Beginning in the late 1840s advocates of municipal reform in the United States campaigned to throw rascals out of public office, reconstruct the legal foundations of municipal government, and install regimes of at least modest virtue in place of local government's shameless vice. More profoundly, reformers hoped to replace municipal political cultures of partisanship and patronage with different values and expectations. In these efforts reformers met with the militant opposition of party leaders and their constituents; party leaders too had a vision of what local political life ought to be, and of their own central role in making it so.

The election of 1912 retains its hold on the imagination of students of American political development. Long interpreted as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Martin Sklar has recently argued that the old order had passed by 1912. In law and economy, competitive-proprietary capitalism had been eclipsed by administration. The political conflict was now over who would administer prices and investment, the corporation of the state?

The following essay elaborates the proposition that changing work relations has been a major problematic of American constitutional development. By work relations I refer to the hiring and firing, compensation, and discipline, of persons assigned to perform designated tasks in public and private settings. By “problematic” I have in mind cause and project, dynamic and rationale, of constitutional duration and change. By “constitutional development” I mean the authoritative reordering of government institutions or of the transactions between government and society.

Recently, Victoria Hattam and William Forbath have separately defended new explanations of the development of the distinctive, relatively apolitical labor movement in the United States. Their explanations differ from earlier accounts that saw the failure of socialism in the United States as the result of either the distinctive liberal tradition in the United States or of ethnic and other divisions within the working class. Their alternative view is that distinctive structural features of the U.S. state – in particular, the independent judiciary – played a decisive role in shaping the development of the labor movement. This paper questions some of the shared assumptions of these new accounts, focusing on Victoria Hattam's recent book, Labor Visions and State Power. Without denying that the judiciary played an important role in the development of the U.S. labor movement, I want to suggest a different account of the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches.

From today's vantage point, the radical potential originally envisioned for parcel post is hard to imagine. One historian facilely characterized postal savings banks (1910) and parcel post (1912) as small incremental advances in the evolution of state action: “From legislation designed to restrain harmful practices in big business, it was but a step for the government to embark in business on its own accord.” Yet parcel post marked a dramatic departure in public-sector initiatives: it put the federal government in the transportation business to compete with well-established private firms. That the United States started parcel post so late – it was the last major industrialized nation to do so – suggests the extent to which the service raised fundamental questions about the proper sphere of state action.

The period roughly encompassing the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century has been described as one in which America embarked on a “search for order.” It has also been characterized as a period that witnessed the genesis of the modern American administrative state. The time was one of profound change, marking the transition from a principally agrarian to an industrial society and economy. Positions on the most contentious issues of the era tended to fall along sectional lines that reflected regional disagreement on the scope, as well as the propriety, of that transition. Even after appeals to the “bloody shirt” had waned, the fundamentally sectional nature of the national debate over these issues, and the state's capacity to deal with them, remained.