Entrepreneurial Bureaucrats

Daniel P. Carpenter. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001. xvi + 479 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, archival sources, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

In the most recent installment of his biography about Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris pays considerable attention to the social life of Washington to explain how political decisions were made. ¹ For example, the president's famous Tennis cabinet, where Roosevelt met with important government players to hammer out policy, politics, and electoral strategy was as important an arena as formal Cabinet meetings or the halls of Capitol Hill. Morris points out how Roosevelt successfully worked with individuals such as a Gifford Pinchot, one of the most favored members of the Tennis cabinet, not only because they shared political ideas but because they were educated at certain types of institutions, they were well traveled in Europe, and they were closely connected to prominent families. Morris's account raises the question of how students of American political history could integrate these types of informal relationships into their accounts of large-scale institutions and policy.

Daniel Carpenter's The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, is a piece of work that moves us farther in the direction of understanding the historical role of networks than any work by a political scientist who is sensitive to institutions. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy integrates the rich sociological literature on organizational networks into a historical analysis about government institutions. The network literature is one that has been used by political scientists who study agenda-setting and policy communities but rarely by those writing about state building. ² Relying on network theory, Carpenter develops a novel argument to explain how bureaucrats obtained autonomy and expanded the mission of their agencies by embedding themselves into thick networks that were composed of multiple individuals and organizations that cut across economic, social, and ethnic boundaries. The story of the book revolves around the emergence of an administrative state where bureaucracies achieved significant independence from elected politicians, a characteristic that he says did not exist in "the clerical state" of the nineteenth century where the "national bureaucracy was assigned and delegated distributive tasks fit only for organizations of mediocre talent and routinized duties" (p. 64). To achieve autonomy, Carpenter argues that bureaucrats had to prove that their agencies offered a service that was unique and that they had to maintain ties to relevant networks. The reputation of bureaucrats within these networks, Carpenter argues, generated support for their programs. The growth of bureaucratic autonomy in the progressive era did not result from social movements, business, or elected officials, Carpenter concludes, but from entrepreneurial bureaucrats. From the very opening of the book, Carpenter brings home this point when he discusses how Speaker Joseph Cannon, usually considered one of the most powerful legislators in congressional history, was outflanked by Gifford Pinchot, chief forester in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Harvey Wiley, chief of the USDA's Chemistry Bureau.

Importantly, Carpenter's argument goes much further. Just as John Mark Hansen showed how interest groups gained their power in the first three decades of the twentieth century because they maintained a strong link to electoral politics by revealing the preferences of voters to politicians, Carpenter offers compelling evidence that non-elected bureaucratic officials amassed their power since they had earned the support of key organizations and interest groups. ³ Federal bureaucracies and democratic politics, according to The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, were not inherently in conflict.

In other respects, the contributions of this book to the field of American political development resemble the advances made by Alfred Chandler in the field of business history. Chandler entered into his specialty at a time when business historians had focused on nineteenth- century "robber barons" to explain the rise of modern capitalism and had highlighted prominent individual businessmen who were central, in their minds, to the development of the corporate economy. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning...