The Politics of Bureaucracy

Why does a country with so many governing entities and countless overlapping jurisdictions—this is a construct that goes beyond the simple local, state, federal and the legislative, executive, judicial dichotomies—have a population that thinks in a singular grammatical construction about “the government”? This is a difficult question in no small part because historians have just begun to tackle questions regarding governing entities not defined in the Constitution. Popular visions of governance are linked to what the Founders created, and indeed our language for discussing government comes from the early national period when the Constitution was adopted.

Writings in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison help frame how Americans often think about government. Hamilton's observation in Federalist No. 81 speaks to the importance of the Constitution: “The Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution.” Beyond the Constitution, governmental structure is probably the second significant marker in the way citizens think about government. Hamilton and Madison spoke positively about the division of government:

In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people, is submitted to the administration of a single government; and usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people, is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each, subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises on the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other; at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.¹

Madison believed this structure would ensure a measured, deliberative process wherein change would be cumbersome and slow in coming—anything but the structures of governance that Joanna L. Grisinger and Gail Radford explicate.

For scholars working today on appointed governing entities, the meaning of the Constitution and the division of government are central underlying themes, but little in political history has addressed these matters. Until recently, the historiography of American politics has been focused on one or more of the following: sociocultural issues, ideology, the construction and impact of legislation, grass-roots social movements, institutions like Congress and the courts, biographies, and supposedly discrete political eras (for example, the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan years). Aside from presidential and sometimes congressional studies, less attention has been given to questions about who is doing the governing, for what purpose, and how that governing is happening. Instead such scholarship has more often been the domain of political scientists and public administration scholars.

At the federal level, a mushrooming bureaucracy, mostly a twentieth-century development created in part by legislation that Congress passed and in part by presidential executive order, has assumed quasi-legislative, executive, and even judicial functioning without the democratic accountability under which the three branches of government operate. Some scholars, particularly Brian Balogh, have found credible evidence of an activist federal government in the nineteenth century, raising a host of questions regarding how we define government activism.² This twentieth-century bureaucracy, though, is different; it includes entities that are hybrid creatures, partially governmental and partially private. The situation becomes even more complex at the state and local levels. Two new books—Gail Radford's The Rise of Public Authority and Joanna L. Grisinger's The Unwieldy American State—provide much-needed relief to this historiographic problem.

Grisinger's book, published in 2012, explicates federal-level administrative law in the years since the 1930s, with the focus on the 1940s and 1950s. Her concern is less with...