toward its classical roots. From his perch at the British Embassy in Washington, Berlin tracked every development in US public opinion over the course of the war, on the lookout for any recrudescence of the political currents that had come so close to killing the alliance in its infancy during the neutrality debates. His astute analyses of politics and public debate, sent by cryptogram back to Whitehall on a weekly basis, became famous for their incisiveness in the Washington circles Berlin frequented.6 Indeed, they soon became infamous. After the war Berlin wrote to a friend that he had gotten wind of an amusing wartime exchange between a clueless fellow Englishman and Adolf Berle—­founding member of the Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” assistant secretary of state, and no friend of the British Empire. Apparently the fellow had confused him with Berlin due to the similarity of their names. “I have often read your telegrams, you know,” the aristocratic embassy employee related jovially to Berle. “Oh, I am not in the American Department, of course, but they come round, you know, they come round.” It is unclear whether Berle’s resulting consternation derived from anger at the wide-­ranging political intelligence and insight informing Berlin’s perceptive telegrams, from the thought of the British still working on American generosity during the war, or from the possibility that the embassy might have access to Berle’s telegrams. But what does come out in this exchange is the tacit acknowledgment of the great scope of Whitehall’s efforts to monitor and influence American politics and perceptions. A very similar kind of confusion, resulting from the even greater notoriety of Berlin’s reports in London, produced a misguided meeting between Winston Churchill and Irving Berlin, after which Churchill is said to have concluded in disappointment, “Berlin writes better than he talks.”7 The British were not the only ones who closely monitored the often-­heated

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public debate that swirled around American international com­mitments during World War II and afterward. The Americans also maintained staffs in New York and Washington devoted to the daily monitoring of public opinion and political debate. Even after Lend-­Lease and the Atlantic Charter had laid the material and ideological cornerstone of the Anglo-­American alliance, and the attack on Pearl Harbor had allowed isolationists to fold their resentment of Britain and reluctance to enter another war in Europe into the loud passions of a war against Japan and fascism, the Roosevelt administration was well aware of the challenge it faced in trying to sell Americans on their British allies. Roosevelt, the master of bonhomie, liked to tell a joke intended to cultivate a soft spot for the budding relationship. When overcome by a presidential motorcade on the streets of Washington, DC, he related, one “Negro” upbraided another for not realizing “dat am de President of de United States and Mr. Winston Churchill!” On absorbing this information, the other man was said to reply, “Yeah, what dey done?”8 More than racial condescension would be required to sell the American public on an alliance with the British, even after the GIs went off to battle with them. Roosevelt assigned his “private” pollster, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril, to gauge attitudes toward the British during key moments of negotiation—­as a general measure of American “war-­mindedness,” and as a guide to the popular reception of particular policies and wartime developments. Cantril, who had begun monitoring public opinion research using Rockefeller money at Princeton as a pioneer of the field in the late 1930s, set up shop in a private house in Washington, DC, during the war, the better to apply his talents to the fielding and analysis of such polls as the president should require. The prevalence of polled questions regarding public attitudes toward the United States’ main ally, Britain, reflected Roosevelt’s recognition that such views were a barometer of the broader hopes and legitimacy attached to the war effort more generally.9 The task of managing public perceptions of the British Empire required all the talent the government could muster. The State Department, having learned from the neutrality debates, secretly lavished extraordinary resources on monitoring domestic public opinion regarding foreign affairs. An entire office—­the Office of Public Opinion Studies, headed by the former Ohio State political science professor Schuyler Foster—­conducted ongoing research that tracked the minutest daily fluctuations of attitudes among every interest group seeking to influence foreign policy. To augment these analyses of public debate over foreign policy, Foster secretly contracted with the cutting-­edge survey research firm, NORC, to conduct regular survey research

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that was based on rigorous sampling far in advance of the commercial techniques Gallup and Roper used.10 It is not surprising that the State Department should have devoted itself so intensively to monitoring public opinion on policies for which it was responsible. All the temporary and Cabinet-­level agencies commissioned surveys of “morale” as it pertained to their policy turf during World War II. NORC got its start working for the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Rensis Likert at the Bureau of Agricultural Economics began the work that would help launch the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan–­Ann Arbor while studying war bond drives and other matters for the Treasury. Samuel Stouffer made his fame directing the “American Soldier” studies of GI morale for the War Department.11 Wartime administrators were not content to track opinion polls and issue corrective information. Their worries extended even into the mundane realms of everyday speech. The domestic branch of the OWI contained a small group dedicated to “rumor control.” Working with social workers, librarians, and thousands of other local government employees around the country, as well as civic-­minded groups that had organized themselves into “rumor clinics” to debunk particularly harmful canards, the OWI encouraged newly minted “rumor wardens” to mail transcripts of overheard rumors to Washington, DC, where they could be tracked and analyzed for evidence of fifth-­column subversion by Axis propagandists and morale saboteurs. Drawing on these networks of informants, the OWI could conduct spot canvassing on potentially disruptive issues as they arose, or even mount a full-­scale national survey of wartime rumor, as it did in August of 1942. The transcripts produced by the rumor wardens could then be analyzed alongside other sources of domestic intelligence gathered from the FBI, military intelligence, and other wartime agencies.12 These and related sources revealed that anti-­British rumors were surprisingly common on the American home front, suggesting that the fires of anti-­imperialism stoked amid the interwar neutrality debate had not subsided. To counter the rumors, misinformation, and propaganda their researchers tracked, the OWI, Treasury, and other war agencies worked closely with all media to insert British-­friendly images into war films, radio plays, and news coverage. To provide one example from thousands of media placements, the September 18, 1943, issue of the Saturday Evening Post featured an article by Forrest Davis titled “The British Get Out of the Doghouse” that hit all the right notes under the auspices of “reporting” on the upsurge of good feeling and mutual understanding that had been produced by the

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wartime alliance. Giving abundant space to Churchill’s frequent invocations of the Atlantic Charter and the “great Atlantic powers,” it emphasized reconciliation. As a sop to the right-­wing isolationist base, it threw in Churchill’s warnings against left-­wing criticism of the alliance.13 Apparently the favorable placement of the administration’s message was not always sufficient. A few months after Davis’s article, the Saturday Evening Post felt obliged to run a subsequent story warning its readers that “Hating the British Is a Costly Luxury,” cannily reversing the stereotype of aristocratic arrogance and privilege that tinged so many Americans’ views of England. “The British are wise enough,” it reported, “not to react to allegations that Great Britain is planning to bring the US back into its empire.”14 A union official and OWI informant in the Los Angeles shipyards reported that British-­friendly coverage “stopped much criticism” and produced a “marked decrease in anti-­British feeling” that apparently was palpable among workers.15 How deep the good feeling ran is impossible to ascertain, particularly given the entrenched Anglophobia among Irish, German, and other ethnic groups that made up a large portion of the working class. These official endeavors did not go without a response, however. Indeed, a kind of vernacular counterpropaganda emerged over the course of the war. Always attuned to undercurrents of anti-­British sentiment, Berlin noted that the “isolationists,” as he continued to refer to them, used their assaults on the Anglo-­American alliance, and on Roosevelt’s foreign policies more generally, to advance their domestic political agenda in Congress. Nowhere was this clearer than in their sustained pursuit of the liberal poet Archibald MacLeish, an unabashed friend and defender of Britain as America’s dearest ally.16 Conservatives eliminated MacLeish’s liberal Office of Facts and Figures 1942, before forcing his retirement from the successor Office of War Information in late 1943, when the domestic branch was almost entirely defunded in retaliation for the friendliness of its propaganda toward the Roosevelt administration. MacLeish subsequently escaped into the State Department, where he took up the newly created post of assistant secretary of state for public and cultural relations. MacLeish’s position opened at the same time as the new post of assistant secretary in charge of international organization and security, reflecting a larger move by the State Department toward a more systematic engagement with public and cultural affairs during the campaign for the international organization that would become the United Nations (UN).17 Congressional conservatives like the arch-­isolationist senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan sensed—­not entirely without justification—­an effort by the Roosevelt administration to export the New Deal to the rest of

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the world in the name of collective security. As word of MacLeish’s nomination leaked to the press in late 1944, the isolationist stalwart Chicago Tribune warned its readers of a new organization within the State Department to be “brain trusted” by the infamous “poet and Librarian of Congress”: He is said to have been chosen to preside over a great propaganda machine to influence public opinion at home and abroad in favor of various global plans by which the President and Harry Hopkins hope to extend the New Deal [throughout] the world.18

Behind closed doors Vandenberg complained loudly to the new secretary of state, former US Steel executive Edward Stettinius, claiming that ten senators had buttonholed him about MacLeish. Vandenberg and other “irreconcilables” on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations voted against MacLeish, with conservative “border state Democrat” Champ Clark of Missouri moving to hold hearings into MacLeish’s background. This ready-­made controversy soon produced an extended effort to link MacLeish to Popular Front groups associated with his work as “an active propagandist in the United States” on behalf of New Deal agencies.19 After several votes that ended in a tie MacLeish squeaked into a confirmation by a vote of 11–­10, but only after testifying to his zeal in defense of the war effort with an account of his brother’s death that he recounted “with a solemnity which seemed to shame the Senators into embarrassed silence,” according to Berlin.20 After a respectful pause that betrayed the legitimating power bestowed by the invocation of the combat soldier as culture hero, the conservatives resumed their assaults, although now without sufficient force to preempt MacLeish. The prospect of building American global preponderance from within the “special relationship” thus remained an especially fraught proposition, particularly as it pertained to setting new rules for global power that, in the founding of the United Nations as a collective security organization growing out of the wartime alliance, tacitly followed the model of the British Commonwealth and the discredited League of Nations.21 Even in the idealistic early days of the alliance, conservatives like Taft railed against the prospect of “a policing of the entire world by the Anglo-­Saxon race” and warned that founding international cooperation on New Deal principles such as “freedom from want” would lead to the establishment of an “international WPA.” To Taft even bipartisan plans, such as the wartime resolution sponsored by Republican Joseph Ball of Minnesota that called for an

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international police force, were bound to produce the opposite of peace, born as such plans were in the feverish dreams of what he called the “war crowd.”22

From the very beginning the problem of England’s image in the American political imagination preoccupied internationalist molders of public opinion. In the prescient and influential essay “The American Century,” which charted a path for the ascent of US globalism, media mogul Henry Luce went out of his way to make the English people look good. As they looked “out at the rest of the world” and “toward the future,” he observed, Americans were hopelessly “confused,” “filled with foreboding,” paralyzed, and “filled with nervous strain.” The British, by contrast, he described as “profoundly calm”—­despite being summoned out of the depths of their slumbers by the Luftwaffe on a nightly basis, only to be driven deep into the subterranean refuge of the London tube. They had shed the indecision and error of the interwar period and found triumphant purpose in “defending, yard by yard, their island home.” That they were also defending an empire that covered a quarter of the globe remained unstated, although it was implicit in Luce’s subsequent invocation of “19th Century England” as an example of the kind of “great internationalism” the United States could surpass if it seized the scepter of its own Century. Despite his rhetorical relegation of Britain’s international power to the previous century, Luce knew he somehow had to address the fact of it if he were to persuade Americans that they should commit their sons and tax dollars to saving America’s most venerable adversary and ally. He could even present the British Empire as a model if he dressed it anew in the vestments of Hollywood, Coca-­Cola, and American know-­how.23 Luce had the advantage of writing in a moment when the climate of public opinion was shifting in favor of the British after a long season of inclemency. By the winter of 1941, when he wrote “The American Century,” the fall of France had already shifted American attitudes away from the interwar pattern. Between the spring and late summer of 1940, the openly isolationist proportion of the American electorate had shrunk drastically, and the proportion willing to extend some aid jumped to nearly 80 percent, while the portion thinking it “more important to help England than to keep out of the war” doubled, rising to 70 percent once the full implications of the protracted Battle of Britain had sunk in. Even so, deeply ingrained suspicions lingered. The proportion of Americans thinking the British were fighting

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“mainly to keep their power and wealth” (30 percent) counterbalanced a similar proportion believing they fought “mainly to preserve democracy against the spread of dictatorship.” Significantly, a comparable proportion (27 percent) said “both.” According to Cantril, roughly a fourth of respon­ dents fit the “isolationist pattern,” indicating an opposition to any aid to Britain, and indifference to the fate of Europe.24 Although Pearl Harbor brought a general approval of the Anglo-­ American alliance, that came with considerable baggage and subterranean dissension. This became clearer as support for Britain eroded over the course of the war, a trend recorded with concern by a team of analysts tracking public opinion in the State Department. From a high of 76 percent expressing “trust” in America’s foremost ally in 1942, the proportion responding “we can trust British cooperation” declined steadily to around 60 percent toward the end of the war, despite a momentary victory spike of over 70 per­ cent for a few months during the defeat of Germany in the spring of 1945. Overt distrust of Britain evolved in mirrorlike fashion, rising to over a fourth of responses to the question by the end of the war. Even those who said Britain could be trusted justified their belief by pointing to Britain’s depen­ dence on American assistance, rather than indicating any virtues it might possess.25 At the center of the anti-­British views that persisted throughout the war, even though they were not dominant, were righteous criticisms of empire—­ “the traditional ‘British evil,’ ” in the words of the State Department’s opinion analysts.26 When pollsters asked respondents what they thought the United States and England “did not agree about,” the “outstanding” and by far most frequent response was British imperialism—­the point on which Americans felt “especially self-­righteous.” Other objections—­to Britain’s ostensible desire for greater world power, its “less democratic” society, or its “greater socialism”—­were all mentioned only half as frequently, if that.27 Isolationism by this point had become a minority position with ominous undertones, rather than a direct threat. As early as spring 1942, an OWI report snarked, Americans had “rediscovered the roundness of the earth” and generally accepted the war aims and international cooperation growing out of the alliance.28 The report acknowledged that such discontent as existed was not overwhelming, nor even a sign of Axis sympathy: “A person complaining about some aspect of the administration’s conduct of the war or criticizing England for her colonial policy is not thereby a Fascist at heart.” But OWI focused in on the malcontents nonetheless, worrying about their threat to national morale. If left unchecked, their grievances might

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“reduce efficiency and threaten national unity.” An OWI study in summer 1942 of five communities in the rural Midwest and South worried that Americans expressing grievances about the war effort were “susceptible to the Axis efforts to accentuate existing cleavages,” because of a “continuation into the war period of the pre-­war isolationist frame of mind, generally distrustful of the administration and uneasy about the war.”29 Currents of overt ill feeling and suspicion toward the British persisted into the fall of 1942, when the first successes of the North African landings began to alter public perceptions. Abiding distrust of Britain tapped many generations of ingrained suspicion on which something approaching an American political tradition had been built. A powerful theme among the grievances common in the rural South and Midwest was that Britain was once again duping the United States to prop up its empire, as it had in the last war. OWI interviewees repeated the truism that by 1942 had hardened into a formula: the United States had pulled Britain’s imperial “chestnuts out of the fire” because England was too weak and decadent to defend herself. Of special concern to the OWI, a primitive correlation matrix revealed a very close association between such anti-­British views and an even more prominent tendency among skeptics to express antiadministration sentiments; anti-­Semitic, antilabor, and anti-­ Russian views were also correlated with anti-­British and antiadministration statements, but to a lesser degree. Subsequent government research on the vagaries of public opinion would continue to track this intersection of sentiments, which served as a rough barometer of “war-­mindedness” to guide policy and politics throughout the war.30

Anti-­British rumors stood out to war administrators because they seemed specially designed to strike at the heart of the wartime alliance through the Nazi psychwar technique of “divide and conquer.” Such rumors were doubly discomfiting because they revealed a persistent tendency to view English allies through the lens of their failures in the previous world war, which only compounded the abiding American resentment of British imperialism. Feeding on isolationist criticism and antiadministration pique, Anglo­ phobic rumormongers channeled frustration with the privations of the war mobilization—­such as they were, in a land that saw none of the civilian peril its British ally faced—­to make a dig at more deeply felt resentments about the conduct of the war. On the West Coast in the summer of 1942, for example, a student at the University of Southern California confidently

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joked within earshot of a Los Angeles rumor warden that “the American Navy is convoying a boat load of rubber heels to England to be put on the shoes of the English soldiers so they can retreat more easily.”31 The compressed critique this joke expressed—­of rationing and transatlantic convoys as well as putatively craven British allies—­was a common feature of the anti-­British jokes and rumors the government tracked. Federal rumor wardens recorded the appearance of such rumors all over the country. Like other wartime rumors that used well-­established stereotypes to undermine popular faith in particular government agencies without appearing treasonous, these anti-­British rumors scapegoated the state, feeding into a subterranean politics of legitimacy that would constrain Roosevelt and his successors throughout the 1940s.32 Northern cities like Boston, which had a large concentration of Irish—­as well as the nation’s first “rumor clinic”—­were awash in anti-­British rumors throughout the war. In the spring of 1942 the Boston Rumor Clinic recorded a range of anti-­British rumors concerned citizens had reported, many of which echoed the fantastic conspiracy theories that dominated anti-­Semitic wartime rumors. “The British are running everything in Washington,” claimed one Boston-­area rumormonger; their sinister designs went as far as “having everyone finger-­printed, etc.”—­a practice adopted in fact at the behest of the FBI, not Whitehall.33 Less sensational wartime frustrations and puzzles also inflamed the conspiratorial imagination—­and not only within the “ethnic enclaves” of Boston, although that is where such canards were most glaring. A conspicuous proportion attributed galling American shortages to British self-­indulgence. Shortages of sugar, for example, were supposed to be the consequence of “our having shipped too much to England where they already have more rationing allowance than do we,” according to a rumor reported to the Boston Rumor Clinic. No, claimed another, sugar was scarce because “we are shipping much of our sugar to England to make black powder, which the British are still using.” In Brooklyn, the inconvenient rationing policies of the OPA were conflated with the war materiel sent to Britain under Lend-­Lease in a rumor claiming, ironically, that “England doesn’t have half the rationing we do. They did for a while, but we are shipping them all our best stuff now so they don’t have to ration things.” Rubber captured the imaginations of those who passed along a slightly different rumor reported to the Boston clinic, which held that even though it was being conserved through high-­profile scrap drives, “a large part of the rubber we now have is being shipped to England,” which, the rumor teller related confidently, “has no tire rationing.” The English hoarded scarce oil, too, in yet another

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tale reported to the Boston clinic: “we have sent a good number of tankers to England,” it related, “where they idle in port.” One rumor was so specific as to complain about the South American markets in steel the British were imagined to be capturing by “underselling the United States . . . ever since the Lend-­Lease bill.”34 Such suspicions made it harder for the OPA to enforce regulations whose avoidance already sustained a booming black market that fed inflation. They also completely inverted the reality of the situations they described, for it was Britain that suffered under extreme privations that included massive rationing beyond anything the Americans could imagine, while it was the Americans who scrambled to secure new markets in steel. Anglophobic rumors swirled in a kind of cultural symbiosis with the oratorical maneuvers of anti-­British and antiadministration hard-­liners in Congress. Summing up the main chance of the “irreconcilable” coalition in Congress as it anticipated the impending midterm elections, Berlin wrote in June 1942 of conservative critiques that sounded remarkably similar to the rumors whose transcriptions flooded into the OWI’s offices: The isolationists are definitely on the march again. . . . The anti-­Administration drive in Congress is being pressed. Questions . . . such as the muddle in the rationing scheme, alleged failure of War Production Board to cope with rubber shortage and failure to implement plans for extracting a synthetic rubber out of great wheat surplus (for which British-­Dutch cartel share the blame with American rubber companies and Secretary of Commerce) form favorite means of attack on Administration.35

Class resentments, articulated in an antiaristocratic vernacular that had long defined American political culture, provided much of the content as well as the animus driving anti-­British rumors. This vein of invective drew on economic resentments to blend anti-­British sensibilities with an abiding distrust of big business that fueled a surprising, even counterintuitive, resurgence of antitrust politics during the war. Working-­class and small business resentment proved potent, targeting the big war contractors’ cost-­ plus contracts and near monopolization of government business.36 The Roosevelt administration, ever responsive to such political sentiments, pursued a number of measures to placate it, not least of which included antitrust prosecution. By the end of the war the antitrust division of the Justice Department, led by Wendell Berge, had successfully prosecuted both Alcoa and American Tobacco in high-­profile cases, despite being called off particularly sensitive cases directly pertaining to the war economy.37

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One of those wartime prosecutions included Imperial Chemical In­ dustries (ICI), a high-­profile British cartel. Brought before the dock along with other firms suspected of serving the interests of German cartels in 1942, ICI was accused of delaying the construction of flying fortresses through its control of a patent involved in the manufacture of plastic glass. By January of 1944—­helpfully close to the impending presidential elections, as the administration fully understood—­the prosecution continued under full steam, pulling in DuPont, perhaps the most notorious of the “merchants of death” publicized by the Nye Commission’s interwar investigations, which had done so much to rally isolationists against intervention.38 “The inclusion of ICI in the suit,” Berlin wryly noted, “provides that flavor of sinister international monopoly which is one of the traditional bogeys of the American man in the street, and clears such attacks of any suspi­ cion of a New Deal campaign against private enterprise.” The prosecutions were less risky once the peak of economic mobilization had been passed in late 1943. According to Berlin they were clearly good Roosevelt politics, inasmuch as there exists widespread popular feeling against cartels; both because they are thought of as a wicked foreign invention, to which the British are particularly prone . . . and because of the perpetual fear which haunts small business of being swallowed up by cartelized Big Business. . . . [T]here is no doubt that popular as well as departmental feeling is set strongly against the pre-­war practices of such firms as Standard Oil or Duponts, and even more against foreign enterprises such as ICI behind which loom such sinister spectres as IG Farben.39

As in other kinds of wartime rumors, the nature of the allegation deployed in Anglophobic rumors varied to suit regional sensibilities and traditional scapegoats. In Indianapolis, the resentment of Britain assumed a personified malice in the claim that “Churchill doesn’t care how long the war lasts if the big shots can hold on to their profits and their businesses.” A like-­minded rumormonger, this time in the factory town of Troy, New York, provided a more precisely conspiratorial reason for the fact that no end to the war seemed in sight in the summer of 1942: “Churchill owns part of  I. G. Farben industries, German Chemical and Dye trust, and for that reason its plants in Germany are not being bombed.”40 Even the South, a traditional stronghold of pro-­British sentiment—­and the region with the lowest relative frequency of anti-­British “wedge-­driving rumors” according to aggregate patterns discerned by the Boston Rumor Clinic—­was vulnerable to poisonous rumors that played on the class tensions cresting amid

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the labor shortages and wage controls in the first years of the war.41 In the textile towns of the Piedmont South, class tensions similar to those that roiled Boston, Indianapolis, and Troy provided the temptation to use anti-­ British tropes to provide cover for what otherwise might seem a seditious attack on a vital wartime ally: A Southern Textile Manufacturer states that a union organizer has spread a rumor among the employees that the nobility and upper-­class in England have prevented the opening of a second front with the 3,500,000 trained combat soldiers because they want these soldiers to remain in England to protect their estates, and that if a second front is opened it will have to be through the use of American troops.42

Like the roughly contemporary rumor circulating among discontented Irish Americans that “Churchill wants American troops sent to Northern Ireland so that they can be used by him in an invasion of Ireland,” this Southern rumor employed a clever mobilization of class resentments that drew on the larger tendency to scapegoat the state. Even English landing fields and hospitality could appear suspicious from this point of view.43 The harshest criticisms of the British ally came in the form of insults to the bravery and competence of the English soldier and military command. This was in keeping with the near-­universal wartime veneration of the combat soldier as a culture hero on whose fate the legitimacy of the war government hung.44 In Boston it was uncontroversial, at least among Irish Americans, to explain the massive tonnage sunk by German U-­boats by stating outright that “the British are sabotaging their own ships in American ports so they will not have to put out to sea.”45 In Salt Lake City, not known for its concentration of Irish or German isolationists, a rumor warden overheard the claim, “every time you read a newspaper article, it is either the Australians, the Irish or the Canadians who are doing the fighting. You never hear of an Englishman on the front line.”46 Virtually any strategic move by the British could be used as a pretext for casting more global aspersions. Rumors impugning the fighting abilities of the British echoed the criticisms of British strategy leveled by “Asia-­First” advocates who pushed to prioritize the Pacific war ahead of the European theater in grand strategy, a position advanced by the Hearst, Patterson, and McCormick newspapers as well as by isolationist papers. These critics were inflamed by the lost racial pride of Pearl Harbor as much as by lingering suspicions of the designs harbored by the Rothschilds, the war profiteers, and the imperialists presumed secretly to direct British strategy.47

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Even those concerned about the fate of Europe found bones to pick with the British. In a report that began with a section titled “open season against British foreign policy,” Berlin observed the derision greeting Britain’s fall 1944 landing of troops in support of the royalist Papandreou government in Athens. The criticism Britain’s actions elicited in Congress was borne aloft on a “very general conviction that British Government (and more particularly the Prime Minister) is firmly resolved to effect restoration of King George of Greece as well as other southern European monarchs which is repugnant to traditional sentiment of all shades of American opinion from the most conservative to the most radical.”48 The potency of casting aspersions on British motivations in order to impugn Allied strategy and war aims was clear in a joke that was current in Washington, DC, from the spring of 1941 into 1942. It imagined the following scenario: When it was necessary to evacuate a plane, one after the other of the occupants, who represented the United Nations, volunteered to parachute in order to save the plane. The last but one to get up, the joke says, is the British, who, in getting up, shouts, “God save the King!” and throws out the last passenger, the Greek.

Ernst Kris, the director of a research project on “totalitarian communications” who sent the joke to the OWI’s rumor control unit, reported that the same joke was told inside Nazi Germany, only it ended with a German soldier throwing out an Italian and exclaiming “Heil, Hitler!” Kris thought it a fascinating “migration” of authoritarian resentment across enemy lines.49 The skepticism of British intentions extended well beyond the fighting to the larger war aims proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter, coloring perceptions across the political spectrum. If conservatives’ anti-­British sentiment mingled easily with antipathy toward the liberal policies of the Roosevelt administration, so too those on the left could exercise a similar conflation, not to delegitimize FDR, but to equate England with her empire. Two liberal employees of the federal government, for example, presumed that only hubris and cynicism motivated Churchill and other imperialists: I believe that the Negroes in India have been exploited for many years by powerful and wealthy firms in England. We all know that the English Govern­ ment has condoned mistreatment of people in their possessions for centuries. These English firms exploit the poor for all they are worth. It seems that

Rumors of Empire  /  117 India is telling them where to head in at now and England has finally come to a point where she must pay for her sins. Just compare the loyalty of the Filipinos with the loyalty of the people of India. The United States always treated the Filipinos as they should be treated and if England could truthfully make the same statement perhaps she would be in a better position to secure their cooperation. In my opinion the prouzd British Empire is a thing of the past. If they intend to keep Japan from taking India they had better give India what she wants.50

While Filipinos may have taken issue with some of these assertions, nonetheless the conversation, covertly recorded by a rumor warden, indicated the powerful mutual influences exerted by anti-­imperialism and racial liberalism in these years.51 Erstwhile nativists and their conservative allies also found anti-­ imperialism a convenient stance to adopt in public debate over the terms of the alliance with Britain. Although the Atlantic Charter’s idealistic affir­ mation of freedom from fear and want, and of the “right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live,” may well have informed “Nelson Mandela’s Atlantic Charter,” it also drew the attention of others who held aspirations less idealistic than decolonization or national liberation.52 Among the Anglophobes of New England, it was simply common sense that “Roosevelt and Churchill have a secret agreement and will not uphold the Atlantic Charter as indicated in the case of India.”53 Both ends of the political spectrum converged on a passive hostility to the fate of empire, with over 60 percent polled by Gallup and other organizations indicating that they felt India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, should be granted independence either during or after the war. Only a third of respondents Cantril polled in June 1942 could bring themselves to dispute as “not true” the claim that “the English have often been called oppressors because of the unfair advantage some people think they have taken of their colonial possessions.”54 In this context of deep ambivalence about America’s main ally, administration opponents could not resist the opportunity to play politics by making the most of anti-­imperial sensibilities, transforming themselves into unlikely (if temporary) advocates of colonial reform in the process. In Congress, Albert Chandler of Kentucky (another “border state Democrat”) complained in May 1943 that Japanese forces were prevailing against a tepid British showing in Burma because more than two million Indian troops were needed on the subcontinent to prevent an anticolonial uprising. Senators Vandenberg, Wheeler, and Shipstead, true to their isolationist

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instincts, chimed in with their support for Chandler’s speech. The criticism stung sufficiently that Churchill felt compelled to issue a reply before a previously planned joint session of Congress.55 Apparently the prime minister enjoyed popularity even among many isolationists; at any rate, his critics conceded he “triumphantly carried his audience with him,” although “the fires of ‘Pacific first,’ ” Berlin noted, would “continue to burn.” Berlin astutely noted that these fires might have had more to do with old domestic beefs than with deeply held concerns about the fate of Burma or India. Chandler’s resentments dated back to Roosevelt’s efforts to “purge” him and other conservative Southern Democrats during the 1938 primaries, while at the same time elevating the other Kentuckian in the Senate, Alben Barkley, to the preeminent congressional leadership position.56 Chandler’s sudden concern for the plight of South Asians resembled a burst of anticolonial sentiment from otherwise conservative members of Congress, including Robert Reynolds, Democrat of North Carolina. Reynolds, the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, had only a few months earlier urged the administration to use its leverage in the direction of “extending freedom—­unqualified, unlimited freedom—­to the people of India and thereby making those people a part of the great program and crusade for freedom and independence now being engaged in throughout the world.”57 As a Southern Democrat, Reynolds was doubtless tweaking the Roosevelt administration for its invocation of the Four Freedoms to court black voters who sought antilynching bills and an end to Jim Crow. Certainly he was not calling for the kind of freedom struggle that was even then drawing together African Americans and Indians in a fledgling transnational movement.58 Winston Churchill was, of course, the preeminent symbolic receptacle for these crosscurrents of ambivalence about the alliance with Britain, thanks to the comfort and self-­assurance with which he inhabited the imperialist stereotype. His infamous Mansion House speech of November 10, 1942, in which he bluntly remarked, “I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” only made explicit what most of Britain’s critics took as a starting point for Anglo-­ American relations. Coinciding as it did with deteriorating conditions in Britain’s relations with India, among other developments, Churchill’s frank admission of overweening imperial interest had only “tended to revive a picture of Britain as a stronghold of reactionary imperialism,” according to Berlin. Only the recent publication of the Beveridge Report proposing an expansive postwar welfare state had mollified that perception among American liberals, revealing a strangely inverted link between socialism and

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imperialism in the American imagination of Britain that would come to the surface after the war’s end.59 The flip side of the loathing and dread British global power inspired was a snickering sense of its impending doom. Indeed, the two perspectives were not incompatible. This could be seen in a popular wartime joke that reversed the meaning of an interwar joke. After World War I a tale common in England recounted the seaside exchange between a man dressed in a bathing suit borrowed from an American that read “America won the war,” and a friend who warned him of sharks. “Oh I’m not afraid,” he responded, “no shark would swallow that stuff.” By World War II the joke had migrated across the Atlantic, where it depicted an American taking a dip at Miami Beach in a suit loaned to him by an Englishman. In response to warnings about sharks, he pointed to the slogan written on the suit that would protect him: “There’ll always be an England.”60 The contemptuous, even gleeful presumption that the British Empire was doomed held ominous implications for the popular support that would be necessary to sustain the special relationship after the war, when financial strain and imperial disarray would make American aid vital to both British and American interests overseas.

The spring of 1945 brought not only the defeat of Germany but also the death of Roosevelt. These developments spelled the end of the self-­ confident, sometimes imperious personal diplomacy on which so much of the Anglo-­American alliance had rested. An expansive, heedlessly unilateral mood began to creep into the void left behind. Berlin’s outfit in Washington soon picked up on this shift. On September 8, 1945, the perspicacious office of the British Embassy in Washington, DC, opened its weekly political summary to the foreign office in London with a description of the triumphal mood that had overtaken the United States with the official arrival of Victory over Japan (V-­J) Day a week earlier: It was a mood of nationalistic, even imperialistic, pride in what the President [Harry S. Truman] called “the strongest nation on earth.” Yet it had an idealistic side too, for nothing was more noticeable than the note of rededication and the urge towards what [General Douglas] MacArthur called a “spiritual recrudescence” that would save the world from the horrors contained in the atomic bomb. It was indeed precisely on account of the idealistic urge to “make the world over” that this revived spirit of manifest destiny had such vitality. . . . This was not just a Big Business mentality. It was the mood of the Middle West and of the average American whom President Truman is the

120  /  James T. Sparrow embodiment. . . . [B]usiness spokesmen like the Saturday Evening Post had recovered their balance and were proclaiming that there was no reason for America to go left because Britain had already done so.61

The embassy staff detected an ominous undercurrent to the “exuberant, power-­conscious mood of the moment.” American business leaders, initially alarmed by the formation of Clement Attlee’s Labor government in Britain during the preceding months, had “recovered their balance” by September and no longer brooded that an American leftward turn would follow suit. Instead, these businessmen now argued that Britain had gone socialist “to secure for themselves some of the fruits which American capitalism” could bestow by way of American aid. Taft and Vandenberg complained, predictably, that President Harry Truman’s administration was giving away the farm. Less predictably, they indulged a tacit, if mainly rhetorical, nod toward internationalism. Rather than canceling the outstanding dollar balances of the recently terminated Lend-­Lease program, as Truman recently had recommended, they argued the United States should exact some compensation: postwar rights to the camps and bases the United States had constructed on the soil of British possessions during the war against the Axis powers; acceptance “without further delay” of the Bretton Woods agreements for an international monetary authority and world bank; and improved terms of access to the Imperial Preference trading system and the sterling bloc—­ which violated Article VII of the newly minted United Nations Charter, the conservatives complained. The conservatives’ invocation of the sacred obligations of world government in the service of unilateral score settling was revealing. The “fiery indignation” that still burned in the “isolationist” Midwest over “the idea that America is used as a Santa Claus by an ungrateful and largely undeserving world,” combined with the resurgence of antiadministration heavyweights in Congress willing to send “dead cats flying in all directions,” seemed to bode ill for what the report predicted might be “a grand debate on United States foreign policy.”62 But even though the conservatives clustered around the Taft wing of the Republican Party would retain their chary stance toward international commitments until Taft’s defeat by Eisenhower in the 1952 primary race, it was significant that even Taft and Vandenberg were now—­well before the scares of the Greek crisis in 1947 or the Berlin airlift in 1948—­willing to pursue their partisan maneuvers within a framework established by international institutions that grew out of intensive Anglo-­ American postwar planning conducted when the United Nations was still a military alliance, and not yet a collective security organization.

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It was significant that the loud critics of Britain could cast their acceptance, tacit or otherwise, of such commitments in the sensibilities of anti-­imperialism, for that only made their acquiescence stick. The United Nations would not become the greater Anglo-­American Commonwealth that Churchill and Jan Smuts dreamed it might, but it did provide a critical forum in which postwar international politics could germinate. The Bretton Woods institutions would not offer all the monetary or fiscal tools Keynes sought, but they did provide struts for a postwar international political economy in which American commercial interests became increasingly intertwined with those of trading partners like Britain. The economic aid extended through the Marshall Plan, and the permanent military alliance cemented with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), might not have sustained Britain’s wartime status as first among peers, but both kept the special relationship alive, even as they afforded conservatives the excuse that they provided necessary leverage to break the stranglehold on trade exerted by Britain’s sterling area. By couching their newly assumed global burdens in anti-­imperial language, Americans could convince themselves of their necessity, and of their nation’s exceptional—­even providential—­role in delivering the world from the sorrows of empire. In all registers and at all levels—­high and low, official and vernacular—­public debate about the Anglo-­American alliance had opened up ways to explain and justify the myriad devices by which the United States was supplanting Great Britain throughout the world. This multiyear conversation ultimately circumscribed the rhetorical and imaginative boundaries of what might be called an “anti-­imperial empire,” helping to orient Americans across the political spectrum toward the responsibilities of newly expanded extraterritorial sovereignty while indulging their widely divergent, often contradictory understandings of anti-­imperialism. The vast governmental apparatus devoted to surveilling, tracking, and analyzing public debate and opinion regarding foreign affairs was just as significant as the substance of the anti-­imperial imaginary coalescing around public debate over the alliance with Britain. The scale and scope of the effort devoted to monitoring public discourse and political attitudes betrays a recognition of the centrality of public opinion to the unprecedented state-­building enterprise on which the United States was embarked. British efforts to track and redirect the volatile currents of US politics may seem more understandable than American actions along the same lines, since the fate of England hung in the balance with every renewal of Lend-­Lease and congressional hearing into the conduct of the war effort. But the state department’s even larger apparatus suggested that the (mostly liberal)

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officialdom presiding over the radical extension of American sovereignty throughout the world recognized that their own political lives were also on the line. If the treacherous politics of neutrality in the 1930s hadn’t made this realization a basic part of their professional survival instincts, the mounting investigations of “internal subversives” that began during the war and exploded soon thereafter could only have amplified their recognition of the essential value of tracking public debate over foreign affairs, and wherever possible, making voters’ fluctuating foreign policy preferences legible.63 Public opinion and mass politics were messy—­never more so than during the partisan upheaval of the 1940s. They posed a problem whose solution required the most advanced tools of social science. Since the alliance was the central strut in the edifice of extraterritorial power the United States was building in those years, and since the British were by far the closest and most strategically relevant ally, it is unsurprising that the public image of the British Empire should have proven such a central concern for this apparatus. An American state capable of assuming global responsibilities—­and extracting the funds and conscript soldiers necessary to meet them—­had to make citizens’ subjectivities “legible” in order to gauge the legitimacy of the increased demands the government made on the populace. Americans had to sign off on their century in some fashion, or there would be consequences.

Notes 1.

The literature on the “special relationship” is by now massive. For helpful overviews, consult David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-­American Relations,” International Affairs 65, no. 1 (1988–­89): 89–­111; Geoffrey Warner, “The Anglo-­American Special Rela­ tionship,” Diplomatic History 13, no. 4 (1989): 479–­99; and C. J. Bartlett, “The Special Relationship”: A Political History of Anglo-­American Relations since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992). For one of the first historical interpretations of the origins of this relationship, see H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-­ American Relations (1783–­1952) (London: Oldhams, 1954). 2. The term “archipelago of empire” is from Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 388–­423. 3. Nicholas J. Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5–­13; Susan Brewer, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 11–­27. 4. Cull, Selling War, 72–­83, 109–­10. See also James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 1. 5. Brewer, To Win the Peace, passim; and Cull, Selling War, esp. 57–­68, 127–­35, 142–­45.

Rumors of Empire  /  123 6.

On Berlin’s procedure, see Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” in Washington Despatches, 1941–­1945: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy, ed. H. G. Nicholas (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vii–­xiv. On the place of the wartime assignment within Berlin’s larger trajectory, see Joshua L. Cherniss, A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Politics Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 2; and Arie Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), chap. 7. 7. On the high reputation of Berlin’s reports in Washington and London, and Churchill’s audience with Irving Berlin, see Marilyn Berger’s obituary of Berlin, “Isaiah Berlin, 88, Philosopher and Historian of Ideas,” New York Times, November 10, 1997; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger’s reminiscence, “A Great Man in a Grim Time,” Newsweek, November 16, 1997. On Berle, see Jordan Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York: Free Press, 1987), 180–­81; and Isaiah Berlin to Diana Cooper, November 15, 1946, in Supplementary Letters, 1946–­1960, Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/e/l2supp.pdf, 1–­2. 8. Bennett A. Cerf, ed., The Pocket Book of War Humor (New York: Pocket Books, 1943), 150. 9. On the arrangement as FDR’s “private” pollster, supported by the Listerine heir Gerald Lambert, see Hadley Cantril, The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Re­ search (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 35–­36; Jean Converse, Survey Research in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 153–­54, 165. 10. William O. Chittick, State Department, Press, and Pressure Groups: A Role Analysis (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970); Schuyler Foster, “American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy,” State Department Bulletin, November 30, 1959. One longtime State Department employee, Philip C. Jessup, claimed that “the Department in the 1940s was particularly anxious to ascertain public opinion”; interview cited in Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-­American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949–­50 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 297n28. 11. Converse, Survey Research in the United States, 186–­236. 12. Transcripts of over three thousand rumors stored at Local Rumor Control Project files, World War II Rumor Collection, AFC 1945/001, Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as “LC Rumor Control mss.”). On the US government’s rumor control in World War II more generally, see Sparrow, Warfare State, chap. 3. 13. Forrest Davis, “The British Get Out of the Doghouse,” Saturday Evening Post, Septem­ ber 18, 1943, 18. 14. “Hating the British Is a Costly Luxury,” Saturday Evening Post, November 20, 1943, 116. 15. J. Crawford Brooks, administrative assistant for OWI in SF, reporting contacts among unions to William H. Webber, October 13, 1942, in CA field reports, LC Rumor Control mss. 16. For more on MacLeish and his efforts to reinforce Anglo-­American ties, see Sparrow, Warfare State, chap. 1. 17. Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64–­141; Michael Leigh, Mobilizing Consent: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 1937–­1947 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 105.

124  /  James T. Sparrow 18. As quoted in Leigh, Mobilizing Consent, 106–­7. 19. Leigh, Mobilizing Consent, 107–­9. 20. Report for December 17, 1944, in Washington Despatches, 478. 21. The reliance of the United Nations on the Commonwealth tradition of international thought that had shaped the League is incontrovertibly traced out in Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); see also Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). 22. James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 285–­87. 23. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 61–­65. 24. Hadley Cantril, “America Faces the War: A Study in Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1940): 387–­407, poll on 390; isolationist pattern on 395, 400; jump in support for aid to allies spring–­summer 1940 on 397. On aid to England specifically, see Hadley Cantril, “Opinion Trends in World War II: Some Guides to Interpretation,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1948): 30–­44, chart 2 on 37. 25. Division of Public Studies, Office of Public Affairs, “Public Attitudes toward Great Britain (1940–­1947)” (June 1947), chart on 5. 26. “Public Attitudes toward Great Britain (1940–­1947),” 1. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. “Survey of Intelligence Materials” #17 (April 1, 1942), box 1805, Intelligence Surveys, Bureau of Intelligence, Office of War Information, stored in the records of the Office of Government Reports (RG 44), National Archives–­College Park (hereafter cited as “OWI-­BOI Survey Reports”). 29. Report #15a, “The Grievance Pattern: Elements of Disunity in America” (June 25, 1942), box 1784, OWI-­BOI Survey Reports. 30. Report #15a, “The Grievance Pattern,” 9–­13; “index of discontent” on 16 (0.52 over­ all skepticism of war aims, 0.49 anti-­Administration, 0.37 anti-­Britain, 0.36 fear allies will back out, 0.36 anti-­Semitism, 0.30 anti-­Russia, 0.19 anti-­Labor, 0.10 misgivings about expeditionary force); centrality of isolationism on 17. 31. CA field report, first half of August 1942, LC Rumor Control mss. 32. On the politics of “scapegoating the state,” see Sparrow, Warfare State, chap. 3. 33. Important similarities linked anti-­British to the anti-­Semitic rumors that scapegoated the state in the industrial north; see Sparrow, Warfare State, chap. 3. The irony of this parallelism would not have been lost on Isaiah Berlin, who was all too aware of the profound anti-­Semitism of the British establishment in those years. 34. Brooklyn rumors transcribed in NY field report, first half of August, 1942, LC Rumor Control mss.; Rumors to Boston Rumor Clinic reported in “Rumors in the Boston Region: March 20–­May 25, 1942,” 4–­2, and 4–­3, in folder 126, “Psychology of Rumor-­Misc. Material,” box 5, papers of Gordon W. Allport, HUG 4118.60, Harvard University Archive (hereafter cited as “Allport ms.”). 35. Report for June 3, 1942, in Washington Despatches, 44. 36. On the labor politics of this resentment, see Mark H. Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (1991): 1296–­318; and Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 37. Wyatt Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), chaps. 3–­4.

Rumors of Empire  /  125 38. Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World, 98–­105. 39. Reports for April 18, 1942; January 10 and September 19, 1944, in Washington Despatches, 33–­34, 303, 420–­21. 40. Transcripts of rumors transcribed in NY and IN field reports, LC Rumor Control mss. 41. For data on regional distribution of rumors, see Robert H. Knapp, “A Psychology of Rumor,” Public Opinion Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1944): 22–­37; table 1 on 25. 42. Related by OWI fieldworker in supplemental OH report filed by Cleveland rep. on August 17, 1942, in OH field report, LC Rumor Control mss. 43. Rumor about preparing to invade Northern Ireland reported by Victor E. Devereux (commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars), “Kill That Rumor: Ask the Rumor-­ Monger, Can You Provide It? Then Listen to Him Stutter and Stammer,” VFW Foreign Service, January 1943, 10–­11. The VFW and the American Legion participated actively in local rumor clinics and as deputy spy hunters and countersubversives in the FBI’s special wartime contact program; see Sparrow, Warfare State, chap. 3. 44. On the GI as a wartime culture hero, see Sparrow, Warfare State, esp. introduction, chap. 6, and conclusion. 45. Knapp, “A Psychology of Rumor,” 24. 46. UT field report, early August 1942, LC Rumor Control mss. 47. Brewer, To Win the Peace, 57. 48. Report for December 17, 1944, in Washington Despatches, 476–­77. 49. Ernst Kris to Leo Rosten, December 30, 1942, in “Rumors: Reactions to Releases,” box 1856, OWI-­BOI Survey Reports. 50. Rumor transcribed ca. late summer 1942, in “Miscellaneous” folder (#92), LC Rumor Control mss. 51. The literature on these mutual influences has grown large in the last two decades. Essential studies include Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–­1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–­1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–­1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 52. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 29. 53. As reported by rumor wardens in Stony Creek, Connecticut, and Boston, Massa­ chusetts, in field report from Connecticut and Massachusetts, August 1942, LC Rumor Control mss. 54. Hadley Cantril, ed., Public Opinion, 1935–­1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), item 1 on 274; items 2–­4, 6, 10 on 327. 55. Roland Young, Congressional Politics in the Second World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 150–­52. 56. Report for May 24, 1943, in Washington Despatches, 192–­93. 57. Young, Congressional Politics in the Second World War, 161–­62. 58. Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism, chap. 5. 59. Berlin’s report for December 8, 1942, in Washington Despatches, 122.

126  /  James T. Sparrow 60. Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt, 1947; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 207–­9. 61. Report for September 8, 1945, in Washington Despatches, 614–­15. 62. Ibid., 614–­17. 63. I refer here to the notion of “legibility” discussed in James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), introduction.

Five

The Great Transformation: The State and the Market in the Postwar World J ason S c ott S mit h

In his classic work of 1944, The Great Transformation: The Political and Eco­ nomic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi attempts to make sense of the political and economic upheaval that unfolded during the first half of the twentieth century. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II had, for Polanyi, exposed the destructive power of the market economy and the inability of nation-­states to cope with the social dislocation that accompanied the spread of capitalism across the world. While Polanyi returned to the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explain the origins of the political economy of the twentieth, his central claim—­that human society and the market existed historically in an intimate and interdependent relationship—­sheds considerable light on the interconnected roles the state and the market played in the post–­World War II world. This essay attends closely to the interactions of these categories, arguing that a field of vision that includes both the state and the market can serve to clarify the foundational assumptions that have driven recent scholarship on the history of capitalism and the history of the state.1 The state, many observers on both sides of the political spectrum have long agreed, has served to constrain and contain free-­market capitalism. On the right, economists who identify with the work of Milton Friedman have argued that the sole legitimate role for the state is to safeguard private property rights, asserting that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—­and American liberalism, generally—­served only to weaken the power of the free market to improve society. On the left, economists who identify with the work of John Kenneth Galbraith have argued the opposite, observing that increased government regulation is a necessary check on the excesses of free-­market capitalism and arguing that the core of twentieth-­century liberalism can be

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found in the ability of government to serve as a “countervailing power” in a society dominated by large corporations.2 The long-­held assumption that underpins each of these viewpoints, that free market capitalism and liberal reform have existed only in an oppositional relationship, misses a crucial dimension of this seemingly binary construction. Rather, the state and the market—­as Polanyi argued—­have each been essential to the other’s existence. For their part, students of the history of capitalism have long been aware of this intimate relationship between the market and the state. Sven Beckert recently noted that historians of capitalism “argue that states and markets, politics and business, cannot be understood separately from one another.” These historians thus “study the particular ways in which the market and the state interact, how this interaction is influenced by the shifting power relations of various social groups, and how the rules of exchange are set politically.”3 Some scholars who have championed the state as a useful category of analysis have not fully shared this awareness. As William Novak has observed, “The role of the American state in the very creation of the private sphere” of market relations “is less routinely acknowledged” by the sociologists, political scientists, and historians who study the state.4 Inspired by the work of Beckert, Novak, and Polanyi, this essay draws on postwar development and reconstruction plans proposed and carried out by the United States government and by private firms in order to underscore the range of institutional mechanisms that operated during the years after World War II; both public institutions and private firms could (and did) deploy their organizational capacities to shape and change foreign markets, driving the expansion of capitalism around the world. In a number of cases, these organizational capacities and institutional mechanisms were rooted in the liberalism and state structures constructed by the New Deal. Instead of fading away after the Great Depression, New Deal liberalism played a vital role in creating the ideas and institutions that allowed American capitalism and influence to expand after 1945. Despite what historian Alan Brinkley has termed the “end” of reform within the United States, many elements of the New Deal traveled overseas after World War II. These reform impulses were carried abroad by New Dealers such as Adolf Berle, who drew upon his knowledge of the dangers big business posed to the functioning of democracy when he served as ambassador to Brazil after the end of World War II. They were transmitted by multinational corporations, who took their experience working for the federal government during the Great Depression and applied it in foreign markets. They were also present at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, as New Dealers, scarred by the economic collapse of the

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1930s and the devastation of World War II, worked with colleagues from other nations to create postwar institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), injecting stability into the global economy. As these ideas and institutions shaped the economies and societies of other nations, their policies (and the expertise that had generated them) were often subsequently imported back into the United States, usually with little knowledge of their real origins.5 In short, domestic efforts the federal government undertook to support economic development during the 1930s and 1940s, which witnessed the southern and western regions of the United States becoming home to military bases, an expanded highway network, and new and improved airports, did not stop at the nation’s borders after World War II. Abroad, postwar efforts such as the Marshall Plan, the reconstruction of Japan, and projects such as the Pan-­American Highway in Latin America began to carry the New Dealers’ vision of economic development overseas, fostering the idea that economic growth could follow from improvements in infrastructure and government regulation of markets. Politicians, policy makers, and multinational corporations drew upon this intellectual tradition of planning. For example, Lyndon Johnson’s vision of exporting Keynesian-­style economic development to Southeast Asia (by replicating the Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong Delta) reflected the powerful legacy of the New Deal for postwar liberals who were struggling to reconcile foreign and domestic policy goals. This struggle helped to transform New Deal liberalism, as the imperatives of Cold War anticommunism increasingly shaped the ideas and objectives of American politicians, business people, and labor leaders. The project of postwar capitalist development these actors advanced represents kinds of “infrastructural power,” to use the term coined by sociologist Michael Mann, illustrating how states could deploy their authority in civil society through private organizations. This essay aims to capture the often-­overlooked international dynamics of how this kind of state power was deployed historically.6 Overseas, New Deal–­style regulations and institutions often found a mixed reception, as local elites, business, and labor organizations modified (or rejected outright) various elements of American capitalism. These dif­ fer­ing power relationships shaped the range of possible actions for Ameri­ can politicians, as well as for multinational construction firms such as Bechtel, Morrison-­Knudsen, and Brown & Root (a longtime subsidiary of Halliburton). During the postwar years American corporations regularly took capabilities and ideas originally developed within the United States

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during the Great Depression, when they built projects for the federal government (particularly in the American West), and exported them abroad.7 American politicians and corporations, however, did not work diligently to spread American ideas about human rights around the globe. Rather, they were at times selective with respect to the nations they chose as multilateral partners, often working with dictatorial and repressive regimes in embarking upon a fierce Cold War with the Soviet Union for the ideological affections of the rest of the planet. Marshall Plan aid, for example, functioned at times as a kind of subsidy that allowed Western European nations to fund wars and conflicts with their colonial possessions, thwarting their desires for independence and self-­determination.8 In other words, after 1945 American government and business aimed to enact portions of the New Deal for only part of the world, an arrangement that at times boiled down to increasing access to foreign markets for American firms and supporting political and economic stability in strategically important nations. Following World War II, New Deal liberalism built a postwar global economy that was decidedly friendly to multinational corporations in order to halt the spread of communism. To be sure, postwar liberalism, in focusing on using public resources and regulating the activities of private capitalism, managed to foster impressive rates of economic growth (particularly in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan) and to intervene powerfully in the economies and societies of other nations. However, these achievements were often accomplished at the expense of more progressive ideas about deploying public authority to address concerns about social justice, human rights, and the distribution of wealth.9

Reconstruction: Japan and Western Europe The most important task facing much of the world immediately following World War II was reconstruction. Much of the thinking behind reconstruction and economic recovery schemes for Japan and Western Europe drew upon the experience of the New Deal. In Japan, New Deal liberals like Theodore Cohen and Charles Kades supervised the writing of a new constitution, labor laws, and legal framework for business on behalf of Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). As historian John Dower has noted, Cohen, Kades, and other New Dealers emphasized in their work “a strong component of economic democracy, which in practical terms meant the active encouragement of organized labor, opposition to excessive concentrations of economic power, and policies aimed at ensuring a more equitable distribution of wealth.” These New Deal liberals

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also included guarantees of new rights in the Japanese constitution, most notably, a full-­throated commitment to freedom of expression, rights for working people, and equal rights for women, among others.10 Focused on the goals of defeudalizing, demilitarizing, and democratizing Japan, the officials of the SCAP tried to balance these objectives, over time, with the task of rebuilding Japan’s economy and integrating the nation into an international framework increasingly shaped by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and United States. This “reverse course,” as some in the Japanese media called it, witnessed a partial reversal of earlier attempts to reform Japanese zaibatsu (a diversified group of businesses owned by a family, literally translated as “financial clique”) and purge the upper management in the biggest Japanese firms. Leading this effort on the American side was Wall Street investment-­banker-­turned-­economic adviser, William H. Draper Jr. Appointed by President Truman as an undersecretary of the army, Draper first served in Germany as chief economic advisor to General Lucius Clay. Subsequently, between May 1947 and March 1949, Draper led a reorientation in Japanese economic policies for the SCAP, with the goal of improving Japan’s economy in order to contain Soviet influence in East Asia. Joining Draper in this undertaking were such businessmen as Percy Johnston, chairman of the Chemical Bank and Trust Company of New York, and Paul G. Hoffman, who would be nominated to run the Marshall Plan in Europe upon his return from Japan. Hoffman termed the goal of Draper’s economic mission succinctly, stating, “Our greatest responsibility today is to fortify capitalism against all attacks.” While this reorientation in policy restored some of the power of Japanese businesses, many of SCAP’s New Deal–­inspired reforms persisted, providing (over the long run) an effective legal and institutional framework for the Japanese economy. In the short run, however, it would take the anti-­inflation program created by a Detroit banker, Joseph Dodge, combined with a surge in economic activity and growth the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 stimulated, to put the Japanese economy on the road to recovery.11 In Western Europe, American policy makers and businessmen worked together with their European counterparts to spur economic recovery and contain the spread of communism. In June 1947, when he announced the Truman administration’s plan to aid reconstruction in Europe, Secretary of State George Marshall identified the harm that war had done to the market economy throughout the continent. “Long-­standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization or by simple destruction,” Marshall declared. “In many countries, confidence in

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the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete.”12 Marshall pledged that the US government would provide necessary aid and assistance so long as European nations agreed to work together in drawing up their own plan for recovery. Marshall’s diagnosis of the European economy—­with its emphasis on restoring confidence and facilitating capitalism—­echoed earlier New Deal analyses of the US economy’s failure during the Great Depression: The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. . . . The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies the continuing value of which is not open to question. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.13

Marshall’s remarks, with their emphasis on the multiple sources of economic prosperity and the importance of government action, resonated with the sentiments that FDR had voiced in some of his earliest fireside chats. In 1933, for example, Roosevelt declared that the United States could not return to “a more lasting prosperity . . . in a nation half boom and half broke.” Rather, FDR argued, “If all our people have work and fair wages and fair profits, they can buy the products of their neighbors, and business is good. But if you take away the wages and the profits of half of them, business is only half as good. It does not help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous; the best way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.” The Marshall Plan carried forward this strand of New Deal thinking, but it also drew on other American traditions of thinking about the relationship between the market and the state.14 Indeed, the relationship between the market and the state in United States history has long been a close-­knit one. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the growth of a “developmental state” served to underscore the often-­intimate relationship between public and private interests, as public policies explicitly underwrote the growth of the American

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econ­omy. While sometimes the developmental state was present more in theory than in practice—­witness Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manu­ factures—­conceptions such as Hamilton’s underwrote subsequent generations of political thinking, from the Whigs’ American System to the Republican Party’s ideas about using government to foster economic activity. From early Supreme Court decisions, such as Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), that secured the legal status of the corporation, to the use of public funds to build internal improvements like canals, to the use of federal lands to encourage the spread of private railroad companies across the North American continent, public authorities created a set of incentives to encourage private economic development.15 During the twentieth century, visions of an “associational state” served as a distinctive mode for channeling the market and other forms of social power toward nominally public purposes. Articulated most fully by Herbert Hoover when he served as secretary of commerce in the 1920s, the associational state and its advocates encouraged governmental bodies to collaborate with private organizations, sharing information and expertise in order to smooth the oscillations of the business cycle, avoid periods of prolonged unemployment, and, in short, bring stability to the economy. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that first implemented and deployed this concept on a wide scale, particularly in developing codes of competition for business and labor under the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933). This strain of American liberal reform, in the words of Ellis Hawley, “viewed the business sector not as an entity to be mastered and constrained but as one to be equipped with a higher rationality, assisted in developing responsible self-­government, and then brought into a social concert or partnership with new capabilities for solving national or societal problems.” The economic crisis of the Great Depression, followed by the global turmoil, military mobilization, and destruction wrought by World War II, created political and economic openings for newly empowered professionals, politicians, and public administrators to bring about a great transformation of much of the postwar world.16 As historian Michael Hogan has argued, the Marshall Plan was about more than simply providing grants of monetary aid to Europe as it rebuilt from the destruction of World War II. In full, the effort’s aim “was to refashion Western Europe in the image of the United States” via a combination of technocratic and associational impulses that dated back to the “New Era” of the 1920s with an appreciation for state-­led economic development and Keynesian economic policy that was undertaken during the New Deal of the 1930s.17 The policy goals of the Marshall Plan—­restoring European

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industrial capacity, increasing productivity and economic output, the liberalization of trade across national borders, ensuring financial stability, and containing communism—­used public authority to reconstruct the capitalist framework of the private market, drawing on the developmental and associational state traditions. Within the United States, these goals were supported by a range of organizations, from the National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce to the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Prominent businessmen like Philip Reed (chairman of the General Electric board) and Paul Hoffman (the head of Studebaker) took leadership roles in the European Cooperation Administration (ECA), with Hoffman serving as the ECA’s director and supervising the recovery program. While Henry Wallace and other progressives charged that the Marshall Plan signaled the takeover of government by “Wall Street wolves,” opponents on the right worried that the reconstruction plan would be a kind of global New Deal, as if the Works Progress Administration were set loose upon the planet, with the American taxpayer funding “every crackpot theory of the New Deal from leaf raking to pump priming.” Bipartisan supporters of the Marshall Plan, ranging from Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-­Michigan) to Senator Millard Tydings (D-­Maryland), backed by strong support from many prominent investment banks, trade unions, farm lobbies, and multinational corporations, thwarted these opponents, successfully rallying domestic support for the plan. While providing economic assistance to Western European nations, the Marshall Plan also brought thousands of European managers (as well as union leaders) to the United States to study and learn how American-­style capitalism worked in action. As historian Tony Judt has observed, although the rebuilding of the European economy was “not altogether un-­self-­interested” from the perspective of the United States, “this self-­interest was distinctly enlightened.” CIA director Allen Dulles put it this way: “The Plan presupposes that we desire to help restore a Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets and for that very reason will be able to buy substantial amounts of our products.” For Paul Hoffman, the activities of both SCAP in Japan and the Marshall Plan in Europe served as evidence that US bureaucrats and businessmen had figured out how capitalism functioned. As Hoffman wrote in 1951, “We have learned in Europe what to do in Asia, for under the Marshall Plan we have developed the essential instruments of a successful policy in the arena of world politics.”18 In addition to transferring funds to European nations and bringing European businesspeople and union leaders to America for training, the United States also provided extensive technical advice, engineering

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knowledge, technology, and organizational training to European businesses under the Marshall Plan’s “Technical Assistance Plan.” While this public assistance drew heavily on the expertise and involvement of private business executives, during the late 1940s and early 1950s most American firms chose to focus the bulk of their investment decisions within the borders of the United States. The postwar economic boom at home, coupled with fears of European regulations and socialist governments (or political parties) abroad, provided incentives for many American investors and businesses to keep their capital within the United States.19 Just as public spending attempted to fill this gap left by the private sector, drawing on the earlier precedent set by the New Deal, so too did government-­sponsored experts take the place of advisors who had been employed by private financial and commercial interests in the interwar period. In Truman’s 1949 inaugural address the president announced four major foreign policy points for his administration: the first three were continued support of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and plans for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As his fourth proposal, Truman announced a “bold new program” that would draw on American science and resources to aid underdeveloped nations. The Washington Post termed Point Four a “ ‘Fair Deal’ Plan for the World.”20 As the Truman administration tried to flesh out the substance behind Truman’s address, his advisor Thomas Corcoran turned to the man who had led the New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA) during the Great Depression, Harold Ickes. Corcoran wrote to Ickes that he had been “working like hell on the Point IV business.” Although Ickes had fallen out with Truman and had resigned his post as interior secretary in 1946, Corcoran wondered if Ickes was interested in returning to public service. Point Four, Corcoran declared, had the potential to use public works and economic development as the carrot to containment’s stick. “The usefulness for you” was what “intrigues me most,” Corcoran wrote. “Point IV has to be the affirmative hope-­side of our foreign policy to balance the negative military policy of keeping strong and being tough.” If Ickes was interested, and if Truman could be persuaded to appoint him, Corcoran proposed, “your appointment will mean that the program takes on the character of an international P  WA as distinguished from a boondoggling W  PA,” contrasting Ickes’s former agency with his longtime rival Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration.21 Ickes was interested but skeptical. “Your suggestion, as to how the money appropriated in support of Point Four should be used, is another of your inspirations,” he replied to Corcoran. “By all means, an international PWA

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should be set up.” Ickes, however, did not think that Corcoran would be able to persuade Secretary of State Dean Acheson or President Truman to consider him for any role in Point Four. “I suspect that you had better give up trying to do anything with this particular lame duck,” Ickes concluded.22 Despite meager funding, during the 1950s the Point Four Program made important strides, building much-­needed highways and airports in Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Vietnam, among other places.23 Taken together, the reconstruction of  Japan, the Marshall Plan for Western Europe, and President Harry Truman’s Point Four Program reflected the different ways that the New Deal gave public policy makers and businessmen a language and set of tools for using government to stimulate economic activity. But if the tools were familiar, the results they brought were not, particularly in areas outside the core geostrategic zones centered on Germany and Japan. Reconstruction in Western Europe and Japan seemed to confirm to American policy makers that their ideas worked in practice as they did in theory. These same policy makers, however, often overlooked the potential for overseas development programs to go awry. They were so impressed by the undeniable success of programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (T  VA) at home—­for example, the cost of electricity produced by the TVA declined, uninterrupted, for over three decades—­that they failed to take account of different circumstances abroad. Drawing on the social scientific framework of modernization theory, many policy makers (and their intellectual advisers) simply assumed, as Nils Gilman has observed, that the United States demonstrated “an apparently universalizable American model of development.” Economists, in particular, fresh from their success in guiding the nation’s mobilization during World War II, reinforced this assumption. This intellectual scaffolding, when combined with the impressive track record of the New Deal’s public works programs in developing the United States, presented a potent and heady combination for liberals during the postwar years. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, “Our engineers can transform arid plains or poverty-­stricken river valleys into wonderlands of vegetation and power. . . . The Tennessee Valley Authority is a weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for support of the people of Asia.” While the New Deal failed to remake the world’s political economy in the ways that it so emphatically did for the domestic United States, its achievements profoundly shaped how the nation interacted with the rest of the globe.24

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The Enterprise of Development The story of development in the Third World departs from the relatively successful narrative crafted by postwar reconstruction as it unfolded in Western Europe and Japan. In the Third World, public institutions such as the Inter­ national Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) worked together with multinational corporations and foreign governments to “develop” the natural resources of nations that had long been on the periphery of the Western economy, with the explicit aim of spreading eco­nomic prosperity while promoting American capitalism and anticommunism abroad. While development practices varied from region to region, private multinational firms took a more prominent role than they had in postwar Europe or Japan. Many of these firms and their leaders drew on methods, structures, and organizations built by the New Deal as they expanded their enterprises overseas. In Brazil, to take one example, both Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kaiser reflected “the collaborative, corporatist style and structure of the New Deal” in the development work they undertook there.25 In many respects, the enterprise of development underscores the importance of Polanyi’s insight into the interconnected roles the state and the market played in shaping the nature of capitalism. In its construction of large-­scale infrastructure projects for a range of nation-­states, the Bechtel Corporation was at the forefront of crossing national borders after World War II. In its work, Bechtel built directly on its previous experiences in working for the federal government of the United States. During the Great Depression, the company was frequently employed by the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, primarily in the building of public works projects such as dams in the underdeveloped American West. After World War II, the strand of New Deal liberalism this activity represented—­public investment via private firms to build public works projects that would underwrite economic development—­was exported abroad.26 Indeed, Bechtel was a key player in the formation of this kind of twentieth-­century capitalist partnership, as the state and the corporation joined together to focus on addressing problems of “underdevelopment, minimizing the political objective of reducing unemployment while emphasizing instead more capital-­ friendly priorities.” The large multinational construction firm was one of the key beneficiaries of the New Deal state’s focus on public works construction, but as a subject of historical study it has remained, to invert FDR’s famous phrase, the “forgotten firm at the top of the economic pyramid.” These firms were

