When Good Government Meant Big Government
The Quest to Expand Federal Power, 1913–1933
Columbia University Press
When Good Government Meant Big Government
The Quest to Expand Federal Power, 1913–1933
Columbia University Press
The years after World War I have often been seen as an era when Republican presidents and business leaders brought the growth of government in the United States to a sudden and emphatic halt. In When Good Government Meant Big Government, the historian Jesse Tarbert inverts the traditional story by revealing a forgotten effort by business-allied reformers to expand federal power—and how that effort was foiled by Southern Democrats and their political allies.
Tarbert traces how a loose-knit coalition of corporate lawyers, bankers, executives, genteel reformers, and philanthropists emerged as the leading proponents of central control and national authority in government during the 1910s and 1920s. Motivated by principles of “good government” and using large national corporations as a model, these elite reformers sought to transform the federal government’s ineffectual executive branch into a modern organization with the capacity to solve national problems. They achieved some success during the presidency of Warren G. Harding, but the elite reformers’ support for federal antilynching legislation confirmed the worries of white Southerners who feared that federal power would pose a threat to white supremacy. Working with others who shared their preference for local control of public administration, Southern Democrats led a backlash that blocked enactment of the elite reformers’ broader vision for a responsive and responsible national government.
Offering a novel perspective on politics and policy in the years before the New Deal, this book sheds new light on the roots of the modern American state and uncovers a crucial episode in the long history of racist and antigovernment forces in American life.
Tarbert traces how a loose-knit coalition of corporate lawyers, bankers, executives, genteel reformers, and philanthropists emerged as the leading proponents of central control and national authority in government during the 1910s and 1920s. Motivated by principles of “good government” and using large national corporations as a model, these elite reformers sought to transform the federal government’s ineffectual executive branch into a modern organization with the capacity to solve national problems. They achieved some success during the presidency of Warren G. Harding, but the elite reformers’ support for federal antilynching legislation confirmed the worries of white Southerners who feared that federal power would pose a threat to white supremacy. Working with others who shared their preference for local control of public administration, Southern Democrats led a backlash that blocked enactment of the elite reformers’ broader vision for a responsive and responsible national government.
Offering a novel perspective on politics and policy in the years before the New Deal, this book sheds new light on the roots of the modern American state and uncovers a crucial episode in the long history of racist and antigovernment forces in American life.
In When Good Government Meant Big Government, we see American policy makers look, for the first time, to the corporation for inspiration in how to run the country, only to find that America could not be as easily ruled as the market. In this sweeping and writerly history, Tarbert lays bare the prehistory of our own times, as early twentieth-century reformers struggle with how to manage big government, white supremacy, and economic dislocations. Louis Hyman, author of Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary
There have been dramatic fights in recent years about the size and scope of government and whether the country needs another New Deal. In When Good Government Meant Big Government, Jesse Tarbert offers new insights into those conflicts by tracing how self-described “public men” took inspiration from big businesses in their efforts to clean up and expand an executive branch that had become large, unwieldy, and ineffective before WWI. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, author of Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt
When Good Government Meant Big Government provides an authoritative history of the United States’ twentieth-century evolution into a nation equipped with a powerful central government. That path, Tarbert argues, was forged with the help of a powerful set of business-oriented elites eager to import corporate practice into the federal government and keen to demonstrate that the most egregious racist excess damaged America’s reputation as a “nation of laws.” Brian Balogh, author of The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century
Following Schumpeter’s observation that “the budget is the skeleton of the state,” Tarbert offers readers a clearly written, well researched, and historiographically up-to-date analysis of federal budget policy from Wilson to FDR. Historians, political scientists, and historical sociologists can all profit from Tarbert’s judicious analysis of the partisan divisions that shaped the policy debate—a factionalism that in often surprising ways prefigured the political landscape we live in today. Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
Tarbert’s book joins a rich literature on the creation and development of the American state...[and] will require historians, APD scholars, and lawyers to grapple with the argument. Patrick J. Sobkowski, Liberal Currents
Introduction
1. Administration and Accommodation: Before 1913
2. The Elite Reformers in Exile: 1913–1918
3. After the Armistice: Spring 1919
4. The Budget Debate: 1919–1920
5. The Dark Horse: 1920–1921
6. Early Success: Spring and Summer 1921
7. Equal Protection Under Law: 1921–1923
8. Backlash: Spring and Summer 1923
9. Southern Strength: 1923–1924
10. Congressional Counteroffensive: Spring 1924
11. Low Expectations: 1924–1927
12. The Great Engineer: 1929–1931
13. Dashed Hopes: 1930–1933
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
1. Administration and Accommodation: Before 1913
2. The Elite Reformers in Exile: 1913–1918
3. After the Armistice: Spring 1919
4. The Budget Debate: 1919–1920
5. The Dark Horse: 1920–1921
6. Early Success: Spring and Summer 1921
7. Equal Protection Under Law: 1921–1923
8. Backlash: Spring and Summer 1923
9. Southern Strength: 1923–1924
10. Congressional Counteroffensive: Spring 1924
11. Low Expectations: 1924–1927
12. The Great Engineer: 1929–1931
13. Dashed Hopes: 1930–1933
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index