Forged Consensus

Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921-1953

David M. Hart

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691146546
  9780691026671
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400832422
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this thought-provoking book, David Hart challenges the creation myth of post--World War II federal science and technology policy. According to this myth, the postwar policy sprang full-blown from the mind of Vannevar Bush in the form of Science, the Endless Frontier (1945). Hart puts Bush's efforts in a larger historical and political context, demonstrating in the process that Bush was but one of many contributors to this complex policy and not necessarily the most successful one. Herbert Hoover, Karl Compton, Thurman Arnold, Henry Wallace, Robert Taft, and Curtis LeMay--along with more familiar figures like Bush--are among those whose endeavors he traces.

Hart places these policy entrepreneurs in the broad scheme of American political development, connecting each one's vision of the state in this apparently esoteric policy area to the central issues, events, and figures of mid-century America and to key theoretical debates. Hart's work reveals the wide range of ideas, often in conflict with one another, that underlay what later observers interpreted as a "postwar consensus." In Hart's view, these visions--and the interests and institutions that shape their translation into public policy--form the enduring basis of American politics in this important area. Policymakers today are still grappling with the legacies of the forged consensus.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1. The Malleability of American Liberalism and the Making of Public Policy
• Chapter 2. The Republican Ascendancy and the Crash: Associative Undercurrents in a Conservative Era, 1921-1932
• Chapter 3. Trial and Error: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the First Roosevelt Administration, 1933-1936
• Chapter 4. Breaking Bottlenecks and Blockades: The Heyday of Reform Liberalism, 1937-1940, and Its Postwar Consequences
• Chapter 5. Old Fights, New Accommodations: Wartime Experiments and the Demise of Reform Liberalism, 1940-1945
• Chapter 6. Groping toward Management: Science, Technology, and Macro- and Microeconomic Policy, 1945-1950
• Chapter 7. “The Crescendo of Hideous Invention”: The National Security State Comes of Age, 1945-1953
• Chapter 8. The Past in the Present: The “Hybrid” in the Cold War and Beyond
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author