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important players in the political economy the New Deal created. The New Deal’s public works programs, such as Harold Ickes’s Public Works Administration (PWA) and Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), were central to the New Deal state—­approximately two-­thirds of New Deal spending went to these two programs; their payrolls dwarfed those of any private firm in the nation. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure laid crucial foundations for postwar economic growth and enhanced the ability of the United States to project its power abroad.27 After the end of World War II Bechtel set its sights abroad, focusing on a range of locations. In July 1945 the firm’s president, Stephen Bechtel, proclaimed on a radio program recorded for broadcast by the Office of War Information that the vast Pacific basin would be “the setting for civilization’s next era,” recounting for his listeners in New Zealand, Australia, and other parts of Asia, “the story of construction in the American West” and the potential for Bechtel to repeat this story abroad.28 In addition to looking for opportunities in Asia, Bechtel became active in other regions as well. After the war’s close, Bechtel expanded into the Middle East, beginning the task of constructing much of Saudi Arabia’s petrol infrastructure. To accomplish this daunting undertaking, the firm regularly advertised within the United States in order to recruit the specialized labor it required. “Bechtel Needs Construction and Refinery Men,” read one ad that ran in the Chicago Tribune. “Save Big Money Where you can’t spend” in the “Persian Gulf Area,” Bechtel’s pitch continued, offering guaranteed salaries, paid vacations, and generous bonuses upon completion of its contract, to ironworkers, riggers, pipefitters, welders, and operators of heavy cranes with expertise in refinery construction.29 In the late 1940s and early 1950s Bechtel regularly sought skilled construction labor in this fashion, advertising in cities like Chicago in order to recruit workers for projects underway in the Middle East, as well as in Venezuela and other parts of South America. While many scholars have traced the importance of such actors as social scientists in shaping modernization theory, equally if not more important were the roles American companies and their executives played abroad in enacting this theory on the ground.30 One person who did notice Bechtel’s activities was New York Times reporter C. L. Sulzberger. In 1946, Sulzberger noted in the Times that “American oil towns are now materializing along the baking east coast of medieval Saudi Arabia and inland amid the shifting sand dunes as possibly the greatest petroleum boom in history takes shape along hitherto little-­explored regions on the Persian Gulf.” There, American firms like the Standard Oil Company of California created subsidiary firms

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like the Bahrain Petroleum Company, Ltd., to exploit such lucrative opportunities, replacing the previously influential British petroleum companies and dealing directly with Saudi Arabia’s ruler, King Abdul Aziz Bin Saud. Sulzberger noted the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth to the American military, observing that 70 percent of the output of a new refinery at Ras Tanurah (it produced 90,000 barrels of oil per day) was being delivered directly to the American navy in the Philippines, at Pearl Harbor, and in Japan. The US Army, for its part, had quickly erected an airbase at Dhahran. “Gradually,” Sulzberger concluded, “Saudi Arabia is being hoisted a millennium from its medieval past.”31 While many elements of the New Deal’s approach to development traveled abroad, one aspect of the New Deal’s political economy was not so likely to gain even a small foothold in the Middle East, Sulzberger reported. “No labor unions exist among ‘Aramco’ workers,” he explained to Times readers, “there being no such institution in the country and strikes being unpopular with King Ibn [Bin] Saud.” Despite Saudi concerns about Zionism and possible Soviet expansion in the Middle East, Sulzberger continued, the United States “retains great influence through the tremendous local reputation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the oil development, and the presence of many Arab graduates of American universities at Istanbul, Beirut, and Cairo.”32 In 1947 Bechtel’s role in Saudi Arabia continued to grow, with the company playing a key role in completing a survey on behalf of King Bin Saud, who was eager to secure $15 million in loans from the United States in order to embark on a vast program of public works construction. Or, as one New York Times correspondent put it, rather less elegantly, “the King is seeking an additional loan from the United States to start the modernization of his retarded country while waiting for his oil royalties to pour in,” obtaining a $10 million loan from the recently created Export-­Import Bank for various material purchases.33 The Saudi ruler was particularly interested in Bechtel’s help in constructing a 330-­mile railroad from the capital (Riyadh) to the Persian Gulf, terminating near Dhahran, where a coalition of contractors was to build a deepwater freight port. Bechtel’s expertise was particularly useful in its work in building the 1,068-­mile Trans-­Arabian pipeline, which carried oil across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to tankers in the Mediterranean. These projects, and Bechtel’s role in executing them, would, King Bin Saud thought, strengthen his nation’s connection to world markets while simultaneously strengthening his control over domestic structures of governance.34 Stephen Bechtel, for his part, declared that Saudi Arabia held “tremendous possibilities” for his company, noting that Arab-­American

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operations and their associated public works projects were “potentially the biggest development of natural resources ever undertaken by American interests.”35 These forms of engineering expertise—­first honed by Bechtel in the United States, on such projects as Boulder Dam, and then refined overseas in nations like Saudi Arabia—­would in subsequent years be reimported back to the United States, as Bechtel built nuclear power plants in Illinois; the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) in the San Francisco Bay Area; and, most recently, the “Big Dig” that for so many years tested the patience of Boston drivers.36 More broadly, the story of Bechtel in the postwar world serves to confirm the findings of historians of technology, such as Thomas Hughes. What Hughes terms the “second discovery” of America by the rest of the world, which recognized the United States as a “building site” par excellence—­witness the Saud family’s enthusiasm for American construction and engineering expertise—­was paralleled by America’s “discovery” of the rest of the world as a building site for advancing a formula originally perfected in the United States by the New Deal: public investment via private firms to build public works projects that would underwrite economic development.37 While intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others presented state-­sponsored economic development to the American public as a way to preserve a “vital center,” thwart communism, and increase American prosperity, firms like Bechtel enacted and articulated this combination of ideas across national borders, profoundly altering the landscapes and political economies of such nations as Saudi Arabia. Despite the unintended outcomes associated with the exporting of New Deal–­style state-­led development, many American liberals and businessmen remained convinced of their abilities to use public funds and private firms to stimulate economic growth. Perhaps no one better expressed this confidence and optimism than did TVA director David Lilienthal. In his classic work, TVA: Democracy on the March, Lilienthal crafted a manifesto that expressed the scale and scope of New Deal liberalism. “Dreamers with shovels,” as Lilienthal described his fellow New Dealers, could use the power of the federal government to spread economic development and democracy across the United States and around the globe. Lilienthal urged his readers to “cut through the fog of uncertainty” and grasp the reality in front of them—­namely, that institutions the New Deal created could use the power of government to build “real things” and help “real people.”38 During the 1930s and 1940s, Lilienthal helped run the Tennessee Valley Authority, serving as the TVA’s chairman between 1941 and 1946. Appointed by FDR, Lilienthal was on the front lines of the New Deal’s

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battles with big business, leading the TVA in its fight against private power companies to provide low-­cost electricity to the people of the Tennessee Valley. In so doing, Lilienthal amassed a great deal of political and administrative experience while defending the TVA as a worthwhile public investment from attacks made by conservative politicians and corporate leaders.39 Lilienthal found himself on the other side in 1955, however, when he started his own company. Lilienthal’s Development and Resources Corporation, or D&R, as it was commonly called, provided a wide range of services around the world for nations interested in developing their natural resources, working in such countries as Iran, Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, and Vietnam. While helping to create the field of international development, Lilienthal was also forced to invent a new terminology in order to accurately describe all of D&R’s cross-­border activities, ultimately coining the phrase “the multinational corporation” in 1960.40 With the founding of D&R in 1955, Lilienthal conceived of his firm as a private enterprise that would provide the necessary expertise and organizational capacities to governments around the world in order to foster economic development. In so doing, Lilienthal intended to build directly on the work he had done with the TVA during the 1930s and World War II. He argued that the TVA captivated people not with the specifics of its “physical accomplishments,” but rather with “the principles underlying the development, and the methods by which the work has been carried on.” This made the TVA strikingly different, in Lilienthal’s mind, from other large-­scale development projects. “TVA is conservation of a new kind: not conservation by clinging to what we have, but by expanding the opportunity for the people,” an idea, Lilienthal argued, that “can be applied to any region anywhere.” Lilienthal’s claims for the transferability of the TVA abroad contained good news for American business and paralleled subsequent arguments others deployed in support of the Marshall Plan and reconstruction of Japan: After the war, we will again be interested in getting good customers in other countries. That’s why Americans are interested to learn that comparable river-­ valley projects are being mapped all over the world—­in India, China, Africa, Russia, Palestine, Brazil and other parts of Latin America, and in the Balkans. Every such project involves vast engineering works, requiring machinery and technical skills which the United States may be asked to provide. Also, these countries will become good customers through demand for agricultural machinery as a result of irrigation and better farming. And with more money in their pockets, people of these other lands will become important buyers of consumer goods.41

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While Lilienthal and his colleagues believed deeply in the transferability of  TVA-­style development to other nations and regions they were also aware that local and national differences mattered a great deal. Taking stock of the first four months of D&R’s existence, Lilienthal frankly described the challenges facing his company to his main financial backer, André Meyer of the Lazard, Frères investment bank. “Our problems,” Lilienthal wrote, “are easily identified: (1) to get contracts; and (2) to develop a technique of operation that enables us to be ready, as we do get the business, to do well what we have agreed to do, and do this with the smallest possible staff and overhead.” D&R’s attentions focused on two major projects, the first with the Cauca Valley Corporation of Colombia, and the second with Puerto Rico’s Water Resources Authority. To drum up more business overseas, Lilienthal and his colleague Gordon Clapp were planning trips to Turkey, Italy, Iran, Egypt, and Venezuela. The main difficulty, Lilienthal thought, would be “the distances involved, the utter dissimilarity of the situations in Italy, say, and Colombia or Iran,” and “the complex and sensitive political situations in all countries. Factors like these don’t make the problem [of managing a multinational corporation] any easier.”42 Lilienthal and his colleagues made explicit attempts to reconcile D&R’s roots in the TVA’s successful undertakings in the United States with their desire to transfer this approach overseas. Writing to Lucas Lopes, the president of Brazil, D&R’s president, Gordon Clapp, pointed to what the firm’s officers and staff had learned from the TVA. “Analysis to define these key obstacles to development, exploration of ways and means to remove them and consultation with the agencies or groups which have plans or ideas about special development of single resources to encourage a common perspective and a unified effort in the region,” Clapp wrote to Lopes, “is the fundamental story of TVA’s function in the Southeastern United States.” It was this approach, he continued, that “our company is working on in other countries with governments and their agencies and with private groups.”43 As a firm active throughout the world, D&R relied on a highly trained staff of engineers, economists, and administrators. By 1968, D&R employed 138 total staff members. In addition to executive administrators (ten within the United States and ten abroad), the company employed seventy people in their engineering division, twenty-­five with expertise in agricultural development, seventeen experts in industrial development and economics, and six people who focused on water resource issues. Many of these staffers had careers that reflected their movement across the public-­private divide. A number previously worked for organizations such as the TVA, the Interior Department, the Agriculture Department, the US Army Corps of Engineers,

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the Bureau of Reclamation, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the National Science Foundation, before seeking private employment. After leaving these government or NGO jobs and before joining D&R, many staffers then worked for a diverse set of pri­ vate companies and foreign governments, including the RAND Corporation, the National Economic Development Bank of Brazil, Dole Pineapple Company, Firestone Tires, and such contractors as Morrison-­Knudsen, the Ralph M. Parsons Company, and Ebasco (the Electric Bond and Share Company, a former division of General Electric). Many worked overseas, in locations such as Brazil, Rome, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hawaii, Liberia, Colombia, Pakistan, Iraq, Panama, and Peru. Development, in short, was a worldwide business, and for many years a successful one for D&R.44 With all of the expertise that they had marshaled inside the firm, D&R (like many businesses) focused on maximizing their comparative advantage in international development, providing assistance in planning large-­scale projects dealing with land and water resource issues. By 1960 D&R had established a wide-­ranging portfolio of projects, but they regularly contracted with other firms in order to execute their plans. Lilienthal’s company regularly worked and corresponded with a number of international construction firms (many of them former employers of D&R staff ), including Morrison-­ Knudson; the Italian companies Impresit, Societa Anonima Elettrificazione, and GEIET (Construzione Esercizie Impianti Elettrici e Telefonici); the Dutch International Contracting Company, Stork-­Werkspoor (Netherlands); the Ralph M. Parsons company (Los Angeles); the Brown Boveri Corporation (New York); and British Insulated Callender’s Cables (London), to name but several.45 The approach of Lilienthal’s firm—­concentrating on where it could add the greatest value in the development process and supervising the work of other firms with respect to implementation—­was formalized as the “value chain” by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter in 1985. Under this concept, firms concentrate on their core competencies and outsource other activities to subcontractors outside of the formal bound­ aries of the firm.46 By the late 1960s, D&R began to seek work inside the United States in order to further diversify its business activities. These new contacts led to Lilienthal’s firm reimporting its expertise and planning processes back from overseas, as it took on a range of consulting and planning activities. In 1969, D&R built on its work for the Peace Corps in order to work with the War on Poverty’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), providing “specialist services, technical assistance and support” to the OEO’s Community Action Program, designed to stimulate the work of local private and nonprofit

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organizations to address inequality. D&R provided or proposed similar consulting services for other War on Poverty organizations, including VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and the youth programs run by the federal government’s Community Action Agencies. In addition to providing technical assistance and support to program staff, D&R also worked on water and land development issues for the states of California, Alaska, and Washington. In 1971, D&R was commissioned by the newly created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prepare a manual for the EPA’s manpower planning activities. D&R also studied the costs associated with preventing and controlling water pollution for the EPA.47 These domestic efforts at diversification, however, were not enough to stabilize Lilienthal’s company. By the 1970s, D&R was in serious financial difficulty. The company’s revenues depended mainly on its work on hydroelectric development in the Khuzestan region of Iran. Lazard severed its relationship with D&R in 1970, forcing Lilienthal, who at points had to rely on his personal funds to make D&R’s payroll, to enter into a partnership with the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), run by Nelson Rockefeller’s son, Rodman. Lilienthal had long been proud of D&R’s work for the shah of Iran, dating back to the 1950s, but his friendship with the monarch prevented him from recognizing the rise of militant Islam in Iranian society and the growing unpopularity of the shah’s rule, which was increasingly dependent on the ability of the shah’s secret police to crush dissent. After the revolutionary forces of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over and forced the shah into exile, the new regime voided Iranian contracts with D&R, leaving the company with nearly $2 million in unrecoverable assets within its borders. IBEC liquidated the remaining holdings of D&R, ending Lilienthal’s company. Lilienthal refused to acknowledge the true nature of the shah’s regime, blaming his fall instead on radical Islam and the convoluted Iranian bureaucracy. In his final months of life, Lilienthal served as a trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary’s Center for Theological Inquiry and pushed the center to “throw some light on the practical problem facing the world, how to understand Islam and the misuse—­as I saw it—­of the political and military power of the Islamic religious leaders.”48

This essay’s survey of postwar development and reconstruction practices sheds light on two areas of interest to scholars of the history of the state and capitalism. First, it serves to remind both groups of scholars that Polanyi’s insights regarding the interconnected nature of the state and the market provide an exceedingly useful theoretical lens for viewing

The Great Transformation  /  145

capitalism and government in their proper historical context, namely, together. Governments and private firms worked successfully to generate economic growth following World War II; descriptions of these developments as a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” keep us from recognizing the very visible hands of politicians, businesspeople, labor unions, institutions, and public policy makers in creating the postwar global economy. The state and the market are not miracles; believing that they were so only keeps us from understanding how these two institutions functioned historically. As Polanyi put it, “A belief in spontaneous progress must make us blind to the role of government in economic life.”49 To avoid becoming blind, we must expand our field of vision and recognize the historically constructed and contingent character of both the state and the market in order to make productive claims about their intersection. Second, the abbreviated history of postwar development and reconstruction programs presented here underscores the multiple vehicles that have worked to project New Deal–­style capitalism overseas. In the case of  Western Europe and Japan the federal government of the United States took the lead in delivering technical assistance, institutional knowledge, and public funds. In other cases, primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, multi­ national firms such as Bechtel and D&R were employed by foreign governments to build infrastructure and make and implement development plans, drawing on their previous experience working for the New Deal within the United States during the Great Depression. Taken as a whole, the actions of governments and private firms spread a vision of capitalist development overseas, one that had strong roots in the New Deal. These concrete activities reshaped the global economy while serving to provide “evidence” that stimulated a range of contemporary midcentury social theorists who were occupied with formulating deeper understandings of capitalism. Polanyi was of course a key player in this intellectual project; others who provided their own critique of capitalism during this period included Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, radical-­turned-­conservative James Burnham (author of The Managerial Revolution), New Dealers such as Adolf Berle, and management theorist Peter Drucker, among others.50 Central to Berle’s interpretation of capitalism was recognition of the essential part corporations played in what he called “the twentieth century capitalist revolution.” The coauthor, with Gardiner Means, of the classic Depression-­era account of corporate power in the domestic economy, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Berle was quick to recognize the international significance of multinational firms after World War II. While governments “struggle . . . to bring international relations into line with

146  /  Jason Scott Smith

the stark necessities imposed by economics and by defense,” Berle argued that corporations could act with remarkable autonomy in generating activities underpinning economic growth and development.51 Nation-­states could form various institutions, such as the Organization of American States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the South East Asian Treaty Organization, to manage international relations, but these groups, he observed, lacked the robust capacities and abilities of private firms in the economic arena. Indeed, as Berle put it, intergovernmental efforts at organizing political and economic relations “would be shadow pictures or worse if there were not, beneath them, the commercial organizations which produce, transport, and distribute in adequate quantities oil, iron, copper, bauxite, fibers, food, rare metals of all kinds, commercial diamonds, rubber, chemicals, and so forth.”52 The ability of multinational corporations to undertake these and other economic activities at scale, their capacity to marshal and apply technical expertise, and their power to mobilize capital across borders all served to underscore that the corporation, as Berle concluded, “has become an international as well as a national instrument.” Berle’s investigation of midcentury capitalism makes the case for recognizing the corporation as a key agent of change in the great transformation of the global political economy following World War II.53 Today, the multinational corporation dominates the world, with analysts of all political stripes, from David Harvey to Thomas Friedman to Moisés Naím, acknowledging its significance and power.54 The historical role the ideas, methods, and structures of the New Deal played in shaping the postwar global economy, however, has been relatively neglected. When viewed together in their historical context, though, the multinational corporation and the legacies of the New Deal merit recognition for their interdependent contributions to creating the postwar landscape.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). For a recent overview of the “rediscovery” of the market, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 41–­76. Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 319. For further examples, see the works cited in Beckert’s essay as well as the essays in Kim Phillips-­ Fein and Julian A. Zelizer, eds., What’s Good for Business: Business and Politics since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Great Transformation  /  147 4.

William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 769. There are, of course, exceptions here. See, for example, the works discussed in Jason Scott Smith, “A Reintroduction to Political Economy: History, Institutions, and Power,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36 (Summer 2005): 63–­71. 5. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); and, for an important qualification of Brinkley’s argument, see Alan Brinkley, “The Transformation of New Deal Liberalism: A Response to Michael Brown, Kenneth Finegold, and David Plotke,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 421–­25; Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York: Free Press, 1987); Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–­1965 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); Thomas W. Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Michele Alacevich, The Political Economy of the World Bank: The Early Years (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–­1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Theodore Cohen, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, ed. Herbert Passin (New York: Free Press, 1987); John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Jason Scott Smith, Building New 1956 (Cambridge: Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–­ Cambridge University Press, 2006), 248–­55; David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25 (November 1984): 185–­213. 7. For local resistance to American capitalism, see, for example, Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); and Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-­Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 8. Charles S. Maier, “‘Malaise’: The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 29. 9. I find the account in Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) to be more persuasive than the optimistic narrative advanced in Elizabeth Borgwart’s A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 10. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 220, 365. See also Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945–­1952 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989); and Cohen, Remaking Japan. 11. Schonberger, Aftermath of War, 161–­97; Hoffman quoted on 185. 12. For the text of Marshall’s speech, see http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library /doc_marshall_plan_speech.html. 13. Ibid.

148  /  Jason Scott Smith 14. For FDR, see Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat (Recovery Program),” July 24, 1933. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14488. 15. Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Harry N. Scheiber, “Government and the Economy: Studies of the ‘Commonwealth’ Policy in Nineteenth-­Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 135–­51; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–­1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–­1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–­80; Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–­ 1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). 16. Ellis W. Hawley, “The Corporate Ideal as Liberal Philosophy in the New Deal,” in The Roosevelt New Deal: A Program Assessment Fifty Years After, ed. Wilbur J. Cohen (Austin: Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, 1986), 85; Ellis W. Hawley, “Hebert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–­1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–­40; Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State”; Brian Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-­ Professional Relations in Modern America,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Spring 1991): 119–­72; Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–­90; Robert D. Cuff, “War Mobilization, Institutional Learning, and State Building in the United States, 1917–­1941,” in The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 388–­425. 17. Hogan, Marshall Plan, 13, 89. See also Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy after World War II,” Inter­ national Organization 31 (Autumn 1977): 607–­33. 18. Hogan, Marshall Plan, 138–­39; 190–­91; Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–­1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 94; Hoffman quoted in Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25. 19. Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168–­71; Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 308–­10; see also Marie-­Laurie Djelic, Exporting the American Model: The Post-­War Transformation of European Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jacqueline McGlade, “The Illusion of Consensus: American Business, Cold War Aid, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1948–­1958” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1995);

The Great Transformation  /  149 Nick Tiratsoo and Jim Tomlinson, “Exporting the ‘Gospel of Productivity’: United States Technical Assistance and British Industry, 1945–­1960,” Business History Review 71 (Spring 1997): 41–­81; and Kim McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–­1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 47. 20. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 730–­31. 21. Thomas Corcoran to Harold L. Ickes, September 6, 1950, “Harold L. Ickes. General Correspondence, 1946–­52. Corcoran, Thomas, 1946–­51” folder, box 53, Harold L. Ickes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Emphasis in original. 22. Ickes to Corcoran, September 11, 1950, in ibid. 23. Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 340. For more on the links between Point Four and the New Deal, see Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Rural Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264–­81; on Point Four more generally, see Stephen Macekura, “The Point Four Program and U.S. International Development Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 128 (2013): 127–­ 60; Ekbladh, Great American Mission, 77–­113; Amanda McVety, Enlightened Aid: U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Merle E. Curti and Kendall Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954). 24. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 39; and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 233. See also Nick Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan: Modernization in a Buffer State,” Journal of American History 89 (September 2002): 512–­37; the essays collected in David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-­Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For the TVA, see Erwin C. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–­1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Thomas K. McCraw, “The Hubris of the Engineers,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 1007–­14. For a cautionary account of the limitations of “authoritarian high modernism,” see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 25. Elizabeth A. Cobbs, The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 15; see also Ellis W. Hawley, “The Corporate Ideal as Liberal Philosophy in the New Deal,” in The Roosevelt New Deal: A Program Assessment Fifty Years Later, ed. Wilbur J. Cohen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 85–­103. 26. Several historians have recently noted the varying effectiveness with which elements of the New Deal have been exported. For accounts of what happened to New Deal anti­trust law after World War II, for example, see Wyatt Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Tony Freyer, Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–­2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For an account of the connections between the New Deal and the evolution of human rights, see Borgwardt, New Deal for the World. 27. For a fuller elaboration of this argument, see Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism. 28. Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1945, 2.

150  /  Jason Scott Smith 29. Chicago Daily Tribune, November 14, 1948, 49. Many similar ads ran regularly in urban newspapers around the country. 30. Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 31. New York Times, November 28, 1946, 2. For a comparative study of the long-­term implications of oil wealth for Middle Eastern nations, see Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth: Institutions and Economics in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 32. Ibid. 33. New York Times, January 28, 1947, 13. For a history of the Export-­Import Bank, see William H. Becker and William M. McClenahan Jr., The Market, the State, and the Export-­Import Bank of the United States, 1934–­2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 34. New York Times, January 28, 1947, 13. 35. New York Times, February 24, 1947, 8. 36. Alan A. Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-­Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003); and Barry B. LePatner, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America’s Trillion-­Dollar Con­ struction Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 37. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological En­ thusiasm, 1870–­1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 38. David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (New York: Pocket Books, 1944), xxi. 39. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth; Steven M. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal: The Journey of an American Liberal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996). 40. For more on this, see Jason Scott Smith, “The Liberal Invention of the Multinational Corporation: David Lilienthal and Postwar Capitalism,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and Politics since World War II, ed. Kim Phillips-­Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 107–­22. 41. Clipping of “Will We Have A World TVA?” in Magazine Digest, March 1945, in “Re Publication: Magazine Digest. “Will We Have A World TVA? [Edited Without the Approval of David E. Lilienthal.] March 1945” folder, box 109, David E. Lilienthal Papers (DEL Papers), MC 148, Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. 42. David E. Lilienthal to André Meyer, January 1, 1956, in “1956 Correspondence: Name Files De-­Mi.” folder, box 403, DEL Papers. 43. Gordon R. Clapp to Lucas Lopes, May 14, 1958, in “RE Brazil 1958” folder, box 408, DEL Papers. 44. “Propuesta Tecnica. Sistema de Conexion Terrestre con la Mesopotamia” report [no date], in “Reports, 1968–­1970” folder, box 217, Development and Resources Corporation Records (D&R Records), MC 014, Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. 45. Walton Seymour to Antonio Tornio, February 29, 1960, in “Foreign Correspondence-­ General, 1960” folder, box 215, D&R Records. 46. Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (New York: Free Press, 1985); for other instances, see, e.g., Peter Botticelli, “Rolls-­ Royce and the Rise of High-­Technology Industry,” in Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions,

The Great Transformation  /  151 ed. Thomas K. McCraw (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 94–­132, esp. 116–­18. For a foundational statement on the boundaries of the firm, see Ronald H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4 (16): 386–­405. 47. See the correspondence and reports in “US-­Alaska-­General, 1962–­1964” folder, box 348; “US-­Environmental Protection Agency, 1971–­1972” folders, box 354; “US-­ Office of Economic Opportunity, 1969–­1970” folders, box 382; and “US-­Office of Economic Opportunity, 1970” folder, box 383; all in D&R Records. 48. Neuse, David E. Lilienthal, 292–­315 (DEL quoted on 315); David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); for D&R’s financial difficulties in the 1970s, see the material in box 55, International Basic Economy Corporation Papers, The Rockefeller Archive Center. 49. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 37. 50. Daniel Immerwahr, “Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (July 2009): 445–­66; Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and the essays collected in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 51. Adolf A. Berle Jr., The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 161. 52. Ibid. 53. For more on the corporation, see Neil J. Mitchell, The Conspicuous Corporation: Business, Public Policy, and Representative Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michi­ gan Press, 1997); and William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large In­ dustrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 54. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999); and Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

Pa r t T wo

The State and Civil Society

Since Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic study, Democracy in America, civil society has stood near the center of American conceptions of democratic practice. Yet rarely has this valorization of civic life gone far beyond a superficial celebration of “voluntarism.” Civil society, it has been argued, helped democracy thrive by limiting the state’s reach and preventing public authority from penetrating beyond its specific purview into the private lives and organizations of its citizens. This largely unspecified, and substantially unhistoricized emphasis on the primacy of civil society has been one of the profoundest sources of the unthinking opposition between state and society that continues to define the literature on the state. At the same time, this opposition has tacitly contributed to some of the basic notions in our understanding of the state, including autonomy, coercion, and bureaucratic rationality.1 Precious few scholars have challenged the basic intellectual genealogy that generated the state-­society opposition—­least of all those working within the long tradition of continental European social and political theory. Indeed, the opposition between state and civil society may be traced back to some of the most important authors of European social and political theory, including Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber. The overwhelming emphasis on this opposition has been perpetuated since the mid-­twentieth century in the American context through an exceptionalist ideology in the United States, a kind of American sonderweg championed by such key figures as Louis Hartz and his fellow heralds of a liberal “consensus” running through the American political tradition. It has also been the prized domain of a reduced social science that abandoned institutional economics and progressive political science for a deracinated and atomized electoral model, augmented by “interest-­group pluralism”—­the analogue of triumphant civil

154 / Part Two

society, which makes the state at best a neutral platform or refractory medium for contending interests. Finally, an ultimate distortion of this opposition can be found in the “capture” model of the Chicago school theory of regulation and public choice. All of these approaches have reinforced the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century oppositions between public power and private initiative, civil society and state. And yet it is increasingly clear that they simply don’t hold up against the evidence of a growing number of studies. All of these traditional American approaches to civil society have suffered from what the sociologist Andrew Abbot lamented as the “bibliographical dominance of ‘the mainline European tradition’ of classic social theory in thinking about the social and political conditions of modernity”—­ particularly as it has been used to misconstrue or ignore the “distinctive American law of associations [that] was integral to the construction of the public civil society created in the nineteenth-­century United States,” as William Novak has observed.2 One corrective can be found in American social theory—­specifically the pragmatists, who provided vital if neglected intellectual resources for interpreting the state. Building on these two insights, the essays in this section place empirics before theory to focus specifically on the dynamics of the American state. Assembling historical investigations of civil society and American state building, the essays in this section push beyond some of our basic conceptions about how states have exercised power. In particular, these studies reveal a whole range of state technologies that have depended upon a permeable relationship between the state and civil society. They thus challenge the basic notion that civil society is opposed to the state; rather, these studies suggest civil society is intrinsic to the power most characteristic of a democratic state. All of the studies that follow challenge the basic notion that state and civil society were locked in a zero-­sum game. The American state, it appears, distributed power through civil society to achieve key policy aims, suggesting the simultaneous development of civil society and more effective state repertoires of action. The opposition between state and civil society must then be recast. Rather than two warring forces, it would seem that they functioned reciprocally, mobilizing political will and social energies by drawing boundaries between state and society in productive ways that could allow expertise and initiative to flow most flexibly toward the greatest opportunities. Such an approach suggests that American political development may not be some exceptional outlier, but instead may have some fundamental insights to teach us about the history of the modern state more generally. In so doing, it also suggests that our histories of the state must focus less

The State and Civil Society  /  155

on the ins and outs of bureaucracy, parties, or autonomy, and more on the state-­society relationship. Indeed, all of the examples of state power and state construction in this section took place within a context of varying degrees of democracy. They revealed that the ways in which power has been legitimated and deployed have varied widely depending on the forms of democratic engagement. They also revealed that state power has been a central strut in the history of democracy and suggest that what has been missing has been a history of the democratic state.3 As these studies show, the history of the democratic state cannot be captured fully by a simple focus on the variable strength of parties, vote counts or the move toward or away from mass politics. Such approaches depend on an impoverished, minimalist, and ultimately tautological theory of democracy. Rather, these histories of the democratic state place the question of the permeability and dissemination of power into the polity front and center. They also suggest that what has been missing from our histories of democracy is a history of power within democratic practice, rather than simply arrayed against it. The following essays begin to explore this question by tracing the shared history of the state and civil society.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

A robust literature on the history of civic associations has arisen in response to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); most notably, Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003) and What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality, ed. Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). But virtually all of this literature has taken the categorical separateness of civil society from the state for granted, despite Skocpol’s call for a more “polity-­centered” history, in her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). William Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 761; Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-­Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (2001): 187. John Dewey, “The Democratic State,” in The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), ch. 3.

Six

Governing the Child: The State, the Family, and the Compulsory School in the Early Twentieth Century T r ac y S teffes

In the 1925 case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the US Supreme Court declared that a new Oregon referendum that required attendance of all children, ages eight to sixteen, at public schools, and public schools alone, was unconstitutional. The law “unreasonably interferes with the rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” argued the court. “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” Precisely which rights and duties parents possessed was left undefined, but the court argued that in the very least, they included the right to send children to private schools. The state had expansive authority over education, the court ruled, including the power to regulate private schools and require particular subjects, but this authority “excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”1 Historical accounts of the Pierce decision usually locate it within two major narratives about the state in the early twentieth century. In the first, the decision was an important constitutional defense of parents’ rights and limit to state power, an early step toward more expansive individual rights protections under the Fourteenth Amendment. In the second and related narrative, the state law it rejected was yet one more child-­saving effort of the era that brought aggressive social policing into households where parental authority was perceived as weak or deficient, particularly in poor and working-­class immigrant families. While accounts of juvenile courts, reformatories, child labor, and other analogous child protection policies have explored how working-­class people could sometimes use these

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interventions to their advantage, scholars have tended to describe them as paternalistic, elite-­driven efforts of social control shaped by anxieties about immigration, urbanization, and industrialization.2 While there is some truth to these larger narratives, they take for granted the institution at the center of the Pierce decision—­the compulsory school—­ and in the process have missed a key site where state authority expanded over children in the early twentieth century in ways that went far beyond the direct policing of particular households. Public schools were, after all, public governing institutions whose explicit purpose was citizen formation and socialization. Since their inception in the nineteenth century, they were places where parents and children encountered the state in their everyday lives and negotiated the boundary between public and parental authority. This boundary began to shift around the turn of the century. Reformers and state courts articulated an expansive public interest in children’s education and welfare. Self-­consciously defining a “new education” for modern life, they expanded the goals and reach of the school in ways that enhanced the authority of state government and often challenged and circumscribed parental authority. Compulsory attendance was an important reflection and catalyst of this change. New compulsory attendance policies—­state laws and local enforcement efforts to give effect to them—­provided a rationale and mechanism to extend state oversight and public policies over children through the agency of the school. Consequently, compulsory attendance policies did much more than just compel a resistant minority into school or intervene in particular households. They helped to expand public responsibility over all children in ways that reshaped the relationship of the state to families, and they worked over time to discipline and normalize full-­time attendance of all children at school, habituating even those who already attended voluntarily to new expectations. The Pierce case’s protection of parental rights under the Fourteenth Amendment only makes sense in the context of this substantial expansion of state institutions and authority through the school that eroded the once nearly sacrosanct authority of parents under common law. This essay examines the development and institutionalization of compulsory attendance policies in the early twentieth century as an exploration of the state out of place. Schools are rarely examined as state institutions by historians of education who, like most historians of child welfare policies, view institutional changes through the lens of social group conflict and social history. At the same time, scholars of American social policy and state development have tended to take schools for granted. When one looks

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backward from the New Deal or across the ocean from Europe as much of this scholarship implicitly does, the school is hard to see as part of state development: schools developed slowly and unevenly as public institutions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they were extremely decentralized and blurred the lines between public and private; they were often framed deliberately as nonpolitical, community institutions rather than institutions of government.3 Yet this opacity was part of the strength of public schools as governing institutions. While top-­down school reform efforts increased in the early twentieth century, schools also grew from the bottom up efforts of local officials, reformers, parents, and communities who identified with “their” local school and participated in its expanding scope and authority. Attendance policies, for example, rested on a foundation of popular participation and consent, including the willingness of the vast majority of families to send their children to school and their acceptance of new expectations for regular daily attendance that school officials worked to cultivate and institutional­ ize. Compulsory schooling was not simply top-­down, coercive social polic­ ing but also a project of shaping norms, expectations, and consent—­a project of governmentality—­that aimed to persuade the vast majority of Americans to internalize new attendance practices in ways that rendered overt policing less necessary over time. The strong local, community identity of public schools and popular participation in their expansion obscured the ways in which the school, especially the compulsory school, was a site of public governance and social policy implementation. Consequently, schools were an important site of what theorist Michael Mann has called infrastructural power, the penetration of state power through the institutions of civil society, one of the ways in which the American state governed out of sight.4 At a time when scholars often describe American social policy as weak and stingy, Americans invested generously in education. American spending on public education surpassed all other nations and was the single largest social welfare expense measured by the census most years before World War II. Public schooling comprised one-­quarter to one-­third of all state and local spending in the first four decades of the twentieth century. If we take schools seriously as sites of government and social policy, we must reframe questions about the underdevelopment of American social policy and ask why Americans made the choices they did to subsidize opportunity for children rather than socialize risk for workers. While many western nations grew concerned about children as national assets during the period, especially after World War I, Americans’ investment in schooling and children

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marked it as a distinctive focus shaped by different priorities and assumptions about social welfare. Public schooling was not a peculiar aside to the era’s weak social policy, but a major public investment that should be integrated into the story and used to rethink it.5

Compulsory Attendance Laws and State Police Power When public school systems were created in the antebellum North and postbellum South, supporters justified government support and control by emphasizing their public value and goals: to educate citizens and safeguard democracy; to socialize and assimilate youths of all religions, classes, and ethnicities into a common people; and to uplift individuals and prevent social ills like crime and poverty that stemmed from ignorance. Building on popular support and local efforts to expand schooling, reformers transformed a patchwork of independent schools into publicly funded and controlled school systems over time. State law provided the framework and mandated that localities maintain schools, but legislatures delegated nearly all aspects of school governance and finance to local districts that varied in how much support they gave to schooling. While districts had to provide schools, parents did not have to use them. Under common law, parents ostensibly had absolute authority to determine how, where, and even whether to educate children under their care, for the obligation to educate was moral rather than legal. In practice this parental authority could be forfeited through contract, circumscribed by race or poverty, and denied by slavery. Nevertheless the public schools of the nineteenth century were, by and large, voluntary schools, and attendance was often casual and intermittent.6 Beginning in the early 1870s, a growing number of civic leaders and commentators, especially northern Republicans, began to advocate laws to require some attendance at school. Concerned about the expanding polity that resulted from enfranchisement and immigration during Recon­ struction, policy makers blamed ignorance for rising rates of crime, poverty, and vice among the newly visible “dangerous classes” of the cities. Connecticut state superintendent Birdsey Northrop explained in his 1871 report on “obligatory education” to the legislature that “we have imported parents so imbruted as to compel their young children to work for their grog and even to beg and steal in the streets when they should be in schools.” These “imbruted” parents were fostering a growing rank of “ignorant, vagrant and criminal youth” in the nation’s cities, against whom moral suasion and the voluntary school were insufficient. Pointing to the positive results of European nations that had erected attendance requirements,

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Northrop recommended the state of Connecticut do so too, for “those who need education most and prize it least are fit subjects for coercion, when all persuasives are in vain.”7 Two dozen northern state legislatures followed Connecticut in passing an attendance statute in the 1870s and 1880s, expressing similar concerns about the social dangers of ignorance. The laws typically required parents to send their children between the ages of eight and fourteen to school for twelve weeks each year, including six weeks of consecutive schooling. They recognized exceptions for poverty, distance, and mental or physical handicap, among other reasons. They defined penalties for noncompliance but were silent on the mechanisms for enforcement, leaving it to local districts, as they did most other aspects of school governance.8 The laws were bitterly contested even in states where they were passed; dozens of additional states considered and rejected compulsory attendance statutes in the late nineteenth century, including Pennsylvania, Iowa, and most southern states. While a wide range of commentators shared concerns about ignorance, many were not willing to take the step of compulsion, finding it “un-­American,” an “abridgement of liberty,” and an invasion of natural parental rights and the “sacredness of the family.” Supporters defended the laws as a necessary modification of parents’ common law authority in extreme cases of neglect. The state steps in, argued one proponent, if a “parent should beat his child unreasonably, or should starve him, or should otherwise maltreat him, however to deprive a child of education, to cripple him for life by lack of knowledge and of proper schooling is a worse outrage than any of these.” The first state court to evaluate the constitutionality of a compulsory attendance law evinced this understanding of it as a check on parental neglect in 1891: “It is only when a parent, if I may so say, forfeits his right to the child, or at least at when he shall so far forget his duty to the child as to entirely neglect to educate him, or refuse to educate him, that the state steps in, and by virtue of these statutes compels his attendance at school.” The Ohio court sustained it as parens patraie, the well-­established authority of the state to step in when parental authority was absent or suspect.9 Three subsequent state supreme courts agreed that compulsory atten­ dance laws were constitutional in cases widely viewed as settling the issue, but they grounded their decisions in the expansive doctrine of state police power rather than parens patraie. State police power was the inherent lawmaking power of the state legislature to act on behalf of the health, safety, and welfare of citizens and was limited only to the extent that it conflicted with specific clauses in state or federal constitutions. The New Hampshire

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Supreme Court acknowledged that the attendance statute was “a decided invasion of parental domain,” but it was one the legislature could make because the education of citizens was “essential to the stability of the state.” Finding no constitutional conflict, the court upheld the law and noted that as in other cases of valid police power regulation, the citizen “must yield submission and obedience.”10 Compulsory attendance statutes formed part of a growing body of case law that defined education as a fundamental state interest and schools as agents of state government. Courts legally defined districts as quasi-­ corporations that existed to carry out state legislative policies; this meant districts could not assert “local rights” to resist state government directives or claim autonomy, but it also meant that as agents of the state they had considerable legal authority to represent the public interest, an interest that was balanced, and usually outweighed, the rights of individuals. In 1919 the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, sustained the expulsion of a “crippled and defective child” whose “physical condition and ailment produces a depressing and nauseating effect upon the teachers and school children” and “takes up an undue portion of the teacher’s time.” Balancing the public interest and the child’s claims to an education, the court ruled that the child’s right to attend “cannot be insisted upon when its presence therein is harmful to the best interests of the school. This, like other individual rights, must be subordinated to the general welfare.”11 Many progressive reformers at the time and historical narratives since have portrayed the era as one of laissez-faire constitutionalism and federal limitations on state police power, epitomized by “liberty of contract” decisions like Lochner that struck down protective labor legislation. However, when one looks at education the overwhelming story was one of state courts legitimating a broad range of state actions over local schools and children themselves that were rarely rejected by federal or state courts. In cases about student injuries, textbook regulation, school consolidation, taxation and school funds, regulation of student conduct, and a whole host of other disputes, state courts defined schools as state rather than local institutions and insisted on the legislature’s supreme and expansive authority to regulate them with few limits in the early twentieth century. It was not until the 1920s that the Supreme Court stepped in to define a zone of individual rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as a constitutional limit to state police power in some circumstances. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska three years earlier, the court argued that “the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected” that included the right “to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according

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to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally enjoy the privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men” as well as the right to attend private schools.12 Pierce and Meyer articulated a new, absolute constitutional basis for parents to assert rights against state power to replace the relative rights under common law, but in practice the cases did relatively little to scale back expansive state police power regulation through the compulsory school for the next two decades. During that time, state and federal courts continued to give tremendous deference to the state’s interest in children’s education, rejecting efforts of parents to use the Pierce decision to challenge a host of school policies and rules when they conflicted with their values. When Jehovah’s Witness children refused to salute the flag because of religious beliefs in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, state and federal courts allowed school officials to expel them and prosecute their parents under the atten­ dance law until the Supreme Court defined the issue as one of protected free speech in 1943. It was the expansion of other fundamental rights, especially religion, that gave parents in the post–­World War II era stronger authority to challenge the governance of the school and demand accommodations to parental values. Consequently, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, courts defined the state’s authority over schools and children in expansive though not unlimited terms, sustaining the vast majority of regulations as important public interests.13

Progressive Era Development of Compulsory Attendance Policies Despite the passage of over two dozen laws and the strong legal authority of legislatures and districts to act if they chose to, the US commissioner of education reported in 1891 that with only a few exceptions, the laws were “wholly inoperable” throughout the nation because of inadequate enforcement mechanisms, community hostility, and lack of support by local officials. Yet this assessment came on the cusp of a new era of enforcement. Histories of compulsory attendance policies have often described this shift from a “symbolic” to “bureaucratic” phase as driven by professionalization and bureaucratization. However, these explanations miss the new proponents, constituencies, and aims that drove these enforcement efforts and worked to extend state laws. Schools often lacked enough space for children who wanted to be there, and administrators were less than eager to manage the ones who did not. The energy for reform came from groups outside the school, especially child labor reformers, who saw restricting children’s

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labor and ensuring their attendance at school as linked projects. Women played a central role in these reform efforts, framing their policy advocacy as an extension of their gender roles and maternal responsibilities. In heavily industrialized states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, they successfully lobbied for state restrictions on child labor under age fourteen and regulation until age sixteen through new systems of working papers and state factory inspectors. Practically, they recognized that the projects of labor restriction and compulsory attendance were interdependent. The Illinois factory inspector noted in 1895 that the labor law was effectively nullified if the “child is not kept in school, but drifts from one workshop into another, or from factories into the streets,” and called for stronger attendance laws and enforcement.14 Philosophically, child labor reformers believed in compulsory atten­ dance because both reforms shared the same commitment to protecting children’s opportunity to develop to their fullest potential as a moral imperative and national interest. Often using charged emotional language, child labor reformers described the physical, moral, and mental dangers of factory labor for children and the ways in which it sacrificed their long-­ term development and potential for immediate economic gain. Child labor was “white child slavery,” one reformer argued, and through it “we enslave the innocent children, and make their lives a joyless nightmare of misery, physically decrepid [sic], mentally stunted and morally dwarfed.” Protecting children’s ability to be children was a moral responsibility of the nation. According to reformers, children needed this protection because some parents were too poor, ignorant, or selfish to safeguard their welfare. One National Child Labor Committee report argued that some foreign parents viewed children’s labor a “shrewd economic move” and some “go so far as to plan to stop all labor themselves at the age of thirty-­five and live entirely from the wages earned by their children.” This critique was heard so often in connection with southern mill labor that the Georgia legislature made it a crime in 1903 for parents to be idle and live off their children’s wages. While some reformers blamed parental greed, others saw the fault in the economic system’s failure to pay a living wage and pointed to the ways that child labor subverted the family. Florence Kelley, for example, argued that “dependent parents are, as a rule, dependent because we do not make Industry pay its way, and we try to make the unhappy children pay the bills due to the family from Industry.”15 Child labor reformers not only emphasized the harms of child labor for the child and family but also linked children’s development to the welfare of the nation in ways that urged public action. Editor Charles Spahr

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warned that child labor “impairs the foundation of our national superiority” because it “saps physical vigor and dwarfs mental growth” and “must be regarded as a criminal waste of the nation’s best resources.” Many others used similar language about draining the nation’s vitality and framed it as a project of conservation. “The children of to-­day must be viewed as the raw material of the State; the schools as the nursery of the Nation,” argued Lewis Terman and Ernest Hoag. “To conserve this raw material is as logical a function of the State as to conserve the natural resources of coal, iron, and water power.”16 In the South, child welfare reformers inflected these arguments with appeals to white racial pride. Southern reformers faced considerable obstacles in their efforts: the industrial ambitions of the region; reliance of poor families on children’s labor; the political power of manufacturing interests that resisted labor regulation; the underdevelopment of public education; and the racial politics of the region, including deep animosity to black education. In Georgia, for example, a compulsory education bill was voted down in the legislature in 1909 when opponents charged “it would force the negroes into the schools, give them a better education than the whites, and make them more useless than ever.” Some proponents tried to invert these fears and use them to argue for compulsory attendance and labor restriction. South Carolina educator William Hand argued that those who feared an attendance law would raise African American educational aspirations were “ill-­informed as to the actual situation,” for “the negro child needs no compulsory law to put him into school. He is already there wherever and whenever possible.” Comparing racial statistics on illiteracy that showed that black illiteracy had decreased over time while white illiteracy remained constant and high, he warned that white southern children had better start going to school. Southern progressive reformers made similar racial appeals for child labor restriction, arguing that factory labor was “killing the whole white race of the South” and warning that the “purest racial stock in the world” must be “preserved as the only safeguard of national greatness.” They targeted the factories that employed predominantly white child labor and largely ignored the agricultural labor of black children.17 These efforts of child labor activists provided much of the initial push for stronger compulsory attendance policies, but they were successful in large part because of the simultaneous transformation of the modern school as education reformers worked from the top and popular investment surged from the bottom to broaden its aims, activities, and reach. Many of the same groups that supported child labor restriction worked with educators and civic clubs to expand high schooling, lengthen school terms, increase school

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spending, add modern subjects and activities like vocational education, and rationalize and professionalize school governance.18 Scott Nearing summed up the sentiment that guided these multifaceted efforts and gave it a name in his 1915 book, The New Education. The modern world “demands a new teaching which shall relate men and women to the changed conditions of life.” Universal education, enforced if necessary, would provide opportunities for individuals to navigate the changing modern world but even more importantly would provide stability, progress, and integration for society. Education, one scholar explained, “may be thought of as social insurance.” While schools were interested in the individual, “this interest in the individual is not altruistic; it is selfish, as the social order may not exist or progress except as it is composed of good leaders and effective followers.” This educational “social insurance,” reformers argued, was particularly important in the modern era because of economic change and social interdependence, and they worked to improve the holding power of the school during and after the compulsory period.19 Compulsory attendance policies also developed because of popular demand and bottom-­up investment in schooling that fueled school expansion and made more Americans willing to support compulsion. Most of the growth in school enrollments, particularly at the high school level, came through voluntary attendance as more families saw economic and social benefits in extended schooling, including access to white-­collar work in offices and stores, and were able to afford to forgo their children’s labor. High school enrollment grew from about 7 percent of adolescents ages fourteen to seventeen in 1890, to over 50 percent by the mid-­1920s, to over 70 percent by 1940, while elementary education became effectively universal for all racial and ethnic groups in all regions of the nation by the early 1930s. This surge in voluntary attendance helped to drive the gradual extension of the laws and generate support to target the resistant minority. Supporters of compulsory attendance policies pointed to the growing public investment in schooling—­from $141 million per year in 1890 to $2.3 billion per year by 1940 in constant dollars—­and argued that parents should not be able to squander this investment. “The state has no right to levy and collect taxes for a specific purpose, then permit that purpose to be defeated by the hands of indifferent or selfish parents,” observed one educator who argued compulsory attendance flowed directly from compulsory taxation.20 Compulsory attendance laws and practices spread first across the North and West and then penetrated into the South by World War I through a combination of local experimentation, emulation and diffusion, and state government promotion. Large cities were often the centers of attendance reform

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and innovation, but smaller cities, towns, and even rural areas borrowed and adapted their methods based on their size, resources, and community sentiment. Urban reformers lobbied state legislatures to extend statutes and tighten loopholes through which parents and children evaded the law, and legislatures responded with statutes that extended the compulsory period, restricted exemptions, and mandated proven practices statewide. These efforts intensified after World War I draft statistics revealed high rates of illiteracy, physical unfitness, and unassimilated immigrants, especially among native-­born whites in the countryside, that shocked the nation. Among other efforts to promote school attendance, state legislatures favored average daily attendance rather than enrollment to determine the distribution of state aid, offered state assistance to local officials to improve record keeping and attendance enforcement, established county attendance officers to serve rural districts, and provided state aid for transportation and other services to enable better attendance.21 However, state legislatures did not take responsibility for attendance enforcement away from districts. As one attendance director told the National Education Association in 1917, local officials “should assume the burden of enforcement; otherwise local sentiment and support may be alienated.” While he admitted the progress would be slower, “the results will be more permanent in character” and hence more effective. In attendance, like many other areas of school policy, educators and policy makers believed that fostering local effort and investment was a far more effective strategy in the long run than imposing state rules. “Out of freedom to exercise initiative nearly all of our educational progress has come,” warned one school administration expert, while another noted that “emulation between local districts is the most powerful string on which to pull” for increased support and innovations. States nevertheless used incentives and pressure to prod districts to assume this burden of enforcement.22 The South lagged behind the North and West in attendance laws and enforcement, but it followed the same basic patterns. After World War I southern states intensified their efforts to compel white children to attend school. The last state to enact a compulsory attendance law—­Mississippi—­did so in 1918, and all southern states extended attendance and labor restrictions after the war. Enforcement was racialized, for as one state official candidly acknowledged, it was well known that many of these states ignored their attendance responsibilities “as it pertains to negro, Indian, or Mexican children.” This neglect of compulsion also signaled a lack of commitment to provide educational opportunities, as the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools recognized. Calling for “an elementary school accessible

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and compulsory for a normal term to every child of schooling age 6–­15,” the president of the association in 1934 detailed the racial disparities in state school provision and concluded that “these figures really show that there are other ways of lynching than by using rope and faggot.” Black reformers pressed public officials to enforce attendance laws for black children because they recognized this enforcement brought with it resources and obligations that states were neglecting.23 Although compulsory attendance policies varied in different places and for different groups, they spread throughout the nation in the two decades after World War I. State mandates and bottom-­up efforts of localities to enforce the laws extended compulsory attendance legal requirements over time. Whereas the first statutes typically required twelve weeks of schooling spread across a three-­to five-­month term, by 1940 most states required regular full-­term attendance for a period of eight to nine months. By 1940, statutes extended compulsory attendance ages upward and downward, from the ages eight to fourteen stipulated by most initial attendance laws to ages six to sixteen in most states, with some states requiring additional part-­time or full-­time schooling until age eighteen. They also gradually eliminated exemptions for distance, poverty, mental and physical handicap, and mandated services to reduce the obstacles they presented, such as free transportation for children who lived more than two miles from school. Average daily attendance rose dramatically: in 1890, each enrolled child attended an average of eighty-­six days per year, while in 1940 the number had almost doubled to 152 days per year. The main effect of these changes was not to substantially increase the number of students enrolled in school—­ voluntary attendance was already quite high—­but to discipline, regularize, and lengthen the daily attendance of already-­enrolled students and deepen the role of the state in schooling.24

Attendance Service and Disciplining the Household As school officials, child welfare advocates, and education reformers worked to enforce attendance requirements, they confronted two related but distinct problems: first, how to find and enroll children who should be in school and keep them there; second, how to improve and regularize the atten­ dance of students who were enrolled. The first problem occupied the earliest enforcement efforts; truant officers patrolled the streets to find youths who should be in school and worked with factory inspectors to enroll children found illegally employed. Over time, school officials and reformers developed new techniques to find and keep track of children, shaped by the ways

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families tried to evade the requirements. When they found that students were using school transfers to drop out of sight of school officials, for example, they instituted new record-­keeping practices and follow-­up procedures to ensure that students that left one school enrolled in another. To aid in these efforts to find and monitor students, school officials redesigned the school census as an attendance tool, transferring it from a haphazard and periodic canvass of youths to a permanent record-­keeping system. Denver stood as a model; officials boasted that they found 12,000 previously unreported children after it instituted the continuous census, which tracked students’ movements and collected information about them, including family background, health, test scores, and other academic information. In Denver and other cities, attendance departments expanded public oversight and knowledge about children and their families and helped urban schools to manage, monitor, and know their students in new ways.25 This record keeping was necessary because of the tenacious efforts of some children and their parents to evade school. Some families depended on children’s labor. The case of twelve-­year-­old Genevieve in Chicago was not uncommon; she stopped attending school in order to care for three younger siblings when her mother fell ill. In other cases, children or their parents simply did not view schooling as worthwhile. A sociologist who interviewed working children in Massachusetts was surprised to learn that most left school because they did not like it, not because of economic pressures, and subsequent studies found that many adolescents were “restless” in school and eager for the independence of work. Sadie Horowitz kept her fourteen-­year-­old son Irvin home from school because he was several years “backward in his studies” and his age and size—­he was nearly six feet tall—­“caused some of his fellow pupils to tease him.” Like many parents she thought her son would be better served by working than failing in school.26 School attendance officials worked to find and hold these youths in school, and they had legal tools at their disposal. Attendance statutes allowed courts to impose penalties on parents, including fines and imprisonment, and to institutionalize truants who operated outside of parental control. When twelve-­year-­old “James G.,” for example, repeatedly used transfers between public and private schools to evade attendance agents in Chicago, the court first fined his parents. When his parents were unable to induce James to attend regularly, officials sent him to a residential reformatory school. While judges in some communities were initially reluctant to impose penalties, they became less hesitant to do so over time. In New York City, for example, magistrates only imposed penalties in forty-­one of the 850 attendance cases brought before them in 1904, but by the mid-­1920s

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they were finding 95 percent of parents guilty. Rather than simply punish violations, judges often used probation or suspended sentences to secure compliance with the law. A judge in Utah, for example, found the parents of twenty-­eight children guilty of violating the attendance law for refusing to send their children to school and imposed a heavy fine—­ninety days in jail and a $200 fine—­to be due the next time their children missed school illegally, resulting in immediate compliance.27 While enrolling children at school—­by force if necessary—­was an important part of attendance policy, attendance officers began to define the heart of their work as improving and regularizing the daily attendance of children already enrolled in school. Absences and patterns of irregular attendance, they argued, impaired the efficiency of that instruction and undermined the goals of requiring attendance in the first place. Irregular attendance, argued one school administration expert, “is the cause of enormous losses in the product of the schools”: “school funds are wasted, school property and equipment are not used to capacity, teachers grow discouraged, children become retarded and failures, the rate of promotion is lowered, and the number persisting in school through the upper grades is greatly reduced.” To monitor and discipline daily attendance, attendance departments required teachers to keep daily attendance logs and report every absence. Attendance officials adopted new procedures to follow up with parents and investigate.28 Attendance agents recognized that education, persuasion, and assistance were more effective than threats to reduce unnecessary absences, and they defined their work increasingly as social service rather than policing. Reflecting their growing professional identity as social workers, one atten­ dance expert explained in 1923 that the “modern conception” of atten­ dance work “recognized the necessity of compulsion, but places service for the child’s welfare above it.” While “corrective and curative measures” were sometimes needed, attendance service “puts a greater premium on prevention, and the elimination of causes” of irregular attendance because “the supreme aim is to serve the child and the community, through protecting the child from any interferences whatsoever in his rights to an education.”29 To address these “interferences” to regular attendance, attendance agents often connected families to private charities, public relief like mother’s pensions, juvenile courts, and public health services. As scholars have shown in studies of social work, these interventions could mix benevolence and paternalism and were sometimes welcome and sometimes not. Chicago attendance agents, for example, helped “Sam C” get an operation at the Central Free Dispensary to treat a long-­festering hernia that had caused the boy to be sickly, “pale and underfed.” His grateful father was unaware the

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condition could be treated. One New York City mother successfully used the attendance agent to bring her daughter, who skipped school and “powdered and painted,” under control by taking her to juvenile court and threatening incarceration in a reform school. However, agents often imposed class and gendered assumptions that penalized working mothers and nontraditional family arrangements. One attendance agent described how she “re-­ habilitated” a family by pressuring a mother to return to the husband and children she had left eight years earlier by threatening to take the parents to court for “improper guardianship” and publicize the case. She deemed her intervention a success because the family was still together seven months later, even though the youngest child was “still a little bitter, and says she will never love either of them.”30 Addressing interferences often meant educating parents about the necessity of “regular habits of attendance” and the need to prioritize it. The New York Attendance Bureau observed that “there are numbers of parents in all parts of the city who fail to appreciate the importance of regular atten­ dance” and defined correcting this attitude as one of its “most fundamental duties.” Reformers and attendance officials reported that students missed school for a host of “trivial” reasons—­to do washing and chores, help a neighbor move, to visit or travel, take part in festivities, or simply because children overslept—­and they set out to convince parents to prioritize school attendance and schedule these activities outside of school hours.31 Attendance agents recognized that their work reached far beyond visits and services to particular families, pointing to a dimension of social policy to which scholars have paid much less attention. Prompt inquiry into absences for some homes, reported attendance agents, “had a tonic effect on school attendance” in those neighborhoods by encouraging other families to take school attendance seriously. The visible presence of attendance service itself, including the daily ritual of taking attendance and investigating absences, communicated to parents and children that regular attendance was important. “The virtue of a compulsory attendance law,” argued one observer, “lays not so much in its compelling force upon those who are penalized for offenses as in its silent operation upon those who fear open chastisement. As a result, an attendance law affects a larger percentage of our school children than is at first apparent.” Attendance service helped to institutionalize emerging new cultural norms about attendance that affected the large majority of parents who never encountered an attendance agent. Parents who once may have thought nothing of taking the child out of school for a few weeks to travel, for example—­a common reason for nonattendance in rural New York—­began to plan those trips for school breaks, and social pressure

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led many parents to change their behavior without any consciousness of being coerced or persuaded. Consistent full-­term, full-­time attendance became not only the law but also the cultural expectation, and the elaborate procedures of attendance and investigation helped to reinforce it over time.32

State Regulation and Responsibility in the Compulsory School In a 1935 report on compulsory attendance laws, the US Office of Education argued that they invited and even necessitated greater state regulation of local schools: “it is obvious that the State should not compel a child to attend school in a building that is unsafe or unsanitary, or a school taught by an unqualified teacher, or a school that does not make provision for caring for the child who varies seriously from the normal type.” Compulsion, it argued, “places a responsibility upon the State and upon every school district within the State to provide the very best of school facilities.” In all of these areas and more—­school building codes and health, teacher qualifications and salaries, curriculum, and institutional “adjustments” for pupil needs—­ the state extended its authority over local public schools in the first four decades of the twentieth century with a combination of incentives and penalties, aid, and minimum standards. State legislatures and state departments of education outlined new educational standards and requirements and increased their supervision of local schools. If the state were going to require children to attend school, it had to have an interest in shaping what they did there and a responsibility to make it safe and meaningful.33 Compulsion consequently legitimated and necessitated new school policies to improve the quality and quantity of children’s attendance at school, including new health policies. One expert argued that “if a community through ignorance or carelessness neglects the health of its children while in attendance in schools to which they are compelled to go, the State has not only the right but is in duty bound to protect them as well as to help them,” because “we know that physical welfare and mental progress are inseparably related.” Poor health and treatable physical defects were an obstacle to regular attendance and an impediment to learning. If the state was going to require attendance at school, many reformers argued, it should ensure the quality and effectiveness of this attendance. “A well-­trained mind in a weak body is as much a mistake as a house built on sands,” argued one school health advocate. Reformers maintained that the same state interest and authority that prompted attendance laws justified state health efforts. “The well-­being of the state is as much dependent upon the strength, health, and productive capacity of its members as it is upon their knowledge

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and intelligence,” argued one school survey report. If the state could “make mandatory training in intelligence, it may also command training to secure physical soundness and capacity. Health is the foundation on which rests the happiness of the people and the power of a nation.”34 School officials and education reformers instituted a variety of new practices to improve student health. In many cities, women’s clubs and voluntary associations provided penny lunches and breakfasts to battle malnutrition and hunger. Schools added new health and physical education classes to their curriculum, and after World War I many states mandated these courses. Schools began to inspect children for contagious diseases and conduct regular examinations of eyes, ears, throats, and teeth and record vital statistics like health and weight. By 1923 over 1,100 cities conducted regular examinations and many had full-­time health staffs that included doctors, nurses, dentists, and specialists like oculists. By 1915, for example, Cleveland public schools not only employed sixteen physicians, one oculist, and twenty-­seven nurses but also maintained eighty-­six dispensaries and clinics. Health supervision also expanded in the countryside; a 1930 study reported that over a third of counties had a medical inspector and half had a school nurse working in rural schools.35 Compulsory attendance policies not only helped to justify these interventions but also extended their reach. Parents were required to send their children to school where medical inspection was mandatory and where teachers instructed them in so-­called American standards of nutrition, health, and hygiene. Some parents, most notably Christian Scientists, objected to compulsory medical examinations as “unwarranted paternalism and un-­Americanism” and protested that these health policies, which violated their beliefs, were “an invasion of the home” and “assault upon the person.” However, school officials were often unsympathetic to their complaints and courts rejected their legal challenges, finding that the liberty of the individual had to be weighed with, and ultimately subordinated to, the public welfare. For many proponents of school health, one of its values was the opportunity to shape the health practices of poor and immigrant families according to middle-­class, “American” standards. School nurses, one expert noted approvingly, offered an “excellent opportunity for general family service,” including not only education about treatment and prevention of diseases but also “instruction in better methods of housekeeping, better care of all the children, as well as help in the process of Americanizing many homes.”36 Compulsory attendance policies also gave school officials and other public officials leverage to insist on health practices and treatment that were

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not themselves mandatory under law. Most commonly they excluded children from school with diseases or physical defects, prompting many parents to act. If parents refused to address the problem, they could be prosecuted under anticruelty or attendance statutes. Vaccination offers a powerful example of the leverage that attendance laws provided to enforce health rules that were not themselves mandatory. A hotly contested public issue, vaccination was not compulsory for all citizens in most American states, although state legislatures allowed boards of health to require vaccination during epidemics and require it at school. Many districts enforced the vaccination rule only during epidemics by suspending unvaccinated students until the threat passed. Others began to require vaccination as a condition of enrollment, which permanently excluded youths whose parents refused vaccination. Initially, courts were unanimous in insisting that parents could not be prosecuted for violating the attendance law if they were willing to send their children to school but the school refused to accept them. However, as state interest in education grew, courts were less willing to accept parents’ objection to vaccination as a valid excuse for nonattendance. In 1914 the New York Court of Appeals initiated a major change in policy by upholding penalties against a father whose unvaccinated child had been excluded from school. The court argued that the state had recognized education as an important state interest and invested heavily in it. If a parent could evade the statute “by simply alleging he does not believe in vaccination,” the court reasoned, “the policy of the state to give some education to all children, if necessary by compelling measures, will become more or less of a farce under existing legislation.” Other state courts, citing this precedent, began to sustain similar prosecutions.37 Consequently, while vaccination was not itself compulsory, it became effectively so when made a precondition for attendance. One mother complained to the Christian Science Monitor in 1919 that “my children were compelled to be vaccinated before they could go to school, and there is a state law compelling the children to go to school. Now if this isn’t compulsory vaccination I would like to know what they call it.” In the years just before the American entry to World War I, William Gillen learned how potent these laws could be when enforced together when his two children were expelled from Saint Agatha’s Parochial School in Philadelphia because of his refusal to vaccinate them. With no public or private school willing to take them unvaccinated, Gillen began to instruct the children at home. School officials then prosecuted him for violating the attendance law. Citing the New York precedent, the court ruled that Gillen’s unwillingness to comply with the vaccination rule did not exempt him from attendance requirements, and it

