Patrick D. Reagan. Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning1890-1943. Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xii + 362 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55849-230-1.
Reviewed by Jim Tomlinson (Brunel University, London)
Published on EH.Net (February, 2001)
This book provides a detailed account of the evolution of the movement for national planning in the US between 1890 and 1943, when Congress ended funding for the National Resources Planning Board. Much of the account is woven around the careers and ideas of five key participants: Frederic A. Delano, Charles E. Merriam, Wesley C. Mitchell, Henry. S. Denison and Beardsley Ruml. During the 1920s and 1930s, these five, Patrick Reagan argues, evolved a distinctive version of planning, sharply contrasted with the plans of the contemporary authoritarian states of Europe and Japan. The impetus for this American form of planning came partly from the experience of state intervention to support the American participation in the First World War and partly from the Hoover-led attempts to deal with the unemployment problem of the immediate post-war years. New Deal planning is seen as closely following these precedents, though receiving new impetus from the great depression, and moving in a more statist direction under the stimulus of Roosevelt's actions to counteract the great depression.
The key characteristic of this planning was its attempt to find a way between nineteenth-century liberalism, and especially its sharp distinction between the public and private sectors, and twentieth century collectivism. This third way embodied voluntary co-operation between organised business and government (with a token role for unions and others) guided by experts working in close co-operation with political leaders. These experts would bring to bear the knowledge created by the nascent social sciences, and in so doing would prevent the economic and social breakdown which in so many parts of the world was creating dictatorships of the right and left. This version of planning was unambiguously elitist, excluded the unorganised, and showed little concern for issues around the distribution of income and wealth. Nevertheless, it provided the foundations for much of the discussion of planning that became an important element in post World War II politics, at least down to the 1960s.
The biographical approach to the evolution of planning proves an effective way of bringing into focus both the convergence of concerns and themes which underlay these ideas of planning, and the informal networks which transformed the ideas into policy initiatives. Equally, the author's aim to place planning in the mainstream of inter-war American politics (rather than an 'extremist' response to the great depression) is successfully attained. The contingencies of history are also nicely brought out in the account of the abolition of the NRPB, which was based on a combination of Congressional manoeuvrings for power, absurd ideological posturing by Republicans, and political maladroitness (and bad faith?) on the part of the President.
The author is repetitive in his claims for American exceptionalism with regard to planning. (Indeed there is rather a lot of repetition even of minor points: we are told at least six times that Congress in 1943 mandated the sending of the NRPB records to the National Archives). This claim for a peculiarly American version of planning is sound where the contrast is made with authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Japan. But it is less persuasive if the comparison is made with other democracies that faced economic and social crisis in the 1920s and 1930s. In Britain, for example, as Daniel Ritschel in his The Politics of Planning (Oxford, 1997) has recently emphasised, the ideology of planning was widely embraced across the political spectrum. Many of the ideas articulated at that time had close affinity with the contemporary American version of planning, though what was also striking in Britain was the wide diversity of ideas that could come under that umbrella term. In this comparative light America appears less unique, more in a common mould of democracies where, many felt, 'planning' would provide a route to economic stability which free market policies seemed no longer to secure.
Jim Tomlinson is Professor of Economic History, and Head of Department of Government, Brunel University, London. He has published widely in the field of macro-economic policy, industrial development and economic history, principally on Britain. His most recent publication is The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-War Britain, Longmans 2000.
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Jim Tomlinson. Review of Reagan, Patrick D., Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning1890-1943.
EH.Net, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4942
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