Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:20:36.074Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Brian Balogh
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

Twenty years after Louis Galambos published “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis,” the organizational strand of revisionist history has become a mainstay of scholarly interpretation. One hallmark of its maturity is that today the organizational synthesis is itself a subject undergoing revision by charter members and critics alike. High priests like Galambos have underscored the wealth of scholarship spawned by the organizational approach and have discerned broad new trends and tensions in that scholarship. Galambos recently blessed three denominations that have embellished and elaborated upon the founders' abiding faith in the forces of modernization to reshape state-society relations: technology, as mediated through large-scale corporate development; the administrative state, as it has developed over the twentieth century to embrace a new, corporatist form of liberalism; and the pervasive professionalization of society. Yet many leading historians remain outside of the organizational flock. Alan Brinkley, one of the agnostics, has criticized organizational historians for pushing “vast segments of society to the periphery of historical analysis.” Michael McGerr, an outright heretic, has questioned the whole endeavor, doubting whether there “really was an ‘organizational society’ in the early twentieth century (or even now)” and charging the historians who in-vented that society with the sin of “presentism.”

Type
Perspectives
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Galambos, Louis, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although this refined the organizational scholars' original emphasis on broad social forces attributed to modernization, modernization remained the engine that drove the organizational interpretation.

3. Brinkley, Alan, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Daedalus 113, no. 3 (Summer 1984): 134Google Scholar.

4. Michael McGerr, “Organization, Individualism, and Class Conflict: Redefining Early Twentieth-Century America,” paper presented to The Seminar, Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University, October 20, 1986, p. 5.

5. There are some notable exceptions. In 1988, Hays, Samuel P. once again broke new ground by pushing his study of administrative decision-making forums into the Reagan administration in Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wiebe, Robert, in The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, and Galambos, Louis, in America at Middle Age: A New History of the U.S. in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983)Google Scholar, have sketched the contours of post-World War II American state-society relations.

6. Brinkley, “Writing the History,” p. 134.

7. Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. For a good summary of that field see Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History (12 1982): 113132Google Scholar; Thelen, David P., “Social Tensions and the Origins of Progressivism,” Journal of American History 56 (1969): 323–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The seminal revision before the organizational scholarship was Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955)Google Scholar.

9. On the Progressive synthesis, see Higham, John, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 171232Google ScholarPubMed; and Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parnngton (New York: Knopf, 1968)Google Scholar.

10. Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (New York: MacmillanCo., 1909Google Scholar, reprinted by Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 6. The transition from natural abundance to constructed abun-dance is emphasized by Potter, David in People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 8690CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and applied directly to the growth of the twentieth-century state in Galambos, America at Middle Age, ch. 2.

11. Higham, John, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History 61 (06 1974): 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Ibid., p. 23.

13. Ibid., p. 24. See also May, Henry, “The Religion of the Republic,” in May, Henry, ed., Ideas, Faiths, and Feelings: Essays on American Intellectual and Religious History, 1952–1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

14. Charles, A. and Beard, Mary R. describe the “progressive wave” that brought about reforms towards “direct government” in The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 556–62Google Scholar.

15. Higham, “Hanging Together,” p. 25.

16. Lippmann, Walter, review of William English Walling's Larger Aspect of Socialism, Call, 05 11, 1913Google Scholar, quoted in Steel, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 79Google Scholar; see also Lippmann, , Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914Google Scholar, reprinted by University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 87.

17. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” pp. 123–24.

18. Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar; Porter, Glenn, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910 (Arlington Heights, 111.: AHM, 1973)Google Scholar.

19. In a detailed elaboration of precisely how this alliance worked, Richard L. McCor-mick has described how professional regulation of big business proceeded hand in hand with the less scientific but more deeply held public conviction that big business corrupted. See “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 247–74.

20. Ibid., p. 265.

21. Ibid., pp. 265–70.

22. Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar and “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (Oct. 1964): 157–69; Kolko, Gabriel, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Macmillan, 1963). See also Wiebe, Robert, Businessmen and Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, and Galambos, Louis, Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

23. Other central works include Chandler, Alfred D., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar and Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

24. Hays documents how the business community used the techniques of direct democracy to break the hold of ward politicians in “The Politics of Reform.”

25. wiebe, Search, p. 223.

26. Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Re-search,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 4Google Scholar. On Weberian roots see Brinkley “Writing the History,” p. 132. See also Galambos, Louis, “Parsonian Sociology and Post Progressive History,” Social Science Quarterly 50, no. 1 (05, 1969): 2545Google Scholar.

27. David B. Truman was probably the most influential political scientist in this regard. See Truman, , The Government Process, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1971; original 1951)Google Scholar.

28. For a good summary of this literature and the most recent scholarship on issue networks see Gais, Thomas L., Peterson, Mark A. and Walker, Jack L., “Interest Groups, Iron Triangles and Representative Institutions in American National Government,” British Journal of Political Science 14 (04 1984): 161–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McConnel's, GrantPrivate Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966)Google Scholar, which comes down squarely on the “capture” end of the spectrum, is still one of the best examples of this bipolar framework. The classic formulation of “capture” theory is Bernstein, Marver H., Regulating Business by Independent Commission (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” p. 4.

30. The best statement of the Weberian ideal can be found in Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1947)Google Scholar.

31. Peter Blau has emphasized informal practices that operate under the surface in bureaucracies that often violate the official rules and alter officially stated objectives. See Blau, Peter M., Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1956), pp. 5357Google Scholar. He has also stressed the link between competent officials' work satisfaction and the expansion of their responsibilities and their agencies'jurisdictions in The Dynamics of Bureaucracy: A Study of Interpersonal Relations in Two Government Agencies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 198–202. March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., in Organizations(New York: Wiley, 1958), pp. 172210Google Scholar, have used the concept of “bounded rationality” to introduce the limitations of human rationality into the study of organizations.

32. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” p. 4; Samuel Beer noted in 1973 that the old pressure group model did not apply to what he called “technocratic” politics. The merger of science and public policy, according to Beer, “shifts the initiative in government from the economic and social environment of government to government itself.” Beer, Samuel H., “The Modernization of American Federalism,” Publius 3 (Fall 1973): 75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Hays, Samuel P., “Political Choice in Regulatory Administration,” in McCraw, Thomas K., ed., Regulation in Perspective: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

34. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In.” Among historians, Hays himself has led the way with his pathbreaking study of politics and the environment– Beauty, Health, and Permanence. Other examples include Skowronek's, StephenBuilding a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Tomlin's, Christopher L.The State and the Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and my “Securing Support: The Emergence of the Social Security Board as a Political Actor, 1935–1939,” in Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis W., eds., Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. History informed by “supply-side” organizational theory has pushed the discovery of bureaucratic political agendas to its extreme. Weaver's, CarolynThe Crisis in Social Security: Economic and Political Origins (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982) is a good example of thisGoogle Scholar.

35. Skowronek, Building a New American Slate, p. 287.

36. The Budgeting and Accounting Act of 1921, for instance, did create a beachhead for expert advice on fiscal matters and an administrative apparatus for managing the budget within the executive branch. But for each executive structure established, there seemed to be a congressional counterweight as well. In the case of fiscal advice, it was the General Accounting Office. In the case of the President's Civil Service Commission, it was the Congressional Bureau of Efficiency. Ibid., chs. 3 and 6.

37. Ellis Hawley, “Social Policy and the Liberal State in Twentieth Century America,” in Critchlow and Hawley, Federal Social Policy, p. 127.

38. This relationship to the state bears certain similarities to the relationship of the professions to capitalism during this period, as suggested in the writings of Peirce and interpreted by Haskell, Thomas L. in “Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emil Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities,” in Haskell, Thomas L., ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 214–19Google Scholar.

39. McGeary, M. Nelson, Gifford Pinchot: Forester; Politician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 43Google Scholar.

40. Pinchot was not afraid to temper the decisions of his experts–on matters as small as the failure of an individual forest ranger to “get on with the western people” or issues as large as garnering the support of Western urban constituents by favoring a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley (ibid., p. 71; and Cooper, John Milton, “Gifford Pinchot Creates a Forest Service,” in Doig, Jameson W. and Hargrove, Erwin C., eds., Leadership and Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987] p. 82)Google Scholar. For a more detailed account of Pinchot's relations with his constituency see Hays, , Conservation, and Balogh, , “Democratizing Expertise: State Building and the Progressive Legacy,” paper presented to the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 08, 1989Google Scholar.

41. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” p. 4.

