Emergency-war machine: national crisis, democratic governance, and the historical construction of the American state

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Emergency-war machine:
national crisis, democratic governance, and the
historical construction of the American state

Tyler M. Curley
University of Southern California
Political Science and International Relations
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Conferral Date: May 13, 2016
i

If you cannot thoroughly eradicate corrupt opinions or
cure long-standing evils to your own satisfaction, that is
still no reason to abandon the commonwealth, deserting
the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds.
– Thomas More
1

The great task of our times is to build a government
strong enough to meet the complicated difficulties we
face, but to build it so that we do not lose our democratic
traditions. There is no ready-made solution.
– Wayne Coy
2

A state based on ideas should be no more and no less
than a guarantee of freedom and security for people who
know that the state and its institutions can stand behind
them only if they themselves take responsibility for the
state – that is, if they see it as their own project and their
own home, as something they need not fear, as something
they can – without shame – love, because they have built
it for themselves.
– Václav Havel
3

1
More, Utopia, 44.
2
Coy, “The Men of Government,” 117.
3
Havel, Summer Meditations, 128.
ii

Table of contents

List of tables, figures, and charts ........................................................................................................... iv
List of abbreviations ............................................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... vi
Abstract ................................................................................................................................................ viii

Introduction. Towards a genealogy of permanent emergency ............................................................. 1
I. A tale of two emergency states – preparation and prevention ...................................................... 1
II. Analytical closures in mainstream IR ........................................................................................... 5
III. Genealogy as an alternative approach ......................................................................................... 8
IV. A roadmap of the genealogical narrative .................................................................................. 12
V. Conclusion: recovering American democracy in crisis .............................................................. 16

Chapter 1. Discourse, ideas, and statebuilding from the inside-out ................................................... 19
I. The need for a dynamic state concept ......................................................................................... 19
II. Models of emergency statebuilding in IR .................................................................................. 21
III. Historical institutionalism: common analytical limitations ...................................................... 32
IV. Recovering historical sociology through a dynamic ideal-type ................................................. 36
V. Conclusion: the benefits of configurational analysis .................................................................. 49

Part I. New Deal planning – from recovery to reform ....................................................................... 53

Chapter 2. Democratic national planning and collaborative federalism ............................................ 59
I. A brief primer on planning in the U.S. ....................................................................................... 59
II. Enframing the nation: towards national planning ...................................................................... 62
III. A plan for national resource planning ...................................................................................... 68
IV. Data collection and synthetic research ...................................................................................... 72
V. Technocracy, American style: a continuously planning society ................................................ 75
VI. Collaborative federalism: decentralizing and coordinating planning ....................................... 80
VII. Conclusion: the case for democratic national planning .......................................................... 86

Chapter 3. Governing the national economic condition .................................................................... 90
I. Planning and democratic economic management ...................................................................... 90
II. Progressive origins of macroeconomic management ................................................................ 92
iii

III. Enframing the national economy .............................................................................................. 98
IV. National income and the “underconsumption thesis” ........................................................... 105
V. Managing the 1937-1938 crisis through fiscal stimulus ............................................................ 112
VI. Conclusion: economic planning as a democratic policymaking tool ..................................... 118

Chapter 4. Reorganizing the federal administrative machinery ........................................................ 121
I. The need for administrative reform .......................................................................................... 121
II. Planning a study on administrative management ..................................................................... 123
III. The President’s Committee on Administrative Management ............................................... 129
IV. On the administrative machinery of democratic government ............................................... 133
V. Contesting the committee’s proposals in Congress ................................................................. 140
VI. Reorganization as a continual administrative process ............................................................ 145
VII. Conclusion: enduring institutional reform, at last ................................................................. 149

Part II. Laying the foundation for an emergency-war machine ........................................................ 152

Chapter 5. Ordering the mobilization institutional system ............................................................... 159
I. Rediscovering the wartime machinery ....................................................................................... 159
II. Interwar military planning and the continuation of the WWI model .................................... 162
III. Provisioning for the OEM – autumn 1939............................................................................. 166
IV. Forming the OEM – spring 1940 ........................................................................................... 172
V. Piecing together the machine – summer 1940-winter 1941 .................................................... 179
VI. Collaborative federalism – democracy through the OEM ..................................................... 185
VII. Conclusion: institutional preparedness for war ..................................................................... 189

Chapter 6. Managing the total mobilization program ....................................................................... 198
I. From total mobilization to permanent emergency .................................................................... 198
II. Civilian defense and the promise of collaborative federalism ................................................. 200
III. Coordinating domestic transportation through the OEM system ......................................... 209
IV. Governing the national economy and industrial production ................................................. 219
V. Postwar anxieties, collaborative federalism, and inverted totalitarianism ............................... 229
VI. Conclusion: the American state as crisis governance machine .............................................. 236

Conclusion. Practicing criticism after 9/11 ........................................................................................ 240

References .......................................................................................................................................... 251

iv

List of tables, figures, and charts

Figure 1.1. Alternative conceptions of the state in IR………………………………...…………………….....…. 22
Table 1.1. Summary of theoretical expectations..…………………………..……….……..…………………….... 32
Figure 1.2. A schematic ideal-type of statebuilding.……………………………………..……………………….… 46
Table 1.2. Theoretical approaches to state development..……….……………………………..…………….… 49
Figure I.1. Configuration of New Deal statebuilding………..………….………..……………………………….. 58
Figure 2.1. Map of planning regionalization.……………..………….……………………………………….……… 89
Figure II.1. Configuration of WWII statebuilding………………….……..…...……………………….………. 158
Chart 5.1. National defense organization chart, 1940..……………………............................................ 192
Chart 5.2. Development of the war organization.……………..……………………………………….……….… 193
Chart 5.3. National defense organization chart, spring 1942...…………………..………………………..…. 194
Chart 5.4. Emergency war agencies organization chart, fall 1942……………...…………...................... 195
Table 5.1. List of agencies coordinated through the OEM………………………………………………….… 196
Figure 6.1. Configuration of emergency-war machine……………………...……..…………………….….….. 236
Table 6.1. Summary of changes in total mobilization....………..………………….…………………….……. 237
Table 6.2. Historical transformation of the American state……..……………………………………….…… 239

v

List of abbreviations

APD – American Political Development
BoB – Bureau of the Budget
CND – Council of National Defense
DHS – Department of Homeland Security
EOP – Executive Office of the President
FDR – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
FEMA – Federal Emergency Management Agency
ICC – Interstate Commerce Commission
IMP – Industrial Mobilization Plan
IR theory – International Relations theory
NBER – National Bureau of Economic Research
NDAC – National Defense Advisory Commission
NEC – National Emergency Council
NPB – National Planning Board
NRA – National Recovery Administration
NSA – National Security Agency
NRPB – National Resources Planning Board
OCD – Office of Civilian Defense
ODT – Office of Defense Transportation
OEM – Office for Emergency Management
OLC – Office of Legal Counsel
OPA – Office of Price Administration
OPACS – Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply
OPM – Office of Production Management
PCAM – President’s Committee on Administrative Management
PWA – Public Works Administration
SSRC – Social Science Research Council
U.S. – United States
WIB – War Industries Board
WPA – Works Progress Administration
WPB – War Production Board
WRA – War Resources Administration
WRB – War Resources Board
WWI – World War I
WWII – World War II

vi

Acknowledgements

In one way or another, this project has been a long time in the making. The terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001, shook me to the core, as they did countless others around the world. Like
most people, I remember that day vividly. For years, I have struggled to understand the
implications of the attacks and the ensuing global “war on terror.” In my undergraduate and
graduate education at the University of Washington, Tacoma, I began to engage more critically with
issues of international politics and political theory, so much so that I continued to study these topics
in my doctoral program at the University of Southern California. Without the unstinting support of
countless people along the way, it surely would not have been possible to transform my critical-
normative ideals into a concrete research project about democracy, crisis, and the American state.
Several professors at UWT were integral to my early intellectual development. Michael
Forman first sparked my interest in politics and theory, and he has been a constant source of moral
support throughout the years. Turan Kayaoglu channeled these broad interests into focused
research and writing. My time studying with him in Turkey was perhaps the most critical of
junctures that set me on my current path. Rob Crawford taught me to do academic work while
retaining a critical edge. But, more importantly, hiking with him in the Olympic Mountains instilled
in me the value of a balanced work/personal life. Years after graduating from UWT, I had the
privilege of returning to teach my own course. Even if Michael, Turan, and Rob were annoyed by
my endless concerns about how to transition from teaching assistant to educator, they did not show
their irritation. I thank them for their help and lasting friendship, and I thank my students for their
patience. Many thanks also to Katie Baird, Anne Beaufort, Philip Cushman, Laura Delval, Bob
Hardie, and especially Jon Mercer (UW Seattle) for their encouragement.
Despite my professors’ concerted efforts to convince me that I should avoid an academic
life, I followed their model, not their advice, and decided to continue my political education at
USC. When I arrived, I quickly discovered that my interdisciplinary training at UWT did not fit
well into the mainstream curriculum of political science. That first year, Ange-Marie Hancock,
Jacques Hymans, Brian Rathbun, Nick Weller, and especially Ann Tickner helped me make the
move, and they actively encouraged me to think outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. Over
the next few years, I added a host of other professors to that list: Jeb Barnes, Mai’a K. Davis Cross,
Rob English, Sharon Hays, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (American University), Pat James, Anthony
Kammas, Saori Katada, Andrew Lakoff, Steve Lamy, and Wayne Sandholtz. The departmental
staff – Cathy Ballard, Jody Battles, Ashley Bonanno, Veri Chavarin, Linda Cole, Aurora Ramirez,
and Karen Tang – also indulged me with lengthy conversations about the discipline in general, and
the department in particular. My undergrad students and fellow colleagues also helped immensely
in making the shift to an academic life.
More importantly, my dissertation committee – Ann Tickner (chair), Jeb Barnes, Patrick
Thaddeus Jackson, Anthony Kammas, and Andrew Lakoff – cultivated the project and nurtured
me along the way. Ann’s generosity reached far beyond the dissertation. She not only let me stay at
her home in Washington, D.C., while I conducted research at the National Archives; her constant
support on phone calls and in person continuously revived my confidence that I was on the right
track. Through Ann, I had the privilege of meeting Patrick. From our first email correspondence to
my defense, I have been astounded by the amount of time and effort he put into my development.
Thanks to him, my thinking has blossomed in ways I never would have believed possible. Anthony
was also integral to my growth at USC. Our conversations have transformed my vision of the world,
and he continues to be a source of wisdom, both personal and intellectual. Without his
reassurance, I likely would have gotten bogged down by my own lack of confidence. While
Anthony and I were consumed by informal conversations about political theory, Andy’s class on
Foucault and governmentality provided a formal setting to discuss these same issues. It was in this
vii

course that Andy first pointed me in the direction I took for my dissertation research. From our
shared interests in emergency politics, he pressed me to look beyond post-9/11 to the FDR
administration, and he gave me invaluable insights throughout the project. Finally, though Jeb was a
late addition to the official committee, he had long been a part of my unofficial “coalition of the
willing,” as he puts it. He provided a sanctuary for me to learn about American Political
Development, free from judgment, and urged me to frame the project in a more accessible way.
Like my professors at UWT, Jeb taught me to pursue my passions, above all else.
The research and writing of my dissertation was supported financially by several institutions
at USC. The School of International Relations gave several generous summer fellowships and a
year-long fellowship (2013-2014) that enabled me to conduct archival research. They also provided
much-needed coffee breaks. The following year (2014-2015), the Center for International Studies
offered me a dissertation fellowship to begin writing my dissertation and present some of the work
along the way. Pat James and Indira Persad were constant sources of institutional and intellectual
support. In my final year (2015-2016), the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences gave me
a dissertation completion fellowship (a.k.a., the “fellowship of death”), motivating me to complete
my degree in a timely manner.
I would be remiss if I did not also thank the many skilled and courteous librarians I
worked with over the years. The VKC library staff at USC – especially Lourina Agnew, Mary Clark,
and Robert Labaree – were always kind and inviting. And without the assistance and expertise of
the librarians at the National Archives in College Park, MD, and the FDR Presidential Library at
Hyde Park, NY, I would not have known how to find the primary sources I used for my project, let
alone even known that they existed. Thanks also to Max Moretti, a fellow researcher I met at the
National Archives, for our conversations on the shuttle bus to/from the archives, as well as online.
In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends from back home – Michele
Brittany, Brent Carter, Nick Diak, Jeremy Fegley, Nick Wilson, and Rex Yabut – and my new
friends from USC – Jiun Bang, Fabian Borges, Youssef Chouhoud, Juvenal Cortes, Kory DeClark,
Adam Feldman, Ronin Fu, Fabian Gonzalez, Lauren Goodwin, Jake Grandy, Matt Gratias, Erin
Greene, Eric Hamilton, April Hovav, Chin-Hao Huang, Joey Huddleston, Tom Jamieson, Gloria
Koo, Kym MacNeal, Michel Martinez, Matt Mendez, Cyrus Mohammadian, Ron Osborn, Mark
Paradis, Simon Radford, Jenn Rogla, Guez Salinas, Keira Stearns, Scott Wilbur, Phil Wilcox, Sean
Wong, Ming-Min Yang, Laura Yen, and Nicolas de Zamaroczy – all of whom kept me sane during
this process, whether through drinks, Pho, movies, or conversations. I also had a needed reprieve
from academia through playing music with Kevin Beason, Justin Crandall, Jeremy Kirby, and Chris
Pancho. In truth, I prefer being on stage with them to being at the podium by myself.
I am also forever grateful to my family, without whom I would have lost all hope of
completing my doctorate long ago. Sharry and Larry let me do laundry at their place, provided
sound advice to navigate the rough seas of graduate school, and perhaps most importantly, turned
me on to good wine, an expensive but worthy habit. Grammy watched countless movies with me,
always with a huge grin on her face. Grandpa and Judy; Dan and Kim; and Rand, Deb, and
Chesirae all provided support and encouragement of one kind or another. Bob and Edie continue
to send me heartening emails. And though Sydney, Terra, my mom and Todd, and my dad and
Carrie have all certainly grown tired of my countless phone calls and despairing conversations,
they’ve always been there for me. Terra has even burdened herself with reading some of what
follows. My new family with Ashley has also welcomed me with open arms, and I am especially
grateful to Jim, Jovi, and Zac, and Ami, Nikki, and Ozzie for their support.
Above all, though, Ashley has changed my world forever. She has endured more of my
dissertation than anyone else, and – despite everything – has stuck around. I can’t wait to see where
life takes us. Also, without my lengthy, meandering walks with our loving dog, Pierre, I surely would
have gone blind from staring at the blank pages on the computer screen for too long. It is to them –
Ashley and Pierre – that I dedicate this dissertation.
viii

Abstract

In International Relations theory, it is often claimed that the structural pressures of international
security crisis determine statebuilding processes from the outside-in. The overwhelming consensus
among IR scholars is that the exogenous shocks of war and economic depression unsettle long
periods of relative stability, catalyzing new institutional arrangements that in turn become path-
dependent. Following this logic, many scholars have argued that the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001, and the ensuing global “war on terror,” changed everything in the United States. They
suggest that the drive to prevent further terrorism instigated widespread transformations in legality,
the separation of powers between branches of government, and national security and foreign policy.
This dissertation presents an alternative understanding based on Michel Foucault’s
genealogical approach. Rather than viewing post-9/11 as an exceptional period in U.S. history,
genealogy asks how we arrived at such an alarming condition of permanent emergency. To make
this case, I first situate genealogy within the wider IR literatures on statebuilding. While many
scholars have attempted to study the historical construction of states, they rely on particular
analytical assumptions that predefine the timing, shape, and extent of domestic institutional
developments under international crisis. This tendency blinds us to enduring transformations in the
American state. I offer, instead, a dynamic ideal-type based on Foucault’s conceptualization of the
state as an effect, always being performed through discursive and ideational practices. This provides
a generalizable analytic to trace the myriad configurations that states can take.
From this baseline, my historical argument demonstrates more specifically that certain
developments during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, between 1933 and 1945, laid the
groundwork for what we now consider to be fundamental aspects of the modern American state.
While expert advisors at that time insisted that experiments in national planning expertise, crisis
governance, and administrative management were the only way to ensure democracy in the face of
widespread existential threats – namely, economic depression and total war – the particular paths
they took conditioned the possibility for enduring constitutional powers and emergency
preparations from that point onward. Despite significant efforts to dismantle the World War II
apparatus, officials embedded preparatory crisis governance in the institutional architecture first set
by the FDR administration, and emergency became a normalized feature of the American state
since the early Cold War.
The argument in this dissertation contributes to both IR literatures on emergency
statebuilding and post-9/11 critical discourse. On the one hand, the theory provides an analytical
justification for how domestic institutions matter for issues of international politics, from emergency
preparedness and foreign policymaking to war mobilization and counterterrorism. On the other
hand, the historical narrative suggests that in order to understand the war on terror, we must look to
the broader construction of the modern American state. Only by exposing these contingent
foundations can we uncover the conditions of possibility for permanent emergency in the U.S., and
begin to propose alternative arrangements that sustain democratic principles and procedures.

