TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction -James Sparrow, William Novak, and Stephen Sawyer
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0000
[the state, APD, bureaucracy, autonomy, boundary conditions, Max Weber, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Michael Mann]
In their productive outpouring, the scholarly literatures on "the state" in American history and political development have advanced myriad working assumptions about the state without reconciling those assumptions within a coherent rubric. This introductory essay makes a preliminary case for addressing this challenge by focusing research on the boundary conditions of state formation, where the limits of government authority reveal the principles of its operation. Focusing on boundary conditions allows us to move beyond a merely refractory view of the state to probe the ways in which public power has been constitutive of politics and indeed of social categories themselves. This approach has the added advantage of accounting for the dynamism and flexibility of American power, whereas more established scholarly approaches centered on bureaucratic autonomy or elite networks paint a more static portrait. It would appear that these boundaries are not simply limits or loci of visibility for American government, but are themselves generators of new quanta of power, providing sites for the transformation of social into public power. (pages 1 - 16)
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Part I: The State and the World
The Early american state "in action": The Federal marine hospitals, 1789–1860 -Gautham Rao
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0001
[health care, merchant marine, political economy, administration, administrative law, federal government]
Beginning in 1798, the federal government deducted twenty cents per month from merchant mariners' wages to fund a network of hospitals for their care. This chapter argues that the marine hospitals furnish evidence of a capable federal government that has been overlooked by scholars of the American state. It also identifies how administering the marine hospitals necessitated a centralization of federal bureaucratic authority. (pages 21 - 56)
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Beyond Tocqueville's myth: rethinking the model of the american state -Stephen Sawyer
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0002
[French liberalism, American State, French State, American liberalism, Civil War, The Paris Commune, Democracy, Civil Society, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adolphe Thiers, Emergency powers]
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. This essay is part of a broader 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 that of Adolphe Thiers—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. (pages 57 - 78)
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Inventing the US-Mexico border -CJ Alvarez
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0003
[U.S.-Mexico border, police, boundary survey, Apaches, U.S.-Mexico relations, U.S. Army, Mexican Army, Porfirio Díaz, Teresa Urrea, Lauro Aguirre, U.S. Marshals, Apaches, dissidents, cooperation]
This chapter examines the establishment of the United States-Mexico border, not just as a cartographic construction, but as a joint production of cooperative policing. As U.S.-Mexico relations deepened and became more complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the borderland transformed into a space of bilateral, if sometimes grudging, consent. By focusing on U.S.-Mexico military campaigns against Apaches and U.S. attempts to quell Mexican political dissidents on American soil, an image emerges of a fledgling bilateral policing apparatus, one in which the police power of both countries is pooled, borrowed, and amplified. (pages 79 - 100)
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Rumors of Empire: Tracking the image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century -James Sparrow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0004
[rumor, empire, extraterritorial sovereignty, Lend-Lease, Bretton Woods, British Loan 1946, antitrust, Imperial Chemical Industries, American Century, psych war, surveillance, Anglophobia, non-intervention, isolationism, unilateralism, Allies, United Kingdom, Great Britain, US State Department, US Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Whitehall, British Library of Information, British Information Service, Gordon Allport, Archibald MacLeish, Isaiah Berlin, Adolph Berle, Albert Chandler, Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee]
In its pursuit of globalism during and after WWII, the United States abandoned foundational political traditions by entering an "entangling alliance" with Great Britain, and then supplanting its Empire through tutelage, emulation and competitive displacement. Within the decade, the US becane the very thing against which it had been defined since the Revolution. This chapter examines the ways in which American political discourse at all levels---from high policy debates and propaganda to public opinion and everyday rumor---accommodated this new US role, ironically authorizing a vast new extraterritorial state through arguments couched within an anti-imperial imaginary. Well beyond the confines of the "special relationship," the American Century rested on the institutions of this offshore state, which in turn had to be justified to voters, taxpayers, and families of servicemen. Consequently, conceptual boundaries drawn between "America" and "the world," "republic" and "empire," helped authorize this new state-building, precisely to the extent that they were deployed through anti-imperialist arguments over particular wartime and early postwar commitments. (pages 101 - 126)
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The Great Transformation: The state and the market in the postwar world -Jason Scott Smith
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0005
[capitalism, New Deal, postwar economy, Karl Polanyi, social justice, human rights, Marshall Plan, Bechtel, World Bank, TVA, David Lilienthal, Adolf Berle]
Following the work of Karl Polanyi, this essay explores the interaction of the state and the market in creating the postwar global economy, tracing the persistent influence of New Deal liberalism. Politicians, policy makers, and business people fostered impressive rates of economic growth in many parts of the world, but often at the expense of concerns about social justice, human rights, and the distribution of wealth. (pages 127 - 152)
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Part II: The State and Civil Society
Governing the Child: The state, the Family, and the Compulsory school in the Early Twentieth Century -Tracy Steffes
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0006
[schools, education, compulsory attendance, progressive, social policy, governmentality]
This article explores how the development of compulsory attendance policies in the early twentieth century—state laws mandating attendance and local district enforcement practices to give effect to them—expanded the reach and power of the state over children. It argues that compulsory attendance polices increased the state's access to children and invested school officials acting on its behalf with the means and rationales to extend public oversight and regulation of children's education, health, labor, and welfare in new ways. Enacted from the top down and bottom up and shaped by popular participation and consent, attendance policies also disciplined and regularized school attendance for all children over time and helped to institutionalize new norms of full time, regular attendance at school. Consequently this article argues that the chief significance of compulsion was not the policing of particular households or the children it brought into school by force, but the broader ways in which it served as a site for expanding public governance and claims over all children. 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 they choices they did to generously subsidize opportunity for children rather than socialize risk for workers. 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. (pages 157 - 182)