42. The exception was Samuel Hays's account of the rise of scientific conservation (in Conservation). While the profession that Pinchot pioneered ultimately achieved a degree of expertise, credentials and autonomy, it was hardly born professional, as Hays displays in impressive detail. Its influence was the product of a series of political organizational and intellectual struggles during which the very nature of the profession was altered. In treating professionalization and the application of professional values and knowledge as a struggle with the outcome far from determined, Hays anticipated the thrust of much recent scholarship. Along these lines, see Cooper, “Gifford Pinchot Creates a Forest Ser-vice.”

43. The best summary of this literature is Friedson, Eliot, “Are Professions Necessary?” in Haskell, Thomas L. ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

44. Burton J. Bledstein, “Discussing Terms: Professions, Professionals and Professionalism,” paper presented to the Organization of American Historians (April 1984).

45. The best example of this is Haskell's, ThomasThe Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

46. Hays, Samuel P., “Introduction–The New Organizational Society,” in Isreal, Jerry, ed., Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Assodational Activities in Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1972), p. 1Google Scholar.

47. Larson, Magali Sarfatti, Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 25Google Scholar.

48. Ibid., Introduction.

49. See, for example, Parsons, Talcott, “The Professions and Social Structure,” Social Forces 17, no. 4 (05 1939): 457–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Wiebe, Search, ch. 6.

51. Higham, “Hanging Together”; McCormick, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts.” In both the Higham and McCormick models, the technical/professional interests outlasted the wave of broader public concern and involvement. But as both McCraw, Thomas, in Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis Brandeis, James M. Landes, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Chris Tomlins, in The State and the Unions, have shown in their studies of regulators, the professionals were hardly insensitive to popular beliefs. Perhaps the best example, however, of how cultural values influenced professional perspectives is Brandt's, Allan M. study of venereal disease–No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United Slates Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Prevailing attitudes towards sexual practices and class bias, Brandt argues, helped shape the way doctors and scientists denned and treated venereal diseases. This proved to be a major factor in explaining why venereal disease failed to join the list of infectious diseases eradicated by medicine in the early twentieth centuryGoogle Scholar.

52. This tension is explored by Hobson, Wayne K. in “Professionals, Progressives and Bureaucratization: A Reassessment,”The Historian 39 (1977): 639–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Hays, Response, ch. 9; Wiebe, Search, chs. 2–3; Haskell, Emergence; and Galambos, America at Middle Age, ch. 2.

54. Hays, “Introduction.”

55. Underpinning the organizational revolution was an intellectual phenomenon that Wiebe labeled bureaucratic thought, in which process and adaptation replaced an earlier emphasis on fixed rules. Wiebe, Search ch. 6, and The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

56. Wiebe, Search p. 115; Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), pp. 108–12Google ScholarPubMed.

57. Wiebe, Search p. 117.

58. Walsh, Andrew, “Hartford Seminary and the Training of a Modern Ministry” (unpublished paper, Harvard University, 1988, p. 8)Google Scholar.

59. Ibid., p. 12; see also Haskell, Emergence p. 83.

60. Rather than crediting the specialization of knowledge exclusively for the profession's reconstituted authority, Thomas Haskell suggests that scholars “might construe both specialization and professionalization as strategies that people who claim to possess esoteric knowl-edge are likely to adopt when confronted with rising levels of competition” (Haskell, , ”Are Professors Professional?” [review essay], Journal of Social History 14, no. 3 [Spring 1981]: 489)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. Auerbach, Jerold S., Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 85Google Scholar.

62. Haskell, Emergence p. 24.

63. Ibid., p. 40.

64. Ibid., pp. 246–56.

65. Ibid., pp. 236, 239–0.

66. Dorothy Ross, ”American Social Science and the Idea of Progress,” in Haskell, Authority pp. 160–61.

67. Ibid., p. 157.

68. Ibid., p. 161.

69. Larsen, Rise of Professionalism p. 34.

70. Ibid., p. xiii.

71. Brown, E. Richard, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 77Google Scholar.

72. Ibid., p. 75.

73. Starr, Social Transformation pp. 135–37.

74. Ibid., p. 141.

75. Noble, David F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 2638Google Scholar.

76. As the president of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education put it, “First, the principles of science were regarded as principles of truth whose study was ennobling because it attempted to solve the mystery of the universe; second, the laws of the forces of nature were recognized as important to be understood in order to advance the prosperity and happiness of man. The former point of view led to the introduction of experimental work, it being recognized that the truth of nature's laws could be verified by experience alone; the latter point of view led to the application of these laws in industrial and technical experimentation” (quoted in Noble, America by Design p. 24).