1

Introduction.
Towards a genealogy of permanent emergency

[T]he critique of what we are is at one and the same time
the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us
and an experiment with the possibilities of going beyond
them.
– Michel Foucault
1

I. A tale of two emergency states – preparation and prevention

On September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush met with students at the Emma E.
Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, to discuss the importance of education.
2

What at first must have seemed a normal day for Bush quickly turned into perhaps the
defining moment of his presidency. Before entering the classroom, Bush’s security detail
informed him that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New
York City. The incident, originally thought to have been caused by pilot error, was not an
immediate source of panic, so the president went into the class as planned. But as Bush
read to the students, White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, informed him that another
plane had hit the second tower. “America is under attack,” Card whispered.
3
Anxious to
move the president to a secure location, the Secret Service escorted him to the motorcade.
While on their way to the airport, Bush learned of yet another attack – this time, on the
Pentagon.
The revelation that the United States was under siege must have been deeply
unsettling, and it instigated different emergency response measures across the country. In

1
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 50.
2
The following account is from 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report.
3
Ibid., 52-53.
2

New York City, as the World Trade Center crumbled to ash, leaving thousands dead in its
wake, the fire and police departments hastily improvised medical rescue missions. At the
Pentagon, officials activated the Incident Command System, an emergency management
organization designed to provide the framework and authority to coordinate a unified
institutional response. Meanwhile, high-level leaders at the White House, including Vice
President Dick Cheney, were escorted through a tunnel to an underground bunker,
equipped with elaborate technological amenities to facilitate government decisionmaking in
crisis. And President Bush, after being flown to two different air force bases, returned to
Washington, D.C., where he met with the National Security Council, Secretary of
Transportation, and director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to devise
comprehensive recovery plans moving forward.
Emergency responses such as these were the result of long-term preparations.
4
On
the day of the attacks and long afterwards, domestic crisis management was implemented
through devices that had been established in earlier periods – reaching back well into the
Cold War – to ensure continuity of government functions in times of grave national
security threat. With such capacities already in place, the central failure that had led to the
attacks was not a lack of institutional resources to respond but rather a lack of foresight to
anticipate terrorism on American soil. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz,
put it, a “failure of imagination” was to blame for not predicting the suicide bombings.
5

Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, went so far as to suggest that
in securing the nation against further terrorism, “imagination… must take an institutional
form, to be carried out effectively by ordinary people every day. That means the
development of a craft, of a culture, of routine procedures.”
6

After 9/11, attempts to routinize imagination and thwart future terrorist attacks
through a global “war on terror” ushered in two divergent modes of statebuilding, crisis
governance, and foreign and national security policymaking. On the one hand, novel
institutional configurations for domestic emergency management were constructed in the
Department of Homeland Security. Not only were preexisting capacities for emergency

4
Ibid., 386.
5
Ibid., 463-464.
6
Ibid., 528.
3

preparedness, like those activated on 9/11 through FEMA, converted into the DHS
system, new agencies (e.g., the Transportation Security Administration) were also created.
Formed in November 2002, DHS was initially organized around a number of mandates to
prepare the American state for the threat of domestic terrorism, and it has grown to include
natural disaster and epidemic planning, infrastructure and border protection, as well as
cybersecurity defense. Instead of simply expanding executive powers, it is designed to
distribute authorities to local, state, and regional groups – both governmental and non-
governmental – and to coordinate their activities through a collaborative federal system, the
roots of which can be traced back to the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War.
7

Yet on the other hand, the war on terror also inspired a preventive rationale – one
that, in contrast to the decentralized authorities of the preparedness approach, cleared the
way for widespread illiberal security measures. “In order to fight and to defeat terrorism,”
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said in February 2003, “the Department of Justice
has added a new paradigm to that of prosecution – a paradigm of prevention.”
8
Officials in
the Bush administration first implemented this new paradigm through a variety of
reprehensible counterterrorism policies – including extraordinary rendition, indefinite
detention and torture of terrorist suspects, and the suspension of civil liberties – and they
legitimated these actions under the banner of attaining intelligence vital for preventing an
attack. Moreover, the USA PATRIOT Act transformed previous legal requirements for
gathering data on U.S. citizens, effectively dismantling informational barriers between local
law enforcement and national intelligence agencies (e.g., the Federal Bureau of
Investigation). Through such newfound authorities, leaders created an unprecedented
domestic surveillance apparatus in the National Security Agency, which continues to be a
source of controversy between officials, lawmakers, and civil liberties proponents.
9

7
On the Cold War lineage of DHS, see especially Collier and Lakoff, “Distributed Preparedness;” Lakoff,
“Preparing for the Next Emergency;” Roberts, Disasters and the American State.
8
Quoted in Cole and Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free, 1.
9
The literature on these aspects of the war on terror is extensive. I deal with them more specifically in the
Conclusion, and in Curley, “Models of Emergency Statebuilding.” See, e.g., Ackerman, Before the Next
Attack; Ackerman, The Decline and Fall; Agamben, State of Exception; Butler, Precarious Life; Cole,
Enemy Aliens; Cole, Justice at War; Cole and Dempsey, Terrorism and the Constitution; Cole and Lobel,
Less Safe, Less Free; Danner, Torture and Truth; Fein, Constitutional Peril; Fisher, The Constitution and
9/11; Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency; Greenwald, No Place to Hide; Herman, Taking Liberties; Johns,
“Guantanamo Bay;” Neocleous, Critique of Security; Posner and Vermeule, Terror in the Balance; Posner
and Vermeule, The Executive Unbound; Posner, Not a Suicide Pact; Scheppele, “Law in a Time of
4

Though these two approaches may appear to be fundamentally at odds – with the
former grounded in preparation and distributed federal authority, and the latter guided by
a preventive logic, vastly expanded executive powers, and the erosion of liberty – they have
come to coexist in the American state in a troubling way. Alongside crucial developments
in emergency management, natural disaster preparedness, and disease control through
collaborative domestic institutional systems, the war on terror has simultaneously
comprised some of the most deplorable acts of U.S. state violence in the twenty-first
century. Security practices that were once regarded as extraordinary – namely, heightened
surveillance, detention and torture in black sites, the use of private military corporations,
and an increasingly militarized local police force – have become the norm. Protracted
international conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, in addition to the ignominious rise of drone
warfare, have exposed countless peoples around the globe to extreme forms of aggression
and mass devastation – all in the name of securing the civilized, Western world against the
threat of terrorism.
10

This dissertation seeks to understand how we arrived at such an alarming condition.
On what basis have these ostensibly conflicting forms of institutional development, crisis
governance, and security practices become possible? How has executive power become
largely devoid of limits in some areas while remaining constrained in others? How have
domestic institutional structures impacted foreign policy and national security? Perhaps
most importantly, what are the implications for democracy? While many scholars suggest
that we recently moved into a permanent emergency after 9/11, I argue that we must look
instead to the genealogical construction of the modern American state during the Franklin
D. Roosevelt administration, between 1933 and 1945.
11
In that time, not only did
innovations in planning expertise first condition the possibility of continuous preparation
for emergency but enduring crisis authorities and presidential autonomy were also built

Emergency;” Scheuerman, “Survey Article;” Scheuerman, “The Powers of War and Peace;” Schwarz and
Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced; Stone, Perilous Times; Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace.
10
“We wage a war to save civilization, itself,” President Bush claimed in November 2001. See Bush,
“President Discusses War on Terrorism.”
11
Cf. the broad historical critiques in Neocleous, Critique of Security; Neocleous, “The Problem with
Normality;” Tichenor, “Historical Set Points;” and the specific historical claims in Collier and Lakoff, “Vital
Systems Security;” Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Curley, “Models of Emergency
Statebuilding.”
5

into the executive branch. Only by exposing these contingent foundations can we recognize
how both preparatory and preventive configurations became normalized in the U.S., and
propose alternative arrangements that sustain democratic principles and procedures.

II. Analytical closures in mainstream IR

At first glance, this mode of questioning, and my proposed answer based on genealogical
evidence, probably seem strange to students of international politics. One might wonder,
for example, why it would be necessary to trace historical developments in an effort to
understand our present situation. One might also ask what impact domestic institutional
developments have on global issues, or how emergency preparedness relates to more
traditional state-security matters, like war and counterterrorism. Though reasonable, these
concerns are nevertheless guided by several fundamental misconceptions in mainstream
International Relations theory focused on the state.
12
Scholars typically draw stark analytical
boundaries between the state actor and the international system, between domestic and
foreign policy, and between non-traditional and sovereign security issues. Following these
dichotomies, IR literature lacks the tools to account for significant transformations in the
American state across time. It is thus worthwhile to elaborate on what is at stake in moving
towards a genealogical approach.
The state has long held a distinctive place in our social imaginary.
13
In many ways, it
was an emphasis on the state concept that differentiated the discipline of political science
from other social sciences, and the same can be said for IR theory.
14
Over the past century
of theorybuilding, the sharp analytical distinction between the stable political order within
states and the anarchic international environment outside their territorial borders has
served to delimit IR as a separate field of study. But even as this concept undergirds most
political studies, reaching back as far as the early twentieth century, it has become so
fundamental to the discipline that it often goes undefined altogether. Nowadays, most

12
See especially the critical disciplinary history in Bartelson, The Critique of the State.
13
I use “imaginary” in the sense that Cornelius Castoriadis does in The Imaginary Institution – not as fictive
but as a collective consciousness that shapes our experience of reality.
14
See, e.g., Bartelson, The Critique of the State; B. Schmidt, “On the History;” Walker, Inside/Outside;
Watkins, The State as a Concept.
6

scholars assume that the state in general – and the American state in particular – is the
principal actor in international politics, without making it an explicit category of analysis, or,
to be more precise, without reflecting on the inherent limitations of their preconceived
notions about the state.
State actorhood/International system. In mainstream IR, the heavy-hitters of
neorealism, neoliberal institutionalism, and structural constructivism all start from a
systems-level approach, which, in contrast to what Kenneth Waltz defines as reductionist
approaches that “concentrate causes at the individual or national level,”
15
aims to explain
political action based on the structural forces of the international system, namely, an
anarchic order and lack of world government. To allow for systemic theorizing, the internal
properties of states must be considered stable and exogenously given.
16
Rather than
focusing on the specific characteristics of each state, theorists suggest that we examine how
states stand in relation to one another – that is, their arrangement or position within the
international system – and in this way, they treat states as autonomous, like-units. “To call
states ‘like units,’” Waltz explains, “is to say that each state is like all other states in being an
autonomous political unit. It is another way of saying that states are sovereign.”
17

Beyond this baseline assertion, scholars disagree on what specifically can be
assumed about states. For neorealists – including Robert Gilpin, Charles Glaser, Joseph
Grieco, John Mearsheimer, and Waltz – states are considered autonomous, sovereign units
in that they possess well-defined territorial borders and military capabilities, have a well-
ordered institutional structure, and are relatively unconstrained by domestic political
settings and preferences.
18
While starting from the same unitary actor foundation,
neoliberal institutionalists – like Robert Axelrod, G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane, and
Kenneth Oye – find that even if states are interested in survival, the negative effects of
international anarchy can be mitigated through the development of international

15
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 18.
16
See especially Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 198.
17
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 95.
18
See, e.g., Gilpin, War & Change; Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics; Grieco, “Realist
International Theory;” Mastanduno, Lake, and Ikenberry, “Toward a Realist Theory;” Mearsheimer, The
Tragedy; Waltz, Theory of International Politics. A wide swath of literatures on liberalism, audience costs,
bureaucratic politics, and political psychology undermines the final point that domestic politics has little
impact. For a few representative examples, see Allison, “Conceptual Models;” Fearon, “Domestic Political
Audiences;” Jervis, Perception and Misperception; Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously.”
7

organizations and institutions.
19
Counter to this focus on material features, structural
constructivists – among others, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Sikkink, and Alexander
Wendt – argue that states are constituted by social factors, particularly norms and stable
collective identities based on their interactions in the international system.
20
Yet no matter
how it is conceived, the state actorhood assumption is insufficient to recognize the impact
of statebuilding on international politics.
Domestic/Foreign policy. Simply claiming that the state is, or acts as if it is,
21
a
unitary actor precludes an in-depth analysis of the influence of domestic institutions on
foreign policy and national security decisionmaking. In the effort to trace how pressures in
the international system impact political order, mainstream IR scholars must distinguish
between internal and external structures, thereby treating the state as a stable, unchanging
organization. Waltz put it best when he wrote: “National politics is the realm of authority,
of administration, and of law. International politics is the realm of power, of struggle, and
of accommodation. The international realm is preeminently a political one. The national
realm is variously described as being hierarchic, vertical, centralized, heterogeneous,
directed, and contrived; the international realm, as being anarchic, horizontal,
decentralized, homogenous, undirected, and mutually adaptive.”
22
We are left without a
clear theoretical understanding of how these ostensibly separate realms are interrelated.
23

Non-traditional/Sovereign security. A final distinction is made between sovereign
and non-traditional security issues. From the view of state-centric IR theories, security is
often understood as measures to increase military capacities, balance power in the
international system, consolidate and protect territorial borders, and otherwise extract

19
See especially Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation; Ikenberry, After Victory; Keohane, After
Hegemony; Oye, Cooperation Under Anarchy.
20
See especially Finnemore, National Interests; Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics;”
and Wendt’s theory of corporate state identity, in “Collective Identity Formation;” Social Theory of
International Politics.
21
In this respect, Waltz is perhaps the clearest in arguing that unitary actorhood is merely a heuristic device to
simplify reality for the sake of generating a parsimonious analytical theory. Others, like Wendt, define the
state ontologically as a unitary actor.
22
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 113.
23
See the classic critiques in Allison, “Conceptual Models;” Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed.” Cf.
the diverse claims in Ashley, “Living on Border Lines;” Campbell, Writing Security; Rathbun, “Does One
Right Make a Realist;” Walker, Inside/Outside.
8

resources and produce armaments essential to survive the external pressures of war.
24

Charles Tilly put this logic in its pithiest form: “War made the state, and the state made
war.”
25
There is little room in these frameworks, however, to investigate issues that are not
directly tied to the state as the referent of security. While other scholars have begun to
include economic depression as an important catalyst for statebuilding, they still do not
provide a foundation for examination across types of security. Mainstream IR rarely traces
how political actors themselves draw the boundaries of security threats that require
governance, including not only war, terrorism, and economic crisis but natural disasters,
epidemics, human security, and so on.
26
If we are to account for these dynamics, we need to
move beyond the folk wisdom in IR.

