1. Wilson, Woodrow, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (06 1887)Google Scholar. No text in the field of public administration has been subject to more hermeneutical attention. For examples, see Stillman, Richard J. II, “Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration: A New Look at an Old Essay,” American Political Science Review G7 (06 1973)Google Scholar; Ostrom, Vincent, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Riggs, Fred W., “Relearning Old Lessons: The Political Context of Development Administration,” Public Administration Review 25 (03 1965)Google Scholar; Miewald, Robert D., “The Origins of Wilson's Thought: The German Tradition and the Organic State,” in Politics and Administration: Woodrow Wilson and American Public Administration, ed. Rabin, Jack and Bowman, James S. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1984)Google Scholar; Cuff, Robert D., “Wilson and Weber: Bourgeois Critics in an Organized Age,” Public Administration Reinew 38 (1978)Google Scholar; and Wright, Deil S., “A Century of the Intergovernmental Administrative State: Wilson's Federalism, New Deal Intergovernmental Relations, and Contemporary Intergovernmental Management,” in A Centennial History of the American Administrative State, ed. Chandler, Ralph Clark (New York: Free Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

2. Chandler, Centennial History.

3. The public administration tradition also has made a strong imprint on the historiography of 20th-century America. The ‘organizational synthesis’ stressing the growth of state capacity and the nationalization of politics and policy has supplanted consensus school interpretations at the center of the American history profession. For a sympathetic yet skeptical assessment, see Brinkley, Alan, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges,” Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984)Google Scholar.

4. For representative examples or overviews, see Benjamin, Roger and Elkin, Stephen, eds., The Democratic State (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bensel, Richard, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Block, Fred, Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Carnoy, Martin, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Evans, Peter, Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Heclo, Hugh, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Krasner, Stephen D., Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Krasner, Stephen D., “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16 (01 1984)Google Scholar; Lowi, Theodore J., The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969)Google Scholar; Nordlinger, Eric A., On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and, perhaps most influential of all within American political studies, Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. The foundational article of the new statist work is Nettl, J. P., “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (07 1968)Google Scholar.

5. For an essay that critiques the new state-centered tendencies in American and comparative politics for their implicit conservatism in supporting a strong state and for being insufficiently attuned to the values of the liberal tradition, see Binder, Leonard, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (01 1986)Google Scholar. A useful overview of developments in the political science discipline is Kesselman, Mark, “The Conflictual Evolution of American Political Science: From Apologetic Pluralism to Trilateralism and Marxism,” in Political Values and Private Power in American Politics, ed. Green-stone, J. David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar. A far less sympathetic reading is provided by Almond, Gabriel A., “The Return to the State,” American Political Science Review 82 (09 1988)Google Scholar.

6. Skowronek, New American State, pp. 286, vii. A recent analysis of the comparatively diffuse qualities of the American national state along these lines is Campbell, Colin, Governments Under Stress: Political Executives and Key Bureaucrats in Washington, London, and Ottawa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

7. A much fuller analysis of political coalitions in the Democratic party than can be found here or in section VII is presented in Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Liberalism and the Southern Veto: The Making of the Modern Democratic Party,” in process.

8. There is a massive literature on the New Deal. Representative and influential examples include Leuchtenberg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)Google Scholar; Braeman, John, Bremner, Richard, and Brody, David, eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Karl, Barry D., The Uneasy State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Gourevich, Peter Alexis, “Breaking with Orthodoxy: The Politics of Economic Policy Responses to the Depression of the 1930's,” International Organization 38 (Winter 1984)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Thomas, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38 (Winter 1984)Google Scholar; and Skocpol, Theda and Finegold, Kenneth, “Economic Intervention and the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97 (Summer 1982)Google Scholar. A useful recent overview of the literature, with a fine annotated bibliography, is provided in Badger, Anthony J., The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Nooneday Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

9. Hofstadter, Richard, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Patrician as Opportunist,” in Hofstadter, , The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948)Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., p. 317.

11. Marquand, David, The Unprincipled Society: Sew Demands and Old Principles (London: Cape, 1987)Google Scholar. We have found particularly useful Barry's, Brian review of this book, “Growth at a Price,” in the Times Literary Supplement, 02 26–03 3, 1988, p. 207Google Scholar.

12. The AAA also had a corporatist aspect, especially after the ‘purge of the liberals’ and the development of very close ties between its commodity sections and organized growers.