77. Layton, Edwin T., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), ch. 1Google Scholar.

78. Noble, America by Design p. 41; Larsen, Rise of Professionalism p. 28. Engineers may have been the first science-based profession to face this dilemma, but they were not the last. This was precisely the choice ultimately confronted by basic scientists after World War II when colossal costs and Federal funding served to consolidate the clients for the kind of large-scale projects dictated by professional agendas.

79. Noble, America by Design p. 130.

80. Ibid., p. 139.

81. Kohler, Robert, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. Ibid., pp. 158–65.

83. Ibid., p. 217.

84. Ibid., pp. 288–9, 334.

85. Lamoreaux, Naomi R., “The Regulatory Agencies,” Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Scribners, 1984)Google Scholar.

86. “Predominant” agency is Hunter A. Dupree's characterization. See “Central Scientific Organization in the United States Government,” Minerva (Summer 1963): 453–69.

87. Skowronek, Building pp. 142, 149–50. By including both an antipooling clause which was intended to promote competition, and a prohibition on long-haul and short-haul discrimination, the primary means available to railroads for realizing such competition, Congress merely shifted the conflict to a slightly more insulated forum.

88. Ibid., pp. 151–52.

89. Ibid., pp. 160–61. Hadley and his colleagues gained a strong and effective supporter in Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had little faith in the capacities of the courts or the Congress to rationalize railroad regulation. It was the President's duty to ensure that this difficult task was left to experts serving in an independent administrative agency [ibid., p. 254]. Insulated independent professionals were the only group capable of embodying the broader public interest at stake in regulatory questions.

90. Ibid., pp. 256, 264, 269.

91. Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92. Ibid., p. 315.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid.p. 422.p. 428.p. 426. pp. 420–21.

97. Ibid., chs. 3 and 6.

98. Hawley, “Social Policy,” p. 129.

99. Karl, Barry D., The Uneasy State: The United States From 1915 to 1943 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

100. Katz, Michael B., In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 121, 128, 135Google Scholar.

101. Rothman, David J.. Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), ch. 2Google Scholar.

102. Katz, Shadow p. 139.

103. Andrew J. Polsky, ”The Odyssey of the Juvenile Court: Policy Failure and Institutional Persistance in the Therapeutic State,” Studies in American Political Development 3:157–98.

104. Ibid., p. 173.

105. Ibid., p. 174.

106. Ibid.

107. Ibid., p. 177.

108. Ibid., p. 178.

109. Ibid., p. 122.

110. Walker, David B., Toward a Functioning Federalism (Boston: Little Brown, 1981), p. 62Google Scholar.

111. Berkowitz, Edward D. and McQuaid, Kim, “Bureaucrats as 'Social Engineers': Federal Welfare Programs in Herbert Hoover's America,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 39, no. 4 (10 1980): 325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112. Walker, Toward a Functioning Federalism p. 62.

113. Berkowitz and McQuaid, ”Bureaucrats as 'Social Engineers,'” p. 325.

114. Hays, “The Politics of Reform.”

115. For a brief history of the rise in grants-in-aid, see Walker, Toward a Functioning Federalism ch. 3.

116. There is a vast political science literature on these enduring relationships. One of the earliest commentators, Maass, Arthur, Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974)Google Scholar, documents the power of the Army Corps of Engineers. Other early commentators include: Freeman, J. Leiper, The Political Process (New York: Random House, 1965)Google Scholar; and Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1963)Google Scholar. There is an equally vast political science literature crticizing these pluralist models. See, for instance, Schattschneider, E. E., The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1960)Google Scholar, and Lowi, Theodore J., The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: W. Norton, 1969)Google Scholar. John Mark Hansen's work on policy networks in agriculture is unique in that it applies the theoretical framework of a political scientist to primary sources in tracing the historical development of a crucial policy network. See, for instance, Hansen, , “Choosing Sides: The Creation of an i Agricultural Policy Network in Congress, 1919–1932,” Studies in American Political Development 2 (1987): 183229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hansen, “Creating a New Politics: Development and Change of an Agricultural Policy Network in Congress, 1919–1980” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987). Historian Louis Galambos has also used these three-sided relationships between agency, Congressional committee and interest group to describe the development of the twentieth-century American state, labeling them “triocracies” in America at Middle AgeGoogle Scholar.

117. On the professionalization of the Federal government see Moser, Frederick C., Democracy and the Public Service (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 99133Google Scholar. See also Beer, “Modernization,” pp. 74–80 for a discussion of “technocratic politics.” Two classic studies of administrative trends before World War II are White, Leonard D., Trends in Public Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933)Google Scholar, and Waldo, Dwight, The Administrative State: A Study of Political Theory of American Public Administration (New York: Ronald Press, 1948)Google Scholar.

118. Mosher, Democracy and Public Service pp. 104–105.

119. For a good example of how “state capacity” can be measured see Skocpol, Theda and Finegold, Kenneth, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97 (Summer 1982): 255–74. I agree with Skocpol and Finegold that state capacity encompasses expertise. For the purposes of this article, however, I distinguish between the two in order to understand better the relationship between experts and the administrative infrastructure in which they workCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120. Friedson, Eliot, “Are Professions Necessary?,” p. 10, and for genera! discussion of sources of professional autonomy, Friedson, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

121. Karl, Barry D. and Katz, Stanley N. argue that foundations filled a need for national organization that, for political reasons, the federal government was unable to fill in “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 254; see also Karl, “Philanthropy and the Social Sciences,” andGoogle ScholarPubMedKohler, Robert E., “Philanthropy and Science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 129, no. 1 (1985): 1419. Ellis Hawley has summed up the need for “quasiprivatist” machinery in “Social Policy and the Liberal State.” Guy Alchon'sThe Invisible Hand of Planning is the most detailed account of how such mechanisms operated during the twenties and their limits in the thirtiesGoogle Scholar.

122. Beer, “The Modernization of American Federalism,” p. 75.

123. Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” p. 18.

124. Katznelson, Ira and Prewitt, Kenneth, “Constitutionalism, Class, and the Limits of Choice in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Fagen, Richard, ed., Capitalism and the State in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), p. 38Google Scholar, cited in ibid.

125. Rossiter, Margaret W., “The Organization of Agricultural Sciences” in Voss, John and Oleson, Alexandra, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modem America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 215Google Scholar.

126. Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity,” p. 271.

127. Ibid., pp. 270–73. Agriculture's department status dated back to the Civil War. It became a cabinet level department in 1889.

128. Ibid., p. 274; emphasis is theirs.

129. Quotation from ibid. On agricultural science initiating policy see Hadwiger, Don F., The Politics of Agricultural Research (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982), pp. 1522Google Scholar; and Kirkendall, Richard S., Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

130. Dupree, A. Hunter, “Central Scientific Organization in the United States Government,” Minerva 1, no. 4 (Summer 1963): 457–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The definitive account of those scientific fields in which the federal government was active before World War II and analysis of the nature of Federal support is Dupree's, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

131. Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity,” p. 273; Walker, Toward a Functioning Federalism p. 60.

132. Rossiter, “The Organization of Agricultural Sciences,” p. 215.

133. Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity,” p. 272.

134. Ibid.

135. Thus a large part of the Federal Government's Hygienic Laboratory's legitimacy was derived from the fact that it enforced the Biologies Act of 1902, despite the fact that it began to develop an independent research laboratory in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The same pattern obtained in the case of the Agriculture Department's enforcement of the Food and Drug Act of 1906. See Harden, Victoria A., Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887–1937 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 3, 42Google Scholar.

136. Despite the fact that Federal expenditures on research in 1900 totalled $11 million–a staggering amount compared to other sources–Federal spending did not dominate science because so much of it was devoted to practical day-to-day problem solving as op-posed to basic research (Geiger, Roger L., To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], pp. 29, 59)Google Scholar.

137. Harden, Inventing the NIH p. 42.

138. Ibid., p. 3.

139. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge pp. 29, 59.

140. Dupree, “Central Scientific Organization,” p. 462.

141. Kargon, Robert and Hodes, Elizabeth, “Karl Compton, Isaiah Bowman, and the Politics of Science in the Great Depression,” Isis 76 (1985): 316Google Scholar. For an account of some of the funding pressures facing the sciences and the failed effort to organize industrial support, see Davis, Lance E. and Kevles, Daniel J., “The National Research Fund: A Case Study in the Industrial Support of Academic Science,” Minerva 12, no. 2 (04 1974): 207–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

142. Kargon and Hodes, “Karl Compton,” p. 316.

143. Kargon, “Karl Compton”; Auerbach, Lewis E., “Scientists in the New Deal: A Pre-war Episode in Relations between Science and Government in the United States,” Minerva 3, no. 4 (Summer 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kevles, Daniel J., The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978), ch. 17Google Scholar.