III. Genealogy as an alternative approach
27

Of course, this is not to suggest that all IR scholarship falls victim to these analytical
closures. A variety of broadly social-constructivist approaches challenge the stark
dichotomies assumed by mainstream theories.
28
The point, rather, is that the prevailing
frames of intelligibility in IR theory serve to exclude the very questions that must be raised
if we are to understand the complexities of permanent emergency in the U.S. What we
need is an approach that actively dissolves and denaturalizes the false analytical divisions
between domestic institutional development, foreign and national security policymaking,

24
See especially Gilpin, War & Change; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy.
25
Tilly, “Reflections,” 42.
26
See Booth, Theory of World Security; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security; Hansen, Security as
Practice; Tickner, Gendering World Politics.
27
On genealogy, see generally Dean, Critical and Effective Histories; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History;” Foucault, “What is Enlightenment;” Hacking, Historical Ontology; Koopman, Genealogy as
Critique; Roth, “Foucault’s ‘History of the Present.’” Michel Foucault’s insights extended Friedrich
Nietzsche’s focus on morality to wider issues of power/knowledge. See especially Nietzsche, On the
Genealogy of Morality; Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Part II.
28
I deal more specifically with practice theory, poststructuralism, and epistemic communities below in
Chapter 1, Sec. IV. See, e.g., Adler, “The Emergence of Cooperation;” Adler and Pouliot, International
Practices; Ashley, “Living on Border Lines;” Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism;” Bartelson, “Second
Natures;” Bartelson, The Critique of the State; Branch, The Cartographic State; Buzan, Wæver, and de
Wilde, Security; Campbell, Writing Security; Cross, “Rethinking Epistemic Communities;” Haas, “Do
Regimes Matter;” Hansen, Security as Practice; Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy; Jackson and Nexon,
“Relations before States;” Onuf, World of Our Making; Ringmar, “On the Ontological Status;” Walker,
Inside/Outside.
9

and international politics, so that we can examine their dynamic interrelationships. Michel
Foucault’s genealogy provides a particularly fruitful alternative that breaks through the
façade of state actorhood to trace the contingent processes through which states are
produced. Chapter 1 situates genealogy within the IR theory literatures. Here, I suggest that
genealogy offers three specific benefits for studying the post-9/11 American state.
Problematization of the present. Genealogy is concerned, above all, with diagnosing
our current situation,
29
but it does not view the present simply as an exceptional period.
Without accounting for the historical processes through which we have arrived at the
present, most discourse concerning the war on terror incorrectly suggests that post-9/11 is
an unprecedented time in U.S. history.
30
Genealogy, by contrast, unsettles what is taken-for-
granted, undermining in particular the common notion that everything changed after 9/11.
“[W]e should have the modesty to say to ourselves,” Foucault suggests, “that… the time we
live in is not the unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history where everything is
completed and begun again.”
31
Whereas scholars generally assume that the terrorist attacks
catalyzed wholesale transformations in domestic institutions, national security, and foreign
policy, genealogy encourages us to remain open to the multiple, often overlapping, forms
of statebuilding that have occurred at the same time, specifically how previous institutional
arrangements were reformed while others were created anew.
The post-9/11 American state is not simply constituted by preventive measures,
centralized executive powers, and sovereign security concerns, as many commentators
would have us believe. It has been subject to various modes of development simultaneously
– everything from the gradual conversion and distributed authorities of emergency
preparedness, to the transformations and expanded powers of the preventive paradigm
32
–
and these competing approaches have both become normalized. Precisely because it is
organized by these different layers, the modern American state is perhaps best defined,
following the literature in American Political Development, as an “intercurrent”
33

29
See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 119.
30
See fn. 9 above, and the Conclusion below.
31
Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” 36.
32
Cf. the more general insights about comparative institutional development, in Hacker, “Privatizing Risk;”
Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity.
33
The term comes from Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development.
10

constellation of institutional sites – each with their own history, structural arrangement, and
discursive and ideational foundations. Genealogy encourages us to shift our theoretical
attention away from the state as a unitary actor and towards the contingent practices
underlying permanent emergency in the U.S. While many scholars pinpoint the attacks on
9/11 as the source of these developments, genealogy reveals that they were conditioned for
long before the war on terror.
Historical process ontology.
34
Thus, instead of focusing on the existing condition,
genealogy asks more fundamentally how we got here. In IR theory, genealogy is not alone
in its emphasis on historical developments, yet it does history in a very different way. As
Foucault explains it, genealogy is not about capturing a comprehensive picture of a past
epoch: “Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity
that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that
the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present.”
35
It is
neither a version of presentism, whereby one reads the present back into the history of
other periods to find a parallel meaning in the past; nor of finalism, whereby one picks a
particular aspect of the present at some distant point in the past to show the necessary
developments over time from its origins.
36
In short, it does not aim to identify the
continuous progression of the American state along the same line of development, as does
the IR literature on statebuilding.
Rather, genealogy introduces a particular form of historical analysis based on
process ontology. It seeks out ruptures, discontinuities in development, and critical
moments of transformation, in order to expose the contingencies on which our present is
grounded.
37
Foucault describes genealogy as a “history of the present,”
38
by which he means
a deeply historical analysis of the conditions of possibility that constitute the present.
Genealogical studies investigate how certain aspects of our time were contingently
produced and have since become stabilized, solidified, and as a result, go unchallenged.

34
See especially Dean, Critical and Effective Histories; Foucault, “What is Enlightenment;” Hacking,
Historical Ontology; Jackson, “How to Think about Civilizations.”
35
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146. On this point, Foucault is building specifically on
Nietzsche’s approach, in On the Genealogy of Morality.
36
See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 118.
37
Ibid., 106.
38
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31. See also Roth, “Foucault’s ‘History of the Present.’”
11

“The question bears on what this present actually is,” Foucault explains; “it bears firstly on
the determination of a certain element of the present that is to be recognized, to be
distinguished, to be deciphered among all the others. What is it in the present that
produces meaning now for philosophical reflection?”
39
Because it stresses contingency over
continuity, genealogy is particularly equipped to uncover the historical construction of the
post-9/11 intercurrent American state.
Critical self-reflection. Taken together, the problematization of the present and
historical process ontology lead to a final, and perhaps even more important, aspect of
genealogical research. Genealogy encourages a critical self-reflective attitude, ethos, and
sensibility. As much as genealogy is concerned with diagnosing our present condition, it is
also careful to clarify what we are doing when we speak about this present.
40
Genealogy,
according to Foucault, makes explicit the connections between “the significance” of
scholarly work on the present, “a reflection on history[,] and a particular analysis of the
specific moment at which [one] is writing and because of which [one] is writing. It is in the
reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical
task that the novelty of” genealogy lies.
41
This approach, in other words, encourages us to
reflect on our position in history, so that we may open up the possibility of taking
alternative paths moving forward.
In seeking to uncover contingent foundations while remaining cognizant of the role
that historical knowledge production plays, genealogy is an effective device for reimagining
the present.
42
“History does not simply analyze or interpret forces: it modifies them,”
Foucault says. “The very fact of having control over, or the fact of being right in the order
of historical knowledge, in short, of telling the truth about history, therefore enables [one]
to occupy a decisive strategic position.”
43
Since it is not deterministic in the sense that it
seeks to identify the continuous progression of U.S. history towards a single endpoint,
genealogy radicalizes the post-9/11 permanent emergency condition. Instead of simply

39
Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth,” 87.
40
Ibid., 89.
41
Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 38. Or, as Nietzsche put it, in Untimely Meditations, 59: “We need
history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of
knowledge needs it… We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action.”
42
Koopman, Genealogy as Critique, 130.
43
Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 171.
12

essentializing our time as an exceptional moment, or, alternatively, suggesting the war on
terror is an inescapable fate along a singular line of development, genealogy unsettles these
historical foundations. In light of such analysis, I contend more urgently that we are able to
expose the precise ruptures in the past that have closed off certain possibilities for
American democracy. Only then can we ask what we ought to do moving forward.

IV. A roadmap of the genealogical narrative

The genealogical task in this dissertation is to pinpoint the specific developments that
conditioned the possibility for permanent emergency in the U.S. I locate the contingent
bases for both emergency preparedness and the preventive paradigm during the 1930s and
1940s.
44
Expert advisors in the FDR administration insisted that experiments in national
planning, technocratic governance, and administrative management were the only way to
ensure democracy in an American state faced with widespread existential threats and social
ills, including not only economic depression but total war. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively,
the particular paths they took laid the foundation for enduring constitutional executive
authorities beyond the limits of democratic accountability. Despite significant efforts after
World War II to dismantle the wartime apparatus and return to a pre-crisis condition,
officials embedded preparatory emergency management in the institutional architecture
first set by the FDR administration, and crisis became a normalized feature of the
American state since the early Cold War.
This historical narrative is divided into two main parts. Part I explores the
transformation effected through New Deal planning and rule by experts. Chapter 2
examines how planning became a lasting feature of the American state. In the wake of
World War I,
45
Progressive advisors made numerous attempts to sustain the surge of
interest in planning brought on by the war effort. But their insights did not gain momentum

44
My argument builds on Collier and Lakoff’s work, in “Vital Systems Security;” “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
We diverge on two important points, however. First, whereas they focus on the government of emergencies
related to what they call “vital systems” (e.g., the economy), I expand this specific focus to the more general
issues of American statebuilding. Second, whereas they suggest that vital systems security entails a more
liberal-constitutional form of governance, I aim to show how these developments paved the way for
constitutional, illiberal security measures as well.
45
While at the time it was known variously as the “European War,” “Great War,” or “World War,”
throughout this dissertation I use modern-day terminology for ease of comparison with WWII.
13

until spring 1933, when three leading civilian experts – railroad engineer and president
Frederic A. Delano, political scientist Charles E. Merriam, and economist Wesley C.
Mitchell – were offered an enduring institutional influence in the newly founded National
Planning Board. These individuals, working with countless research committees, seized the
opportunity to bring Progressive ideas to the national experiments of the New Deal. As a
result, the NPB became the most comprehensive government planning agency up to that
time. From the board members’ perspective, planning offered a systematic approach to
view natural and human resources in their interdependence; and they expanded data-
collection and statistical projects accordingly. These advances enhanced state capacities to
govern the most pressing security issues of the day without the pervasive controls or laissez-
faire measures used in the past. Instead, planning targeted the specific parts within the
national system in need of better management.
46

Based on their discursive and ideational innovations to plan national resources, the
FDR administration was in a unique position to examine the ongoing concerns of
economic depression and executive branch reorganization in a different light. Chapter 3
demonstrates how, throughout the 1930s, economists sought to open a space between
absolutism and free-market capitalism for what they considered to be a democratic middle-
ground. Many socioeconomic advisors – chief among them Lauchlin Currie, Marriner
Eccles, Alvin Hansen, Gardiner Means, and Mitchell of the planning board – began to
envision the economy as an interconnected machine. From this structural view, they
isolated underconsumption as the root cause of the initial economic downturn; and to
remedy the situation, they recommended deficit spending as a democratic way in which
leaders could redistribute income to consumers.
47
By the start of WWII, fiscal policy had
become an indispensable instrument in the policymaking toolkit for officials to govern the
economy without the direct interventions or contractual arrangements with industry needed
before. Economic growth was no longer simply a side-effect of the fervent experimentation

46
On the board, see especially Brinkley, “The National Resources Planning Board;” Ciepley, Liberalism in
the Shadow, Ch. 5; Clawson, New Deal Planning; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Jones, “A
Plan for Planning;” Merriam, “Planning Agencies in America;” Merriam, “The National Resources Planning
Board;” National Planning Board, Final Report; Reagan, Designing a New America; Warken, A History.
47
See Brinkley, The End of Reform; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Gruchy, “The
Economics;” Hill, “Wesley Mitchell’s Theory of Planning;” Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning;”
Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy.
14

of the early New Deal but a known consequence of government stimulus and planning.
In addition to inspiring new forms of economic management, expertise also
motivated institutional preparations that paved the way for the modern presidency and
executive emergency powers. Chapter 4 looks at how New Dealers promoted planning as a
democratic approach to prepare the American state for addressing widespread social
issues. Through early New Deal recovery activities, the number of emergency commissions
and agencies had expanded to such an extent that public administration advisors became
increasingly concerned about the president’s ability to effectively manage the government.
48

The Committee on Administrative Management – led by Louis Brownlow, planning board
advisor Merriam, and Luther Gulick – was formed in 1935 to propose solutions to the
problems that arose from the vast new responsibilities expected of the president. They
insisted that political institutions could be organized before security threats materialized, in
ways that made dictatorial executive authority a last resort, as opposed to an automatic
response, as was the case abroad in Nazi Germany. In line with these insights, the
Executive Office of the President was created in September 1939, furnishing Roosevelt
with the constitutional flexibility to legally reorder the executive branch, without direct
congressional interference.
49

Part II brings this history into the WWII period, as officials began to experiment
with innovations in planning expertise and institutional preparation for emergency
management. It is truly surprising that the FDR administration, on the brink of total war,
did not simply turn to the past strategies of crisis governance employed before. Not only
were the structural pressures largely the same as in WWI but, what is more, there was also
immense pressure from all sides to reinstate the earlier ideal in which military and
industrial leaders took charge of mobilization. Throughout the interwar period, various
studies had been arranged by military planners outlining how to prepare for another total
war, if the need were to arise. Based on WWI practices, which incentivized private industry
as a main part of economic management and gave the Departments of War and Navy
authority over all non-civilian procurements and production, the plans were, perhaps

48
See especially Dickinson, Bitter Harvest.
49
See Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Emmerich,
Federal Organization; Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning;” Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance.”
15

unsurprisingly, supported by big business and the military alike.
50
Even as the war
progressed, a variety of programs remained on the table, most of which were modeled
directly on the lessons of WWI.
Despite these countervailing forces, Chapter 5 finds that democratic national
planning and the newfound authorities of the executive office – not the earlier patterns of
emergency statebuilding – ultimately aided in the transition to defense and industrial
mobilization. Beginning in 1939, the FDR administration set out to manage the
complications of preparing the nation’s defense for total war while respecting constitutional
principles, as New Dealers had originally recommended. In direct contrast to the advice
calling for a return of the WWI approach, they formed an unprecedented administrative
framework within the EOP in spring 1940 – the Office for Emergency Management –
which retained overall managerial control of the government in the executive. The OEM
functioned unlike any other emergency device before its time. Virtually all defense agencies
established for the war effort were housed within its dynamic institutional structure prior to
the U.S. officially entering WWII in December 1941.
51
Remarkably, this system provided
the legal foundation for Roosevelt to initiate administrative reorganizations as needed
during the war via executive order.
Even more impressive, Chapter 6 contends, is how the OEM transformed the
national program into a collaborative federal project. It allowed for a mode of exercising
power through the American state that was neither dictatorial nor weak, as is often assumed
in IR theory, but rather capable of preparing for emergencies – from the ongoing economic
depression and total war mobilization, to non-traditional threats like natural disasters and
epidemics – through constitutional means. Given enduring societal pressures to distribute
authority across levels of government, the FDR administration determined that it was
essential to devise plans for mobilization while forming cooperative ties with local, state,
and regional actors – governmental and non-governmental. By stark contrast to the
centralized powers employed in WWI, the OEM decentralized responsibilities for crisis
governance and then coordinated these independent activities at the national level. Officials

