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BOOK REVIEWS85 common school for young girls) he opposed. Defeated in his candidacy for a seventh term as Boston's mayor in 1828, he became president of Harvard, and promptly sought to impose discipline on the wastrel sons of the well-to-do. Confronted by the insubordination of Harvard's adolescents, Quincy employed suspensions, expulsions , and even the local courts and police to bring law and order to the campus. Though not averse to the traditional emphasis on classics and teaching by rote, he was prodded by loss of state funds to modernize Harvard. The college sought to become self-sufficient upon alumni patrons, modified the classical curriculum in favor of more options and practical subjects, and moved to extend its appeal to the worldly, striving sons of Boston's merchants and industrialists . Quincy's reign pointed the way to the Brahmin-business connection that would triumph in the Harvard of Charles Elliot thirty years later. McCaughey thus shows, in this handsomely-written and affectionate portrait, how Boston's "last Federalist" became one of its first modernizers. As McCaughey indicates, only a portion of Quincy's character—his commitment to hierarchy, his staunch independence —linked him to the eighteenth century. As an apostle of work and discipline, as a land speculator, and as one of Boston's wealthiest men, Quincy possessed traits which made him a natural transitional figure to the nineteenth century. The book's rich detail and frequent insights permit the reader to draw his own conclusions about the broader significance of Quincy's example. Quincy discovered —and other Federalists created—institutions removed from the vagaries of party politics, made them powerful, and created a potent elite counter-force to the atomizing impulses of ante-bellum America. Sydney Nathans Duke University The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America. By Matthew A. Crenson. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University press, 1975. Pp. xii, 186. $10.00.) With this slender volume Matthew A. Crenson joins the long line of social scientists who have been drawn to the question of administrative reform during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. A student of public administration with a previous book on the politics of air pollution, Crenson traces the origins of modern bureaucratic organization in the federal government to the Jacksonian era. The Old Hero and his followers, in their attempts to guard the public purse, somewhat inadvertantly substituted "rules, regulations and surveilance ," the essentials of modern bureaucracy, for the traditional 86CIVIL WAR HISTORY methods of their predecessors who had relied upon "the integrity of individuals." Crenson argues that Leonard White missed this change because he focused on the "technology of management" which underwent little modification during these years. At the same time he rejects Lynn Marshall's argument that the "spoils system" represented a distinct step toward the modernization of the American civil service. Rather he postulates a two stage evolution of Jacksonian reform keyed to the ideological quest of the Jacksonian elite for the "Republic of Virtue." Crenson insists that the introduction of the "spoils system" in Jackson's first term simply continued traditional politics; and it was only in their search for practical ways to institutionalize honesty that the Jacksonians introduced modern accounting and information systems. The "Beginnings of Bureaucracy" accompanied the "Birth of Mass Political Parties" and the "Discovery of the Asylum" as Americans responded to the social disorganization characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century. While Crenson's thesis is interesting and plausible, it remains unproved and suggests implications which do not comport with the facts. Although the course of social change is crucial to his argument , students of the period will find Crenson's social history inadequate and far too abstract to suit his analytical needs. He feels free to wander about the nineteenth century to choose examples of the social disorganization which led to Jacksonian reform. However, the book is plagued by more serious problems. Crenson relies upon a dichotomous conception of political development in which structures are either "traditional" or "modern." While he describes certain aspects of each of these categories, Crenson rejects consideration of the important measurement problem involved in operationalizing these concepts. Thus we are forced to accept Crenson's claims that the first...

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