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Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America -Gabriel Rosenberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0007
[Agriculture, Intimacy, Embodiment, US Department of Agriculture, Civil Society, State-building, Modernization, Infrastructure, Rural]
This chapter explores the relationship of agriculture and homemaking 4-H youth clubs, a famous icon of rural American civil society, to early twentieth century state-building and rural modernization programs. Although sometimes mistaken for private, voluntary associations, the US Department of Agriculture and Cooperative Extension Service organized and administered 4-H clubs throughout America's sprawling agricultural peripheries. Through the clubs, organizers hoped to cultivate greater governing capacities and debt-financed, mechanized farming. The result was an "intimate state" in 1920s rural America in which the bodies of youth formed a vital infrastructure of governance. The intimate state allowed participants to act in lieu of formal state actors, and healthy youthful bodies advertised the bounties of future cooperation with the intimate state's agencies and allies. Attention to the intimate state demonstrates the instability and permeability of the boundary between civil society and the state, and it underscores the importance of affection, intimacy, and embodiment to the continuing operation of American state power. (pages 183 - 208)
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Good Citizens of a World Power: Postwar Reconfigurations of the Obligation to Give -Elisabeth S. Clemens
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0008
[citizen philanthropy, civic benevolence, March of Dimes, American Red Cross, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Basil O'Connor]
In times of crisis, domestic or international, the capacity of American government has been enhanced by the large-scale mobilization of civic benevolence. Although the New Deal is often envisioned as marking an end to the era of voluntarism in the provision of public goods, President Roosevelt constructed new alignments of citizen philanthropy with national projects, represented by the March of Dimes against polio and the widespread equation of donating with patriotic citizenship during the Second World War. Following Roosevelt's death and the end of the war, both his allies and opposition competed to reinforce or replace this presidentially-centered regime of civic philanthropy with other configurations that varied in their degree of inclusion (particularly of organized labor) and local rather than national orientation. Within a decade, the result was a much more fragmented system of civic benevolence, oriented to particular causes rather than national crises and patriotic solidarity. (pages 209 - 232)
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The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State: Black Religion and the Negotiation of Church/State Boundaries during the War on Poverty -Omar McRoberts
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0009
[public religion, civil rights movement, War on Poverty, Office of Economic Opportunity, black churches, church and state separation]
This essay conceptualizes the War on Poverty 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, as it needed not only to execute but also to justify social policy to a variety of publics, including black political movements. Welfare state expansion during this period occasioned the setting of a practical boundary between public and private religion. Then, especially through the Office of Civil Rights, the Office of Economic Opportunity incorporated black religious activists, or public religionists, into the welfare state to gather reconnaissance of and influence the ideological and tactical commitments a religiously based civil rights movement field. (pages 233 - 258)
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Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEoC, and Civil rights Enforcement -Robert Lieberman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0010
[affirmative action, civil rights, race, discrimination]
The development of affirmative action poses a challenge for standard accounts of American state building and policy development. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemed to rule out group-based, race-consciou enforcement and provided very little coercive power to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency it established to enforce antidiscrimination law. And yet within a decade, the EEOC had spearheaded the development of affirmative action. How was the EEOC able to be effective in an institutional environment that was quite hostile to its success? How did it manage to reorient the effects of a major policy without visible policy reform? The answer lies in a strategic alliance between the EEOC and civil rights organizations. This case suggests that conventional accounts of administrative power are inadequate to explain the particular patterns of American state building and policy change and points to an alternative approach based on links between public and private actors. (pages 259 - 294)
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From Political Economy to Civil Society: Arthur W. Page, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Reframing of the Past ?in Post–New Deal America -Richard John
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0011
[civil society, political economy, Arthur W. Page, Bell System, telephone, Center for the Study of Liberty, Harvard University, historiography, corporate philanthropy, Oscar Handlin, Bernard Bailyn]
In the post-New Deal era, corporate philanthropists mounted a deliberate campaign to persuade U. S. historians to shift their focus from political economy to civil society. This essay explores one such venture--the Center for the Study of Liberty at Harvard, founded in 1958. By focusing on the vision of the center's founder, one-time American Telephone and Telegraph public relationship executive Arthur W. Page, it traces the influence of a pro-corporate political agenda on several of the most justly admired works of historical scholarship in the 1960s. (pages 295 - 324)
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Conclusion: The Concept of the State in American History -William Novak
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226277813.003.0012
[US political history, political sociology, American Political Development (APD), legal history, policy history, law and society, the state, US government, governance, governmentality, police, civil society, bureaucracy, exceptionalism, law, socio-legal studies, legal realism, politics, statecraft, liberalism, democracy, polity, public policy]
This chapter draws attention to the vital role of interdisciplinary perspectives in law, history, sociology, and political science in redirecting our understanding of the origins, development, and nature of the American state. It highlights the particularly formative role of an emerging theoretical literature concerning the character of statecraft in modern democratic regimes. The paper begins with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the state concept as articulated in the diverse contributions of American history, political sociology, and American Political Development. It goes on to question the predominance of the essentially bureaucratic and Weberian model of the state that has governed thinking about and controlled discussion of the American state for the last two generations. It concludes by using the interdisciplinary perspectives that have recently emerged in socio-legal studies in the United States to generate an alternative approach to American state development that takes account of the nature of democratic rule as well as the fungibility of the state/society boundary. (pages 325 - 350)
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Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
