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  • Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present by Gary Gerstle
  • Paul E. Herron
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. By Gary Gerstle. ( Princeton and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 452. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-16294-2.)

The American state is a curious thing. Historians and political scientists have been grappling with its development for decades. More often than not these scholars focus their investigations on the federal government and transformative moments in American history. Gary Gerstle's Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present offers a much-needed addition, and in many ways a corrective, to the literature. In this sweeping and well-written account, Gerstle tells the story of the American state by considering "two contradictory principles of governance that have shaped and confounded the deployment of public power" (p. 1). These principles were woven into the system of federalism, wherein the U.S. government was designed with limited, enumerated, and separated powers, while all remaining power was reserved to the states. This scheme was not just a division of authority; it was two completely different theories of governance: liberalism and police power. Gerstle argues that this contradiction is manifested in the larger political order and within the minds of individuals (today in the Tea Party wing of the GOP) who decry federal overreach while pushing state laws that are aggressive and invasive. Of course the states did most of the governing in the early republic, and they were not subject to the kind of oversight that exists today—most notably, the Bill of Rights was not fully applied to the states until well into the twentieth century.

Liberty and Coercion traces the rise of federal power and coincidental decline of state power since the Founding through an impressive consolidation of the scholarly work on American political history. The second chapter, which outlines the role of the states, presents a real contribution to the literature. Instead of simply locating change at moments of crisis or at critical junctures, Gerstle considers three strategies of improvisation that the national government deployed to overcome the limits contained in the U.S. Constitution. "Exemption" required looking to the courts to redefine existing authority; "surrogacy" involved clever expansions of enumerated powers; and with "privatization" the government relied on private groups to accomplish tasks outside federal authority (p. 5). Scholars of American political development will be particularly impressed with the work that Gerstle does to carefully describe incremental change in the capacity and reach of central state authority prior to the Great Depression. Finally, Gerstle argues that the modern American Leviathan is more a product of the Cold War than the New Deal, and he effectively shows how the federal government managed to overpower the states during the 1960s and beyond.

For those of us who study southern politics, Liberty and Coercion has much to offer. The broad authority of state and local governments was particularly dangerous in the antebellum South, where planters used it to legitimate and perpetuate slavery. Moreover, southerners were able to control the small federal government and deploy it, in the words of Don E. Fehrenbacher, as an "agent of [End Page 668] state sovereignty" (p. 74). Daniel J. Elazar, Harold Hyman, and Michael Les Benedict have all argued that the aftermath of the Civil War did not result in a stronger, more cohesive Union, but instead in the retention of basic structures of federalism. This continuity, along with the reluctance by the Supreme Court to broadly interpret the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, allowed the South to institute Jim Crow laws and disenfranchise large portions of the electorate with little oversight from Washington, D.C. Gerstle recognizes the failures of Reconstruction and laments the inability of the national government to protect state citizens (despite and often because of federal "improvisations"), something that would have been particularly helpful to those in the region south of the Potomac River (p. 87).

Gerstle closes with a call to action by chiding conservatives who worship a perfect Constitution that never existed and by suggesting that...

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