144. See, for instance, Alchon, Guy, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science and the State in the 1920s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Critchlow, Donald T., The Brookings Institution, 1916–1952 (DeKalb, 111., Northern Illinois University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

145. Katz, Shadow p. 167.

146. Galambos, America at Middle Age pp. 42–47.

147. “Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1922–29,” Minerva 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 362.

148. Ibid., pp. 363, 386; see also, Martin Bulmer, “Governments and Social Science: Patterns of Mutual Influence,” and Skocpol, Theda, “Government Structures, Social Science and the Development of Economic and Social Policies,” in Bulmer, Martin, ed., Social Science Research and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

149. Karl, Barry D. and Katz, Stanley N., “The American Private Philanthropic Foundation and the Public Sphere, 1890–1930,” Minerva 19, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 238; see also Karl, “Philanthropy and the Social Sciences;”Google ScholarPubMed and Kohler, Robert E., “Philanthropy and Science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 129, no. 1 (1985): 1419Google Scholar.

150. Karl and Katz, “Philanthropic Foundation,” p. 243.

151. Kennedy, David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 50Google Scholar. For a good discussion of Progressive ambivalence towards the impact of war on American domestic politics see Vincent Tompkins, “The Pragmatic Dilemma: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne and World War I,” paper presented to the Twentieth Century American History Workshop, Harvard University, July 26, 1989.

152. Karl, Uneasy State p. 46.

153. Kevles, Daniel J., The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community m Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 137Google Scholar.

154. Ibid., p. 95.

155. Ibid., ch. 9.

156. Skowronek, Building pp. 274–76.

157. Cuff, Robert, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations During World War I (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, chs. 5–6; “Bernard Baruch: Symbol and Myth in Industrial Mobilization,” Business History Review 18, no. 2 (Summer 1969).

158. Karl, Uneasy State p. 46.

159. Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning pp. 68–75. Two institutions set up in response to the crisis did survive the war intact. The National Research Council turned from government sponsorship to corporate and foundation support in order to fund its research projects. NACA survived the war and established an important precedent following the war, funneling federal dollars to university laboratories. It proved to be an important model in meeting the scientific and technical demands of World War II, foreshadowing the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Re-search and Development (Heilbron, John L. and Kevles, Daniel J., “Science and Technology in U.S. History Textbooks: What's There–and What Ought to Be There,” unpublished paper presented to the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, 12, 1987, p. 13)Google Scholar.

160. The National Transportation Act (1920) completed the authority of the ICC. It granted the ICC far greater rate-making authority and for the first time allowed for a more cooperative approach, sanctioning pooling and allowing the ICC to plan rail consolidations. Without the crisis of World War I it is not clear that even in this leading case, the administrative state would have broken the grip of courts and parties (Skowronek, Building pp. 279–83).

161. Skowronek, Building pp. 279–83.

162. See, for instance, Hawley, Ellis W., “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat and the Vision of an Associative State, 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974): 116–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hawley, , “The Discovery and Study of a Corporate Liberalism,” Business History Review 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 308–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

163. Arnold, Peri E., “Herbert Hoover and the Continuity of American Public Policy,” Public Policy 20 (Fall 1972): 525–44Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

164. Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning chs. 5–8.

165. Though I view Hoover's thinking as growing directly out of one strand of Progressive thought, not as a sharp break with Progressive thought, I was led to reexamine Progressive attitudes towards interest groups by reading McConnell, Private Power: on the distinction between the “Progressive” view and “orthodox” view, see McConnell, pp. 3–4.

166. Kevles, Physicists ch. 16.

167. Ibid., pp. 250–8.

168. Ibid., pp. 260, 265.

169. Selznick, Philip, TV A and the Grass Roots: A Study of Politics and Organization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

170. Baldwin, Sidney, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968)Google Scholar.

171. Kevles, Physicists p. 285.

172. Kohler, “Management of Science,” pp. 279–306; Bulmer, “Philanthropy and Social Science,” pp. 406, 403.

173. Ibid., p. 406.

174. Kirkendall, Social Scientists.

175. Buhner, “Philanthropy and Social Science,” p. 347; Klausner, Samuel Z. and Lidz, Victor M., eds., The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

176. Klausner and Lidz, Nationalization of Social Sciences p. 5.

177. Karl, Uneasy State p. 113.

178. Ibid.

179. Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), chs. 7–8, and p. 48Google Scholar.