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ruled that the instruction in the home did not meet the statutory requirement that alternatives to the public school be by a “properly qualified private tutor” and “satisfactory to the proper county or district superintendent of schools.”38 The Gillen case, which was about expulsion from a private school and about the legitimacy of home instruction, demonstrates how compulsory attendance laws expanded state authority beyond the state public schools to establish minimum standards in education to govern all children. The very logic of attendance as it deepened over time necessitated that the state, in the interests of effective policy, exercise some oversight over alternatives to ensure that they met state goals in requiring attendance. One Catholic scholar explained that compulsory attendance brought with it “new powers of state control over private schools.” If attendance at private schools was to be accepted as satisfying attendance laws, then “the state must have the right to investigate the manner in which these private institutions were meeting compulsory education requirements.” By 1918, about half of states regulated private schools, ranging from minimal requirements for attendance record keeping to far-­reaching powers to inspect and approve private schools. These regulations expanded after the war with new state Americanization and curriculum requirements that applied to public and private schools alike.39 Public school standards were applied to private schools and restricted or even outlawed home instruction in many states through courts’ interpretation of equivalency requirements in attendance laws. Attendance statutes often included qualifying phrases that courts interpreted as setting standards by which public school alternatives should be judged. A 1906 Pennsylvania court, for example, ruled that attendance at a private Polish-­ language school did not meet the law’s requirement for an education in “the common English branches.” Using public schools as the standard, many state courts demanded that private schools, tutors, and home instruction mirror the public school’s course of study, English language, term length, hours of instruction, and teacher qualifications. In some cases, it meant even outlawing home instruction and private tutors altogether. In 1937 a New Jersey court ruled that Benno Bongart violated the compulsory atten­ dance law by teaching his two children at home because even though he was an experienced, qualified teacher and was following the public school curriculum, he was unable to provide “equivalent” instruction in the home. According to the judge, “education is no longer merely concerned with the acquisition of facts: the instilling of worthy habits, attitudes, appreciations and skills is far more important that mere imparting of subject-­matter.” He

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concluded, “I cannot conceive how a child can receive in the home, instruction and experiences in group activity and in social outlook in any manner or form comparable to that provided in the public school.”40

Conclusion Attendance statutes gave the state a rationale and means to articulate and universalize minimum standards and expectations for all children’s education, not just those in the public schools. They made the school a powerful entry point for public regulations and oversight, including welfare services, vaccination, medical inspection and health policies, and Americanization. Some parents resisted and challenged this expanding state authority through the compulsory school, which grew more coercive with Americanization efforts after World War I, prompting the US Supreme Court to establish some federal constitutional protections for individuals in Meyer and Pierce—­albeit ones that did not significantly or immediately scale back the power of the state and compulsory school. In some cases, therefore, these public regulations were imposed over strong parental objections and were experienced as intrusive imposition that could ride roughshod over the religious beliefs and personal values of parents like Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In many other cases, however, families accepted medical inspection, vaccinated their children, welcomed new services like low-­cost meals and vocational guidance, and prioritized full-­time, full-­term regular atten­ dance because they accepted that education was a beneficial, important public project. In accepting and habituating to these new practices over time they strengthened the reach of the state and its claims to safeguard children’s welfare as a public interest by participating in this extension of public governance. Compulsory attendance policies reflected a slow, uneven, but unmistakable shift in the public regulation of children through the school. They marked the school as a place of social governance, public oversight, and child welfare policy in the early twentieth century. This change was not simply a story of declension and of eroding parental autonomy in the face of elite coercion, paternalism, and social control, although some families undoubtedly experienced it this way. Compulsion also represented new public responsibility for children’s education and welfare as “social insurance” for the nation, one embraced or at least accepted by the vast majority of Americans who participated in its slow expansion. As southern African American reformers well recognized, compulsion was not simply control, for it carried with it a more expansive state responsibility to provide

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educational access, opportunities, and services for children, an obligation that was not honored equally for all children, but nevertheless helped some to secure personal, social, and economic benefits from schooling. Although rarely acknowledged as such, this public investment in children’s welfare and development reflected a major social policy that extended state oversight and regulation of children in new and important ways that would reverberate across the twentieth century.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Davis S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael Grossberg, “Changing Conceptions of Child Welfare in the United States, 1820–­1935,” in A Century of Juvenile Justice, ed. Margaret K. Rosenheim et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3–­41; Michael Grossberg, “ ‘A Protected Childhood’: The Emergence of Child Protection in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. Wendy Gambler, Michael Grossberg, and Hendrik Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 213–­39; Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Susan Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–­46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). For a discussion and critique of social control explanations, see Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6–­7. While historians of education have generally neglected schools as state institutions, there are a few important exceptions, including David Tyack and Thomas James, “State Government and American Public Education: Exploring the Primeval Forest,” History of Education Quarterly 26 (Spring 1986): 39–­69; Nancy Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Education is neglected in most of the major accounts of American social policy; for example, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Cross­ ings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). For social policy studies that acknowledge education as an area of generous spending but do not pursue its implications, see Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Morris Janowitz, Social Control of the Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer, eds., The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984). A few recent studies have begun to make the case for integrating education into the story of the welfare state:

178 / Tracy Steffes Michael B. Katz, “Public Education as Welfare,” Dissent 57 (Summer 2010): 52–­56; Miriam Cohen, “Reconsidering Schools and the American Welfare State,” History of Education Quarterly 45 (Winter 2005): 512–­53; Irwin Garfinkel et al., Wealth and Welfare States: Is America Laggard or Leader? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 4. On governmentality and infrastructural power, see Michel Foucault, “Governmen­ tality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” in States in History, ed. John A. Hall (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 109–­36; William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–­72. The phrase and idea of governing “out of sight” is from Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5. Thomas Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Center for Education Statistics, 1993); Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975), 340–­41; Claudia Goldin, “The Human-­Capital Cen­­ tury and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past,” Journal of Economic History 61 (June 2001): 268; Europe’s Needs and Resources, Trends, and Prospects in Eighteen Countries (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). 6. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–­1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Benjamin Justice, The War That Wasn’t: Religious Conflict and Compromise in the Common Schools of New York State, 1865–­1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–­1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Beadie, Education and the Creation of Capital. On common law duties as moral obligations, see Stephenson v. Hall, 14 Barb. 222 (1852); People v. Olmstead, 27 Barb. 9 (1857); Harvey Cortland Voorhees, The Law of the Public School System of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1916). 7. Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Birdsey Grant Northrop, “Obligatory Education,” in Annual Report of the Board of Education of the State of Connecticut (1872): 34–­35. 8. William T. Harris, “Compulsory Attendance Laws in the United States,” in Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1888–­1889 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1891), 470–­531. 9. Edward Searing, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Wisconsin for the School Year Ending August 31, 1874 (1874), lx–­lxi; J. P. Wickersham quoted in Samuel Fallows, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Wisconsin for the Year Ending August 31, 1873 (1873), 67–­68; Richard Edwards, Eighteenth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Illinois, 1888–­1890 (1891), lxxv; Quigley v. State, 1891 WL 289 (Ohio Cir.) (1891). 10. State v. Jackson, 53 A. 1021 (1902); State v. Bailey, 61 N.E. 730 (1901) Commonwealth v. Edsall, 1903 WL 2585 (Pa.Quart.Sess.) (1903); Stephen Provasnik, “Judicial Activ­ ism and the Origins of Parental Choice: The Court’s Role in the Institutionalization

Governing the Child  /  179

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

of Compulsory Education in the United States, 1891–­1925,” History of Education Quarterly 46 (Fall 2006): 311–­47. State v. Board of Education of Antigo, 172 N.W. 153 (1919). For key cases and school law overviews, see State v. Haworth, 23 N.E. 946 (Ind., 1890); Leeper v. State, 53 S.W. 962 (Tenn. 1899); School Dist. No. 17 of Garfield County v. Zediker, 47 P. 482 (Okla. 1896); Kennedy v. Miller, 32 P. 558 (Calif. 1893); Attorney General v. Lowrey, 92 N.W. 289 (Mich. 1902); City of Louisville v. Commonwealth, 121 S.W. 411 (Kent. 1909); Lee O. Garber, Education as a Function of the State (Minneapolis: Educational Test Bureau, 1934); Newton Edwards, The Courts and the Public Schools: The Legal Basis of School Organization and Administration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); H. H. Schroeder, Legal Opinion on the Public School as a State Institution (Bloomington, IN: Public School Publishing, 1928); Joachim Frederick Weltzin, The Legal Authority of the American Public School as Developed by a Study of Liabilities to Damages (Grand Forks, ND: Mid-­West Book Concern, 1931). Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390; Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). For analysis and critiques of this laissez-­faire story, see Markus Dirk Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); William J. Novak, “The Legal Origins of the Modern American State,” in Looking Back at Law’s Century, ed. Austin Sarat, Bryant Garth, and Robert A. Kagan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 249–­83. Bishop v. Houston Independent School District, 29 S.W.2d 312 (1930); State v. Drew, 192 A. 629 (1937); Marsh v. Earle, 24 F. Supp. 385 (1938); Edwards, Courts and the Public Schools; Nicholls v. Mayor and School Committee of Lynn, 7 N.E.2d577 (1937); Leoles v. Landers, 192 S.E. 318 (1937); Hering v. State Board of Education, 189 A. 629 (1937); Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940); West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). “Third Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois, 1895,” in Truancy and Non-­Attendance in Chicago Schools, ed. Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 422. For historical accounts of compulsion that emphasize its “bureaucratic phase,” see David B. Tyack, “Ways of Seeing: An Essay on the History of Compulsory Schooling,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (August 1976): 355–­89; David B. Tyack and Michael Berkowitz, “The Man Nobody Liked: Toward a Social History of the Truant Officer, 1840–­1940,” American Quarterly 29 (Spring 1977): 31–­54; Michael S. Katz, “The Concepts of Compulsory Education and Compulsory Schooling: A Philosophical Inquiry” (PhD diss., Stanford Uni­ versity, 1974). For histories of child labor reform, see Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); Forest Chester Ensign, Compulsory School Attendance and Child Labor: A Study of the Historical Development of Regulations Compelling Attendance and Limiting the Labor of Children in a Selected Group of States (Iowa City, IA: Athens Press, 1921); Elizabeth H. Davidson, Child Labor Legislation in the Southern Textile States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939); Jeremy P. Felt, Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965). C. Orchardson, “White Child Slavery: A Symposium,” Arena 1 (April 1890): 602; “National Effort to Solve Child Labor Problem,” New York Times, November 27, 1904, SM8; “Hits at Home: Georgia Legislature Provides Punishment for Idle Parents

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Who Live on Earnings of Children,” New York Times, July 31, 1903, 1; Florence Kelley, “The Child Breadwinner and the Dependent Parent,” Child Labor Bulletin 2 (June 1913): 4. Charles B. Spahr, “Child Labor in England and the United States,” Chautauquan: A Weekly Newsmagazine 30 (October 1899): 43; Ernest Bryant Hoag and Lewis M. Terman, Health Work in the Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 4. “Keep Negroes Ignorant,” New York Times, August 12, 1909, 1; William H. Hand, “The Need of Compulsory Education in the South,” in “Compulsory School Attendance,” United States Bureau of Education (USBE) Bulletin, no. 2 (1914): 99–­110; “New York’s Child Labor Worse Than South Carolina,” New York Times, February 1, 1903, 3; A. J. McKelway, “The Child Labor Problem—­A Study in Degeneracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 27 (March 1906): 55; Shelley Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); William Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–­1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in Education, 1876–­ 1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); William J. Reese, Power and Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Tracy L. Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–­1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Scott Nearing, The New Education: A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915; New York: Arno Press, 1969); Hollis P. Allen, Universal Free Education (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1934), 52. William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From Common Schools to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 180–­214; Snyder, 120 Years of American Education, 59–­60; William Hand, “Need of Compulsory Edu­ cation in the South,” Child Labor Bulletin no. 1 (June 1912–­February 1913): 80. Deffenbaugh et al., “Compulsory School Attendance”; Ward W. Keesecker, “Laws Relating to Compulsory Education,” USBE Bulletin, no. 20 (1928); Walter S. Deffenbaugh and Ward W. Keesecker, “Compulsory School Attendance Laws and Their Enforcement,” USBE Bulletin, no. 4 (1935); F. V. Bermejo, The School Attendance Service in American Cities (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1923); Ernest Carroll Moore, What the War Teaches about Education and Other Papers and Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1919); Charles W. Eliot, “Defects in American Education Revealed by the War,” School and Society 9 (1919): 1–­10. George Chatfield, “What Provisions Should a Compulsory-­Education Law Include from the Viewpoint of Aim and the Viewpoint of Enforcement?” Addresses and Pro­ ceedings of the National Education Association (1917): 828; Ellwood P. Cubberley, State School Administration (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1927), 715; William A. Cook, Federal and State School Administration (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1927), 140. Irvin Simon Noall, “Administration of Compulsory School Attendance” (PhD diss., University of California, 1935), 6; “President Scott’s Annual Address before the NATCS at Baltimore, MD, July 31, 1934,” NATCS Bulletin 13, no. 1 (1934): 5; “A Study of School Attendance in Negro Schools,” NATCS Bulletin 6, no. 3 (1926): 5–­12; W. T. B. Williams, “The Educational Needs of the Negro Child,” NATCS Bulletin 8, no. 5 (1928): 11–­13.

Governing the Child  /  181 24. David Segel and Maris M. Proffitt, “Pupil Personnel Services as a Function of State Departments of Education,” USBE Bulletin, no. 6, monograph no. 5 (1940); Maris M. Proffitt and David Segel, “School Census, Compulsory Education, Child Labor: State Laws and Regulations,” USBE Bulletin, no. 1 (1945); Arch O. Heck, “School Attendance,” Review of Educational Research 3 (June 1933): 186–­93; Snyder, 120 Years of American Education, 57. 25. Abbott and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-­Attendance; Bermejo, School Attendance Service; Frederick Earle Emmons, City School Attendance Service (New York: Teachers College, 1926); Joseph LeMart Schultz, “An Analysis of Present Practices in City Attendance Work” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1938); Arch O. Heck, Administration of Pupil Personnel: A Book on Pupil-­Accounting Written from the Point of View of the Classroom Teacher (Boston: Ginn, 1929); John Dearling Haney, Registration of City School Children: A Consideration of the Subject of the City School Census (New York: Teachers College, 1910); Arthur B. Moehlman, Child Accounting: A Discussion of the General Principles Underlying Educational Child Accounting Together with the Development of a Uniform Procedure (Detroit: Friesema Bros. Press, 1924); Segel and Proffitt, “Pupil Personnel Services.” 26. Abbott and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-­Attendance, 135; Susan Kingsbury, “Re­ port of the Sub-­Committee on the Relation of Children to Industries,” in Report of the Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Teachers College Educational Reprints 1 (New York: Teachers College, 1906), 25–­127; “No Jobs for Children That They Ought to Take,” New York Times, March 2, 1913, SM7; “Tutor, Court Holds, No Truancy Excuse,” New York Times, January 19, 1923, 36. 27. Gertrude Howe Britton, An Intensive Study of the Causes of Truancy in Eight Chicago Public Schools Including a Home Investigation of Eight Hundred Truant Children (Chicago: Chicago Board of Education, 1906), 23; J. K. Paulding, letter to the editor, New York Times, April 15, 1906, 8; John Frederick Bender, The Functions of the Courts in Enforcing School Attendance Laws (New York: Teachers College, 1927); Noall, “Administration of Compulsory School Attendance,” 139; Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28. John F. Bender, “Irregular Attendance—­Its Effect and Reduction,” American School Board Journal 75 (December 1927): 46. 29. Bermejo, School Attendance Service, 144; John W. Davis, Report of the Bureau of Attendance for the Period between July 31, 1915 to July 31, 1918 (New York: Department of Education, Bureau of Attendance, 1919), 143. 30. Britton, An Intensive Study of the Causes of Truancy, 16; Davis, Report of the Bureau of Attendance, 154–­55, 164–­66. See also Mary B. Sayles, The Problem Child in the School: Narratives from Case Records of Visiting Teachers (New York: Joint Committee on Methods of Preventing Delinquency, 1925); Elisabeth A. Irwin, Truancy: A Study of the Mental, Physical, and Social Factors of the Problem of Non-­Attendance at School (New York: Public Education Association, 1915). 31. Hermann Cooper, An Accounting of Progress and Attendance of Rural School Children in Delaware (New York: Teachers College, 1930); John W. Davis, First Annual Report of the Director of Attendance for the Year Ending July 31, 1915 (New York: Department of Education, Bureau of Attendance, 1916), 49; Abbott and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-­Attendance, 141–­43. 32. Abbott and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-­Attendance, 147; H. R. Bonner, “Com­ pulsory Attendance Laws,” American School Board Journal 59 (December 1919): 37

182 / Tracy Steffes (italics mine); Whittier Lorenz Hanson, The Costs of Compulsory Attendance Service in the State of New York and Some Factors Affecting Cost (New York: Teachers College Press, 1924). 33. Deffenbaugh and Keesecker, “Compulsory School Attendance Laws and Their Ad­ ministration”; Edgar Fuller and Jim B. Pearson, eds., Education in the States: Historical Development and Outlook (Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers, 1969). 34. F. B. Dresslar, “The Duty of the State in Medical Inspection of Schools,” in “Current Educational Topics No. 3,” USBE Bulletin, no. 24 (1912): 6; “What the Health Cam­ paign Means for the Schools,” New York Times, March 22, 1907, SM2; Irving Fischer, “School Hygiene as a Profitable Investment,” New York Times, June 22, 1913, SM13; Leonard P. Ayres and May Ayres, Health Work in the Public Schools (Cleveland: Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation, 1915), 18. 35. Reese, Power and Promise of School Reform; Willard Small, “Educational Hygiene,” USBE Bulletin, no. 33 (1923): 5; Ayres and Ayres, Health Work in the Public Schools; James Frederick Rogers, “School Health Activities in 1930,” USBE Pamphlet no. 21 (1931), 31–­33; Thomas D. Wood and Hugh Grant Rowell, Health Supervision and Medical Inspection of Schools (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1927). 36. “Medical Control Protest Advised,” Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 1920, 1; “Barred Children Invited to Return,” Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 1920, 1; Abbott and Breckenridge, Truancy and Non-­Attendance, 130; Ernst B. Hoag, “Organizing Health Work in the Schools,” USBE Bulletin, no. 44 (1913). 37. On vaccination laws and politics, see J. W. Kerr, “Vaccination,” Public Health Bulle­ tin, no. 52 (1912); Bender, Functions of the Courts; William Fowler, “Smallpox Vac­ cination Laws, Regulation, and Court Decisions,” in Public Health Report, supp. no. 60 (1927); James Colgrove, State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-­ Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For examples, Commonwealth v. Smith, 1900 WL 4587 (Pa.Quart.Sess.) (1900); Ohio v. L. M. Tourney, 1909 WL 1144 (Ohio Circ., 1909); State v. Cole, 119 S.W. 424 (1909); People v. Ekerold, 105 N.E. 670 (1914). 38. Lola Weaser, letter to the editor, Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 1919, p. 3; Commonwealth v. Gillen, 1916 WL 5152 (Pa.Qaurt.Sess.). 39. Raymond McLaughlin, A History of State Legislation Affecting Private Elementary and Secondary Schools in the United States, 1870–­1945 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1946), 66–­68; Charles N. Lischka, “Private Schools and State Laws,” National Catholic Welfare Council Education Bulletins, no. 4 (1924): 103–­8. 40. Bender, Function of Courts; Commonwealth v. Snyder, 1906 WL 3024 (Pa.Quar.Sess) (1906); State v. Counort, 69 Wash. 361, 124 P. 910 (1912); Wright v. State, 209 P. 179 (1922); State v. Hoyt, 146 A. 170 (1929); Stephens v. Bongart, 15 N.J. Misc. 80, 189 A. 131 (1937) (italics mine).

Seven

Youth as Infrastructure: 4-­H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America G abri e l N . R os e nb e rg

Today, 4-­H is global. The iconic rural youth clubs, moored intractably in the American public imagination to state fairs, pet calves, and rural traditionalism, now persist in more than eighty countries around the world and on every inhabited continent. In sub-­Saharan Africa, the most recent frontier for 4-­H expansion, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Gates Foundation, Cargill, DuPont, Nike, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and numerous NGOs promote 4-­H clubs as a revolutionary social technology capable of transforming economies and cultures through the labor and bodies of youth. Imagining a sea of clover across the African continent, this collection of actors now directs millions of dollars to agricultural youth clubs work in thirteen countries. With the assistance of national ministries of agriculture, African 4-­H hopes to enroll 250,000 members by 2015. The African 4-­H network has embraced a strategy of development in which a sweeping agricultural transformation aligns the interests of millions of youths, transnational agribusiness firms, international development agencies, and national bureaucracies.1 If 4-­H’s current status as an instrument of international development is in tension with the American public’s perception of it as a provincial feature of a bucolic countryside, it is only because most Americans are unaware of 4-­H’s history. Since its origins in Progressive-­era America, 4-­H has always allied technocracy, agribusiness, and youth volunteerism to “develop” rural economies, cultures, and politics from within.2 What appears to be a neoliberal development strategy actually has its roots in a century-­long experiment conducted by the USDA and agribusiness allies in the American countryside. By enrolling millions of farm youths in 4-­H in the 1920s, governing actors hoped to extend the infrastructure of American statecraft and a burgeoning

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agribusiness economy into the nation’s spatial and temporal frontiers. 4-­H members would act in lieu of the state and on behalf of capital in the agricultural hinterlands of a contested present, as well as in the prosperous, managed countryside of an imagined future. In contrast to the brute materiality of bridges, pipes, and roads—­strong but static and immobile—­these “people as infrastructure,” to quote sociologist Abdou Maliq Simone, offered the USDA and its allies maneuverability, adaptability, and room for strategic growth, qualities that promised to bridge the gaps between center and margin, present and future. This human infrastructure permitted action at a distance in agricultural peripheries that foreshadowed—­and, indeed, permitted—­the contemporary neoliberal development projects to which 4-­H is still attached in various global agricultural peripheries.3 This essay follows the USDA’s strategy of human-­infrastructure building with an eye on contemporary debates about the history of the American state. Historian William Novak, borrowing from historical sociologist Mi­ chael Mann, encourages historians of the American state to attend to “infrastructural power,” originally defined by Mann as “the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm.”4 Sociologist Philip Gorski notes that Mann’s schema of power permits but leaves unexamined “diffuse ideological power” that is “fragmented, decentralized, and flat,” is dependent upon “peaceful and persuasive tactics,” offers “partial or incomplete worldviews,” and is “often absorbed and deployed without the conscious will or knowledge of the actors.”5 How can scholars study diffuse ideological power? Among other things, Gorski recommends we “look for tactics of seduction and a politics of pleasure,” as well as “for the mute practices and rituals through which ideology acts on the body.”6 I ask historians of the American state to take Gorksi’s notion of the seductive powers of the state, with its bodily politics of pleasure, quite literally. What does it mean for the state to seduce private bodies? At the very least, the state must affect desire, affection, and intimacy for its projects, schemes, and agents. Historians of sexuality have long identified the American state as a vital mediator of desire. Political histories of desire often focus on how state policies and actors both produce and regulate sexual intimacy between and among subjects. By contrast, I want to “bring the state back in” to American history as a potential object of desire, intimacy, and affection and as a historical actor that uses affection to mobilize bodies in lieu of coercion. Intimacy, as I mean it, is affective and embodied. It is closeness and visceral friction among bodies. One needs long arms indeed to hug the Department

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of Agriculture. To understand the state as an intimate object requires us also to examine how a dynamic network like the USDA is localized in particular, if diffuse bodies—­how it interpellates bodies, cultivates them, and then ultimately deploys them for strategic ends. My essay expands upon the approach to American state building taken by scholars of American political development (APD) by giving attention to feminist, queer, and Foucauldian analytics of political culture and gover­ nance.7 While maintaining APD’s focus on institutional capacity building, I invest minimal stability in state/civil and public/private boundaries that undergird those accounts. Instead, I foreground the supposedly private ideological, affective, embodied, and disciplinary valences of the American state’s governing network. I follow that network past the doorstep and threshold and into the intimate realms beyond: the capillaries where demarcations between public and private become murky and untenable and where the state and civil are mutually constituting and interpenetrating.8 4-­H provides exceptional territory to explore this political intimacy, in part because its parent agency, the USDA, has been the subject of several important APD works.9 My approach reveals the vital intimate machinery of American governance neglected by APD scholars, and, in turn, also uncovers a surprising genealogy of intimate state power that connects the rural United States in the early twentieth century to the global South of the postwar period. In this essay, I chart intimacy in three successive registers: cooperation, self-­care, and publicity. The first section examines how cooperation produced personal contact and intimacy between rural people and the USDA and rendered rural people vital components of the USDA’s governing alliance. In the next section, I describe how 4-­H clubs, as a part of that intimate state, linked the self-­care of private bodies to the USDA’s public goal of modernizing the American countryside. The final section charts the potentials and limits of 4-­H as a component of the intimate state. It examines the publicity of 4-­H bodies during debate on the 1928 Capper-­Ketcham Act, legislation that increased general federal appropriations for the USDA’s Cooperative Extension Service (CES) for the first time since its creation in 1914. Once affected, intimacy produced unexpected obligations for the USDA. In particular, emphasis on 4-­H bodies placed the USDA’s relationship to urban capital under the scrutiny of maternalist activists. These activists used the private bodies of 4-­H’ers to stake a powerful claim to the public resources of the extension service, and illustrated how intimacy inflected state politics even among those so often historically relegated to the state’s margins.

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Building an Intimate State in Rural America For much of rural America, the decade preceding the Great Depression could easily be summarized with two words: crisis and cooperation. Crisis was the economic and social blight that afflicted rural America throughout the decade with an intensity not seen since the great agricultural depression of the 1890s. Cooperation, a ubiquitous buzzword of the age, was the tonic for that malady, prescribed by countless, breathless technocrats at the USDA and in the progressive agricultural press. Cooperation did mean engaging in collective economic action. However, it also required openness to various elite actors who, in prior decades, had provoked anger, skepticism, and populist rebellion from rural people. Preeminent progressive agriculturalist Kenyon Butterfield characterized this openness to the complementary interconnections of modern life as the “New Day” in American agriculture.10 The dawn of the “New Day” would bring professionals, experts, bankers, managers, and marketers into the fabric of everyday rural life, and it would give local expression to previously distant sources of capital, knowledge, and technology. But the dawn hinged on something more visceral than the esoteric arguments of USDA officials and rural sociologists. As extension officials and county agents labored to create grassroots cooperative institutions in rural communities, they also worked to generate intimacy between rural people and the American state. In this sense, the cooperative mania that engulfed rural America in the 1920s also multiplied the personal, embodied contacts between technocratic expertise and rural people. Even before the farm crisis, efforts to reorganize the American countryside were rooted in recognition of the unique powers of personal contact between the USDA and rural people. In pressing for the Smith-­Lever Act in 1914, advocates of the bill favored a diffuse system of county agents living and working close to local people over “Farmers’ Institutes” and publications by mail, because those older methods lacked the intimacy of “personal contact.”11 During floor debate, Indiana’s representative John Adair expanded on what the genius of that “personal contact” entailed. It “carr[ied] the truths of agriculture and home economics to the door of the farmer” and “ma[de] the field, the garden, the orchard, and even the parlor and the kitchen the classrooms.” In those intimate spaces, county agents would become “the instrumentality through which the colleges, stations, and Department of Agriculture will speak.”12 Not everyone was quite so enamored of government agents probing “parlors and kitchens,” and opponents characterized it as onerous “paternalism.” This paternalism was not just the idea that the CES would treat farmers like children, but, rather,

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that with access to rural homes, government agents might actually supplant rural fathers. The horrifying scenario of rural emasculation structured the concerns of many congressmen during the floor debate. New York’s John Joseph Fitzgerald blasted the idea of “an agent of the Federal Government” being given access to a farmer’s “wife or . . . other female members of his family.” Both support and opposition to the bill hinged on the assumption that the CES, for better or worse, would dramatically change the countryside by multiplying intimate “personal contacts” between government agents and rural people.13 Smith-­Lever passed during a period of relative rural prosperity, but economic problems after World War I only intensified concerns about rural dysfunction and the need for rural reform. Faced with tightening budgets, rural people, and particularly rural women, searched for work in nearby towns. Others fled the farm altogether. Farmers abandoned two million acres of  land by the middle of the decade, and the farm population declined from one-­third to one-­quarter of the nation’s population by 1930.14 The drift to the city had long been a popular source of national anxiety, but the events of the early 1920s inflamed those concerns and framed the economic crisis as a dire catastrophe of social reproduction. Commentators characterized cities as pits of sexual vice and decadence and that view, inflected by Jeffersonian agrarianism and nativist concerns about the nation’s racial composition, suggested that urban industrialism was driving American civilization to a “race suicide.” As the white middle class left the countryside for professional and managerial employment in the crowded, sterile city, it would also abandon its reproductive prowess and the source of its manly vigor.15 In response to the decennial census in September of 1920, which revealed that a majority of the nation no longer resided in rural areas, journalist Frederic J. Haskin explicitly tied the nation’s agricultural and racial futures. He warned the readers of his regular Los Angeles Times column that in the not-­distant future, the United States would be “a heavily populated country of short dark-­skinned men, living . . . [in] crowded, complicated and enormous cities” unless the government adopted a policy that produced more farms and kept the next rural generation from moving to the city.16 Similarly, a New York Times editorial pondered what rural dysfunctions might be driving the trend: “Evidently something is wrong with country life, its occupations and amusements, when so many cannot resist the ‘lure’ of the city.” The Times editorial articulated a popular imagined geography of social reproduction. Rural spaces were fecund but faltering, while urban spaces pulsed with a vibrant but fruitless sexuality. The choice seemed to be between a series of painful births or a pleasurable sterility.17

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But the farm crisis was also surely evidence that sound farmer-­ businessmen were few and far between. Many elites merely shrugged at the structure of economic incentives that induced a spiraling price situation. The more proximate problems, they reasoned, were ignorance and a lack of organization: farmers failed to understand how to use credit responsibly; to record their expenses properly; to monitor market conditions; to grow crops suitable for both soil and market; to take advantage of premiums, value-­ added crops, and niche marketing possibilities; and, most crucially, to engage in cooperative economic endeavors where it might pad their margins and stabilize prices. In sum, this elite consensus held that far from being farmer-­ businessmen, few Americans knew how to run their farms like businesses. As historian Deborah Fitzgerald argues, the USDA and agricultural progressives doggedly promoted an “industrial ideal” as a tonic for the farm crisis under a variety of deceptive monikers. Extension officials used “efficient,” “progressive,” “businesslike,” and “scientific” nearly interchangeably to describe a prescriptive model of agriculture that privileged capital-­and technology-­ intensive agricultural practices and operationalized “large scale production, specialized machines, standardizations of processes and products, reliance on managerial (rather than artisanal) expertise, and a continued invocation of efficiency as a production mandate.” Small farmers could neither capture the economies of scale to compete with larger operations, nor could they afford the “specialized machines” that minimized production costs. And, without cooperation, farmers could never curb overproduction. Absent cooperation, farms would stay small and they would die small.18 Agricultural marketing cooperatives were among the more popular palliatives the USDA prescribed in response to the farm crisis and agricultural atomization. In 1900, the USDA had recorded only 1,167 agricultural cooperatives nationwide.19 By 1924, 12,000 agricultural marketing cooperatives did business worth $2.5 billion.20 With the pretext of creating economic opportunities for farmers, this “cooperative turn” circulated the industrial ideal among smaller producers and defused radical political challenges to capitalist agriculture. After the passage of the Capper-­Volstead Act in 1922, marketing cooperatives could also issue stocks and bonds to finance mechanization and the hiring of marketing and management experts. The agricultural cooperatives the USDA and the agricultural press envisioned were not so much ways for farmers to band together and defend themselves from predatory firms and the caprices of the market as they were instruments to ease farmers into management models suitable for an economy dominated by large, efficient, highly mechanized firms.21

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Beyond marketing cooperatives, the cooperative turn found its clearest expression in the explosive growth of farm bureaus. Beginning in upstate New York in 1911, county extension agents and chambers of  commerce urged the creation of these voluntary farmers’ associations or clubs. Ultimately, farm bureaus served simultaneously as locally rooted clearinghouses for businesslike and scientific agriculture; cooperative purchasing and marketing organizations; political muscle for the CES, USDA, and progressive agriculturalists; and community organizations for rural people. The Smith-­Lever Act fed the Farm Bureau’s flame with an accelerant of public subsidies. County extension agents with salaries and expenses paid by federal, state, and municipal agencies did the organizational legwork of, and often gave free office space to, the ostensibly private farm bureaus. In return, farm bureaus provided the USDA with grassroots allies and acted as extension’s civil-­society partner. By 1921, membership in the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the national umbrella organization for county and statewide farm bureaus, topped one and a half million, and the AFBF was already the most formidable agricultural lobby in Washington.22 Farm bureaus also gave the USDA and CES consolidated access points for personal contact, further multiplying the advantages of extension’s intimate approach. New York extension official and Farm Bureau pioneer, Maurice Burritt, laid out that case in his book, The County Agent and the Farm Bureau (1922). Farm bureaus, by Burritt’s reckoning, permitted collective economic action, but they also offered a “common meeting ground” where “the farmer and the government’s agricultural employees” could be “brought closer together.” In the Farm Bureau office ordinary farmers, middlemen, financiers, agricultural experts, and county agents would all commingle, “sharing agricultural statistics and records” and “information and advice as to what the best practices and methods” were.23 Burritt’s emphasis on shared social space underscored the trust and intimacy that farm bureaus fostered between farmers and sometimes-­distant sources of capital, knowledge, and technology. That cooperative spirit was also highly infectious beyond the confines of the meeting room. Describing the cooperative activities of a Maryland farmer’s club, B. H. Crocheron noted that the greatest benefit of the organization was to circulate among “the people of the country-­side a concrete example and ideal of fine American citizenship and strong country manhood.” If proximity in cooperative spaces produced the necessary masculine self-­possession, rationality, and comfort with external expertise and capital needed for rural leadership, that exemplar of manhood

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could be translated furthest through the daily interactions between members and the rest of the community.24 To complement the promise of better men, rural cooperative institutions also promised to improve the lot of women and children. The CES, of course, employed female home demonstration agents and invested a third of its resources in its expansive youth club program, 4-­H. Mirroring this strategy, farm bureaus featured “home bureaus” for rural women and a variety of planned activities and events for rural youth. Beyond ensuring the personal contact of cooperation was gender appropriate, such activities provided additional access points, allowing the farm bureau to appeal on multiple fronts, not just to rural patriarchs.25 It also made use of the labor and activism of rural women, who, according to Burritt, gave their “natural” attention to “rural social and community problems and to the needs of children.”26 In deploying this familial rhetoric, advocates of the cooperative turn also appealed to female reformers concerned with the relationship between rural family life and poor rural health. The alleged causes of poor rural health were numerous. Reformers rightly noted that distance to both potable water and medical care in rural communities drove the countryside’s comparatively higher morbidity rates. Reformers also pointed out that rural women engaged in strenuous labor during and immediately after pregnancies, which undoubtedly posed a serious danger to mothers and infants. But they also blamed the consequences of poverty and racism on ignorance and bad “mothering” skills. The ideal of the “farmer’s wife” home economists circulated encouraged rural women to abandon revenue-­ producing labor and focus on domestic consumption, nurturing, health, and aesthetics—­changes that essentially sought to transform farm women into rural analogues of urban, middle-­class housewives.27 As with male-­focused agriculturalists, cooperation’s promise of multiplied personal contacts offered female reformers a number of new tools. Cooperation could mean broader public support for rural infrastructure improvements that shrank distances to clean water and medical care. And women’s rural organizations provided grassroots workers for health campaigns. But social connectivity also enhanced the educational opportunities that female reformers hoped would transform coarse rural women into efficient farmers’ wives. Just as cooperation expanded the reach of the CES’s county agricultural agents, it did the same for their home demonstration agents, who introduced USDA-­approved homemaking techniques into rural communities through public demonstrations, home visits, and clubs. Justifications for cooperative social forms also circled back to the specter of rural-­to-­urban migration. By making rural life more socially fulfilling for

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rural women, reformers could hope to retain the countryside’s most eugenically fit. For the many female rural reformers enamored of eugenics, cooperative institutions provided the means to assess and voluntarily regulate reproductive fitness. Female health reformers organized “Better Baby Contests” at state and county fairs next to stalls featuring livestock produced through better breeding techniques. Such a juxtaposition of standardized animal and human bodies was far from accidental. Rather, those reformers simply transposed to the problem of rural health the grammar, values, and organizational techniques of the industrial ideal.28 Cooperation meant more than merely collective economic action, and it involved a colorful palette of participants with competitive agendas. Across various scales, cooperative institutions claimed the ability to reshape rural practices and bodies through the multiplication of personal contacts, but they often begged a thornier question: to what and whom were rural people being opened and connected? In aiming to better integrate rural communities into the urban industrial order, the cooperative turn issued an ambiguous and open-­ended promise. The cooperative turn’s very personal medium of transmission could open a rift between progressive agriculture’s paternalist and maternalist wings. Urban capital, vital for the business of farming, carried the taint of urban vice, and its uncontrolled diffusion promised to undo the careful work of female rural reformers. The potentially toxic embodied costs of unmediated urban capital became clearest when the stakes were the vulnerable bodies of rural youth brought into intimate contact with the USDA through the burgeoning 4-­H network.

Self-­Care, 4-­H Bodies, and Youth Infrastructure Among the CES’s tools for cultivating grassroots goodwill and trust among rural people, 4-­H was paramount. With the promise of improving the “head, hands, heart, and health” of all 4-­H members, the USDA simultaneously created loyal allies in rural communities, and it habituated future rural citizens to working with and trusting the USDA’s recommendations from childhood. Rural corn and canning clubs originated among turn-­of-­ the-­century educational reformers seeking a means independent of the troubled rural schoolhouse to reach farm children. Agricultural reformers quickly grasped their potential and worked youth clubs into early extension programs. Illinois’s burgeoning corn clubs solved “the problem of arousing an interest in farmers’ institute,” gushed the USDA’s Dick Crosby in 1905: “The farmers were reached through their children, and the interest thus aroused will be handed down to their children’s children.”29 By 1920, 4-­H

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clubs extended the USDA’s reach in rural communities under its four-­leafed clover emblem. Although extension officials trusted that rural youth would demonstrate technical prowess in rural communities, barnyards, and parlors around the nation, they also believed that club work communicated the value of cooperation by producing highly publicized perfect “specimens” of rural living. By cultivating self-­care, 4-­H offered rural America the “perfect boy and girl,” as the Washington Post put it. 4-­H showcased the advantages of intimacy with the USDA and rendered their bodies indispensable parts of the USDA’s governing infrastructure.30 4-­H’s goal, announced O. H. Benson, the USDA agent who headed club work throughout the North, should be “a man for every boy”; for every club member, there should be a corresponding adult—­parent, relative, or neighbor—­whose interest, alliance, and affection would be won over to the USDA’s cause. Every club member, simply by enrolling, became “a demonstrator for the State and the United States Department of Agriculture . . . the cooperator is a man who will agree to cooperate with the boy and the State and Government authorities in getting the best possible results from this club work.”31 Earlie Cleveland of Decatur, Mississippi, reported to the USDA that his previously indifferent father was now invested in the practices of scientific agriculture. Papa Cleveland could be found “hustling Round for seed corn” to help his son improve his contest acre of corn. At other times, alliance with the USDA pitted rural children against their parents. Perry T. Dill of  Taylor, South Carolina, sent the USDA his father’s address so that they could mail the stubborn patriarch literature. Paul Burtner of Harrisonburg, Virginia, reported to the USDA that his father “was simply not on our side,” but the boy was “hopeful of winning him over.”32 In these cases, the USDA created persistent allies inside rural homes. American entry into World War I, of course, increased both the value and quantity of those allies, as 4-­H members participated in wartime food production campaigns. County agents encouraged rural youth to direct their patriotism into home gardening and canning projects. 4-­H enrollments swelled to nearly two million a year. The end of lavish wartime appropriations, however, required the CES to shed its temporary wartime agents. Many temporary agents had done shoddy work and, in fact, had overextended the club network beyond what it could accommodate. As the farm crisis intensified into the 1920s, the mandate for greater efficiency in extension work spurred the USDA to launch a “standardization” campaign. The USDA promulgated basic rules governing 4-­H clubs and CES agents that provided a USDA charter for clubs that reached a minimum enrollment

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of youth ten to twenty years in age, met once a month, and achieved basic pedagogic goals. The campaign also encouraged clubs to adopt a unified set of symbols and mottos: the 4-­H name itself, the clover symbol, the motto “making the best better,” and, after 1927, the national 4-­H pledge: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my club, my community, and my country.” As a result of the standardization campaign, 4-­H ended the decade with smaller enrollments than during wartime—­around 800,000 members in 1930—­but it was also much better coordinated with the national extension program and institutions of the cooperative turn.33 4-­H’s close relationship to the local farm bureau ensured members had access to the capital needed to conduct projects. For children from wealthier families, the expenses of fertilizer, cloth, or a purebred hog were manageable, but poorer farm families hesitated to divert money to an untested educational project. Extension agents worked through the Farm Bureau to convince local businesspeople and bankers to provide “loans at reasonable interest rates directly to club members.”34 Extension officials argued that credit services offered businesses free publicity, strengthened their standing in the community, and habituated the youth of their communities to doing business with them. Bankers heeded the call. In 1920 alone, bankers provided over $1.6 million in loans to club members.35 By 1925, the idea that country banks should be a primary source of capital for club projects was so well institutionalized that industry publications identified support for club work as a foundational element for agricultural finance departments.36 The USDA’s insistence that club members generate exhaustive records of everything they did convinced the business community of 4-­H’s value. Record keeping, after all, allowed a bank or investor to assess the soundness of a farmer’s operation. The proliferation of records, ledgers, scorecards, and account books encouraged businesslike agriculture, and they provided a visceral conduit between club members, businessmen, and USDA officials. Of course, record keeping touched a variety of practices that were not explicitly concerned with production for the market. For girls, the ultimate product of a given project, like for sewing or meal planning, was usually intended for domestic use, and, in the case of health projects, the product was a member’s own body. As one Arizona girl explained, “efficiency [was] taught in keeping records.”37 And efficiency, always assessed through objective quantifiable metrics club organizers provided, applied to all elements of rural life, not merely agricultural production. The CES proffered scorecards covering quantifiable standards for corn, oats, wheat, dresses,

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canning, interior decorating, nutrition, club organization and leadership, parliamentary procedure, the aesthetics of human and animal bodies, and even the frequency of bowel movements (at least once every day, preferably in the morning). The ubiquity of records and scoring permitted a variety of useful comparisons—­the member to the ideal, the member to her peers, and the member to her past and future self. Through these comparisons and the practices of self-­care they enabled, 4-­H members could track individual and collective progress. As Hallie Hughes, a West Virginia club leader, explained, “The individual self must be studied, analyzed and trained. . . . Self management must be practiced.” 4-­H records could function as a crucial technology of “self management” by permitting the intensive study, analysis, and training of bodies.38 This kind of self-­scoring formed the foundation of 4-­H’s most publicized and publicly esteemed activity: health contests. Parallel to the rural “maternal health” initiatives of the Sheppard-­Towner Act (1921), club experts recognized that 4-­H health projects could generate new connections among medical professionals, maternalist activists, extension officials, and rural people. 4-­H’s health-­improving potential appealed to the USDA because it provided a compelling advertisement for the broader extension program, even as it knit the extension program into the maternalist networks that mobilized, financed, and maintained rural medical and nursing efforts. Gertrude Warren, a club specialist at the USDA, urged county extension and home economics agents to concentrate on health promotion work in 4-­H. “In conferences, talks in public, and in publicity articles, emphasize ways in which the health of club members is being looked after through club works,” Warren wrote in a manual on girls’ club work in 1925. By the end of the decade, most states featured comprehensive 4-­H health programs, including local health examinations, sustained health education, and county and statewide health contests. Doctors and nurses examined club members at county and state fairs, judged them according to a standardized scorecard, deducted points for “defects,” and selected a winning boy and girl as a desirable “specimen.” Much like “Better Baby Contests” organized by Sheppard-­Towner nurses, 4-­H health contests transposed the logics of industrial agriculture and livestock breeding to human bodies by scrutinizing them as standardized, interchangeable, and marketable commodities. The effectiveness of 4-­H health programs hinged on the regular use of the health “scorecard”—­a device that permitted both medical professionals and club members to scrutinize bodies and quantify their copious “defects.” The Iowa 4-­H scorecard, for example, was composed of over seventy particular metrics, covering categories as diverse as the flushness of the lips,

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the symmetry of “sex characteristics,” the shape and position of ears, and the quality of posture. Although the scorecard covered health dimensions influenced by habit and behavior, it also deducted points for features outside of the youth’s control—­the presence of “birth marks,” flat feet, or an “abnormally shape[d]” skull. A full 13 percent of the total score was governed by an entirely subjective assessment of attractiveness called “general impressions.”39 “Health improvement” awards encouraged all participants, even those who were initially infirm or sickly, to have “some defects corrected [and] bring up her standing for next year.”40 Examinations enabled medical authorities to quantify both the defects and potentials of 4-­H bodies, and it generated valuable bodily knowledge that could be mustered into personal or cooperative health activities executed over the course of months. Media presented 4-­H health champions as the “healthy specimens” of a wholesome, gender-­appropriate middle-­class white rural lifestyle.41 4-­H health competitions received coverage in local, regional, and even national newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Daily Tribune.42 Newspaper accounts referenced the youths’ attractiveness and fitness and provided photographic evidence with the articles. An account of the 1928 National 4-­H Health Competition, for example, lauded champion Thelma Svarstad of South Dakota for her “blond, clear skinned” appearance, while the Times of Alden, Iowa, celebrated Tennessee’s Marguerite Martin as the “ideal of perfect health.”43 These media accounts also emphasized that this attractiveness was a natural outcome of a wholesome rural lifestyle, one in which boys and girls played their accepted parts. For boys, this meant a robust physique gained from helping out on the farm, playing on athletic teams, or hiking in the woods. For girls, it meant naturally rosy cheeks and no makeup, helping mother in the kitchen, and getting their “beauty sleep.” Florence Smock of Florida, the 1929 National 4-­H Health Champion, “use[d] no rouge nor lipstick but ha[d] rosy cheeks” and, despite going on a “few dates,” was always in bed by nine o’clock. Harold Deatline, the boys’ champion, had “broad shoulders and [was] strong muscled because of ‘plenty of good, hard work’ on his father’s farm.” While Smock enjoyed dancing, Deatline reported that he did not “care for dancing or ‘gadding about.’ For recreation he [went] hunting and fishing sometimes.”44 By the end of the decade, 4-­H offered health projects and examinations to rural youth around the nation. A 1931 American Medical Association survey reported that 40 percent of all responding county medical associations cooperated with 4-­H to conduct medical examinations.45 By 1930, more than 100,000 youth were annually enrolled around the nation in 4-­H health

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projects and examinations.46 Media accounts focused on the pristine winners of health competitions, but ignored the copious supply of “defective” contest losers and the tens of thousands of nonwhite 4-­H’ers who were systematically excluded from competing. Throughout the South, health promotion ranked among the highest priorities for the African American extension services. Nearly 20 percent of all 4-­H’ers in the South were African American, and they also regularly received lessons in hygiene and health from black county agents. In the West, the extension service considered health promotion an important component of work with “Mexican” and “Indian” girls. Yet only white 4-­H’ers were permitted to compete in health competitions at the National 4-­H Congress.47 Nor did media accounts rhapsodize about perfect nonwhite bodies produced through club work. Instead, media descriptions frequently conflated whiteness and attractiveness when lauding the pristine skin and hair of winners. The publicity associated with 4-­H health competitions circulated the ideal 4-­H body as white and, simultaneously, suggested that state experts, in cooperation with a well-­ordered farm home, could produce this perfected white body. Nostalgic agrarianism, whiteness, and the gendered aesthetics of normal bodies intersected in public celebrations of the intimate state’s great bodily harvest.

The Capper-­Ketcham Act of 1928 and the Politics of the Publicized 4-­H Body Although club experts like Gertrude Warren advised county and home demonstration agents to advertise the benefits of 4-­H health work, publicity for National 4-­H Health Champions was handled by Guy Noble, the managing director of the National Committee for Boys’ and Girls’ Club Work (the National Committee). Formed in 1921 with the USDA’s encouragement and operated out of office space provided by the AFBF, the National Committee raised money from the business community to support club work. Like his associates at the USDA, Guy Noble recognized the value of equating 4-­H with wholesome, white rural youth and he regularly used that rhetorical figure in publicity. By the end of the decade, that publicity had garnered the National Committee substantial support from firms interested in reaching rural consumers. Noble’s activities brought him the political clout necessary to engineer a lobbying campaign for 4-­H and the extension service. That lobbying campaign ultimately brought Noble and several 4-­H members to the floor of the United States Senate, where healthy 4-­H’ers continued to symbolize the embodied benefits the intimate state offered to rural Americans.

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Guy Noble more aggressively publicized 4-­H than anyone in the USDA, and he had little patience for the deliberate pace of bureaucrats. In January of 1925, Noble used advertisements in the national AFBF newsletter to launch a 4-­H “one million members” drive without first consulting the USDA.48 The move earned him a polite but decisive letter from C. B. Smith, pointing out that the CES could not accommodate so many members.49 Privately, CES director Clyde W. Warburton fumed to Smith about Noble’s “aggressive” behavior, complaining that his scheme would so overtax the extension service it would be “one of the worst things that could possibly happen to club work.” Was “boys’ and girls’ club work . . . being directed by the National Committee or by the extension service of the De­ partment and the State colleges of agriculture?” Warburton wondered.50 Noble’s more “aggressive” approach reflected, in part, an obvious pecuniary interest. Extension officials at the USDA had the luxury of a permanent, reliable congressional appropriation. The National Committee, however, depended on constant donations that might dry up at any moment and leave Noble unemployed. While the nuts and bolts of club work could survive on money from the CES and state sources, the big-­ticket events the National Committee favored—­an elaborate national meeting and a variety of lavish prizes—­required contributions from urban firms. Noble’s aggressive approach reaped greater financial security for his organization. Mail-­order titan Montgomery Ward began sponsoring national club awards through the National Committee in 1922, and, in 1925, Sears sponsored a contest to promote “the use of mail-­order catalogues.” Noble even arranged to have attendees of the National 4-­H Club Congress tour the offices of the major mail-­order firms in Chicago.51 Smaller firms took the less expensive route of advertising in the National Boys and Girls Club News, the monthly magazine Noble published and circulated to club leaders and members free of charge. Whether large or small, all these businesses hoped to reach rural consumers through the 4-­H clover. Through the National Committee, businesses could market directly to club members in advertisements and at sponsored events, and they could win the affection of rural people by sponsoring the emblem of healthy rural living. Noble’s publicity strategy placed the health benefits of 4-­H and wholesome rural living front and center. A 1925 article in the Washington Post, based on Noble’s press release, announced that alongside “grand champion steers, prize porkers, sheared sheep, high-­stepping horses” were “the healthiest boy and girl in the United States . . . selected in very much the same manner. . . . Expert judges looked them over, poked them, punched them and put them through their paces.” Female health champion Inez

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Harden, the article continued, was a “beauty,” whose “splendid body” was complemented by “so sunny a disposition.” The article also described the “perfect” body of her male counterpart, Coe Emens: “His eyes, ears, nose and throat are perfect, netting him a total of fourteen points. His head is perfect, too, as are his hair, his scalp, his face, neck, chest, back, abdomen, arms, hands, legs, feet, posture, gait, muscles and nerves. . . . His clean, lean body netted him two more points, and the perfection of his measurements netted him seven.” The author of the article was also duly impressed with how Coe dealt with “being the most perfect specimen of boyhood,” modesty the author attached to his masculine countenance. The article included a lengthy quotation from Noble, concluding, “As a result of the work done by the committee [the National Committee], farm boys and girls are better farmers, are better physically and the girls are better housewives.”52 Warburton was livid about the Post article, though not because the article bestialized farm youth. Rather, Warburton charged that the article had neglected to mention the USDA’s role in club work. Extension officials complained that whatever the benefits derived from the National Committee, Noble tended to “commercialize” club work and to induce confusion among the public about 4-­H’s public status.53 Despite these misgivings, there was little Warburton could do about Noble’s excesses. Noble enjoyed the backing and financial support of both the AFBF and influential farm-­state politicians like Arthur Capper. Even as the conflict between Noble and the USDA unfolded, Noble was in the process of launching a lobbying campaign to increase the CES’s federal appropriation, money that both the USDA and the Land Grant College Association (LGCA) craved.54 As early as 1921, Noble began to engineer support for an increased federal appropriation. He began by seeking and then circulating supportive resolutions from the AFBF, the LGCA, and a variety of industry organizations. Following a meeting of the executive committee of the LGCA in November of 1926, Noble believed that he had sufficient support from the LGCA to begin to formulate specific legislation. Noble then “initiated” the legislative process by coordinating between the LGCA, Kansas senator Arthur Capper, and Michigan representative John Ketcham and by circulating the copious private support for the legislation he had gathered over the past six years.55 By 1927, Noble had amassed an impressive display of support for legislation expanding club work. Nineteen different national organizations, including the AFBF, National Grange, the American Bankers Association, American Home Economics Association, and the National Dairy Council; forty-­five state associations; and scores of prominent individuals pledged

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support for the Capper-­Ketcham Bill.56 “The National Grange favors every movement that will extend the usefulness of boys’ and girls’ club work,” explained a resolution of the Grange’s executive committee. “We favor the Capper-­Ketcham Bill recently introduced into Congress to provide additional funds for this class of extension work.”57 By 1927, two separate ideas—­an expansion of club work and a general expansion of extension—­became conflated in a single piece of legislation, the Capper-­Ketcham Act, which, if passed, would double federal appropriations to the CES. A memo circulated by Noble described the legislation as the first step in a plan to place a club agent in every county. Clyde Warburton and the USDA, however, supported the legislation because it allowed, in broad language, a general expansion of extension, only some of which would be dedicated to club work. In his public testimony on the legislation, Warburton consistently steered clear of committing the department to placing a club agent in every county and instead argued that the funds would be split between club agents, home demonstration agents, and agricultural agents. Capper and Ketcham, for their parts, gave statements that only vaguely supported Noble’s intent. Although the legislation explicitly mentioned club work, it contained no specific language to mandate any spending, instead leaving it up to the department’s discretion. When the legislation was first introduced in 1927, it was passed unanimously out of the House, but it stalled in the Senate. In 1928, Capper and Ketcham reintroduced the legislation with only minor changes.58 Despite Warburton’s reluctance to view the legislation as exclusively directed toward club work, Noble initially controlled the terms of the debate on Capper-­Ketcham. Noble’s lobbying proved so effective that the public often assumed that the legislation was narrowly tailored to support club work and club work alone. To hammer his point home, Noble brought club participants to testify before both Senate and House committees. Club members Viola Yoder of Cumberland, Maryland, and John Visny of Newtown, Connecticut, praised 4-­H to the Senate committee. Yoder stressed that 4-­H club work had transformed her family’s home and improved her person through better nutrition. 4-­H had “brought [her] closer to her parents and to [her] home.” In addition to imparting him with valuable knowledge, 4-­H had entirely changed Visny’s attitude toward life on the farm. “I know that if I had my choice to start all over again,” Visny announced, “I should want to be born and brought up on a farm, but the most important part of that would be that I be granted an opportunity to take part in 4-­H club activities.” Other rural youth, without that fortune, would abandon

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the countryside and make the slow drift to “overcrowded cities.” Mrs. D. B. Phillips, a club leader from Forestville, Ohio, also called to testify, expanded on Visny’s point. “We do not want to keep everyone of our boys and girls on the farm,” she explained. “We want to keep our best boys and girls on the farm, and then you may have the rest of them out in the city.”59 Even as the complexities of  the legislative process shaped the bill, the pub­­ lic image its supporters presented coalesced around the image of robustly healthy, wholesome rural youth, an image that crystallized the benefits of intimacy with the state. A moment of serendipitous theater brought this rhetorical strategy into focus. As the Senate committee prepared to adjourn, Alabama senator James Heflin asked how many members of the committee were raised on the farm. After most of the members volunteered that they had been and Senator Capper prepared again to adjourn, Mrs. Phillips interjected. Asserting her maternal authority, she asked those who had been raised on the farm to stand so that the audience could “view them.” When they did so, she offered her appraisal: “Well that is fine. But I would like to remark one thing, that the farm boys are the best looking members of the committee.” The committee shortly thereafter voted unanimously to report the bill to the Senate.60 Observers may have assented to healthy intimacy between rural youth and the state through 4-­H, but they were less certain about how wholesome the National Committee was, as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) soon made clear. The GFWC complained that the legislation would allow the USDA to continue to neglect home demonstration work, farmwomen, and rural girls. Speaking on behalf of the GFWC, President Mary Belle King Sherman explained to the House committee that even though 100,000 more girls than boys were enrolled in 4-­H, male agricultural and club agents outnumbered female home demonstration and club agents by a considerable margin. This resulted, she continued, in the distressing “tendency under men agents to divert girls from home making to the raising of baby beef, pigs, and field crops for purely commercial ends.” This diversion led to both the overproduction of agricultural commodities and a neglect of the rural home. To remedy the situation, Sherman suggested that the legislation should be amended to ensure that the CES hire “equal numbers” of home demonstration and agricultural agents.61 Sherman attacked the National Committee by arguing that that it introduced an unsavory, “outside” element to 4-­H and thus threatened to make such intimate contact with the state corrupt and untoward. Intimacy, in this view, was a binary relationship between the government and youth, not to

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be sullied by urban businessmen. The tendency to enroll girls in agricultural projects was “greatly emphasized,” Sherman argued, “by the policy of the national committee on boys’ and girls’ clubs.” While Sherman had no qualms with 4-­H, she emphasized that farm girls needed the direction of women and that the legislation needed to focus not just on the promotion of club work, but on a broader strengthening of home economics work. In the popular press, she was more explicit. Sherman told the Atlanta Constitution that the National Committee’s “tamper[ing]” encouraged overproduction and gendered disorder. She demanded “to know why the 4-­H clubs [were] being tampered with by an outside committee with the full sanction of the extension heads at Washington. [The GFCW] hopes that Congress will inquire in these matters at an early date and clean up the situation.”62 By focusing on rural girls and dangers to the rural home, Sherman dramatized her case for an expansion of home demonstration agents and appropriated for her own ends Noble’s rhetorical focus on the bodies of rural youth. The GFWC approved of club work, but it “favor[ed] the girls being under women,” Mrs. John S. Sippel of the Maryland GFWC affiliate testified to the House committee.63 The image of men directing vulnerable rural girls evoked gendered disarray and it portrayed extension as a threat to rural households. The GFWC portrayed the National Committee as a nefarious, sinister organization, a far cry from the image Noble promoted of a group of public-­minded businessmen cooperating to keep the fittest youth on farms. They “tampered” with 4-­H, apparently indifferent to the potential damage wrought by their producer mindset to farm girls, country homes, and rural communities. In that narrative, the commercial interests the National Committee represented were willing to exploit rural girls and place them in the care of men—­an arrangement as inappropriate as it was ineffective. “What does a man know about teaching a girl home economics?” Representative James Aswell of Louisiana, the GFWC’s champion in the House, asked Clyde Warburton. If Guy Noble had hoped to capitalize on the highly publicized intimacy with the state 4-­H generated, Sherman and her allies demonstrated that the gendered complexities of that strategy could also cut against his schemes.64 The resolution of the debate on Capper-­Ketcham both vindicated and indicted Noble’s chosen rhetorical strategy of promoting the perfected bodies of rural youth. The Senate and House committees adopted the GFWC amendment providing for a “just and fair” distribution of funding between male and female extension workers. The Coolidge administration, however,

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signaled that it would veto the legislation and encouraged Congress to pare down the price tag. The version of the bill presented to the president eliminated nearly $5.5 million in appropriation authorizations from the original legislation, but it did secure an increase of $1.5 million in funding for extension and left open the possibility that later congresses would revisit the issue. Calvin Coolidge signed Capper-­Ketcham into law on May 22, 1928. Noble proclaimed the lobbying campaign a singular success and issued a series of letters thanking his various supporters for their contributions to the effort.65 But the reality behind Noble’s public words was surely more mixed. The GFWC’s amendment and the Coolidge administration’s threat of veto had diluted Noble’s vision of thousands of new club agents and had, instead, strengthened the influence of home economics within the CES. More importantly, the debate surrounding Capper-­Ketcham had accentuated ways in which advertising 4-­H through the bodies of rural youth made Noble’s private work suspect and potentially dangerous. If 4-­H was to produce robust rural bodies, and through them to extend the intimate state’s infrastructure, the USDA would need to temper Noble and the urban businesses he represented.

Capper-­Ketcham was just the beginning of Noble’s fight with the USDA. In 1930, Noble unilaterally approved a girls’ outfit arranging contest sponsored by the Chicago Mail Order Company that featured a grand prize of a trip to Paris. An enraged Gertrude Warren penned a searing memo to C. B. Smith. Noble’s “Style Revue” promoted the dangerous idea that learning proper homemaking methods was less important than prevailing in a subjective, frivolous outfit arranging contest. Echoing Mary King Belle Sherman’s characterization of the National Committee as subverting appropriate gender roles, Warren blasted Noble’s publicity for its use of titillating “ ‘bathing beach’ style headlines” that made rural girls the objects of urban lust, thus multiplying precisely the sorts of desire 4-­H was intended to stave off. Nor was the problem confined to the “Style Revue.” “Our relationship with business interests is being brought to the attention of Congress,” she warned, and an “outside agency” manipulating club work would “jeopar­ dize the whole movement.”66 Smith and Warburton took Warren’s complaint seriously, and they spent the next decade struggling to bring Noble under the USDA’s control—­a struggle that led in 1939 to the criminalization of use of the 4-­H name and emblem without USDA authorization.67 What made 4-­H such a sturdy infrastructure that Warren, Smith, and Warburton would, to secure it, willingly imperil the USDA’s relationship

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with the National Committee and the political and financial capital it represented? 4-­H’ers simultaneously advertised capitalist agriculture and the authority of state actors, often using one as proof of the other. They did so through numerous quotidian acts distributed across realms both public and private: growing corn, raising pigs, canning tomatoes, and sewing dresses; in parlors and barns; and in county fairs, public rallies, and newspaper articles. These simple acts—­guided by technocratic authority, funded by private capital, and executed by the bodies of rural youth—­inserted the USDA (and its inconstant allies) into the everyday fabric of countless rural communities, mustering intimacy and personal contact in service to state-­directed political and economic development. The USDA recognized that vigorous young bodies testified to its wisdom and trustworthiness, and that by cultivating, claiming, and mobilizing those bodies they could also expand governing capabilities in rural America. This was, as historians typically describe it, state building. But the product of these actions was not a formal agency or bureaucracy. It was, instead, a diffuse ideological acceptance of the appropriate contours of the state. It was a normalized relationship among rural subjects, technocratic authority, and capital—­a broad cultural consensus about how those three elements could safely interface for the healthy benefit of all. The tug-­of-­war between the USDA and the National Committee clarified the stakes and fragility of that consensus. Noble was an “outside” force. His ac­­ tions threatened the viability of the intimate state by rendering its bound­ aries too porous. He sold access to youthful rural bodies and imported urban corruption to rural homes. Noble used a public infrastructure for an untoward, private end. Warren, Smith, and Warburton might countenance such behavior if the infrastructure in question were merely a road to Chicago. They were less willing to permit their road to the future to be so abused. Historians of the postwar United States increasingly view the American nation-­state as an imperial formation operating globally through a series of intertwining military, economic, cultural, and political networks that trouble conventional distinctions between public and private, state and civil, global and local. The globalization of American empire has been inseparable from the proliferation of local strategies of governance that produce, condition, and mobilize the private, the intimate, and the somatic—­often with global geopolitical implications. This same apparatus vigorously exported 4-­H clubs to battlegrounds in the global Cold War—­Korea, Latin America, Cuba, and Vietnam among others—­just as a second wave of international 4-­H now targets pockets of underdevelopment throughout the global South. As this essay argues, to understand this postwar proliferation of intimate governance we need new genealogies that look anew to the

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history of American state formation. These new genealogies may take as a guiding principle that in the American past, the production of the state was always also the production of the intimate.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

National 4-­H Council, “Linking Partners from Across the World,” accessed Decem­ ber 3, 2010, http://www.4-­h.org/uploadedFiles/About_Folder/Global/Global%20 PPT%20Dec.%202010.pptx. See Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-­H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Abdou Maliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannes­ burg,” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407–­29. Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” Archives Européennes de So­ ciologie 25 (1984): 113. See also William Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–­72, and the roundtable responses in American Historical Review 115 (June 2010): 766–­800. Philip Gorski, “Mann’s Theory of Ideological Power: Sources, Applications and Elab­ orations,” in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann, ed. John A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122–­23. Ibid., 130 (emphasis mine). In particular, my thinking has been shaped by two strands of scholarship: by Ni­ kolas Rose and Peter Miller’s “governmentality studies,” a hybridization of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Bruno Latour’s “actor-­network-­theory”; and by feminist and queer scholars of political intimacy such as Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Ann Stoler. For Michel Foucault’s major writings on biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990); Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–­1978 (New York: Picador, 2009); and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979 (New York: Picador, 2010). For governmentality studies, see Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social, and Personal Life (London: Polity, 2008). For foundational scholarship on political intimacies, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). I regard the boundary between state and civil as a historically constituted, permeable, and fluid political effect, what political theorist Timothy Mitchell calls “the state effect.” See Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/ Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 1999), 76–­97.

