Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (review)

We know that the progressive era incubated the modern American state, but we are at odds over explanations for how progressivism shaped that development. Opening with a penetrating survey of competing interpretations of progressivism and American state development, Harrison observes that one of the few points of agreement among scholars is that Congress was "reactive, residual, even epiphenomenal" (10). Yet, new administrative institutions and novel regulatory powers required new laws for their establishment. "In an important sense the new American state was a congressional creation." (10) Harrison's major aims in this excellent book are twofold. First, he analyzes congressional action on progressive reform legislation. Second, and consequently, he examines Congress' imprint on early twentieth-century state development.

Harrison ably uses both empirical and theoretical literatures in history and political science to frame his research. The study's empirical focus is congressional action within three areas—railroad regulation, labor disputes, and the regulation of urban life in the District of Columbia. Each issue arena was prominent for progressive reform. Simultaneously, each is sufficiently distinct to test whether congressional progressives supported a cross-issue reform agenda or whether they were issue-specific reformers. Using legislative roll-call data, Harrison employs Guttmann scaling to discern the relative propensity of legislators to vote for reform in an issue arena, identifying the spectrum of reform voting from weak to strong. Then calculating Yule's Q for his roll-call data, Harrison identifies how legislators' votes cluster, according to their propensity to vote for or against reforms in multiple issue arenas. He finds that reformist legislators clustered around specific issue arenas and did not unify behind a progressive agenda. Proponents of strengthened railroad regulation were not necessarily supporters of labor reforms or "model city" legislation for the District of Columbia.

Harrison demonstrates that legislators' propensities to support reform bills were related to both constituency and party interests. Democrats from the agricultural and extractive constituencies of the West and South supported railroad regulation but not reforms for the District of Columbia. But constituency economic interests were not the sole determinant of reform voting; Harrison's analysis differs importantly from Sander's argument that the agricultural periphery sent progressive reformers to Congress and created progressivism.¹ He argues that congressional reform voting was influenced by the political calculations of legislators as well as by constituency economic interests. Democrats, even those who were hostile to populism, had partisan organizational incentives to oppose the positions of the dominant, conservative Republican congressional leadership. Moreover, stymied by their party's political machine, many Midwestern Republicans broke with the conservatives to support some reform legislation.

Finally, Harrison asks how Congress' fragmented progressive reform influenced the formation of a more unified, expanded, and bureaucratized state. He looks to the executive branch for an answer. Policy leadership by progressive-era presidents, and their entrepreneurial officials, established a multi-issue agenda of reform and muted the congressional reformers' preferences for clear statutory standards in favor of administrative regulatory discretion. The tug of war between congressional institutional characteristics and a modernizing executive created "the unevenness of state making in early twentieth-century America" (275). Harrison's insights into the contributions of institutional politics to American state formation are rich. This important contribution deserves attention from historians, political scientists, and sociologists seeking to understand American political development.