Synopses & Reviews
Reconstructing the story of how reformers used public authority to reshape the nation, Jason Scott Smith argues that the New Deal produced a revolution in state-sponsored economic development. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure laid crucial foundations--sometimes literally--for postwar growth, prestaging the national highways and the military-industrial complex. This impressive and exhaustively researched analysis underscores the importance of the New Deal in comprehending political and economic change in modern America.
Review
"What lay at the center of the New Deal? Was it the emergence of a new regulatory state? Or of a new welfare, laborite, corporate, or consumerist one? Arguments for each exist. But in this provocative, elegantly written, and massively researched study, Jason Scott Smith maintains that its real center lay elsewhere...Smith has given us a major work deserving of a wide readership."
Business History Review
Synopsis
The first historical study of New Deal public works programs.
Synopsis
This book provides the first historical study of New Deal public works programs and their role in transforming the American economy, landscape, and political system during the twentieth century.
About the Author
Jason Scott Smith holds a Mellon Fellowship in American Studies at Cornell University, where he is a visiting assistant professor in the department of history and the department of government. In 2001-2002 he was the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where he taught courses on the history of capitalism. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including the Journal of Social History, Pacific Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Table of Contents
1. Re-evaluating the new deal state and the public works revolution; 2. Economic development and unemployment in the early new deal; 3. Making a New Deal state: patronage and the Public Works Administration; 4. The dilemma of new deal public works: people or projects?; 5. Boondoggling and the welfare state; 6. Party building and pernicious political activities: the road to the Hatch Act; 7. Public works and new deal Liberalism in reorganization and war; 8. Public works and the postwar world; 9. Epilogue: public works and the building of new deal Liberalism.