States, race, and the decline of New Deal Liberalism

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 157-172

  Weir, Margaret ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644893686     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X05000106     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. For an influential version of this account see Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991);
2. for an alternative account that identifies the 1940s as the critical period, see Ira Katznelson, "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity? "in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 185-211.
3. See, for example, Fraser and Gerstle, eds., Rise and fall of the New Deal Order.
4. Wallace E. Oates, Fiscal Federalism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovariovitch, 1972);
5. Paul E. Peterson, The Price of Federalism (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1995).
6. Oates, Fiscal Federalism;
7. Peterson, The Price of Federalism;
8. David Brian Robertson, "The Bias of American Federalism: Political Structure arid the Development of America's Exceptional Welfare State in the Progressive Era," Journal of Policy History 1 (1989): 261-91.
9. Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Vintage, 1966).
10. New Ice House Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) Brandeis, J. dissenting; David Osborne's Laboratories of Democracy (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1988) helped to revive interest in this idea.
11. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
12. Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
13. Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
14. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a 'New Institutionalism',"in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 311-92;
15. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 3;
16. for a complementary approach that emphasizes institutional dissonance, see Elisabeth S. Clemens, "Continuity and Coherence: Periodizarion and the Problem of Institutional Change," in Social Time and Social Change: Perspectives on Sociology and History, ed. Fredrik Engelstad and Ragnvald Kalleberg (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1999), 62-83.
17. On policy legacies and feedback mechanisms see Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
18. and Paul Pierson, "When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change," World Politics 45 (1993): 595-628.
19. On patterns of success see Martin Shefter, "Regional Receptivity to Reform: Legacy of the Progressive Era," Political Science Quarterly 98 (1983): 459-83. The best analysis of how progressives restricted participation at. the local level is found in Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1997).
20. For argument and evidence about the relationship of interest groups development and government activity at the federal level, see Frank R. Baumgartner and Beth L. Leech, "The Co-evolution of Groups and Government," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association 28-31 August 2003.
21. This point is made by Claus Offe, "Institutions' Role in the Distribution and Control of Social Power," in Crafting and Operating Institutions, ed. Stephen Skowronek, Ian Shapiro, and Daniel Galvin (forthcoming).
22. Keith E. Whittington, "Preserving the "Dignity and Influence of the Court: Political Supports for Judicial Review in the United States," in Crafting and Operating Institutions (forthcoming).
23. For the original statement see William H. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
24. For the recent debate see Paul Pierson, Politics in Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 5;
25. Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) ;
26. Kathleen Thelen, "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," Annual Review of Political Science (1999): 385-86.
27. On the mutually constitutive relationship between ideas and institutions, see Robert C. Lieberman, "Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change," American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 697-712.
28. See the discussion in Eileen L. McDonough, "The 'Welfare Rights State' and the 'Civil Rights State': Policy Paradox and State Building in the Progressive Era," Studies in American Political Development 7 (1993): 225-74. McDonough reviews the continuity argument and shows demonstrates the continuity in welfare policy initiatives launched at the state level during the Progressive era but also notes that the Progressive Era brought retrogression in the domain of civil rights.
29. See the discussion in Martha Derthick and John J. Dinan, "Progressivism and Federalism," in Progressivism and the New Democracy, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 81-102.
30. Richard L. McCormick, "The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism," American Historical Review 86 (1981): 247-74;
31. McDonough, "The 'Welfare Rights State'." On Progressive social policies
32. see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
33. For an analysis with a special emphasis on New York, see Rogan Kersh, Suzanne B. Mettler, Grant D. Reeher, and Jeffrey M. Stonecash, '"More a Distinction of Words than Things': The Evolution of Separated Powers in the American States," Roger Williams University Law Review 4 (1998): 5-49.
34. Alberta M. Sbragia, Debt Wish: Entrepreneurial Cities, U.S. Federalism, and Economic Development (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996);
35. Michael J. Lacey, "Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy," in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. Robert. Fishman (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999), chap. 4.
36. For the original source see Henry Carter Adams, Public Debts: An Essay in the Science of Finance (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887).
37. Arthur E. Buck, The Reorganization of Governments in the United States (New York: National Municipal League, Columbia University Press, 1938);
38. Jon C. Teaford, The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 69-95.
39. Council of the States, Reorganizing State Government (Chicago: Council of the States, 1950), 20-30.
40. McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy, 186.
41. See, for example, Stanley P. Caine, The Myth of a Progressive Reform: Railroad Regulation in Wisconsin, 1903-1910 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970).
42. Thomas R. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 204.
43. For perspectives on the importance of local politics in the states see Nancy Burns and Gerald Gamm, "Creatures of the State: State Politics and Local Government, 1871-1921 Urban Affairs Review 33 (1997), 59-96
44. and Kimberly S. Johnson, "Modernity, Public Administration, and the Disappearance of the American States, A Necessary Development?" Administration and Society 35 (2003), 144-59.
