New Dealclients, but not themselvesagentsof labor policy change in the New Deal.
(For an opposing view that stresses labor agency, see GoldWeld 1989 .)
Skowronek’sBuilding A New American State ( 1982 ), one of the founding works in
the 1980 s revival of historical institutionalism in the United States, focused on three
cases in the modernization of the American national state: the beginning of
national railroad regulation, theWght for a meritocratic civil service, and the
struggle for a permanent professional army. Though each case of necessity touched
on Congress, the states, and parties, the prime movers in these accounts were
distinctively elite. In the case of civil service reform, Mugwump intellectual
reformers, with the support of important businessmen who hoped for a more
eYcient bureaucracy, were the activists who championed a meritocratic bureau-
cracy against party ‘‘spoilsmen.’’ Of course, it was acknowledged that elites had to
settle for partial loaves and halting progress, in view of the centrality of patronage
resources for American parties. Skowronek’s central argument is that a disjointed
state ‘‘of courts and parties’’ could succeed only in erecting a ‘‘patchwork’’ rather
than a fully rationalized administrative state.
In theWght for railroad legislation, according to Skowronek, well-educated
intellectual reformers worked through a savvy Midwestern senator to restrain
(while moderately responding to) agrarian forces in Congress. In 1887 , they created
the nation’sWrst independent regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission. From the time of its founding, commissioners, judges, and ultimately
presidents were the principle actors, in Skowronek’s narrative.
Presidents, intellectuals, and generals were the prime movers in the struggle to
create a professional army (the ‘‘continental army’’ of progressive era policy
debate). Elite business actors were strongly supportive, since a permanent, profes-
sional military promised better protection for investment, at home and abroad,
than the traditionally decentralized and part-time militia. ReXecting the power of
path dependence unfolding from initial policy decisions, echoes of this debate still
reverberate in the speeches of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who would clearly
prefer a larger professional military (and private national contractor corps)
to what he sees as the reluctant amateurs in the national guard contingents raised
by the states.
To a large extent, the elite-centered account of APD in Skowronek’s early work
was shaped by the chosen cases: the campaigns for military and civil service
professionalism were not popular causes in the United States (far from it).
Likewise, Daniel Carpenter ( 2001 ) has recently challenged claims of social move-
ment responsibility for reforms in the early twentieth-century United States. His
careful archival and statistical work has demonstrated that entrepreneurs in the
country’s early bureaucracies came up with ideas for expanded bureaucratic
authority and then engineered social movements to support new postal services
and food and drug regulation. However, the elite leadership in these two
arenas cannot be generalized to other policy domains (Sanders 1999 ), and the
46 elizabeth sanders