The Associational State

American Governance in the Twentieth Century

Brian Balogh

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812224221, 9780812247213
• eBook ISBN: 9780812291377
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the wake of the New Deal, U.S. politics has been popularly imagined as an ongoing conflict between small-government conservatives and big-government liberals. In practice, narratives of left versus right or government versus the people do not begin to capture the dynamic ways Americans pursue civic goals while protecting individual freedoms. Brian Balogh proposes a new view of U.S. politics that illuminates how public and private actors collaborate to achieve collective goals. This "associational synthesis" treats the relationship between state and civil society as fluid and challenges interpretations that map the trajectory of American politics solely along ideological lines. Rather, both liberals and conservatives have extended the authority of the state but have done so most successfully when state action is mediated through nongovernmental institutions, such as universities, corporations, interest groups, and other voluntary organizations. The Associational State provides a fresh perspective on the crucial role that the private sector, trade associations, and professional organizations have played in implementing public policies from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Balogh examines key historical periods through the lens of political development, paying particular attention to the ways government, social movements, and intermediary institutions have organized support and resources to achieve public ends. Exposing the gap between the ideological rhetoric that both parties deploy today and their far less ideologically driven behavior over the past century and a half, The Associational State offers one solution to the partisan gridlock that currently grips the nation.

Chapter 1

The Enduring Legacy of Nineteenth-Century
Governance in the United States:
The Emergence of the Associational Order

That nineteenth-century Americans did not want the national government involved in their lives, that they preferred to leave things to state and local government and a free market unencumbered by government intervention and that they got their wish—a central government that did not do anything important—has informed popular interpretations of nineteenth-century U.S. history. It has influenced scholarly accounts of twentieth-century political development as well, and continues to frame twenty-first-century political debate, with partisans dividing over the battle to resurrect or bury America’s laissez-faire tradition.

But what would our account of state building in the twentieth century look like if the fundamental historical premise upon which Progressives and conservatives have waged war for the past one hundred years is flawed? What if the battle between big and small government, and the sharp line often drawn between public and private, is grounded in a false historical premise?

I argued in A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America that although the United States did indeed govern differently than its industrialized counterparts, it did not govern less. Americans did, however, govern less visibly. The key feature that distinguished the United States in the nineteenth century was the preference among its citizens for national governance that was inconspicuous. Americans preferred to use the language of the law, the courts, trade policy, fiscal subsidies—supported by indirect taxes—and partnerships with nongovernmental associations, instead of more overt, bureaucratic, and visible interventions into the political economy.¹

These patterns of interaction between citizens and the national government established over the course of the nineteenth century are best described by a phrase coined by Ellis Hawley and applied to his interpretation of the middle third of twentieth-century American history. As Hawley saw it, an “associative state” emerged in the early twentieth century. By then, many of the private, voluntary, and federated state and local organizations that were born in the late nineteenth century had come of age. Some were corporations that were national, if not international, in scope. Others were professional organizations like the American Medical Association. Still grounded in its state chapters, it began to have a national impact through its federated structure. Voluntary organizations like the International Red Cross were full-throated advocates for and recipients of the national government’s power to organize and coordinate public policy across state and local boundaries. National authority was exercised through these key intermediaries and in partnership with them, paving the way for public policies that were national in scope.²

The associative state overlaid the kinds of horizontal interlocking relationships between citizens and their localities and states that had evolved over the first 150 years of American history. These kinds of relationships were epitomized by the nested layers of jurisdictions that Americans called federalism. But an emerging associational order offered opportunities for citizens to break out of that older regime while avoiding the kind of central, hierarchical government that Americans had always feared and continue to resist today.

An organizational revolution, from the Gilded Age through the 1920s, powered reforms that were national in scope yet stopped short of building a powerful central state. Because the private and voluntary sectors of the civil sphere had outgrown local and regional constraints, many of the organizations that now inhabited these realms stood ready, willing, and able to work in conjunction with the national government, just as their more localized forerunners had partnered with state and local government as they strived to realize the commonwealth ideal of mixed enterprise for much of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century, these partnerships produced an impressive system of communications, starting with the U.S. Postal Service, and extending to roads, canals, and railroads. In the twentieth century, such partnerships ranged from farm supports to tax expenditures for so-called private health care provision.

