David E. Lilienthal: The Journey of an American Liberal (review)

David Lilienthal was one of the architects and overseers of the historical epoch commonly known as the American Century. From his time as a law student under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter, his government service at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and his later years promoting TVA-style international development, Lilienthal’s life straddled that fifty-year “century.” His career rose and fell with the crest and crash of American prowess, and through his public oratory and the private musings in his journal, Lilienthal bore witness to the making (and unmaking) of the American Century.

Lilienthal’s work was indeed central to that foreshortened century, and his politics and administrative practices were indelibly marked by that epoch’s ideological vision. His world was a place characterized by the belief that the technics of statecraft and the technologies of industrialism could be hitched together to yield a progressive new social order. He believed that benevolent experts could use quasi-public agencies such as the TVA and AEC as tools to fine-tune the workings of liberal democracy and regulated capitalism. Described by Brian Balogh in his study of the politics of nuclear power, Chain Reaction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as the “proministrative state,” this articulation of administrative power and professional-technocratic politics charted much of the course for America in the mid-twentieth century.

Though much has been written about the dynamics of the TVA and AEC, historians had a relatively restrictive view of Lilienthal’s activities until the publication of Steven M. Neuse’s biography. A political scientist, Neuse has performed a very important service in providing scholars with a comprehensive “life and times” chronicle of Lilienthal. Whereas previous studies told of Lilienthal’s role at the TVA or the AEC, we can now see his career in its entirety. Neuse’s account is impressively researched, his prose admirably lucid. He is sympathetic without being hagiograhic. Readers can follow Lilienthal across the political stage, from the internecine battles at the TVA and the forging of an atomic era to his arrested hopes for a reconstructed world ushered in by multipurpose dams and cheap electricity. True to his life-and-times format, Neuse also recounts much of Lilienthal’s private life. Especially compelling are accounts of deep rifts between Lilienthal and his son and daughter-in-law during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, as the elder Lilienthal’s commitment to cold war liberalism meshed with personal differences to fuel divisive family battles. Neuse also makes a modest venture into psychobiography as he unpacks the complexities of Lilienthal’s well-known ambition. The zeal that Lilienthal brought to his work, the abrupt disdain he felt for many of his opponents, and his periodic collapses were symptomatic, Neuse suggests, of a manic-depressive state that shadowed Lilienthal throughout his life. The author believes that Lilienthal’s optimism and ambition complemented the grand vision of American Century liberalism, ultimately making this biography a tragic tale of the rise and fall of both the man and his world.

Neuse stays close to Lilienthal throughout the book, and this approach yields much of value for any historian studying the period. Neuse’s study stands as proof that narrative biography is still a vibrant scholarly enterprise. But if David E. Lilienthal is a successful example of its genre’s potential, it is also freighted with some typical problems. The relationship between an individual such as Lilienthal and the broader structures of policy and ideology that underlay the American Century could bear further scrutiny. However grand the scale, the personal pathos of ambition and naive optimism are not sufficient to highlight the contours of cold war liberalism at home and abroad. The explosion in domestic consumption of electric power, the struggles over civilian versus military control of atomic power, and the government’s commitment to large-scale international development projects would, in all...