50
On military planning, see Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War; Koistinen,
Planning War.
51
See especially Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;”
Emmerich, Federal Organization; McReynolds, “The Office for Emergency Management.”
16

addressed the problems of civil defense, domestic transportation, and industrial production
through this unparalleled institutional system, without relying predominately on dictatorial
coercion or laissez-faire management for national security.
This genealogy tells us a great deal about the historical construction of the modern
American state. Advances in national planning expertise and executive institutional
preparedness during the 1930s and 1940s laid the groundwork for transformations that
continue to resonate in systems of emergency preparedness, as well as the constitutional
powers, erosion of civil liberties, and security practices of the preventive paradigm.
Without the seeds of collaborative federalism first planted in the EOP and OEM, it is
likely that wartime institutions would have been dismantled in the postwar period, just as
they had been after WWI. Yet with the foundations laid, preparatory emergency
management no longer served simply as a means to stave off recourse to dictatorship. Ever
since the early years of the Cold War and through to post-9/11, the American state has
been cultivated into a dangerous configuration premised on permanent mobilization and
enduring crisis. The ostensibly conflicting forces of expanded executive authority, free-
market capitalism, and technocratic planning have become embedded within an
intercurrent institutional system – what I have come to call an emergency-war machine.
52

V. Conclusion: recovering American democracy in crisis
53

It is in this alarming context that I have written this dissertation. At stake in the historical
analysis is not merely an investigation of the past but, more importantly, a normative claim
concerning how we ought to proceed today. A citizenry unaware of or apathetic to these
developments in constitutional permanent emergency threatens to destroy what is left of
American democracy. Practicing criticism after 9/11 demands that we take a radical,
historically-informed stance. Because a principal democratic goal is to maintain

52
Cf. the more general critical insights in Bacevich, Washington Rules; Hedges, The World As It Is;
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Mills, The Power Elite; Wolin, Democracy Incorporated.
53
My normative ambition can be read as a response to Neocleous, Critique of Security, 9-10, who writes that
the aim of critique is “to free ourselves from security fetishism by provoking and intriguing others to try and
think politics without security. It is often said that security is the gift of the state; perhaps we ought to return
the gift.” While Neocleous focuses solely on the preventive paradigm, I believe emergency preparedness
associated with natural disaster, epidemics, and so on is vital. Thus, my goal is not to free ourselves from
security but rather to make it more democratic.
17

accountability in the face of existential threats, it is essential that we hone our sights on how
certain transformations during the FDR administration, while intended to save democracy
in crisis, ironically closed off possibilities for democracy in the present. Only then can we
understand the dominant security practices of our time and the contingent foundations
upon which they have been constructed. The foremost task is to open critical discourse so
we can challenge the legitimacy of the post-9/11 American state, now inextricably linked
with both emergency preparedness and illiberal modes of policymaking. Doing so
produces a space to reveal the potentially limitless constellation of alternative configurations
that sustain, rather than undercut, democracy.
One option, I would like to suggest, is to redeem the hopes of the public officials
and national planning experts in the FDR administration. In a series of speeches given
shortly after being selected as the president’s top administrative assistant and OEM Liaison
Officer in 1941, Wayne Coy cogently explained the way in which planning could ensure
democratic crisis governance.
54
Still several months before the U.S. officially entered
WWII, Coy stressed the importance of public administration for the difficult mission that
lay ahead in transitioning the nation’s resources to the mobilization effort. “Essentially the
national defense job is that of unifying and coordinating all of the manifold activities of our
economic life in the service of the nation’s need for gigantic armament production,” Coy
said. He added, however, that “these tremendous tasks are all subordinate to the essential
job of preserving the respect for the individual, the zeal of justice and freedom, and all the
ultimately important qualities of the life of free men.” Defense, in other words, had to be
achieved through democracy.
Responding to fears that such an enormous undertaking would inevitably require
dictatorial means, Coy carried his faith in government even further. As he recalled it, “A
friend said to me the other day, ‘You fellows in government tend not to represent anybody,
tend to be without roots. You are organizers and manipulators and operators of a great
human machine, but you are likely to get lost in the fascination of running the machine, to
lose sight of why you are here.’” “Surely,” Coy conceded, “that poses the greatest danger
that faces public administration… Great power is placed in the hands of public servants,

54
For the following quotes, see Wayne Coy, Address to Indiana University, October 30, 1941, Container 26,
Coy Papers. The same speech was given at Oberlin College on December 5, 1941.
18

and that power can be abused and tyrannically used if men come to think the power
belongs to them and forget they merely use it as trustees of all citizens.” But far from
producing irresponsible dictators, it was precisely the institutional apparatus originally built
through the EOP and OEM that facilitated democratic management for total mobilization
in WWII. It was only after the war that the executive became fundamentally unrooted
from the principles of democracy, and thus, as many feared, leaders lost sight of why they
were there in the first place.
The chief purpose of this research, then, is to account for what has been lost – to
understand, in particular, how the collaborative institutional ties of emergency
preparedness have become entangled with the preventive paradigm – so that we can
recover democracy in our current age rampant with national emergencies and security
threats, not the least of which include terrorism, economic depression, natural disasters,
and epidemics. If we can make crisis governance in the U.S. more democratic, then we will
have gone a long way towards implementing what Roosevelt and his advisors once thought
should be our primary ambition: to ensure that in protecting the American people –
whether from a downturn, foreign foe, or any other calamity – we do not at the same time
surrender ourselves to the call for dictatorship. And so, in the hope that we can begin to
rediscover democratic crisis governance for ourselves, we turn to critical genealogical
analysis. For the essential duty to “keep our Government channeled in the direction of
democracy,” as Coy once put it, is not simply a forgotten ambition of years past; it is the
foremost matter to which we must devote our political and intellectual resources today.

19

Chapter 1.
Discourse, ideas, and statebuilding from the inside-out

No state… is anything in and of itself, outside historical
time and social space… Every state, on the contrary, grows
out of specific intellectual, spiritual, and cultural traditions
that breathe substance into it and give it meaning.
– Václav Havel
1

I. The need for a dynamic state concept

Before we get to the genealogical narrative, however, we need an analytical framework that
helps identify how the transformative change from temporary statebuilding to permanent
emergency in the United States was made possible.
2
This chapter develops a conception of
the state suitable for such a genealogy. Section II foregrounds the often-undisclosed
assumptions underlying state concepts in IR theory, and finds that there are two prevailing
models of statebuilding based on the work of historical sociology: the national security state
and contract state. Just as the post-9/11 literature defines terrorism as a critical juncture that
determined the course of American statebuilding, the overwhelming consensus among IR
scholars is that states are solidified structures whose stability is interrupted by international
security crises from the outside-in. Analysts, in considering states as unitary actors, must
smuggle in external factors to explain formative changes in domestic institutions.
Yet because they predefine the timing, shape, and extent of statebuilding under
emergency, the IR literature is ill-equipped to trace the wider genealogical developments in
the intercurrent American state. Thus, after outlining the models’ primary claims, Section

1
Havel, Summer Meditations, 128.
2
A previous version of this chapter was published in Curley, “Models of Emergency Statebuilding.” Here, I
focus predominately on the IR theory scholarship on the state concept, and I elaborate on the ontological
implications for studying a genealogy of American statebuilding.
20

III exposes their common shortcomings. Following the assumptions of historical
institutionalism, both models close off scholars’ analytical ability to adequately account for
state developments over time. Perhaps the central shortcoming of historical-institutionalist
IR scholarship is that it reifies contingent processes of statebuilding into stable ontological
characteristics of the state.
3
The resulting tendency to periodize U.S. history into long eras
of constancy interrupted by exogenous shocks – that is to say, forces that cannot be
incorporated into their conception of the state – blinds IR scholars to enduring
transformations in statebuilding processes, crisis governance, and security measures.
Genealogy demands that we pry open a space in the existing theoretical frameworks
to trace the practices that continuously constitute the American state. What we need, I
suggest in Section IV, is a dynamic ideal-type that militates against the closures that have
become commonplace in IR theory. If the central drawback of the IR models is that they
close off analytical boundaries to historical contingency and agency, then a dynamic ideal-
type seeks to move beyond these limits by reconceptualizing the state to sustain these
factors. Michel Foucault’s efforts to denaturalize the state provide an analytical foundation
sufficient for this task. Expanding on his conceptualization of the state as an effect, always
being performed through discursive and ideational practices,
4
I argue in particular that
expertise is an endogenous source of statebuilding from the inside-out. Such a conception
at once locates the contingent historical processes through which the state is continuously
produced while remaining neutral to the myriad configurations these processes can take.
On this view, the state is never a finished entity, as is typically assumed in IR theory,
but rather is subject to various modes of continuity and change simultaneously. Differences
in these processes are largely a function of the friction-points between competing discursive

3
While historical sociologists themselves do not fall victim to this criticism, much of IR theory building on
their work does. Glaring exceptions include Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States;” Nexon, The
Struggle for Power.
4
See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Foucault, Society Must be Defended; Foucault, The Birth of
Biopolitics; Foucault, “Two Lectures.” Cf. Bourdieu, On the State; Dean and Villadsen, State Phobia;
Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect;” Mitchell, “The Limits of the State.” There is also a clear
relation to practice theory and discourse analysis in IR, as we will see. Consider, e.g., Adler and Pouliot,
International Practices; Ashley, “Living on Border Lines;” Bartelson, “Second Natures;” Bartelson, The
Critique of the State, Ch. 5; Campbell, Writing Security; Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy; Jackson, “How to
Think about Civilizations;” Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States;” Onuf, World of Our Making;
Ringmar, “On the Ontological Status;” Walker, Inside/Outside.
21

and ideational claims about which issues the state has a responsibility to manage,
5
and the
institutional sites that are chosen to address these problems.
6
It is at these specific points
that we can see how discourses and ideas lead to different institutional forms. Though we
cannot theoretically predict the outcomes of these practices – for such an assumption
would place us in the same trap as the IR literature – this ideal-type offers a generalizable
analytic that not only recovers the ambitions of historical sociologists but lets us investigate
the particular developments at the heart of the genealogical study in this dissertation.

II. Models of emergency statebuilding in IR

What each analyst sees and judges to be important is a
function not only of the evidence about what happened
but also of the ‘conceptual lenses’ through which he looks
at the evidence.
– Graham Allison
7

IR scholarship on the state concept differs significantly on two central analytical points (see
Figure 1.1 below). The first, ontological status, refers to the ways in which analysts conceive
of the state’s reality.
8
At one extreme, the state is considered a solidified, unitary actor
identified by its characteristics (attribute ontology); at the other, it is always in a process of
becoming (process ontology). The second distinction, substantive emphasis, refers to which
factors are said to make up the state. Some theorists argue that material factors (e.g.,
military power, stable territorial boundaries, institutional structures, a monopoly on the use
of physical force) are the sine qua non of the state, whereas others insist that social factors
(e.g., identity, discourse, ideas) are more formative. Each perspective differs insofar as it
views these aspects as inherent attributes or as processes through which the state is
constructed and reconstructed.

5
Cf. more generally Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and
Political Order.” The focus on the social construction of emergency aligns closely with IR work on
securitization, in Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security; Hansen, Security as Practice.
6
I thank Jeb Barnes for stressing this point to me. See more generally Barnes and Burke, How Policy Shapes
Politics.
7
Allison, “Conceptual Models,” 689.
8
See Jackson, “How to Think about Civilizations;” Jackson and Nexon, “Relations before States.”
22

This mapping exercise is not meant to be exhaustive. Even if these points of
contention are fundamental, by no means are they the only ones on which scholars
disagree. Nor is there space to discuss every approach, which in itself would be a fruitless
task. The objective, rather, is to situate a dynamic ideal-type within the wider IR literatures
on the state concept. Especially problematic, when seen from this perspective, are
mainstream theories that define the state as a sovereign actor which possesses certain
features inherent to statehood (attribute ontology), and those that highlight only one
substantive factor (material or social). In both scenarios, scholars reify ongoing processes
into ontological characteristics. This is not only untenable but, what is more problematic
for our purposes, provides insufficient analytical foundations to identify the specific
configurations that conditioned the possibility for a post-9/11 intercurrent American state.
If we are to account for this contingency, we must avoid the commonly held unitary actor
assumption altogether, developing instead a theory of statebuilding.
For this purpose, a host of IR scholars have turned to the historical sociology
literature concerning the effects of international crisis on early modern state formation.
9

9
See generally the literature reviews in Hobden and Hobson, Historical Sociology of International Relations;
Hobson, The State and International Relations.
national
security
state model

neorealism neoliberal
institutionalism
attribute
structural
constructivism

ontological
status
process

historical sociology

dynamic ideal-type
contract
state model
material social
substantive
emphasis
Figure 1.1. Alternative conceptions of the state in IR
23

Taking Otto Hintze, Harold Lasswell, Gianfranco Poggi, and particularly Charles Tilly and
Max Weber as their main departure points, this diverse literature has breathed new life
into the stale state concepts in mainstream IR. Rather than approaching the state from an
attribute ontology – as a pre-formed entity that possesses certain characteristics – historical
sociologists center their analyses on state development over time. What many IR scholars
take for granted as the essential features of statehood come to be seen as the consequences
of complex historical processes to mobilize for war and manage economic depression. The
broad conclusion from these works is that international security crises created sovereign
states as we know them today.
10

At its best, such a claim encourages us to think of states not as finished products
(i.e., stable, unitary actors) but rather as contingent products of international emergency.
Historical sociologists insist that the patterns of statebuilding vary significantly across time
and space. Even though institutional developments are initiated by the structural forces of
crisis, Tilly suggests that these processes have ranged anywhere from “coercion-intensive”
to “capital-intensive” patterns.
11
In the coercion-intensive mode, rulers forcefully remove
the means of war by appropriating national resources, controlling industries, and
nationalizing transportation systems. But coercive methods, Tilly explains, have often been
met with increasing resistance by well-organized social classes; and institutional systems
created for war mobilization can reflect these domestic conflicts over scarce resources. In
the capital-intensive mode, instead of simply creating a monopoly on force, rulers rely on
voluntary cooperation and incentives to contract-out state capacities to capitalists, and the
state is only temporarily expanded to meet the necessities of war without constructing
permanent institutional orders.
At its most troubling, however, this perspective congeals into universal claims about
how specifically international security threats impact statebuilding.
12
The lineage of two IR

10
A wide literature stems in large part from Tilly’s and Weber’s work on the state. See, e.g., Downing, The
Military Revolution; Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan; Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State
Back In; Poggi, The Development; Poggi, The State; Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions; Tilly, Coercion,
Capital, and European States; Tilly, “Reflections;” Tilly, “War Making.” For earlier works, see Hintze,
“Military Organization;” Lasswell, “The Garrison State;” Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.”
11
See Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 30, 99.
12
Even Tilly, Ibid., 12, admits that in his earlier work he advanced a “unilinear story – one running from war
to extraction and repression to state formation.”
24

frameworks in particular – the national security state and contract state models – can be
traced to this broader literature. Yet while the historical sociologists initially aimed to
identify diverse configurations of statebuilding, the IR models have ultimately lost sight of
historical contingency and agency. Whereas the former finds that structural forces unsettle
long periods of domestic institutional stability, thereby contributing to a new political
arrangement based on centralized executive powers and economic controls, the latter finds
that, even in crisis periods, liberal ideology and culture carry on to ensure that security
practices do not upset the continuous advance of free-market practices. Their analytical
assumptions lead down a dangerous road, positing that statebuilding in general only arises
as a result of grave national emergencies, and that American statebuilding in particular has
followed the same course in these times.

National security state: a first cut

[W]e are now, as the combined result of legislative
delegation, the constitutional authority of the President,
and the separation-of-powers theory, living under the
government of irresponsible, executive dictators.
– Lindsay Rogers
13

In periods of grave security threat, many scholars claim, states have increasingly advanced
along similar lines. War has been a “powerful catalyst of change,” Bruce Porter argues –
one that has modernized institutional systems “from medieval, traditional, decentralized,
and personal forms of government to bureaucratic, rationalized, centralized, and
impersonal forms.”
14
The need to extract resources and mobilize the population has
engaged rulers in activities to centralize control of government functions – military,
economic, administrative. Leaders have rapidly consolidated authority and raised armies
through conscription, forcefully united the nation behind mobilization, and
commandeered the means of violence from the private sphere. Taken together,
international crises have generally led to territorial consolidation, societal unification, the
centralization of power, the rationalization of political institutions, increasingly

13
Rogers, “Presidential Dictatorship,” 139.
14
Porter, War, xv, xiv, respectively.
25

interventionist social policies, government-led economic management, and unitary
decisionmaking – in short, all of “the fundamental state-making processes.”
15

Only through these historical practices have states become the well-ordered,
compulsory organizations we find in mainstream IR theory. “The modern state begins to
develop,” as Weber explains, “wherever the monarch sets in train the process of
dispossessing the autonomous, ‘private’ agents of administrative power who exist in parallel
to him, that is to say, all the independent owners of the materials of war and the
administration, financial resources, and politically useful goods of every kind.” War offers
leaders an extraordinary justification to accelerate these measures and to confiscate the
means of producing violence. What we get “is an institutional form of rule that has
successfully fought to create a monopoly of legitimate physical force as a means of
government within a particular territory. For this purpose it has concentrated all the
material resources of organization in the hands of its leaders.”
16
As a result, the modern
state has transitioned into a political organization equipped not only to survive international
threats but to quell domestic unrest through domination and violence.
17

The key to understanding state development, from this baseline, is to identify the
effects of external crisis on internal political systems. Several common themes unite
analysts within a shared framework: the national security state model. First is agreement on
the source of institutional change – that it is only under conditions of extreme crisis that
statebuilding occurs. What separates the historical sociologists from the IR theorists is the
subsequent claim as to how, specifically, international crisis impacts state development.
Whereas Tilly and Weber stress that statebuilding occurs in a variety of ways, many others
– like Robert Higgs, Bruce Porter, Robert Saldin, Bartholomew Sparrow, and James
Sparrow – argue that the external pressures of war compel state rulers to engage in certain
sovereign security measures to survive from international threats. Crisis, for them,
necessitates a coercion-intensive form of statebuilding, in which leaders centralize control,
engage in interventionist economic policies, and integrate society and other levels of

15
Tilly, “Reflections,” 42. See also Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan; Porter, War, 13-15; Tilly, Coercion, Capital,
and European States; Tilly, “War Making;” Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.”
16
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 37, 38, respectively.
17
See Porter, War, 11.
26

government for national interests.
18

Viewed in this way, the state is an institutional structure whose stability is unsettled
by international crises – defined as exogenous shocks that exert an overwhelming force on
domestic institutional development. War, as Saldin writes, is a “key causal variable” in
statebuilding processes; it interrupts longstanding periods of order, allowing unprecedented
changes to political institutions, economic management, and state-society relations –
changes which, without the destabilizing impact of emergency, would otherwise not
succeed.
19
“At the outbreak of war,” Higgs claims in his classic study, Crisis and Leviathan,
“a suddenly heightened demand for governmental provision of military activities leads
immediately to displacement of market-directed resource allocation by greater taxation,
governmental expenditure, and regulation of the remaining civilian economy. The larger
and longer is the war, the greater is the suppression of the market economy.”
20
Differences
in statebuilding, therefore, result from the structural demands placed on states.
21

Not only do scholars agree that crisis requires leaders to expand the size and scope
of the state but also that the changes effected by exogenous shocks become path-
dependent, resulting in permanent institutional transformations. Though statebuilding only
occurs during emergencies, these exceptional measures get locked-into the state’s
organizational structure, and authority is expanded indefinitely. “[W]hat goes up,” Porter
suggests, “seldom comes down.”
22
This is generally referred to as the “ratchet effect” – the
notion that “after each major crisis the size of government, though smaller than during the
crisis, remained larger than it would have been had the precrisis rate of growth persisted
during the interval occupied by the crisis.”
23
Emergency statebuilding, Saldin argues, is “a
story of path dependence.” International threats “force the government’s hand; responsive
action is taken; and, once taken, is usually not reversed even after resolution of the
instigating problem is achieved.”
24

18
See especially Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan; Porter, War; Saldin, War, the American State; B. Sparrow,
From the Outside In; J. Sparrow, Warfare State.
19
Saldin, War, the American State, 9.
20
Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 17.
21
We will return to this point below in Sec. III.
22
Porter, War, 14.
23
Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 30.
24
Saldin, War, the American State, 237.
27

From these basic theoretical propositions, analysts have constructed a specific
narrative about the impact of crisis on American statebuilding. This model finds that
international security threats have been the primary impetus for large-scale political and
institutional upheaval in the U.S. The deep-seated liberal traditions and institutional
arrangements engrained in the Constitution made statebuilding all but impossible without
crisis. “Centralization of power,” Saldin writes, “runs counter to traditional American
liberalism. But because wars are such intense events, they frequently compel the kind of
centralizing activity that would otherwise be highly controversial.” The reason being that
emergencies unite elite and public opinion into a consensus about how to move forward.
“Although this process plays out through sheer necessity and a realization that no other
options are available, the fact remains that wars have a tendency to compel state responses
that are rare in the absence of major crises and that generally have a lasting effect on the
American political system.”
25

Over the course of the twentieth century, emergencies not only necessitated
temporary alterations in state capacities to deal with existing problems but, it is argued,
these changes have endured, and profound expansions in the state have become
permanent. The pressures of international crisis have culminated in what Higgs laments is
an American state that is “powerful, highly arbitrary, activist [and] virtually unchecked by
the constitutional limitations of checks and balances.”
26
Several lasting transformations have
become path-dependent: the development of an integrated conception of federalism, by
which individual states were regarded as crucial parts of the program to fulfill the national
government’s demands; the dissolution of the traditional separation of powers through the
delegation of executive administrative authorities; and the diminishing significance of
Congress and the Judiciary in crises. Even more important, from this perspective, has been
the enduring shift in executive powers. Whereas the Constitution previously enumerated
the president’s authorities, Congress has delegated inherent powers for mobilization,
making national resources permanently available to the state.
27

25
Ibid., 236-237 (emphasis added).
26
Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 233.
27
See, e.g., Corwin, Presidential Power; Corwin, Total War; Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan; Hooks, Forging the
Military-Industrial Complex; Porter, War; B. Sparrow, From the Outside In; J. Sparrow, Warfare State;
Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship; Unger, The Emergency State.
28

It is little wonder that this model has become a leading narrative of statebuilding in
IR theory. If the modern state is defined, following Weber, as a compulsory political
organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory, then
scholars are likely to see an evolutionary trend towards consolidation, dispossession of the
means for coercion from the private sphere, and increasing economic control. The view
that rulers are compelled by international crisis to remove the means of violence and rule
from society by appropriating resources, controlling industries, and nationalizing economic
markets suggests that modern sovereign states are largely the by-product of a ruthless
selection process. States that did not meet the burdens of war and economic depression
through coercion ultimately did not survive in the international system.
28
Even in the U.S., a
state largely removed from European wars, these processes have been at work.

Contract state: a second cut

No matter how big and strong it grows, the American state
is destined always to be uneasy.
– Aaron Friedberg
29

This is far from a complete story, however. Following Tilly’s insight that different state
forms have survived the same structural forces, a competing perspective has taken shape:
the contract state model. Marc Eisner, Aaron Friedberg, Michael Hogan, and Barry Karl
have all contended that institutional development occurs on the backdrop of preexisting
cultural norms, ideologies, and institutions.
30
A central point of tension between the
national security state model and this alternative lies in their emphasis placed on exogenous
shocks. Whereas the former model assumes that external pressures determine the course
of statebuilding, the latter resists this tendency. “Although crises create opportunities for
change,” Eisner writes, “they are not determinative. There is nothing inherent in a crisis
that determines the precise features of the political-institutional response.”
31
While
emergencies remain a primary source of change from the outside-in, these shocks are

28
Cf. Waltz, Theory of International Politics.
29
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 33, citing Karl, The Uneasy State.
30
See especially Eisner, From Warfare State; Friedberg, In the Shadow; Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United
States;” Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Karl, The Uneasy State.
31
Eisner, From Warfare State, 3.
29

nevertheless mediated by intervening domestic factors.
Friedberg’s In the Shadow of the Garrison State offers an exemplary account of this
competing view. Like other IR theorists, Friedberg reinforces the common wisdom that
“[w]ar made the state.” He admits, following a narrow reading of Tilly, that war “forced”
rulers to extract resources from the private sphere; in order to build military systems
effective enough to survive international conflict, leaders “had to develop more efficient tax
systems, bureaucracies, and professional armies.” But while inevitable in Europe, given the
evolving technologies and stresses of warfare, Friedberg argues that war by itself did not
create the U.S. “The American republic was born while this larger historical process was
already well underway and, indeed, it was founded in part out of a reaction against the
trend toward ever-greater concentrations of state power (and ever-expanding state capacities
for military creation) taking place on the other side of the Atlantic.” America’s geographic
isolation allowed it to “survive and thrive… without developing a central state that was
strong in the traditional ways.”
32

The question that arises, then, is what explains restrained forms of statebuilding.
Before returning to the peculiar path of the American state, we can draw out several
analytical points. According to the contract state model, capacities for crisis governance are
expanded in less coercive ways, and we should see differences in states that have particular
institutional arrangements and ideological values against statebuilding – what Friedberg has
termed “anti-statism.” Certain institutional orders (e.g., competitive federalism and the
constitutional separation of powers) weaken unitary control of the government, while
certain cultural traditions (e.g., in favor of decentralized economic management) inspire
noninterventionist modes of state involvement in society and economy. In such contexts,
instead of nationalizing state power through coercion, we should expect to see rulers
contracting-out to the private sphere, through compensatory measures that incentivize
industrialists to engage in security measures voluntarily.
33

It follows, therefore, that even if institutions must be reformed to galvanize the
national unity required to meet international crises, statebuilding subsides after these

32
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 3.
33
See generally Eisner, From Warfare State; Friedberg, In the Shadow; Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United
States.”
30

periods to restore pre-emergency arrangements. In direct contrast to the national security
state model’s expectation that statebuilding will remain ratcheted-up, the contract state
model suggests that institutional development will be rolled-back once the crisis period is
over. Expanded state capacities are dismantled once the threat dissipates, allowing for the
return of limited government and traditional, free-market economic policies. The sources
of this rollback are the very same ideological and institutional pressures that limit
statebuilding in normal times. When the hostilities cease and the need for war preparations
or economic management subside, so the argument argues, the narrow window of
opportunity for change closes.
Seen in this light, the American state appears far weaker than the modern sovereign
states typically assumed by IR scholars – in part because of its remoteness from the outside
world, and in part because of an exceptional cultural idealism against the state.
Commentators as diverse as the Federalists and Alexis de Tocqueville, Samuel Huntington
and Seymour Lipset, have all noted the distinctiveness of the American republic.
34
At the
heart of this idealism, Karl explains, is a “commitment to the autonomous individual as the
fundamental element in American democracy.” The individual is said to possess natural
rights to liberty, property, and security; and it is the individual who endows the state with
the responsibility to ensure that these rights are upheld in a political collectivity. Liberal
individualism “is the one most fundamental tenet in the American belief in self-
government, in the state that serves its citizens and meets their demands.”
35

These scholars argue further that the roots of ideological and institutional anti-
statism can be traced all the way back to the founding of the American republic. A number
of longstanding traditions have served to counterbalance the tendencies toward growth and
expansion associated with European states. Liberal ideas, on the one hand, weaken the
influence of those figures who promote statebuilding activities, and political institutions, on
the other, tend to undermine the concentration of power in a single branch of government.
Together, these forces impose “a marked anti-statist bias” on the processes of American
statebuilding. Using a biological metaphor, Friedberg claims that “at the moment of its

34
On American exceptionalism, see Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers; Huntington,
American Politics; Lipset, American Exceptionalism; Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
35
Karl, The Uneasy State, 6.
31

conception, the new nation had a strong anti-statist strain encoded into its political DNA.”
36

It was constructed from the bottom-up as an organization intended specifically to promote
individual freedom, rather than from the top-down to compel the private sphere to act in
the collective interest, and it has remained relatively unchanged ever since.
With these countervailing forces, the difficulty in moments of extreme emergency
has been to strike a tradeoff between the need to allow for unitary decisionmaking and the
widespread social drive to uphold the tenets of liberal idealism. This tentative balancing act
has thrown the American state into tension, forever destined to lumber between the
necessities of international crisis and the cultural imperatives for limited government.
37
Yet
even if the external pressures have opened up the possibility for fundamental change, the
contract state model suggests that anti-statism has motivated only temporary capital-
intensive solutions to emergency conditions. During periods of crisis over the past century,
state capacities have been expanded not only through government controls, centralized
executive authority, and heightened militarism but through what compensatory measures
that provide economic incentives to industrial leaders and the public to assist the state.
38

Instead of allowing for transformations in the normal constitutional order, the
argument goes, anti-statism has acted as a permanent barrier to absolute rule in the U.S.
Even if institutions have been reformed to galvanize the unity required for emergency
management, statebuilding has subsided after these periods to restore pre-crisis
arrangements. Expanded state capacities were removed once the threat dissipates, allowing
for the return of liberal self-government and traditional, free-market economic policies. As
Friedberg puts it, there is “a strong and persistent national tendency to rely on private over
public actors, inducements over authoritative commands, and decentralization over
centralization of control.” He concludes: “The centrifugal tendencies that are built into the
American constitutional design tended to reassert themselves when the galvanizing energy
of a crisis started to subside.”
39

36
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 5-6, 9, respectively.
37
In Karl’s terms, the American state is “uneasy.” See Karl, The Uneasy State.
38
Eisner, From Warfare State, 12; see also 40-43.
39
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 29-30, 31, respectively. Cf. Eisner, From Warfare State, 34.
32

III. Historical institutionalism: common analytical limitations

The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive
view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and
continuous development must be systematically
dismantled.
– Michel Foucault
40

While both models help us understand certain aspects of American statebuilding, they are
ultimately unable to identify other forms of institutional development. Whereas the former
finds that emergencies unsettle long periods of stability, thereby contributing to a new
arrangement based on centralized powers, the latter finds that, even in crisis, culture and
ideology ensure that security measures do not upset the continuous advance of anti-statism.
Both argue that statebuilding only arises as a result of grave national security threat – that is,
out of necessity to meet the demands of war and economic downturn – and both contend
that statebuilding occurs in the same way across time, whether through wholesale
transformations or the maintenance of the status quo (see Table 1.1 for a summary).
Neither view offers an analytical foundation sufficient to trace configurations beyond these
two extremes.

Table 1.1. Summary of theoretical expectations

national security
state model
contract state
model
source of
change
external pressures
of crisis
crisis mediated
by anti-statism
mode of
change
exogenous exogenous
shape of
statebuilding
coercion-
intensive
capital-
intensive
state power strong weak
prevailing
measures
centralization compensatory
economic
management
interventionist laissez-faire
form of
federalism
integrated competitive
outcome permanent temporary

40
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153.
33

Despite their prospects, each model falls into three successive analytical traps that
bring them closer and closer to the mainstream IR theories based on an attribute ontology.
First is an overly materialist outlook on the state concept. IR scholarship emphasizes only
the material aspects of the state concept, to the detriment of the social. Scholars, therefore,
identify alterations in state power as the primary statebuilding process. For the American
state, more specifically, this boils down to an analysis of the executive branch within the
federal government. Since this notion highlights institutional capacities to formalize,
centralize, and coordinate rule over society, scholars identify material alterations in
executive authority as the primary statebuilding processes. “In the American context,”
Friedberg tells us, “the term ‘state-building’ therefore refers to efforts to increase the size
and strength of the executive branch.”
41
Saldin put it more precisely “as an organizational
process in which new governing institutions are created, existing institutions are expanded
or strengthened, or the relationship between government and society is altered.”
42

Of course, there is substantial disagreement about how these processes have been
implemented in practice. As drawn out above, the national security state model
demonstrates how state leaders concentrate the means of physical force to mobilize for war
and manage economic crisis by expanding the scope of executive authorities to intervene in
the private sphere. Over time, sovereign states successfully acquire the means for
administrative rule by divesting them from society. Alternatively, the contract state model
highlights how social factors serve to limit statebuilding. Due to societal demands, officials
expand state capacities to manage war and economic depression by incentivizing the private
sector to cooperate. Each narrative, however, accepts the core notion that statebuilding
refers only to attempts to monopolize the means of violence within the executive branch.
Everything else, in this scheme, does not count as statebuilding and thus is ignored.
The disproportionate emphasis on material properties reduces the importance of
the social side of state developments, leading scholars to neglect them altogether. Even
when IR scholars include social features, as does Friedberg, they relegate them to “society”

41
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 10.
42
Saldin, War, the American State, 10. Bartholomew Sparrow, From the Outside In, 20, would certainly
concur: “State-building can thus be understood as a process of organizational change: change in the
bureaucracies of government, change in the relations between government organizations and societal actors,
and change in the means of administration.”
34

and conflate them with constant pressures against statebuilding. Consider an example we
will return to in Chapters 3 and 6 below. When scholars examine economic crisis
management, such as the need to tax the population for war, they neglect concomitant
innovations in expert knowledge about the economy. Discourse and ideas nevertheless
constitute vital state developments, and they significantly impact state capacities to govern.
To account for these influences, we need a theoretical framework that presents a wider
conception of political development, beyond the purely material definition of expansions
in the size and scope of executive coercive powers.
Second, even if the models differ on what specific type of statebuilding we expect to
see in moments of crisis, they both stress constancy. In claiming that only material growth
constitutes statebuilding, the IR models conclude that institutional development occurs in
the same way – through either coercion- or capital-intensive modes – and thus are ill-
equipped to trace the myriad configurations that statebuilding can take. The national
security state model argues that any deviation from the normal pattern of centralization is
the result of distinct structural forces brought on by crisis. As Saldin puts it, statebuilding
differs according to the “peculiar idiosyncratic effects instigated by wars.”
43
Such a sweeping
generalization closes off our analytical ability to uncover differences in statebuilding under
the same external forces. In a similar way, the contract state model solidifies historical
contingencies into a generalized analytic, finding that institutional development is
consistently limited. Anti-statism is a stable countervailing force that works against the
pressures for statebuilding triggered by crisis. But if anti-statism is persistent, then we still
cannot pinpoint what leads to alternate state forms.
Attention to constancy in and of itself is not problematic, if it is an empirical claim.
But to suggest that the shape of institutional development is essentially unchanging, or to
lack a generalizable analytical framework to account for these differences, effectively
solidifies ongoing historical processes into ontological principles. More than an analytical
simplification, the materialist state concept turns into an ontological claim when scholars
define states as strong or weak, developed or underdeveloped. Compared with the
prevailing notion of the sovereign state, for instance, the American state is widely assumed

43
Saldin, War, the American State, 26.
35

to be limited. It can be said to have “a government of sorts” but not “a state” in the fullest
sense of the term, Friedberg insists.
44
The most burning question that follows, in Eisner’s
eyes, is how to explain the “retardation of political development” in the U.S.
45
These sharp
dichotomies narrow our analytical vision of what is important to examine, and limit our
ability to identify qualitative changes to statebuilding processes that do not sit comfortably
within the prevailing models’ expectations.
All of this points to a final, even more fundamental, limitation. For all their
emphasis on institutional change in emergency, analysts lack a thorough theoretical account
of statebuilding processes. Just as mainstream IR theories view the state from an attribute
ontology, the models place overwhelming significance on stability and order. Following a
materialist definition of the state, the IR models assume that the state is ontologically a
finished product. Stasis is the status quo; administrative regimes and ideologies are durable
characteristics of the state. In privileging order, the models follow an unambiguous
analytical separation between path-dependence in normal times and fleeting moments of
upheaval. Since the material aspects of the state are unchanging, they must locate the forces
of statebuilding in factors that are exogenous to their models. Without an “intense and
galvanizing atmosphere of crisis,” Friedberg contends, “attempts at state-building are
doomed to fail.”
46

Scholars propose an episodic, critical-juncture theory of institutional change,
whereby the apparent solidity of the state institutional structure is destabilized by external
crisis conditions. Emergencies are defined as shocks that cannot be incorporated into
everyday statebuilding processes, the traditional legal framework, or constitutional
arrangements between branches of government. Dramatic shifts in political institutions are
only experienced, we are told, in conditions of extreme national emergency. While the
state is typically settled, Eisner explains, these “periods of relative stability are punctuated
by rapid, substantial, institutional changes” brought about by crises.
47
The American state
develops in “bursts or spurts, with periods of rapid change followed by intervals of

44
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 16. See also Skowronek, Building a New American State.
45
Eisner, From Warfare State, 27.
46
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 20.
47
Eisner, From Warfare State, 7.
36

comparative stability.”
48
“Change in the state,” Sparrow insists, “happens not gradually or
incrementally, but disjunctively and sporadically. And crises create opportunities for, and
make transparent the necessity for, change.”
49

Yet such a logic of institutional development is problematic. First, there is no
theoretical justification for why exogenous shocks inspire certain types of change instead of
others. Second, to the extent that scholars do try to explain the necessities of statebuilding,
they argue that emergencies generate rare periods of consensus and coordination between
political actors, society, and industry – groups which otherwise would oppose material
expansions in executive power altogether.
50
What we regularly see, however, is not
agreement but immense contestation. Third and related, rather than identifying how
political actors themselves struggle to define the boundaries of national security threats and
propose solutions to these issues, analysts merely assume what constitutes an emergency
and what form institutional development will take in these times. With each analytical
move, the models shift further away from their roots in historical sociology and come to
resemble mainstream IR theory based on the state actorhood assumption.

IV. Recovering historical sociology through a dynamic ideal-type

I could cite you kilometres of texts with the word state as
the subject of actions and proposals. That is a very
dangerous fiction, which prevents us from properly
understanding the state… [B]e careful, all sentences that
have the state as subject are theological sentences – which
does not mean that they are false, inasmuch as the state is
a theological entity, that is, an entity that exists by way of
belief.
– Pierre Bourdieu
51

We are left in dire need of a framework that resists the analytic closures to historical
contingency and agency shared by the IR models – an alternative that at once focuses our

48
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 19.
49
B. Sparrow, From the Outside In, 7. Cf. Saldin, War, the American State, 234-235.
50
See, e.g., Saldin, War, the American State, 236-237, who argues that while traditional American liberalism is
a consistent force against centralization, statebuilding in emergency “plays out through sheer necessity and a
realization that no other options are available” (emphasis added).
51
Bourdieu, On the State, 10.
37

attention on particular aspects of the state and statebuilding while simultaneously allowing
us to trace the diverse forms that political development can take, as historical sociologists
like Tilly and Weber originally strove to do. This requires that we move beyond the purely
materialist definition of the state, the punctuated-equilibrium assumption that statebuilding
only arises during emergency, and the notion that exogenous shocks determine the timing,
course, and extent of institutional change. The strategy I take – by no means the only viable
one – is to develop what can be considered a dynamic ideal-typical conception of the state,
founded not on the essential characteristics of state actorhood, as in mainstream IR and the
prevailing models, but rather on the ongoing processes that constitute the state. I suggest in
this section that a genealogical approach is particularly equipped to open a space in the IR
literature for such an alternative.
This strategy to develop an ideal-type of the state for genealogical purposes may
seem contradictory. After all, Foucault himself can be read as perhaps the most infamous
anti-statist scholar. He vehemently opposed traditional, top-down models of the sovereign
state; and his genealogies of disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality were in
tension with the dominant understandings of the state in political science and IR. In
studying social power relations, he emphatically maintained that theorists should decenter
their analyses, thereby cutting off the King’s head, as it were. Because the state is ultimately
unable to occupy all fields of power and cannot possibly govern every aspect of social life,
Foucault reasons, “[w]e have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the
field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State. We have to analyze
it by beginning with the techniques and tactics of domination.” Thus, he considered the
state as an effect of other, more fundamental social practices, processes, and power
relations “which render its functioning possible.” For many Foucauldian scholars, the
question we are left with is: Why not simply do away with the state concept altogether?
52

Building on Pierre Bourdieu, Mitchell Dean, Timothy Mitchell, and others who
have attempted to recover the state concept for historical sociological analysis,
53
I intend to

52
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 102, 122, respectively. See also Foucault, “Governmentality;” Foucault, “Truth
and Power;” Neal, “Cutting Off the King’s Head.” For scholars who have taken this to its logical conclusion
by dissolving the state as an object of inquiry, see Rose and Miller, “Political Power;” and the contributions to
Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, The Foucault Effect.
53
See especially Bourdieu, On the State; Dean, Critical and Effective Histories; Dean and Villadsen, State
Phobia; Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect;” Mitchell, “The Limits of the State.” Cf. the more
38

demonstrate the analytical import of merging Weber’s insights on ideal-typification with
Foucault’s notion of the state-effect. Rather than developing an ideal-type that falls into the
same traps as IR scholarship based on an attribute ontology, genealogy introduces a
particular form of state analysis based on a process ontology. Genealogy understands the
state not as a solidified material institutional structure susceptible to change only in extreme
circumstances but instead as an effect, continuously produced and reproduced through
discourse, power, and knowledge. By incorporating these practices as endogenous sources
of statebuilding, and by investigating the interrelationship between material and social
factors, this perspective contributes to an analytically generalizable conceptual framework
that accounts for statebuilding dynamics without predefining the outcome of these
processes. In doing so, it recovers the ambitions of historical sociology and foregrounds
Foucault’s contributions to state analysis.
54

Ideal-typification – from the state to the “state”
55

An inanimate machine is mind objectified.
– Max Weber
56

The analytical task of studying the state is as difficult as it is vital. Though necessary for any
comprehensive understanding of politics, both domestic and international, the state
nevertheless poses numerous challenges to intelligibility – it is, in Bourdieu’s words, “an
unthinkable object.” This is especially so in our time, because the prevalent state actorhood
assumption has acquired a taken-for-granted status. Everywhere we look – not only in
academic literatures but in everyday discourses as well – the state is repeatedly
conceptualized as a solidified entity, a thing that possesses essential characteristics. Through
repetition, this understanding of the state has become deeply rooted in our modern social

general sociological insights in Steinmetz, State/Culture; Vu, “Studying the State.”
54
It should be noted, however, that what follows is not intended simply to be a close reading of Foucault.
Rather, I cull out specific points from his and others’ work, and I arrange them together to create an ideal-
type. It should be judged, therefore, not on its consistency with Foucault’s theory of the state – if that even
exists – but on its practical contribution to the study of the state.
55
I borrow this play on words from Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, Ch. 1, who employs a similar device to
differentiate Western Civilization as an ostensibly objective category from “Western Civilization” as a
discursive effect.
56
Weber, Economy and Society, 1402.
39

consciousness and political reality. Since the state has become self-evident, the very
problem of the state has gradually dissolved, and its foundations have gone unquestioned.
Yet while our everyday experiences reinforce these assumptions without question, when we
take these existing categories at face value we fail to understand the state.
57

If IR scholars attempt to define the state at all, they usually cite Weber’s renowned
ideal-type of the modern state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
58
This
conceptualization has become perhaps the authoritative concept in political science and IR
theory. But despite Weber’s appeals to the contrary, analysts have employed it without
reflecting on its inherent limitations. Prevailing state concepts in IR tend to forget that
though it may appear as a unitary actor, the term “state” is a deceptively elegant heuristic
device designed to simplify the complex historical processes underling this façade of
actorhood. Embedded in the common usage of Weber’s concept is the misguided
assumption that the state is, ontologically speaking, an actor that possesses particular
features – namely, a monopoly on violence, legitimacy, and concrete territorial boundaries
– and that it is only susceptible to change in moments of extreme crisis.
Weber himself likely contributed to this confusion, for his ideal-type can rather
easily be misunderstood as privileging the characteristics essential to states. Weber
constructs his ideal-type by first establishing a sharp distinction between the political and
the social. He identifies the state as the foremost political collectivity, which he
distinguishes from social groups by its means of domination through violence. Since there
are no specific ends to which every political collectivity strives, he reasons, these
organizations can be defined only in terms of their particular means. The state can be
understood “sociologically,” according to Weber, “only in terms of the specific means
peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force.” Having
made this distinction, Weber then identifies the specific attributes and formal
characteristics that differentiate states from other political organizations: Modern states
consist of 1) administrative and legal orders that 2) claim binding authority over subjects

57
Bourdieu, On the State, 3, 56. See also Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State;” Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and
the State Effect;” Mitchell, “The Limits of the State.”
58
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 78.
40

within a delimited jurisdiction; and as such, are 3) territorially bounded compulsory
organizations that 4) possess a monopoly on the right to use force.
59

The problem with this conceptualization, however, does not reside in the process
of ideal-typification but rather in the way that IR theorists have appropriated this particular
definition. On a narrow reading, one might argue that Weber considers states, in
ontological rather than analytical terms, as bounded political communities that control the
legitimate use of force inside a given territorial space. Yet Weber is especially careful to
draw attention to the fact that he is developing an ideal-type – a concept that, far from
merely copying objective facts, explicitly abstracts from the values of his day to purposely
idealize them for analytical purposes. “An ideal type,” as Weber explains it, “is formed by
the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great
many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual
phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints
into a unified analytical construct.” He concludes that such constructs are “found nowhere
in empirical reality;” they are “utopia[s].”
60

Basing their frameworks on Weber’s ideal-type, IR scholars often confuse analytical
conveniences with ontological reality. Models of statebuilding rely on simplistic
dichotomies between state, society, and international system; between strong and weak
government; and between developed and underdeveloped states. These categories, though,
are neither natural nor essential but are analytical claims concerning the boundaries that are
drawn by actual people. Weber was particularly concerned that ideal-types of social
collectivities, like modern states, would become reified into the kinds of attribute ontology
definitions prevalent in IR. “[F]or practical ends,” Weber tells us, “it may… be convenient
or even indispensable to treat social collectivities, such as states,… as if they were individual
persons.” Yet he suggested further that “for sociological purposes there is no such thing as
a collective personality which ‘acts.’ When reference is made in a sociological context to a
state…, what is meant is, on the contrary, only a certain kind of development of actual or
possible social actions of individual persons.”
61

59
Ibid., 78, 82-83. See also Weber, Economy and Society, 54-56.
60
Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science,” 90. Cf. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry, Ch. 5.
61
Weber, Economy and Society, 13, 14, respectively.
41

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of state existence, from this view, is that it has
a social meaning for individual people. At its core, the state is grounded in a consensus.
The exercise of state power always rests, in one way or another, on the basis of shared
intersubjective belief – both in the idea that the state exists and in the widespread
recognition of its normative legitimacy.
62
More than that, when people orient their actions
towards the state, these ideas and normative claims have a causal influence in the
ontological creation of states. “Thus,” Weber writes, “one of the important aspects of the
existence of a modern state, precisely as a complex of social interaction of individual
persons, consists in the fact that the action of various individuals is oriented to the belief
that it exists or should exist, thus that its acts and laws are valid in the legal sense.”
63
Since
the state is an effect of the social practices of people, it follows that the state ceases to exist,
for purely analytical purposes, wherever meaningful action is not taken towards it.
This reversal has devastating impacts on how we conceive of the state in IR. If
individual persons collectively come together to constitute states’ ontological reality, then it
follows that our ideal-type must underscore the social meaning that states have for people.
“[W]hen we inquire as to what corresponds to the idea of the ‘state’ in empirical reality,”
Weber explains, “we find an infinity of diffuse and discrete human actions,… partly unique
and partly recurrent in character, all bound together by an idea, namely, the belief in the
actual or normative validity of rules and of the authority-relationships of some human
beings towards others. This belief in part consciously, in part dimly felt, and in part
passively accepted” is a central process through which people construct states. “[I]n other
words,” Weber elaborates, “the ‘ideas’ which they construct for themselves about the
state… [are] of great practical significance.” As such, our ideal-type must aim to synthesize
these ideas and social practices, rather than predetermine the concrete forms they may
acquire. By contrast to the autonomous state actor assumption, the state concept and the
“practical idea” of the state should “approach each other very closely.”
64

62
Bourdieu, On the State, 10, considers the state a “well-founded illusion” or an “illusory reality.”
63
Weber, Economy and Society, 14.
64
Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science,” 99.
42

Genealogy: deconstructing and rethinking the state concept

To put all of this another way, Weber proposes that we move away from an ideal-type
based on an attribute ontology to one based on a process ontology. Weber does not
develop this line of thought further, however, so I would like to suggest that a genealogical
approach offers invaluable resources to make such a shift. Broadly speaking, genealogical
research dissolves everything that appears immobile into historical motion:
65
Rather than
asking who or what holds power (i.e., the sovereign state), it aims to uncover the effects and
targets of power (e.g., individuals and the population), what specifically is produced through
the exercise of power and claims to authoritative knowledge (e.g., new categories of agents
and subjects), and how political actors constitute certain objects as intelligible and
governable (e.g., the economy and social problems). In order to study these fundamental
processes, genealogy strips the modern state of its essential characteristics, and thereby
dissociates us from our common familiarity with the state as a finished entity. “The state
does not have an essence,” Foucault argues. “The state is not a universal nor in itself an
autonomous source of power…. There is no question of deducing this set of practices from
a supposed essence of the state in and of itself.”
66

While this may seem obvious to some, it is often forgotten by the IR models, which
not only segment time into distinct periods of long-term stability interrupted by episodic
moments of development but also assume beforehand the shape and extent of these
statebuilding processes. Foucault convincingly argues (à la Weber) that traditional
frameworks of the sovereign state fail to appreciate the ongoing dynamics, social forces, and
power/knowledge relations that in fact constitute the state. In grounding their studies in
universal claims about the ontological attributes of states, mainstream scholars 1) approach
power in a universalizing fashion as emanating from a central location in a unitary agent, 2)
understand right and legitimacy as being possessions of a sovereign political actor, and 3)
interpret political action as a result of state repression, prohibition, and compulsion.
Foucault concludes that we should “eschew the model of Leviathan” altogether.
67

Instead of starting from the universal definition of the modern state that has

65
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 147. See also Dean, Critical and Effective Histories.
66
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 77. Quoted in Dean and Villadsen, State Phobia, 89.
67
Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 102.
43

become dominant in political science and IR, then, genealogy examines the complex set of
“concrete practices” through which the state is continuously produced and reproduced.
68

This effectively unsettles the stagnant state concept based on a narrow reading of Weber’s
ideal-type, and peels back the mask of statehood to discover the ongoing processes of
statebuilding. Simply put, the practices that constitute the state are both discursive and
ideational: the state is an idea – as Bourdieu, Foucault, and Weber all suggest – insofar as
people act towards it based on a fundamental recognition of state existence and legitimacy;
and from this consensus have emerged new categories of agents (i.e., officials) who are
authorized to speak for and act on behalf of the state. Discourses and ideas, accordingly,
serve as the foundation for the development of institutional structures, and these
institutions in turn provide the sites within which actors struggle to concentrate the means
of physical, informational, and symbolic production.
69

In revealing the practices that give rise to states, genealogy productively decenters
the notion of statebuilding purely as material institutional developments in the executive
branch. Wedded to an overly materialist conception of the state, the dominant assumption
in IR theory is that statebuilding entails actions to reform agencies, consolidate authority,
and otherwise monopolize the means of physical coercion in institutions. Since political
orders are solidified and stable, the models identify exogenous shocks as the source of
fundamental transformations in state institutions. Following this line of reasoning, stability
and change are the result of material factors only – such as structural constraints, veto-
points, and the fit of preexisting institutional arrangements to address new problems – and
scholars are encouraged to trace the impact of international crises on specific institutional
systems over time.
70

And while the contract state model is laudable to the extent that it underscores the

68
Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 3. Foucault’s emphasis on the practices that constitute the state is in line with
Bourdieu’s practice theory. See especially Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power; Bourdieu, On the State;
Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State.” Yet while practice theory has gained wide traction in IR theory – see
especially Adler and Pouliot, International Practices; and Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality” – Bourdieu’s
insights have not been extended to issues of the state concept and statebuilding.
69
Following Foucault’s lead, many poststructural IR scholars have suggested that the state is contingent upon
discourse. See especially Ashley, “Living on Border Lines;” Bartelson, The Critique of the State, Ch. 5;
Campbell, Writing Security; Ringmar, “On the Ontological Status;” Walker, Inside/Outside. Even though
they start from the same place, however, I maintain that genealogy moves beyond this focus by investigating
how discourse and ideas constitute institutional structures.
70
See more generally Hacker, “Privatizing Risk;” Streeck and Thelen, Beyond Continuity.
44

importance of ideas for statebuilding, it nevertheless does so in a troubling way. When IR
scholars include social features in their analyses, they relegate them to “society,” a
seemingly singular entity that is forever hostile to the “state.” What is more, they view ideas
as institutions-in-themselves, relatively stable and coherent – not as contingent practices,
fragmentary and open to change. The “persistent presence” of anti-statist ideology, it is
argued, has opposed expansions in state power ever since the dawn of the American
republic. Efforts to expand the size or strength of the executive have “invariably arouse[d]
opposition.”
71
American culture, legal institutions, and liberal traditions appear unvarying
throughout time. This approach views the U.S. Constitution as an inflexible document,
impervious to opposing interpretations; the separation of powers and federalism as
inherently competitive ways to restrain the scope of executive power; and laissez-faire as the
only approach to economic management.
72

Yet just a brief glance at history demonstrates that these assumptions are, at best,
empirically inaccurate and, at worst, ideologically charged promotions of a certain political
agenda.
73
Politics as usual does not consist of stasis but change; even institutional orders that
appear stable must be maintained, and thus are open to transformation. Even if the staying
power of certain beliefs is hard to contest, they do not simply remain the same over time,
nor do they exist in a space devoid of rival values and principles. Such a narrow conception
overlooks the influence of competing discourses and ideas. Genealogy, by contrast,
considers political institutions as particular configurations, or crystallized orderings, of
ongoing power/knowledge relations. Rather than simply disaggregating the state into its
component parts, genealogy underscores historical contingency and the multiplicity of
institutional orders at any given moment by tracing the dynamic discursive and ideational
practices that constitute institutions. In so doing, it encourages us to shift the entire focus of
our analysis away from material institutions to the ever-evolving practices of state agents,
those individuals who take responsibility for building the state.
74

71
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 4, 23, respectively (emphasis added).
72
The same critique can be made of liberal IR theory, which views societal preferences and ideology as
continuous pressures against state centralization and expanded powers. See especially Moravcsik, “Taking
Preferences Seriously.”
73
See the critique in Novak, “The Myth.” On the transformations in federalism, for example, consider Beer,
“The Modernization;” Beer, To Make a Nation; Corwin, “The Passing.”
74
On these points, genealogy is remarkably similar to the APD literature. See especially Orren and
45

To say that discourse and ideas are integral to institutional development does not
mean that institutions are simply a product of rational design, as implied in IR theory.
Recall, the national security state model proposes that officials will exploit their institutional
position to attain further resources, authority, and power to impose their political will on
other branches of government and society; and the contract state model, conversely, finds
that traditional liberal ideology is a deeply held, calculated belief which constrains these
efforts. “No leader,” Friedberg explains, “will knowingly choose a path that he regards as
impassable, and most will also forgo alternatives that they believe to be morally wrong or
not in keeping with what they construe as the nation’s basic ideological principles.”
75
While
state agents may exploit discourse and ideas as strategic tools, the important analytical point
from a genealogical perspective is that state institutional structures take material form only
through social practices, and that it is in discursive and ideational struggle that we can find
the bases for statebuilding.
In short, this view greatly expands our analytical framework to consider both
material and social ontologies simultaneously. The state is at once an objective reality and
an intersubjective representation. Just as all state coercion is at the same time a symbolic
construction, all social representations of the state take concrete forms (e.g., legal language
and rulings, official garb and symbols of authority, borders to delimit the community).
Timothy Mitchell argues convincingly that the material institutional structures and
discursive representations of the state are part of the same process. “[T]he phenomenon
we name ‘the state,’” he writes, “arises from the techniques that enable mundane practices
to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form. Any attempt to distinguish the
abstract or ideal appearance of the state from its material reality, in taking for granted this
distinction, will fail to understand it.” The resulting challenge is not to demarcate the

Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development. But whereas “the institutional turn” in APD
views institutions as material structures that can exist apart from discourse and ideas, genealogy parts ways in
suggesting that discourse and ideas are the ontological source for institutional development, maintenance, and
change. Cf. the critical interventions in APD: Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order;” R. Smith,
Stories of Peoplehood; R. Smith, “Which Comes First.” Also see the literature on discursive institutionalism,
in Blyth, Great Transformations; Curley, “Models of Emergency Statebuilding;” V. Schmidt, “Discursive
Institutionalism;” V. Schmidt, “Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously.”
75
Friedberg, In the Shadow, 22. On ideology as belief, see also Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan. Consider also
Eisner’s claim, in From Warfare State, 25, that American institutional fragmentation “was a product of
calculated constitutional design.”
46

boundaries between these factors prior to analysis, as is typically done in IR, but “to
historicize them.”
76
That is where a dynamic ideal-type proves most useful.

A dynamic ideal-type, in brief

Whereas the models in IR theory conceal ongoing practices, genealogy avoids reifying
them into stable universals, ontological characteristics, or unchanging orders, and instead
presents numerous avenues for examining statebuilding processes: 1) The state is never a
finished entity but rather is continuously performed through contingent practices (process
ontology); 2) The state is not an actor but rather is a field of power in which new categories
of agents are authorized to speak for and act on behalf of the state (field of state power); 3)
Insofar as people act towards the state based on a fundamental recognition of its existence,
state agents legitimize their actions to publics (performative discourse and ideas); and 4)
Discursive and ideational practices serve as the social foundation for material institutional
structures – the sites within which actors struggle to concentrate the means of physical,
informational, and symbolic production (institutional development and policymaking).
Taken together, these points comprise a dynamic ideal-type of statebuilding that remains
open to the myriad configurations possible (see Figure 1.2).

Seen from this perspective, a genealogy of statebuilding entails a triple-move. First,
it traces the ontological creation of a field of state power. The state is a space within which

76
Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” 77. See also Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State;” Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population; Vu, “Studying the State.”
field of state power

performative discourse performative ideas

institutional development

policymaking

Figure 1.2. A schematic ideal-type of statebuilding
47

certain people – and not others – legitimately claim to speak in an official capacity, act as
agents of the state, and have publics recognize this right. This is, as Bourdieu explains, a
“juridico-poetic creation” – an act to bring into being something that did not previously
exist. Statebuilding, therefore, involves the performative construction of social-institutional
conditions for state authority. Discourses and ideas are performative in that they produce
their own foundations for existence. “The reproducer of the official,” Bourdieu clarifies, “is
able to produce (in the etymological sense of the word: producere means ‘bringing to
light’), by theatricalizing it, something that does not exist (in the sense of palpable, visible),
and in the name of which he speaks. He has to produce what it is that gives him the right to
produce… He has to produce the staging of what authorizes his speaking, in other words
the authority in whose name he is authorized to speak.”
77

Second, genealogy investigates, rather than pre-defines, the impact of performative
discourses and ideas on institutional development. Statebuilding is much more than simply
a process to transform material structures and expand coercive authority; it is a process to
organize reality, produce standard principles of classification, structure the social world,
and impose this vision on those within state space.
78
Of particular importance for
genealogical purposes are the ongoing discursive and ideational practices through which
political actors construct particular objects of government management. These processes
shape both the social construction of issues and the processes of statebuilding and security
measures utilized to govern them. To trace these practices requires a detailed focus on the
frictions between competing claims about which issues the state has a responsibility to
manage and how political institutions should be organized to address them. It is at these
specific points of clash that we can see how discourses and ideas lead to different
institutional configurations.
79

Throughout this dissertation, I use the concept “enframing” as a shorthand to

77
Bourdieu, On the State, 59, 63, respectively. Cf. Bartelson’s argument, in “Second Natures,” from an IR
perspective, that the state is identical with itself. See also Campbell, Writing Security, on the notion of
performativity.
78
See especially Bourdieu, On the State, 168.
79
On this point, there is a clear connection with the securitization and epistemic communities literatures in
IR. See, e.g., Adler, “The Emergence of Cooperation;” Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security; Campbell,
Writing Security; Cross, “Rethinking Epistemic Communities;” Haas, “Do Regimes Matter;” Hansen,
Security as Practice. Also see more generally Sheila Jasanoff’s work on expertise, the ordering of reality, and
state power, in Designs on Nature; Science and Public Reason; States of Knowledge.
48

describe these discursive and ideational practices. Martin Heidegger first coined the term
to mean, literally, the projection of a frame onto the world. This action orders the chaos of
the ontic in such a way that certain aspects become intelligible and manageable.
80
Genealogy
traces, in particular, the enframing processes through which the boundaries of a crisis are
drawn and a path of institutional development is proposed. Discursive enframing means
the definition of events or situations as problems that must be governed. This may be
related to traditional issues like war or economic depression, yet is not limited to these
types. The spatial boundaries of these problems and their proposed solutions, moreover,
may be enframed at different levels – local, state, regional, national. Ideational enframing
means the practices through which these problems are made intelligible, and administrative
solutions are identified. Ideas and expertise can inspire not only responsive measures to
manage existing threats, like the IR models assume, but also preparatory and preventive
actions to transform state institutions before a crisis occurs.
Third, genealogy examines how these contestations influence policymaking. Since
each institution is steeped in its own history, policy outcomes may be different depending
on which site is chosen to govern problems. If institutional change and stability are an effect
of discursive and ideational practices, then it follows that institutional sites are a primary
influence on policymaking as well. Just as institutional development is not merely the result
of exogenous forces that shape the state from the outside, as IR theories would have us
believe, neither does policymaking transpire in a vacuum, absent preexisting orders, rules,
and norms. Rather, it is a process that occurs in a particular historical time and social
space, and on the backdrop of particular institutional sites. By tracing the ongoing
development of institutional structures, without assuming beforehand what impact national
emergencies will have on the state, we are able to examine how these settings influence
national security and foreign policy.

