By the 1890s, the United States had consolidated its continental empire and was beginning to redefine its relations with the rest of the world. America was now a very large, unified nation. Its population had grown by more than 25 percent in the previous decade, and the great tide of immigrants was still flowing across the Atlantic. Having just become the world's leading industrial producer, the United States was tempted to flex its new economic muscles and maybe even assert its power abroad. Maybe even among the developed nations of Europe.

It was not at all clear, however, what the United States would do or should do. It was unclear to most Americans that it was wise to intrude on the affairs of other powerful nations. George Washington's famous Farewell Address had established the central principle that had guided American foreign policy in the nineteenth century. Over two centuries later, it's still worth quoting.

Apparently down and out by the end of the 1970s, the United States made a remarkable comeback. Nations don't always come back, don't always make it through these transitions successfully. In the early nineteenth century, the British had tremendous advantages on the basis of their success as the “first-movers” in the first industrial revolution. But the British steadily lost out to newcomers in the second industrial revolution. So America's ability to change course, to transform many of its basic institutions and policies, and to recover its leading position in the world economy deserves some serious attention. This recovery is all the more important because it took place against the background of total collapse in the Soviet empire.

As became apparent during these decades, one of the great weaknesses of totalizing, authoritarian polities like the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China was their tension with professional elites. Fascist regimes have normally had the same problem. The Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Nazi assaults on the universities – these experiences stunted the development of professional expertise. Professionals and professional institutions need to be nurtured in loosely controlled environments that foster debate. Authoritarian governments curdle professional discourse by encouraging intellectual and ideological conformity and compliance. The United States had vibrant professional cultures and organizations, and they played an important role in America's recovery from the serious stagflation of the 1970s. Professional elites also helped the European democracies catch up gradually with America's ability to generate productivity increases and economic growth. The professionals on both sides of the Atlantic didn't always get it right, but they gave their societies the kind of public and private expertise essential to economic recovery.

Houston, Texas, in the early 1960s was typical in many regards of the fast-growing southern and western cities of the United States. It was growing out, with new minicores of banks and shopping centers spreading around a flat exterior. The Gulf Plain was low and marshy and inviting to the real estate investors who were guiding Houston's growth. The city was miles from Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico, but Houston's avid promoters had long ago developed a channel that brought oceangoing ships right up to the city. The oil, gas, and petrochemical industries were thriving, as were the banking, legal, and transportation businesses. These provided services to the core industries and jobs for all those non-Texans pushing into the suburbs. They were moving into new apartments and ranch-style houses, sending their children to new suburban schools. Everything seemed new.

The suburban culture and economy were omnipresent in Houston, which had virtually no downtown, hardly any city center as late as the 1960s. The automobile was as important to everyday life in Houston as it was in Los Angeles. As the new houses went up, the city often didn't even bother to build sidewalks. Who would walk? Highways cut through the city, linking the suburbs, the shopping centers, and the public schools that were the essential base for the universities and the professions. The schools were growing in pace with the suburbs. The roads that were the city's lifelines also brought workers from the other side of the city – the African-American and Hispanic laborers, men and women who played as crucial a role in Houston life as air conditioning. Houston had the temperature and humidity of Calcutta, India, and on hot summer nights you could hear the steady dripping of water from the broad leaves of the tropical bushes.

In 1890, a young scientist at Columbia College, Michael Pupin was just getting settled in the school's new Department of Electrical Engineering. He had recently returned to New York City from Europe with a new bride and a Ph.D. in hand and was optimistic about his ability to make a success of the department despite its primitive facilities. His office and laboratory were housed in a tiny brick building that the students called a “cowshed.” Even more distressing was the lack of equipment and funds. Pupin and his co-teacher had to give public lectures to raise the $300 they needed to buy additional equipment.

Fortunately Pupin was used to hustling. He had first come to the United States from Serbia in 1874, armed with little more than a good secondary education and an intense drive to get ahead in his new home, New York City. This was the New York of Boss Tweed, whose corrupt regime was crumbling even though his ward-level political machine would continue to dominate the city's politics for decades. Many immigrants were drawn to politics, but Pupin applied his sharp mind to languages and science and was able to enter Columbia College, where he graduated with honors in 1883. After two years studying mathematics at Cambridge, he went to Germany and completed a Ph.D. in 1889 at Berlin University. Back in New York, he would remain at Columbia, teaching electrical engineering and mathematical physics until his retirement in 1931.

Whether Americans lived on a farm or in a city, they had long been the least-governed people in the developed world. State and local governments did their best to fill this void. But insofar as modernization in Europe involved the creation of national administrative states – that is, a national government with a formidable bureaucracy – the United States was still premodern as late as the 1890s and apparently enjoying its unique brand of political innocence. Of course this bliss didn't last. During the next four decades, the country struggled to create new forms of national governance consistent with the needs of a very large, urban, industrial society.

In a rapidly expanding democracy with fluid class boundaries and an economy experiencing alternating surges of growth and depression, state building was at best a haphazard undertaking. The profession that played the leading role in that bitterly contested and bruising process was the law. Party politicians, reformers, the clergy, bureaucratic entrepreneurs within government, even economists, sociologists, philosophers, and an occasional historian made proposals. As would the representatives of the myriad interest groups eager to shape every political decision. Business would, of course, have its say. But it would largely be lawyers who would craft the compromises essential to an American democratic society. The lawyers dominated the entrepreneurial gap in politics. Like young parents trying to shop with their children in tow, the lawyers usually had more help than they wanted. But their profession was accustomed to conflict, hardened to defeat, and strategically positioned to shape the emerging American administrative state.