13. Developmentalism and fiscalism need not be incompatible. Many New Dealers, including early American Keynesians like Alvin Hansen, saw them as complementary approaches, but they came to be quite starkly competing alternatives in the 1940s.

14. Clawson, Marion, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. xviGoogle Scholar.

15. For a fine discussion of these issues, see Karl, Barry, “Presidential Planning and Social Science Research: Mr. Hoover's Experts,” Perspectives in American History 3 (1969)Google Scholar.

16. National Resources Committee, Progress Report (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 06 1939)Google Scholar, cited in Rockwell, L. G., “National Resources Planning: The Role of the National Resources Planning Board in the Process of Government” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Politics, Princeton University, 1942), p. 95Google Scholar.

17. The roots of the Bureau of the Budget can be found in the Taft Administration. In 1909, in collaboration with Congress, the President initiated an Inquiry into Re-Economy and Efficiency, which later became the President's Commission on Economy and Efficiency. Frederick Cleveland, the Director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, and the initiator of the notion of a budget within the world of public administration, chaired the Commission, thus reflecting Taft's support for an executive budget as a means to enhance the presidency and coordinate federal agencies. The centerpiece of the Commission's recommendations was the creation of a Budget Division to develop an annual expenditure plan buttressed by a Bureau of Central Administrative Control to act as “the consolidated information and statistical arm of the entire national government.” In 1912, Taft forwarded these recommendations, along with a sample budget, to the Congress, which ignored it and, instead, followed the traditional budgeting procedures whereby the Department of the Treasury prepared a Book of Estimates for the coming fiscal year. Under the impact of World War I, budgeting returned to the national agenda. From 1919 to 1921, the executive and legislative branches tussled over the character of federal budgeting capacity. The resultant Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 that established the Bureau of the Budget institutionalized and enhanced executive authority and congressional oversight. This summary draws from the discussion in Skowronek, New American State pp. 186–211 (quotation from p. 206).

18. For a useful overview of the history of the Bureau, see Marx, Fritz Morstein, “The Bureau of the Budget: Its Evolution and Present Role,” part 1, American Political Science Review 39 (08 1945)Google Scholar. A fine history of the first two decades of the BOB can be found in Van Patten, Paul L. Jr, “B.O.B. and F.D.R.: A Stage in the Growth of the Institutional Presidency” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Government and International Relations, University of Notre Dame, 1983)Google Scholar. Van Patten's main focus is on the period of rapid growth between 1939 and 1942.

19. Brownlow and Merriam had traveled to Europe in 1934. This trip, in the view of a leading student of administrative reorganization, “provided a normative foundation for their committee's report.” Arnold, Peri E., Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 99Google Scholar.

20. Cited in Clawson, New Deal Planning, p. 183.

21. In section VII, we suggest a causal account that focuses on the political coalition within the Democratic party, but we do so in only a very schematic way. In this article, our aim is relatively modest: to trace the ties between different kinds of administrative capacity and the substantive qualities governing the rules of transaction between state and economy.

22. Warken, Philip W., A History of the National Resources Planning Board, 1933–1943 (New York: Garland Press, 1979), p. 108Google Scholar.

23. “Industrial Location and National Policy,” Interim Report, May 1941, p. 23, cited in Warken, History, p. 152.

24. Key documents included After Defense—What? (1941), Security, Work, and Relief Policies (1941), After the War—Full Employment (1942), Post-War Planning—Full Employment, Security, Building America (1942), Demobilization and Readjustment (1943), and National Resources Development Report (1943).

25. National Resources Planning Board, Post-War Planning (Washington, D.C.: Government Publishing Office, 1942), p. 32Google ScholarPubMed.

26. Smith, Harold D., “The Budget in Transition,” in Budgeting: An Instrument of Planning and Management, Unit I: The Evolution of the Budgetary Concept in the Federal Government, ed. Seckler-Hudson, Catheryn (Washington, D.C.: American University, 1944), p. 73Google Scholar.

27. Roth, Harold H., “The Executive Office of the President: A Study of Its Development with Emphasis on the Period 1939–1953” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, American University, 1958), p. 222Google Scholar.

28. For a discussion of the role of economists in Washington in this period, see Stein, Herbert, “The Washington Economics Industry,” American Economics Review 76 (05 1986)Google Scholar.

29. For a discussion, see Bailey, Stephen Kemp, Congress Makes a Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1950), p. 25Google Scholar.