45. James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 14.
46. Patterson, The New Deal and the States, 13-16.
47. See David J. Barrori, "Reclaiming Home Rule," Harvard Law Review 116 (2003): 2255-386. Barron notes that these reformers still envisioned state oversight but in characteristic Progressive fashion they wanted oversight from a state administrative body, not from the state legislature. In fact, states did not create such administrative capacities during the Progressive Era. In most states, such capacities were not created until the 1960s and 1970s, if at all.
48. Richard Briffault, "Our Localism: Part II - Localism and Legal Theory," Columbia Law Review 90 (1990): 357-58.
49. Jon C. Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850-1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979);
50. Richard Briffault, "Our Localism: Part I - the Structure of Local Government Law," Columbia Law Review 90 (1990): 73-77.
51. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
52. Barron, "Reclaiming Home Rule," 2319.
53. Raphael Fischler, ""Health, Safety, and the General Welfare: Markets, Politics and Social Science in Early Land-use Regulation and Community Design, "Journal of Urban History 24 (1998): 675-720;
54. Keith D. Revell, "The Road to Euclid u Ambler: City Planning, State-Building, and the Changing Scope of the Police Power," Studies in American Political Development 13 (1999): 50-145.
55. The social aspect is stressed in Fischler, "Health, Safety, and the General Welfare."
56. Marc C. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The Amer icon Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 8.
57. Revell, "Road to Euclid u Ambler."
58. National Resources Council, Our Cities, 5.
59. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders, 7, 72-76.
60. On uniform state laws as a Progressive strategy, see William Graebner, "Federalism in the Progressive Era: A Structural Interpretation of Reform," Journal of American History 64 (1977): 331-57.
61. For an overview of these studies by 1958, see Government Affairs Foundation, Metropolitan Surveys: A Digest (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1958).
62. Weiss, Rise of the Community Builders, chap. 5.
63. Revell, "Road to Euclid v. Ambler.
64. Racial zoning was outlawed in 1917.
65. See J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
66. For a related analysis about, the negative impact, of the Progressive Era on the civil rights of African Americans, immigrants and women, see McDonagh, "Welfare Rights State."
67. Commonwealth Club of California, The Legislature of California: Its Membership, Procedure, and Work (San Francisco: Commonwealth Club, 1943), 140-43.
68. Commonwealth Club of California, Legislature of California;
69. George W. Bemis, Sectionalism and Representation in the California State Legislature, 1911-1931 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1934).
70. This was not a strict one-county/one-vote allocation. Smaller counties were grouped into districts of no more than three counties (Commonwealth Club of California, Legislature of California, 70-77).
71. On the new mobilization in California see Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 178-84.
72. Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics, 21.
73. Walter Dean Burnham, "Theory and Voting Research: Some Reflections on Converse's 'Change in the American Electorate'," American Political Science Review 68 (1974): 1002-23.
74. Patterson, New Deal and the States.
75. Ibid. Edwin Amenta
76. focusing on the implementation of social policy, presents a somewhat more positive picture of the impact of the New Deal on the states. His account is focused, however, on state implementation of nationally-developed programs, and he notes the many factors that kept many nonsouthern as well southern states from building on the activist government of the New Deal (Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998], chap. 5).
77. Richard C. Keller, "Pennsylvania's Little New Deal," in The New Deal: The State and Local Levels ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 72.
78. See Patterson, New Deal and The States, 144-53;
79. Amenta, Bold Relief.
80. Data compiled from the Book of the States (Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments, various years).
81. Paul T. David and Ralph Eisenberg, Devaluation of the Ur ban and Suburban Vote: A Statistical Investigation of Long-Term Trends in State Legislative Representation, (Charlottesville, VA: Bureau of Public Administration University of Virginia, 1961), 10.
82. For unionization rates, see Leo Troy, Distribution of Union Membership among the States, 1939 and 1953 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1957).
83. David O. Walter, "Representation of Metropolitan Districts," National Municipal Review 27 (1938): 129-37
84. On labor's political activities in Pennsylvania, see Thomas T. Spencer, '"Labor is with Roosevelt': The Pennsylvania Labor Non-Partisan League and the Election of 1936," Pennsylvania History 39 (1979): 3-16.
85. Michael P. Rogin and John L. Shrover, Political Change in California: Critical Elections and Social Movements, 1890-1966 (West-port, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1969), 139-47.
86. Rogin and Shrover's Political Change in California shows that malapportionment was not the only force at work in California.
87. David R. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 17-103, 196-200.
88. See John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds., The New Deal: The State and Local Levels (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975);
89. Mayhew, Placing Parties;
90. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives.
91. John H. Fenton, Midwest Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 28-34;
92. Dudley Buffa, Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984). However, even with control of the Democratic Party and a popular liberal governor, the liberal/labor coalition could not control state politics because legislative malapportionment meant that Democrats did not win majorities in either House from 1938 to 1958.
93. Buffa, Union Power and American Democracy, 10.
94. Lyle W. Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977).
95. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 137-39.
96. See Milkis, President and the Parties, 83-97.
97. Mayhew's Placing Parties makes this point (chap. 10).
98. The AALL disbanded in 1943, for example. Richard M. Valelly discusses this outcome in Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota farmers Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
99. Baumgartner and Leech, 'Co-evolution of Groups and Government."
100. Alan Draper, A Rope of Sand: The AFL-CIO Committee an Political Education, 1955-L967 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989);
101. Brown, Race, Money and the American Welfare State, 163.
102. W. Brooke Graves, "The Future of the American States," The American Political Science Review 30 (1936): 24-50.
103. The Council of State Governments, Reorganizing State Government (Chicago: The Council of State Governments, 1950), 61-63.
104. See Lieberman, Shifting the Colorline;
105. Mettler, Divided Citizenship;
106. Gilbert Y. Steiner, Social Insecurity: The Politics of Welfare (Chicago: Rand McNally arid Co., 1966), chap. 4.
107. The Council of State Governments, Planning Services for State Government (Chicago: The Council of State Governments, 1956), 20-25.
108. Ibid., 24,
109. The NRC was particularly interested in problems of physical planning and, composed as it was of city planners, was particularly attuned to the problems of metropolitan areas. See their report, United States, National Resources Committee, Committee on Urbanism, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (1937; New York: Arno Press, 1974).
110. Patterson, "New Deal arid the States," 81.
111. See James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1968).
112. See for example, Anthony Chen, "From Fair Employment to Equal Employment Opportunity and Beyond: Affirmative Action and the Politics of Civil Rights in the New Deal Order, 1941-1972," (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003);
113. Isaac Martin, "The Roots of Retrenchment: Tax Revolts and Policy Change in the United States and Denmark, 1945-1990" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004)
114. On the federal government and race, see Desmond S. King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the U.S. Federal Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
115. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier;
116. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line;
117. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
118. On the roles of business and race in forming new local governments, see Nancy Burns, The Formation of American Local Governments: Private Values in Public Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83-95.
119. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
120. See Briffault, "Our Localism: Parts I and Part II";
121. Gregory R. Weiher, "Public Policy and Patterns of Residential Segregation," 42 (1989) Western Political Quarterly: 651-77.
122. On the impact of local boundaries on remedies for racial discrimination and disadvantage, see Briffault, Our Localism Part I, Part II.
123. Building the New American City: Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems to the Congress and to the President of the United States (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
124. Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, "Racial Orders in American Political Development," American Political Science Review 99 (2005): 75-92.
125. Michael Honey, "Operation Dixie: Labor and Civil-rights in the Postwar South," Mississippi Quarterly 45 (1992): 439-52;
126. Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
127. Draper, A Rope of Sand, 50-51;
128. Greenstone, Labor in American Politics.
129. Draper, A Rape of Sand, 120-28.
130. Riker, Strategy of Rhetoric;
131. see also the discussion in Kenneth A. Shelpsle, "Losers in Politics (and How They Sometimes Become Winners): William Riker's Heresthetic," Perspectives on Politics 1 (2003): 307-15.
132. On the ideas and reframing in policy, see the discussion in John L. Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
133. On the new meaning of local boundaries, see Burns, Formation of American Local Governments, 112-16.
134. This picture of new ideas about localism being developed within a fundamentally racist framework is akin to Rogers Smith's discussion of the recasting of white supremacy to Jim Crow. See Rogers Smith, "Which Comes First, the Ideas or the Institutions? Toward a Synthesis of Multiple Traditions and Multiple Orders," in Crafting and Operating Institutions, ed. Stephen Skowronek, Ian Shapiro, and Daniel Galvin (forthcoming).
135. In suburbariizirig postwar America, the number of local municipal governments grew from 16,807 in 1952 to 18, 517 in 1972. See U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2003 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), 276.
136. With the growth of new suburban political jurisdictions came increasingly homogenous localities. For example, Gary J. Miller's detailed analysis shows that in 1950, approximately 60 percent of the cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area had what he termed a very heterogerious mix of income classes; by 1970, the percent of very heterogerious cities had declined to 20 percent. Moreover, of the thirty new jurisdictions created after 1950, only one exhibited a heterogenous mix of incomes. At the same time, African Americans living in the Los Angeles region became more residentially concentrated in fewer municipalities. See Gary J. Miller, Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 132-35.
137. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 218-29.
138. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
139. Juliet F. Gainsborough, Fenced Off: The Suburbanization of American Politics, (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001), chap. 5.
140. Ibid., 95.