Youth as Infrastructure  /  205 9.

See Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America’s New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Elizabeth Sanders, The Roots of Re­ form: Farmers, Workers, and the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovations in Executive Agencies, 1862–­1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 2000); Adam Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Insti­ tutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 10. Kenyon L. Butterfield, The Farmer and the New Day (New York: Macmillan, 1919). 11. Frank Lever, Congressional Record (CR), 63–­62, 1997. 12. John Adair, CR, 2067–­68. 13. John Joseph Fitzgerald, CR, 2000. 14. Douglas Hurt, Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century (Chi­ cago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 43–­47; and Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 19–­20. 15. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–­1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Laura Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–­1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 16. Frederick J. Haskin, “Nation Gets Cosmopolitan,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1920, 35. 17. “The Drift to the City,” New York Times, October 2, 1920. 18. Fitzgerald, CR, 23. 19. Claud Scroggs, “Historical Highlights,” in Agricultural Cooperation, ed. Martin Abra­ hamsen and Claud L. Scroggs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), 21. 20. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in Amer­ ica, 1900–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 155. 21. See Donald A. Frederick, “Antitrust Status of Farmer Cooperatives: The Story of the Capper-­Volstead Act,” Cooperative Information Report 59 (September 2002): i–­361; and J. C. Thompson, “Agricultural Co-­Operatives in the United States: Origin and Current Status,” Agricultural Administration 11 (September 1982): 1–­22. 22. Keller, Regulating a New Economy, 152. 23. Maurice Chase Burritt, The County Agent and the Farm Bureau (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 190–­91. 24. B. H. Crocheron, “A Real Farmers’ Club,” Journal of Agriculture 4, no. 4 (1917): 207. 25. See Nancy Berlage, “Organizing the Farm Bureau: Family, Community, and Profes­ sionals, 1914–­1928,” Agricultural History 75, no. 4 (2001): 406–­37. 26. Burritt, County Agent and the Farm Bureau, 228. 27. On the “farmer’s wife,” see Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–­1963 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For transformations in rural women’s labor, see Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–­1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 28. See Laura Lovett, “ ‘Fitter Families for Future Firesides’: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics,” Public Historian 29, no. 3 (2007): 69–­85. 29. Dick Crosby, “Boys’ Agricultural Clubs,” in Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1904 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905), 489–­90.

206  /  Gabriel N. Rosenberg 30. “The Perfect Boy and Girl,” Washington Post, February 8, 1925, SM3. 31. O. H. Benson and Gertrude Warren, “Organization and Results of Boys’ and Girls’ Club Work” (1918), 22–­23, in unmarked folder, box 3a, 4-­H Extension Service Col­ lection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 32. “Extracts from Letters of Boys’ Corn Club Members” (1912), “Records of Develop­ ment of Early Phases of Development” folder, Box 1, 4-­H Extension Service Collec­ tion, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 33. See Rosenberg, Breeding the Future, 54–­87. 34. C. B. Smith, “How Banks Can Cooperate in Agricultural Extension Work” (1919), 7, in “Significant Talks and Addresses on 4-­H Club Work, Volume 1: 1904–­1929” folder, Box 4, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 35. G. L. Noble, untitled article in The Banker Farmer (1921), in “4-­H Early Development (Folder 2)” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 36. See R. A. Ward, The Bank Agricultural Department (New York: Bankers Publishing Company, 1923); or R. A. Ward, “Banking Service in the Rural Community,” Bankers Magazine, November 1921, 845–­49. 37. Caroline Eyring, “My Experiences as a Local Club Leader,” in A. B. Ballantyne, “1927 Annual Report, Supervisional and Boys’ and Girls’ 4-­H Club Work, State of Arizona” (1927), Records of Arizona Extension Service, Special Collections, University of Ari­ zona Library, Tucson. H Club Camp, 38. Hallie Hughes, “Self Management” (1931), 1, in “National 4-­ June 17–­23” folder, Box 33, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 39. “Iowa Health Score Card,” in 1924 Annual Report (1924), 4-­H Series, Special Col­ lections, Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames. 40. “Excerpts from County Agent Reports,” in 1927 Annual Report (1927), 4-­H Series, Special Collections, Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames; “Health, a Definite Part of Club Program,” in 1928 Annual Report (1928), 4-­H Series, Special Collections, Parks Library, Iowa State University, Ames. 41. “Pick Healthy Specimens of Boys and Girls,” Oelwein Daily Register, December 3, 1924, 1A. 42. For examples, see “The Perfect Boy and Girl,” Washington Post, February 8, 1925, SM3; “Huskiest Farm Boy Is a Kentucky Lad,” New York Times, December 1, 1926, 16; “Dakota Girl, 17, Wins National Health Contest,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 5, 1928, 14; “South Dakota Girl, Michigan Boy Chosen Nation’s Healthiest in Chicago Contest,” New York Times, December 5, 1928, 4; “Healthiest Boy and Girl Picked,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1928, 1. 43. “So. Dakota Girl Gets 99 Rating in Health Tests,” Waterloo Evening Courier, Decem­ ber 5, 1928, 9; “America’s Healthiest Girl,” Alden Times, May 24, 1924, 2. 44. “Floridan Is Healthiest Girl in U.S.,” Mason City Globe-­Gazette, December 4, 1929, 5. 45. W. W. Bauer, “Contesting for Better Health” (1933), in “1933 Club Congress” folder, Box 1, 4-­H Service Committee Program Files, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 46. For health club enrollments see the statistical compilations found in “Statistics” folder, Box 16a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 47. For exclusion of nonwhite 4-­H’ers from national events, see Carmen V. Harris, “States’ Rights, Federal Bureaucrats, and Segregated 4-­H Camps in the United States, 1927–­1969,” Journal of African American History 93 (Summer 2008): 362–­88.

Youth as Infrastructure  /  207 48. Letter, Noble to Smith, January 2, 1925, Box 1a, in “4-­H Goals” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. See also the announcement in the National Boys and Girls Club News, January 10, 1925, in “National 4-­H Club News 1924–­1935” folder, Box 13, 4-­H Service Committee Program Files, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 49. Letter, Smith to Noble, January 10, 1925 and Telegram, Smith to Noble, January 5, 1925, in “4-­H Goals” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, Na­ tional Archives–­College Park. 50. Letter, William M. Jardine to H. L. Russell, April 28, 1925; Letter, Warburton to Smith, February 18, 1925; Letter, Smith to Warburton, February 20, 1925, “4-­H Goals” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 51. “Swift Company Prize Memo” (1924), in “1924 Club Congress” folder, Box 1, 4-­H Service Committee Program Files, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. See also “Armour Gives to State Livestock Champs,” National Boys and Girls Club News, Janu­ ary 10, 1925; “Program of Wilson & Co.,” National Boys and Girls Club News, Janu­ ary 10, 1925; “Grain Marketing Company Aids Corn Champs,” National Boys and Girls Club News, January 10, 1925; and “National State and Local Prizes Offered Poultry Club Members,” National Boys and Girls Club News, August 20, 1929, in “National 4-­H Club News, 1924–­1935” folder, Box 13, 4-­H Service Committee Program Files, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 52. “The Perfect Boy and Girl,” Washington Post, February 8, 1925, SM3. 53. Letter, Warburton to Noble, February 27, 1925; Letter, Noble to Warburton, March 3, 1925; Letter, Warburton to Directors of Extension, March 10, 1925, in “4-­H Service Com. & Ext. Rel.” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. See collected responses of the state directors in the same folder. See also discussion of the article in correspondence between Warburton and Smith in “4-­H Goals” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 54. See statement by William Jardine, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, Seventieth Congress, First Session on S. 1285 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1928), 3–­5. 55. See Mary Belle King Sherman, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States House of Representatives, Seventieth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 6074 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 24; and Letter, Noble to T. T. Martin, April 7, 1932, in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1c, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 56. See statements of support collected by Noble in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1c, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 57. Resolution of the National Grange in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1c, 4-­H Ex­ tension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. See also Oscar G. Mayer, Letter to House Committee Members, February 1, 1927, and Statement by National Swine Growers Association (1927?) in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1c, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 58. See statement of Chester H. Gray, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, Seventieth Congress, First Session on S. 1285 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1928), 13–­15. 59. Statements of Viola Yoder, John Visny, D. B. Phillips, and Guy Noble, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 23, 24–­26, 28–­30, 30–­35.

208  /  Gabriel N. Rosenberg 60. Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States Senate, 35–­36. 61. Mary Belle King Sherman, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States House of Representatives, 23. 62. “Sherman Asks Wider Farm Extension Law at Meeting,” Atlanta Constitution,  Janu­­ ary 10, 1928; and Mary Belle King Sherman, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States House of Representatives, 23–­24. 63. Statement of Mrs. John S. Sippel, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States House of Representatives, 29. 64. James Aswell, Hearing before the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, United States House of Representatives, 4. 65. See, for examples, Letter, Noble to R. A. Pearson, May 28, 1928; Letter, Noble to Arthur Capper, May 28, 1928; Letter, Noble to John Ketcham, May 28, 1928, in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1c, 4-­H Extension Service Collection, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 66. Memo, Gertrude Warren to Clarence Smith, March 20, 1930, 1–­3 in “4-­H Service Com. & Ext. Rel,” in “Capper-­Ketchum” folder, Box 1a, 4-­H Extension Service Collec­ tion, RG33, National Archives–­College Park. 67. Rosenberg, The 4-­H Harvest, 150–­51.

E ig h t

Good Citizens of a World Power: Postwar Reconfigurations of the Obligation to Give E lisabet h S . C le m e n s

In 1943, more than 80 percent of Americans surveyed by George Gallup reported that they had donated to the American Red Cross during the past year.1 Other war charities benefited from elevated levels of giving, and at the same time, citizens purchased war bonds in large numbers. Although all these contributions were understood as “voluntary,” the pressures to give were often intense. The scale of citizen support for the war exemplified the consolidation of a strong civic culture in which giving, loaning, and volunteering were powerful enactments of citizenship. Linked to the nationalization of economic activity and the power of a revered wartime president, this pattern of citizen engagement was a formidable political resource. But by 1946, this regime of wartime solidarity expressed through civic benevolence was already at risk. The American Red Cross commissioned another confidential poll from George Gallup. This time they found that support had fallen dramatically, particularly among those who had direct ties to someone serving overseas. Troubling as this discontent among veterans and their families was to the Red Cross, it represented only one dimension of the destabilization of the distinctive regime of national mobilization that had characterized the Second World War. In an extension of patterns evident for decades, and especially in the mobilization for the Great—­not yet First—­World War, military mobilization had driven the US government to expand in ways that depended massively on extended collaborations with private organizations to rally support, to produce war material, to provide aid to the troops, and to discipline the civilian population. Reliant as it was on local business leaders, corporate executives, and a nascent category of public relations experts, this model of governing through public-­private

210  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens

collaboration expanded public power and delegated a portion of control to private individuals and organizations. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, this delegation of control had been attached to a new demand—­namely, that organized labor be given a seat at the civic “roundtables” that had played such an important role in the mobilization of resources and public support for national efforts during war, natural disaster, economic crisis, and renewed war. This demand represented a “nationalization” of associational governance in at least two senses of the term: an intensification of presidential direction of civic mobilization and a requirement that effective participation—­as leaders as well as contributors—­be extended beyond the business and community elites long central to the architecture of civic associations in the United States. This marked shift in the structure of control over civic efforts in support of the federal government set the terms for a postwar political struggle over the demobilization of the wartime state and the role of civic associations in American public life. The result of this competition would be a strange hybrid political regime that linked the celebration of voluntary participation in local politics to an expansive internationalism in support of the Cold War national security state. This moment of national dominance, the high water mark of “the American Century,” was marked by a puzzling combination of voluntarism and statism.

The Associational State in American Political Development Viewed through the lens of comparative politics, the history of the American state has seemed anomalous, a deviation from the trajectories followed by governing arrangements in Europe and elsewhere. Instead of conforming to the model of centralized, bureaucratic, autonomous public authority often equated with the modern state, American governance has been organized through both public institutions and private organizations or individuals. This type of regime relies on what sociologist Michael Mann has called “infrastructural” strength, allowing for the development of “power to coordinate civil society” without a commensurate increase in the scale or visibility of formal public institutions.2 The apparently “weak state” scholars of nineteenth-­century American politics observed has been recharacterized as a system of governance that relied significantly on these “sinews of power” that extended far beyond the visible boundaries of official institutions.3 Attention to infrastructural power has been central to dispelling what historian William Novak has termed “the myth of the ‘weak’ American state.” In terms of the capacity or resources available to the federal government,

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  211

the existence of a rich network of collaboration with private individuals or organizations helps to explain how such a small government—­measured in terms of its budget or personnel—­could accomplish so much in terms of expanding across a continent and mobilizing for modern wars, both civil and overseas. But if infrastructural power helps to explain the capacity of the American state, this concept has been less effective at posing a related question: if governance is constituted through infrastructural networks, then who governs?4 What determines the particular configuration of networks of governance and relations of power? This question requires moving beyond the ratio of visible to submerged state capacities. In addition, there is a politics surrounding the specific con­ figurations of associational involvement in governance and, by extension, conflicts over control of critical networks in these expansive state-­linked collaborations. Over the course of the twentieth century, the “associational state” repeatedly morphed into new forms, at times more closely linked to the building of new federal agencies and capacities and at others more aligned with those opposed to the expansion of federal powers. Consequently, the recognition of the distinctive character of American state building is only a first step, framed as it is by the comparison with the more classically We­ berian administrative state that cases drawn from continental Europe exemplify. Beyond the comparative analysis of state forms there lies the question of the distinctive politics of different associational configurations. Different arrangements of infrastructural power advantaged different political actors and were consistent with different policy visions. One variant, celebrated as the “associative state,” was championed by Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce and then as president in the 1920s.5 This vision has often been understood as an alternative to the expanded government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its array of new regulatory agencies, citizen entitlements, and social insurance programs. From this vantage point, party politics plays out as a contest over the extent of associational or collaborative government, with more conservative administrations expected to favor limiting the role and size of public agencies and programs. Despite the undoubted hostility of many conservatives to the expansion of state intervention,6 this standard account misses the important ways in which associational politics and governance have proved attractive regardless of an administration’s ideological commitments. Roosevelt himself did not shy from harnessing civic and voluntary groups to public projects. Examples can be found in the policy responses to the depression years of the 1930s,7 in his own signature project of civic benevolence, the March of Dimes, as well as the national mobilization in support of World

212  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens

War II. Rather than rejecting the associational methods linked to the conservative opposition to the New Deal, Roosevelt managed a transformation of purpose and control. His accomplishment did not escape leading public relations experts whose profession had developed out of the massive fund-­ raising efforts of the First World War:8 “The present occupant of the White House is preeminent among all men in public life in his ability to think in selling terms and speak in advertising language.”9 Roosevelt had, in effect, stolen their methods and mastered an approach to civic mobilization long felt to be the distinctive property of business and community elites. If this moment of crisis can be understood as a political competition for loyalty and obligation,10 Roosevelt appeared a clear winner, and in the process the president engineered a decisive shift in the control of civic benevolence and the ramified system of associational governance. Although the New Deal had begun with the drawing of a bright line between federal programs and private, charitable relief efforts, this clean divide was soon blurred.11 Roosevelt came to appreciate the power of charitable fund-­raising in his personal campaign to put his polio facility at Warm Springs, Georgia, on a stable financial footing. What began as the Committee to Celebrate the President’s Birthday soon grew into what we still know as the March of Dimes. Faced with the inevitable limits of federal revenue, Roosevelt also insisted on the continuing responsibility of private relief and local government contributions to aid for the unemployed and, particularly, the unemployable as the depression lingered on through much of the decade. With respect to the delivery of social services, the result was not a return to Hoover’s vision of smaller government and revived independent voluntarism, but rather a complex and attenuated web of relationships between formally private voluntary efforts and federal funds, mandates, and tax subsidies. As early as 1935, federal social security legislation had been amended to allow public funds to flow to private, not-­for-­profit social service agencies, specifically to residential and nursing homes for the elderly.12 The result was the emergence and eventual consolidation of a field of what were now known as “nonprofit organizations.” Although many of these organizations traced their origins to the Charity Organization Societies of the late nineteenth century or the progressive social reform efforts of the Progressive Era, these newly named nonprofit organizations were now managed by professional social workers and nested in networks that linked business-­ dominated centralized municipal fund-­raising and local volunteer efforts that were structured in deference to professional authority.13 Consequently, the flow of federal funding to at least some of these organizations did not necessarily result in a political alliance between local providers and the

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national state. Rather, this first infusion of federal funds into the domain of nonprofit organizations helped to strengthen what many conservatives believed to be a bulwark against further expansion of the national welfare state.14 Thus the flow of federal funds alone was not sufficient to align civic organizations with national political projects. As the case of social service provision illustrates, federal financial support might well strengthen the hand of local municipal and business elites. As the conflicts that would become a second world war gathered force, Roosevelt turned again to the American Red Cross as a vehicle for raising citizen contributions for war relief that could be sent where no federal assistance could go as a consequence of the power of isolationist forces in Congress. Federal agencies revived the impressive infrastructure of advertising and salesmanship of war bonds that had played such an important role in the First World War.15 Many read these efforts through a political lens. Roosevelt’s revival of “Red Cross patriotism” and the success of the March of Dimes represented, to at least some of his critics, a disturbing resemblance to the fascist societies just defeated in war. By the end of the Second World War, the ties between charity and citizenship had been anchored in the person of  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for well over a decade. A part of his achievement consisted in recentering the emotional focus of civic benevolence on the presidency itself. But a second element involved translating civic benevolence into a more inclusive mode. While voluntary associations have long been an established feature of the social landscape for a wide range of ethnic, religious, occupational, recreational, improvement, and educational efforts, the fact of associating did not automatically translate into meaningful influence over public affairs.16 Civic groups dominated by business had edged aside the membership-­based voluntary associations of the nineteenth century: the Grange, the Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and all the women’s clubs. These cliques of local notables now had to acknowledge the role of the national government and to provide a seat at the table for organized labor if they were to remain even partially in control of their own benevolent empires. This insistence on a more inclusive17 organization of civic benevolence set the terms for a fierce competition over the same terrain in the years after the war.

Presidential Variants on Civic Benevolence President Roosevelt’s death removed a central pillar of this regime of nationalized reciprocity. Although the drive for the March of Dimes in the year after his death would set records as a national memorial for Roosevelt

214  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens

himself, thereafter the efforts became more problematic, revived only as the prospect of a successful polio vaccine came into view during the 1950s.18 The configuration of civic voluntarism and expanded state activities that had been consolidated through the New Deal and the world war was up for grabs again. Although calls for a single coordinated war fund drive had never been fully realized (in this, as in almost every administrative matter, FDR preferred to have multiple players in a single field), many groups had chafed at the partial centralization of control whether in the Red Cross or the War Chests. The result was a period of flux in which some groups defected from centralized fund-­raising, others made plays to wrest control from the groups that had dominated the wartime organization of civic benevolence, still others turned from nationalizing benevolence to fund-­raising that would strengthen institutions—­particularly in health care and higher education—­ that would serve as bulwarks against state expansion and pillars of domains of private enterprise. These efforts to deconstruct the specifically presidential focus of civic benevolence did not mean an abandonment of nation-­building projects. In the emerging context of the Cold War, large-­scale organized voluntarism and community democracy served important expressive purposes, demonstrating to the world the practices of civic membership and self-­governance that exemplified liberal internationalism. The challenge, therefore, was to unwind the webs of reciprocity that had linked citizens throughout the nation to the charismatic figure of FDR himself while preserving the vitality of local forms of participation once economic crisis and international conflict had come to an end.

A Legacy Envisioned Following the president’s death and as wartime expectations of national unity faded, the postwar years brought efforts to redefine the linking of charity and citizenship. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, Roosevelt’s longtime allies sought to perpetuate the connection of giving to a strong national identity, notably through the mechanism of national blood banking and the continuing war against polio. But other camps advocated a return to more local networks of civic responsibility. In some part, this was the “local” of the bowling leagues and Parent-­Teacher Associations that were populated by returning veterans, their spouses, and burgeoning families.19 But, perhaps more significantly, this was also the local of chambers of commerce and

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  215

community hospital boards that occupied the center of networks boosting economic development.20 All three—­nationalized citizen philanthropy, local-­ civic, and local-­business—­of these configurations can be characterized as “infrastructural” or “associational,” but they supported very different distributions of power and understandings of national membership and obligations. The terms of conflict involved the level of voluntary giving as well as the locus of control. Economic elites came to understand giving by citizens as an obstacle to the expansion of a consumer economy at the same time that they recognized the potential of a newly conceptualized nonprofit sector as a site for setting boundaries on the expansion of public social provision. This potential for limiting explicitly public programs was underwritten by expanding streams of tax-­subsidized contributions, enabled by the linking of a long-­standing individual deduction for charitable contributions with the introduction of a mass income tax as well as the regularization of corporate charitable contributions in the Wealth Act of 1935. As federal spending programs increasingly recognized nonprofit organizations—­whether social welfare agencies, community hospitals, or research universities—­as legitimate recipients of public funds, the ingredients were in place for the distinctive brew of public and private efforts that has come to characterize American governance in the second half of the twentieth century.21 Thus the postwar years provide an opportunity for exploring how political struggles operated to decouple cultural logics from one configuration of alliances and then embed them in different networks of reciprocity and responsibility. Alternatives, however, were imaginable. The wartime experience worked powerfully on political imaginations, particularly of those who understood how extended networks of civic benevolence sustained the capacity and legitimacy of state action. Nowhere had this lesson been better learned than in the circles closest to President Roosevelt. Within those circles, perhaps no one understood the implications of this model of governance and solidarity more fully than Basil O’Connor, FDR’s former law partner, founding president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (which received 50 percent of funds raised by the March of Dimes), and, as of 1944, president of the American Red Cross. Situated at the intersection of structures of civic organization and formal political institutions, O’Connor understood what might be accomplished by a peacetime alignment of nation and citizen through voluntary gifts. O’Connor proposed a domestic substitute for wartime mobilization as a method of generating national solidarity. He argued that a national system of blood banking would provide a moral infrastructure for national unity:

216  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens The goal of the National Blood Program is to provide blood and blood derivatives, without charge for the products, wherever needed throughout the nation. To accomplish the objectives of this new service to humanity, the Red Cross will have the advice and guidance of medical, health, and hospital, au­ thorities . . . with full realization that it is a program of, for, and by the people of this nation. . . . The program is a cooperative project in which hospital and medical au­ thorities, public health officials, and the American Red Cross will participate to ensure the soundest policies and the highest possible standards of operation. The most important participant, however, must be the citizenry. The need of the people for blood has been our motivating force in establishing this new program. And only the generosity of the people in donating their blood to the sick and injured will provide the power to drive this program forward with sustained momentum. . . . The National Blood Program presents the opportunity to all our citizens to contribute directly to the saving of life and the prevention of suffering—­not as an ideal but as a concrete act of generosity. What if the donor cannot actually trace, with his own eyes, the use of his blood to the beneficiary? Each gift of blood will have tangible value to someone in need. The picture is clear. It needs only to be made vivid in the minds of the American people. A pint of blood given by John Doe rests in the storage vault of a blood center. Not far away on a main highway, two cars come speeding toward each other and collide. Their occupants are torn by broken glass and twisted metal and suffer great loss of blood. John Doe’s blood is rushed to the bedside of one of the victims, who has well-­nigh bled to death, and is poured into his veins. John Doe’s blood has helped to save a life. Another donor’s blood has been processed into plasma and held for emergency use. Weeks later a fire breaks out in one of the city’s large buildings. Dozens of residents suffer shock and terrible burns. This plasma is poured into the veins of one of the victims, even before there is time to transport her to the hospital. The donor’s gift of blood has lessened shock and suffering. . . . The blood of generous citizens, donated to the general welfare, will be the raw material out of which may come great discoveries in the amelioration of prevention of some of mankind’s worst enemies. Men and women—­the volunteers of America—­could not give of themselves to a finer cause. Yes, this is truly a milepost for all the participating chapters. Likewise it is a milepost for the medical world.22

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This passage, quoted at length, links themes of civic solidarity, prepared­ ness, and progress. It is a textbook plan for generating national solidarity through an extended system of indirect exchange,23 albeit a plan that elided the official policies of racial exclusion and segregation that had been retained despite vocal civil rights protests throughout the war and the remainder of the decade.24 Through the practice of donating blood, so the model operated, citizens give gifts that then forge ties of gratitude among strangers (and, by extension, contribute to a vast system of mutual insurance against unexpected accidents and threats to health). These acts of generosity contribute to more than the repair of the damaged bodies of fellow citizens; they also sustain the progress of science and medicine that will contribute to the well-­being of all, present and future generations alike. For the five years that he led the organization, Basil O’Connor worked to realize this vision of a national infrastructure of benevolence consistent with democratic commitments and expansive participation. He pushed the first revisions of the Red Cross charter, adopted more than four decades earlier when Mabel Boardman and her allies had ousted Clara Barton in 1902. (Boardman herself died in 1946, only a year after stepping down from the position of Red Cross secretary that she had held for decades.) The revision shifted power to the local chapters which would now elect a clear majority of the board, the remaining seats to be filled either ex officio by representatives of the federal cabinet departments or by nominations from the current board.25 At the tail end of a long Democratic administration, having provided relief to citizens and support to soldiers, the Red Cross stood on the verge of a stronger alignment with basic democratic principles. But, in many respects, the shift came too late to forestall criticism, defection, competition, and a slide from national influence. O’Connor’s attempt to transpose a model of nationalized civic benevolence from wartime to peaceable uses foundered in the face of opposition fueled both by a general suspicion of any extension of the Roosevelt-­Truman political hegemony and by the specific fear of government expansion into a national health service. This latter point, after all, represented one of the lines drawn in the sand by critics of the New Deal in the late 1930s.26 But the defeat of O’Connor’s national blood-­banking plan was only a first move in a broader effort to realign voluntary efforts with different structures of power and circuits of exchange. The business leaders and community elites who had long watched as Roosevelt gained leverage over local networks of voluntary associations were now poised to retake control.

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A Legacy Undone The possibility of constructing a national infrastructure of benevolence was undermined by political developments set in motion by the Roosevelt administration itself. With its roots in the tradition of civic deference that stretched back to the antebellum Whigs, organized benevolence did not necessarily mesh smoothly with the expansion of democratic rights and participation pushed by the New Deal and wartime mobilization. The friction surfaced early in relationships between the Red Cross and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). While the CIO had participated in multiple wartime drives led by the Red Cross, frustrations had mounted at the failure of the Red Cross to provide meaningful opportunities to participate in the volunteer services and decision making of the organization. Early in 1946, the CIO withdrew from joint fund-­raising, asserting that “the Red Cross had not indicated any interest in the CIO’s efforts to promote volunteer participation in home nursing, first aid, and other essential Red Cross volunteer work, and that ‘our efforts to create a more wholesome understanding between Red Cross chapters and local labor groups were discouraged at every turn.’ ” Holding out the possibility of a rapprochement, the CIO expressed its hope “that under your [Basil O’Connor’s] leadership the Red Cross will become a truly American Red Cross, democratized for full participation for everyone in the community.”27 If the union members of the CIO felt that they had been excluded from full membership in the “community” as represented by the American Red Cross because of their politics, other organizations put themselves forward as more appropriate representatives of local rather than national community. The alternative was represented by the resurgence of federated fund-­raising, once organized through the hundreds of “community chests” but increasingly now under the banner of “United Funds.” This fund-­raising model was pioneered in Detroit in 1949 and, from the perspective of the Red Cross, constituted a threat to its own understanding of national patriotism artic­ ulated through voluntarism. The Red Cross defense was presented in an official pamphlet that, according to newspaper reports, contended that the idea of united fund-­raising was “being ‘actively sold’ to business leaders, large corporations and membership organizations, in Michigan by the United Health and Welfare Fund of Michigan, Inc., and on a nation-­wide scale by the Michigan unit as well as by Community Chests and Councils, Inc., of New York.” At the national meeting in 1949, the Red Cross “struck out . . . against ‘coercive’ attempts to federate all welfare fund drives in one annual appeal.” Red Cross officials argued that “ ‘compulsory federated fund

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  219

raising’ would be federated and controlled first on a state-­wide and eventually on a national basis. The system would produce one mammoth annual financial campaign carried on simultaneously throughout the country ‘under the direction of this national authority,’ according to the Red Cross.”28 In the alternation of “community” and “national,” two different configurations of voluntarism are visible. The first, represented by the Red Cross, linked local chapters to the national organization with its presidential imprimatur. The second, exemplified by the Community Chests and Councils Inc., sought to span the nation geographically through a loose web of municipally centered organizations.29 As wartime mobilization receded, national organizations such as the American Red Cross once again found themselves competing for control of charitable citizenship with locally oriented efforts to harness networks of reciprocity and mutuality. The conflicts over the relationship of the Red Cross to the Community Chests that had flared in the 1920s resurfaced, pushing the leadership to issue a statement as to “Why The American National Red Cross Does Not Permit Participation in Any Joint Fund Raising Campaign.”30 This argument was couched in an extended analogy to world politics: “One argument against communism is the fact that under this system those who deserve to be better off are not and those who do not deserve to be better off are. To a considerable extent this has been the experience of Community Chest agencies. The weak and less needed organizations must ride in on the wake of the stronger ones. Without much question it can be said that the Red Cross, because of its very nature and purpose as a national and international force, deserves to be better off financially than possibly can be provided through any communized fund-­raising device.”31 These conflicts turned on money and power. Familiar complaints were recited, that local Red Cross chapters had joined Community Chests with the assurance of certain distributions from the united drives, yet those assurances were not honored. Revenues were slashed, memberships declined, and “most chapters identified with chests tended to become more and more localized in their point of view and to lose sight of the fact that they were the agents of a national organization governed by a Congressional Charter. Furthermore, in some instances, the chapter’s identity in the local community faded almost to the vanishing point. . . . Chests tended to become dictatorial and to assume vested authority over chapters along with other member agencies.” Apart from the implications for the amount of funds raised or needy persons served, each separate fund-­raising effort sustained a particular network of influence and particular understanding of the relational quality of civic life. Thus the conflicts surrounding national charities

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and the civic role of philanthropy were not necessarily expressions of populist resentments but the mutual suspicion of distinctive subsets of the many different elite networks that organized life within and across the nation’s communities.32 Eventually, the Red Cross succumbed to the pressure from a handful of powerful local chapters to allow participation in joint fund-­raising in industrial plants that allowed only one fund-­raising drive per year. This agreement was hedged about with conditions—­that the Red Cross would determine its own budgetary means added into the total amount of the drive, that the Red Cross would retain the right to organize independent drives in the broader community—­but the change of principle was clear. By-­ then-­former Red Cross president Basil O’Connor blasted the policy change, arguing that payroll deductions “no matter how dressed up, are compulsory assessments on employes [sic] for health and welfare activities.” This compulsion, O’Connor argued, undermined the pretense of voluntarism as a legitimate alternative to public social services: If funds for health and welfare are to be obtained by assessment, then the proper mechanism to use is obviously the power of taxation where the burden falls on all and not just on labor. If the public will not voluntarily support voluntary associations for health and welfare, the indication is that the public believes such associations should no longer exist and that health and welfare should be totally a matter of governmental operation. That seventy million people annually support the March of Dimes shows clearly that the public has reached no such decision.33

In the space of a few years, networks of corporate leaders had substantially retaken control over the organizational infrastructure of civic benevolence, leading critics to see “voluntary” fund-­raising as a new form of economic dictatorship capable of coercing employees to donate funds to support services that could be funded more democratically through taxation. On this dimension, the postwar politics of civic benevolence shifted the balance between a charisma-­driven nationalizing mode and a much more municipally centered, business-­dominated form of mobilization. As a consequence, the philanthropically sustained sense of common membership in a national community was increasingly frayed. Focusing his comments on the “ingrate crisis area” of Flint, Michigan, which had been struck by a tornado in 1954, Red Cross president E. Roland Harriman complained that “the pattern had been to wait until ‘the Red Cross finished the

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job of meeting basic needs’ and then to use the contributions from other sources ‘to replace losses on a pro rata basis’ without respect to the resources of the recipients and their ability to re-­establish themselves.’ . . . In the future, he said, ‘communities that don’t help themselves in the total responsibility of a disaster can hardly expect to be recipients of nation-­wide generosity.’ ”34 In parallel with these shamings and scoldings, others attempted to revive the sense of national obligation and solidarity. As fund-­raising efforts fell short in 1953, Mamie Eisenhower made a “personal appeal to the mothers of America,” calling for them to donate both funds and blood. Attempting to explain the troubling shortfall, the First Lady speculated: “ ‘What they perhaps do not realize is that the same pint of blood they contribute can be processed into gamma globulin and also into serum albumin, the blood derivative which our Korean combat wounded need so desperately.’ Through the Red Cross, therefore, Mrs. Eisenhower stressed blood today did double duty. ‘ We can help children walk and wounded to live.’ ”35 In these appeals, the faded spirit of wartime civic benevolence reappeared, but the results fell short of the national solidarity that was to have been generated by circuits of blood donation and receipt within a unified citizenry. The shift from national networks of benevolence to more restricted circuits of mutual aid was evident across policy domains, including not only disaster relief but also medical care. The same tension between the inclusive “indirect exchange” envisioned in O’Connor’s plan and the organizational features of the postwar health care system produced a schism within blood banking over issues that went to the heart of a Maussian model of gift exchange.36 Whereas the Red Cross under O’Connor had envisioned a system in which blood would be donated without compensation and available to all those who needed it, the medical societies—­at least in the vicinity of New York City—­were interested in linking the provision of blood to the financial practices of private hospitals. Consequently, they promoted a system in which donors would receive “credits” for donations that would entitle them to a certain amount of blood for themselves if needed (at a ratio of up to four pints for every one pint donated) and, at a slightly less generous rate, to other family members. The Red Cross protested that if a system of credits was to function it needed to recognize that blood donation often happened in the context of group membership—­in fraternal lodges, unions, churches, workplaces—­rather than narrowly within the bounds of family.37 Credits, they argued, needed to be transferable to comembers in these organizations. But these arguments did not persuade the leadership of professional medical societies, and their breach with the Red Cross widened further. Here, civic

222  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens

benevolence was not only denationalized, it also was increasingly individualized and disembedded from the variegated voluntary associations that had been a feature of the American landscape for more than a century. Through the cumulative effects of these conflicts over the specific forms of associational voluntarism, the years following the end of  World War II saw the landscape of civic benevolence fracture along multiple dimensions. The unified fund drives of wartime gave way to increased competition, dissent, and mutual recrimination as various groups and constituencies contested the right of any one group to represent and choreograph the generosity of the American people. This splintering among organizations committed to some encompassing civic vision was accompanied by a retreat into professionalism on the part of organizations that had once served as focal points for the mobilization of a sense of mutual obligation within the nation’s towns and cities. As historian Andrew Morris has demonstrated, the Charity Organization Societies and relief boards that had provided a venue for recognition and coordination of benevolence prior to the New Deal emerged from the Second World War as entities dedicated to professional therapeutic work with a mix of paying and subsidized clients.38 But even if the volume of civic benevolence had been turned down, these methods still operated within the nation’s cities to provide relief and to activate relationships of civic membership and governance. Here too, however, the capacity of civic benevolence to mobilize political solidarity was on the wane.

A Transformed Organizational Landscape In the years immediately after the war, social service organizations oscillated between these two understandings of their role, alternately acting as private charities or as professional nonprofit agencies. Thus the winter of 1947 brought appeals that would have seemed quite familiar a half century earlier: “For $15 one of these children will find a wealth of warmth in a bright new coat. $10 will fit his little sister into a sturdy snowsuit, and $5 will keep a youngster snug with a set of galoshes, mittens and stockings.”39 Yet by later that spring, one study committee of the same organization, the Community Service Society of New York (the product of a merger between the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor, established in the 1840s, and the New York Charity Organization Society, established in 1882) reported: “In the light of our study it would appear that in the process of growth and expansion the Family Service Department has been undergoing a gradual change in function, as evidenced by the greater emphasis on research and staff development and by a deepening of the content of case

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  223

work, to the point where it has become more nearly a family-­counseling and child-­guidance service.”40 This organizational transformation involved multiple reconfigurations, not least the relationships between organization and donor as well as organization and client. Above all, the remnants of the traditional ties of benevolence between donors (or the organization as their representative) and clients had to be purged. These organizational changes extended the new division of labor between government and private efforts that had begun to be articulated early in the New Deal. Whereas FDR had spoken about government’s responsibility for “economic maladjustment” and charity’s jurisdiction over “individual maladjustment”, the language now referenced the relationship of those providing and receiving services. The key distinction conflated references to commerce and totalitarianism, drawing a line between “mass” services and “individuated” or “retail” services.41 Urging support for the Community Service Society of New York, Frederick Sheffield wrote to Lau­ rance Rockefeller: This new society is equipped to do all of the jobs that the prior organizations did and do them more effectively and more efficiently. Of course, you realize what this means to our community. My personal belief is that unless the right kinds of private charitable organizations are supported in these days, the future of each individual’s relationship to his community will become more and more dependent upon government and less and less individualistic. The particular charity, moreover, reaches down into the very roots of the troubles which so many charities have to help and for which so much government expenditure is necessary.42

Whereas the nation-­centered civic benevolence of wartime had emphasized how each small gift incorporated individuals into a national struggle, here the emphasis was on private charity as a limit on the intrusion of government service that was understood to be corrosive of democratic values. Thus the linking of mass citizen benevolence to national projects and patriotism eroded. And, as a consequence, circuits of reciprocity were reoriented. With the struggle over government financial support for relief and social services now long settled in the affirmative, nonprofit organizations confronted the question of how to motivate supporters to make contributions above and beyond their mandated taxes. Absent the rallying force of a national crisis or presidential charisma, what was to persuade people to give freely in order to forestall the need to expand mandatory taxation to

224  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens

support those same community services? In the fund-­raising drives of the 1950s, charitable motives were displaced by references to business calculation infused with political commitments: “This is a straightforward business appeal. The century-­old Community Service Society is in the business of helping to keep sound the New York community in which you do business, to help protect the community’s family life—­the bedrock of democracy.”43 Yet for all these changes, the mobilization of resources in the nonprofit sector continued to rely on networks of personal reciprocity.44 These were recalibrated to accommodate the expansion of widespread, almost mass-­ market solicitation45 and to convey respect for the individual choices made by donors rather than inherited family ties to a particular organization.46 Fund-­raisers understood the extra influence that came with an appeal embedded in a personal or business relationship. As the Community Service Society reported in December 1955: Every effort has been made in this campaign to increase the extent of personal solicitation of our more generous contributors. This means that instead of having one of the chief officers of the Society appeal for a renewal or an increased contribution, we have been able to enlist a good number of civic and business leaders who have taken responsibility for approaching certain individuals with whom they have influence. Since a great deal of our fund raising has to be by mail, the campaign organization has been built up with an aim to providing the most effective signatures on the mail solicitations, e.g. executives in Wall Street have been written to by fellow executives; lawyers have been approached through letters signed by one of several prominent lawyers serving on the campaign committee, etc.”47

In this respect, the postwar pattern following the Second World War paralleled that after the First. While the Red Cross, the organization most closely identified with the national military effort, fizzled and fractured in peacetime, the municipal pieces of the fund-­raising machinery were quickly repurposed and even strengthened. Circuits of giving built on and even strengthened relationships in the world of work, either through quasi-­ mandatory assessments of employees within a firm or the interpersonal persuasion (and pressure) of organized businessman-­to-­businessman solicitation. The resulting funds supported a wide range of activities ranging from the self-­provisioning of an expansive middle class through scouting groups and the Y’s (which, in turn, were increasingly orienting themselves to recreation rather than spiritual uplift48) to the support of the professionalized

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  225

social service agencies that now dealt with “clients,” some of whom paid for services, others of whom were subsidized by funds raised through federated campaigns. As Basil O’Connor had argued with respect to joint fund-­raising within industrial plants, this represented something very close to a system of taxation, but a system that was most “mandatory” for workers and over which business leaders exercised considerable control. The limits of this system would be revealed in the 1960s, as multiplying strains on the fabric of urban life would invite new federal interventions. Ironically, these interventions would be “contracted out” to the very system of nonprofit organizations that had been sustained as a bulwark against the expansion of tax-­supported community services.

Civic Benevolence and State Building In important respects, the resulting vision of civic participation reversed many of the important precepts of the model of benevolent patriotism that had been deployed by nation builders since the nation’s founding. Local ties enacted in participation were embedded in the social imaginary of an extended system of national solidarity. Gifts circulated among strangers, linking diverse places and types of people without requiring direct social ties. Envisioned on this national scale, organized civic benevolence constituted a reinforcing armature for a political order ever-­threatened with secession and group conflict. By the 1950s, however, the continued efforts of private voluntary associations to contain the expansion of domestic public spending programs coexisted with a recognition of the role of a powerful national government, particularly one that would project its (putatively benevolent) power in a contested and dangerous world. This dual vision would mark the state-­building strategies of the Kennedy administration, in which military strength was coupled with the “authentic” personal engagement of the Peace Corps or later Vista in American cities. It would emerge in yet another con­ figuration during Johnson’s Great Society, in which massively expanded fed­­eral funding for poverty relief and economic development would flow through community nonprofits, many of which traced their lineage back through the professionalized social service organizations of the 1950s to the reform-­minded groups of the turn of the century. Perversely, at least from the vantage point of those who had championed voluntary social service as a bulwark against state expansion, this configuration allowed for a continued escalation of federal spending

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combined with a diffusion of governmental control and accountability. Public funds were channeled to private organizations in an enormously complex web of contracts, grants, and subsidies that continues to defy efforts at regulation or even documentation. Thus the effort to dismantle the national configuration of civic benevolence out of concern that it would unduly enhance the power of the presidency has had the result of enhancing the scale of government while disguising and degrading the capacity of any political actor or institution to oversee the operations of this vast new system of associational governance. This greatly expanded web of federal, state, and local grants to nonprofit organizations has had the additional effect of undercutting the power of community-­level federated fund-­raising to enact a strong sense of municipal membership. While the leaders of the community chest movement had presumed a set of common concerns to motivate contributions and direct the resulting funds, by the late 1950s and 1960s, newly mobilized groups increasingly charged that such centralized fund-­raising and distributing models overlooked or misunderstood the needs of their particular community or cause.49 Patterns of giving, like those of distributing funds, became increasingly fragmented and difficult to map clearly into civic identities. Although levels of giving and donating have continued to fluctuate, subjects of celebration and anxiety, these exchanges no longer effectively enact the model of civic benevolence that had been such a powerful force in mobilizing much—­if never all—­of the nation across a series of crises culminating in the Second World War.

Notes 1.

The American Red Cross commissioned a series of “confidential” polls from George Gallup. “A Study of the Public’s Attitude toward the American Red Cross” (October 8, 1943); “A Study of the Public’s Attitude toward the American Red Cross with a Supplement Dealing with World War II Veterans” (June 28, 1946; this report includes comparisons to the 1943 and 1944 surveys). Records of the American National Red Cross, 1935–­46, RG 200, Box 764, 494.2; National Archives and Records Admin­ istration, College Park, Maryland. 2. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 477. 3. This characterization of the United States as governed by a “weak state” has a long history but is often linked to Stephen Skowronek’s characterization of nineteenth-­ century government as a “state of courts and parties.” Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On “infrastructural power,” see Michael Mann, “The Auton­­ omous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–­213. In the context of American political develop­­

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  227 ment, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Pro­ grams, 1900–­1940,” in The Art of the State: Rethinking Political Institutions, ed. Ian Sha­ piro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and William Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American His­ torical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–­72. The phrase “sinews of power” is taken from John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–­1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). 4. The classic statement of this question comes from Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). Dahl’s commitment to a pluralist analysis of American politics put him at odds with those who underscored the pervasive power of elite networks. For a review of this debate, see Shamus Khan, “The Sociology of Elites,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2102): 364–­65. 5. Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–­1928,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 116–­40. See also Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Mark Frederickson, New Capitalism in the New Era: American Labor and Economic Rights from World War I to the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 6. At least with respect to social provision and economic regulation; military mobilization and national security are different issues. 7. See Elisabeth S. Clemens, “In the Shadow of the New Deal: Reconfiguring the Roles of Government and Charity, 1928–­1940,” in Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. Clemens and Doug Guthrie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Andrew J. F. Morris, The Limits of Voluntarism: Charity and Welfare from the New Deal through the Great Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8. Scott M. Cutlip, Fund Raising in the United States: Its Role in American Philanthropy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 128. 9. Bruce Barton quoted in Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press). 10. For the development of this concept in the context of the First World War, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008): “Looking at the history of a liberal society like the United States, it might seem that Americans have never really had to think much about their political obligations, let alone act on them. In the later wars of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, liberal individualism, an economy of consumption, a nationalized culture, legally protected civil liberties, and an expanded federal state all played more prominent roles in public life. But even so, throughout American history, a citizenship of obligation has always coexisted with one of rights, as a patchwork of political cultures supported a hybrid state as jumbled as Uncle Sam’s ill-­fitting suit” (6). 11. Clemens, “In the Shadow of the New Deal.” 12. David C. Hammack, “Failure and Resilience: Pushing the Limits in Depression and Wartime,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence Fried­ man and Mark McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

228  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens 13. Morris, Limits of Voluntarism. 14. Ironically, however, the same changes that decoupled voluntary organizations from the presidential philanthropy of the Depression and world war would lay the foundations for a recoupling with national governance as a later Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, discovered a formula for state building through voluntary associations in peacetime. Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15. James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119–­59. For the classic study of the underlying dynamics of such fund-­raising efforts, see Robert K. Merton, with the assistance of Marjorie Fiske and Alberta Curtis, Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946). 16. Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–­1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 17. The linkage of giving to civic inclusion was dramatized at its limits, where the Red Cross policy of refusing—­and later segregating—­blood donations from African Americans was paralleled by disproportionately low rates of cash contributions from blacks. Thomas A. Guglielmo, “ ‘Red Cross, Double Cross’: Race and America’s World War II–­Era Blood Donor Service,” Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (2010): 63–­90. 18. David L. Sills, The Volunteers: Means and Ends in a National Organization (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957); David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Gen­ eration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 20. Emily Barman, Contesting Communities: The Transformation of Workplace Charity (Stan­ ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Elisabeth S. Clemens, “From City Club to Nation-­State: Business Networks in American Political Development,” Theory and Society 39 (2010): 377–­96. 21. For examples of this large literature, see Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 20002); Smith and Lipsky, Nonprofits for Hire; Jennifer R. Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: Foundation Center, 1990). 22. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR, Welfare Interests General, RG III 2 P. Box 1, Folder 1. American Red Cross. Dedication Address by Basil O’Connor, President, The American National Red Cross. At the inauguration of THE NATIONAL BLOOD PROGRAM. Rochester, New York, January 12, 1948. After accepting O’Connor’s resignation in 1949 (he was succeeded by General George Marshall), President Truman praised O’Connor for having “given your country a relief agency capable of efficient work through strictly democratic processes” and concurred “in your opinion that the Red Cross blood program may well become the greatest single health activity in history.” “Truman Appoints Marshall President of the Red Cross,” New York Times, September 23, 1949, 1. For a description of those “democratizing” changes, see “Red Cross Revision Favored by Group,” New York Times, September 21, 1946, 9.

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  229 23. Linda Molm, Jessica Collett, and David R. Schaefer, “Building Solidarity through Generalized Exchange: A Theory of Reciprocity,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 1 (2007): 205–­42. President Truman echoed this theory of extended benevolent exchange: “In the continuance of our diligent work toward a just and enduring peace, it is very heartening to observe that however peoples may differ on political and economic issues, under the banner of the Red Cross they can unite for the betterment of mankind.” “Truman Says Unity Is Red Cross Role,” New York Times, June 19, 1946, 20. 24. Guglielmo, “Red Cross, Double Cross.” 25. “Red Cross Revision Favored by Group,” New York Times, September 21, 1946, 9. 26. John D. Rockefeller Jr., “Address Introducing the Mayor at the Opening Rally of the Greater New York Fund” (February 24, 1938), Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller III 2Z, B4, F166, Rockefeller Archive Center. 27. “CIO Agency Ends Red Cross Tie-­Up,” New York Times, April 15, 1946, 29. Expressing the hope that the Red Cross would become “a truly people’s organization,” the letter “recalled that on Nov. 15, 1945, Mrs. Eugene Meyer, wife of the Publisher of The Washington Post, and co-­chairman of the women’s foundation committee on reorganization of community services, charged that a group of conservatives within the American Red Cross had determined to force Mr. O’Connor out of his position on the ground that he was too friendly to labor.” Mrs. Meyer had claimed, “Your very respectable, supposedly honorable but very bitter and very obtuse old fuddy-­duddy leaders resent the fact that labor is gaining a foothold in the management of the Red Cross.” See “Red Cross Warned against Reaction,” New York Times, November 16, 1945, 10. 28. William M. Farrell, “Red Cross Decries United Campaigns: Independent Fund Raising Is Fostered in Pamphlet at National Convention,” New York Times, June 29, 1949, 25. Local chapters faced suspension of their charters for joining such federated drives. The Pittsburgh chapter received such a warning after making a local decision to join the federated drive “was spurred by the preference of a number of Pittsburgh industrial plants for consolidation of philanthropic appeals to their employees.” William M. Farrell, “Red Cross Warns Pittsburgh Unit,” New York Times, June 28, 1949, 31. 29. Tellingly, the champions of the Red Cross portrayed their rivals as nationally centralized despite the considerable evidence that both the Community Chest and United Fund models centered control in municipal or corporate communities. 30. “Why the American National Red Cross Does Not Permit Participation In Any Joint Fund Raising Campaigns” (issued April 30, 1946; attached to ECS 625), American National Red Cross, RG 200, Box 548, 221.012, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. This policy memo explained that in 1929 ARC Central Committee adopted a policy that required locals to “solicit memberships and funds independent of any other joint fund raising agencies.” In 1941, the Community Chests proposed “ONE WARTIME CAMPAIGN,” but the Red Cross declined. “In the earlier days, as previously indicated, a storm of protests always broke when a Red Cross chapter proposed severing its Chest connection. In every such community identically the same arguments were advanced against this move, including the prediction that other agencies would follow suit with the result that the very existence of the Chest would be jeopardized. However, no stampede ever took place and interestingly enough most Chest officials, where separations were affected, soon came to the conclusion that they were in a better position by not having

230  /  Elisabeth S. Clemens the responsibility for raising the large sums required by the Red Cross from year to year. This conviction was strengthened by the interesting discovery that a contributor does not tend to reduce the amount he gives to other agencies because of his Red Cross contribution any more than is the case in his financial support of the church. Therefore, Chests in most instances continued to be supported on much the same level as was the case previous to the separation. On the other hand, by independent campaigns, chapters uniformally [sic] experienced no difficulty in securing greatly enlarged sums of money, for both local and national Red Cross purposes, and as a by-­product were able to reinstate a consciousness of individual membership in the Red Cross.” Foster Rhea Dulles, American Red Cross (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 332–­33. 31. “WHY THE AMERICAN RED CROSS IS OPPOSED TO PARTICIPATION IN ANY JOINT FUND RAISING CAMPAIGNS,” October 1, 1945. National American Red Cross, RG3, Box 548, 221.012 COMMUNITY CHESTS, National Archives and Rec­ ords Administration. 32. Chester Barnard, president of the USO, captured something of this type of conflict in a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr. (February 16, 1944): “I am a little reluctant to be too positive in assuming extravagance in the Red Cross because I know there are a number of spots in which the same charge could be made against us by anyone not knowing all the circumstances and the conditions which inhibit prompt curtailment. Nevertheless, I have much difficulty in understanding why the amounts spent by the Chapters should be so large or should have increased so much and there are things brought to my attention which would lead me to scrutinize that part of the budget pretty carefully. However, I am increasing my subscription to the Red Cross 50% notwithstanding.” 33. “Joint Fund Drives by Red Cross Hit: O’Connor Assails Approval of Coordinated Campaigns in Industrial Plants,” New York Times, August 15, 1951, 39. Echoing the late 1920s, the theme of voluntary fund-­raising as a prophylactic against expanded taxation regularly appeared in arguments for the Red Cross. Defending the size of the organization’s projected budget in 1949, President E. Roland Harriman questioned the demand that the Red Cross return to its prewar scale: “Why should Red Cross be the only organization, Government, welfare or business to return to any predetermined level? . . . America still is growing and all of us are doing everything in our power to keep it growing. Red Cross is part and parcel of that growth, particularly with respect to national defense.” The failure to support those activities would have undesirable political consequences, he warned: “If the Red Cross and other agencies do not give the people what they need and what they have learned they want and can get, the only road left open may be for the Government to take over. That means taxation instead of voluntary contributions.” “Harriman Fights Cut in Red Cross,” New York Times, January 7, 1949, 26. 34. Gladwin Hill, “Red Cross Declares Itself Tired of Aiding Ingrate Crisis Areas,” New York Times, March 15, 1954, 1. 35. “First Lady Spurs Red Cross Drives,” New York Times, March 22, 1953, 2. 36. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1950; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 37. William L. Laurence, “Red Cross Leaves Blood Bank Group,” New York Times, May 21, 1945, 29; Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Pantheon, 1971). 38. Morris, Limits of Voluntarism.

Good Citizens of a World Power  /  231 39. Mrs. Oswald B. Lord, Board of Trustees, CSS to Mrs. David Rockefeller, mid-­winter 1947, in folder 75 “Community Service Society,” box 7, OMR III 2 P, Rockefeller Archive Center. 40. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. Draft of Report from Yorkville District Committee (April 24, 1947). 41. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. Community Service Society, Symposium I—­Human Relations in Science and Practice, January 29 and 30, 1948. 42. Frederick Sheffield to Laurance S. Rockefeller (November 15, 1939). Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. 43. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. A Memorandum to Private Businesses and Executives of Corporations From the Community Service Society, 1948. 44. Advising in response to a request from the Community Service Society, Arthur W. Packard of the Rockefeller Family Office suggested to Mrs. Laurance Rockefeller that “Unless a gift were to be made because of friendship with a solicitor, we would not recommend that any other gifts be made by members of the family.” Arthur W. Packard to Mrs. Laurance S. Rockefeller (January 21, 1949). Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. 45. This accommodation was not always made without complaint. At the Rockefeller Family Office, Arthur W. Packard provided a rather grumpy rationale for not replying to a particular solicitation. “This is a form letter with a stamped signature which has been sent to all contributors of the Community Service Society. Since it is not a personalized letter to Mr. Rockefeller and even though he usually answers even form letters from Mr. Gifford, I believe it would be best to ignore this letter. . . . The only type of reply Mr. Rockefeller could make would be a reply expressing appreciation for Mr. Gifford’s letter and pointing out that he personally has not been contributing for some years now and that the pledge of the Davison Fund which he established some years ago has already been made. This of course is a fact of which the officers of the Society are well aware, and I should think it would be better to ignore the letter than for Mr. Rockefeller to make a reply of that character.” Arthur Packard to Janet Warfield, October 30, 1941. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. 46. Mrs. JDR 3rd to Keith McHugh, March 26, 1957. Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. 47. STATUS REPORT OF THE CSS FAMILY FUND, Rockefeller Archive Center, OMR III 2 P, Box 7, Community Service Society, Folder 75. 48. Mayer Zald and Patricia Denton, “From Evangelism to General Service: The Trans­ formation of the YMCA,” Administrative Science Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1963): 214–­34. 49. Barman, Contesting Communities.

N in e

The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State: Black Religion and the Negotiation of Church/State Boundaries during the War on Poverty O m ar M . M c R ob e rts

Introduction Scholarly and public discourses on church-­state relations emphasize that, particularly since the late 1970s, traditional boundaries have been challenged by two “new” dynamics: the rise of a new religious right and its moral politics, and permutations of the welfare state now associated with welfare reform. On the one hand, a surge of public religious activity emerging from religious right organizations has challenged the normative notion that religious claims and practices are properly situated outside the realm of politics and statecraft. As the religious have become more political, the state has become more religious; the state has increasingly litigated and legislated moral issues, and religious leaders and groups more frequently have entered the public realm to take political stances on moral issues.1 On the other hand, discussions of church-­state issues increasingly have pertained to social welfare policies that expect religious institutions to provide social programs, while churches increasingly have relied on public funds to provide social services. The establishment in 2001 of the White House Office of Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives was a landmark in this regard, since it created for the first time a named and dedicated institutional locus within the federal state for the promotion of government partnerships with service providing religious entities. This scholarly and public discussion has suffered from two peculiar limitations. First, considerations of church-­state politics since the 1970s have identified “moral politics” with issues identified as such by the religious right. These issues concern the enforcement of personal morality and the

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public expression of personal piety, rather than the nature and promulgation of a public good per se. Proper religious challenges to the state have thus come to be associated with politics opposing abortion, homosexuality, and other lifestyle manifestations, or advocating prayer in public schools and the defense of public religious exercise more generally. Meanwhile, despite their obvious moorings in religious ideologies and institutions, major post–­World War II movements championing civil rights, antiwar, and antipoverty causes are not frequently recognized as bearing on church-­state relations, because they do not bear the religious ideological signature of the New Christian Right and earlier culturally conservative activisms. This misperception has largely obscured the way the moral politics of public good, including contestations over the role of the state in alleviating poverty and rendering social justice, have in previous eras drawn church and state into entanglements that have both set and disrupted boundaries between the two.2 Second, discussions regarding the impact of a shifting federal welfare state begin with the retrenchment of welfare provision and the consequent expectation that religious and other “private” institutions pick up the slack as partners of national government. The underlying assumption is that federal social policy will only impact religion when it compels the state to behold churches as potential social service providers. From this vantage point, the main church-­state issues at stake are whether and how public social service funds should flow into church coffers, and whether and how the state should regulate deployment of those funds in the hiring of staff (may a faith-­based program hire all Pentecostals?) and provision of services (may a program require its clients to pray?). The abiding concern with church-­ based social service provision in an era of social welfare retrenchment has precluded consideration of all the other ways social policy could lead to church-­state entanglements, including through the roiling politics of social policy formation and implementation. It has also come at the expense of attention to earlier periods characterized by the expansion of federal social welfare, during which the boundaries between church and state were negotiated in ways that actually set the stage for later developments.3 This essay illuminates important episodes of church-­state contact during a period of welfare state expansion that revolved around the moral politics of poverty and social inequality. The period in question is the Great Society of the middle and late 1960s, which brought the dramatic policy iterations of the War on Poverty. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty is not commonly understood as a set of policies targeting religious institutions as partners of the state in the alleviation of poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act

The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State  /  235

of 1964, which created such programmatic icons as the Job Corps, Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America, and the Community Action Program (CAP), certainly contained none of the direct provisions for “faith based” organizations and services later included in the “Charitable Choice” section of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Yet the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which implemented the War on Poverty, launched extensive outreach to religious groups and made church-­based social service providers some of its most visible clients. Indeed, no other federal welfare administration, at that time or prior, involved as much religious outreach as the OEO endeavored. Much of the re­ligious activity of the OEO took place through its Office of Civil Rights, which was established to monitor the racial fairness practices of OEO programs, but ultimately served aggressively to promote the War on Poverty and Lyndon Johnson among African Americans through contact with a variety of black religious movements. Welfare state expansion during the War on Poverty occasioned the setting and crossing of church-­state boundaries on three counts. First, a boundary was established between public and private religion. In the sociology of religion, public religion is conceptualized as all of the civic activity engaged by religious bodies in societies where church and state are formally distinct. It is the politically and socially concerned activity of religious institutions attempting to impact the world.4 It presumes, moreover, a contrary private religion that includes the sectarian ritual and spiritual activities of individuals and faith communities. In its early years, Office of Economic Opportunity leadership found it necessary to establish a practical boundary between public and private religion to preempt any constitutional flap that might come from funding private religion, even while justifying its enthusiastic promotion of public religion. Frequently, that promotion involved lauding prominent black churches that appeared to be putting OEO money to good use in Community Action Programs. Second, through the Office of Civil Rights, the OEO began deliberately to incorporate black religious activists, what I call public religionists, into the welfare state in order to gather reconnaissance of and articulate with a heavily religious civil rights movement field. Third, those state-­situated public religionists consequently labored to sway the public religious commitments of black movement leaders toward support of the War on Poverty and OEO. The War on Poverty should be understood as a period during which public religious capacities were incorporated into the institutional apparatus of the national welfare state. Such incorporation largely served the political needs of the welfare state itself; that is, it needed not only to execute but

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also to justify social policy in a political atmosphere partially hostile to state expansion. Some of that hostility came from theological conservatives who viewed poverty as a consequence of individual moral failure, valorized free market ideology, and objected to the expansion of centralized state power. The OEO countered by developing the institutional capacity to project and defend in the public realm a theological vision of its own. That vision implicitly favored the Social Gospel: a justice-­oriented theology promoting the alleviation of poverty and inequality by reforming government and redressing the negative social consequences of laissez-faire capitalism.5 Acting in this public religious role, the federal welfare state functioned as a public religious welfare state.

Avoiding “Private Religion,” Promoting “Public Religion”: Church-­State Concerns in the Early War on Poverty Lyndon Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver as the first head of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1965. At the time, Shriver was the head of the Peace Corps, which his brother-­in-­law, President John F. Kennedy, had tapped him to create just a few years prior. Shriver was a veteran of the Catholic interracial movement, a vigorous promoter of Catholic social justice teachings, and a close ally of the civil rights movement that had just won a legislative victory in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was himself a public religionist—­a character grounded and legitimated in the field of institutional religion and committed to religious beliefs and principles, but who was dedicated to applying religion to the work of broad social transformation.6 As head of the Peace Corps he was already articulating a vision of government working with and through an organized public religious field to realize society’s highest ideals. In a 1963 commencement address at Fordham University, he asserted in terms saturated with Social Gospel themes: Separation of Church and State meant one thing when government and religion were at cross purposes. It means something different when they have common purposes. Today they have such common purpose in “social prog­ ress.” The great social question—­war and peace, civil rights, education, the elimination of poverty at home and abroad—­are all, at bottom, moral questions. They reflect spiritual values. They are the concern of religion and government; they are the concern of millions who perceive no difference, in this regard, between their beliefs and their social obligations.

The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State  /  237 This principle, the identity of private morality and public conscience, is as deeply rooted in our tradition and Constitution as the principle of legal separation. Washington, in his first Inaugural, said that the roots of national policy lay in private morality. De Tocqueville observed that American democracy was uniquely founded on morality. Lincoln proclaimed as a national faith that “right makes might.” Those who would read the Constitution as erecting a wall of hostility and distrust between Church and State neglect this aspect of our tradition. They are blind to the spiritual mainstream of American life. Equally important is the need for cooperation and common effort in attacking social problems. For the State to deprive itself of the support of religious belief and organization is to enter the battle for social justice without our strongest weapon: the spiritual beliefs from which social action springs. And without the cooperation of Church and State, of belief and power, our efforts will be doomed to failure.7

As the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, however, Shriver found himself in the position of potentially funding religious institutions that had applied for support for their community programs. The neat rhetorical “identity of private morality and public conscience” met the messy practical reality that the OEO would need to avoid the appearance of violating First Amendment–­based conventions regarding establishment, which recently had been sharpened by prohibitions against religious discrimination set out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it were to fund specifically religious activities, the newly expanded welfare state would appear to establish those religious perspectives while discriminating against all those religious individuals, groups, and beliefs not funded. Thus in the earliest days of the War on Poverty, OEO staff and legal counselors struggled to clarify church-­state issues in order to avoid any inappropriate funding relationships. In the process social policy established a new distinction between private and public religion. The struggle commenced as a variety of church-­based programs applied for CAP funds to offer counseling services to clients. Internal memos reveal that Shriver and OEO staff debated over whether to fund proposals from a “Christian Rural Fellowship Appalachian Project,” a Catholic Charities proposal for Manhattan and the Bronx that explicitly mentioned counseling for “spiritual, moral values” and would involve clergy in such counseling, and a program in Hawaii organized largely around “pastoral counseling.”8 An initial question was whether the OEO should be funding counseling programs at all, let alone pastoral counseling, but staff member Edgar May pointed out that such programs had

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already been funded: “We have funded counseling programs for birth control, employment, etc. We have held up counseling programs that would be operated by church related institutions.” The real concern, May submitted, was “that it would be extremely difficult to offer a public explanation [of ] how a clergyman can ever operate solely in a secular capacity. I don’t believe this case compares with the education problem where a nun, working as a teacher, could clearly restrict herself to secular subjects.”9 Initially, Shriver agreed: “I question whether we can permit ordained ministers, priest or rabbis to serve as counselors in an OEO supported program. Their professional duties require counseling. I don’t see how we can set a clear and acceptable demarcation line between their secular and religious advice.”10 OEO legal counsel Don Barker noted, however, that they already had clergy operating in “secular” counseling capacities in “half a dozen cases.”11 Shriver urged Barker simply to “clear this up so we can start funding these projects.”12 Barker prepared a set of formal guidelines for church-­related CAP programs. Rather than prohibiting clergy, or other religious figures from delivering counseling, the document referred to the nonestablishment clause of the First Amendment to justify setting a prohibition of religious content in publicly funded services. It identified religious institutions as physical spaces or “facilities” where programs could take place, but where no “sectarian instruction,” “sectarian identification,” or “religious worship” could be engaged under the auspices of a CAP. Moreover, church-­based CAPs would be prohibited from using the program to promote its religious purposes—­there can be no proselytization, no recruitment or inducement to join any religious institution or any religious activity. In sum, the church-­related institution is rendering a service to the community action organization—­and therefore to the community—­just as is any other participating agency. No support is given to the institution, nor is the institution advantaged to any measurable degree in the advancement of its religious purposes.