180. Ibid., pp. 244, 250.

181. Ibid., p. 249.

182. Ibid., pp. 256–7.

183. On the influence of World War II on the acceptance of Keynesian economics see Stein, Herbert, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 169–70Google Scholar. Collins, Robert M., in The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 115–72, finds a more divided response, in the immediate wake of the war. But by the mid-fifties, Keynesians had carried the dayGoogle Scholar.

184. Karl, Uneasy State p. 163.

185. Critchlow, Brookings pp. 108–9; 131–6.

186. Balogh, “Securing Support.”

187. Walker, Toward a Functioning Federalism p. 78.

188. Ibid., p. 79.

189. Arnold, “Hoover and Continuity,” p. 541.

190. Karl, Uneasy State pp. 160–68.

191. For the challenge to institutionalization of many of the New Deal programs that had I relied on social science expertise, see Patterson, James T., Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 288324; and Baldwin, Poverty and Politics pp. 365–94Google Scholar.

192. Dupree, “Central Scientific Organization,” pp. 457–8; and Science in the Federal Government.

193. The best work on the “crisis” attributed to the shortage of highly trained experts, the major role played by the Federal government in both publicizing and responding to this shortage, and the ultimate inflation of categories of expertise considered crucial to the state is an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation by FrankJ. Newman, entitled “The Era of Expertise: The Growth, the Spread and Ultimately the Decline of the National Commitment to the Concept of the Highly Trained Expert: 1945 to 1970” (Stanford University, July, 1981). On the professionalization of the postwar state see Frederick C. Mosher, Democracy and the Public Service pp. 99–133. Price, Don K. comments on the trend of scientists moving into administrative positions in The Scientific Estate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 6671Google Scholar. For the influence of World War II on the acceptance of Keynesian economics see Stein, Herbert, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)pp. 169–70Google Scholar. Collins, Robert M., in The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 115–72Google Scholar, finds a more divided response, in the immediate wake of the war. But by the mid-fifties, Keynesians had carried the day. On the wartime mobilization model, see Kevles, The Physicists ch. 20. Dupre, J. Stefan and Lakoff, Sanford, Science and the Nation: Policy and Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice Hall, 1962), pp. 911Google Scholar; and Price, Scientific Estate pp. 32–8 document wartime scientific breakthroughs. On the Manhattan Project's impact on funding for science see Dickson, David, The New Politics of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), pp. 56Google Scholar. As Gilpin, Robert put it in American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 25, “those wartime projects initiated a military revolution which changed irrevocably the relationship of science and war.” For a good comparison to the impact of science on World War I, see Gilpin, pp. 10–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

194. Edward Everett Hazlett to Eisenhower, 9/24/52, Dwight D. Eisenhower Personal Papers (1916–1953), Presidential Library, Abilene, Ks.

195. On military spending see Gaddis, John Lewis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 23Google Scholar. On Eisenhower's battle, see Alexander, Charles C., Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

196. U.S. National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for Science: III; The Federal Research and Development Budget, Fiscal Years 1953, 1954, and 1955 (Washington D.C.: U.S.G.P.O.), p. 15. For Eisenhower's farewell address see New York Times January 18, 1961. Quotation from Eisenhower to Directors and Chiefs of War Department, April 30, 1946, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower vol. 7, Chief of Staff Galambos, Louis ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 19701979), pp. 1046–47Google Scholar.

197. James B. Conant, “The Problems of Evaluation of Scientific Research and Development for Military Planning,” speech to the National War College, 2/1/52 quoted in Hershberg, James G., “'Over My Dead Body: James B. Conant and the Hydrogen Bomb',” (unpublished paper presented to the Conference on Science, Military and Technology, Harvard/ MIT, revised draft, 06 1987), p. 50Google Scholar.

