-
Introduction: Statebuilding in the Progressive Era: A Continuing Dilemma in American Political Development
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I n t r o d u c t i o n Statebuilding in the Progressive Era: A Continuing Dilemma in American Political Development This volume addresses statebuilding in the Progressive Era, and the years leading up to and immediately following it, by considering institutions, policy areas, reformers, and sites of development that have largely evaded the analytical gaze of researchers who explore the roots of the modern American state. In doing so, this book hopes to add to the richness and complexity of the literature concerning development in this era by bringing forward new cases for consideration. More fundamentally, though, these cases reveal themselves as crucial sites of statebuilding—the making of black and monogamous citizens in the postbellum years, the racial and personal politics of Georgia’s adoption of prohibition, the rise of public waste management, the incorporation of animal management into the welfare state, the initiation of state and federal wildlife management, the creation of public juvenile courts, and the involvement of women’s groups in the creation of U.S. housing policy. They were locations where boundaries between public and private shifted, where models for state “borrowing” of private capacity were piloted, where new hybrid institutions were sometimes forged, where a variety of policy entrepreneurs used creative techniques to get results through informal and formal politics, and where institutions and their development can be understood in structural, cultural, and ideological terms. The Progressive Era was a particularly fertile moment because of the shifting boundaries between public and private. Much of this shift, and the incorporation of new issues into the regulatory reach of the public sphere, relate to a broadening vision of women’s sphere as women successfully interjected themselves into the world of politics as caretakers, advocates, and 2 Introduction policy entrepreneurs.1 But even beyond the striking growth of middle-class women’s political and policymaking capacity, the other issues these chapters discuss were increasingly framed as problems in which the state should take a direct interest in the betterment of society. Considering this process at this time with regard to these issues presents a picture of active growth of state capacity and the development of new institutions—defined not just as material structures but also through the ideological frameworks that animated them.2 Whereas our curiosity about these individual issues drove our initial inquiries, bringing them together raises larger related questions about development , institutions, and statebuilding. Project Origins Over the last five years, some of the authors represented in this volume began to realize a set of shared and overlapping interests as we studied politics and policy developments during the years from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal. Many of us had done archival work on particular Progressive Era issues we found provocative, and exchanges, conference panels, and collaborations followed. We found ourselves talking, at various times, to law and courts scholars; to race, gender, and ethnicity scholars; and, quite often, with scholars of American political development (henceforth, APD) as we developed these ideas and research projects. The coeditors of this volume began thinking about bringing these authors together and we identified additional fellow travelers. Several elements drew our research together and made it worthwhile to put our projects more directly in conversation with each other. We all saw the decades between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the New Deal as dynamic and formative years for American political development. This period is too often treated as the raw material from which (and against which) the modern nation-state is forged. We rejected readings of these post-Civil War decades as ones in which partisanship was intense but governance was largely absent, save for urban machines.3 We found the view, often expressed by comparativists, that America in this period lacked what could reasonably be called a “state,” highly problematic and even counterproductive for studying this period.4 We found unacceptable Hartzian arguments contending that atomistic individualism prevented significant statebuilding until the 1930s, and likewise arguments that political development took lengthy “time-outs” .144.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:26 GMT) Statebuilding in the Progressive Era 3 in certain sections of the country.5 We rejected the idea that the struggles and institutional changes that took place during these years were superseded or overwritten entirely by subsequent institutional developments, especially those of the New Deal era. We found changes occurring that were neither linear nor simply incremental , and that even studies incorporating intercurrence...