The community-­oriented purpose of the program was underscored by a requirement that there “be evidence that use of the church-­related institution has the support of the broadly based community action organization or a consensus of the community.”13 What the internal wranglings and ultimate guidelines of the OEO reveal is a specific understanding of private religious activity, which the welfare state was to avoid funding lest it run afoul of nonestablishment principles. As Shriver stated in his final note declining to fund the Honolulu pastoral counseling project, “Plainly, OEO is being called upon to fund a religious

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activity—­counseling with deep religious content. Such counseling is in effect the teaching of religion on an individual basis. The OEO conditions, placed on grants to all church related organizations, bar use of OEO funds in any program teaching religion or having religious content. These conditions are based on the sound public policy that the federal government should not be paying for religious activities—­that it should neither interfere with these activities nor support them.”14 Private religion, in other words, involved the transmission and expression of sectarian ideas, which were to be absorbed and believed by individuals, not disseminated by the government. Implied in this definition of private religion, however, was a sense of public religiosity. The “community” language presented in the guidelines for church-­related CAPs already began to trace the contours of a nonsectarian, publicly oriented religion of service and advocacy, which the government could support cheerfully. Shriver and even President Johnson made highly publicized visits to, and otherwise touted, church-­based CAPs in order to promote this kind of religious activity as a pillar of the War on Poverty. Indeed, because of such attention, CAPs run out of African American churches became some of the most visible efforts of their nature at that time. These programs were brazenly religious in their motivations—­ their leaders spoke openly of their personal faith in God, God’s promise of deliverance for poor people and black people, and God’s expectation that governments do justice. For instance, Rev. Leon Sullivan, founder of the Philadelphia-­based Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC), began his book on this OEO funded project with a confession of faith: I believe in God. I believe that God is working now in the nation, as in the world, in an extraordinary way. I believe that God can do anything. I see Him as a Being tangible and still intangible, with all power in His hands. And I believe that He is at this moment reconciling the nation, and all humanity, unto Himself. Everything I do, I do as an outreach of my ministry. The work in which I am engaged can be understood only in that kind of context. I believe God wants me to help men to live better on earth. I believe not only in milk and honey in heaven but in ham and eggs on earth besides.15

Such declarations were by no means off limits by OEO standards, as they represented the ideological underpinnings of public religious activity. They were not calls to personal conversion or advertisements for a particular sect, but rather verbal pastiches revealing the theological motivations to action for the public good. Sullivan’s words, echoing the Social Gospel call for a just Kingdom of God on earth, appeared to flow right into the “spiritual

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mainstream of American life” that Shriver spoke of in his commencement address at Fordham. Sullivan described fellow public religionist Shriver as a “friend” of his program who “told the story of OIC everywhere he went.” It was Shriver who arranged for Lyndon Johnson to visit the program in June 1967. Upon that visit, even Lyndon Johnson spoke to matters of the spirit: The Federal government did not build this center. Neither business, nor labor, nor philanthropy, nor city official built it. All of us are helping now, and I am proud of the part we are playing. But the spirit built this center—­the spirit that wants to say “yes” to life, that wants to affirm the dignity of every man, whatever his origins, whatever his race or religion.16

The boundary work engaged by the OEO involved not merely a separation between church and state, but the establishment of a practical boundary between public religion and private religion. The former would be avoided like a biblical plague; the latter would be courted and encouraged, particularly if it manifested as a Community Action Program. The idea was to avoid appearing to establish a private sect, even while pursuing the very establishment of a specific vision of public religion: one that supported the OEO by performing the kind of community services that could become state funded. As Sargent Shriver reflected in a 1967 interview: The original legislation passed by Congress specifically stated we were to mobilize all of the resources of the American people. Some think that means governmental resources—­the federal government, state government, municipal government—­but I never interpreted it that way. I read it literally. And to me that meant, as in any other total war, you use volunteers; you use religious groups; you use old ladies who can wrap bandages and maybe nothing else; you use invalids who can write letters and maybe nothing else. And as a consequence, we have attempted, not always successfully, to mobilize or energize every institution and every group in our nation who is willing to participate, and none, in my judgment, is more important than the religious groups.17

By no means, however, was the OEO’s “spiritual mainstream” exclusive to churches that launched the right kind of Community Action Program—­ the War on Poverty also required public defense. Congressional Republicans politically contested the OEO almost from the time of its creation. Shriver and his staff therefore needed to leverage the public religious energies of the churches to mobilize political support for the existence and expansion of the War on Poverty. Funding holdups that threatened Catholic Charities

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programs involving pastoral counseling were especially important to resolve because, as one OEO staff member averred after meeting about the War on Poverty with “twenty five Catholic Poverty Coordinators from all over the country who had gathered in Washington . . . the Catholic social action groups are really into this thing in a big way.”18 If Catholic CAPs were too frequently denied funding, influential Catholic public religious bodies, including Catholic Charities, might deny the OEO precious political support. The OEO needed to encourage the public religious activity of Catholic and certain black protestant organizations likely to lend political support to the War on Poverty. As the next section will reveal, however, the field of black religion was a particularly complicated one to cultivate, not because black churches were more likely to try and push private religion with public funding, but because their public religious stances regarding the worthiness of state interventions were growing more complex and politically unreliable.

The Civil Rights Office, Public Religionists, and the Political Purposes of the OEO The OEO’s Civil Rights Office (CRO) was established in 1964, along with the OEO. Its stated purpose was to monitor compliance with antidiscrimination laws set out in the Civil Rights Act passed just months earlier. The first CRO director was Samuel Yette, a Shriver appointee with a background in journalism and civil rights activism. Yette quickly found himself overwhelmed by cases, and simultaneously understaffed and underfunded. He found himself taking sharp criticism on behalf of the OEO from civil rights groups when funding for black community action programs was cut or denied, even though his office played no role in the selection of grantees.19 In a particularly embarrassing episode, a riot broke out at an OEO job training center after a popular black trainer was dismissed. Before the riot, the trainer had appealed to Yette, who was unable to intervene and restore the worker’s position. Some black commentators blamed Yette’s inefficacy for the violence, taking it and him as evidence that the OEO was not really serious about civil rights priorities.20 After three years of service, Yette resigned in bitterness. Yette’s experience underscored a reality with which OEO leadership had to grapple in the first three years of the War on Poverty. The landscape of black social movement activity after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was growing increasingly militant, with many strident voices growing ever more critical of government in its handling of poverty at home

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and conflicts abroad. Even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Shriver previously would have identified with the “spiritual mainstream of American life,” was intensifying its critique of the state and accelerating plans for protest under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The church-­based civil rights movement did have roots in the same social gospel tradition that influenced the War on Poverty through Sargent Shriver, but to Shriver’s dismay, such ideological kinship would not render the SCLC a compliant partner of the state. The SCLC had inherited a distinct black Social Gospel, which always regarded sustained protest against institutions of power as a primary means of ushering in the Kingdom of God.21 A movement thus motivated could tentatively cooperate with a political regime that promised to promote justice and equality, then unleash scathing critique and relentless protest on that regime when it failed to deliver. If the Social Gospel of Shriver encouraged policy reform and enlightened administration, the Social Gospel of King and the SCLC demanded revolutionary opposition to institutions they deemed as accommodating the status quo. While even the mainstream civil rights movement cranked up its opposition to government, periodic riots were breaking out in poor black urban areas around the country, further leading members of the Johnson administration to wonder whether the executive branch of government was significantly out of touch with a segment of the populace thought to have been placated by recent civil rights gains. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans generally resented the expansion of the welfare state under the War on Poverty and had been attacking the OEO since its inception. They were now using the intensification of civil rights militancy and the ballooning specter of urban violence as evidence that the War on Poverty was underwriting mass chaos, and that funding for the OEO should be rolled back dramatically. In light of such political challenges to the stability of the OEO, a Community Relations Office was established to keep special tabs on developments in the civil rights movement and gather reconnaissance in local black communities deemed ripe for riots or that might otherwise create political liabilities for the Johnson administration.22 Likewise, the purpose of the OEO Civil Rights Office was re-­visioned: rather than trying to keep OEO funded agencies in line with the antidiscrimination imperatives of civil rights legislation, it would promote the goals of the War on Poverty among black leaders and co-­opt as much of the complexifying black movement as possible, while gathering data on, and directly attempting to “cool off,” local areas thought prone to riots.23 To spearhead this effort, Shriver appointed the public religionist Maurice Dawkins. Dawkins had recently pastored a prominent African American church in

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Los Angeles, and was seen as a prominent civil rights leader there. In fact, he directed the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and had organized the West Coast contingent to the March on Washington in August of 1963. He also headed the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He loudly denounced rioting and other forms of civil disruption, and roundly rejected black nationalist militancy. He once publicly refused to allow a meeting involving members of the Nation of Islam to convene at his People’s Church. At the time of his appointment to the Office of Civil Rights, Dawkins was already serving government as associate director of the OEO program VISTA. In his public announcement of Dawkins’s appointment, Shriver stated, “As a civil rights officer with the OEO he will be concerned with equal opportunity compliance on OEO-­funded projects.”24 But Dawkins’s actual job was to monitor all varieties of black political struggle and, whenever possible, defend the record of the War on Poverty with regard to civil rights, promote nonviolent civil rights agitation over more combative varieties, investigate accusations that CAP workers were helping incite rebellion, and encourage black civil society to shift its activities toward the kind of local social service provision the OEO supported. Dawkins clearly was an attractive choice for this role because of his simultaneous ties to the civil rights movement and the welfare state. Ostensibly, he could keep his finger on the pulse of the black public even while justifying the aims of the War on Poverty to that public. But the civil rights movement of King and the SCLC was a churchly one—­it was rooted institutionally and ideologically in black religion. Many of the other manifestations of black movement activity had foundations in religion as well. As a public religionist, Dawkins brought to the Civil Rights Office an extensive knowledge of the black religious landscape. He multiplied this knowledge by appointing yet another public religionist, Grady Poulard, as head of the Community Relations division of the Civil Rights Office. Poulard, the former pastor of a thriving black church in Washington, DC, also had connections to the SCLC. From the outset, Dawkins and Poulard spent much of their time discovering the movement activities of black clergy and religious organizations. Of central concern was the intensifying militancy of black religion after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as militancy—­interpreted here as a radical opposition to the status quo including a refusal to cooperate with government—­ was perceived as a threat to the aims and very survival of the OEO. Their interest in militancy extended beyond the realm of black Christianity into the territory of stridently non-­Christian black religious formations whose leaders and perspectives appeared to be gaining popularity at the time. Of

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these, the most visible was Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of  Islam. Malcolm X, a former member of the Nation, had been slain in 1964 after blazing a meteoric career as its national spokesman, and as a captivating foil to Dr. King’s Christian prophetic persona. The Nation’s theology of black political, economic, cultural, and metaphysical independence from white America clearly had influenced strains of Christian black power thought. Dawkins and Poulard, then, were deeply concerned when the world champion boxer and Nation of Islam member Muhammad Ali began to use his fame as a national platform to criticize military escalations abroad and ongoing racial repression at home. On April 22, 1967, Ali spoke to one thousand students at Howard University, where, according to Grady Poulard, he “urged black Americans to follow the preachings of Muslim leader, Elijah Muhammad. ‘We have tried everything—­sit-­ins, lie-­ins, wade-­ins, pray-­ins—­ and we’re still catching hell,’ the explosive fighter said, in explaining why he was following the separatist path of the Nation of Islam.”25 But black Christian militancies fell much more frequently under the microscope of the welfare state, through the work of the Civil Rights Office. Dawkins and Poulard were aware of a growing “black power” sensibility among African American clergy, which threatened to eclipse the far more amenable sensibilities of 1950s SCLC activism. On July 22, 1966, more than a year before the Office of Civil Rights shifted purposes, forty black clergy met at the Bethel AME church in Harlem to form the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, an organization explicitly committed to principles of black power. In a statement obliquely critical of the predictably nonviolent, moralistic tactics of the foregoing civil rights movement, the clergy declared that the “power of white men is corrupted because it meets little meaningful resistance from Negroes to temper it and keep white men from aping God. The conscience of black men is corrupted because, having no power to implement the demands of conscience, the concern for justice is transmuted into a distorted form of love, which, in the absence of justice, becomes chaotic self-­surrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars.”26 The signatories and conference attendees were no collection of fringe religionists, but rather represented the major black Methodist and Baptist denominations and black members of mainline majority white denominations such as the United Churches of Christ and the Episcopal Church. Rev. Nathan Wright, the Episcopal minister who convened the committee, later wrote that the efforts of the OEO itself, while necessary for the purpose of “enabling Negroes to survive and of postponing the day of massive revolt” fell severely short of the ultimate goal of establishing a substantial black presence “in positions of high economic value and extensive influence

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at policy-­making levels in our business, educational and civic structure.”27 Rather than facilitating long-­term material self-­sufficiency and empowerment, he argued, the OEO promoted black dependency on the political and economic whims of the welfare state. Wright called the churches to a new prophetic imperative, a new public religious stance, one that would begin by withdrawing its messianic expectations from white-­controlled agencies such as the OEO and its federal regime, for if “the wide variety of such programs alone possibly could be taken as a measure of the efficacy of their operation, we might readily utter a sigh of relief that the millennium was about to come at last.”28 Black power demanded “apocalyptic” zeal in the pursuit of self-­determination, the spirit in which “black men may walk, even now, revealing each day something of the power which comes from eternity. . . . This might be akin to the arousing of a giant possessed of infinite strength of which he had been unaware.”29 When Poulard learned that a second black power minister’s conference would be held in July of 1967, he immediately sought permission from Dawkins to attend. He noted that the conference would draw some five hundred clergy, including fifty actual conferees and 450 observers, and that he personally knew all the conferees. He asserted, “This will be an opportunity for our office to learn a great deal about what is going on in the communities which these ministers represent, and in which all of them are playing key civil rights leadership roles.”30 Poulard also investigated CAPs whose church affiliates appeared to be going militant. As early as April 1967, his harried dispatches from the local urban fronts reported civil rights ministers with CAP ties going “pro-­black nationalist” and “anti-­OEO,” leaving CAP workers unsure of whom in the black religious field to trust. In Rochester, New York, for example, a prominent clergyman had abandoned his conventional civil rights activities to found a more militant clergy coalition called FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today). Poulard fretted that “many of the ministers are in a quandary concerning the position of FIGHT Executive Minister Franklin Florence. . . . Initially it was a community civil rights–­economic organization [working] side-­by-­side with ABC [an OEO funded Community Action Program].”31 To Poulard’s horror, Florence was organizing through FIGHT a “national enclave of ghetto dwellers in Rochester on July 24. While he stated that it will be a ‘peaceful prayer pilgrimage’ that will set the pace for calm throughout the country for the remainder of the summer, I concluded differently. Ghetto dwellers are no longer impressed by ‘prayer pilgrimages.’ I suggest that Florence is merely throwing up a smoke screen to shield his real plans for July 24th.” Florence’s real plan, Poulard surmised, was to

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ignite violent rebellion. In these and numerous other instances, Poulard and Dawkins’s status as public religionists brought the Civil Rights Office, and by extension the OEO, special access to and insight about public religious forms thought to bear on the fate of the War on Poverty welfare state. Of course, along with the rise of Christian black power and crypto-­ Islamic militancies, the OEO had to make sense of the increasing radicalization of traditional civil rights leadership. On April 4, 1967, just days before Muhammad Ali’s incendiary speech at Howard, Dr. King delivered possibly his most radical speech to date at Riverside Baptist Church in New York. There he called his audience to “recapture the revolutionary spirit” and declare “eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” He went on directly to criticize the federal administration for diverting resources from the War on Poverty to military war abroad, and declared it hypocritical to advocate nonviolent struggle at home when the United States was sending poor blacks and whites alike to propagate violence abroad: It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. . . . As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

With Dr. King adopting a more militant stance on the US welfare and warfare states, it appeared that the stably nonviolent and ultimately pro-­ American core of the church-­based civil rights movement was at stake. The civil rights stream of black public religion might no longer be relied upon to promote peaceful agitation over violent alternatives; it might no longer

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be expected to promote the belief that American political regimes and state apparatuses would redress poverty and racial inequality if morally pressured to do so. Again, the importance of civil rights institutional connections was important here. Dawkins knew King, and many of the key operatives in the SCLC, as Poulard claimed to know all of the ministers presenting at the aforementioned black power conference. But it is important also that Dawkins knew and understood King’s logic of public religion. He understood the Christian underpinnings of SCLC activism, and how its civil religious vision of a prodigal America redeemed by a return to its foundational commitment to equality, freedom, and justice motivated earlier pressure tactics. He also could feel its public religious commitment drifting away from a “spiritual mainstream” that justified working with government even while protesting it. And as a black public religionist situated within the welfare state, he was in a position to present the case for the SCLC to develop a strong pro-­OEO public religious expression. The Civil Rights Office tried to accomplish this with multiple groups, as the OEO was coming up for funding renewal, and as President Johnson was preparing to run for his first full term of office amid Republican claims that urban riots were in fact “Goldwater rallies.” What is most important for this portion of the analysis, though, is that for the first time the federal welfare state had formally incorporated into itself figures and forms of religious expertise that would help it navigate, for political purposes, a preponderantly religious social movement terrain.

To Interpret to the Nation: The Civil Rights Office’s Religious Interpretive Project As should be evident, the OEO needed not only to distinguish public religion from private religion, and encourage public churchly activity in the form of state-­fundable social service programs, but also to rally pro–­War on Poverty religious commitments as a moral counterweight to ascending black ideological militancy. This meant the civil rights officers needed to use their access to key black religious figures and institutions to intervene in the discourses of those church-­based movements that threatened to peel popular support from the War on Poverty and President Johnson. “Black revolt,” Dawkins warned, would “require a new kind of relationship to anti-­ poverty programs.” In the spring of 1967, Dawkins and Poulard launched an “O.E.O. Interpretation Project with Civil Rights Organizations.” Among other objectives, the Interpretation Project set out to “interpret to the civil rights community that OEO is a veritable ally in the cause for justice and

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equality,” to “‘tell the story’ of all that OEO has done for minority groups since 1964, in spite of the efforts of its many enemies,” and to “attempt to communicate with civil rights militants, with a view to channeling their talents, their energy, and their hostility onto the ‘battleground’ of the war against poverty.”32 While the language of the Interpretation Project proposal never mentioned religious groups as an institutional target, it aimed from the onset a substantial amount of its hermeneutical efforts at religious bodies and church-­based movement organizations. Dawkins spent a tremendous amount of time going to black churches, and church-­based activist groups, to promote local antipoverty work and the aims of the OEO. Only later, as the political ambiguity involved with engaging “militants” threatened the project, did the Civil Rights Office begin to specify the religious nature of its work. Rather than merely cavorting with militants, they were using their expertise and social connections in black religion to try and steer the churches toward forms of public religious expression that resonated with the work of the OEO. In this way the public religious mission of the Office of Civil Rights became even more explicit. In August 1967 Dawkins brought a pro–­War on Poverty theology directly to the SCLC when he spoke at the organization’s tenth annual convention. The conference was a true space of debate, with a variety of speakers and perspectives pulling clergy in multiple ideological directions. A prevalent issue was the rise of black power ideologies and the separatist tendencies of some its exponents. Dr. King formally proposed a wave of antipoverty, antidiscrimination protests to commence in 1968 under the rubric of a Poor People’s Campaign. The British economist and futurist Dr. Robert Theobald pressed an opposing direction; he urged the clergy to abandon King’s racially “divisive” mass protest strategy and instead advocate nonconfrontationally for the expansion of federal welfare policy to provide a guaranteed income for all citizens. Dawkins, speaking as a representative of the welfare state, opposed both black power and Theobald’s socialist-­sounding guaranteed income proposal, on religious grounds. He urged the clergy to reject the separat­ ist “black romanticism” of the militants and to hold on to the “Christian Pragmatism” of the earlier civil rights movement, whose critique of the state grew out of a deeper faith in its permanent capacity to reform, and a willingness to actually work with well-­intentioned political regimes. Turning to the imminent fate of the OEO at the hands of Congress, he pronounced the War on Poverty a “peace making and peace keeping instrument” in the midst of rioting in urban centers across the country, and urged clergy to make the

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case to their political representatives. By way of minimizing the partisan dimensions of the matter, Dawkins made sure to bring God directly into the picture: “Surely the 2 billion dollars requested by President Johnson should be passed by an almost unanimous bi-­partisan vote, if men of good will remember that God is not a Republican or a Democrat. They must remember that American poor of all races and both parties are God’s children, for whom a humane Congress must provide both a new hope and a new economic opportunity.”33 Later, Dawkins would impress upon Sargent Shriver that his offhand remarks about the value of Christian Pragmatism had been especially pivotal in convincing some clergy not to wander too deeply into militancy and too far away from “the establishment”: I might add here that the pickup of some portions of this address in which “black romanticism vs. Christian pragmatism” was mentioned was really an ancillary and minor point in the total address. I view this particular session . . . as one where we won many converts to support the war on poverty machinery in their local areas rather than join the Alinsky-­type “don’t have any dealings with the establishment” approach that other opinion-­makers at the convention were trying to sell.34

According to his own report, Dawkins spent more than two hours with Dr. King discussing ways that the convention could be of use to the War on Poverty, and King “further agreed to use his good offices with other civil rights leaders and to participate personally in any ad hoc advisory civil rights group that would meet on a regular basis with the Director of OEO to assure maximum effective cooperation between civil rights forces and OEO.” In addition, Dawkins reported that his appearance and remarks at the SCLC gathering had given him access to some five hundred people, mostly clergy, who were ready to help the OEO.35 To be sure, the Civil Rights Office’s mission to the SCLC did not coax the fullest imaginable support from the Christian social movement organization. In Dawkins’s fantasy scenario, he would convince the SCLC to pass a strongly worded resolution in favor of OEO expansion. He had arrived with his own draft of such a resolution in hand, hoping that the convention might pass it on verbatim so as to “permit clergy to speak from their pulpits and speak to their local congressmen with one voice, one message, and all of the salient facts.”36 Instead, the SCLC board of directors passed its own resolution, which Dawkins found “inadequate for our purposes” due to its generality.37 In truth the SCLC resolution quite specifically criticized Congress

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for “pretending it is under pressure to abandon anti-­poverty programs” while the Johnson administration “dawdles,” and demanded a large-­scale full employment project and a federal program to tear down ghettos in cities across the nation. It did not, however, offer what Dawkins sought: a pointed and religiously tinted endorsement of the OEO’s preservation and expansion under the Johnson administration.38 The militant SCLC resolution distilled action points from King’s address at the conference. In that speech he deepened his indictment of the diabolical American triad—­militarism, racism, and economic inequality. Far from endorsing the Johnson administration and the OEO, he called government and the white powerful to task in categorical terms. Without actually defending riots in the northern black ghettoes, King explained violent outbreaks largely as a reaction to white lawlessness, especially in the realms of policy making and execution: The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they created slums; they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty . . . when we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. Let us say boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law-­breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. Our real problem is that there is no disposition by the Administration nor Congress to seek fundamental remedies beyond police measures. The tragic truth is that Congress, more than the American people, is now running amok with racism. We must devise the tactics, not to beg Congress for favors, but to create a situation in which they deem it wise and prudent to act with responsibility and decency.

Rejecting riots, armed rebellion, and “obsequious pleas to insensitive government” as equally futile, King called for new forms of civil disobedience that would radically destabilize the operation of northern cities over periods of weeks or months, but without destroying them. These fresh, distinctively northern civil rights protest tactics, which actually did resemble in theory the urban high jinks Saul Alinsky advocated, would be deployed alongside national demonstrations at Washington, and the necessary but “tedious, often frustrating” work of “coalition politics” and “political action.” So the

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movement would not rule out collaboration with government administrations and politicos, but it would prioritize high-­pressure disruptive strategies. King’s address concluded in pithy, apocalyptic terms not entirely dissimilar from Elijah Muhammad’s perennial predictions of unjust America’s imminent destruction at God’s hands. Quoting Thomas Jefferson, King resolved: “ ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ In the second half of the 20th Century his warning can no longer remain unheeded.”39 Despite the SCLC’s adherence to a fundamentally critical stance on government, Dawkins did succeed at injecting into the discursive crucible of the conference a specific public religious vision—­one that called the churches to support the extant social welfare regime, even if they continued to protest that regime’s foibles. The OEO, through Dawkins, visibly encouraged the churches to fight for the expansion of the War on Poverty, and against voices in Congress that were calling for severe retrenchment. That encouragement consistently entered black media coverage of the event alongside the voices of King and Theobald. Although the SCLC did not produce a public endorsement of the OEO in 1967, Dawkins’s extended tête-­à-­têtes with King and other movement leaders demonstrated the latter’s implicit willingness to at least be in dialogue with the OEO. The SCLC would finally produce an OEO endorsement at its 1968 confab. Despite the ascendancy of public religionists in the Civil Rights Office, and the explicitly religious nature of many of their contacts, OEO higher-­ ups never raised church-­state issues as a concern. After all, public religious expression had already been distinguished from its private, and constitutionally taboo, kin. Rather, at issue were policies regarding the political conduct of OEO personnel. Dawkins’s performance at the SCLC conference apparently raised concerns within the OEO, not about the religious tones of his outreach, but about the possible entanglement of its staff with nonviolent radicals like King, and worse, with potentially violent characters affiliated with the churches. It is no surprise, then, that some OEO officials approached the clergy-­targeted outreach of the Civil Rights Office with reticence. In September 1967 a frustrated Grady Poulard wrote Maurice Dawkins in complaint that Walter Robbins, the OEO deputy assistant director for civil rights, had discouraged him from attending the annual gatherings of the National Baptist and Progressive National Baptist Conventions. “While you were on vacation I was contacted by officials of both of these organizations, and I was invited to participate in the activities of their annual conventions. This, I thought, would have provided our office with an invaluable opportunity to ascertain the passage of strong, positive resolutions in favor of the pending OEO legislation.” Noting that Robbins had

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thought it “unwise” for him to participate in such activities, Poulard continued: “I could be wrong, but I think we may have missed an opportunity to influence and gain the public support of nearly three million Negroes throughout the country.”40 It is possible that Robbins thought the proposed sorties “unwise” because they involved speaking directly before major religious assemblies, about the virtues of “Christian Pragmatism” no less; this could raise the hackles of observers concerned with the preservation of church-­state distinctions. But Poulard and Dawkins had already proposed, with no attendant controversy, a project involving similar visits to majority white denominations. Concurrent with the 1967 launch of their “Interpretation Project with Civil Rights Organizations,” Poulard and Dawkins also presented an “OEO project with the Commissions on Religion and Race on the Major Religious Federations and Denominations.” This project aimed to support the efforts of majority white denominations and ecumenical groups that had not only established civil rights committees but also had dutifully shifted their public religious activities to antipoverty work in the wake of War on Poverty policy making. “Now that the civil rights movement is beginning to see the elimination of poverty as its primary ‘raison d’être’ ” the proposal observed, “these Commissions have accordingly shifted to a basically economic gear, and they may be likened unto brave little platoons whose efforts often go unnoticed and whose pleas for assistance and coordination are often unheard—­by their sponsoring organizations, nor by the OEO.” Among other works, the methodology of the project would include “appearing with Executive Directors [of the various race commissions] at general assemblies of their religious organizations, to give support for their work, and to interpret OEO to those assemblies.” Unlike their contact with the “brave little platoons” emanating from the majority white denominations, working within the complicated field of black religious activism could appear to legitimate political varietals that did not uncritically support the War on Poverty and the Johnson administration. Of particular concern may have been the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which Dr. King and others had only recently formed in protest of the National Baptist Convention’s refusal to endorse nonviolent, albeit militant, civil rights struggle. Civil Rights Office appearances at the black denominations could be interpreted as a government endorsement of the emerging protest activities of religious blacks, and was therefore “unwise.” In order to quell OEO concerns about the political entanglements of the Civil Rights Office, Dawkins and Poulard would emphasize the religious nature of its outreach. In response to the stated concerns of Walter

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Robbins, Poulard and Dawkins launched a “project with the Black Religious Denominations” designed specifically to channel religious activist energies into pro–­War on Poverty activities and away from forms of militancy that might fuel the fires of urban unrest or antiadministration sentiment. In actuality, this project merely added an explicitly religious language to the previous Civil Rights Interpretation effort, which theretofore had none. It justified potential, and unpredictable, contacts with all sorts of black activists by emphasizing the religious nature of those contacts. Rather than merely gathering reconnaissance on the deeds of activists, the point was truly to insert state-­sanctioned, pro-­OEO public religious orientations into black religious discourses. The point was truly to bring more of black religion into an American spiritual mainstream. At this juncture, the public religious function of the OEO’s self-­justifying outreach gained a formal institutional status theretofore unknown. The hermeneutical promise of this state religious function had triumphed over OEO fears that its staff might inadvertently fuel its own opposition. By further institutionalizing the public religious function of the welfare state, Dawkins and Poulard neutralized internal fears regarding the treachery of its political imperative.

Conclusion The War on Poverty entailed a significant transformation of the welfare state, which in turn occasioned significant developments in the state’s engagement with organized religion. In this period are multiple lessons for our understanding of the welfare state as public religious welfare state; this is the welfare state as a parser of religious matters and an interlocutor with institutional religion. It is critical that the War on Poverty was a period of state expansion rather than of retrenchment. To implement this expansion, the OEO invited a full range of institutions of civil society, including religious institutions, to seek funding for local services. But the risk of actually funding religious practice required that the welfare state develop and articulate a clear posture on what church-­based activities could be supported. This meant it had to define religion in a way that ultimately distinguished private religious practices and commitments from public ones. As such, the state’s approach to religion was not binary, with something either being religious or not, or religiously “on” or “off,” but dualistic, treating private and public religious expressions quite differently. Private religion involved the sectarian counseling, rituals, symbols, and doctrines of the churches, and the OEO would be at pains not to fund or direct such activities in any way. Public religion, by wide contrast, addressed social matters of concern to both church

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and state and articulated the motivations for such concern in nonsectarian terms of human and national ultimacy. The boundary between private and public religion also allowed the state more easily to justify its intervention in the religious field for political purposes. In a political terrain populated in part by public religious agitators preaching the fundamentally unjust nature of state power, officials of the expanding welfare state needed to learn about the religious activist field while strategically intervening in its discourses. The institutional boundary between church and state was breached as the welfare state incorporated public religionists to accomplish this task. Public religionists were thus made institutionally amphibious by the state. Although their legitimacy as religious figures was rooted in the world of organized religion, and their public status was accumulated outside of, and even in antagonism against, the state, their status was transmuted as they became religious servants within the welfare state. The discursive boundary of the state was crossed as public religionists tried to enter the deliberative realms of religious activism, armed with public and civil religious languages defending the moral worthiness of the welfare state. But the work of state-­based public religionists came to require internal justification, as its political purpose, which involved contact with harsh critics of the welfare state, threatened to make welfare expansion look like a confused and self-­negating partisan venture. Public religionists defended their role by emphasizing its fundamentally religious nature, over and above any narrowly political concern. In this way, public religion was enshrined within the welfare state as a domain of nonpartisan, as well as nonsectarian, activity purely concerned with the public good. That domain was an instantiation of the public religious welfare state. Developments in church-­state relations since the War on Poverty are fruitfully read in terms of the institutional and ideological morphology of the public religious state as well as the increasing legislation and litiga­ tion of personal morality. A case in point is the Office of Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), founded by the executive order of President George W. Bush in 2001. Viewed through the conceptual lens of the public religious welfare state, the OFBCI appears to elaborate rather than break from patterns of state-­based public religious activity initiated during the War on Poverty. The primary difference between the Civil Rights Of­fice of the OEO and the OFBCI was that the purpose of the Civil Rights Office was to garner religious support for welfare expansion, while the aim of the OFBCI was to justify and promote retrenchment. The stated purpose of the OFBCI was to level what the Bush administration described as an “uneven

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playing field,” where religious institutions could not compete on equal footing with secular agencies for funding. This goal was not entirely original, as decades earlier the OEO tried to “clear up” the distinction between private and public religion “so we can start funding these projects.” Nor was the stated goal of “leveling the playing field” a solitary one. The OFBCI sacralized the executive branch of government such that it would appear less as a target for the criticism of socially concerned churches, and more like an extension of the churches’ highest social aims. Also, in the public rituals surrounding the establishment of the OFBCI, Bush propelled a new set of black ministers into a national spotlight previously enjoyed almost exclusively by clergy identified with Social Gospel and civil rights agendas. The clergy elevated in these inaugural events were partial to the congregation-­based, moral-­reform-­oriented human service strategies favored by Bush as part of his “compassionate conservatism” social policy agenda. By covering the executive branch with the patina of “faith” and elevating certain public religious figures and policy ideas over others, Bush’s OFBCI operated as a cultural and political vehicle, set in motion to legitimate specific understandings of and solutions to persistent poverty and social in­equality, while cultivating religious support for the administration. Accounts penned by the office’s first director and deputy director attest that it had been put to political purposes, as staff eventually were required to be registered Republicans,41 and office-­sponsored conferences were used to recruit “nontraditional” Republican voters including African Americans. 42 Yet, like the Civil Rights Office of the OEO, the self-­justifying rhetoric of the OFBCI was stridently nonpartisan. It presented its public religious mission as one inherently immune to the rogueries of politics proper. An overarching lesson of this history is that, at least since the War on Poverty, struggle over the constitution of proper politics, statecraft, and religion alike has been a key preoccupation of the national welfare state. The public religious welfare state has been a crucial product of and an arena for that struggle.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

Clarke E. Cochran, “Public/Private—­Secular/Sacred: A Context for Understanding the Church-­State Debate,” Church and State 29 (1987): 113–­25. Clarke E. Cochran, Jerry D. Perkins, and Murray Clark Havens, “Public Policy and the Emergence of Religious Politics,” Polity 19, no. 4 (1987): 595–­612. Thomas Robbins, “The Intensification of Church-­State Conflict in the United States,” Social Compass 40 (1993): 505–­27. New forms of church-­state conflict emerged as early as the years just before World War II, when private institutions began seeking their share of an expanding pool of

256  /  Omar M. McRoberts public resources for social welfare provision. See N. Jay Demerath and Rhys Williams, “A Mythical Past and Uncertain Future,” Society 21 (1984): 3–­10. 4. See José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1994). 5. The most important early exponent of the Social Gospel was the Baptist churchman Walter Rauschenbusch. His manifesto, A Theology for the Social Gospel (1997 [1917]), outlined all of the most influential ideas of the movement, including the notion that human inequalities were social sins redressable only via large-­scale institutional transformation, and that the Kingdom of God would appear only after humans had worked to alleviate all social sins. 6. Robert Liston, Sargent Shriver: A Candid Portrait (New York: Farrar Strauss, 1964). 7. Sargent Shriver, Point of the Lance (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 209. See also “Speech by Sargent Shriver, Director, Peace Corps at the National Conference on Religion and Race—­January 15, 1963, Chicago Illinois.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Sargent Shriver Papers, Box 18. Series 2.2 Peace Corps Writing. Speeches: National Conference on Race and Religion, January 1963. 8. All in “Church-­State Matters” folder, Box 1, “General Counsel Subject and Litigation File, 1967–­1974” (Entry A1 1008), RG 381, National Archives and Records Admin­ istration–­College Park. Hereafter cited as “OEO Church-­State Files.” 9. Memo from Edgar May to Sargent Shriver, July 20, 1965. OEO Church-­State Files. 10. Letter from Sargent Shriver to White House legal counselor Don Barker, July 20, 1965. OEO Church-­State Files. 11. Don Barker, handwritten comment on Memo from Edgar May to Sargent Shriver, July 20, 1965. OEO Church-­State Files. 12. Letter from Sargent Shriver to White House legal counselor Don Barker, July 20, 1965. OEO Church-­State Files. 13. “Community use of the church-­related institutions in the War on Poverty.” OEO Church-­State Files. 14. Letter from Sargent Shriver to Senator Daniel K. Inouye, June 22, 1965. OEO Church-­ State Files. 15. Leon Sullivan, Build Brother Build (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1969), 25. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. “Shriver Interview: The Church and the Poverty War,” Home Missions (June 1967), in Box 61, OEO Writings (Series 3.2.0), Sargent Shriver Papers. 18. Memorandum from Hyman Bookbinder to Sargent Shriver, August 17, 1965. Ibid. 19. “An Impossible Task,” Baltimore Afro-­American, December 24, 1966, 5. 20. “Rift Widens on Policy at Kentucky Job Center,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1965. 21. The progenitor of the black Social Gospel was African Methodist Episcopal bishop Reverdy Ransom, whose activism spanned the first half the twentieth century. A democratic socialist inspired by the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, Ransom opposed the “accommodationist” politics of Booker T. Washington, preaching instead militant confrontation with all institutions undergirding racial inequality. Ransom was a colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois, and a founding member of the Niagara movement that later became the NAACP. In 1934 he founded the Fraternal Council of Negro Churchmen, the first nationally organized black church protest movement. See Reverdy Ransom, The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son (Nashville, TN: Sunday School Union, 1949). 22. David C. Carter, The Music Has Gone out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965–­1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State  /  257 23. The reconnaissance function of the Civil Rights Office presents an opportunity to apply the concept of social learning to the incorporation of religious knowledge in social policy regimes. Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976) describes social learning as the process whereby existing policies present opportunities for elites to learn about social problems in specific ways; these ideas then impact subsequent policy development. See also Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 24. “Appoint Pastor Poverty Equal Job Officer,” New York Amsterdam News, April 8, 1967, 7. 25. Memo from Grady Poulard to Maurice Dawkins, April 29, 1967, “Correspondence With Regional Civil Rights Leaders” folder, Box 6, “Office of Civil Rights. Program records of the assistant director for civil rights nov 1965–­dec 1968.” RG 381 National Archives and Records Administration–­College Park. Hereafter cited as Office of Civil Rights Files. 26. “A Statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, July 31, 1966,” reproduced in Nathan Wright, Black Power and Urban Unrest (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967). 27. Ibid., 18. 28. Ibid., 25. 29. Ibid., 154–­55. 30. Memo from Grady Poulard to Maurice Dawkins, June 20, 1967, “Correspondence With Regional Civil Rights Leaders” folder, Box 6, Office of Civil Rights Files. 31. Memo from Grady Poulard to Maurice Dawkins, April 28, 1967. Ibid. 32. “Definition of an O.E.O. Interpretation Project with Civil Rights Organizations,” Undated Memo; “Poulard Reports, July 1967 to April 1968” folder, Box 7, “Corre­ spondence with Regional Civil Rights Leaders,” Office of Civil Rights Files. 33. “Excerpts from address of Dr. Maurice A. Dawkins, Assistant Director for Civil Rights in the Office of Economic Opportunity, to the 10th Annual Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” “SCLC National Convention, Atlanta, GA August 17, 1967” folder 1, Box 2, “Speeches,” Office of Civil Rights Files. 34. Memo from Maurice Dawkins to Sargent Shriver, September 9, 1967. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Memo from Maurice Dawkins to Sargent Shriver, September 14, 1967. Ibid. 38. “Resolution by the Board of Directors and the Tenth Anniversary Convention, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 17, 1967.” Ibid. 39. “A Statement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tuesday, August 15, 1967. Southern Christian Leadership Conference Annual Convention. Ebenezer Baptist Church. Atlanta, Georgia.” Ibid. 40. Memo from Grady Poulard to Maurice Dawkins, September 11, 1967, “Corre­ spondence With Regional Civil Rights Leaders” folder, Box 6, Office of Civil Rights Files. 41. John DiIulio Jr., Godly Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 117. 42. David Kuo, Tempting Faith (New York: Free Press, 2006), 230–­32.

Ten

Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEOC, and Civil Rights Enforcement R obert C . L ieber m a n

The role of the state in American politics presents something of a puzzle. The illusion that the United States is a “stateless” society is long gone. Several generations of scholars have resurrected and reconstituted the notion of an American state, and it is now well established that the state plays a more powerful role in American politics as an authoritative rule maker, national standardizer, and manager of the nation’s affairs than earlier accounts had generally concluded.1 But it remains the case that accounts of the American state tend to focus mainly on the state’s comparative lack of the formal structures of authority rather than on the means by which it accomplishes all that it does. The state’s role in the enforcement of civil rights is a case in point, highlighting both the limitations on the state’s formal coercive authority and the state’s ironic accomplishments as enforcer and social transformer. For all its symbolic power and pivotal importance in mandating equality under the law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a limited vehicle for social transformation. The legislative compromise that was necessary particularly to break a Senate filibuster that famously lasted three months and filled more than sixty thousand pages of the Congressional Record was principally aimed not at limiting the act’s bold assertion of equal rights but at restricting the mobilization of state power to enforce those rights.2 Title VII of the act, which outlaws employment discrimination, created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as the principal agency to enforce this prohibition. As originally conceived by civil rights advocates, the EEOC was to have full regulatory powers, particularly the power to issue binding cease-­ and-­desist orders to employers. By final passage, however, the EEOC had

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neither cease-­and-­desist authority nor the intermediate level of authority that the House of Representatives had favored, the power to file lawsuits in federal court against offending employers. Instead, the commission could only receive and investigate individual complaints of discrimination and, upon finding that there was probable cause to believe that discrimination had in fact taken place, attempt to mediate a settlement between the parties. Coercive enforcement was left to individual plaintiffs, who could sue employers once the EEOC procedure had run its course, while the Justice Department could also file lawsuits if it identified patterns or practices of discrimination. This was not a recipe for strong and effective enforcement; indeed, it is a plausible reading of the historical record that limiting the effectiveness of enforcement (especially in the North) was precisely the purpose of the compromise over Title VII.3 As one leading practitioner of employment discrimination law put it, “the prevailing attitude toward Title VII, as finally enacted, was that the civil rights movement had suffered a defeat.”4 Despite these limitations, however, Title VII soon became the basis for a strong, arguably effective, state-­initiated program of antidiscrimination enforcement—­the cluster of mandates and practices known collectively as affirmative action. This development, which took place in the short span of ten years or so following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, poses a double paradox. First, affirmative action, which relies on race-­conscious and group-­ based means to remedy the effects of discrimination, seems to contradict the clear color-­blind orientation of the Civil Rights Act, which appears to prohibit the consideration of race or other group characteristics in employment. Second, the enfeebled EEOC was one of the principal driving forces behind the evolution of affirmative action. Bereft of power to carry out its enforcement responsibilities, it nevertheless managed to create a strong enforcement regime that came to be backed by federal courts (including the Supreme Court), widely adopted and internalized by corporations, and broadly supported by many public institutions in American life.5 For example, in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases of the early 2000s, which upheld the consideration of race in public university admissions in order to maintain a diverse student body, sixty-­eight amicus curiae briefs in support of the university’s admissions policies were filed with the Supreme Court.6 Represented among the filers were nearly ninety major private and public universities and law schools, sixty-­eight major corporations, twenty-­ two state governments, 118 members of the House of Representatives, fourteen US senators, and fourteen then-­current and retired military leaders (including several former secretaries of defense and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ).7

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How was the EEOC able to be effective in an institutional environment that was quite hostile to its success in both material and cultural terms?8 The commission, that is, lacked both the coercive tools of administrative power and a clear legal mandate to violate the color-­blind framework that underlay American civil rights policy and practice. What, then, enabled the EEOC to act effectively? More generally, how can an agency embedded in the famously weak, fragmented, and highly constrained American national state develop and deploy this kind of effective capacity to achieve a set of goals through autonomous action?9 Finally, how was the EEOC able to challenge and reinterpret its own mandate, even in the absence of explicit change from above, in a way that constituted real political development, as defined by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek—­“a durable shift in governing authority”?10 In this essay I explore these questions—­both the particular puzzle of the EEOC and the more general one about the roots of state authority in American governance. I begin by examining a range of approaches toward the administrative foundations of state power, particularly those that emphasize the means of gaining control over the formal powers of the administrative state. I then develop an alternative approach that emphasizes the mobilization of private power on behalf of public regulatory goals as a source of endogenous institutional change and the growth of state power. Through a case study of the EEOC and its role in the rise of affirmative action, I examine the implications of these theories and conclude that the private-­public approach best accounts for the EEOC conundrum and offers a fruitful approach for further research on state building and American political development more generally.

The Private Bases of Public Power Studies of American political development have mostly equated “the state” with formal structures of administrative power and have defined “state building” in terms of the elaboration of those structures. In the 1960s, Samuel Huntington identified the American state as a peculiarity in comparative terms, an underdeveloped “Tudor state,” stuck in a medieval institutional rut and lacking centralized coercive capacity while American society modernized around it (producing the incipient crisis of order and governability about which he was seized with anxiety).11 In his foundational work on American state building, Stephen Skowronek showed that the United States was not as stateless as Huntington feared, but rather that American national administrative capacities had developed out of America’s own distinctive political patterns rather than on the European model of the progressive

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democratization of absolutism.12 But still, for Skowronek, the sine qua non of state building was the construction of public administrative power as a replacement for the private power that characterized the nineteenth-­century “state of courts and parties”—­“reconstitution” replacing “patchwork” as the dominant image of state building. Legions of state-­building studies have followed Skowronek’s lead, considering state authority as differentiated from and opposed to private power. This formalism in the understanding of the state, moreover, is paralleled by formalism in the understanding of policy and policy development, which is typically associated with formal authoritative action by state institutions: laws, regulations, and the like. But as Ira Katznelson has recently reminded us, such an undifferentiated notion of “the state” has limited the conceptual apparatus available to students of the state in American political development.13 He suggests a return to J. P. Nettl’s suppler, multidimensional notion of the state, which allows us to consider “stateness” in more varied, and hence more precise, terms than simply the strength of coercive administrative power.14 Complicating our account of the American state in this way, moreover, opens space for a more careful understanding of many of the peculiarities of policy development and change in the United States. Although the formal institutions of American governance famously constrain the prospects for policy reform through formal legislative and regulatory channels, policy change in the United States is less rare than this perspective suggests and often arrives through unexpected means, as the affirmative action case demonstrates.15 Accounts of American state building focus on the development of public power, by which I mean power that derives from the legal authority of duly constituted government officials, whether elected or not. State, or public, authority, in this view, is a matter of wielding autonomous, coercive administrative capacity—­the government’s ability to make authoritative rules and enforce them. This ability, in turn, tends to be understood as a function of the formal organizational and political structure of the government, particularly the executive branch and administrative agencies.16 In these accounts, policy change typically results from authoritative formal changes, such as statutory reform or bureaucratic reorganization.17 The problem is that affirmative action evolved without such formal reform, and none of these state-­centered accounts of state building or bureaucratic capacity can explain the EEOC’s success in fostering this sharp policy change.18 The EEOC had none of the institutional resources that conventional institutional theories of bureaucratic effectiveness suggest are necessary for such success. Standard accounts of the origins and evolution of affirmative action dovetail very well with this approach to state power. These accounts portray

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affirmative action as the product of activity by public officials, principally EEOC commissioners and staff members and federal judges, who developed the tools of affirmative action—­statistical definitions of discrimination, numerical targets, and “disparate impact” jurisprudence, among others—­as a pragmatic response to political pressure to produce results in the turbulent era of the mid-­to late 1960s, driven largely by EEOC’s organizational need to achieve legitimacy.19 But the EEOC had none of the institutional resources that the conventional accounts of state power suggest are necessary for such success. Enforcing employment discrimination is a form of regulation in which the government is supposed to make and enforce broadly applicable rules about the behavior of a class of private (nongovernmental) actors—­in this case, employers with fifteen or more employees.20 But despite the original conception of the EEOC as a full-­blown regulatory agency with coercive rule-­making authority, the EEOC as it was constituted did not have this authority and despite lobbying from the civil rights community, was never granted it.21 Affirmative action thus evolved without formal policy reform, but through some alternative mechanism. Victoria Hattam offers an important critique of the top-­down understanding of the evolution of antidiscrimination policy, arguing that it wrongly downplays the direct role of social movements and mobilized pressure and overemphasizes the autonomous action of government officials.22 Hattam’s principal target, sociologist John Skrentny, responds rightly that Hattam’s critique sidesteps the importance of power vested in those offi­ cials. “The study of policymaking,” he writes, “should begin at the center of power, where policy decision-­making takes place, and should assume nothing about the relevance or role of the political grass roots.”23 Except that the EEOC had no decision-­making power, at least in the conventional sense. It could not promulgate binding regulations, issue cease-­and-­desist orders, decisively adjudicate disputes over claims of discrimination, or impose sanctions on employers who continued to discriminate. That striking fact leaves something of an explanatory gap between the presumption of power intrinsic to the state-­centered, top-­down approaches to affirmative action and the reality that the EEOC essentially had to convert its hollow bureaucratic frame into an edifice of power. Hattam’s brief in favor of a more society-­and specifically movement-­ centered approach to the development of antidiscrimination policy moves importantly toward the consideration of private actors in the construction of state power. In fact, as I will demonstrate, civil rights organizations and activists played a significant role in the development of affirmative action

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and the evolution of state power. Hattam’s suggestive account points toward a need for a clear and nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which mobilized civil rights activity affected the inside processes of policy formulation and implementation that led to the creation of affirmative action and the construction of state power. Similarly, Skrentny’s focused and careful account of bureaucratic decision making helps explain why the EEOC made the choices it did about how to interpret Title VII and how to define discrimination in order to solve their immediate problem of legitimacy. But it comes up rather short as an explanation of the EEOC’s transformation from “toothless tiger,” as one of its key staff members understood it, to the effective midwife of affirmative action a few short years later.24 An important alternative to Skrentny’s account of the EEOC and affir­ mative action takes more seriously the importance of social movement pres­ sure from below and gives an account of state capacity that engages the connections between state and private actors. The sociologists Nicholas Pedriana and Robin Stryker argue that the EEOC responded to pressure from the civil rights movement largely by promoting broad legal interpretations of discrimination, and that these interpretations expanded the resources available to actors who sought to pursue broad group-­based enforcement using statistical patterns to identify and measure discrimination.25 Legal interpretation, as I will show, was a crucially important part of the EEOC’s enforcement strategy. But this perspective, I will suggest, underemphasizes the extent to which the EEOC was an active and entrepreneurial partner in the public-­private nexus that contributed to the development of affirmative action and the concomitant creation of state power, taking advantage of uncertainty in the institutional system and finding innovative pathways to power in this context.26 How did the EEOC become a successful regulator with the typical regulatory tools, and how did affirmative action emerge from this apparently unfavorable institutional arrangement? A number of scholars have described the participation of a range of actors beyond the EEOC in the evolution of affirmative action, from union locals and grassroots civil rights activists to state politicians and fair employment practices commissions to the burgeoning employment bar.27 But no account has yet convincingly narrowed the puzzling gap between the lack of state capacity and the success of affirmative action as a regulatory strategy. Students of regulation and bureaucracy in the United States have long been attuned to the importance of links between state regulators and actors outside the state. Regulation aimed at limiting the concentration of economic power or constraining the predatory practices of some economic

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actors against others less well situated in the marketplace entailed an analytical distinction between the intended targets of regulation—­those actors (whether individuals or firms) whose behavior was supposed to be limited by regulation—­and its intended beneficiaries—­those entitled to protection—­ and this distinction has animated much early scholarship on the regulatory state. Beginning in the post–­World War II era, empirical studies of regulation began to observe that regulation intended to limit the predatory behavior of firms in particular economic sectors has often come to favor the interests of those actors whose behavior regulation was supposed to limit, a phenomenon that has come to be known as “regulatory capture.”28 Subsequent work postulated a variety of causal mechanisms that seemed possibly to lie behind the capture of regulatory agencies by regulated interests. Some historians tried to show that regulatory laws and agencies were, in fact, sought by regulated industries, and consequently that regulation was generally intended to protect their interests and that regulatory statutes were designed and implemented under their influence.29 More recent analysts have avoided this functionalist approach by showing how capture might emerge from the logic of regulatory politics, in which the costs of regulation are borne by concentrated actors (a small number of large firms in a single industry, for example, or a single economic sector) while its benefits are widely distributed across the broader population.30 This now-­classic account of regulatory capture rests on a variety of plausible and reasonably well-­documented mechanisms, including the political behavior of economic actors such as firms and interests groups, who seek to use money or organizational resources to influence legislative and bureaucratic behavior, and the behavior of bureaucrats themselves, who seek either to maximize agency budgets and power, to protect bureaucratic turf, or even to enrich themselves through corruption.31 More recent variants of this approach to regulation have observed that the targets of regulation are not the only policy-­making actors who have the resources to influence bureaucratic behavior. Regulation, in this view, is an arena of policy-­making conflict and in many policy domains both sides of the regulatory equation—­targets and beneficiaries alike—­have the resources and organizational capacity to shape regulatory outcomes.32 Consequently, a wider range of interest groups, and not just regulated businesses, potentially drive bureaucratic politics, either because politicians want to maximize their electoral support or because they need to craft winning policy coalitions from diverse and otherwise disconnected elements.33 These accounts of influence over regulatory behavior share a set of common analytical features. They presume, first, that regulators’ preferences

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with regard to the policies they are tasked with implementing are flexible. Bureaucrats-­cum-­regulators might be indifferent to their agency’s stated regulatory mission and hence easily diverted (or, in extreme cases, corrupted) through political or economic influence, resulting in the distortion of state authority as a result of private influence. Or preferences might shift as agency personnel changes over time, as presidents try to bend agencies toward their own preferences. Either way, the logic of “capture” implies that the activities of actors outside of the state whose preferences diverge from those of the regulators can induce the regulators to act in accordance with the preferences of those interests even when they diverge from the regulators’ own preferences or from the apparent intent of the law. Second, they presuppose that regulatory authority resides in a well-­bounded state that already has coercive regulatory authority. In this view, the aim of private actors who have a stake in regulatory outcomes is to persuade regulators to deploy their power in a particular direction, by writing favorable regulations, adjudicating cases in a particular way, or imposing either stiff or lax penalties, as the case may be. Without power lodged in the agency, however, there is, in effect, nothing to “capture.” On the surface, it is perhaps plausible to portray the EEOC as a “captured” agency. Its regulatory outcomes, relatively vigorous and effective enforcement of Title VII that led to a sharp decline in discrimination and helped reduce wage inequality between blacks and whites, certainly consistently favored one set of interests, minority (and women) workers and the organizations that represented them, over their antagonists, employers (and, to a certain degree, labor unions). But in several crucial respects, the EEOC’s path toward regulatory effectiveness diverged from the capture script. First, the preferences of the key regulators, the EEOC commissioners and staff, remained consistent over time. Moreover, they overlapped almost entirely with the preferences of the intended beneficiaries of  Title VII; as historian Nancy MacLean has shown, workplace equity and antidiscrimination enforcement were long-­held goals of the civil rights movement.34 And they were consistent with the plain meaning of Title VII. Second, the EEOC did not come equipped with regulatory authority preinstalled. At issue for both state regulatory officials and private actors alike was not how to deploy state power but how to create it in order to achieve a set of regulatory ends.35 It seems apparent that the EEOC’s power did not expand over the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to congressional pressure; Congress had ample opportunities to directly empower the EEOC to issue cease-­and-­ desist orders, but it repeatedly declined to do so, and the agency was consistently underfunded and its resources stretched.36 The resultant challenge

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of expanding its power, as we will see, consumed both the EEOC staff and much of the civil rights establishment in the mid-­and late 1960s. In recent years, moreover, scholars have challenged several aspects of the “captured” bureaucracy narrative. First, bureaucrats are not necessarily either fickle or venal; in many, if not most, cases they are conscientious regulators, committed to their agency’s mission but susceptible to a variety of influences that might lead regulatory output to appear to favor established firms or other targets of regulation, including information asymmetries, reputation, and visible political contributions to the agency’s political principals.37 As Daniel Carpenter cautions, it is dangerous to infer regulatory mechanisms from regulatory results; regulatory mechanisms often involve more complex and two-­sided interactions between “state” and “private” actors than standard accounts of regulation generally contemplate.38 Another recent approach to regulation points to private, nongovernmental action as an important element of regulation. One prominent arena in which private behavior cumulates to produce policy-­relevant public outcomes is the courts. Conventionally regarded as disputes between private parties, lawsuits and court judgments are clearly central to policy making and implementation in a range of policy areas; employment discrimination, environmental regulation, and welfare and health policy, among others, are all increasingly policed through the courts.39 As Sean Farhang has shown, however, private litigation is not merely autonomous private behavior but is often part of a carefully calibrated, politically driven system of regulation created by Congress as a means of regulatory enforcement.40 To this picture, Quinn Mulroy importantly adds the observation that bureaucratic agencies, as well as Congress, can induce private litigants to file lawsuits to effect regulatory outcomes.41 Corporate organization is another mechanism through which private power and public power are connected. Frank Dobbin, Lauren Edelman, and colleagues have shown, for example, how corporations have internalized a variety of regulatory norms and practices concerning equal employment opportunity, workplace health and safety, and employee benefits as a response to the changing and uncertain legal and policy environment.42 Taken together, these works echo an older theme in American politics, voiced most effectively by Grant McConnell, of power exerted not through the deployment of clear state authority but through its displacement onto the private realm, through the reliance on means of policy implementation and enforcement that depend on private action.43 Above all, they highlight the two-­sided and potentially cooperative nature of state power. Regulatory authority (and state authority more generally) is not, in this

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picture, a matter of one-­way power being exerted by the state on private actors; rather, it involves two-­way interactions in which the power of the state emerges not only through the top-­down exertion of coercive authority but also through the state’s entanglement with “private” actors.44 In this view the state’s administrative power does not rest solely on delegated constitutional authority but primarily on the linked activity of “public” and “private” actors—­bureaucrats, organized interest groups, and private citizens.45 Moreover, and particularly pertinent here, this view suggests how successful regulation might be possible where formal state authority is weak. An approach that builds on this line of work seems to offer a better account of the EEOC’s role in overcoming its own limitations as a regulatory agency. As an agency without clear regulatory authority it lacks the resources it needs in order to exert any kind of power and constrain behavior in any meaningful way. If these resources are not to be found within the agency’s own ambit, it must look elsewhere to find the resources that will enable it to do what it perceives to be its job and respond to political pressure to produce results. This entails elements of both the top-­down and bottom-­up approaches that have framed previous studies of the EEOC and affirmative action. In this framework, the agency will take advantage of the presence of a friendly constituency with resources that can be useful to the agency in pursuing its aims. The agency will not only respond to pressure from outside groups but also, and crucially, take its own entrepreneurial initiative in contacting and soliciting participation from the group, reversing and unsettling common institutional pathways.46 The primary mechanisms at work in such a circumstance are thus neither top-­down—­regulators making decisions that have force—­nor bottom-­up—­private actors pressuring regulators to take particular actions. Rather, state regulators and private groups will cooperate to pursue jointly held policy goals, devising and pursuing joint strategies to expand state capacity. In empirical terms, this perspective suggests that evidence about the engagement between regulators and pri­vate groups will reflect neither the subordination of the agency’s auton­ omy and mission to the aims of regulated interests, as in notions of “capture,” nor the agency’s susceptibility to movement influence. Importantly, the agency is as likely to be the initiator of contact as private actors, and agency personnel are likely to conceive of their contact with private actors in strategic terms. The puzzle here is one of institutional change without a formal change in rules or governing structure, but in a context where political conditions gave bureaucratic actors a great deal of scope to reshape the rules from within.47 In the case of the EEOC and affirmative action, these conditions included

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the presence of a well-­organized, federated social movement that was connected both to local communities and the federal government; a political context that offered few veto points to the agency’s activities and little counterorganization to the civil rights movement, especially in the business community; and a potentially receptive legal system.48 It is worth noting that these conditions describe a particular historical moment, before the consolidation of conservative counterorganization in the business community and the legal establishment, and the counterpunch to the civil rights revolution was focused elsewhere, particularly on law and order and school busing.49 At this moment, a distinctive configuration of circumstances favored the associational strategy that the EEOC and its partners followed to stretch the state’s power.50 Such a configuration may not repeat itself precisely, but it might suggest a broader set of structural and political conditions under which such a strategy might be possible, as well as help to explain one particularly puzzling and tremendously important episode of policy development and state building in the United States.51 In the remainder of this essay I show how the EEOC’s early experience as toothless regulatory agency and midwife of affirmative action tends to lend plausibility to the associational approach. There is, as I will show, some evidence in the commission’s formal administrative record of responsiveness to both interest groups and political swings. Its record in dealing with individual complaints—­its main administrative power—­was sluggish and troubled, an outcome that tended to favor employers (the targets of regulation) by severely reducing the likelihood of a successful complaint and, consequently, providing little disincentive to discriminatory employers. The commission’s handling of complaints was, to some degree, sensitive to political swings; the EEOC’s practices and procedures did tend to change in response to political shifts, particularly changes in presidential administration.52 In the aggregate, however, the commission’s record of handling discrimination complaints certainly could not be said to favor the protected interests in the domain of antidiscrimination law (particularly African Americans). But a focus on these constraints on the agency’s formal administrative powers obscures the EEOC’s surprising success at finding and promoting a successful Title VII enforcement formula. To do this, the commission, from its very beginnings, developed a close relationship with organized civil rights groups that persisted through political changes; at the same time its relations with industry were fairly antagonistic, contradicting a capture account. Although charged with the enforcement of the antidiscrimination rules promulgated by the Civil Rights Act, the EEOC had few of the resources conventionally associated with administrative power. Nevertheless,

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by forging a strategic alliance with civil rights organizations, the EEOC (particularly its conscientious staff who sought to establish the agency’s legitimacy by finding a way to fulfill rather than shirk its regulatory mission) was able to exploit the ambiguities inherent in the Civil Rights Act and convert the unfavorable institutional structure of Title VII to a new set of purposes. The result was a process of transformative policy change from within that occurred without further legislative change and that reshaped the American state’s role in civil rights policy.

Private Power, Public Power, and the EEOC The limitations of the EEOC’s formal administrative capacity are well known.53 In its first year of operation alone, the commission received nearly nine thousand discrimination complaints and resolved almost three-­ fourths of them, by completing an investigation and brokering a settlement between the parties, or by issuing a ruling (either that there was sufficient cause for the complainant to file a federal lawsuit or that there was not), or by referring cases to a state agency where appropriate. The first year’s work thus left a backlog of nearly 2,500 cases unresolved, and complaints were typically met with long delays in coming to a resolution (in violation of the sixty-­day time limit specified in the law for resolving cases). Even when cases did move forward, the resolution was often less than fully satisfactory for the complainant because the commission lacked the power to impose a remedy even when it found evidence of discrimination.54 Things only got worse from there as the EEOC entered a period of Malthusian challenges. Over the next several years the number of cases filed grew exponentially, doubling every three or four years while the pace of resolution was linear, resulting in backlog that reached 145,000 cases by the mid-­1970s. The backlog was to some degree sensitive to political oversight. During the Carter administration, under commission chair Eleanor Holmes Norton, the backlog declined; Ronald Reagan’s EEOC chair, Clarence Thomas, instituted several policy changes that limited the commission’s ability to resolve charges in house.55 By the mid-­1990s, the EEOC’s cumulative backlog of cases was nearly a quarter of a million. Over time the resolution of complaints responded to a number of factors, including the racial and gender composition of the commission’s field staff.56 But the formal complaints process never worked very well as a means of enforcement. On the surface, these figures appear to lend some plausibility to a picture of the EEOC as captive of employer interests. The commission was slow to resolve complaints of discrimination, and when it did resolve them,

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resolutions tended to favor employers. In cases where the commission’s investigation process went far enough to result in a cause finding (approximately half the cases filed; the other half were either settled or closed administratively without reaching the finding stage), fewer than 10 percent generally resulted in a finding of probable cause favoring the plaintiff.57 To the extent the EEOC was successful as an enforcer of civil rights laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was so despite and not because of its administrative capabilities. In order to understand how the EEOC, laboring under the institutional and political constraints imposed on it, managed to oversee the birth of affirmative action, it is necessary to look beyond its regulatory outcomes and the regular administrative processes associated with them. Overcoming these constraints required working in partnership with other institutions, both private and public, whose aims overlapped with and whose capacities complemented those of the EEOC and its staff. Two links in particular—­with civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Color People (NAACP) and with the federal courts, through the agency of individual plaintiffs—­proved especially fruitful for the EEOC in its quest to establish its own legitimacy as a civil rights enforcer and in so doing to construct a strong and resilient enforcement regime. That this very fruitful nexus of connectedness between the EEOC and organized private interests was a key motor of policy development suggests that an associational approach to bureaucratic power may hold the key to explaining the EEOC’s overall pattern of activity and policy impact.