By the twentieth century, the states themselves sought more systematic ways to coordinate their efforts in order to achieve national objectives, ultimately founding the National Governors Association in 1908. While it would take them a bit longer, cities, by the second half of the twentieth century, emerged along with the states as one of the nation’s more powerful national lobbies by, in many instances, lobbying for more national funding. To ignore the long-standing pattern of cooperation across the public/private boundary, or to neglect the public impact of organizations and federations that served national constituencies just because they did not wield plenary state power, is to misunderstand one of the great turning points in American history.³

Standard accounts of American political development characterize the Progressive Era as the moment that the rise of the modern administrative state emerged, replete with the bully pulpit and newly found centralized authority. It was the dawn of the “administrative state” as scholars like Stephen Skowronek have called it. While instances of such expansions in unitary state power are surely part of the story, they are the least representative part of the quest to tackle the national challenges that Americans faced at the turn of the century.⁴

The kind of state that Progressives advocated was best articulated by Eldon Eisenach when he talks about “parastates.” He defines them this way:

Progressives deeply doubted that the presently constituted national government and, indeed, most state governments were capable of achieving “stateness”—and for good reason. They were equally skeptical—absent a changed legal and institutional framework—about the willingness of large financial and industrial trusts to institutionalize and embody a larger public good. What they did instead was to impute “stateness” only to those institutions and practices consciously devoted to an articulate conception of the common good regardless of their legal or constitutional status.⁵

Although the transition evolved slowly over the course of the nineteenth century, the remnants of authority that had resided in “the self-government of households, towns, counties,” and the several states themselves were undermined by associations that cut across such little “republics,” allowing citizens working through these national associations and organizations to engage directly with, or serve as a substitute for, the national government. Bolstered by the very Fourteenth Amendment that was intended to protect the rights of freedmen, corporations took full advantage of their due process protections when states sought to rein in their growing reach. To be sure, their first purpose was to turn a profit, which they did handsomely, and it often came at the expense of those workers who rarely shared fully in those profits. Yet many of these same corporations were the first to promote the very kinds of practices that ultimately subdued parochial and short-sighted practices, whether it was selling meat that had not been inspected or decimating forests that happened to be easily accessible to local populations.⁶

As Theda Skocpol and others have demonstrated, national associations from the American Association for Labor Legislation to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs were as locally grounded as towns and counties. But properly organized and effectively mobilized, they offered citizens direct access to national policy decisions—from public health to civil service reform.⁷

This is not to say that national organizations displaced federalism. Powerful groups like the American Medical Association still relied heavily on state licensing laws to control entry into the profession. Ultimately, however, national associations did undermine the authority of political parties, which, until the late nineteenth century, had enjoyed the advantage of serving as one of the few nationally organized voluntary groups that could mobilize voters locally to address, or at least claim to address, national issues. By the 1920s, interest-group politics shaped both electoral preferences and policy outcomes that had once been the relatively exclusive domain of partisan politics.⁸

The emergence of partners in the private and voluntary sectors who were capable of operating on a national scale and the increased federated activities of states and even cities that on occasion partnered with the national government spurred Progressive Era development. Sometimes these associations served as catalysts toward national expansion and sometimes they were the deputized agents, distributing the national authority parceled out to them. This associational order addressed problems spawned by industrialization, international trade, and rapid urban expansion, arming reformers with a long-standing American approach to problem solving. It relied on the national government to serve as coordinator and facilitator.

Rather than command, national governance was more often hidden in plain sight. The organizational revolution that swept the nation from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era meant that reformers now had the wherewithal to execute this associational approach to national problems, as corporations, trade associations, interest groups, professional organizations, and federations of state and local officials expanded to continental proportions. In the wake of the exceptional, and exceptionally unsuccessful, attempts to maintain a strict division between public and private action during the Gilded Age, Progressives embraced this associational order, addressing problems that ranged from labor relations to conservation.

Ellis Hawley’s scholarship best captures these associational interactions, distilling the model in his article “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State.’ ” Hoover believed that the way to reconcile individual initiative while harmonizing interests “lay in the development and proper use of cooperative institutions, particularly trade associations, professional societies, and similar organizations among farmers and laborers.” Yet Hawley’s work, though highly influential among a handful of policy-oriented historians, never fully captured the hearts and minds of political historians. Rather than acknowledge the associational nature of national power, scholars, even today, remain wedded to accounts that chart the rise and fall of liberalism—framed as the battle between big and small government.⁹

Indeed, shoehorned into the twentieth-century historiographic strait-jacket of liberal, or Progressive, history, Hawley’s insistence that Hoover sought to capitalize upon the malleable boundaries between the public sector and private sphere, mediated by interest groups and encouraged by a political culture hospitable to pluralism, serves as a footnote for the more sophisticated interpretations of a transition from nineteenth-century classical liberalism to the big government future embodied in the New Deal. Other interpretations simply consign Hoover to a reactionary fate.

