Author(s): | Reagan, Patrick D. |
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Reviewer(s): | Tomlinson, Jim |
Published by EH.NET (February 2001)
Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: the Origins of New Deal
Planning, 1890-1943 . University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Pp. xii +
362. ISBN 1-55849-230-5.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Jim Tomlinson, Brunel University, London.
This book provides a detailed account of the evolution of the movement for
national planning in the US between 1890 and 1943, when Congress ended funding
for the National Resources Planning Board. Much of the account is woven around
the careers and ideas of five key participants: Frederic A. Delano, Charles E.
Merriam, Wesley C. Mitchell, Henry. S. Denison and Beardsley Ruml. During the
1920s and 1930s, these five, Patrick Reagan argues, evolved a distinctive
version of planning, sharply contrasted with the plans of the contemporary
authoritarian states of Europe and Japan. The impetus for this American form
of planning came partly from the experience of state intervention to support
the American participation in the First World War and partly from the
Hoover-led attempts to deal with the unemployment problem of the immediate
post-war years. New Deal planning is seen as closely following these
precedents, though receiving new impetus from the great depression, and moving
in a more statist direction under the stimulus of Roosevelt’s actions to
counteract the great depression.
The key characteristic of this planning was its attempt to find a way between
nineteenth-century liberalism, and especially its sharp distinction between
the public and private sectors, and twentieth century collectivism. This third
way embodied voluntary co-operation between organised business and government
(with a token role for unions and others) guided by experts working in close
co-operation with political leaders. These experts would bring to bear the
knowledge created by the nascent social sciences, and in so doing would
prevent the economic and social breakdown which in so many parts of the world
was creating dictatorships of the right and left. This version of planning was
unambiguously elitist, excluded the unorganised, and showed little concern for
issues around the distribution of income and wealth. Nevertheless, it provided
the foundations for much of the discussion of planning that became an
important element in post World War II politics, at least down to the 1960s.
The biographical approach to the evolution of planning proves an effective way
of bringing into focus both the convergence of concerns and themes which
underlay these ideas of planning, and the informal networks which transformed
the ideas into policy initiatives. Equally, the author’s aim to place planning
in the mainstream of inter-war American politics (rather than an ‘extremist’
response to the great depression) is successfully attained. The contingencies
of history are also nicely brought out in the account of the abolition of the
NRPB, which was based on a combination of Congressional manoeuvrings for
power, absurd ideological posturing by Republicans, and political
maladroitness (and bad faith?) on the part of the President.
The author is repetitive in his claims for American exceptionalism with regard
to planning. (Indeed there is rather a lot of repetition even of minor points:
we are told at least six times that Congress in 1943 mandated the sending of
the NRPB records to the National Archives). This claim for a peculiarly
American version of planning is sound where the contrast is made with
authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Japan. But it is
less persuasive if the comparison is made with other democracies that faced
economic and social crisis in the 1920s and 1930s. In Britain, for example, as
Daniel Ritschel in his The Politics of Planning (Oxford, 1997) has recently
emphasised, the ideology of planning was widely embraced across the political
spectrum. Many of the ideas articulated at that time had close affinity with
the contemporary American version of planning, though what was also striking
in Britain was the wide diversity of ideas that could come under that umbrella
term. In this comparative light America appears less unique, more in a common
mould of democracies where, many felt, ‘planning’ would provide a route to
economic stability which free market policies seemed no longer to secure.
Jim Tomlinson is Professor of Economic History, and Head of Department of
Government, Brunel University, London. He has published widely in the field of
macro-economic policy, industrial development and economic history,
principally on Britain. His most recent publication is The Politics of
Decline: Understanding Post-War Britain, Longmans 2000.
Subject(s): | Macroeconomics and Fluctuations |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |