The Creation of the Modern American State, 1866–1932

Between 1866 and 1932 – between the Civil War and the New Deal – the American system of governance was fundamentally transformed with momentous implications for modern American social and economic life. Nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship were replaced by a modern approach to positive statecraft, individual rights, social welfare, social police, public administration, and economic regulation very much with us today. I will sketch the history of this great transformation. Its main thesis is explicit in its title. The period from 1866 to 1932 was not just an “age of reform” or a “response to industrialism” or a “search for order.” Rather, it was an era marked by the specific and unambiguous emergence of a new regime of American governance – a modern democratic state. A central nation-state consolidated around new positive (and I will argue “new democratic”) conceptions of politics and administration radically extended its reach into American social and economic life. In the social sphere, new definitions of national citizenship, rights, and belonging, coupled with new forms of cultural policing and social policymaking, transformed the basic relationships of state and society. Social legislation and social welfare emerged as new objects of state and national governments actively committed to guaranteeing social rights while also insuring and policing populations. In the economic sphere, the relationship of government and the market underwent a similar restructuring. The state regulation of modern business and mass production and consumption ushered in a new understanding of the interdependence of statecraft and economic development in a mixed economy and a new political-economic vision of the democratic control of capitalism. Together these changes amounted to a fundamental restructuring of American governance that was arguably the most significant legal-political development of the twentieth century.