30. Stone, Donald C., “Planning as an Administrative Process,” in Seckler-Hudson, Catheryn, ed., Budgeting: An Instrument of Planning and Management, Unit IV: The Relationship of Budgeting to Planning and Management (Washington, D.C.: American University, 1944), p. 118Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., p. 116.

32. Contrast Stone's statement to the conclusion of a report of the Senate Committee on Appropriations entitled “Transfer of Employees, Conserving Office Space…and Promotion of Economy and Efficiency”—the Tydings Report. The Tydings Report strongly criticized “certain personnel of the Fiscal Division of the Bureau of the Budget for ‘directly and indirectly…making policies on taxes and expenditures’ (i.e. deficit financing and deficit spending) without the approval of Congress.” This exemplifies what became the dominant attitude in the Congress, that the strengthening of the policy-making capacities of the Executive branch was at its expense. Only a detailed examination of both the technical/administrative and the fiscal/macroeconomic functions of the BOB can make sense of these seemingly contradictory statements. U.S. Senate, Committee on Appropriations, Transfer of Employees, Conserving Office Space…and Promotion of Economy and Efficiency, July 22, 1942, cited in Harold H. Roth and Catheryn Seckler-Hudson, “Annotated Bibliography on Public Budgeting: An Analytic Guide to Useful Materials,” in Seckler-Hudson, Unit I, p. 155.

33. Harold D. Smith, “Government Planning for a High Level of Employment in the Post-War Period,” in Seckler-Hudson, Unit IV, p. 147.

34. Colm, Gerhard, “Federal Budgeting and National Fiscal Policy,” in Seckler-Hudson, Catheryn, ed., Budgeting: An Instrument of Planning and Management, Unit II: Federal Budgeting and the National Fiscal Pohcy (Washington, D.C.: American University, 1944), p. 16Google Scholar.

35. Cited in Bartels, Andrew H., “The Office of Price Administration and the Legacy of the New Deal, 1939–1946,” The Public Historian 5 (Summer 1983): 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36. Ibid., p. 12.

37. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, “White House Statement and Executive Order to ‘Hold the Line’ on Prices and Wages,” Executive Order No. 9328, April 8, 1943, in Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. Rosenman, Samuel I. (New York: Random House, 1945)Google Scholar.

38. Bailey, Congress, pp. 168–69.

39. For a discussion, see Flash, Edward S., Economic Advice and Presidential Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 16Google Scholar.

40. Nourse, Edwin G., “The Employment Act of 1946 and a System of National Book-keeping,” American Economic Review 37 (05 1947): 23Google Scholar.

41. This need not have been the case. As David Naveh observes, “The academic character of the CEA was not the product of a clear-cut organizational plan.” Naveh, David, “The Political Role of Economic Advisors: The Case of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisors, 1946–1976,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (Fall 1981): 493Google Scholar.

42. Broughton, Philip, Man Meets Job—How Uncle Sam Helps (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1941), p. 7Google Scholar.

43. Adams, Leonard P., The Public Employment Service in Transition, 1933–1968 (Ithaca: New-York School of Industrial Relations, Cornell University, 1969), p. 27Google Scholar; and Broughton, Man Meets Job, p. 9.

44. “The Question of Federal or State Control of the Employment Services,” Congressional Digest 25 (April 1946): 104.

45. Adams, Public Employment Service, p. 28.

46. Ibid., p. 29.

47. Rosenman, Public Papers, p. 208.

48. Cited in “The Question,” p. 107.

49. Cited in “The Question,” p. 107.

50. Shonfield, Andrew, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Face of Public and Private Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

51. Jeffries, John W., “The ‘New’ New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism,” Political Science Quarterly 105 (Fall 1990)Google Scholar.

52. For relevant data and a useful discussion of the role of Southern Democrats in Congress, see Brady, David W., Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

53. From one vantage point, the Democrats exhibited very high voting cohesion in the 1930s except on questions of civil rights. Such is the perspective of Brady, for example. Yet this perspective misses the fact that even when the South's share of the Democratic sides of the House and Senate were reduced to minority status during the heyday of the New Deal, the South strongly affected the content of New Deal legislation. Thus, domestic and agricultural labor were excluded from labor protection and social insurance provisions and the administration of most programs was organized to allow for wide variations in regional practices. Roosevelt was disinclined to tamper with the social and political bases of the Democratic party, and was especially willing to help reproduce diverse regional labor markets rather than strive for a single integrated one.

54. Skowronek, pp. 284, 287.

55. Ibid., pp. 288, 289, 290.

56. Ibid., p. 292.

57. Ibid., p. 285.