The Mixed Economy of Affirmative Action The EEOC’s operational and institutional limitations proved a double-­ edged sword. On one hand, the commission’s relative weakness and political vulnerability reflected the general limits on administrative power in American government. On the other hand, these very same institutional constraints created a great deal of slack in the commission’s political and administrative environment. Limits on its power forced it to seek other means of influence, particularly by collaborating with other institutions, both inside and outside the state. This imperative drove the problem of antidiscrimination enforcement into the same fragmented and decentralized political arena that had produced the EEOC’s incapacity in the first place. The struggle for enforcement would be fought out not in terms of administrative power emanating from Washington but in multiple arenas and jurisdictions around the country, and in this political context federalism, usually seen as a constraint on civil rights enforcement and protection,

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was actually empowering.58 In this context, the EEOC sought to play what role and forge what alliances it could as it sought pragmatic rather than ideological or coercive solutions to the problem of fulfilling its mandate in a constrained environment.59 Among the EEOC’s key partners in this endeavor were African Americans themselves, who were organized in a powerful national social movement that remained deeply rooted and active in local political and economic arenas through local organizations. The flourishing of local political organization among African Americans, in fact, was one of the important enduring consequences of the civil rights movement, and these organizations gave African Americans enhanced political leverage in many parts of the country.60 In particular, federated organizations such as the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund (LDF) could collaborate with the EEOC in pursuing race-­ conscious remedies for employment discrimination in a variety of local-­level forums. The principal arenas for these activities were individual investigations of employers’ practices and lawsuits in the federal courts; both of these arenas allowed the EEOC to get around its lack of coercive authority. In particular, the EEOC’s relationship with the federal courts (especially after the 1972 amendments, which empowered the EEOC to bring lawsuits but significantly did not grant it cease-­and-­desist power, for which it and civil rights groups had been lobbying) proved empowering, because it gave the commission access to a politically and organizationally independent means of deciding discrimination cases and enforcing remedies.61 But beyond this structurally determined opportunity, the more historically contingent relationship that the EEOC was driven to forge with certain elements of the waning civil rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s helped it to have an impact beyond its apparent institutional means. These elements of the EEOC’s universe—­also consistent with the characteristic shape of American administrative institutions—­enabled it to participate in the development of policies that transformed American antidiscrimination policy beyond its color-­blind legislative origins. Hamstrung by its limited coercive power and its restricted institutional position, inundated in short order with an overwhelming caseload, and limited by the legal requirement of proving discriminatory intent in individual cases, the EEOC turned to a variety of tactics to pursue its aims. It was able to exert entrepreneurial influence through several channels, ranging from very informal to more formal, because it could exploit the organizational slack in the federal government, because its precise role in the pantheon of enforcement agencies was so ill defined, and because it was able to find outside partners and allies. In this sense, the mixed economy is an

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apt metaphor for the political roots of affirmative action—­neither wholly public nor wholly private, the policy emerged from a hybrid realm.62 The EEOC’s enforcement strategy primarily involved two sets of activities. One revolved around organizing and deploying its limited statutory power in the most effective possible way.63 The question here was not entirely one of expanding the agency’s formal powers, although both EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations lobbied Congress for such an expansion for nearly a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. 64 Rather, the aim was both to reveal the extent of discrimination in the labor market by finding and publicizing discriminatory patterns in the labor market and particularly to reveal common and widespread discriminatory practices and the most egregious discriminators. The other was to develop a legal strategy to promote an expanded definition of discrimination and an alternative interpretation of Title VII’s requirements that would attack not only direct but also indirect discrimination by proscribing practices that had systematically discriminatory effects. Both of these activities involved close collaboration with civil rights organizations, and in fact were possible only because that avenue of collaboration was available. The Complaints Process From the beginning of the commission’s operation, EEOC commissioners and staff realized that the commission’s formal authority would not be sufficient to tackle the enforcement challenge it faced. At the same time, leaders of the NAACP, the LDF, and other civil rights organizations saw in the EEOC an opportunity to advance their own emerging interests in capitalizing on Title VII to attack employment discrimination (which was to become the LDF ’s principal focus in the coming decade).65 Within days after the EEOC began its operations, NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter wrote to EEOC chairman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. expressing the desire to cooperate with the commission in the enforcement of  Title VII and requesting a meeting to discuss “ways and means that we in the Association may best work with you in the ordinary processing of complaints and in their submission and disposition by the Commission.”66 Within several months, Roosevelt convened a meeting of civil rights leaders to discuss the commission’s enforcement plans, at which the representatives of the NAACP and other organizations urged cooperation on the filing and handling of discrimination complaints.67 The commission’s initial focus was on the use of its limited formal powers to address individual allegations of employment discrimination. When

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an employee filed a discrimination case with the EEOC, the commission was supposed to investigate the merits of the claim and rule within sixty days whether there was sufficient evidence of discrimination to warrant a lawsuit in federal court (which could then be filed by the plaintiff ).68 Thus the EEOC did have the power either to advance or stymie actions against alleged discriminators, but it could call attention to discriminatory practices and put pressure on employers by issuing “probable cause” findings that provided an evidentiary record that supported conciliation proceedings and, in many cases, subsequent lawsuits. Much of the commission’s work in its initial scramble to get up and running involved assembling and training its team of investigators and conciliators so that they would be ready to tackle charges as they came in.69 The EEOC was not alone in turning its attention to the formal complaint and conciliation process. Led by the LDF, civil rights organizations made this new process the centerpiece of their activity as well.70 On the first day of commission operations, the LDF announced a program to help African Americans—­particularly in the South, where African Americans were understandably reluctant to challenge authority—­understand their new rights under Title VII and file charges with the commission. The LDF sponsored a summer program in 1965 in which law students spent time in many southern communities helping to publicize Title VII, train local community workers to assist in filing complaints, and develop community relations among local employers, churches, and civil right groups. Other civil rights groups, too, participated in this effort.71 Much as they had in earlier decades, the LDF and the state worked interactively to define and shape the emerging frontier of civil rights law and policy.72 This activity—­some parallel and some cooperative—­on the part of the EEOC and the LDF had several consequences. One was simply a surge of claims that exceeded the commission’s expectations. The commission’s first-­ year budget and staffing levels were based on the assumption that it would process approximately two thousand individual charges. Instead, it received nearly nine thousand complaints in its first year.73 Many of these complaints arrived not from individuals acting on their own but came about with the participation of civil rights groups. The LDF alone shepherded approximately 1,800 of these cases toward the commission in the first eighteen months of operation.74 The LDF was only one of at least eight national civil rights organizations that participated in the process of helping plaintiffs file claims with the EEOC. The correspondence files of the commission’s Compliance Divi­ sion reveal dozens of letters about particular allegations of discrimination

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between 1965 and 1967 from a range of national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Negro Labor Council, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Council of Federated Organi­ za­tions, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCRUL), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and seventeen different state and local chapters of the NAACP itself, as well as from smaller local community-­based organizations.75 This correspondence came from sixteen states, mostly southern (all the former Confederate states but Florida are represented) but also including major northern industrial states such as Ohio and Michigan.76 The range of economic sectors represented in these exchanges was quite broad, encompassing steel, shipbuilding, aerospace, manufacturing, railroads, textiles, tobacco, retail, road construction, and building trades. This was not entirely one-­way communication. The EEOC not only responded but also encouraged civil-­society organizations to participate in the enforcement process. One of the first items on the commission’s agenda on its very first day in business was a discussion of how to deal with cases that came in through organizations and not simply from individual complainants, suggesting that such cases warranted special attention. 77 The EEOC compliance staff also sent claim forms in bulk to organizations that requested them.78 Most important, the EEOC also responded with special alacrity and attentiveness to charges that came to it via civil rights organizations, especially when they shed light on cases of discrimination that went beyond individual instances but rather indicated broader patterns of discriminatory behavior in firms or even in entire industries that required active investigation on the part of the EEOC. One such instance was a series of charges that were filed by African American workers in Birmingham, Alabama. Alfred Blumrosen, the commission’s chief of conciliations, had chosen Birmingham as the site of the EEOC’s first conciliation effort because, as a highly visible focal point of the civil rights movement and a major industrial center, Birmingham was “symbolic of all the problems of discrimination in the South.”79 This again was not simply one-­sided activity in which nongovernmental organizations took it upon themselves to channel claims toward the state. Although part of the groups’ intent was to gum up the EEOC’s works in order to reveal its inherent administrative weaknesses, officials of the commission quickly realized the strategic possibilities that were available in these activities. The EEOC worked actively with the NAACP and other organizations, helping them to identify fruitful opportunities for the filing of claims and, in some cases, to make those claims in a way that would be

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most likely to succeed.80 In September 1965, for example, the EEOC’s director of compliance, George Holland, promised Dr. John W. Nixon, president of the Birmingham chapter of the NAACP, that the EEOC would send a field representative to Birmingham to help the NAACP “perfect” the complaints it was developing in that important city.81 This was just the beginning of a long series of contacts in which the EEOC and the NAACP shared information and collaborated on a sequence of cases in Birmingham, especially those involving US Steel, which had several major plants there and was one of Birmingham’s largest employers (and one of the largest industrial employers in the South).82 Nor was this trivial activity for the EEOC and its field staff, who risked violent reprisals in Birmingham and elsewhere in the South. The commission had arranged with the Justice Department for its field agents to receive protection from the US Marshals Service and the FBI when working in the South, although reports from the field suggested that the level of protection did not always meet the EEOC’s expectation (there is no record of an actual attack on EEOC personnel).83 The EEOC was not thus merely a passive receptor of claims generated entirely by “private” or civil-­society actors, but rather seems to have engineered a symbiotic relationship with private organizations. From this relationship, the NAACP and other organizations got access to important information and assistance that helped them to negotiate the EEOC’s conciliation process. This access was important to civil rights groups partly because it helped them put pressure on employers, especially in the South, where Title VII enforcement would have its most significant impact on the employment prospects and wages of African Americans.84 But it was important also because the EEOC was the gatekeeper to the federal courts—­plaintiffs could file suits only once the EEOC’s investigative process had run its course—­which was where groups such as the LDF, the LCRUL, and the American Civil Liberties Union had their greatest impact.85 For the EEOC, this emerging relationship also conferred advantages. For an agency that was perennially underfunded and understaffed, the LDF and other organizations provided the commission with an additional set of eyes and ears in the field, using its deep local knowledge of conditions in minority communities around the country to bring particularly egregious cases of employment discrimination to the commission’s attention. This knowledge, in turn, helped the EEOC get some leverage on its own enforcement problem by helping it to focus high-­profile, high-­impact cases, which it did by using probable cause finding strategically and “bundling” together investigations of particular places, industries, or firms, as it did in Birmingham (a practice to which business strenuously objected).86

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An important element of this public-­private cooperation was the EEOC’s collection of information from employers on the racial composition of the workforce. Under statutory authority granted to it by Title VII (as liberally interpreted by the commission’s staff ), the EEOC developed form EEO-­1, on which it required employers covered by Title VII to report data on their employees by race, ethnicity, and sex.87 This requirement gave the commission what Alfred Blumrosen called a fairly acute “sociological radar” trained on the American labor market that allowed it to discover patterns of discriminatory practices in particular regions, sectors, industries, and even individual firms.88 Over time, the data that the EEOC compiled from this form would prove a key weapon in the shift toward race-­conscious enforcement.89 As early as October 1966, EEOC officials recognized that EEO-­1 data could “serve as fertile areas for affirmative action,” and a staff research report in 1967 outlined an ambitious plan for expanding enforcement efforts based on EEO-­1 data. These reports and the data they generated, the commission contemplated, could be powerful weapons in the investigation and conciliation process. Not only could they lead to the filing of so-­called commissioner charges, charges initiated by the commission itself against an employer without a specific plaintiff ’s coming forward, but they could also form the basis for “technical assistance” programs, in which specific employers identified as regionally deviant in their hiring practices could be targeted for the negotiation of affirmative action agreements (with the threat of commission investigations, or even lawsuits, looming). Furthermore, the 1967 report noted, “this information adds a new dimension to the investigator’s view of the case and a powerful weapon in the conciliator’s armory.”90 Collaborative Legal Strategy The EEOC’s collaboration with civil rights organizations also extended well beyond the realm of the commission’s formal regulatory powers, particularly to the realm of the courts. As Pedriana and Stryker carefully document, the expansion of the legal interpretation of Title VII was a key step in the EEOC’s drive to overcome its administrative weakness and enhance its power.91 But this interpretive move was made possible not only by the skill and determination of the EEOC’s own staff but also by the relations the commission had begun to forge with the NAACP and the LDF, which provided both information and manpower. Although Title VII had denied the EEOC direct access to the courts, its staff saw the courts as an essential part of their overall mission to attack employment discrimination. The federal courts, in fact, had taken something

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of a lead in promoting racial equality in the workplace during the decades before the Civil Rights Act, although without the statutory backing of Ti­ tle VII their efforts were limited.92 The commission designed its investigation and conciliation process in part to generate probable cause findings that would prove useful in subsequent court proceedings. This meant treating EEOC investigations and conciliations as case law and trying to develop a consistent set of standards and definitions that could be applied in an increasingly standardized way to different kinds of discriminatory practices and situations. The commission began publishing some of its formal decisions in individual cases, much as courts publish selected opinions when their decisions establish new legal principles that are potentially applicable to some class of future cases.93 The commission used these conciliation decisions as a basis for developing and publishing a series of legal guidelines to codify its interpretations of Title VII and serve as guides for employers and employees about what practices the commission would find acceptable and unacceptable in probable cause determinations. These guidelines were, in the first instance, administrative in nature, designed to clarify the EEOC’s own procedures.94 As a result of the US Steel discrimination cases in Alabama, for example, the commission formulated guidelines on seniority, which was a particularly sticky question in declining industries such as steel where shrinking employment meant layoffs, which usually meant that African Americans, who had been hired more recently and were lower down on job ladders than white workers, would be the first to be let go.95 It also published guidelines on matters such as the use of occupational tests as a qualification for hiring and promotion, which often worked against black workers and job applicants. Within months of beginning its operations the commission began producing digests of the guidelines that it produced, and updated these lists regularly. Guidelines deemed particularly important, such as the occupational testing guidelines, were published as pamphlets that could be made easily available to employers, and beginning in late 1965 the commission produced quarterly compilations of its legal interpretations covering numerous categories and dozens of topics.96 But these guidelines were legal as well as administrative documents, and they were critical in the development of legal arguments that were made in the courts by LDF lawyers, among others, in discrimination cases.97 The EEOC staff, moreover, consulted regularly with LDF attorneys in developing the legal rationales behind these guidelines, as the EEOC and the LDF discovered that they had overlapping interests in finding enforcement mechanisms that would transcend the limitations of the case-­by-­case

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conciliation power that Title VII granted to the commission. As LDF director Jack Greenberg reminded EEOC Chairman Roosevelt in March 1966, “from time to time our representatives have conferred with individual commissioners and staff members of EEOC not only about specific complaints filed pursuant to your regulations but about our mutual concern to develop affirmative action programs to attack patterns of discrimination.”98 The occupational testing guidelines were among the most important products of this collaboration, but it extended to other areas as well, including seniority, job ladders, and merit systems for promotion.99 These legal guidelines formed the basis for a legal strategy, hatched jointly by the EEOC and the LDF, to attack discrimination through the courts. This strategy emerged partly from rules Congress created that provided incentives for private litigants to file suits as a way of enforcing the law, as Farhang has shown, but also from the direct intervention of state actors.100 The EEOC could not file lawsuits on its own under Title VII, but the Justice Department could. Despite extensive prodding from the EEOC, however, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed very few such suits—­only ten by the end of 1967—­leaving the field open for the LDF, the ACLU, and other groups who could represent private litigants in filing lawsuits in federal court.101 LDF lawyers were the principal actors in this strategy, filing dozens of Title VII lawsuits in 1965 and 1966 alone, and over time the lawsuits became increasingly important as Title VII enforcement mechanisms. By the early 1970s the number of  Title VII suits filed annually in federal courts numbered into the thousands, and it increased through the decade even as the number of EEOC complaints began to fall, and Title VII suits came to account for nearly 4 percent of all civil actions filed in federal courts.102 But as with other enforcement activities, this legal approach was deeply collaborative, involving both the LDF and the EEOC. The commission participated in several significant ways. Frustrated both by its own inability to file lawsuits on its own behalf and by the Justice Department’s disinclination to file “pattern-­or-­practice” suits, commission staff consulted extensively with the LDF to develop legal strategies for attacking employment discrimination in the courts. In frequent strategy meetings, EEOC staff members and LDF attorneys shared information, devised legal arguments and doctrines, worked to coordinate the various administrative and legal enforcement avenues, and argued about strategy (about which they did not always agree).103 The EEOC was not just a background and sideline player in this legal strategy, but an active participant, particularly through the filing of amicus

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curiae briefs. Through its briefs, the EEOC was able to present its interpretations of Title VII to the federal courts, usually to bolster plaintiffs’ cases as presented by the LDF and its cooperating attorneys. Within a few years of its creation, the EEOC was filing dozens of amicus briefs annually, and the agency’s participation seems to have at least modestly improved the chances for the plaintiff ’s success.104 The EEOC’s legal guidelines also played a significant role in the courts. Because they were produced by the agency that had nominal administrative responsibility for enforcing Title VII, the commission’s guidelines tended to receive deference from federal courts struggling to decide discrimination cases without a great deal of judicial precedent.105 These factors came together most prominently and significantly in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., the case in which the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that employers could not use even ostensibly race-­neutral tests or other occupational qualifications that tend disproportionately to bar minority applicants from certain jobs unless the employer could show that they were a bona fide qualification for the job category in question. Prior to 1964, the Duke Power Company, a North Carolina utility, had a segregated workforce in which African Americans were relegated to low-­level, dead-­end jobs. After the passage of  Title VII, the company dropped its explicit segregation mandate, but required either a high school diploma or a satisfactory score on a stan­ dard intelligence test (either the Wonderlic Personnel Test or the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test—­both standard intelligence and aptitude tests). Most black workers did not have high school diplomas, and many performed poorly on the tests. Consequently, the use of these criteria for advancement in the company effectively denied black workers the opportunity to transfer into departments with greater professional opportunities.106 At issue in the suit was whether the use of occupational tests of this sort, which were racially neutral on their face but had a “disparate impact” on black and white workers in their application, constituted a violation of Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination. The company argued that the tests involved no racial bias and that if black workers fared poorly it was evidence not of any discriminatory intent but of low aptitude or poor preparation. The plaintiffs, by contrast, argued that the tests did not measure the actual qualifications necessary to do the jobs for which they were supposed to screen and that their use constituted discrimination in violation of Title VII because they systematically denied equal opportunity to black workers regardless of intent. They asked the court to rule that employment tests that had a “disparate impact” on black and white employees should be presumed illegitimate unless the employer could show that they were necessary

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prerequisites for the specific jobs in question. This was precisely the thrust of the EEOC’s Guidelines on Employment Testing Procedures, which argued that occupational tests should be professionally developed and expressly tailored for specific classes of jobs rather than general tests of intelligence or aptitude. The trial court and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Duke Power and ruled that the tests were legitimate and that the disparate employment patterns that resulted were not evidence of discrimination. The trial judge, Eugene A. Gordon, specifically declined to recognize the authority of the EEOC’s guidelines when they were introduced.107 But in 1972 the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the ruling and ruled that the “disparate impact” of apparently neutral tests counted as discrimination if the employer could not show that they were closely related to specific job qualifications. Accordingly, the court held that Title VII prohibited not only intentional acts of discrimination against individuals but also practices that seemed nondiscriminatory on their face that had the effect of preserving unequal racial imbalances. “The [Civil Rights] Act,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger for the court, “proscribes not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.”108 The court decisively rejected Duke Power’s argument that Title VII proscribes only demonstrably intentional acts of discrimination and instead embraced a broader standard for discrimination, using the analogy of literacy tests for voting, which the court had earlier banned “on the ground that the test would abridge the right to vote indirectly on account of race.”109 Griggs had begun essentially as a joint product of the EEOC and the LDF. Discriminatory occupational testing had long been a target of the EEOC, and the original lawsuit, filed by fourteen black employees of Duke Power, had emerged from an EEOC investigation that was undertaken as a result of charges filed through the LDF’s summer 1965 Title VII project.110 Several of the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit against Duke Power were members of the Rockingham County, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP and had heard EEOC commissioner Samuel Jackson speak at the North Carolina NAACP’s state conference in 1967 about the importance of activist participation in the EEOC’s campaign to go beyond intent in interpreting Title VII.111 Over the course of the litigation, the EEOC and the LDF consulted regularly about the case, sharing information and conferring on legal strategy, occasionally disagreeing. In fact, after the Fourth Circuit Court of the Appeals ruled in Duke Power’s favor, the EEOC’s lawyers, particularly its deputy general counsel John Pemberton, advised the LDF not to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. The LDF ’s director, Jack Greenberg, rejected this

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advice and chose to appeal, gambling (correctly, as it turned out) that the Supreme Court would be more receptive to the broader interpretation of discrimination than the southern judges of the Fourth Circuit.112 Once the appeal was underway, the commission filed an amicus brief in the case in support of the plaintiffs, presenting its interpretation of  Title VII to the court. Both Simon Sobeloff, the dissenting judge on the Fourth Circuit appeals panel, and Chief Justice Burger cited the EEOC’s brief and testing guidelines explicitly in their opinions. In his opinion, Burger wrote that “the administrative interpretation of the Act by the enforcing agency is entitled to great deference.”113 In announcing this stance of deference, Burger cited an earlier case that established an expectation of deference to reasonable and consistent statutory interpretations by executive agencies, suggesting that emerging legal doctrine in administrative law supported the court’s stance.114 The Griggs decision sanctioned a race-­conscious interpretation of discrimination that gave the state broader power to attack discrimination, particularly through the EEOC’s privileged status as an interpreter of the law. In so doing, the court established the legitimacy of the broader Title VII enforcement standards that both the EEOC and the civil rights community, led by the LDF, had long sought. But it also highlighted the maturation of the links between the EEOC and the organized civil rights community. These links, particularly with the NAACP and the LDF, were the linchpin in advancing collective, race-­conscious enforcement of Title VII. Neither bureaucrats nor courts, either by themselves or in combination only with one another, could have achieved this result. The EEOC certainly could not; it had the power neither to coerce nor sue. Nor could the courts; although they had the power to issue decisive and authoritative rulings in the cases that came before them, these cases had to come from somewhere. It was the linkages between the EEOC and the LDF that gave the courts the cases and the principles that they ultimately used to validate the practices and principles of affirmative action, although it was uncertain how receptive the courts would be to the expansive interpretation of discrimination proffered by the EEOC and the LDF.115 It was the LDF, with the help and background advice of the EEOC, that brought cases strategically to present issues of discrimination in the most legally promising light hoping to make persuasive arguments and find receptive judges. And it was the EEOC that took the lead in developing the legal interpretations and doctrines that backed up those arguments and, ultimately, persuaded judges. These interconnected factors, finally, highlight the importance of the distinctive configuration of forces that was present in the late 1960s and early 1970s that made this set of outcomes possible.116

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  283

In addition to its multifaceted collaboration with civil rights groups, the EEOC used several other tactics to leverage its severely limited formal powers into effective enforcement. It used the power of publicity to expose discriminatory practices and induce employers to change their behavior. It held a series of high-­profile hearings on employment practices in New York City, for example, that targeted prominent service industries such as banking and other white-­collar industries that depended heavily on their civic reputations in the nation’s most liberal city. Among other employers, these hearings shone a rather embarrassing spotlight on the New York Times.117 These well-­publicized hearings contrasted sharply with similar hearings that had been held in 1935 by a city commission investigating the causes of a race riot that occurred in Harlem in March of that year. The 1935 commission similarly documented evidence of widespread racial discrimination in employment, focusing particularly on public utilities and transportation agencies, retail stores, and labor unions.118 The commission documented not only the wide disparities between black and white workers and the nearly complete absence of African American workers from some of the city’s most important economic sectors but also some of the bluntly discriminatory practices that kept African Americans typically in the most menial, lowest-­ paying jobs, which were unabashedly described by their practitioners. One utility executive, for example, testified that he “did not regard the exclusion of Negroes from all positions, except a few jobs as laborers, as discrimination, but only as a customary practice.”119 Even the city-­owned Independent Subway System, the report pointed out, had at one time refused to give African American job seekers applications for any job other than porter.120 The commission concluded that economic inequality, perpetuated by discrimination, was at the root of the racial unrest in Harlem and recommended strong action by the city against job discrimination.121 Despite (or, perhaps, because of ) the direct and damning nature of its findings, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia declined to release the commission’s report to the public, and it received very little public attention. It was published in July 1936 in the Amsterdam News, a major black newspaper, which alleged that the mayor had considered the original draft of the report “too hot, too caustic, too critical, too unfavorable” and had demanded that the official report’s language be softened. The report’s unofficial publication seems to have drawn little or no notice; the New York Times did not report on it, and the Times’s only mention of the commission’s work came in a report about a meeting between the commission and the mayor, at which La Guardia defensively reported on progress the city made in areas such as wages for African American subway porters and playground construction in Harlem.122

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In early 1969, another set of hearings, this time in Los Angeles looking into the motion picture industry, raised congressional hackles (particularly those of Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen, who threatened to oppose President Richard Nixon’s appointment of William Brown as EEOC chair because of his participation). Further hearings in the same year, this time in Houston, hastened the end of Johnson appointee Clifford Alexander’s chairmanship of the commission. Yet another round of hearings in Houston in the spring of 1970 brought a protest to the White House from the Repub­ lican candidate for Senate in Texas, Representative George Bush, who feared they might pose problems for his candidacy.123 Such hearings had no legal force, but they did serve to increase public awareness about the extent and sometimes surprising venues of racial discrimination. This overall pattern of policy and political development was depen­ dent on the forging of relationships among not only bureaucrats and judges but also the collective action of African Americans, organized into a movement that sought and exploited opportunities the American political system offered. Although rooted in a national social movement, the NAACP was organized in a federated structure that mirrored the federal structure of the American state—­with local, state, and national branches—­and so was able to operate in multiple venues and with varied strategies at once.124 For the NAACP and the LDF, the courts and the EEOC were not simply the upper reaches of a hierarchy whose dicta, pronounced from on high, were law. Rather, they were opportunities to be exploited, points of access to the structure of state power, openings that could be entered to try to pry policy loose and to advance an approach to antidiscrimination enforcement that some (although by no means all) African American leaders and organizations and their allies in the worlds of law and government had spent a long time developing.125 At least as much as the EEOC’s other maneuvers, these links forged with the LDF were the key to the commission’s role in nudging forward an interpretation of Title VII based on “disparate impact,” collective employment patterns that were unfavorable to blacks. These informal links, the products partly of the commission staff ’s entrepreneurship but also of the organizational slack in the state that allowed them to be enterprising, meant that the development of affirmative action was not simply a top-­down imposition by meddlesome and imperious bureaucrats and courts, contemptuous of legislative intent and public opinion, as some interpreters suggest.126 Rather, it was equally a bottom-­up effort, facilitated by the configuration of actors, institutions, and ideas prevailing at the time. The flip side of institutional fragmentation has been a level of improvisatory suppleness that has made

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  285

the EEOC and the rest of the American race relations establishment remarkably effective. These institutional opportunities, in turn, were the result not simply of the structure of American political institutions but of the way in which African-­Americans had been incorporated in those institutions through the historical processes of political development.

Private Power and American State Building This picture of the EEOC upends conventional views of civil rights enforcement on a number of dimensions. First, the EEOC, despite its lack of formal regulatory power, was not without considerable opportunity to expand the power of the state. It was able to marshal substantial resources that helped dramatically to shift the grounds of Title VII enforcement in a relatively short time. But it did not accomplish this through conventional command-­ and-­control means of regulatory enforcement, using powers directly and explicitly delegated to it by Congress. Rather, it accomplished this by means of strategic alliances with private civil society groups who were, in effect, partners in a project of public regulatory activity. Second, the centrality of civil rights organizations to these enforcement efforts suggests strongly that the view of affirmative action as the product of a cabal of judges and bureaucrats to subvert the color-­blind premises of the Civil Rights Act are mistaken. “Post-­1968 civil rights law has notably been imposed on American democracy from the top down,” writes legal scholar Andrew Kull. “Little disposed to reclaim the burden of self-­government in an area offering only hard choices, the nation has largely acquiesced in policies chosen by administrators and judges.”127 Not so. Administrators and judges indeed played critical roles in the evolution of antidiscrimination policy, but their actions were enabled and sustained by the wide-­ranging democratic forces of the civil rights movement and its organizations. These organizations exploited opportunities the structure of the American state posed to advance their cause; in doing so they expanded the reach of the regulatory state. This account of the development of affirmative action, moreover, suggests at least that a view of the state and state building that takes seriously the connective role of state-­society associational patterns holds promise as a theoretical approach to American political development and holds one key to explaining this important episode of endogenous policy change, without formal organizational or statutory reform. At the very least, it seems to provide a more cogent and complete account of the EEOC’s activities and regulatory outcomes in the late 1960s and early 1970s than more conventional approaches to locating the state’s regulatory power. The means to

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regulatory effectiveness for the EEOC, and to state power in the area of civil rights, involved the joining of public and private power in surprising ways, resulting in an unanticipated policy transformation that seemed to lack an institutional substrate. More broadly, this theoretical orientation strongly suggests that such a more expansive view of state authority should include the mobilization of private power, not as an accident or a deviation but as a regular and enduring dimension of the American state. Integrating the notion of private power into the study of policy development and state building thus not only helps to explain the puzzling career of the EEOC and the rise of affirmative action but also points the way toward a broader perspective on the sources of regulatory power, policy change, and the contours of American state building.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman, “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61 (2009): 547–­88. Robert C. Lieberman, “Weak State, Strong Policy: Paradoxes of Race Policy in the United States, Great Britain, and France,” Studies in American Political Development 61 (2002): 138–­61; Daniel B. Rodriguez and Barry R. Weingast, “The Positive Political Theory of Legislative History: New Perspectives on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Its Interpretation,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 28 (2003): 1417–­542; Richard K. Berg, “Equal Employment Opportunity under the Civil Rights Act,” Brooklyn Law Review 31 (1964): 62–­97. In the original enforcement scheme set forth in the 1964 act, the Department of Justice was empowered to bring suits in federal court alleging a “pattern or practice” of discriminatory behavior. In 1972, the act was amended to allow the EEOC to sue employers. Michael Selmi, “The Value of the EEOC: Reexamining the Agency’s Role in Employment Discrimination Law,” Ohio State Law Journal 57 (1996): 5–­9; Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 129–­32. Robert Belton, “A Comparative Review of Public and Private Enforcement of Ti­ tle VII,” Vanderbilt Law Review 31 (1978): 907. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resource Management Divisions,” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1998): 441–­76; Nicholas Pedriana and Robin Stryker, “The Strength of a Weak Agency: Enforcement Capacity of  Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Expansion of State Capacity, 1965–­1971,” American Journal of Sociology 110 (2004): 709–­60; Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971); Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003); Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Compiled from material posted by the University of Michigan at http://www.umich .edu/~urel/admissions/legal/amicus.html, accessed on May 9, 2012.

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  287 8.

Robert C. Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 697–­712. 9. See Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 10. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 123. See also Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, “Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, ed. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 11. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), chap. 2. 12. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Ad­ ministrative Capacities, 1877–­1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-­States, 1760–­ 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Martin Shefter, “Party and Patronage: Germany, England, and Italy,” Politics and Society 7 (1977): 403–­52. 13. Ira Katznelson, “Rewriting the Epic of America,” in Shaped by War and Trade: Inter­ national Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 14. J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968): 559–­92. 15. See Jacob S. Hacker, “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hid­ den Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 243–­60; Streeck and Thelen, “Institutional Change.” 16. Skowronek, Building a New American State; Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–­1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–­1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 17. Hacker, “Privatizing Risk.” 18. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action. 19. Ibid.; John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Graham, Civil Rights Era; Lieberman, “Weak State, Strong Policy.” 20. The original threshold for the applicability of Title VII was twenty-­five employees; it was lowered to fifteen in 1972. 21. Sean Farhang, “The Political Development of Job Discrimination Litigation, 1963–­ 1976,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (2009): 23–­60. 22. Victoria Hattam, “The 1964 Civil Rights Act: Narrating the Past, Authorizing the Future,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (2004): 60–­69. 23. John D. Skrentny, “Policy Making Is Decision Making: A Response to Hattam,” Stu­d­ ies in American Political Development 18 (2004): 70. 24. Alfred W. Blumrosen, “Administrative Creativity: The First Year of the Equal Em­ ployment Opportunity Commission,” George Washington Law Review 38 (1970): 703. 25. Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.”

288  /  Robert C. Lieberman 26. Adam D. Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (2003): 185–­203. 27. Thomas J. Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the North, 1945–­1969,” Journal of American History 91 (2004): 145–­73; Anthony S. Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–­1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Sean Farhang, The Litigation State: Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the U.S. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Quinn Mulroy, “Public Regulation through Private Litigation: The Regulatory Power of Private Lawsuits and the American Bureaucracy” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011). 28. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Marasmus of the ICC: The Commission, the Railroads, and the Public Interest,” Yale Law Journal 61 (1952): 467–­509; Marver H. Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent Commission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955); Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–­1916 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). 29. Kolko, Railroads and Regulation; James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–­1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Recon­ struction of American Capitalism, 1890–­1916: The Market, Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 30. George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2 (1971): 3–­21. 31. William A. Niskanen Jr., Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine, 1971). 32. Sam Peltzman, “Toward a More General Theory of Regulation,” Journal of Law and Economics 19 (1976): 211–­40. 33. Terry M. Moe, “Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 236–­99; Sanders, Roots of Reform; Scott C. James, Presidents, Parties, and the State: A Party System Perspective on Democratic Regulatory Choice, 1884–­1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 35. Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.” 36. Robert C. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mark Cancellieri, “Budgeting for Civil Rights: The Case of the EEOC” (master’s thesis, University of New Orleans, 1999). 37. Daniel P. Carpenter, “Protection without Capture: Product Approval by a Politically Responsive Learning Regulator,” American Political Science Review 98 (2004); 613–­31; Daniel P. Carpenter, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sanford C. Gordon and Catherine Hafer, “Corporate Influence and the Regulatory Mandate,” Journal of Politics 69 (2007): 300–­319. 38. Carpenter, “Protection without Capture,” 615. 39. Donald L. Horowitz, The Courts and Social Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings In­ stitution, 1977); R. Shep Melnick, Regulation and the Courts: The Case of Clean-­Air Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983); R. Shep Melnick, Between the Lines:

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  289 Interpreting Welfare Rights (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994); Martha Derthick, Up in Smoke: From Legislation to Litigation in Tobacco Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002); Robert A. Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Thomas F. Burke, Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights: The Battle over Litigation in American Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 40. Farhang, Litigation State. 41. Mulroy, “Public Regulation.” 42. Frank Dobbin, Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Dobbin and Sutton, “Strength of a Weak State”; Frank Dobbin, John R. Sutton, John W. Meyer, and W. Richard Scott, “Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 396–­427; Lauren B. Edelman, “Legal Environments and Organizational Governance: The Expansion of Due Process in the American Workplace,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990): 1401–­40; Lauren B. Edelman, “Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law,” American Journal of Sociology 97 (1992): 1531–­76. 43. Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). 44. Marc Schneiberg and Tim Bartley, “Regulating American Industries: Markets, Politics, and the Institutional Determination of Fire Insurance Regulation,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2001): 101–­46; King and Lieberman, “Ironies of State Building.” 45. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147–­60; Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–­1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Marc Schneiberg, “Political and Institutional Conditions for Governance by Asso­ ciation: Private Order and Price Controls in American Fire Insurance,” Politics and Society 27 (1999): 67–­103; Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 92 (1982): 255–­78; Skowronek, Building a New American State; Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–­1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jody Freeman, “Collaborative Governance in the American State,” UCLA Law Review 45 (1997): 1–­98; Jody Freeman, “The Private Role in Public Governance,” NYU Law Review 75 (2000): 543–­675. 46. Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship.” 47. Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order”; Sheingate, “Political Entrepre­ neurship”; James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, ed. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 48. Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.” 49. Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Establishment: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible

290  /  Robert C. Lieberman Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (2007): 230–­ 65; Gary Orfield, Must We Bus? Segregated Schools and National Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1978). 50. Ira Katznelson, “Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics,” in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, Structure, ed. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 51. See Mulroy, “Public Regulation.” 52. US Commission on Civil Rights, Overcoming the Past, Focusing on the Future: An Assessment of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Enforcement Efforts (Washington, DC, 2000), 4–­8. 53. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action; Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency”; Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy. 54. Richard P. Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 49–­50. 55. Selmi, “Value of the EEOC,” 14–­15; Mulroy, “Public Regulation,” 83–­91; US Com­ mission on Civil Rights, Overcoming the Past, 5–­7; B. Dan Wood, “Does Politics Make a Difference at the EEOC?” American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990): 503–­30. 56. Kenneth J. Meier, Michael S. Pennington, and Warren S. Eller, “Race, Sex, and Clarence Thomas: Representation and Change in the EEOC,” Public Administration Review 65 (2005): 171–­79. 57. Selmi, “Value of the EEOC,” 12–­14; Dinah Payne, Sandra J. Hartman, Maurice F. Villere, Beverly H. Nelson, and Gregory Baxter, “Is Big Brother Watching? Perceptions and Research on the Effectiveness of the EEOC,” Labor Law Journal 43 (1992): 249–­56. 58. Richard P. Young and Jerome S. Burstein, “Federalism and the Demise of Prescriptive Racism in the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 9 (1995): 1–­54. 59. See Farhang, “Political Development of Job Discrimination Litigation.” 60. J. David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics: Com­ munity Participation in the War on Poverty (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1973); James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), chap. 6; James W. Button, Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 61. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy; Farhang, “Political Development of Job Discrimi­ nation Litigation.” 62. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Michael B. Katz and Christoph Sachße, The Mixed Economy of Social Welfare: Public/Private Relations in England, Germany, and the United States (Baden-­Baden: Nomos, 1996); Belton, “Comparative Review.” 63. See Mulroy, “Public Regulation.” 64. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy. 65. Robert L. Rabin, “Lawyers for Social Change: Perspectives on Public Interest Law,” Stanford Law Review 28 (1976): 217. 66. Robert L. Carter (General Counsel, NAACP) to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., July 9, 1965, EEOC Records, Record Group 403 (hereafter RG 403), Office of the Chairman,

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  291 Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 2, Correspondence: Civil Rights Leaders. 67. Telegrams, Roosevelt to James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Mitchell, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney M. Young Jr., 13 September 1965, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman, 1966–­1968, Box 2, Corre­ spondence: Civil Rights Leaders; Memorandum, Samuel C. Jackson to Roosevelt and EEOC commissioners, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 2, Correspondence: Civil Rights Leaders; Roosevelt to Rep. Adam C. Powell, 17 September 1965, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 2, Correspondence: Civil Rights Leaders. Attending the meeting were Marion Barry (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council), James Farmer (Congress of Racial Equality), Walter Fauntroy (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), Clarence Mitchell (NAACP), Bayard Rustin (representing Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph), and Whitney Young (National Urban League). 68. Michael I. Sovern, Legal Restraints on Racial Discrimination in Employment (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966), 73–­75; Alfred W. Blumrosen, Black Employment and the Law (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 83–­89, 149–­55. 69. Blumrosen, “Administrative Creativity,” 724, 733–­39. 70. Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 413–­14. 71. Belton, “Comparative Review,” 924–­26; Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights, 47–­48; Robert Samuel Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights: Griggs versus Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 103–­4. 72. Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 73. Belton, “Comparative Review,” 921–­26; Cornelius J. Peck, “The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Developments in the Administrative Process,” Washington Law Review 51 (1976): 848. 74. Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights, 45–­47, 49. 75. The data in this paragraph were compiled from the EEOC records in the National Archives. RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence. 76. The states represented in the sample, in descending order of frequency, are Ala­ bama, Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Virginia, California, Kansas, Louisi­ ana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington. 77. List of Resolutions and Items of Consensus, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Policy Statements. 78. George L. Holland (Director of Compliance) to Alice Stovall (LDF, New York City), September 22, 1965, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Compliance EXSEC Controlled; Holland to Arthur W. Stanley (NAACP, Darlington, S.C.), RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Compliance Cases Pending/Processing. 79. Blumrosen, “Administrative Creativity,” 741. 80. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 414–­15. 81. Holland to John W. Nixon, 21 September 1965, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Compliance EXSEC Controlled.

292  /  Robert C. Lieberman 82. Alfred W. Blumrosen (EEOC Chief of Conciliations) to Alfred Feinberg (LDF), March 10, 1966, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Compliance: Conciliations; Nixon to Holland, March 14, 1966, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Folder, Compliance EXSEC Controlled; Holland to Nixon, April 28, 1966, RG 403, Compliance Divi­ sion, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 2, Folder, Compliance EXSEC Con­ trolled; Memorandum, Samuel C. Jackson (commissioner) to Holland, May 2, 1966, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­ 1968, Box 6, Comm. Jackson; Blumrosen to Robert Belton (LDF), October 6, 1966, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 1, Conciliation; Summary of U.S. Steel and Steelworkers Charges, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Steel Cases; Report on Charges against U.S. Steel and Steelworkers at Fairfield, Ala., RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Steel Cases; Final Investigation Report, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Steel Cases; Stein 1998, 113. See also Herman Belz, Equality Transformed: A Quarter-­Century of Affirmative Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 29. 83. Roosevelt to N. Thompson Powers (Executive Director, EEOC), September 24, 1965, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Franklin Roosevelt 1965–­ 1966, Box 1, Power, N. Thompson, Executive Director; Telegram, P. H. Vogler Jr. to Samuel Jackson, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 6, Comm. Jackson. 84. James J. Heckman and Brook S. Payner, “Determining the Impact of Federal Antidiscrimination Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks: A Study of South Carolina,” American Economic Review 79 (1989): 138–­77; James J. Heckman, “The Central Role of the South in Accounting for the Economic Progress of Black Amer­ icans,” American Economic Review 80 (1990): 242–­46; John J. Donohue III and James Heckman, “Continuous versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks,” Journal of Economic Literature 29 (1991): 1603–­ 43; Paul Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States since the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 6. 85. Belton, “Comparative Review”; Karen O’Connor and Lee Epstein, “The Importance of Interest Group Involvement in Employment Discrimination Litigation,” Howard Law Review 25 (1982): 709–­29. 86. Alfred W. Blumrosen, Issues and Positions and Prospects in Cases in Which Rea­ sonable Cause Has Been Found Involving U.S. Steel and Steelworkers, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Steel Cases; Memorandum, Kenneth F. Holbert (Acting Director of Compliance) to Roger Lewis (Executive Assistant to the Chairman), November 21, 1966, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 1, Memo—­Compliance. 87. Skrentny, Minority Rights Revolution. 88. Blumrosen, “Administrative Creativity,” 711–­20. 89. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 193–­97, 239–­43. 90. Memorandum, Frank S. Caracciolo (Director, Education Programs) to Stephen Shulman via Herman Edelsberg (Executive Director), October 11, 1966, Re: Affir­ mative Action, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen

Private Power and American Bureaucracy  /  293 Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 10, Office of  Technical Assistance; Office of Research, “The Role of the EEO-­1 Reporting System in Commission Operations,” May 27, 1967, RG 403, Reports and Publicity Records, Box 1, Research Reports (2 of 2), esp. pp. 8–­ 12. See also Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights, 27–­28. 91. Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.” 92. Paul Frymer, “Racism Revised: Courts, Labor Law, and the Institutional Construction of Racial Animus,” American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 373–­87; Peck, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 832–­33. 93. Peck, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 849–­50; Blumrosen, “Admin­ istrative Creativity,” 733–­35. 94. Peck, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 844, 850. 95. Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 111–­13. 96. Guidelines on Employment Testing Procedures, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 10, Research: Testing; Al­ fred W. Blumrosen, “Strangers in Paradise: Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and the Con­ cept of Employment Discrimination,” Michigan Law Review 71 (1972): 60; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 251–­54; Digest of Legal Interpretations Issued or Adopted by the Commission, July 2, 1965, to October 8, 1968, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 3, Rules and Regulations—­ EEOC; Digest of Legal Interpretations Issued or Adopted by the Commission, Oc­tober 9, 1965, through December 31, 1965, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 3, Rules and Regulations—­ EEOC; Digest of Legal Interpretations Issued or Adopted by the Commission, Janu­ ary 1, 1966, through March 31, 1966, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 3, Rules and Regulations—­EEOC. 97. Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.” 98. Jack Greenberg to Roosevelt, March 22, 1966, RG 403, Office of the Chairman, Records of Chairman Stephen Shulman 1966–­1968, Box 2, Correspondence: Civil Rights Leaders. 99. Blumrosen, “Strangers in Paradise,” 60, 73–­74; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 250–­53; Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, 140. 100. Farhang, Litigation State. See also Mulroy, “Public Regulation.” 101. Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights, 76. 102. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 305, 413–­16; Belton, “Comparative Review,” 926–­ 31; Paul Burstein and Kathleen Monaghan, “Equal Employment Opportunity and the Mobilization of Law,” Law and Society Review 20 (1986): 361–­62. 103. Belton, “Comparative Review,” 930–­31; Stein, Running Steel, 102–­5, 112; Belz, Equality Transformed, 28–­29; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 250–­54. 104. Peck, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 858; Burstein and Monaghan, “Equal Employment Opportunity,” 375–­76. 105. Peck, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 843–­44; Belton, “Compa­r­ ative Review,” 944; Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody, 422 U.S. 405 (1975). 106. Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights. 107. Ibid., 125. 108. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 431. 109. Ibid., 430. 110. Blumrosen, “Strangers in Paradise,” 59–­60; Belton, “Comparative Review,” 937. 111. Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights, 94–­96.

294  /  Robert C. Lieberman 112. Jules H. Gordon (Conciliator, EEOC) to Robert Belton (LDF), December 8, 1966, RG 403, Compliance Division, Compliance Correspondence, 1968, Box 1, Con­ ciliation; Belton, “Comparative Review,” 943; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 385; Smith, Race, Labor, and Civil Rights, 158. 113. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 420 F.2d. 1225 (4th Cir., 1970), 1240–­41; Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 433–­34; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 385–­86; Richard Epstein, Forbidden Ground: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 193–­94; Belz, Equality Transformed, 52–­53; Andrew Kull, The Color-­Blind Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 114. Udall v. Tallman, 380 U.S. 1 (1965); Colin S. Diver, “Statutory Interpretation in the Administrative State,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 133 (1985): 549–­99; Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency.” 115. Pedriana and Stryker, “Strength of a Weak Agency,” 739–­40. 116. Katznelson, “Structure and Configuration.” 117. Memorandum, Clifford L. Alexander Jr., to Loyd Hackler, December 28, 1967, FG, White House Central File (hereafter WHCF), Box 380, Lyndon B. Johnson Library (hereafter LBJL); Memorandum, Clifford L. Alexander Jr. to Henry Fowler, April 12, 1968, HU 2-­1, WHCF, Box 44, LBJL; Stein, Running Steel, 118; Nathan, Jobs and Civil Rights, 28–­31. 118. Complete Report of Mayor LaGuardia’s Commission on the Harlem Riots of March 19, 1935 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 31–­43. 119. Complete Report, 33. 120. Ibid., 35. 121. Ibid., 122–­29. 122. Ibid., 1; Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1989), 374–­76; Domenic J. Capeci Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 4–­7; “Mayor Reports on Aid to Harlem,” New York Times, July 1, 1936, 2. 123. Everett Dirksen to Bryce Harlow, April 7, 1969, CF FG 109, WHSF/WHCF, Box 23, Nixon Presidential Materials, National Archives (hereafter NPM); Memorandum, Peter Flanigan to Kenneth Cole, April 14, 1969, CF FG 109, WHSF/WHCF, Box 23, NPM; Memorandum, Leonard Garment to Flanigan, HU 2–­2, WHCF, Box 17, NPM; Memorandum, Flanigan to Bill Timmons, April 9, 1970, HU 2–­2, Box 17, NPM. 124. Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, “A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 527–­46. 125. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 4; Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 208–­9; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 110–­13. 126. Kull, Color-­Blind Constitution; Graham, Civil Rights Era; Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 423–­40. 127. Kull, Color-­Blind Constitution, 191.

E le v en

From Political Economy to Civil Society: Arthur W. Page, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Reframing of the Past in Post–­New Deal America R ichard R . J ohn

Of the many factors shaping the boundaries of state and society in the United States, few are more elusive than corporate philanthropy.1 In subtle and sometimes paradoxical ways, corporate philanthropy has influenced not only the making of public policy but also the framing of credible generalizations about the role of governmental institutions in the American past. Many business leaders resented the regulatory legislation that was a defining feature of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and deplored the enthusiastic embrace of this legislation by prominent academics. In response, probusiness lobbyists launched a wide array of initiatives to roll back the New Deal. One landmark in this anti–­New Deal crusade occurred in 1971, when, in a pointed memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell warned that the professoriate had launched an “attack” on the “free enterprise system” and urged corporate leaders to fight back by bankrolling an intellectual counterestablishment.2 This essay contends that this academic counteroffensive had been well underway by the time Powell prepared his memorandum, and that it has a more complicated lineage, and a less straightforward relationship with the professoriate, than is often supposed. Its theme is the establishment by corporate philanthropists at Harvard University in 1958 of a major research institute—­the Center for the Study of Liberty—­to foster innovative scholarship in American history. This institute was the brainchild of Arthur W. Page, a prominent public relations executive who, following his retirement as vice president for public relations at the telephone giant American Telephone and Telegraph, turned his attention to philanthropy. Page founded the

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center to reorient American historical writing away from political economy, a topic of compelling interest for the previous generation, and toward civil society, by which Page meant the working lives of the American people. The mainspring of the American experience, in Page’s view, was, or ought to be, social history and not political history. Unfortunately, American historians wrote far too much about politics, and, in particular, about the positive role of governmental institutions in regulating big business, and far too little about the everyday activities of ordinary Americans. As a public relations specialist, Page recognized that public attitudes could be altered through the artful reframing of controversial issues. The Center for the Study of Liberty was the culmination of a long campaign to apply the time-­tested techniques of public relations to the writing of American history. Political economy and civil society are, of course, not necessarily opposed. Both, for example, were favorite themes of the eighteenth-­century Scottish Enlightenment social theorists who would prove so influential in the United States. For Page, however, as well as for his allies in the business community, political economy and civil society had come by the mid-­1950s to be regarded as distinct and even antagonistic. Page’s conception of social history originated in a very different intellectual milieu from the environment that spawned the “new” social history, a highly innovative style of historical scholarship that, in the United States, originated at the University of Wisconsin at around the same time that the Center for the Study of Liberty at Harvard opened its doors. The new social historians devoted particular attention to social movements that they presumed to be largely independent of the state. In the language of the day, they aspired to write history “from the bottom up.” Among the phenomena these historians found compelling were those social movements that revealed the often neglected agency of marginalized groups, including women, blacks, and the poor.3 The new social history had an avowedly liberal, and in some manifestations a programmatically radical, cast that was supportive of civil rights, women’s issues, and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Page’s social history had a different genealogy. The new social historians criticized political history as conventional and conservative. For Page, in contrast, political history was subversive and dangerous. Like many business leaders, Page found disturbing the enthusiasm with which prominent historians were rewriting American history through the lens of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Corporate philanthropy, in his view, could reverse this worrisome trend by recalibrating the balance between political economy and civil society.

From Political Economy to Civil Society  /  297

Page had a point. Much of the most influential historical writing on the United States in 1940s and 1950s had been broadly sympathetic to the expansion of the American state that had been catalyzed by the New Deal and augmented by the Second World War. Among the many historians to participate in this post–­New Deal revisionism were Oscar Handlin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Richard Hofstadter. Handlin’s pro–­New Deal sympathies shone through in Commonwealth (1947), a richly detailed monograph, coauthored with his wife Mary, that documented the huge array of tasks the Massachusetts government performed in the early republic. Partial funding for Commonwealth came from the Social Science Research Council, a philanthropic organization that had mounted a research initiative to investigate the role of government in American economic development in the period before Roosevelt came to power in 1933.4 Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s contribution to the revisionist canon included his Age of Jackson (1945), a Pulitzer Prize–­winning interpretative survey of early nineteenth-­century public life that helped to legitimate the New Deal by portraying the Jacksonians as the New Dealers’ ideological ancestor. Schlesinger would go on to serve as a speechwriter for the Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stephenson in 1952 and 1956; shortly thereafter, he published a massive, three-­volume history of the United States between 1921 and 1936 that voted for Roosevelt on every page.5 Hofstadter’s revisionism was less pointed than Schlesinger’s, but no less sweeping. In his Pulitzer Prize–­winning Age of Reform (1955), Hofstadter contended that the achievement of the New Deal lay in the extent to which it transcended the crippling limitations of the earlier populist and progressive movements with which it had so often been compared. Hofstadter was more explicitly critical of the pre–­New Deal reform tradition than Handlin or Schlesinger; even so, he fully shared their conviction that political economy deserved a prominent place on the historian’s agenda. For Page, this was all quite unsettling. Like many American business leaders, Page opposed the recent expansion of the federal government as an assault upon foundational civic ideals. Some of Page’s colleagues mounted an ambitious advertising campaign to champion “free enterprise,” a relatively new meme popularized following Roosevelt’s landslide reelection in 1936 to tilt public opinion against the New Deal.6 By 1952, according to Fortune editor William H. Whyte Jr., the free enterprise advertising campaign, which Whyte derided as a hopeless failure, was costing corporations $100 million a year.7 Although Page was himself a principled critic of the New Deal, he derided the free enterprise campaign as foolish and counterproductive and refused to permit it to be identified with American Telephone and

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Telegraph.8 To shift the boundaries between state and society, in his view, it would be far more productive to shape the outlook of the rising generation of historians. It would be overly simplistic to dismiss Page as a big-­business apologist intent on making the world safe for the giant corporations that by midcentury had come to dominate the American economy. Yet as Page’s voluminous correspondence makes plain, there can be little doubt that in establishing the Center for the Study of Liberty at Harvard, he hoped to win in the history books a contest that corporate America had lost at the polls.

Arthur W. Page was one of the most highly respected of the first generation of public relations practitioners in the United States. When Page entered the field in 1927, corporate public relations had yet to emerge as a distinct occupational specialty. By the time of Page’s retirement in 1946, specialists in corporate public relations had become a fixture at many of the nation’s leading corporations. Although Page was less well known than Ivy Lee or Edward L. Bernays, he may well have done more to shape the field. It was, for example, neither Bernays nor Lee, but Page, who devised the code of ethics for public relations professionals—­known as the “Page Principles”—­that would long define best practice, and that remain influential today. Page’s appointment at American Telephone and Telegraph was something of a landmark in the field. Never before had a public relations specialist obtained such a high-­level appointment at a giant corporation. American Telephone and Telegraph was at this time the capstone of a vast telephone cartel, known as the “Bell System,” or, colloquially, simply as Bell, that would dominate the provisioning of telephone service in the United States from the 1910s until its court-­ordered breakup in 1984. Page remained at Bell for twenty years, making him one of the most prominent public relations executives in the country during the tumultuous epoch that spanned the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. Outside of the field of public relations, Page is best known to posterity as the author of the 1,160-­word statement that President Harry S. Truman released to the public in August 1945 following the detonation at Hiroshima of the first atomic bomb. The willingness of Truman’s secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, to tap Page to craft this public statement testifies not only to Stimson’s esteem for Page but also to the high regard the field of public relations had come by this time to enjoy. Few business leaders had a sounder grasp of the mainsprings of public opinion or of the myriad techniques by which it could be shaped.

From Political Economy to Civil Society  /  299

Like so many specialists in public relations, Page came to the field following a career as a journalist. Page’s father, Walter Hines Page, had been the founder of World’s Work, a highly successful New York City–­based mass-­ circulation magazine. Following Page’s graduation from Harvard in the class of 1901, he joined the staff of his father’s magazine, where he would remain for the next twenty-­six years, first as a reporter, and beginning in 1913 as editor. World’s Work provided Page with a laboratory in which he could experiment with the framing of public issues. Unlike rival mass-­market periodicals such as McClure’s and Collier’s, World’s Work unabashedly celebrated the country’s industrial might. While McClure’s and Collier’s ran muckraking exposés of business misdeeds, World’s Work celebrated American business achievements, establishing journalistic conventions that would later become commonplace at Fortune and Business Week. Page found these conventions compelling. For the rest of his life, he would hail the “world’s work” of the American people as an epic theme. Page’s political outlook owed a good deal to his personal background. Born in North Carolina in 1883, he inherited from his father the “New South” probusiness boosterism characteristic of progressive-­minded southern Democrats. Page’s father had begun his career as a North Carolina newspaper editor, and like many progressive-­minded southerners, was an enthusiastic backer of Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to become a presidential contender since the Civil War. When Wilson won the presidency in the election of 1912, Walter received an appointment as ambassador to Great Britain. Arthur inherited his father’s political identity. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election until 1928, when he bolted the party to support Herbert Hoover against Al Smith. From that point onward, he would consistently vote Republican for the rest of his life.9 Page’s interest in American history dated back at least as far as his undergraduate years at Harvard. A history major, Page took Edward Channing’s survey of the early American republic and Frederick Jackson Turner’s lecture course on the West. Neither seems to have made much of an impression. Although Page frequently corresponded with members of the Harvard History Department in the 1950s, he never mentioned Channing and only mentioned Turner once, and that was in passing. Yet it may well not be coincidental that two Turnerian themes—­the abundance of cheap land and the contrasting social environment of the United States and Europe—­recurred repeatedly in virtually everything Page wrote about the American past. “In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered this

300  /  Richard R. John

continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe,” Turner proclaimed in 1893, in setting forth a position with which Page would have heartily concurred: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.”10 For Page, as for Turner, everyday experience held the key to the American past. Page’s journalistic career ended in 1927 when, at the personal request of Bell president Walter S. Gifford—­who, as it happens, had been a classmate of Page’s at Harvard—­Page agreed to take a position at the telephone giant. The Bell System in the 1920s was widely hailed as one of the best run and most socially progressive corporations in the world. Beginning in 1907, with the appointment of Theodore N. Vail as its president, Bell managers endorsed publicity, financial transparency, state regulation—­preferably via regulatory commissions rather than direct legislation—­and what Vail called “universal service.” By universal service Vail meant more than the interconnection of all of the nation’s telephones and the integration of the telephone and telegraph into a single hybrid network. In addition, Vail envisioned the gradual extension of local telephone service at reasonable cost to the entire population.11 To realize this ambitious goal, Bell managers substituted public service for the maximization of the shareholders’ return as their primary goal. This capacious mandate did much to diminish the influence of shareholders, the putative owners of a publicly held corporation like Bell, and would become a major ideological rationale for managerial capitalism, a business creed that gained widespread legitimacy during the First World War. In addition, it proved useful in staving off a threatened government takeover of the telephone giant during the 1930s.12 Page had become familiar with Vail’s ideas as a staffer at World’s Work and did his best to publicize them at Bell. In public statement after public statement, Page articulated a rationale for universal service and corporate social responsibility. Only rarely, however, did Page attribute these values to Vail himself. Instead, he identified them with Vail’s successor, Walter S. Gifford. For Page, the proof text was an address on Bell policy that Gifford delivered in Dallas, Texas, in 1927, shortly after Page had joined the company. In this address, which Page often praised in later years, and which several insiders assumed Page had ghostwritten, Gifford reaffirmed Bell’s commitment to providing telephone service for the many as well as the few, while maintaining the highest standards of financial propriety. Despite the scale and scope of the Bell System, Gifford observed, the country boasted no tele­ phone millionaires, while shareholders received no “melons” in the form of excessive dividends. In Gifford’s view—­as well as Page’s—­Bell’s fiscal conservatism differentiated it from the railroad and telegraph empires that had

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been cobbled together in late nineteenth century by the notorious financial buccaneers William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.13 Gifford’s rhetoric was intended to forestall political opposition by identifying Bell with the public good. This strategy worked well in the prosperous 1920s, yet it failed to shield Bell from hostile public scrutiny during the Great Depression. Bell’s prospects looked particularly dire following the launch in 1935 by the Federal Communications Communication (FCC) of a massive investigation of Bell business practices. Lawmakers criticized Bell’s cozy relationship with telephone equipment manufacturer Western Electric and blamed Bell for suppressing a host of innovations in electrical communications. Tellingly, even relatively sympathetic accounts of the corporate giant that were published around this time, such as Horace Coon’s American Tel and Tel, felt obliged to remind the public that Bell was the “world’s biggest monopoly” and the “largest single aggregation of capital ever controlled by a single company in the history of private business enterprise.”14 Few events proved more influential in shaping Page’s understanding of American history than the Bell-­FCC set-­to. The nadir for Page came in 1938 with the drafting by FCC chairman Paul A. Walker of a highly critical preliminary report that recommended, among other things, that Congress grant the FCC the authority to rule on the propriety of every single major decision that Bell management made. Walker’s draft report was extremely controversial. In fact, it was so contentious that it was almost immediately superseded, at Bell’s behest, by a report more sympathetic to the telephone giant. Even so, the Walker report demonstrated the vulnerability of Bell to hostile legislation, a lesson Page never forgot. The Walker report haunted Page, and he was determined to set the record straight. Page’s rebuttal took the form of a book, The Bell Telephone System, published in 1941, in which he calmly and deliberately rebutted Walker’s contention that federal administrators could operate the telephone network better than corporate managers. The level of telephone service that Bell provided its users, Page contended, was unmatched anywhere else in the world, because Bell was not a government agency, but a management-­led corporation dedicated to public service. In his indictment on Bell’s detractors, Page singled out for special condemnation various claims that FCC economist Noobar Danielan advanced in AT&T: The Story of Industrial Conquest—­a trade book, published in 1939, that was based on information the FCC investigation generated. The history of Bell, in Page’s view, was a tale not of industrial conquest but of technological virtuosity. Page found particularly objectionable Danielan’s claim that Bell advertised only in those newspapers that had editorialized in support of Bell. No business, large or small,

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that engaged in the practice of “corrupting the press,” Page moralized, had a right to “live” in a democracy. Page was hardly the only Bell executive to find Danielan’s book outrageous; as late as 1962, one sympathetic observer recorded, it would remain “anathema” at Bell.15 While Page proudly celebrated Bell, his Bell Telephone System deliberately downplayed the rather obvious differences between the telephone giant and the nation’s many smaller and less powerful businesses. “The Bell System has no political influence,” Page famously, and erroneously, declared, “and wants none.”16 In making this misleading pronouncement, Page left unmentioned the extent to which Bell had for decades lobbied state legislatures and federal regulatory agencies. For Page, however, size simply did not matter; business was business, no matter how large or small. No longer did Page find it quite so unproblematic, as he had as recently as 1927, to distinguish between giant corporations like Bell, whose management deliberately subordinated profit maximization to public service, and the many businesses for which profit maximization remained the primary goal. The “day-­to-­day practice of democracy,” Page now explained—­indeed, the “essence of the American experiment”—­was to be found in the world of work—­making the Bell System a part of this “greatest of all human enterprises.”17 No longer, in short, did only certain businesses have a social obligation.18 Henceforth, every business, regardless of size, and whatever its mandate, had an obligation to serve the public: “all business in a democratic country begins with public permission and exists by public approval.”19 Page’s ideas concerning the relationship of business and democracy would continue to evolve following his retirement from Bell. Now that he was an independent business consultant, rather than a Bell executive, Page felt emboldened to generalize more broadly about the American experience. Every business, Page now contended, including even a highly regulated government-­sanctioned cartel like Bell, was a voluntary association that owed its success to the same kind of bottom-­up grassroots social mobilization for which the United States had been celebrated for over a century, and about which the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville had written so perceptively in his Democracy in America (1835; 1840). For Page to conceive of Bell as a voluntary association seemed to him particularly apt. Although Bell was a creature of public policy, its managers coordinated a network of semiautonomous units that included a research and development complex (Bell Labs), an equipment manufacturer (Western Electric), and a constellation of regionally based telephone operating companies (the “Baby Bells”). A variant of the word “association” was even part of the phrase that Bell publicists used when describing the

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telephone giant: “American Telephone and Telegraph and the associated companies.” Page’s years at Bell shaped his ruminations on American history. Like the new social historians of the 1960s, Page believed that most historians paid far too much attention to government officials and far too little attention to the rest of the population. To be sure, Page was not interested, like so many of the new social historians, in shifting the locus of historical inquiry from the classes to the masses. Rather, he wanted to expand the masses to include virtually everyone who was not a government official. And in particular, Page hoped to encourage scholarship on nongovernmental forms of collective action, including, in particular, the voluntary association. Voluntary associations, in Page’s view—­rather than, say, legislatures or government agencies—­best exemplified the shared aspirations of the many. Page may never have read Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition (1955), or, for that matter, any of the other American studies classics of the 1950s. Even so, Page and the Americanists had a good deal in common. Both took it for granted that the American experience diverged sharply from a European norm, and that this divergence helped explain why American history was so distinctive—­or, in the language of the day, “exceptional.” Page’s exceptionalism, like Hartz’s, was rooted in the colonial past. For Hartz, the absence of feudalism made American institutions distinctive; for Page, it was the weakness of its government. Hartz regarded the absence of feudalism as a limiting condition that generated a mindless liberalism that cut off American political thought from the intellectual heritage of European philosophy. For Page, weak government was a boon that empowered ordinary Americans, and, eventually, giant corporations, to generate material abundance on a scale that was altogether unprecedented in human history. The need for a revisionist history of the American past was, in Page’s view, long overdue. History professors, Page lamented, wrongly conflated American history with the history of its government rather than the history of its people. To identify a nation with its government would make a certain amount of sense for a constitutional monarchy such as Great Britain or a communist dictatorship such as the Soviet Union. Yet it was entirely inappropriate for the United States, a nation that lacked a feudal past and that, blessed as it had been with an abundance of land, had for over three centuries provided ordinary people with opportunities for economic advancement unavailable anywhere else in the world. Nowhere was the myopia of American historians more obvious than in their neglect of the voluntary association. Incredibly, Page observed, the only professional historian to accord the voluntary association the significance