198. For case studies on how the Cold War stimulated demand for centralized expertise in space and weaponry, seeMcDougall, WalterThe Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar; Herken, Gregg, Counsels of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); York, Herbert F., The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb (San Fransisco, W.H. Freeman, 1976)Google Scholar. Hershberg's “James B. Conant,” is an excellent study of one of the nation's leading scientist administrators and his response to Cold War weaponry. See also Dickson, The New Politics of Science pp. 26 and 119–23. Don K. Price's The Scientific Estate is a testimonial to the increased authority and political clout of scientists in postwar America. Price correctly attributes to the new role of science in the Federal government several major changes, including the narrowing gap between the public and private sectors, greater autonomy for and more initiative by executive agencies as a result of this expertise, and the adaptation of the research contract, leading to Federal support for open-ended research (pp. 15–21, 36–40, and 46–51). Robert Gilpin contrasts the revolution in scientific participation in weapons development during World War II and after, to the case of World War I in American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 9–12. The best survey of the wide range of responses across disciplines is Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985)Google Scholar; see also, Newman, “Era of Expertise.” On the impact of Sputnik, see McDougall, Walter A., The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar, chs. 6 and 7; “NASA, Prestige, and Total Cold War: The Expanded Purview of National Defense,” (paper delivered to the History of Science Society, Chicago, December, 1984), and “Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age–Toward the History of a Salvation,” American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (October 1982). For Bert the Turtle, see, Federal Civil Defense Administration, “Bert the Turtle Says ‘Duck and Cover’ ” (Washington, 1950), quoted in Brown, JoAnne, “'A is for Atom, B is for Bomb': Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948–1963,” The Journal of American History 75 no. 1 (06 1988): 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quotation on experts is from Veroff, Joseph, Kulka, Richard A., Douvan, Elizabeth, The Inner American: A Self-Portraitfrom 1957 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 194Google Scholar quoted in May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 27Google Scholar. For statistics on counselling, see ibid.

199. Statistics on Federal growth are from Crenson, Matthew A. and Rourke, Francis E., “By Way of Conclusion: American Bureaucracy since World War II,” in Galambos, Louis, ed., The New American State: Bureaucracies and Policies since World War II (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 147. On military/foreign policy bureaucracy see Charels E. Neu, “The Rise of the National Security Bureaucracy,” in Galambos, New American State pp. 85–108Google Scholar; Nelson, Anna Kasten, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (09 1985): 360–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rockman, Bert A., “America's Departments of State: Irregular and Regular Syndromes of Policy Making,” The American Political Science Review 75 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crenson and Rourke, “Conclusion,” p. 142. On new and expanded institutions that housed science, see Dickson, The New Politics of Science introduction and ch. 1; Price, The Scientific Estate; Greenberg, Daniel S., The Politics of Pure Science (New York: New American Library, 1967)Google Scholar; Bronk, Detlev W., “Science Advice in the White House: The Genesis of the President's Advisers and the National Science Foundation,” Technology In Society 2, nos. 1 and 2 (1980): 245256CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Rossiter, Margaret W., “Science and Public Policy Since World War II,” Osiris 1 (1985): 273294CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Saltzman, Kevin Michael, “Countdown to Sputnik: The Institutionalization of Scientific Expertise in the White House, 1945–1957” (undergraduate honors thesis in History, Harvard University, 03, 1988)Google Scholar, ch. 3. On the social sciences, see Samuel Klausner and Lidz, The Nationalization of the Social Sciences.

200. Newman, “Era of Expertise,” p. 55 for statistics, p. 59 for quotation, and ch. 3 for transformation of academic community vis-a-vis Federal support.

201. Politics in the proministrative state is the topic of my book, Cham Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). That monograph continues to trace the evolution of professional-Federal political development after World War II.

202. Price, Don K., “Endless Frontier or Bureaucratic Morass?Daedalus 107, no.2 (Spring 1978): 7592Google Scholar.

203. For a provocative account that argues that civil rights groups gained influence in insulated forums even as broad political support for their agenda subsided, see Thernstrom, Abigail M., Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Orfield, Gary also demonstrates the significance of organizational resources applied for similar ends in a far different set of insulated forums in The Reconstruction of Southern Education: The Schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (New York: WileyInterscience, 1969)Google Scholar. Even when civil rights leaders self-consciously played to the public, their campaign worked better when it was closely coordinated with an interest group approach directed towards narrow legislative ends. On the coordination between these two political techniques, see Garrow, David, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

204. Compare, for instance, to the emphasis in Chafe, William, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.