Besides the long odds that any synthetic reinterpretation would face in challenging a powerful scholarly approach that reinforced more popular understandings of history, associational interpretations suffered an even more daunting challenge. They lacked range. Compared to the work of Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, and Frederick Jackson Turner, who, between them, covered much of American history, an interpretative framework confined largely to twenty years stood little chance. It was hard to associate the associative state with much beyond Herbert Hoover’s rise to power and some of FDR’s early programs, like the National Industrial Recovery Act. Even the organizational synthesis, which embraced Hawley’s interpretation, was grounded in the first half of the twentieth century and, infamously, used Robert Wiebe’s “island communities” as its Gilded Age launching pad—a move that only reinforced notions of the “modern” state’s laissez-faire precursors.¹⁰

Yet Hawley was on to something big. Indeed, he began to sketch an interpretation that offered a powerful alternative to the standard Progressive story of American political development. Hawley got the middle right. And Eisenach’s conception of parastates illustrates the Progressive Era reliance upon the cooperative governance that the associational order was built upon. It now remains for scholars to apply that interpretive framework to the beginning of American political development and to its most recent twists and turns.

With some allowances for time and place, and greater attention to the law than Hawley and Eisenach devoted, many of the central patterns of governance forged in nineteenth-century America anticipated the kinds of associations among private, voluntary, and government actors that Hawley and Eisenach wrote about. What’s more, the national government’s role as coordinator, catalyst, and at times regulator endured for much of the twentieth century as well. Once the false dichotomies between laissez-faire and big government are exposed, and once the long history of mixing public and private authority in the nineteenth century is revealed, the pervasive nature of associational governance in America, and, perhaps more importantly, its enduring legacies, can serve as a powerful template for understanding two and a half centuries of American political development.

Five Enduring Patterns

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Americans eschewed visible, centralized, national administration by the central government. That citizens resisted a national bureaucratic state does not mean that they did not ask the national government to do a lot for them. Combining national resources and private initiative proved to be a consistent formula for political success in policies ranging from land distribution to internal improvements. Subsidizing a communications system that provided access to newspapers in remote locations stimulated national political debate in a polity that was highly decentralized. The general government was instrumental in constructing a national market—a contribution soon washed from memory in a torrent of congratulations for America’s exceptional stature among supposedly far more statist industrialized nations. During the Gilded Age, the federal judiciary labored mightily to separate public from private action. It failed to do so, opening the door for the reintegration of public and private endeavors on a national scale in the twentieth century.

There were plenty of exceptions to this rule. Americans consistently supported a more energetic, even bureaucratically empowered state, whenever they perceived their security to be threatened—a second pattern that played out over the course of the nineteenth century. The Civil War was the most pronounced example of this pattern—especially the Confederacy’s Leviathan-like intervention into the private sphere. The same phenomenon was evident with the War of Independence and, to a lesser degree, the wars of 1812 and with Mexico. Americans were willing to grant the federal government even more power when Indians threatened security and economic development. The Trail of Tears was forged by an extraordinary mobilization of federal resources and naked use of force.

A third pattern was the tendency to endorse unmediated national power when it was geographically removed from the locus of established authority. This was the case in the territories that eventually became states, which were governed directly by the national government, and for a short period, in the early twentieth century, in territories acquired during the Spanish-American War. It also was the pattern established through the programs aimed at western resource development, such as irrigation and forestry. It was no coincidence that the U.S. Army proved to be a crucial resource here too. Americans who would never have tolerated this threat to their autonomy back East supported it out West. It was used to subdue Indians and police national forests. Eventually, it was used to build dams and determine grazing rights.

The key variable was the availability of intermediary institutions. Once they existed, Americans preferred that they be used, rather than extending national authority directly. But the principle of empowering the central government at the periphery prevailed precisely because such intermediaries did not exist out West or abroad. Sustaining national authority in such remote regions required that intermediaries, starting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Toward an Associational Synthesis
• Chapter 1. The Enduring Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Governance in the United States: The Emergence of the Associational Order
• Chapter 2. Scientific Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot’s Path to Progressive Reform
• Chapter 3. “Mirrors of Desires”: Interest Groups, Elections, and the Targeted Style in Twentieth-Century America
• Chapter 4. Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America
• Chapter 5. Meeting the State Halfway: Governing America, 1930–1950
• Chapter 6. Making Pluralism “Great”: Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society
• Conclusion. How We Got Here
• Notes
• Index