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it deserved was Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who had laid out his argument in “A Nation of Joiners,” his 1944 presidential address to the American Historical Association. In this address, Schlesinger praised the voluntary association as a nursery for the democratic values indispensable for a robust civil society. “Considering the central importance of the voluntary organization in American history,” Schlesinger declared, “there is no doubt it has provided the people with their greatest school of self-­government.” No governmental institution—­not even the storied New England town meeting about which Tocqueville had waxed so enthusiastic—­could equal the voluntary association as a training ground for civic engagement: “By comparison, the much vaunted role of the New England town meeting as a seedbed of popular government seems almost negligible.”20 Page found it particularly notable that Schlesinger had taken pains to lump together as “voluntary associations” organizations that were conventionally assumed to have had little in common. It was of great signifi­ cance, in Page’s view, that Schlesinger saw no fundamental distinction between a membership-­based organization such as a fraternal order and a management-­led organization such as an industrial corporation.21 In the prewar period, historians had customarily put these two kinds of organizations into separate conceptual boxes: giant corporations were stand-­ins for the few, or what was sometimes called the “interests”; fraternal orders for the many, or “the people.” Business leaders knew better, and Page was delighted that Schlesinger had followed their lead. Page applauded Schlesinger’s address yet lamented that it had fallen on deaf ears. Far more characteristic of the rising generation of historians, in Page’s view, was the relative indifference to civil society that he detected in the New Deal–­centric hagiography of Schlesinger’s namesake and son, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was at the time also a Harvard professor. Arthur Jr., Page complained to Wall Street banker Thomas W. Lamont in 1957, was in the process of writing a laudatory history of the Roosevelt administration, an exercise that Page regarded as more appropriate for a historian of a monarchy or a communist regime than for a historian of the United States.22 The facility with which Schlesinger had elided the people-­versus-­the-­ interests dichotomy in his 1944 address owed something to the historical moment in which it had been delivered. The United States in 1944 was at war, making it a patriotic imperative to emphasize the propensity of Americans from all walks of life—­in business no less than in a fraternal order—­to be “joiners” who enthusiastically pulled together for the public good. In addition, it anticipated the more general shift of midcentury

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public intellectuals away from political economy and toward civil society in the conviction that the horrors of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had fatally undermined the prewar identification of energetic government with the public good.23 Schlesinger’s remarkably benign characterization of big business may also have owed at least something to the prewar corporate-­funded “free enterprise” public relations campaign that business leaders had launched to undermine the moral foundations of the New Deal. This campaign had the support of several of the nation’s most powerful corporations—­though not Bell—­and was spearheaded by a tight knit group of corporate moguls that included Pierre S. and Irénée du Pont of the DuPont Chemical Company.24 Schlesinger himself was personally familiar with the free enterprise public relations campaign, having served between 1935 and 1938 as a paid consultant for the radio program Cavalcade of America—­a DuPont-­funded public relations project that deliberately downplayed controversial political issues in favor of edifying stories celebrating the ingenuity, self-­reliance, and civic spirit of ordinary Americans.25 Page’s faith in voluntarism was informed not only by his critique of the New Deal but also by his fear that the collectivist economic policy and egalitarian political ideology that were being aggressively championed in the Soviet Union by Communist Party officials might win the communists converts throughout Europe and around the world. To meet the challenge of Soviet collectivism, Page joined together with some of the country’s leading bankers in 1947 to promote the Marshall Plan, an ambitious government project to use US capital to hasten Europe’s postwar reconstruction. The Marshall Plan combined altruism with self-­interest, since it presupposed that its beneficiaries would adopt economic policies supportive of US business interests and that US bankers would service the government’s loans. Even so, it marked a sharp departure from the less interventionist policies that the federal government had embraced prior to the war. To combat Soviet egalitarianism, Page supported the establishment of Radio Free Europe, an anti-­Soviet propaganda organ that had been covertly funded though a CIA-­backed front organization, the National Committee for a Free Europe. For the rest of his life Page would view American history though a Cold War lens, a mindset that obliged him to praise certain big government projects—­for example, the Marshall Plan and Radio Free Europe—­even as he criticized others as the misguided by-­products of New Deal planners and Soviet apparatchiks. Page’s idealization of the voluntary association fit well with the Cold War–­era truism that robust voluntary associations were a counterweight

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to big government and that big government stifled voluntary associations. “The fact that we enjoy limited government to the extent we do,” declared Sears executive James C. Worthy in a 1954 address before the Chicago City Club in a characteristic statement of this common belief, could be explained “in no small part to the effectiveness of voluntary organizations.”26 Worthy’s definition of voluntary associations—­like Page’s, and, for that matter, Schlesinger’s—­was capacious. That is, it embraced not only membership-­based organizations such as a religious denomination, but also a management-­led organization such as the nation’s most powerful corporations. Each, Worthy believed, was a crucible of civic engagement: “The individual citizen works with and through his church and his company much as he works with and through the many other voluntary organizations he has created to help serve the many purposes he demands be served.”27 Page found Worthy’s address on voluntary associations to be exceptionally perceptive and took it upon himself to compliment Worthy on it in a personal letter that Page wrote in March 1957. Page’s letter is worth considering in some detail, since it provides an unusually expansive exposition of Page’s ideas regarding the relationship of government and business in the American past. “I have never seen as good an exposition of the voluntary association’s influence on American life,” Page wrote Worthy, “and I have long felt as you do, that it is one of the most characteristic and important elements in our democracy.” In his own “desultory and amateur” reading of American history as it had been written by academically trained historians, Page added, he had seen but “one mention of this important subject,” and that had been in Schlesinger’s 1944 presidential address.28 Too many history professors, Page warned, adhered to the “British idea” that the history of a country was a history of its government. This idea, Page explained, made sense for historians of the many countries that were governed by a ruling class. Yet it was ludicrous for a historian of the United States. Page added that he had tried, largely unsuccessfully, to interest history professors in “recording the effect” of “personal liberty” in the United States. “I have a feeling,” he confided to Worthy, “that if our academic world would lay the basis of understanding of our real history in the minds of college students, the next generation of leadership would be vastly better equipped than our generation has been.”29 To drive his point home, Page turned to history. The centrist “People’s Capitalism” that flourished in the twentieth-­century United States, Page explained—­echoing a slogan that had been popularized by the probusiness

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Advertising Council in the 1940s, and that would be embraced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a pillar of his administration’s economic policy—­ was a “logical later chapter” of the history of “personal liberty,” a history that Page traced back to the earliest settlements in colonial Virginia.30 When the first colonists landed in Jamestown in 1607, Page observed, the great mass of the people of Europe worked as agricultural laborers for a landed aristocracy. In colonial America, in contrast, “owner farmers” prevailed. “There was land aplenty, which was opportunity aplenty,” with widespread land ownership becoming the “original basis” of the “first real experiment in human history of personal liberty for the masses.”31 Like Tocqueville, Page regarded the colonial era as the cradle of American values. Unlike Tocqueville, yet like so many of Page’s fellow southerners, Page traced the origins of American democracy not to New England, but to Virginia. Distant English government officials tried to export a ruling class and to impose a feudal order, without success. As a consequence, Virginians had the chance to exercise a greater sense of personal responsibility and “general altruism” than was possible at this time anywhere else in the world: “The Voluntary Association is the result.”32 Page’s glowing account of seventeenth-­century Virginia is likely to startle anyone familiar with recent historical writing on colonial America. After all, it ignored the centrality in Virginia of involuntary servitude, slavery, and Native Americans, topics that are now integral to its history. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss his account as the ravings of a reactionary crank. For Page was no reactionary, at least by the standards of the day. Page supported government regulation of big business and believed that giant corporations, such as Bell, had an obligation to the public that transcended their obligation to their shareholders. For every business leader, Page reminded Worthy, public service, and not the maximization of shareholder value, must be their “first objective.” This goal, Page was quick to add, was by no means incompatible with the generation of large profits, which Page praised for creating the confidence, and the revenue stream, necessary for the socially responsible corporation to thrive.33 Page’s interest in the history of voluntary associations was stimulated by his conviction that Americans failed to recognize the democratic potential of the giant corporation. Here Page built on his own long-­standing belief as a public relations professional that the most effective form of public relations consisted neither of press releases, nor even of paid advertising and sponsored radio broadcasts, but rather in the meritorious conduct of the corporation’s own employees. Every single corporation in the United States, Page lectured Worthy, had been chartered by a state legislature that

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represented its people, presumably as “consumers.” Corporations, thus, were a “servant of the public” that had been created by “public act” and that owed their future to their continuing “good behavior.” Yet no great enterprise could be expected to achieve the “good behavior” that its charter required by “merely trying to stay within the law.” It was not enough, that is, to avoid the kind of monopolistic practices that had been prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the “great enactments defining good behavior.” Rather, the corporate good citizen, like the “personal” good citizen, must have “wisdom, responsibility, and a belief in serving his fellow men”: “Neither the corporation nor the individual can serve much without a profit, but each must know that serving the public is the first objective.”34 Page elaborated on his vision of American history in numerous letters on the current state of history teaching that he wrote between 1957 and 1959. In these letters, Page urged opinion leaders to reframe the teaching of American history to foreground social factors, such as the social mobility of employees up the corporate ladder, and to marginalize political factors, such as the constraints on corporate management that the regulatory apparatus of the federal government imposed. It was better, Page explained to banker Thomas S. Lamont, to study what people have done with their liberty, rather than the government under which they lived: “The people are the players. The government is the umpire. To understand the game it is better to watch the players rather than the umpire.”35 It is my “firm belief,” Page informed Westinghouse executive Gwilym A. Price, that the student could not reach his “maximum” as an American citizen unless he understood “how it happened that the people in the United States have reached a standard of living, a conception of voluntary association, and a habit of generosity far beyond other countries.” Unfortunately, however, this civics lesson had yet to find its way into the classroom. On the contrary, undergraduate history courses continued to focus narrowly on the history of the government, ignoring Tocqueville’s arresting insight that the “health of a democratic society” could be “measured” by the “quality of functions performed by private citizens.”36 Business management in the United States, Page explained to a chemical company executive, differed from business management in other countries to the extent that it was “dominated” by a “belief in opportunity for all” and committed to “responsibility for the general welfare.” The distinctiveness of American corporate management, in turn, was “one of the most important aspects” of the “results of liberty” in the United States: “For had the corporate device been used to create a privileged class and reduce general opportunity, the results would have been quite different.”37

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Page coupled his highly admiring account of business management with a sharply critical assessment of government grants for higher education. Government grants for research and scholarships, Page warned an officer of the Carnegie Foundation in 1957, had become so ubiquitous that the professoriate was in danger of losing its intellectual autonomy. To wean the academy from its dangerous dependency on government largesse, Page believed, it needed a “dose of poverty.”38 Almost two decades before Lewis Powell would craft his 1971 memorandum, Page had become convinced that the nation’s leading colleges and universities were fast becoming wards of the state.39 Unlike Powell, however, Page chose to bore from within. Following the lead of the Chicago drugstore magnate Charles R. Walgreen—­who in the 1930s had established a foundation at the University of Chicago that, after his death, would underwrite the hiring of a topflight team of market-­oriented professors to institutionalize the “Chicago school” of economics—­Page worked within the system, rather than against it.40 What the country needed, Page counseled Williams College president James P. Baxter, was the establishment with corporate funding of a beachhead in the academy to remind the rising generation of the founders’ conviction that “free men needed little government.” For too long the professoriate had adhered to the “English idea” that the history of a country was a history of its government. As a consequence, most Americans knew only political history, rather than the “relations of business in a democracy.” To remedy this disturbing omission, Page implored business leaders to fund historians willing to reframe the nation’s history as a saga of “personal freedom” rather than as a “record of the activities of our government.”41 Page qualified his faith in corporate philanthropy with a realists’ deference to the professoriate. Academic historians, Page freely conceded, had a “complete monopoly” of “propaganda in history,” and he was “content with that.” Even the characterization of history as “propaganda” held no terrors for Page. Propaganda was nothing but “talking for a purpose.” If communication lacked a purpose, everyone should remain silent. And since history was propaganda, Page’s goal was simple: change the tune.42 The reappraisal of American history that Page envisioned would, Page predicted, have salutary political consequences. If historians reframed the American past as a chronicle not of politics but of society, future elections would have “different results” than they had in 1932, when Roosevelt had bested Hoover, inaugurating the New Deal. The current, highly distorted liberal consensus on the American past had become an encumbrance not only for farmers, scientists, and church leaders but also for the many college graduates who went into business: “A historically well-­educated industrial

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leadership would never have needed [a] public relations counsel” such as himself.43 Page’s tenure at Bell had accustomed him to thinking in expansive terms about sponsored research, and his venture in historical revisionism was no exception. By sponsored research Page had in mind more than the publication of a stand-­alone probusiness academic monograph, such as, for example, an anti-­Danielan history of the telephone industry. If Danielan had been Page’s primary target, Page might well have confined himself to the preparation of a telephonic cousin to Forrest McDonald’s revisionist biography of electric power magnate Samuel Insull, a monograph that McDonald prepared with financial backing from the electric power industry, and that would be published by the University of Chicago Press in 1962.44 To reframe American history, Page believed, would require, at a minimum, the establishment of at least one research institute at a prestigious university. To “spread” his “thesis” about the distinctiveness of the American experience, Page explained in 1957 to a public relations counsel at DuPont, he hoped to persuade a “great university” to establish a center for the “comparative study” of the fruits of liberty in the United States and around the world.45 The publications that such an institute generated, in turn, could be expected to influence a rising cohort of historians, and, through them, the future generations of opinion leaders who attended their classes and read their books. The roots of American liberty, Page declared, in a memorandum outlining his vision of the proposed research institute, were to be found neither in the arts nor literature, but instead in the production and distribution of goods and services, the “physical well being of the people,” and the “voluntary association” of the people for the common good. A research institute dedicated to the exploration of this theme, Page predicted, would over time have a “pervasive effect” not only in the academy but also in the wider society.46 Page was well positioned to realize his goal. Although he had never held an academic appointment, he had served for several years in the 1950s as an elected trustee of the American Historical Association, a position that had introduced him to history professors throughout the country. Page’s connections with his alma mater, Harvard University, were particularly strong. In addition to having graduated from the college, Page had for de­ cades been active in alumni affairs and was currently a university overseer. Page’s backers at Harvard included the university librarian, and ex-­provost, Paul H. Buck. Buck, himself a historian, had recently coauthored a Ford Foundation–­funded study on the “Role of Education in American History,” and was eager to seek out outside funding to boost historical research; predictably enough, he regarded Page’s venture as a means to this end.47

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To fund his venture, Page lobbied the leaders of some of the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations. The mobilization of corporate phil­ anthropy for sponsored research was in no sense a new development in the 1950s.48 The novelty of Page’s venture lay, rather, in the self-­assurance with which he linked corporate funding with the reframing of historical writing on the American past. Academically trained historians, Page reminded General Motors executive Alfred P. Sloan, in a letter intended to elicit from Sloan a financial contribution for Page’s institute, glorified the regulation of business by government “in such a manner as to leave the impression that business, particularly big business, is a menace to the nation.”49 For Page this was bunk; everyone who has “experienced the blessings of freedom in business” should be eager to recruit historians to set the record straight. Sloan, for one, was unimpressed. “You pay your money and nothing happens,” Sloan explained, in justification of his decision not to contribute: “I think it is money going down the drain.”50 Sloan’s misgivings notwithstanding, Page’s letter-­writing campaign bore fruit. In response to Page’s request, the Richardson Foundation awarded a $40,000 grant to the History Department at the University of North Carolina to hire Elisha P. Douglass to write a history of American business, a project that resulted in the publication in 1971 of Douglass’s Coming of Age of American Business: Three Centuries of Enterprise, 1600–­1900. An even larger grant arrived shortly thereafter from the Carnegie Foundation, a philanthropy on whose board Page served as a director. At Page’s behest, the foundation earmarked $200,000 to the Harvard History Department to establish a Center of the Comparative Study of Liberty, a sum equivalent to $1.6 mil­ lion in 2014 dollars.51 The Carnegie grant was the first of several corporate grants that the Harvard center received. By 1961, for example, it would obtain additional funding from the Eli Lilly Endowment, the United States Steel Foundation, the Kennecott Copper Foundation, and the Hudson Gas Corporation.52 By this time, even the philanthropic foundation that bore Sloan’s name had made a modest grant to help cover its costs.53 Page regarded the establishment of the Harvard center as a personal coup and monitored its progress closely. Harvard might well be the most effective single source for the “creation and dissemination of ideas” in the educational world, Page gloated to Sloan, and the educational world was “unquestionably” the most effective “distributor” of ideas to the American people.54 Page’s institute opened at Harvard in 1958, with history professor Oscar Handlin as its first director. The Harvard center, whose name was soon shortened to the Center for the Study of Liberty in America, bore this name until

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1966, when, following a hefty bequest from the widow of a prominent lawyer and legal scholar, it was reorganized as the Charles Warren Center, which it remains today.55 Under Handlin’s capable leadership, the center offered fellowships to twenty-­nine historians, many of whom would go on to distinguished careers. Among them were Bernard Bailyn, Rowland T. Berthoff, Morton Keller, Leonard W. Levy, Gerald D. Nash, William G. McLoughlin, and Clarence L. Ver Steeg.56 Prominent scholars associated with the center in its early years included David Riesman, V. O. Key, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Willard Hurst.57 Along with the Davis Center at Princeton University, founded in 1968 by the investment banker Shelby Cullom Davis, the Harvard center would quickly establish itself as a seedbed for some of the most innovative historical scholarship in the country. Page’s role at the center was confined primarily to its founding. Page remained in touch with Handlin until his death in 1960, but there is little evidence that he had any direct influence on the center’s day-­to-­day administration. Even so, it is suggestive that there remained a distinct overlap between Page’s political goals and the intellectual agenda for the center that were set forth in an early undated memoranda, “The Origins of American Freedom and What the People Have Done with It.” Of the general themes that the memoranda put high on the center’s agenda were two of special interest to Page: the “limited role of the state” and “voluntary modes of action” in religious, economic, cultural, and philanthropic organizations.58 Among the specific topics that Page would have found appealing were the business corporation as a voluntary association, 1840–­1900, and the rejection of government ownership of the “telephone system” in the 1910s.59 While this memorandum suggests that the center’s intellectual agenda was compatible with Page’s political goals, several of Page’s correspondents remained unconvinced. It had been a mistake, they predicted, for Page to have located his institute at Harvard, since, under Handlin’s direction, it was certain to stray from Page’s political goals. Three of the members of the center’s advisory committee, sputtered the conservative Northwestern University political scientist Kenneth W. Colegrove, were Jewish, including Handlin, while Handlin and Riesman were socialists: “I would not object to one or two Jews. But three are altogether too many on a committee of that size. . . . There is no balance.” To make matters worse, the center’s steering committee did not include a single Catholic, even though Catholics were “deeply interested in liberty.”60 Anti-­Jewish sentiment inside the academy remained strong, especially among conservatives, as did hostility to socialism, making it seem inconceivable for Colegrove to entrust academics from

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such a background and who held such political views with the sacred task of promoting the cause of liberty in a hostile world. Page responded to Colegrove’s critique in a letter to Williams College president James P. Baxter. Page conceded to Baxter that he did not know personally any of the members of the committee other than Buck and Handlin. Even so, Page did not believe that they could be “anti-­liberty or anti-­American” if they had been chosen by Buck: “If you knew these men will you call me on the telephone or write me in confidence what you think of them as a committee for the Center?”61 If Baxter responded to Page’s inquiry, no record of it survives. Yet in certain respects, Colegrove’s critique was on the mark. The Harvard center would devote scant attention to the libertarian legacy of colonial Virginia, a favorite topic of Page’s, while it lavished funding on the preparation by Handlin and his coauthor and wife Mary F. Handlin of the Dimensions of Liberty, a prospectus of the center’s research agenda that linked the elab­ oration of voluntary associations in the twentieth century with the expan­ sion of the federal government, a conclusion that Page would have almost certainly deplored.62 Unlike Page, the Handlins traced the origins of the “system of free private enterprise” not to the colonial era, but, rather, to the mid-­nineteenth century, when antimonopolists wary of special privilege articulated a “liberal demand” for the divorce of the state from the economy.63 And unlike Page the Handlins regarded the “key relation” in the modern corporation to be not the public-­mindedness of its management but the “voluntary membership” of its shareholders through their “investment in capital stock.”64 On one critical issue, however, the Handlins and Page agreed: the corporation was a voluntary association, even though, the Handlins candidly conceded, Americans until quite recently had only rarely described it in these terms. The unwillingness of earlier generations of Americans to conceive of the corporation in this way was for the Handlins easily explained: nineteenth-­century Americans typically characterized the corporation as “private” rather than “voluntary,” since they lumped it together with the religious denomination, a “private entity” that operated outside of the purview of the state.65 Page responded to his critics by underscoring the affinities between the center’s work and the probusiness agenda that had been for him its primary rationale. To make his point, Page adopted a somewhat more self-­ consciously boosterish vocabulary than would have been customary for a Bell executive, or even a Bell director, which Page would remain for many years following his official retirement from Bell. The fundamental ideal that

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the center had been established to promote, Page now averred, was the centrality to American history not merely of the voluntary association but of “free enterprise.” Page’s reference to “free enterprise” was something of a new departure; during his many years at Bell, for example, he had pointedly refused to link the telephone giant with the “free enterprise” crusade. Now that he was longer constrained by his corporate position, Page embraced the new terminology with the fervor of a true believer. Neither the Handlins’ Dimensions of Liberty, Page conceded to Lamont, nor Handlin’s annual report as the center’s director, would “I think, satisfy the gentlemen on the far right who distrust Harvard’s fundamental belief in free enterprise.” Neither, after all, declared “flatly,” as would Page, that free enterprise was the “real basis of America’s greatness.” Even so, having talked with Handlin, Page remained convinced that by the time the center was finished with its “academic evolutions” the “result will be good.”66 In no sense was Page the originator of the center’s emphasis on voluntary action and small government. Like so many prominent specialists in public relations, Page was more of a popularizer than an original thinker. American historians had been lamenting the narrow focus of their field on political history for decades, with periodization schemes organized around presidential administrations—­the so-­called and much-­ridiculed presidential synthesis—­being a particular focus for critique. Even so, Page’s agenda would cast a long shadow on the professoriate. Harvard exercised more influence nationwide over the training of graduate students in American history in the 1960s than it does today, and Handlin was one of the nation’s preeminent mentors of the rising generation of American historians. Several of the historians who received center fellowships, including Rowland T. Berthoff, Gerald D. Nash, and Morton Keller, would go on to write extensively on the history of government-­business relations. Berthoff and Keller, though not Nash, viewed this topic—­like Page—­primarily through the lens of civil society rather than political economy. Handlin’s influence on this cohort of historians was forcibly impressed upon me a few years ago when, in a conversation with Jack N. Rakove, a Stanford University political historian who had obtained a PhD in history from Harvard in 1975, I asked what book he recommended as an overview of nineteenth-­century American government; Rakove unhesitatingly proposed the Handlins’ Dimensions of Liberty.67 Fittingly, the Handlins’ dedicated this book to Page, who had died shortly before its publication, as a “Friend of Liberty and of Learning.”68 It was Page, they elaborated in their acknowledgments, who had first conceived the idea of a “sustained scholarly effort” to “describe the character of American free institutions”: “We only regret that he did not live to see the appearance of

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the first fruits of a project close to his interests.”69 Handlin reiterated his indebtedness to Page in a letter to Bell board chairman Frederick R. Kappel that Handlin wrote shortly after Page’s death. “Our center,” Handlin declared, “owes its existence to the interest of Mr. Arthur W. Page.”70 Dimensions of Liberty remains the single-­best overview of the center’s intellectual agenda. The study of liberty in all its facets, the Handlins contended, was but a “single subject”: how was it that “men pursued their hopes for achievement by cooperating voluntarily or by consenting to be governed.”71 Voluntary cooperation, in turn, entailed the establishment of voluntary associations, which had sometimes served the ends of the state but which also, and more importantly, has offered an “alternative” to it—­ making it an “essential factor” in the “development” of American liberty.72 The tone of Dimensions, as one might expect, given the intellectual climate out of which it had emerged, was full of foreboding. Like Page, the Handlins found the simmering Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union deeply troubling and were far from sanguine about the future. “The preservation of liberty,” they proclaimed in their opening sentence, “is the preeminent problem of our times.” The worldwide spread of freedom that once seemed destined to “spread toward horizons of indefinite extension” had come to be threatened by “hostile forces of overwhelming power”—­by which they meant the Soviet Union and it allies. And the emergence of a threat of such magnitude raised the question of whether the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin might indeed have been correct when he claimed that the idea of freedom might soon become a mere curiosity.73 Such considerations, the Handlins added, had led them to establish the center in 1958.74 One project that Handlin hoped the center would sponsor was never consummated. Between 1960 and 1963, Handlin worked closely with faculty members at Northwestern University and the Harvard Business School to lay the groundwork for a major, archivally based history of the Bell System. Whether or not Page had suggested this project is uncertain. It is not inconceivable that Handlin, as a savvy administrator, made it a priority following Page’s death in 1960 in order to perpetuate the center’s relationship with Bell. What can be confidently asserted is that the project dated back to 1958, a period in which Page’s relationship to the center was particularly close, and eventuated, following Page’s death, in a November 1961 meeting at Bell’s baronial headquarters at 195 Broadway in New York City at which both Handlin and Bell board chairman Frederick R. Kappel were present. “Very little of a constructive character,” Kappel had lamented the previous month in a letter to a likeminded Harvard Business School professor, had

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been “written recently” about the early history of his company, and “practically nothing at all in a scholarly vein.” The Handlin-­Kappel meeting had been set up to help remedy this situation.75 Handlin’s rationale for the proposed telephone history echoed themes Page had long championed. It would be particularly valuable, Handlin believed, to explore the abortive movement to nationalize the telephone industry in the 1910s. “Such a history,” Handlin wrote, in a memorandum on his meeting at 195 Broadway, “would throw light on some of the important subjects of concern to the Center, particularly on the role of voluntary associations in the economy and on the distinction of public from private spheres of activity.” Two developments related to the position of Bell as a private enterprise seemed to Handlin to be particularly worthy of investigation. They were the circumstances that “permitted” the telephone in the United States to remain a “free private enterprise” at a time when the medium was being absorbed by the state in much of the rest of the world, and the shift in American public opinion between 1900 and 1920 that led to the recognition that “private was preferable to governmental operation in this sphere.”76 Much depended, of course, on the identity of the author of the proposed study. Handlin confided to a Bell executive that he anticipated that the study might be written by someone like Harold C. Passer, whose publications included a monograph on the late nineteenth-­century electrical manufacturing business, or Morton Keller, author of a sympathetic biography of the archconservative early twentieth-­century corporate lawyer James M. Beck. David Riesman suggested E. Digby Baltzell, a sociologist who had recently published a historically oriented analysis of Philadelphia’s Protestant elite.77 The proposed telephone history never got off the ground, falling victim, as would so many similar business histories from this period, to the scruples of in-­house corporate lawyers fearful of the potentially adverse antitrust implications of a full public disclosure of their past business activities.78 Yet its rationale does highlight a dimension of liberty that Page’s own historical writings deliberately concealed. Like so many giant corporations, Bell was as much a creature of government regulation as it was the by-­product of market incentives and technological imperatives. This was a fact that Page’s stark opposition between political economy and civil society had done much to obscure. The court-­ordered dismantling of the Bell System in 1984 underscored the limitations of Page’s vision of American history. The Bell System had been a victim less of government giantism run amok than of an antimonopoly deregulatory movement that rejected the politically inflected regulatory

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compromises that Page, as the longtime head of Bell’s formidable public relations machine, had worked so diligently and for so long to defend. Bell had indeed been an association of corporations, yet in no sense was this association voluntary. On the contrary, it owed its existence to a constellation of intricate political compromises concerning rate structures and service standards.79 Voluntarism was, and is, a social process rather than a moral imperative, a means rather than an end. To make voluntarism a centerpiece of historical analysis, as Page had, was ultimately to obscure its embeddedness in a political economy that had the potential, as Page had recognized all along, to repudiate the compromises upon which the corporation that he had long championed had been built.

The legacy of Page’s mobilization of corporate philanthropy on historical writing is diffuse, yet multifaceted. The kind of social history that Page tried to encourage was obviously different from the self-­consciously radical and antiestablishment new social history that emerged at roughly the same time at the University of Wisconsin. The new social history had many sources, including some that were transnational, and its implications were not easily contained.80 Even so, Page’s project and the new social history had more in common than one might at first surmise. Each warned portentously that the current generation of academic historians had egregiously distorted the historical record; each held a dim view of the state; and each placed great faith in the wisdom of the masses, even as they differed widely as to who the masses were and why they mattered. Or, to put it somewhat differently, it is worth recalling that the enthusiasm for civil society by social historians has a somewhat more complicated lineage than is often assumed, and that at least part of their fascination with voluntary associations, social mobility, history from the “bottom up,” and the large percentage of Americans whose names never found their way into the newspapers, was indebted to Page’s efforts to promote a style of historical writing that would skew the boundary between state and society so far from political economy and to­ ward civil society as to render governmental institutions largely irrelevant to the American past. The legacy of Page’s center on historical writing at Harvard is even more direct. It remains a matter of record that several of the most gifted American historians in Handlin’s orbit during the 1960s, including Gordon S. Wood and Morton Keller, popularized an approach to the study of the relationship of government and society that Page would have found congenial. Among the habits of mind these historians shared was a skeptical attitude toward the

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early American state as an agent of change. Wood’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) marginalized the Federalists and the governmental institutions they established, contending that, with Thomas Jefferson’s victory in the presidential election of 1800, the United States turned decisively away from the statist project that the Federalists had endorsed. Keller, similarly, has remained consistent over many years in his contention that the nineteenth-­century American state was exceedingly weak, that the political “regime” the Jacksonians established remained pretty much in place until the New Deal, and that the New Deal marked a sharp and irrevocable rupture in American public life.81 The legacy of Page’s center can also be traced, albeit more ambiguously, in Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), one of the great works of historical scholarship to be published in the 1960s. The seed for Ideological Origins lay in an essay that Bailyn prepared as the introduction to a projected four-­volume collection of pamphlets written by American colonists on the eve of the War of Independence. This volume, which Bailyn dedicated to Handlin, and which grew out of a project on early American politics that Bailyn had worked on at the center, was introduced by a remarkable essay that would be later expanded and published as Ideological Origins, in which Bailyn set forth a compelling and highly influential explanation for the American Revolution.82 In the revised version of this essay, Bailyn elaborated in luminous prose and with great insight on the fundamentally antistatist “contagion of liberty” in the 1770s that propelled the founders of the American republic to transform a moderate critique of the British state into a far more radical assault on slavery, religious establishments, and social hierarchy. The revolution, in short, at least in its opening phase, was an epic struggle between liberty and power in which liberty won. The “primary goal” of the Revolution, Bailyn declared, in an oft-­quoted passage, was “the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty.”83 It would not be until many years later, in an expanded edition of Ideological Origins that included a new chapter on the ideological contest of the 1780s, that Bailyn would emphasize the constructive state-­building role of the founders, an elaboration that can be read as a critique not only of Wood’s Radicalism, but also of Wood’s earlier Creation of the American Republic, which had been published in 1968, a mere two years following the reorganization of the center in 1966.84 Handlin remained committed to the completion of a full-­scale history of liberty in the United States, a project for which he regarded Dimensions of Liberty as the prolegomena. This ambitious project eventually came to

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fruition with the publication between 1986 and 1994 of a hefty four-­volume history of “liberty in America” from 1600 to the present that Handlin coauthored with his second wife, Lillian, Mary having died in 1976.85 By the time these sprawling tomes found their way into print, Handlin’s well-­honed combination of oracular pronouncements with pointillistic detail was no longer in vogue, while the intellectual agenda that Handlin had championed in Dimensions of Liberty had become unmanageably diffuse. The volumes received mixed reviews from their colleagues, several of whom focused on the problematic definition of its theme. “One lesson of this book,” wrote a reviewer of volume four in the American Historical Review, was that “any seemingly neutral definition of liberty such as ‘ability to act’ is not feasible”: “The content of action is inseparable from the ability to act.”86 Historians in the 1960s shifted their attention from political economy to civil society for a multitude of reasons that had nothing to do with the establishment of Harvard’s Center for the Study of Liberty. Even so, it would be a mistake to discount the influence of corporate philanthropy upon historical writing. In an age when research support for historical research was less generous that it would later become, cultural entrepreneurs like Page had the opportunity, as the founding of the Harvard center demonstrates, to shape an intellectual agenda that would leave an imprint on some of the leading historians of the age. The Harvard center was but one of several research institutes founded in the 1950s to combat the New Deal. The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, an organization dedicated to the study of American business and technological history that received generous funding from the Du Pont family, had a similar rationale, as did the foundation at the University of Chicago established by drugstore magnate Charles R. Walgreen. The eponymous lecture series that Walgreen’s foundation established eventuated in the publication of several notable history books, including David M. Potter’s People of Plenty (1954), a nuanced yet ultimately sympathetic analysis of American economic abundance that discounted the agency of governmental institutions in bringing this abundance about.87 The Davis Center for Historical Research at Princeton had an analogous genealogy. Funded by investment banker Shelby Cullom Davis, it championed social history over political history at a time when bankers like Davis, a movement conservative active in conservative think tanks, had good reason to be wary of the state.88 To document the influence of politically motivated corporate philanthropy on the funding of historical scholarship does not, of course, impugn the scholarship that this philanthropy helped to sustain. Yet it does deepen

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our understanding of the intensity of the post–­Second World War business crusade against the New Deal, while serving as a pointed reminder of the extent to which the boundary between state and society in the American past has long been a subject not only of dispassionate historical inquiry but also of polemical contestation and debate.

Notes 1.

Several colleagues have read versions of this essay and provided useful suggestions. I am particularly grateful for the assistance of Brian Balogh, Peter S. Onuf, Kim Phillips-­Fein, Mark R. Wilson, and Olivier Zunz. Special thanks to James T. Sparrow for his encouragement and advice, to Emily Bahr-­de Stefano for checking citations, and to Seth Cotlar for the invitation to give a lecture at Willamette University in 2005 at which I first tried out in public some of the ideas in this essay. 2. David A. Hollinger, “Money and Academic Freedom a Half-­Century after Mc­ Carthyism: Universities Amid the Force Fields of Capital,” in Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life, ed. Peggie J. Hollingsworth (Ann Arbor: Univer­ sity of Michigan Press, 2000), 63–­167; Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Busi­ nessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 156–­65. 3. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 13. 4. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” Commonwealth: A Study in the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–­1861, rev. ed. (1947; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), vii–­x. 5. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–­60). 6. Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), chap. 2; William L. Bird Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–­1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), chap. 7; Elizabeth A. Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–­60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 7. Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Pol­ itics, 1942–­1960,” Business History Review 57 (Autumn 1983): 3; William H. Whyte Jr., et al., “The Great Free Enterprise Campaign,” in Is Anybody Listening? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), chap. 1. 8. Noel L. Griese, Arthur W. Page: Publisher, Public Relations Pioneer, Patriot (Tucker, GA: Anvil Publishers, 2001), 195, 269. All unattributed biographical details concerning Page’s career in this essay are drawn from Griese. Additional information on Page’s public relations career can be found in Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 2; and Richard S. Tedlow, Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900–­1950 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1979), chap. 2. I have also profited from the opportunity to read a portion of a forthcoming biography of Page by Karen Miller Russell. 9. Griese, Page, 131.

From Political Economy to Civil Society  /  321 10. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 3–­4. 11. Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 10. 12. John, Network Nation, chap. 11. 13. Griese, Page, 111–­12. Page would later credit the Dallas speech to Gifford, an attribution that may have been a subterfuge. Whoever wrote the speech, Page always held it in high regard; as late as 1959, for example, he praised it, in a letter to the economist Adolf A. Berle Jr., as of “immense importance” in “crystallizing opinion in the business, and creating a favorable attitude towards the business by the public.” Page to Berle, October 14, 1959, box 60, Page Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter PP-­HSW); Page, The Bell Telephone System (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 11–­14. 14. Horace Coon, American Tel & Tel: The Story of a Great Monopoly (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), 2, 13. 15. Page, Bell Telephone System, 159, 161; Howard F. Bennett to Oscar Handlin, June 22, 1962, Handlin Papers, Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (here­­ after HP-­HU). 16. Page, Bell Telephone System, 170. 17. Ibid., 208. 18. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul, chaps. 4–­5. 19. Page, Bell Telephone System, 154. 20. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review 50 (October 1944): 24, 25. 21. Page to Worthy, March 4, 1957, box 51, PP-­HSW. 22. Page to Thomas W. Lamont, May 6, 1957, box 52, PP-­HSW. 23. Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Total­ itarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 24. Robert F. Burk, The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics, 1925–­1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chaps. 13–­14. 25. Bird, Better Living, 72–­82. 26. James C. Worthy, “Citizenship and Democracy: The Role of the Voluntary Civic Association,” Chicago City Club, May 7, 1956, Worthy Papers, Northwestern Uni­ versity, Chicago, Illinois. 27. Worthy, “Citizenship and Democracy.” 28. Page to Worthy, March 4, 1957, box 51, PP-­HSW. 29. Page to Worthy, March 4, 1957, PP-­HSW. 30. Page to Worthy, March 4, 1957, PP-­HSW; Grant Madsen, “Lessons of Victory: Oc­ cupying Germany and Japan, Discovering the ‘People’s Capitalism,’” PhD diss., Uni­ versity of Chicago, 2011. 31. Page to Worthy, March 4, 1957, PP-­HSW. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Page to Thomas S. Lamont, June 30, 1958, box 60, PP-­HSW. 36. Page to Gwilym A. Price, January 21, 1959, box 58, PP-­HSW. 37. Page to Donald B. Woodward, July 29, 1957, box 53, PP-­HSW. 38. Page to John W. Gardner, March 4, 1957, box 51, PP-­HSW.

322  /  Richard R. John 39. Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands, 156–­65. 40. Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–­1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 88–­89; Edward Nik-­Khah, “George Stigler, the Graduate School of Business, and the Pillars of the Chicago School,” in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economic Program, ed. Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 116–­47. 41. Page to James P. Baxter, March 1, 1957, box 51, PP-­HSW. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Forrest McDonald, Insull (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 45. Page to Harold Brayman, June 26, 1957, box 52, PP-­HSW. 46. “Draft,” appended to Page to Thomas W. Lamont, May 6, 1957, box 52, PP-­HSW. 47. Page to Buck, May 20, 1957, box 52, HP-­HU. 48. Alice O’Connor, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 49. Page to Sloan, April 9, 1959, box 59, PP-­HSW. 50. Page to Sloan, April 9, 1959; Sloan to Page, April 24, 1959; both in box 59, PP-­HSW. 51. Fletcher M. Green to Page, December 2, 1957, box 54; Green to Page, April 8, 1959, box 59; Elisha P. Douglass to Page, May 25, 1959, box 59; memorandum attached to Page to Hargreave, June 30, 1958, box 56; all in PP-­HSW. 52. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty (1961; New York: Atheneum, 1966), 192. 53. Handlin and Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty, 192. 54. Page to Sloan, April 9, 1959, PP-­HSW. 55. Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History: First Annual Report, June 30, 1966, 13. 56. Ibid., 30. 57. Handlin and Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty, 192. 58. Center for the Comparative Study of the History of Liberty in America, “The Origins of American Freedom and What the People Have Done with It” [n.d., ca. 1958], box 58, PP-­HSW. 59. “Provisional List of Monograph Subjects,” n.d., UAV 456.1010, HP-­HU. 60. Kenneth W. Colegrove to Marguerite Pettet, July 9, 1959, box 60, PP-­HSW. In a second July 9 letter to Pettet marked “personal and confidential,” Colegrove raised even more pointed objections to the political outlook of the center’s leadership team. Handlin was a “racial expert,” which Colegrove did not intend as a compliment, whose recently published Race and Nationality in America “slanted toward socialism.” Riesman’s appointment was even more objectionable: “He is a behavioralist, radical and socialist. Most of his books, and especially his The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) and his Faces in the Crowd (1952) belittle and ridicule the American tradition. He is the enemy of tradition, He is one of the last men who should share control over a project to study the history of American liberty.” Ibid. 61. Page to James P. Baxter, July 17, 1959, box 60, PP-­HSW. 62. Handlin and Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty, 111. 63. Ibid., 86–­87.

From Political Economy to Civil Society  /  323 64. 65. 66. 67.

Ibid., 103. Ibid., 99. Page to Lamont, February 26, 1960, box 61, PP-­HSW. “The history of liberty,” Rakove elaborated in a thoughtful discussion of Dimensions of Liberty, “lay in the staple themes of the emergence and triumphs of modern forms of constitutional government”: “Although still interested in the formal organiza­tion of power [as they had been in Commonwealth], the Handlins cast their net wider. By defining liberty not as an absence of restraint but as a capacity for action, they would have made it possible to apply this one concept to the many realms in which the modern individual acts, so that its history would embrace not only the meaning of citizenship but also the private and public uses to which liberties of all kinds can be put.” Jack N. Rakove, “Some Kinds of Freedom,” Reviews in American History 24 (September 1996): 394–­95. 68. Handlin and Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty, dedication page. 69. Ibid., 191. 70. Handlin to Kappel, October 23, 1961, HP-­HU. 71. Handlin and Handlin, Dimensions of Liberty, 157. 72. Ibid., 111, 112. 73. Ibid., 1. 74. Ibid., 2. 75. Frederick R. Kappel to George Albert Smith Jr., October 17, 1961, HP-­HU. 76. “Memorandum” [of a conference at Bell headquarters at 195 Broadway, New York City], November 3, 1961, HP-­HU. 77. “Memorandum” [of luncheon meeting with Bell Vice President Mr. Callvart], April 21, 1962; Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America, “Minutes,” UAV 456.1005; both in HP-­HU. 78. “Memorandum” [of luncheon meeting with Bell Vice President Mr. Callvart], April 21, 1962 HP-­HU; George Albert Smith Jr., to Handlin, December 31, 1965, box 1, folder 14, Smith Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts. 79. John, Network Nation, chaps. 10–­11, epilogue. 80. Oliver Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 81. Morton Keller, Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 82. Interestingly, and in accord with what appears to have been a contemporary convention, Bailyn made no reference in his acknowledgments for either volume to the organizations that had provided him with financial support. Bailyn would acknowledge the support of the center for his research on “early American politics” in a related book that he published shortly thereafter: The Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), xi. 83. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 19. 84. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), postscript (“Fulfillment”). 85. Oscar Handlin and Lillian Handlin, Liberty in America: 1600 to the Present, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1986–­96).

324  /  Richard R. John 86. James Hoopes, review of Oscar Handlin and Lillian Handlin, Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present, vol. 4, Liberty and Equality, 1920–­1994, in American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 584. 87. Emile P. Du Pont, “Technology at Work Here” (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum, 1957); Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence, 88–­89. 88. Wolfgang Saxon, “Shelby C. Davis, Envoy and Philanthropist, 85,” New York Times, June 1, 1994.

Conclusion

The Concept of the State in American History W i l l i a m J . N o va k

The State must always be rediscovered. —­John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Debating the State Debates about the state rage in contemporary America. On the right, libertarian and tea party rhetoric fulminates about shrinking the state or shutting down the government, frequently in hyperbolic terms like the Americans for Tax Reform notion of “drowning it in a bathtub.” On the left, concern about the fate of the welfare state and an ever-­expanding warfare and penal state produces equally impassioned retorts. Discussion of the American state—­its nature, its size, and its uncertain future—­dominates the political landscape as perhaps never before. And while more rather than less discussion of the state in America might seem like a good thing, two problems plague popular forms of political debate. First, the character of these discussions is almost entirely polemical. Embedded in deep political commitments and haunted by ever-­present ghosts of ideological battles past (e.g., socialism, communism, and fascism), debate about the American state all too frequently turns on the single intellectual axis of whether one is “for it” or “against it,” as commentators com­ pete to take sides as foremost proponent or critic. Unsurprisingly, this polemical quality also exacerbates a second reductionist tendency to talk about the American state in the kind of woefully simplistic terms usually reserved for children’s books: “too big,” “too small,” “too weak,” “too strong.” Considerably less attention is spent thinking about what “it” actually is that partisans and politicos demand be bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker.

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It would thus seem like a propitious moment for more historical and social-­scientific study of the American state. But while formal scholarly analysis of the American state has been experiencing a welcome renaissance of late, it still lags considerably. Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg as late as 1986, “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of the State in America’ is . . . a major understatement. There is close to everything to be learned about the State.”1 The gap between heated political debate about the state and enlightened scholarly investigation of it continues to expand nationally as well as internationally. As Pierre Rosanvallon lamented in his prescient introduction to L’État en France, “The state as a political problem, or as a bureaucratic phenomenon, is at the heart of heightened partisan passions while more important philosophical debates about the nature of the state evade serious historical scrutiny.”2 But the problem with existing scholarship on the state is no longer primarily a problem of quantity—­that is, not enough of it. On the contrary, over the past thirty years, a proliferation of state studies has risen in direct response to the challenges Leuchtenburg, Keller, and Rosanvallon described.3 The state has indeed been brought “back in,” in Theda Skocpol’s influential words.4 The pioneering texts of Skocpol and Stephen Skowronek (and their students and collaborators), together with the steady stream of monographs produced by the school of social and political scientists working on American political development, have decisively pushed the history of the American state in all its guises (from the fiscal state to the welfare state to the penal state to the warfare state) back to the center of American historical inquiry.5 But if quantity is no longer a pressing issue, qualitative problems continue to plague the existing historiography of the American state. First, somewhat surprisingly, much scholarly discussion of the American state continues to be carried out in terms not entirely dissimilar to those dominating popular partisan debate. That is particularly true of the overweening tendency in American political history to interpret the state primarily through the history of ideas6—­that is, chronicles of the intellectual or rhetorical positions politicians, publicists, and various publics have taken on the state over time. In the United States, this frequently involves the deployment of a series of handy intellectual reference points that denote specific moments in a seemingly ever-­recurring tale of the rise and fall of various forms of “statism” and “antistatism.” The history of the American state thus quickly degenerates into endless variations on the single, normatively charged theme of—­in Sidney Fine’s characterization—­laissez-­faire versus the general welfare state.7 From Hamilton versus Jefferson, to Jackson

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versus Biddle, to Sumner versus Ward, to Peckham versus Holmes, to FDR versus the Liberty League, to Reagan versus regulation, to red states versus blue states, on ad infinitum, American history gets told and retold through the simple trope of liberal reform versus conservative reaction.8 The history of the state itself as a historical problem and artifact is elided in favor of a turn to a general history of ideas repeated with the regularity that perhaps inspired Arthur Schlesinger Sr.’s (and Jr.’s) forays into the “cycles of American history”—­historical cycles highlighting the same basic question, the same basic conflict, the same basic idea of the state.9 As is perhaps clear in the case of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., this type of history of the state is also highly ideological. Like the popular political debates it quite consciously reflects, such histories at bottom are about taking sides “for” or “against” the state—­ for “better” or for “worse,” for “richer” or “poorer.”10 The state thus evades a proper historicization. It grows, it develops, it expands, it ages, it withers, it recycles—­like a plant (more on this persistent organic biologism later) it has staunch admirers and strangely passionate detractors, but it lacks a true history. But if warring liberal and conservative ideological traditions are one major obstacle to a more analytical understanding of the state in America, an even more significant stumbling block is the continued hold on the subject of a narrow rendering of the political. For with some notable exceptions of late,11 the subject of “the state” still remains primarily confined within the scholarly jurisdiction of the traditional practices of political science, political sociology, and political history. And for the most part, the recent renaissance of scholarly interest in the state has been carried out within conventional conceptions of politics and within the traditional boundaries of the political. Now, to some extent, that is not wholly surprising. After all, the very rallying cry “bringing the state back in” that underwrote so much renewed interest in the state in the 1980s and ’90s itself hints at some of the limits of the original vision—­limits implicit in the idea of “bringing something back”—­ returning a former priority, reclaiming a lost agenda, rescuing a neglected concept. Part of an effort in sociology and political science to reclaim the high ground for the study of political institutions, the return to the state in the work of scholars like Skocpol and Skowronek did not so much challenge traditional notions of politics as pugnaciously reassert them. J. P. Nettl captured something of this spirit in his opening to “The State as a Conceptual Variable” in 1968: “The concept of the state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now. Yet it retains a skeletal, ghostly existence largely

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because, for all the changes in emphasis and interest of research, the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it.”12 In the field of American history, political historians initially greeted this self-­proclaimed “return of the state” in the social sciences with some of skepticism—­confident from their own continuous record of research and writing that the American state had never actually been sent packing in the first place.13 But over time, a happy interdisciplinary rapprochement emerged around general increased enthusiasm for studying the history of the state within the strict bounds of political forms of social science. And for the last twenty-­five years or so, this jurisdictional monopoly has no doubt yielded some happy results. The state certainly did move back toward the center of American history, and a plethora of new monographs illuminated ever-­new corners of American state policy making. But somewhat predictably, over time, this traditional political approach has grown a bit stale—­ hitching historical understanding of the American state to an unnecessarily circumscribed scholarly agenda. Several conventional emphases seem to have outgrown their original critical edge and interpretive usefulness. First and most problematic is the continued predilection of traditional political scholars to separate the state (and politics) from society (and culture). This overdrawn distinction permeated the first-­wave revival of social scientific interest in the state, taking the form of a much-­hyped methodological confrontation between newer, so-­called “state-­centered” approaches to the public and its problems (for example, Skocpol, Skowronek, Shefter) versus more traditional “society-­ centered” explorations (for example, Dahl, Moore, Esping-­Andersen).14 Framing discussion of state and society through this simple, either/or interpretive binary frequently devolved into rather bland warnings against overdeterminism coupled with bold assertions of more-­or-­less conventional research priorities. Thus the basic thrust of  Theda Skocpol’s clarion call for polity-­centered analysis: “State formation, political institutions, and political processes (understood in non-­economically [and non-­socially] determinist ways) must move from the penumbra or margins of analysis and toward the center.”15 In addition to frustrating rather than enhancing the possibilities for synthesis, the state or society framework exacerbated a couple of other tendencies. One was a rather unhelpful interpretive focus on the “autonomy” of formal state actors (so-­called state builders) and state institutions (that is, the bureaucracy—­the “administrative, legal, bureaucratic, and coercive organizations” that Skocpol dubbed “the core of any state”).16 As Brian Balogh constructively translated this classic American political development

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(APD) perspective for historians, “The state . . . was a central actor in its own right. . . . It was an autonomous force, and one that had to be reckoned with in writing the nation’s history.”17 As with popular political debates promoting “the state” alternatively as problem or solution, however, one was again left to wonder just exactly what this “it” was (a thing? a force? a group of persons? a set of institutions? a series of policies?) that could possess such an exquisitely anthropomorphic quality as “autonomy.”18 In the short run within particular academic fields, “state autonomy” was an effective scholarly rallying cry. In the long run, however, rather than clarify or advance dis­ cussion of  the already thorny concept of “the state,” it simply added another level of murk—­for what exactly is “autonomy” in complex and increasingly interdependent modern economies, societies, and polities? The autonomous polity-­centered approach to the state was rooted in a troubling reliance on late nineteenth-­century Germanic models of state development (most notably those of Max Weber and Otto Hintze), so some of these interpretive limitations are not wholly surprising. Indeed, there was always something potentially atavistic about the “bringing the state back in” formula—­something strangely discomfiting about returning to (as distinct from dialectically engaging with) late nineteenth-­century state theories to reckon with rapidly changing late twentieth-­century forms of power and politics. Indeed, rather than carry discussion into the future by challenging and expanding conventional conceptions of “the state” and “the political” (or “society” and “the social”), some scholars seemed content to bring the past back in, reinforcing rather than reimagining the traditional boundaries of politics. In the end, too much of the so-­called new study of American political development ended up looking a lot like the old study of Amer­ ican political history—­old wine in new bottles—­as scholarly interest in the state reverted back to canonical sites of traditional political action: elections, political elites, and the formal institutional apparatus of public policy making. Now, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with the traditional study of political elites and institutions. Elites and institutions simply do matter, guaranteeing traditional political analysis a place at the table whenever reckoning with a problem like the state. As William Leuchtenburg wisely counseled, “If, in fact, elites have played a disproportionate role, historians do not diminish that reality by ignoring it.”19 Nonetheless, there is something unsatisfying about restricting the study of the modern state to more traditional aspects of political investigation—­ something of the unsettling, antidemocratic specter of what G. R. Elton described as “the old-­fashioned political historian, on his knees before the

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thrones of kings.” More recently, Tony Judt amplified this critique, decrying a “traditional political history” that “continues on its untroubled way describing the behaviour of the ruling classes. . . . Divorced from social history, this remains, as ever, a form of historical writing adapted to the preservation of the status quo; it concerns itself with activities peculiar to the ruling group, activities of an apparently rational and self-­justifying nature.”20 Elton himself admitted the limitations of histories of public affairs as histories of “great men”—­the happy few: “Whether it concerns itself with kings and popes, or with political parties and politbureaus, it chronicles the specialized existence of special people, and the charge that it confines itself to a very limited part of the human experience must therefore be admitted to be essentially true.”21 Now at some point in the distant past, it might have made sense to conceptualize “the political” or “the state” as involving “a very limited part of the human experience” and remain content with the rudimentary tool kit of traditional political history and a stark separation of powers concerning the study of state and society. But after the extraordinary experiences of the twentieth century, it is difficult to find comfort in such a primitive division of labor. For as theorists as diverse as Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt have argued at some length, a defining characteristic of recent history and a hallmark of our own modern times is the increasing interpenetration of state and society, the political and the social. As Schmitt put it succinctly: The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—­as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains—­religion, culture, education, the economy—­then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics. . . . In such a state, therefore, everything is at least potentially political, and in referring to the state it is no longer possible to assert for it a specifically political character.22

Although one could, indeed should, contest Schmitt’s alternative conception of the political, here he aptly captures the modern sense that traditional notions of politics no longer adequately capture contemporary configurations of state and society. They no longer explain our present. So there is a distinct need for a reconceptualization of the state in Amer­ i­can history. And there is also a shifting horizon and expanding audience

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for historical explanation in general.23 But rather than seize these promising opportunities, traditional political history remains saddled with a crimped and crabbed conception of politics and a thin and impoverished rendering of power. In consequence, two generations of social and cultural historians have essentially voted with their feet—­abandoning traditional political preoccupation with elections, elites, and executive policy making. Such classic loci of authority no longer capture the historical explanatory power desired and needed. Indeed, as if to underscore the extent and depth of prevailing dissatisfaction with traditional models of politics and statecraft, two generations of social theorists, including such notables as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Giorgio Agamben, basically cut their teeth on new and influential conceptions of power defined by their resistance to confinement within the traditional concept of the political. While prevailing intellectual and political histories remain necessary components in a comprehensive historical and social-­scientific account of the state, they are, in short, no longer sufficient. They too closely circumscribe the boundaries of both the political and the state. Alternative models of historical explanation of the state-­society relation are urgently needed. Enter legal history.

The Example of Legal History Once upon a time, the study of the concept of law in America was in a condition not unlike that facing the concept of the state. The history of law, in particular, was dominated by approaches that closely mirrored those just described. Originally, legal history too was pursued as a kind of offshoot of the history of ideas—­in this case, the idea of “the rule of law.” In place of close empirical or social-­scientific investigations, the history of law was frequently propounded through accounts of an ever-­expanding “spirit of the law” in the making of Western civilization. My favorite example of this all-­too-­common trope comes from Julius Goebel’s opening lines in the first volume of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States. In establishing a point of departure for law’s history in what he labeled the “pristine seaboard communities” of colonial America, Goebel located there “the notion of Montesquieu that independently of the laws made by men, a complex of principles is unceasingly operative that determines their institutions and indeed their legislation . . . the suzerainty of the great fundamentals—­the supremacy of law, the prescription of certainty, the orderly determination of controversies and, above all, the dominating concept of due process.”24 Note the autonomy—­the

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self-­genesis—­and teleology involved in this idea of a “rule of law” operating “independently of the laws made by men.” This is law supremely abstracted from social reality—­law hovering somewhere above humanity and society as a higher “spirit” and “a complex of principles” exuding “suzerainty” and “supremacy.” This is what the political scientist Arthur Bentley (in the spirit of Thorstein Veblen) used to refer to critically as “soul stuff.”25 It is essentially ahistorical and irreducibly ideological. This history of the idea of law meshed seamlessly with a further predisposition to talk about legality in highly formalist, doctrinal terms. Law was conceptualized as separate and independent from politics as well as society. Its fundamental principles and operations were discoverable by studying axioms and corollaries in the abstract—­shorn of surrounding social and political context—­as if studying the rules of a book of mathematics or chess.26 Predictably, this formal history of legal ideas grounded in a narrow and autonomous conception of things “legal” produced histories of law focused almost entirely on elite sources and high legal actors: appellate courts, distinguished jurists, treatise writers, and a handful of great—­usually constitutional law—­cases. Together, these features yielded what Morton Horwitz criticized (in terms not unlike Tony Judt’s critique of traditional political history) as an essentially “conservative tradition” in the writing of “lawyer’s legal history.” Horwitz decried this internalist and “politically conservative” ideology of legalism wherein the “received legal tradition is treated not as itself a contingent and changing product of specific historical struggles, but rather as a kind of meta-­historical set of values.”27 But what distinguishes the practice of legal history from political history today is that the “conservative tradition” is now a wholly marginal position. With few exceptions, the narrow nineteenth-­century conception of “the legal” described above was thoroughly transformed in one of the most interesting jurisprudential developments of the twentieth century. The results hold some useful lessons for those trying to expand and revitalize concepts of “the state” and “the political” in the twenty-­first century. At the core of the transformation in the concept of law in America was a long-­term and broad-­gauged effort to modernize legal study in the inter­ est of producing a more disenchanted, nonspeculative, and postmetaphysical jurisprudence. This movement, of course, had many moving parts and almost as many contending voices. Indeed, it has been described with a sometimes-­confusing array of competing monikers (e.g., antiformalism, le­ gal positivism, legal functionalism, sociological jurisprudence, legal pragmatism). For the purposes of this essay, I would like to focus attention on two essential interpretive moves. The first I label “critical realism”—­a

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perspective that preoccupied legal debate in America for the first half of the twentieth century.28 The second is the later but related movement for understanding “law in society”—­a perspective that dominates legal scholarship to this very day. Critical legal realism, broadly construed, is one of the most important and lasting contributions of American jurisprudence. It had its origins in a sustained and distinctive critical sociological jurisprudential tradition that grew up in the early twentieth century in reaction against some of the detached, abstracted, moralistic, and idealistic concepts of law that dominated the previous century.29 In a powerful attempt to de-­mythologize and reorient study of the rule of law, realists criticized the notion of law as divinely inspired moral imperative or formally deductive logic or autonomous science. They argued instead that law and rights were distinctly social and political phenomena deeply implicated in the everyday economic and cultural struggles of a rapidly changing society. The high priest of critical realism in law was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who as early as 1881 threw down the gauntlet and inaugurated a new age in legal thinking with perhaps the most famous line of legal history ever written: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-­men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”30 So much for the “autonomy” let alone the “idea” or “spirit” of the law. As Holmes made even more clear in “The Path of the Law,” he was not interested in abstract idealizations of law and rights: “Nothing but confusion of thought [could] result from assuming that the rights of man in a moral sense are equally rights in the sense of the Constitution and the law.” Rather, he was interested in concrete actions and real-­world consequences—­that is, the real power that was exercised by courts in the name of law—­the takings and redistributions and renegotiation of economic and social and political interests that ultimately were the effects of “breaking the law” or of “violating a right.” No rose-­colored glasses here about what went on in the name of the law or “due process” or the “suzerainty of the great fundamentals.”31 Holmes’s critical legal realism, of course, very much resonated with the more general American intellectual tradition known as pragmatism.32 With formal philosophical insights first honed in the treatises of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism became the lingua franca of professional American social science as practiced at the turn of the century by the likes of Thorstein Veblen, Richard Ely, John Commons,

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Charles Horton Cooley, and so many others. John Dewey’s philosophy of law perfectly reflected Holmes’s early emphasis on social and historical experience rather than logic and abstraction.33 For Dewey, law was “through and through a social phenomenon; social in origin, in purpose or end, and in application”—­“a program for action to be tested in action.” It could neither be talked about in isolation from society or history nor judged “on a purely intellectual basis,” but could “be discussed only in terms of the social conditions in which it arises and of what it concretely does there.” Echoing William James’s conception of truth as something that “happens to an idea,”34 Dewey argued, “A given legal arrangement is what it does, and what it does lies in the field of modifying and/or maintaining human activities as going concerns.” He concluded that without this emphasis on social activity and social application, “there are scraps of paper or voices in the air but nothing that can be called law.”35 This critical, realistic, and thoroughly social concept of law only reinforced the new progressive histories of Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard that were also registering impatience with the old celebratory narratives of American founders, presidents, and Supreme Court justices.36 In sympathy with the general muckraking tradition of the times, critical realism urged scholars to dig beneath the surface of high politics and lawmaking—­ beneath the rhetoric and the conventional sources—­so as to expose the more gritty reality and the omnipresent socioeconomic underpinnings of law and statecraft.37 The realist goal was and is to strip legal investigation of the “myth, folderol, and claptrap” that so powerfully obscured insight into the actual functioning of law and politics—­metaphysical abstractions like “natural law” or “economic man” or even “we, the people.”38 Critical realism urged a more practical and empirical examination of law in terms of who is doing what to whom and how. Realists were interested in law in action rather than law in theory or law on the books—­law on the ground rather than in the heaven of legal concepts.39 Critical realism was extraordinarily successful as a deconstructive legal project. It went a long way toward de-­mystifying the concept of law and purging legal discussion of a certain penchant for “transcendental nonsense.” It thus nicely paved the way for more pragmatic, professional, and social-­scientific investigations of the interaction of law and socioeconomic life. But in the end, that more fully reconstructive jurisprudence required a second wave of scholarly innovation and production. That second wave also has a number of permutations and labels, but it can be thought of usefully as the movement for the study of law in society.

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If one of the main limitations of traditional legal scholarship was an artificial separation of an autonomous law from a complex society, the law in society movement was an attempt to substantively map their deep interdependence and interaction. The scholar who best embodied these new priorities was James Willard Hurst. Hurst basically invented the historical approach that has come to be known as the new sociolegal history.40 In a radical departure from the internalist, doctrinal constitutional histories of the past, Hurst urged the study of law “not as self-­contained system, but as part of the life of its society”—­inextricably connected to larger issues of economy, polity, and society. Hurst gave early voice to the need for a “social history of law”—­a contextual history “pursuing law into whatever relations it has had to the whole course of the society.”41 Revealingly, Hurst’s own magnum opus was a monumental case study of the interaction of law and economy in the Wisconsin lumber industry—­a 950-­page (with double column notes and index) exploration of law intricately and fully embedded in everyday society.42 Obviously, a major consequence of the law in society movement was the redirection of attention away from high-­classical legal sources and topics—­ away from Washington, DC, and the clear, oft-­quoted opinions of justices and into the thick, unexplored forests of Wisconsin. Hurst confessed an irritation with legal history as a “recital of Great Cases” stringing together literary quotes from past legal luminaries. As he put it metaphorically, “With intelligent diligence and some literary flair anyone can make a good story out of the spotlighted star acts, like the Federal Convention or the Legal Tender Cases or the Court-­packing bill. But the spotlighted acts could not go on without stage crew and audience, and without a complicated environing pattern of activity which produced a theater, a city, and an economic surplus to allow the luxury of star performances.”43 In contrast, Hurst urged the bottom-­up reconstruction of legal history around the thousands of everyday interactions of law and economy and society. Hurst thus followed critical realists in further pushing the boundaries of law well beyond the traditional confines of the formal legalism or the law school. As he put it: In deciding what to include as “law” I do not find it profitable to distinguish “law” from “government” or from “policy.” The heart of the matter is that we formed organizations for collective action characterized by their own distinctive bases of legitimacy. . . . In order to see law in its relations to society as a whole, one must appraise all formal and informal aspects of politically organized power. . . . This definition overruns traditional boundaries dividing study of law from study of political history, political science, and sociology.44

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By shifting attention to law-­in-­action among everyday folks rather than law-­on-­the-­books as expounded by judges, jurists, and treatise writers, critical realism and law in society vastly broadened the horizon for legal inquiry. Moving beyond exclusively intellectual or constitutional approaches to law, these critical as well as constructive innovations paved the way for a more comprehensive and synthetic history of American law. Once it became widely recognized that “the legal” was not simply contained in courts, treatises, or natural principles but was implicated in almost all social and historical experience, traditional scholarly concepts, boundaries, and jurisdictions vastly expanded—­an unfolding process that continues to this very day. While American political history continues to struggle with traditional concepts and sources and topics (as well as the ongoing clash of state-­centered versus society-­centered methodologies), American legal history has made great strides in the production of a more diverse, prolific, and synthetic sociolegal history. But, of course, there is no inherent reason for critical realist and law-­ in-­society perspectives to remain the exclusive property of legal historians, especially given the close interconnections between the law and the state. As Hermann Kantorowicz noted in 1931, “The state is one of the elementary concepts of jurisprudence and is closely related to the highest concept of the legal science, namely the concept of law itself.”45 Consequently, applying some of these examples from legal history to the problem of the state makes for some easy analogies. Indeed, critical realism and a more social history of the state (that is, a notion of state in society) seem like useful first steps in the production of a more satisfying history of the political.

Critical Realism and Conservative Histories of the State The first thing that critical realism brought to the study of law was a fierce skepticism aimed at some of the empty formalism, inapt metaphors, and elusive vocabulary that too frequently surrounded discussions of “the law.” Discussions of “the state,” of course, are not without some of these same chronic problems. And a dose of what realists referred to as their “cynical acids” seems just what the doctor ordered. So like the realist effort in law, it is useful to start first with a deconstructive effort—­trying to assess more clearly what the state is not—­before attempting a more positive reconstruction. Indeed, many of the very best conceptual discussions of the state begin with just such a critical perspective. From John Dewey to Michael Mann to Pierre Rosanvallon, the cornerstone of a more realistic approach to the state

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has been the simple, negatively framed caveat that the state is not “a thing.”46 It is neither a singular entity nor a particularly consistent phenomenon. And it should not be confused or conflated with its more visible, concrete, and material manifestations—­for example, particular persons, groups, offices, or institutions. Why is it so important to first recognize and underscore that the state is not a thing? Because so much commentary on the American state repeatedly makes this exact mistake. Dewey recognized this problem as early as 1927: In spite of the fact that diversity of political forms rather than uniformity is the rule, belief in the state as an archetypal entity persists in philosophy and science. Much dialectical ingenuity has been expended in construction of an essence or intrinsic nature in virtue of which any particular association is entitled to have applied to it the concept of statehood. Equal ingenuity has been expended in explaining away all divergencies from this morphological type, and (the favored device) in ranking states in hierarchical order of value as they approach the defining essence.47

The idea that there is some kind of essence or structure or template or size or location or trajectory of this thing called “the state” to which modern political forms inevitably tend and through which modern political organization is to be measured, compared, and ultimately ranked is a source of constant confusion and misdirected scholarly energy. Two forms of this mistake are particularly common and problematic. First is the persistent attempt to take account of the state by measuring it—­by counting something (seemingly, almost anything). Again if the state were indeed “some thing,” this technique would be invaluable. It is helpful when assessing “things” in the world to use weights and measures—­to get some basic account of how much room they take up within the spatial plane of the physical world. But though the state is clearly not such a simple, single, physical thing (with weight or height or circumference), the penchant to quantify it continues unabated. The question of analyzing the problem and nature of the state (that is, trying to figure out what “it” actually is) is subsumed by the priority given to measurement and quantification—­as if the “thing” will be ultimately revealed in the numbers. History is displaced by empirics as study after study proceeds statistically—­measuring public income and expenditure, tallying public employees and governmental units, polling opinions, scoring elections, listing administrative agencies, and counting statutes or pages of regulations—­as if the state could be grasped

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only after meticulously filling in all of the numerical columns of a spreadsheet. The turn to quantification certainly avoids the pitfalls of abstract conceptualism, but only by mistaking doing a sum for understanding.48 One problematic consequence of this fetishization of measurement is the tendency to equate a history of the state with an accounting of changes in the numbers over time. Biological and evolutionary concepts like “growth” and “development,” “lag” and “decline” are usually mapped onto such quantitative assessments. They provide a narrative frame that looks like history—­chronicles of “state development,” “the growth of government,” “the rise and fall of the welfare state.” But too frequently, historical analysis is limited to a handful of simple empirical questions: How big is the state? How much did it grow over time? How does its size and growth compare with other states? What were the key periods of statist expansion? What were the periods of retrenchment or reaction or antistatism? Does the growth of the state mark a departure from original traditions or does it signify a healthy, maturing development? As questions like these make manifest, the growth or development framework still revolves around the single, unproblematized issue of size. Rather than challenging the limited conceptual framework of contemporary political discourse, such social science assessments often simply replicate or reify partisan and ideological debates about growing or reducing the state. But evolutionary notions of growth and development also feed into a second popular form of the state-­as-­entity fallacy. That is the anthropomorphic tendency to talk about the state as a kind of person—­a living, breathing thing—­or to associate it too closely with a particular personality or group of people. Biological metaphors are always misleading ways of reckoning with modern politics. States are not persons. They do not live, they are not really born, they do not speak and act, and they are not easily categorized through anthropocentric qualities like “autonomy,” “strength,” or “charac­ ter.” Indeed, even the soft evolutionary organicism implicit in overused notions of states growing or developing, flourishing or declining, rising or falling produces more shadows than light. This is an outmoded, primarily symbolic, vocabulary. And it barely masks a latent essentialism—­a residuum of the humanistic idea that there is some kind of soul-­like essence to stateness that defines the authentic article, guides its development, and can be used in the end to size up its achievements and shortcomings. John Dewey criticized this tendency to portray the state as singular organic essence rather than pluralistic man-­made artifice where “growth signified an evolution through regular stages to a predetermined end because of some

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intrinsic nisus or principle.”49 Artifice has a human history that invites constant investigation and critique; essence does not. Anthropomorphism also problematically anchors discussion of the po­ litical in an essentially monarchical view of government: looking for the state at the center—­in a capitol city or an ornate public building—­ embodied in a person like a president whose wishes are carried into effect by select ministers. We are still very much in the world of the sun king. It is no accident that American political history so frequently takes the form of serial group biography. Biographical narratives join with biological metaphors to produce not history, but endless iterations of a more-­or-­less still “presidential” synthesis, from the Jeffersonian period to the Age of Jackson, from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Johnson’s Great Society, and beyond.50 In law, Jeremy Waldron criticized the tendency to search for law in a single personalized source—­usually the words of an oracular lawgiver.51 But discussion of the state even more routinely adopts forms more suitable to the investigation of lordship—­the king and his court, presidents and administrations—­ political history still on its knees before some kind of throne. The concerns of Michel Foucault in 1976 continue to resonate: “In political analysis, we have still not cut off the king’s head.”52 For the investigation of democratic politics in a modern age, this is a fatal flaw. So the state should not be confused with (or talked about as) a thing or a person. Much as it was useful in demystifying the law, the perspective of critical realism is helpful in demythologizing the state and cutting through some of the unclear, suggestive language that often envelops it. But how far should we go in this deconstructive enterprise? Is it possible to apply the cynical acid all the way down and do away with an abstract concept of the state altogether? Has the concept outlived its social-­scientific usefulness? And might the political scholar be better off abandoning it so as to pay closer attention to underlying realities like economic interest, sociocultural struggle, and more basic contests for office and policy preferences? The easy answer to questions like these is, “no.” Indeed, one of the great missed opportunities in the study of politics in the United States involved just such a thoroughgoing deconstruction. In the early twentieth century, Arthur F. Bentley consolidated many of the insights and instincts of the critical realism then dominating American social science into something of a new “school” of political inquiry. He thereby launched the so-­called behavioralist revolution in political science—­a movement impatient with formal political abstractions like “the state” or “the public interest” and eager to more critically and scientifically expose the real individual and group

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interests that were increasingly viewed as the underlying sources of actual political behavior.53 In behavioralist studies by midcentury, “the state” basically disappeared or was reduced to a mere site for examining contestation among more fundamental social-­economic group interests. The behavioralist revolution would eventually consume the attention of the leading lights of midcentury American political science, including the likes of Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, V. O. Key, Herbert Simon, and David Truman. And the movement yielded some truly extraordinary studies of the American political process per se. But behavioralism made the common mistake of simply sacrificing generality on the altar of particularity. Just because the state is not reducible to a particular thing or person or institution does not mean that it does not exist. The state’s lack of singular specificity (or Deweyean essence) does make it hard to see (and talk or write about), but it does not and should not therefore disappear. In economic and legal inquiry, “capitalism” and “law” are equally nebulous and difficult concepts, but we cannot ignore them. Political scholars should not make the mistake of some value-­theory economists who fixate on preferences, prices, and individual rational choices at the expense of a more thoroughgoing analysis of the history and structures and functions and processes of capitalism. Nor should they follow realism to the reductionist extremes sometimes taken in legal studies, where laws become mere reflections or “servants of some economic or social interest.”54 Although “law,” “capitalism,” and “the state” cannot be easily reduced to bills of particulars, they illuminate a wider horizon for generalization about the legal, the economic, and the political. Such concepts call our attention to larger, macroscopic questions and the need for a broad survey of cause and effect. They open a more meaningful interpretive field for explanations of change over time than is obtainable by looking simply at the grass roots for the concrete and the particular. Indeed, they are the very building blocks of a much-­needed philosophical, analytical, and conceptual history. That more reconstructive project requires more than critical realism alone can offer.

State in Society The critical realist perspective effectively exposes a certain one-­dimensionality at the core of existing histories of the state. Rooted in outmoded forms of entity theory, a singular conceptualization dominates histories of the state, reducing a myriad of interesting factors, questions, and concerns into variations on the simple theme of size and development. Is the state too big or too small? Is it a weak state or a strong state? Is it developed or underdeveloped?

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Is it rising or falling? So impoverished is this discourse that some have suggested dispensing with the concept of the state altogether. But like the concept of law or the concept of capitalism, the state concept is not going away anytime soon. Indeed, it is the very potential for multidimensionality that keeps scholars coming back to the state. Despite the best efforts of political scientists and political historians to contain the state within traditional notions of politics and administration, it resists just such circumscription. The concept of the state continually draws attention to larger interpretive issues that fall outside ordinary chronicles of elections, politicians, and bureaucracy—­issues like sovereignty, borders, identity, citizenship, nationalism, democracy, representation, and legitimacy. So rather than cling to a unitary conception of the state as some kind of single (essential, European, Weberian) thing or abandon the concept altogether, there is a third way forward. And it starts with taking this multidimensionality seriously and trying to envision a more pluralistic and synthetic approach to the state—­a reinvigorated concept of the state that could itself serve as a steppingstone to a more comprehensive and analytical political history. Now behavioral political scientists were right to start their efforts with a critique of wholly abstracted and formal conceptions of the power of the state. That certainly is the crucial first move en route to a more comprehensive sociohistorical perspective. It is the bedrock of a disenchanted, nonspeculative theory of the state. But a reconstructed concept of the state needs more than critical realism. Moving forward, the example of legal history once again provides a useful reference point, particularly the postrealist effort to more positively reconstruct a social history of law. The starting point of the law in society movement was the effort to break down the harsh boundary separating the study of law from the study of society more generally. The goal of sociolegal scholars was to pierce the so-­called black box of formal, internalist, and principally doctrinal history wherein “the law” was seen as something distinct and autonomous from social life. As Thomas Reed Powell perfectly summed up the classical way of thinking: “If you can think about something that is related to something else without thinking about the thing to which it is related, then you have the legal mind.”55 In contrast, rather than confine their inquiries to some kind of imagined, separate sphere of the purely “legal” action, sociolegal scholars emphasized the close intersection and interdependence of law and society, turning attention to “the part played by factors in the total social process which affect the functioning of our law-­making institutions. . . . The emphasis is on law in society.”56

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What holds for the study of law here seems even more relevant for the study of the state. The history of the state must escape the hold of a separate sphere of narrowly imagined, autonomous “political” action. Like law, the state is also intimately intertwined with “something else”—­that is, society. It cannot continue to be thought about without also thinking seriously about that “something else” with which it is so closely linked. Rather than separate the state from civil society in the pursuit of some kind of false analytical clarity, we need a history of the state that recognizes the interrelationship of state and society and the constant interaction of the political and the social. As the work of Pierre Rosanvallon has made clear, the state is the very crossroads of the political and the civil society.57 So the history of the state must also be a social history, a history of state in society. Articulating at a general level what is implicated in this notion of a history of state in society is not easy. Indeed, it is perhaps only fully recognizable in practice—­in the actual histories produced that illuminate precisely this interdependence and interconnection. But let me make two preliminary attempts to flesh out this idea, first from a negative approach highlighting the differences between this methodology and conventional political history, and then from a more positive (if still necessarily schematic) perspective. Understanding the state in society focuses historical analysis on the changing interrelationship of state and civil society (in its social, economic, and cultural dimensions) over time rather than the location and isolation of the autonomous activities of a cadre of elite state builders or supposedly self-­governing bureaucratic institutions. This is the distinctive point for historians to make against the dominant trend in political science. The idea of a state-­centered approach somehow at odds with a society-­centered perspective is an impossibility. For unlike “government” or “bureaucracy,” we simply cannot understand the state without taking constant notice of its social components. The interpretive sleight of hand achieved by the vocabulary of state autonomy (or even relative autonomy) is purchased only by confining the jurisdiction of the state to a black box of elite political or governmental or bureaucratic actions and institutions analogous to the black box of the law. Just as such an internalist vision of legality yielded an unconvincing legal history, the autonomous conception of statecraft seems to tie political history to a similar fate. Much as the history of the state should not be confused with the history of a thing or person, it should also not be mistaken for the history of government per se yet alone the history of bureaucracy or policy making or even politics (elections, office-­seeking, party organizing, lobbying, voting, logrolling). The history of the state can never be fully grasped or written

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simply in terms of state builders, offices, and administration (yet alone in quantitative terms by charting increases and decreases in voter turnout, taxes, expenditures, government personnel, and the like). Just as the history of law needed to move beyond the jurisdiction of high-­court judges, great constitutional cases, and treatise principles, a true history of the state needs to engage the wider society. For that is where the state as distinct from the government is always to be found. For example, one can write a perfectly adequate history of the Interstate Commerce Commission without leaving the black box of administration: internal reports, budgets, personnel, hearings, rulings, regulations, and such. In contrast, the history of the regulatory state (even on such a limited issue as railroads) resists just such compartmentalization. It requires, instead, as full a reckoning with society in as many dimensions as the historian can incorporate: for example, the economics of railroading; the nature of public opinion; the relationship of city and countryside; the social organization of power among financiers, shippers, farmers, workers, and consumers; changing configurations of citizenship (with crucial cultural determinants like race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and identity) that determine just whose voices will (and will not) matter on this issue; conceptions of the nation that prefigure demands for such things as consolidation and growth; existing laws and social patterns of litigation that shape conceptions of property, contract, rights, and police power; the nature of the democracy; the structure of representation; demographics. The list goes on and on. These are the intersections where the state is found—­the crossroads of the political and the social. These are the places to look for a history of state in society—­on the periphery as much as in the center, in the everyday as much as in high politics, in the local as much as in the national or international, in the social, cultural, and economic as much as in traditional politics. The state is something distinct from government, administration, or politics, and the distinction lies precisely in the fact that, though the state includes all those things, it also incorporates this ineluctably social dimension. It must also be said, however, that the state cannot be simply reduced to its social (or cultural or economic) components. That was the mistake of behavioralism and other simple and deterministic renderings of the political. For there is an irreducible generality about the state that distinguishes it from more particular forms of social and cultural politics. And it is this generality (as well as multidimensionality) that keeps scholars returning to the state. It is this generality that also necessitates continued conceptual development. A certain level of abstraction and generalization is necessary to apprehend the state in history and society.

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Pierre Rosanvallon captured this inherent conceptual element when he identified the state as an especially powerful “form of social representation.”58 This is the aspect of the state that is the most difficult (if also the most interesting) to reckon with. For it marks that site of intense mutually constituting interaction between the social and the political, facts and norms, individual and collectivity, interests and ideas. The state as a “form of social representation” highlights that place (or space or forum) where the community, the people, the nation produce and reproduce (in infinitely complex and interactive processes) the rules, institutions, practices, and forms that govern their collective life together. Here we move distinctly from the sphere of the particular and measurable (that is, the sphere of  individuals and interests and institutions) to the more abstract and conceptual collective symbolic sphere—­the state as a representation of the social body: the “will of the people” or the embodiment of “popular sovereignty.” Here, the concept of the state points directly to the need in history for philosophy and social, political, and legal theory.

Conclusion Morton Keller is correct. Properly conceptualized, “there is close to everything to be learned about the state” in America. But even a reinvigorated concept of the state is not an end in itself—­a final methodological or historiographical destination. Rather, it is a means—­a means to a more synthetic understanding of the political and the social and a rapprochement between political and social history. Traditional political history as well as more recent forms of state-­centered analysis turn on thin and formalistic conceptions of power (in politics, in official action, in bureaucracy) to which we should not return. But the resultant flight from the state and from politics into more particular moments of economic, social, and/or cultural interest and contest can be equally reductionist—­denying history a level of generality, abstraction, and synthesis that is necessary to reckoning with the whole. In contrast to both of these alternatives, the state in society concept encourages historians to think directly about the interconnections of politics, society, culture, and economy, and the complex configurations of political, social, and economic power in modern societies. Although traditional political history has been on the defensive for a generation now, the problem of power in modernity has never been more prominent. State in society leverages an enlarged field for thinking about power and the political. It highlights the intersection of state and society as that space

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where issues like national identity and belonging, democratic participation and exclusion, state building and state resistance, discrimination and equal protection, law and violence, economic expansion and the unequal distribution of wealth are brought into clearer focus and where broad surveys of cause and effect and change over time can gain traction. State in society draws attention to those sites of collective action where the terms of the life in common receive a particularly salient and comprehensive articulation. Only such an enlarged and interdisciplinary concept of the state—­where history, law, political science, sociology, economics, and philosophy must meet—­seems up to the task of taking the full measure of the kinds of issues that dominate our times as well as our social science: citizenship, capitalism, nationalism, empire, democracy, neoliberalism, and globalization. Identifying the conditions for and the historical causes of some of the great changes involved in issues like these over time is crucial to understanding our past as well as our present.

Notes 1.

Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Pertinence of  Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (1986): 585–­600, 594. 2. Pierre Rosanvallon, L ’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 9 (personal translation). This essay first took form in the process of translating Rosanvallon’s field-­defining statement. 3. I try to survey and come to terms with much of this extant literature in “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–­72. 4. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–­37. 5. The classics in the American political development tradition are Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capaci­ ties,  1877–­1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also see Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-­Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 6. Here I would underscore the need to distinguish the “history of ideas” literature from the more nuanced methodology of modern intellectual history that is very much in sync with the approach to the state endorsed by the end of this essay. See, for example, John Dunn, “The Identity of the History of  Ideas,” Philosophy 43 (1968): 85–­104; John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); James T. Kloppenberg, “Deconstruction and Hermeneutics as Strategies for Intellectual History,” Intellectual History Newsletter 9 (1987): 4–­20.

346  /  William  J. Novak 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-­Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–­1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956). The recent obsession of American historians with charting the recent rise of “antistatism” and the New Right in the postwar period is but the latest manifestation of this trend. See for example, Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2010); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Schlesinger Sr. deduced from this regularity eleven cycles of political change along a single liberal/conservative oscillation: Liberal 1776, followed by Conservative 1787; the Age of Jefferson, followed by retreat after 1812; the Age of Jackson to the rule of slaveholders; radical Reconstruction followed by the Gilded Age; the Progressive Era to Republican normalcy; and the New Deal. He then determined the average length of these regular recurrences to be 16.5 years. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Tides of National Politics,” in Schlesinger, Paths to the Present (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 89–­103. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). Again, this taking of partisan sides can become quite complex and conflicted as the nature of state involvement varies from economic to social policy or from welfare to warfare state. Richard Hofstadter offered the most pointed critique of history as simple morality play when he lashed into “the Progressive historians,” noting that “we may appreciate once again the allure of [their] schematizations, but we can hardly continue to believe in them.” Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (New York: Knopf, 1968), 442. Hofstadter’s most direct attempt to outline a more “analytical” alternative to progressive history is contained in Richard Hofstadter, “History and the Social Sciences,” in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, ed. Fritz Stern (New York: World Publishing, 1956), 359–­70. A few of my favorite examples are Stephen Sawyer, “Foucault and the State,” The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville (forthcoming 2015); James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-­Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–­1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968): 559–­92, 559 (emphasis added). I elaborate some of these themes and this critique in more detail in Novak, “Beyond Weber: The Need for a Democratic (Not Aristocratic) Theory of the Modern State,” The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville (forthcoming 2015). See, for example, Morton Keller, “(Jerry-­) Building a New American State,” Reviews in American History 11 (1983): 248–­52; Leuchtenburg, “Pertinence of Political History.” Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In”; Skowronek, Building a New American State; Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Gosta Esping-­Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). For an excellent overview of this

The Concept of the State in American History  /  347 dispute, see Sean D. Stryker, “The Rationalization of the Political Field: Beyond the State and Society-­Centered Theories of Policy Change,” working paper (Berkeley: Center for Culture, Organization and Politics, 1999). 15. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 40. 16. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” 7. 17. Brian Balogh, “The State of the State among Historians,” Social Science History 27 (2003): 455–­63, 455. Beyond the programmatic statements of Skocpol and Skowronek on “state autonomy,” also see Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25 (1985): 185–­213; and Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). One of the most sophisticated renderings of the “autonomy” theme in the political science literature is Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–­1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 18. The very word “autonomy”—­consisting of the conjunction of “auto” and “nomos”—­ “self-­governing” or “self-­ruling”—­belies the pretensions behind the concept of “state autonomy,” especially in the American case. What American governing body could possibly make its own rules and laws without constant input, interaction, intervention, oversight, review, and such, by a dizzying array of other governing as well as nongoverning bodies? The entirety of American administrative law is predicated upon the denial of any such “autonomy.” Indeed, one could argue that American constitutionalism is founded upon a similar denial across the entire governing system—­checks and balances, separation of powers, distribution of authority, overlapping jurisdiction, dual federalism, reserved powers, and so on. The American state does not and cannot govern itself. And any such “state autonomy” would seem to violate general principles of democracy and republicanism almost as much as it conflicts with the entire substructure of American administrative law. 19. Leuchtenburg, “Pertinence of Political History,” 596. 20. Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple,” History Workshop 7 (1989): 87–­88. 21. G. R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice (New York: Basic Books: 1970), 61, 70. I explore some of these themes with Steven Pincus in Pincus and Novak, “Political History after the Cultural Turn,” Perspectives on History (American Historical Association, May 2011) and elaborate in more detail in Novak, “Beyond Weber.” 22. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951). 23. See, for example, the historically oriented philosophical investigations of Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 24. Julius Goebel Jr., The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 1, Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801 (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 2. 25. Arthur Fisher Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908), 162. 26. As noted below, this will be the source of some of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most pointed critiques. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law, ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe (1881; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 5. 27. Morton Horwitz, “Conservative Tradition in the Writing of American Legal History,” American Journal of Legal History 17 (1973): 275–­294, 276, 278.

348  /  William  J. Novak 28. For a somewhat more elaborate discussion of critical realism in a different context, see William J. Novak, “Legal Realism and Human Rights,” History of European Ideas 37 (2011): 168–­74. 29. For a useful introduction and bibliography, see William W. Fisher III, Morton J. Horwitz, and Thomas A. Reed, eds., American Legal Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 30. Holmes, The Common Law, 5 (emphasis added). 31. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457–­78, 460. 32. See Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, 1860–­1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–­1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 33. Holmes and Dewey commented on each other’s work rather frequently. The best comment goes to Holmes who wrote to Frederick Pollock that Dewey wrote, “as God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.” Mark DeWolf Howe, ed., Holmes-­Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–­1932 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), 2: 287. 34. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 169. 35. John Dewey, “My Philosophy of Law,” in My Philosophy of Law: Credos of Sixteen American Scholars, ed. Julius Rosenthal Foundation for General Law (Boston: Boston Law Book, 1941), 73–­85. 36. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913). 37. For the best overarching discussion of these “progressive” historians, see Richard Hofstadter, Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968). On this tradition in legal history, see Morton J. Horwitz, “Progressive Legal Historiography,” Oregon Law Review 63 (1984): 679–­87. 38. Karl N. Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush: Some Lectures on Law and Its Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930), 3–­5. 39. Felix S. Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach,” Columbia Law Review 35 (1935): 809–­49. 40. I discuss Hurst’s law in society perspective at some length in Novak, “Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State: The Historical Sociology of James Willard Hurst,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 97–­145; Also see Robert W. Gordon, “Introduction: J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography,” Law and Society Review 10 (1975): 9–­55; Harry N. Scheiber, “At the Borderland of Law and Economic History: The Contributions of Willard Hurst,” American Historical Review 75 (1970): 744–­56; and my own personal favorite, Earl Finbar Murphy, “The Jurisprudence of Legal History,” New York University Law Review 39 (1964): 900–­943. 41. James Willard Hurst, Justice Holmes on Legal History (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 55, 89; Hurst, Law and Social Order in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 42.

The Concept of the State in American History  /  349 42. James Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–­1915 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964). 43. James Willard Hurst, Law and Social Process in United States History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 18–­19. 44. Hurst, Law and Social Process, 25. Hurst’s capacious definition of law echoed realists like Llewellyn: “The doing of something about disputes is the business of law. And the people who have the doing in charge, whether they be judges or sheriffs or clerks or jailers or lawyers, are officials of the law. What these officials do about disputes is to my mind, the law itself.” Llewellyn, Bramble Bush, 3–­5. 45. Hermann Kantorowicz, “The Concept of the State,” Economica 35 (1932): 1–­21, 1. 46. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–­1953, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 237–­350, 264; Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 1993); Rosanvallon, L’État en France. 47. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 264. 48. As Oliver Wendell Holmes mused, “Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.” Holmes, Speeches (Boston: Little, Brown, 1891), 96. 49. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 264. 50. I mean endless almost literally. As long as the United States maintains its current constitution, there will always be another president to add to the synthesis. To create the illusion of progress, political history can simply turn attention to the next leader: Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama . . . For an example of this tendency, see Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); or Douglas Brinkley, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey beyond the White House (New York: Viking, 1998). 51. Jeremy Waldron, “The Dignity of Legislation,” Maryland Law Review 54 (1995): 633–­65. 52. Quoted in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ix. 53. Arthur F. Bentley, The Political Process: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908). For a couple of useful summaries of the behavioral revolution, see Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 763–­ 72; Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). 54. Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 24. 55. Quoted in Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 4. 56. Lloyd K. Garrison and Willard Hurst, The Legal Process (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), iv. 57. Rosanvallon, L ’État en France. 58. Ibid., 14 (personal translation).

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

The idea of this volume and the ideas in this volume have been a collaborative venture from start to finish. The notion of searching for a new kind of history of the American state was first broached in a 2006 University of Chicago symposium on “State of War: American Politics and State-­ Building.” Under the rubric of exploring the interrelationship of statecraft and warfare, there emerged a larger intellectual agenda focused on historicizing, decentering, and denaturalizing the state by returning to some of the very sites and categories where the idea of “the state” seemed most naturally given. In addition to the institutional support of the History Department and Social Sciences Division at Chicago, we are grateful for the extraordinary intellectual input at that event of Christopher Capozzola, Meyer Kestnbaum, Daniel Kryder, Christine Lamberson, Chris Loss, Stephen Porter, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Jeremi Suri. A subsequent conference, convened in 2010 at New York University’s Remarque Institute, allowed this collaboration to quickly move beyond more conventional topics like the state and the rule of law, the hidden state, and the relationship of conservatism and state building to a more ambitious conceptualization around the two topics that now organize this volume: the American state’s formation by the world beyond its borders and its mutual constitution and interpenetration with civil society. Brian Balogh, Alan Brinkley, Joe Crespino, Daniel Ernst, Gary Gerstle, Joanna Grisinger, Meg Jacobs, Ajay Mehrotra, and Julian Zelizer were invaluable interlocutors in pushing this agenda forward. A final series of more disparate meetings at the American University of Paris; the Organization of American Historians; the Social Science History Association; the University of Michigan Law School’s Race, Law, and History Program; and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago also

352 / Acknowledgments

helped immeasurably to further clarify the conceptual importance of boundaries, or salients, as technologies of power that have proved particularly useful and appropriate to an American state operating in democratic and liberal registers, where greater flexibility, decentralization, delegation, recalibration, and adaptation are essential to fostering and projecting, rather than simply regimenting, social power. Needless to say, we thank all of the authors in this volume not only for their individual essays but also for all of their contributions to the project as a whole as it developed over the last several years. We would especially like to acknowledge the support and insight we received from our ongoing collaborations with Lis Clemens, Bernard Harcourt, Matt Lassiter, and our editor at the University of Chicago Press, Timothy Mennel. Lis in particular has left her imprint on this project at all stages, helping to plan the first symposium in 2006, codirecting the Neubauer Collegium project in 2013–­14, and intervening decisively as a participant in every event described above and as an informed and lively interlocutor in between.

Contributors

c. j. alvarez,

a historian, is assistant professor of Mexican American and Latino studies at

the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently completing a book manuscript about the history of policing along the US-­Mexico border. elisabeth s. clemens

is William Rainey Harper Professor of Sociology at the University of

Chicago. Her scholarship explores organizational and institutional change in the context of American political development. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she has published The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–­1925 (Chicago, 1997) and edited a number of volumes, most recently Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in Americans Political Past and Present (Chicago, 2010). richard r. john is a professor of history and communications at Columbia University. His

publications include Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), which received the 2011 Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference. He is currently working on a history of the antimonopoly tradition in the United States. robert c. lieberman

is professor of political science and provost at the Johns Hopkins

University. He is the author of Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Lionel Trilling Award among other prizes, and Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), as well as the editor of Democratization in America: A Comparative-­Historical Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) and Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post­ racist Era (New York: Russell Sage, 2013). omar m. mcroberts is associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. His first

book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago, 2003), won the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific

354 / Contributors Study of Religion. McRoberts is now completing a book on black religious interaction with the federal state during the New Deal, War on Poverty, and Welfare Reform eras. william j. novak

is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of

Michigan. He is the author of The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-­ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). He is currently working on a history of American democratic statecraft in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. gautham rao

is an assistant professor in the History Department at American University.

He is currently finishing a book on the history of the federal government in the early American republic, also with the University of Chicago Press. gabriel n. rosenberg is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. His

research investigates the intersections of gender, sexuality, food systems, and political economy in the contemporary world. His first book, The 4-­H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), is a gendered history of 4-­H, the iconic rural youth clubs organized by the USDA. stephen w. sawyer

is chair of the History Department at the American University of Paris

and associate editor for the English edition of the Annales Histoire et Sciences Sociales. He has published widely on transnational influences in French political thought and is currently completing a manuscript on the international origins of the French state in the nineteenth century for University of Chicago Press. jason scott smith is associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico, where

he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and liberalism. He is the author, most recently, of A Concise History of the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2014). james t. sparrow

is associate professor of history and Master of the Collegiate Social Sci-

ences Division at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Welfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and is currently working on a history of the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty after World War II. tracy steffes

is associate professor of education and history at Brown University. She

is the author of School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She is currently working on a book about the role of state education policies in shaping development and inequality across metropolitan Chicago.

Index

Abbot, A., 154 absolutism, 3, 67–­68, 262 Acheson, D., 136 ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union Adams, C., 63 African Americans, 196; education and, 165, 168, 176; 4-­H and, 183; Red Cross and, 228n17; religion and, 12, 233–­57; social history and, 296, 307; voting and, 118, 272, 274, 284; War on Poverty, 12, 233–­57; welfare and, 234–­45. See also Civil Rights Act; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Office of Economic Opportunity; and specific legislation, organizations, persons, topics Agamben, G., 331 Age of Good Feeling, 38 Aguirre, L., 91 Alcoa, 113 Alexander, C., 284 Ali, M., 244 Alinsky, S., 250 Allport, G. W., 112, 124n4 Alvarez, C. J., 9, 79–­100, 353 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 275, 276 American Negro Labor Council, 275 American political development (APD) studies, 1, 8, 17, 185, 328–­29 American Red Cross, 12, 209, 213–­19, 221, 224 American Tobacco, 113

anthropomorphism, 3, 329, 338–­39 antiaristocracy, 58, 103, 107, 113 anti-­imperialism, 9, 101, 106, 117, 121 antistatism, 2, 4, 8, 9, 38, 42, 318, 326, 338, 346n8 antitrust policies, 113, 114 APD. See American political development (APD) studies Arendt, H., 330 Arthur, C., 94 associations, civic: altruism and, 307; American law of, 154; associationalism, 65, 211, 215, 222; citizenship and, 11, 189; infrastructural power, 129, 159, 184, 210, 211, 215; mutual aid societies, 63; nationalization and, 210, 211, 213; nonprofits, 213; principle of, 62; social services and, 213. See also charities; civil society; education; health services; religion; voluntarism; welfare; and specific organizations, topics Atlantic Charter, 116, 117 atomic bomb, 298 Attlee, C., 120 autonomy: boundaries and, 5; democracy and, 347n18; neoliberalism and, 10; regulation and, 268; rule of law and, 331, 333, 347n18; state/society opposition and, 65, 153, 155, 162, 328–­29, 338, 342, 347n17. See also boundaries; sovereignty; and specific states, topics Bailyn, B., 318 Ball, J., 108

356 / Index Balogh, B., 45, 75n17, 328 Baltzell, E. D., 316 Barker, D., 238 Barkley, A., 118 Barnard, C., 230n32 Barton, C., 217 Baxter, J. P., 309, 313 Beard, C., 334 Bechtel, S., 138–­39 Bechtel Corporation, 137, 138–­39, 140 Beck, J. M., 316 behavioralism, 340, 343 Bell, D., 14n8 Bell System, 300–­303, 315–­17 Benson, O. H., 192 Bentley, A. F., 339 Berge, W., 113 Berkert, S., 128 Berle, A., 104, 145, 146 Berlin, I., 104, 107, 113, 114, 116, 118, 123n6, 123n7, 315 Berlin, I. (composer), 104, 123n7 Beveridge Report, 118 binaries, 5, 13, 65–­66, 72, 73, 128, 153–­54, 316. See also boundaries; and specific concepts, topics blacks. See African Americans Blumrosen, A., 275, 277 Boardman, M., 217 boundaries: ADP and, 5, 14, 18, 101, 102; binaries and, 5, 13, 65–­66, 72, 128, 153–­54, 316; borders and, 9, 79–­100; boundary conditions, 6, 13; capital­ ism and, 143; church/state, 233–­57; law and, 335, 341; parental authority and, 158; power and, 6, 7, 8, 81, 82, 341, 342; public/private, 6, 215, 235, 240, 254; race and (see race; and spe­­ cific groups); sovereignty and, 121; state/ society (see state/society oppo­sition); types of, 101. See also legal system; power; sovereignty; and specific countries Bourdieu, P., 15n15, 331 Bretton Woods, 128 Brinkley, A., 128 Brown, W., 284 Buck, P. H., 310 Buckley decision, 44, 45, 46 bureaucracy, 5; American state and, 47, 56n85, 259–­94; autonomy and, 5; capitalism and, 77, 134; centralization

and, 6, 8, 41–­48, 65, 72, 210, 261; civil society and, 12, 153, 155, 183, 210; EEOC and (see Equal Employment Opportunity Commission); institutional change, 268; modern and, 47; power and, 259–­94; regulation and, 264, 265, 267; schools and, 163–­64, 179n14; state and, 72, 259–­94, 342; Weberian model, 77. See also autonomy; power; and specific organ­izations, topics Burger, W., 281, 282 Bush, G. W., 254 Butterfield, K., 186 Cabet, E., 75n8 Cantril, H., 105, 110, 117 CAP. See Community Action Program capitalism: agriculture and, 188, 203; associations and (see associations, civic); business management in, 308; civil society and (see civil society); democracy and, 302–­3; education and, 310, 311; employment and (see Equal Employment Opportunity Commission); Europe and, 131–­32; 4-­H Club and, 203; Great Depression and, 131–­32; liberal reforms and, 128; managerial, 145, 188, 300; market and, 55n72, 127–­51, 188, 313–­14; monopolies and, 308; multinationals, 7, 129, 137–­39; New Deal and, 145, 305 (see also New Deal); People’s Capitalism, 306–­7; philanthropy and, 295–­324; property rights, 127; race and (see race; and specific organizations); Schlesinger on, 305; state and, 127, 132–­34, 144, 313, 330, 341; technology and, 136; United States and, 131–­34, 136–­37, 203 (see also specific topics); voluntarism and, 222, 303–­8, 313, 317; World War II and, 131; zaibatsu and, 131. See also specific corporations, topics Capper-­Ketcham Act (1928), 185, 196, 199, 201, 202 Capper-­Volstead Act (1922), 188 capture model, 154 Carter, R. L., 273 cartography, 80, 92–­95 Catholic Charities programs, 237, 240–­41 Center for Study of Liberty. See Charles Warren Center

Index / 357 centralization, 1, 8, 41–­48, 65, 68, 72, 210, 261. See also bureaucracy; and specific topics CES. See Cooperative Extension Service Chandler, A., 117, 118 charities: associations and, 209; joint fund-­raising, 218–­20, 229n30, 230n31; Maussian model, 221; natural disasters and, 220–­21; nonprofits and, 213, 222; patriotism and, 214, 223; political interactions, 218–­22; postwar period, 209; taxation and, 215, 230n33; voluntary organizations, 304. See also associations, civic; voluntarism; and specific organiza­ tions, topics Charity Organization Societies, 212, 222 Charles Warren Center (Harvard University), 295, 311–­12, 319 Chevalier, M., 74n8 Chicago school, 154 children: child labor, 164–­65; child welfare reformers, 165; family and, 157–­82, 214; ideal of, 198; legal system and, 157; as national asset, 159–­60; rural, 190. See also education; 4-­H Club Christians, 233–­57. See also religion Churchill, W., 104, 105, 107, 114–­18, 121 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations citizenship, 11, 189, 341 civic associations. See associations, civic Civil Rights Act (1964), 12, 236; affirmative action and, 260; antidiscrimination rules, 269; EEOC and, 260, 269, 273, 285; enforcement, 259–­94; public religion and, 241–­53. See also Civil Rights Office; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and specific organizations, topics Civil Rights Office (CRO): Community Relations division, 243; establishment of, 241; interpretive projects, 247–­53; militants and, 248; National Baptist Conventions, 252; public religion and, 241–­53; purpose of, 242; reconnaissance function, 257n23; SCLC and, 243, 247, 249; Yette and, 241. See also Dawkins, M.; Poulard, G. civil society: associations and (see associations, civic); boundaries and (see state/ society opposition); democracy and,

153 (see also democracy); education and (see education); in France, 66; influence of, 10–­11; infrastructural power and, 129, 159, 184, 210, 211, 215; law and, 65; liberal state, 61–­67; race and (see race); social categories, 15n10; social power, 15n11; state/society and (see state/society opposition); Thiers and, 66; United States and, 64, 66, 154 (see also specific organizations, topics); vol­ untarism and, 12–13, 153 (see also voluntarism); world and, 7; zero-­sum game and, 73, 154 Civil War (US), 45, 67–­71, 74 Clark, C., 108 Clemens, E., 12, 64, 353 Cochin, A., 68 Cohen, A. W., 47 Cohen, T., 130 Cold War, 18, 130, 131, 203, 210, 305, 315 Colegrove, K. W., 322n60 colonialism, 2; Cold War and, 130; decolonization, 10, 117; Great Britain and, 21, 29, 32, 102, 110, 113, 117; Mexico and, 87; postcolonial studies, 17; Spanish, 2; United States and, 21, 29, 300, 307, 313, 318, 331. See also specific countries, topics communism, 108, 129, 131, 134, 136, 137, 140, 219, 303, 305, 325 Community Action Program (CAP), 235, 238, 240 Community Chests, 218, 219, 229n29 Community Service Society, 224 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 218 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 275 Considerant, V., 75n8 Constant, B., 66 constitutionalism, 23, 60, 162, 347n18 Cooley, C. H., 334 Cooperative Extension Service (CES), 189 Coppet Group, 66, 75n22 Corcoran, T., 135, 136 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality Crawford, W. H., 38–­40 CRO. See Civil Rights Office D&R. See Development and Resources Corporation Danielan, N., 301–­2, 310 Davis, F., 106–­7

358 / Index Davis, S. C., 319 Davis Center (Princeton), 319 Dawkins, M., 248; black power, 244, 245; CRO and, 249; King and, 247, 249, 251; OEO and, 243, 245, 253; Poulard and, 243, 244, 245, 251, 252 (see also Poulard, G.); SCLC and, 243, 247, 249, 251; Shriver and, 242–­44, 249; War on Poverty and, 248, 249 Dearborn, H. A. S., 32, 33 de Beaumont, G., 74n8 decolonization, 10, 117 de Hauranne, E. D., 75n8 democracy, 73, 341; association and, 65, 211, 215, 222; capitalism and, 302–­3; civil society and, 153; Cold War and, 315; elections and, 11, 309, 329–­31, 337, 341; law and (see legal system); liberalism and, 4, 9, 61, 64; liberty and, 308, 318; state and, 57, 58, 61, 74; Tocqueville on (see Tocqueville, A. de); US version of, 58, 61, 81; See also asso­ ciations, civic; civil society; state; and specific topics de Stael, G., 66 Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), 141–­43 Dewey, J., 14, 334, 336, 337 D’Héricourt, J., 75n8 Díaz, P., 80, 81, 89, 91 Dimensions of Liberty (Handlin), 314, 315, 323n67 Dirksen, E., 284 Dobbin, F., 267 Douglass, E. P., 311 Dower, J., 130 Draper, W. H., Jr., 131 Drucker, P., 145 Du Bois, W. E. B., 256n21 Dulles, A., 134 Dupont Chemical Company, 114, 183, 305, 310 Du Pont family, 319 Economic Opportunity Act, 234–­35 economy, maritime. See maritime economy economy, political. See political economy Edelman, L., 267 Edison, T., 93 education, 11; attendance agents, 170–­71; capitalism and, 310, 311; compulsory,

157–­82; ethnic groups and, 167–­68; health policies and, 172–­74; history of, 11, 160–­63; race and, 167–­68; as social insurance, 166; state and, 157–­82; state/ society opposition and, 157–­82; vacci­ nation and, 174 EEOC. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Eisenhower, D. D., 120, 307 elections, 11, 309, 329–­31, 337, 341–­42. See also democracy elites, 129, 188, 210–­13, 217, 257n23, 329, 331 Elton, G. R., 329–­30 empire: British Empire, 22, 49n6, 101–­26 (see also Great Britain); colonization (see colonialism); France and, 59, 69; republic and, 8, 9; United States and, 9–10, 17, 18, 72, 203 England. See Great Britain Equal Employment Opportunity Com­­mis­ sion (EEOC), 12, 259–­94; affir­­mative action and, 264, 268–­85; backlog of cases, 270–­71; bottom-­up studies, 268; Civil Rights Act and, 260, 269, 273, 285; collaborative strategies, 277–­85; complaints process, 273–­77; early experience, 269–­86; employer interests and, 270–­71; federal courts and, 272; form EEO-­1, 277; institutional resources, 262, 263; LDF and, 274, 279, 282, 284; limitations of, 268; NAACP and, 275, 284; pattern-­or-­ practice suits, 279, 286n3; private pow­er, 264, 270–­85; public power, 264, 270–­85; public-­private nexus, 264; as regulatory agency, 259–­60, 263, 266; top-­down studies, 268; US Steel and, 276–­78; white-­collar industries and, 283 Europe: American model and, 61; capitalism and, 131–­32; Japan and, 130–­36; Marshall Plan and, 134; reconstruction, 130; state construction in, 74; See also international relations; and specific coun­ tries, persons, topics exceptionalism: APD and, 17, 154, 185; capitalism and, 303; consensus historians and, 13, 15n13; essentialism and, 13; liberal state and, 7, 303; multilateralism and, 10; United States and, 10, 13,

Index / 359

family, 157–­82, 214. See also children; and specific topics Farben, I. G., 114 Farhang, S., 267, 279 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 301 federalism: autonomy and, 347n18 (see also autonomy); civil rights and, 271–­72 (see also specific legislation, agencies); Federalist era, 22, 24–­25, 37, 48, 318; schools and, 11 feminist studies, 185 feudalism, 303 Fine, S., 326 Fitzgerald, D., 188 Fix-­Masseau, P., 4 formalism, 262, 332, 336 Foster, J., 83, 84, 86 Foster, S., 105 Foucault, M., 15n11, 185, 331, 339 4-­H Club, 11, 12, 183; capitalism and, 203; children and, 190; Cold War and, 203; developing countries, 203; effectiveness of, 194; farm bureaus and, 193; mail-­ order catalogues, 197; media and, 195; origins, 183; race and, 196; record keeping and, 193; rural areas and, 183–­208; standardization campaign, 193; USDA and, 185–­86, 191, 192, 196, 203 France, 57; fiscal crisis, 70; Franco-­Prussian War, 70; French Revolution, 58–­59, 67; French state, 59, 73, 76n44; insti­­ tutional construction in, 78n49; Jaco­ b­inism, 72; Napoleon and, 67; United States and, 66–­72, 73 Friedman, M., 127 Fukuyama, F., 14n8

Germany, 78n50 Gifford, W. S., 300 Gillen decision, 175 Gilman, N., 136 globalization, 17, 102, 109, 203, 345 Goebel, J., 331 González, M., 94 Gordon, E. A., 281 Gorski, P., 184 Gould, J., 301 Great Britain, 303; American Revolution, 318; Anglo-­American alliance, 110, 119; Anglophobia, 107, 111, 113, 114; anti-­Semitism and, 124n33; Atlantic Charter, 105, 116, 117; Churchill and (see Churchill, W.); colonization, 21, 29, 32, 300, 303, 307, 313, 318, 331; constitutionalism and, 60; empire and, 101–­26; image of, 101–­26; India and, 116, 117; institutional construction in, 78n49; Ireland and, 125n43; isolationism and, 107; Lend-­Lease and, 101, 104, 120, 121; Marine Hospitals and (see Marine Hospitals); maritime economy and (see maritime economy); New Deal and, 108; policing and, 108; press gang, 24; propaganda and, 104; public opinion and, 106, 109–­12, 121; socialism and, 120; United States and, 101–­26; WWII and, 101–­26. See also specific top­ ics, persons Great Depression, 128, 131–­33, 137, 145, 186, 301 Great Society programs, 225, 234 Great Transformation, The (Polanyi), 127 Greenberg, J., 279, 281 Grier, R. C., 44, 45, 46 Griggs decision, 280–­82 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 9 Guizot, F., 68

Gallatin, A., 32 Gallup, G., 117, 209 Garfield, J., 67 Gates, P. W., 21 gender, 185, 187, 190, 200, 201, 296 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 129 General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 200, 201 General Motors, 311

Habermas, J., 331 Hamilton, A., 24, 25, 28–­29 Handlin, O., 297, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 319 Hartz, L., 153, 303 Hattam, V., 263 Hawley, E., 133 Hazareesingh, S., 75n9 Head Start, 235 health services, 8, 21–­57, 217

17, 18, 101, 153, 154, 185, 303; Weber and, 4

360 / Index Hegel, G. F., 4 Hintze, O., 329 Hiroshima, 298 historiography, 5, 7, 13. See also specific topics, authors Hoag, E., 165 Hoffman, P. G., 131, 134 Hofstadter, R., 297, 346n10 Hogan, M., 133 Holmes, O. W., 331, 333 Hoover, H., 133, 211 Horwitz, M., 332 Huntington, S., 261 Hurst, J. W., 335 ICI. See Imperial Chemical Industries Ickes, H., 135 idealism, 108, 117, 119, 333. See also specific topics identity: borders and, 18, 341; charity and, 214, 237; citizenship and, 11, 189; morality and, 237; sailors and, 34, 39; sovereignty and (see sovereignty). See also specific topics IMF. See International Monetary Fund Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), 114 imperialism, 106, 110, 111, 117–­19, 121 Indians, 79, 80, 82–­92, 167, 307 infrastructural power, 129, 159, 184, 210, 211, 215 Insull, S., 310 interdependence sovereignty, 84 interest-­group pluralism, 153 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), 137 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 129 international relations, 7, 9, 23, 110, 115, 209–­31. See also specific countries, organi­ zations, topics Islam, 244 isolationism, 110, 115, 117, 120 Jackson, S., 281 Jacksonian period, 42, 46 Jacobinism, 72 Japan, 130–­36 Jefferson, T., 23 Jessup, P. C., 123n10 Job Corps, 235 John, R. R., 13, 295–­324, 353

Johnson, L. B., 129, 225, 228n14, 234, 236, 240, 250, 296 Johnston, P., 131 Judt, T., 134, 332 Kades, C., 130 Kaiser, H., 10, 137 Kantorowitz, H., 336 Kappel, F. R., 315–­16 Katznelson, I., 7, 73, 262 Keller, M., 317–­18, 326, 344 Key, V. O., 339 Khomeinio, R., 144 King, M. L., Jr., 242, 247, 249, 250, 251 Krasner, S., 83–­84 Kull, A., 285 Laboulaye, E., 75n8 Lamont, T. W., 304, 308 Land Grant College Association, 198 Lasswell, H., 339 Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCRUL), 275, 276 LCRUL. See Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law LDF. See Legal Defense Fund League of Nations, 108 Legal Defense Fund (LDF), 272–­74 legal system: admiralty law, 27; civil society and, 65 (see also civil society); critical realism, 13, 332–­36, 339, 340; habeas corpus, 69; LDF (see Legal Defense Fund); legal history, 331–­36; legalism, 332, 335; natural law, 334; political history and, 332; positive law, 74, 296, 341; property rights, 127; rule of law, 74, 331–­36, 351; social history and, 334; Supreme Court, 133, 157, 162, 331–­32 (see also specific decisions) legibility, notion of, 126n63 Lend-­Lease, 121 Leuchtenburg, W., 326, 329 liberalism, 303; associations and, 64 (see also associations, civic); capitalism and, 128; democracy and, 4, 9, 61, 64 (see also democracy); exceptionalism and, 7 (see also exceptionalism); individualism and, 227n10; modernization and, 4; neoliberalism, 4, 10, 17, 183, 345; New Deal and, 128, 129, 130, 133 (see

Index / 361 also New Deal); state and, 59, 73 (see also state); Tocqueville and, 59, 75n9; triumphalism and, 4; United States and, 9, 61, 73 Lieberman, R., 12, 259–­94, 353 Likert, R., 106 Lilienthal, D., 10, 140, 141–­43 Lincoln, A., 68, 69 Lincoln, B., 33 Livingston, E., 30 Lochner decision, 162 Luce, H., 109 MacArthur, D., 119, 130 MacLean, N., 266 MacLeish, A., 103, 107, 108 Malcolm X, 244 Mann, M., 6, 73, 81, 129, 159, 184, 210, 336 March of Dimes, 211, 212, 213, 215 Marine Hospitals, 21–­57; administration of, 37–­44; admiralty law, 26–­28; admission to, 34–­41; blacks and, 36; boarding houses and, 35; canal boats, 46, 48; charities and, 35, 51n24; Great Britain and, 29, 31, 37–­38; Hamilton report, 25; incurables and, 41; Marine Hospital Act, 30–­33; maritime economy, 8, 23 (see also maritime economy); Merchant Marine Act and, 29; New Deal and, 48; physicians and, 35, 36–­37; press gang, 24; public authority and, 31; sailors’ status, 26, 36, 39, 40; space for, 35–­36; taxes for, 28, 29–­33, 44, 45; transient sailors, 40; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 92; in twentieth century, 48; variety in, 37; War of 1812, 37–­38; women and, 35; Wood doctrine, 46 maritime economy: admiralty law, 26–­28, 51n21; canal boats, 44, 46; Marine Hospitals (see Marine Hospitals); market revolution and, 44–­45, 55n79; Merchant Marine Act and, 29; paternalist paradigm, 30; productivity criteria and, 39–­40; race and, 36; river ports and, 42, 44; status of sailors, 26–­29, 33–­34, 39; United States and, 21–­57; western expansion and, 45 market economy, 55n72, 127–­51, 188, 313–­14. See also capitalism

Marshall, G., 131, 132, 229n22 Marshall Plan, 121, 129, 130, 133, 135, 305 Marx, K., 65–­66 Mashaw, J., 46 mass politics, 9, 102, 122, 155, 248, 303, 307. See also specific topics Mauss, M., 221 May, E., 237 McConnell, G., 267 McDonald, F., 310 McPherson, J., 67 McRoberts, O. M., 12, 233–­57, 353 Melville, H., 35 Merchant Marine Act (1790), 29 Merriam, C., 339 meta-­historical values, 332 Mexico, 81; bandits and, 86, 90; California, 86; despotic power in, 81; Gadsden Treaty, 92; highways, 86; Indians and, 79, 80, 82–­92; mining in, 80, 93; policing, 81, 82, 87–­92, 95; railroads and, 86; Reform War, 89; Teresero rebels, 90, 91; United States and, 79–­100; as weak state, 81 Meyer decision, 162, 163 Middle East, 138, 139, 144 military, 2, 82, 89–­92, 188, 209, 227n6, 246, 351. See also specific countries, conflicts Mitchell, T., 204n8 Mitchill, S. L., 31 modernity, 154 modernization, 4, 154 monarchy, 9, 59–­62, 303, 304 monopolies, 308 Montesquieu, C.-­L., 331–­34 Morris, A., 222 Muhammad, E., 244, 251 Mulroy, Q., 267 multilateralism, 10 multinationals, 7, 129, 137–­39. See also specific corporations mutual aid, 62, 63, 64 myth, 18, 21, 57–­78, 210, 333, 339 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 270–­71, 272, 275, 284 National Industrial Recovery Act, 133 nationalism, 341

362 / Index National Security Agency, 2 Native Americans, 79, 80, 82–­92, 167, 307 natural disasters, 220–­21 Nearing, S., 166 Nettl, J. P., 262, 327 New Deal, 10, 56n85; associative state and, 211; capitalism and, 145, 305; charities and, 213 (see also charities); corporate philanthropy, 295–­324; government/ private efforts, 223; Great Depression and, 145; health service and, 217; legacies of, 149n26 (see also specific pro­ grams); liberalism and, 128, 129, 130, 133, 309–­10; Marine Hospitals and, 48; PWA and, 135, 137, 138; Roosevelt and, 107–­8, 114, 127, 133; schools and, 159; social history and, 296; TVA and, 129, 140, 141; WPA and, 135, 138. See also specific persons, programs newspapers, 115 New York Times, 283 Nixon, R., 284 Noble, G., 196, 197, 198, 203 nonprofit organizations, 213, 222–­24. See also charities normativity, 21, 233, 326 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 121, 135 Norton, E. H., 270 Novak, W., 13, 65, 128, 154, 184, 210–­11, 325–­49, 354 Nye Commission, 114 O’Connor, B., 215, 217, 221, 225, 229n22 OFBCI. See Office of Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 235, 240; boundary and, 240; counsel­ ing programs, 237; CRO and, 241–­47, 249, 254; Dawkins and, 243, 245, 253 (see also Dawkins, M.); FIGHT coalition, 245; First Amendment and, 237; Interpretation Project, 247–­48, 252; militancy and, 246; OFBCI and, 254–­55; OIC and, 239, 240; political pur­­pose, 241; Poulard and, 243, 253 (see also Poulard, G.); public/private religion, 235, 253, 255; Republicans and, 240; riots and, 241, 242; SCLC and, 247, 251; Social Gospel and, 236; War on Poverty and, 241, 242, 248, 249 (see also War on

Poverty); welfare state and, 245. See also specific persons, programs Office of Faith-­Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI), 233, 254 Office of War Information (OWI), 106, 110, 111, 116 oil, 138 opinion polls. See public opinion Orren, K., 261 Packard, A., 231n45 Page, A. W., 13, 295–­324 Page, W. H., 299 Paradol, P., 75n8 Parent-­Teacher Associations (PTA), 214 Parsons, T., 145 partisan politics, 38, 120, 122, 249, 254, 326, 338, 346. See also specific topics, groups Passer, H. C., 316 Peace Corps, 225, 236 Pedriana, N., 264 Peters, R., 26, 27, 28, 51n21 philanthropy, 295–­324. See also charities; and specific organizations, topics Pierce decision, 157, 158, 162, 163 Pinckney, C., 30, 33 Point Four Program, 136 Polanyi, K., 127, 137, 144–­45 policing, 89–­92, 108 political economy: civil society and, 295–­ 324; history of, 22–­23, 49n6, 127, 296; postwar, 121, 146. See also capitalism; civil society; maritime economy; New Deal; power; and specific authors, topics postmetaphysical theory, 13, 332 Poulard, G., 243, 244, 245, 251–­53 poverty, 160. See also War on Poverty Powell, L., 295, 309 Powell, T. R., 341 power: associations and (see associations, civic); bureaucracy and, 263; democracy and (see democracy); emergency and, 9, 63; executive power, 68; governance and, 211; infrastructural, 129, 159, 184, 211, 215; institutional resources, 263; police and (see policing); private power, 259–­94; public, 261–­70 (see also democracy; and specific types); public-­ private nexus, 264; regulatory capture, 265; state and, 259–­94 (see also state);

Index / 363 structures of, 15n10 (see also specific institutions, topics); world power, 209–­31. See also specific topics pragmatism, social, 154, 249, 252 Price, G. A., 308 Prince, C., 41 Progressive Era, 12, 212 propaganda, 106, 108, 109, 112 PTA. See Parent-­Teacher Associations public opinion, 117; Great Britain and, 103–­11, 121; index of discontent, 124n30; Lippman on, 103; propaganda and, 106, 109, 112; public debate and, 102, 105, 117, 121–­22; Tocqueville on, 58, 66; WWII and, 103–­11, 121, 122. See also specific issues, topics race, 69, 105, 228n17; education and, 160, 165, 167–­68, 260, 351; industrialization and, 187; Marine Hospitals and, 31, 36; Mexico and, 98n28; Native Americans, 79, 80, 82–­92, 167, 307; religion and, 233–­57; social categories and, 15n10. See also African Americans; and specific persons, organizations, topics Radio Free Europe, 305 railroads, 70, 82, 86, 92, 102, 133, 275, 300, 343 Rakove, J. N., 314 Ransom, R., 256n21 Rao, G., 8, 21–­57, 354 Rauschenbusch, W., 256n5, 256n21 Reagan, R., 48, 270 realism, 332–­34, 336, 339, 340 Red Cross. See American Red Cross Reed, P., 134 religion: blacks and, 12, 233–­57; Chris­ tianity, 233–­57 (see also specific topics); church-­state issues, 233–­57; counseling programs, 237; FIGHT coalition, 245; private/public, 235, 236–­47, 253–­55; race and, 233–­57; school prayer, 234; state and, 253; War on Poverty and, 236–­41; welfare state and, 233–­57. See also specific types, topics representation, 341 Reynolds, D., 122n1 Reynolds, R., 118 Riesman, D., 316, 322n60 Robbins, W., 251 Rockefeller, D., 10

Rockefeller, J. D., Jr., 230n32 Rockefeller, N., 137 Roosevelt, F. D., 104, 210, 273; antitrust policies, 113–­14; Britain and, 105; death of, 119, 213; March of Dimes and, 211–­ 15; New Deal and, 107–­8, 114, 127, 133 (see also New Deal); war fund drive, 214; World War II and, 119 Rosanvallon, P., 326, 336, 342, 344 Rosenberg, G. N., 12, 183–­208, 354 rule of law. See legal system rumor clinics, 106, 112, 114, 125n43 rural areas, 186–­91; children and, 190; farm bureaus, 189, 190; 4-­H Club and (see 4-­H Club); Great Depression and, 186; home bureaus, 190; marketing cooperatives, 188; personal contact in, 186; state and, 183–­208; urbanization and, 187; USDA and, 185, 186; women and, 187, 190, 200 Rynderson, W. L., 91 sailors, 16, 36 Saudi Arabia, 138–­39, 140 Sawyer, S., 8, 57–­78, 354 Schlesinger, A., Jr., 136, 140, 297 Schlesinger, A., Sr., 304, 327 Schmitt, C., 330 schools. See education SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership Conference Scottish Enlightenment, 296 Sewall, S., 30 Shaped by War and Trade (Katznelson), 7, 17 Sheppard-­Towner Act (1921), 194 Sherman Antitrust Act, 308 Shriver, S., 236, 249 Simon, H., 339 Simone, A. M., 184 Skocpol, T., 326, 327 Skowronek, S., 73, 226n3, 261, 326, 327 Skrentny, J., 263, 264 Sloan, A. P., 311 Smith, J. S., 10, 127–­56, 354 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Sobeloff, S., 282 social categories, 15n10 Social Gospel, 236, 239, 242, 256n5 social history, 296; behavioralist revolution, 339–­40; critical realism, 341;

364 / Index social history (cont.) history of law, 341; intellectual history and, 345n6; legal history and, 331–­36, 341; political history and, 306, 310, 332; pragmatists and, 154; progress and, 349n50; revisionism and, 303; state and, 6. See also specific authors, topics socialism, 10, 110, 118, 312, 322n60, 325 social security, 64 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 242–­43, 247–­51 sovereignty: anti-­imperialism and, 121; borders and, 9, 82–­83, 85, 95 (see also boundaries); extraterritorial, 121–­22; Indians and, 96n6; interdependent, 84; Mexico and, 82, 83, 85, 87; popular, 344 (see also democracy); security and, 95; stateness and, 5, 77n48, 82, 87, 341; Vattelian, 83–­84; Weber and, 77n48 Soviet Union, 130, 303, 305, 315 Spahr, C., 164–­65 Sparrow, J., 9, 101–­26, 354 Standard Oil, 114 state: administration, 46, 47, 56n85; anthropomorphism and, 338–­39; antistatism, 326, 346n8; autonomy and, 347n17, 347n18; behavioralist revolution, 339, 340; borders and, 9, 79–­100, 341 (see also specific countries); boundaries and, 6; boundary conditions, 6; centralization and, 47; church and, 233–­57, 255n3 (see also religion); citizenship and, 341; concept of, 2–3, 5, 325–­49; critical realism and, 336–­46; desire and, 184; emergency and, 9, 63; as epiphenomenon, 15n10; family and, 157–­82; fiscal model, 71; hidden state, 75n17; historical studies, 2–3, 5–­7, 13, 21, 325–­49 (see also specific topics); identity and, 341; individuals and, 62, 74; infrastructural power and, 73, 129, 159, 184, 210, 211, 215; institutions in, 1, 78n49 (see also specific topics); intimacy of, 186–­91; laissez-­faire and, 62; liberalism, 4, 73, 327; market and, 55n72, 127–­51, 188, 313–­14 (see also capitalism); metaphors for, 4; modernization and, 4; multidimensional model, 262; nationalism and, 341; power and, 259–­94; public power and, 261–­85; public/private, 261–­85 (see also state/

society opposition; and specific topics); quantitative assessment of, 337–­38; regulatory power, 265 (see also specific agencies, topics); representation and, 341, 344; state effect, 204n8; taxation, 45, 47, 56n82, 71; United States and, 1, 8, 17, 21, 54n59, 71, 185, 226n3, 259, 325–­49 (see also specific topics); Weber and, 4; Wood doctrine, 46. See also associations, civic; boundaries; bureaucracy; capitalism; civil society; democracy; education; exceptionalism; legal system; liberalism; power; religion; rural areas; sovereignty; state/society opposition; welfare; and specific authors, topics state/society opposition: anthropomorphism and, 338–­39; assumption of, 13, 153, 328–­29; autonomy and, 347n17; education and, 157–­82; historical studies, 328–­29, 342 (see also specific topics); state in society, 342; Thiers on, 64–­65, 74; zero-­sum model, 154. See also civil society; state; and specific topics Steffes, T., 11, 157–­82, 354 Stephenson, A., 297 Stettinius, E., 108 Stimson, H. L., 298 Stouffer, S., 106 Stryker, R., 264 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 275 Sullivan, L., 239 Sultzberger, C. L., 138 Supreme Court, 26, 133, 157, 162, 163, 331–­32. See also specific decisions Taft, W. H., 108, 120 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 10, 136, 140, 141 Terman, L., 165 terrorism, 2 Theobald, R., 248 Thiers, A., 9, 63, 74; on American state, 60, 66, 69, 71; associations and, 62, 64, 65–­66; career of, 59; civil society and, 66; Civil War and, 69, 70; concert/cooperation, 65; constitutionalism and, 60; French Revolution and, 9, 59–­74; state/ society relationship, 64–­65; Tocqueville and, 59, 60, 62, 67

Index / 365 third world. See specific countries, topics Tocqueville, A. de, 9, 13, 74, 302; on American state, 57–­58, 61, 62, 66, 67, 307; on associations, 62; Coppet Group and, 66; Democracy in America, 57–­58, 61, 62, 66–­67, 307; French Revolution and, 58, 61, 67; liberalism and, 59, 75n9; Thiers and, 59, 60, 62, 67 Truman, D., 339 Truman, H. S., 119, 120, 135, 136, 229n23 Turner, F. J., 85, 299–­300, 334 TVA. See Tennessee Valley Authority United Funds, 218, 229n29 United Nations, 108, 120, 124n21 urbanization, 187–­88 Urrea, T., 90–­91 US Steel, 276–­78 vaccination, 174 Vail, T. N., 300 Vallarta, I., 83, 84 value chain, 143 Vandenberg, A., 107, 108, 120 Vanderbilt, W. H., 301 Veblen, T., 332 Vista program, 225 voluntarism: associations, 189, 222, 225, 228n14, 303–­6; civil society and, 12–13, 153; coercion and, 160, 166, 168, 173; corporations and, 220, 302; education and, 160, 166, 168, 173; national identity and, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219; rural, 189, 191; social services and, 212, 213, 220, 225; state and, 210, 213, 214, 228n14, 304–­12; statism and, 210; taxation and, 230n33; United States and, 303–­12, 317. See also associations, civic; charities; civil society; and specific organizations Volunteers in Service to America, 235 Walgreen, C. R., 319 Walker, P. A., 301 Wallace, H., 134 Warburton, C. W., 197 War of 1812, 8, 37–­38, 47 War on Poverty, 234, 235, 241, 252; Dawkins and (see Dawkins, M.);

militancy and, 253; military and, 246; OEO and, 242, 248, 249 (see also Office of Economic Opportunity); religion and, 236–­41; welfare and, 240, 253, 255 Warren, G., 196 Warren Center (Harvard), 13 Wealth Act of 1935, 215 Weber, M., 4, 5, 65–­66, 73, 329 Webster, P., 24 welfare: associations and, 63 (see also associations, civic); blacks and, 234–­45 (see also African Americans); charity and (see charities); Dawkins and, 248; liberalism and (see liberalism); military and, 246; New Deal and (see New Deal); OEO and, 245; public religion and, 235, 253, 254, 255; religion and, 233–­57; socialism and, 10, 110, 118, 312, 322n60, 325; state and, 233–­57; War on Poverty and, 233–­57 (see also War on Poverty). See also specific legislation, programs Whyte, W. H., Jr., 297 Winthrop, J., 17 Wolcott, O., Jr., 32, 39 Wolin, S., 57 women, 185, 187, 190, 200, 201, 296 Wood, G. S., 317–­18 Woodbury, L., 44 Wood doctrine, 46 World War I, 18, 119, 159, 167, 213, 227n10 World War II, 9, 18, 101, 106; Anglo-­ American alliance, 101–­26; Asia and, 115, 118, 119; capitalism and, 131 (see also capitalism); charity and, 209–­31; church-­state conflict, 255n3; Great Britain and, 101–­26; index of discontent, 124n30; Marshall Plan and, 129, 130, 305; mobilization for, 209; Pearl Harbor, 110; postwar world, 127–­51; propaganda and, 104, 111, 112, 115; reconstruction, 130–­31; Roosevelt and, 119 (see also Roosevelt, F. D.) Worthy, J. C., 306 Wright, N., 244–­45 Yette, S., 241 zaibatsu, 131