80
See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology.” Many of his insights can be traced further back to
Nietzsche’s work on frames of intelligibility, in The Will to Power. Timothy Mitchell, to my knowledge, is
one of the only political scientists to explicitly use this concept. See especially his work in Colonising Egypt;
“The Limits of the State.” Wherever appropriate, I elaborate on how my use of the term relates to or differs
from Mitchell’s.
49

V. Conclusion: the benefits of configurational analysis
81

These combined analytical moves have significant implications not only for how we think
about the state concept but also how we study statebuilding. The differences between the
IR theory models and the dynamic ideal-type are stark (see Table 1.2). While the
prevailing models disagree in certain substantive areas, they both follow the same core
assumptions based on historical institutionalism. They begin from a conception of states as
relatively stable, material institutional structures and orders. Following this notion of unitary
actorhood, they necessarily locate the source of statebuilding in exogenous shocks. The
structural pressures of international crisis are said to disrupt long periods of continuity,
leading to different institutional arrangements that become path-dependent. In reifying
contingent processes of statebuilding into ontological attributes of statehood, both models
anticipate continuity in the timing, shape, outcome of domestic institutional development,
and thus struggle to account for configurations beyond the two extremes of the national
security state and contract state.

Table 1.2. Theoretical approaches to state development
82

IR theory models dynamic ideal-type
object of
explanation
structures and
orders
discourse and ideas
logic of
explanation
path-dependence
expert knowledge
production
state concept
solidified
unitary actor
effect of discursive and
ideational practices
institutional
development
static – continuity
interrupted by
critical junctures
dynamic – ongoing
intercurrent change or
maintenance
explanation
of change
emergencies as
exogenous shocks
endogenous process to
prepare for crises

The alternative approach to the state concept – and the resulting ideal-type based
not on the attributes of states but on statebuilding dynamics – provides several benefits for

81
See Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry, Ch. 5, for a discussion of analyticist methodology based on
configurational analysis.
82
Adapted from V. Schmidt, “Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously,” Table 1, 5.
50

studying a genealogy of the American state. First of all, this conceptualization shines new
light on why statebuilding is integral to issues of international politics. Unlike both
mainstream theories and the IR models, which rely on stark analytical separations between
the state and the exogenous factors that determine statebuilding, the ideal-type provides an
analytical justification for how domestic institutions matter for foreign policy and national
security decisionmaking. If the state constitutes the primary space within which actors
struggle to make the world intelligible and governable, then preexisting institutional
structures provide the backdrop, material and ideational capacities, and social setting for
intense political conflicts. When striving to negotiate reforms or preserve the status quo,
state agents navigate through these contextual influences to define what the state is, what
problems they are responsible for resolving, and how resources should be employed to this
end.
Second, by incorporating agency into the state concept, we can begin to understand
institutional development and policymaking as endogenous processes that occur from the
inside-out. Rather than assuming that crisis conditions are external pressures that shape the
state from the outside, the dynamic ideal-type identifies discourse and ideas as internal
sources of statebuilding. This suggests that our analysis should focus predominately on the
discursive and ideational practices of state agents, specifically how political actors
themselves define what issues require government management and suggest competing
policies for how to rebuild institutions for this purpose. Such a project undermines the
widespread notion that we can develop a nomothetic, objective theory of statebuilding, and
instead reveals that people continuously perform the state, and thereby constitute its
ontological reality into various configurations. Yet more than simply devolving into the
relativistic notion that we can dismantle states by changing discursive practices, as do some
postmodern IR theories,
83
the ideal-type uncovers the profound interrelationships between
material and social factors, structure and agency.
A final contribution of this conceptualization is that it remains open to historical
contingency and thus offers new possibilities to identify ruptures, discontinuities, and
transformations in the processes of statebuilding. Examining statebuilding episodes in

83
See, e.g., Ashley, “Living on Border Lines;” Walker, Inside/Outside. Cf. the critique in Bartelson, The
Critique of the State, Ch. 5.
51

isolation – that is, only during times of emergency – IR scholars are prone to lose sight of
the ongoing processes of stability and change that exist simultaneously. The dynamic ideal-
type specifies how numerous, often competing, pathways can be taken in moments of
extreme national security crisis. It underscores the multiplicity of political orders, the
distinctive paths of development available for each institutional structure, and the potential
for disparate forms of statebuilding to operate simultaneously. Far from overcomplicating
the state actorhood assumption in mainstream IR, this alternative approach provides an
analytically generalizable framework that locates where statebuilding occurs, without at the
same time predefining the timing, shape, and extent of statebuilding during emergencies.
Since the state is an effect, essentially living and breathing through its agents, as analysts we
must remain open to the myriad forms these practices may take.
From this analytical baseline, the genealogical task in the remainder of this
dissertation is not to account for the myriad layers of the American state, tracing in detail
the diverse processes of institutional development in all their complexity. Rather, it is to use
the dynamic ideal-type to pinpoint the specific configuration during the FDR
administration that opened the conditions of possibility for permanent emergency in the
U.S. I situate these changes within the dominant discursive and ideational clashes of the
day. Statebuilding at that time did not merely follow the expectations of the prevailing
models; it occurred in fits and starts, through pragmatic experimentation and trial-and-
error. Oftentimes, emergency agencies were formed at cross purposes and in contradictory
ways. Yet the rise of planning expertise not only reshaped crisis governance, economic
management, and administrative reforms in the New Deal and WWII but also laid the
foundations for permanent executive authorities and emergency preparedness that
continue in our time.
A counterfactual logic underlies this history: Without innovations in planning and
executive institutional preparations for crisis, it is likely that statebuilding would have
continued along the paths expected by the IR theory models. Policies associated with the
national security state and contract state enjoyed wide support at these times; they
represented not constant objective laws of statebuilding but contingent visions for how to
build the American state in the face of existential threats from without. If implemented,
these alternatives would have led to very different institutional forms. Nevertheless, while
52

many military and industry leaders supported coercion- and capital-intensive modes, in the
end they were the routes that were not taken by executive officials. In their struggle against
these rival perspectives, planning experts competed to influence policymaking, and their
discursive and ideational practices facilitated a democratic middle-ground between the
extremes of the IR models. Since the dynamic ideal-type outlined above remains neutral to
statebuilding configurations, it allows us to trace these fundamental transformations.
This genealogical narrative is a story about statebuilding, through and through, but
not in the sense we typically think in IR theory. It is not simply about statebuilding because
we assume that the American state is a principal actor in world politics. Nor is it simply
about statebuilding because the exogenous shock of international crisis forced the
American state out of its apparent geographic isolation and exceptionalism into traditional
sovereign statehood. It is a story about statebuilding precisely because the officials, advisors,
and experts in the FDR administration considered their task to be one of transforming the
American state into a machinery with the ideational and institutional capacities to prepare
for and govern national emergencies. The path they took, though far from inevitable,
carved out an innovative approach that reorganized political institutions ahead of time for
the devastating effects of crisis, and in this way, conditioned the possibility for permanent
emergency in the U.S.
53

Part I.
New Deal planning – from recovery to reform

It is too much to say that crises are the commonplace of
politics. But fire, flood, famine, pestilence, war,
unemployment, if not customary, are nevertheless
occurrences for which the state must be prepared. In a
sense there should be no crisis which the well-organized
government has not anticipated, if within the range of
reasonable anticipation.
– Charles Merriam
1

In the wake of the rapid increase in investment, industrial production, employment, and
civilian consumption during World War I, the American economy thrived throughout
much of the 1920s. This extended period of prosperity was interrupted, however, by the
worst economic depression in United States history, beginning with the stock market crash
in October 1929 and ending with America’s involvement in World War II. As trust in the
market diminished, stock worth plummeted, gold rapidly flowed out of the country,
interest rates rose exponentially, and production and employment levels sunk to all-time
lows. Between 1929 and 1932, the unemployment rate increased from 3% to a staggering
25%, and some thirteen million people lost their jobs. Customer runs on banks reached
epic proportions, causing thousands of banks to fail because they were left with too few
resources to meet the unprecedented withdrawal demands. “Bank Holidays” were declared
in many states to limit these activities. But the damage had already been done, and it took
the better part of a decade to recover from this catastrophic condition.
2

1
Merriam, Systematic Politics, 241.
2
The literature on the widespread effects of this downturn is massive. See, among many others, Badger, FDR;
Brinkley, The End of Reform; Katznelson, Fear Itself, Ch. 1; Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt;
Schlesinger, The New Deal in Action; Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt. For the parallels and
differences between the economic depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008, see
Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors.
54

At the start of the depression, the American state was not equipped for officials to
manage such an unparalleled economic emergency. Prominent historian William
Leuchtenburg suggests that while the downturn constituted a worldwide economic failure in
the capitalist system, stretching far across the globe, it took “a more violent form” in the
U.S. than elsewhere. “[W]hen economic disaster struck,” he writes, “no major country in
the world was so ill-prepared as the United States to cope with it,” because it lacked “both
instruments of control and a tradition of state responsibility” to ensure sustained economic
growth.
3
The government did not have even basic statistical information about the overall
functioning of the economy.
4
Nor was there agreement about how leaders should be
involved in economic management – if at all. Without an institutional system already in
place, officials in the FDR administration were at pains to define the most effective means
to govern the ongoing crisis, and so they regularly turned to the past strategies of WWI
mobilization.
5

On March 4, 1933, in a rousing inaugural address, President Roosevelt sought to
formulate a government program based on the earlier activities to create an ordered
economy for total war. He explained his intention to wage war against the economic
depression, and he urged the full participation of the population and industrial leaders to
meet the emergency, as if it were brought on by a foreign foe.
6
Just as in war the need for
“undelayed action” might require a “temporary departure from [the] normal balance of
public procedure,” Roosevelt said he would use any measure to meet the crisis – even if
that meant expanded executive powers. True to his word, the very next day he cited the
Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to suspend all gold transactions and shutdown banks
for a period of four days. While the banks were closed, Congress worked in a special
session to draft an act extending war powers to regulate hoarding of gold during war to all
national emergencies.
7

3
Quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 99.
4
Badger, FDR, 8.
5
For this connection, see especially Belknap, “The New Deal;” Brinkley, The End of Reform, Ch. 2; Eisner,
From Warfare State, Ch. 9; Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years, Ch. 2; Levinson and Balkin, “Constitutional
Dictatorship;” Scheuerman, “The Economic State of Emergency;” Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 15-22.
6
For this address, see Roosevelt, Public Papers – Volume Two, 11-16.
7
The U.S. remained on the Gold Standard until mid-1933. Barry Eichengreen, in Golden Fetters, suggests
that the Gold Standard international monetary system contributed to the severity of the depression, because it
limited the national government’s ability to engage in deficit spending. See also more globally, Polanyi, The
55

Throughout Roosevelt’s celebrated first hundred days in office, a period of frenetic
experimentation to end the depression by whatever means necessary, efforts to manage the
economy in wartime were a constant source of inspiration, precedent, and legitimacy for
initiating New Deal recovery. Congress was more than willing to assist in redefining
executive emergency powers for recovery. A “flurry of legislation,” to use historian Alan
Brinkley’s words,
8
was passed based on the earlier precedents set in wartime. Articulated as
a continuous progression of total mobilization activities, this legislation sought to generate
employment opportunities through business cooperation and, when needed, government
authorities for direct economic management, much like Woodrow Wilson had done little
more than a decade before. The economic aid, employment, and infrastructure projects
created through these experiments in the Civilian Conservation Corps, Civil Works
Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the Public Works
Administration represent some of the greatest achievements of the early New Deal.
But if what was true of WWI was also true of the early New Deal, then in the same
way that coercive and compensatory policies proved ineffective for dealing with total war,
9

these approaches to crisis governance were surely also unable to create lasting economic
reform in the early 1930s. In this respect, the National Recovery Administration was
particularly problematic. Modeled on industrial mobilization and run by General Hugh
Johnson, a former advisor in WWI, the NRA stabilized various industries by working with
business and labor representatives to produce temporary controls for specific goods. The
notion of industrial autonomy prevailed in its early stages. While government officials
played an integral role, the NRA was primarily business leaders who enforced the codes.
Yet with this arrangement, it was prone to criticism from small business owners and the
public, who argued that the program only served corporate interests. Due to these rising
pressures, the NRA was ultimately in shambles by the end of 1934, and in spring 1935 it
was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and was dismantled.
10

Great Transformation.
8
Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 20.
9
We will return to WWI mobilization below in Ch. 6.
10
On this administration, see especially Brinkley, The End of Reform; Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow,
Ch. 4; Eisner, From Warfare State, Ch. 9; Hawley, The New Deal; Himmelberg, The Origins; Perna, “NRA
and the Planning Impulse.”
56

The point that has been lost in much of the scholarship on the New Deal is the
fundamental transformation in statebuilding processes achieved. The American state was
not simply reconstituted through reference to the war analogy. Recovery efforts are more
astutely defined as a “chaos of experimentation,” to use Richard Hofstadter’s apt phrase,
rather than as an automatic application of earlier absolutist and compensatory approaches
first tried in war.
11
Even before his presidency began in 1933, Roosevelt insisted that the
spirit of pragmatic trial-and-error was integral to rapid recovery. “The country needs and…
the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” he said in an address on May 22,
1932. “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try
another. But above all, try something.”
12
While some of these experiments drew upon the
lessons of WWI, the prevailing frameworks in IR theory struggle to identify, let alone
explain, other modes of institutional development that occurred at the same time.
Perhaps the most important experiment was to test out innovations in national
planning that had long been underway, since at least the beginning of the 1900s. There is
no doubt, as many commentators suggest, that devising a recovery program to overcome
the limitations of existing arrangements between state and industry stood at the heart of the
FDR administration’s approach to economic recovery in the early 1930s, just as it did in
the Wilson administration’s approach to total mobilization. Nevertheless, when he first
entered office, President Roosevelt was faced not solely with the urgent task of ending the
depression but with the need to frame lasting policies that would prevent a similar crisis
from occurring in the future.
13
For this, reference to the earlier WWI patterns simply
would not suffice. Planning was integral to the transition from emergency recovery based
on the national security state and contract state to enduring reform.
Part I of this dissertation shows how New Deal planning inspired an alternative
configuration for crisis governance, economic management, and institutional development
(see Figure I.1 below).
14
In particular, I trace the evolution of planning discourse and ideas,

11
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 307. Cf. Brinkley, The End of Reform, 18; Frederick, A Primer of ‘New
Deal’, 152-159; Katznelson, Fear Itself, Ch. 1.
12
Roosevelt, Public Papers – Volume One, 646.
13
See Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 18.
14
My narrative expands on Collier and Lakoff’s work concerning New Deal emergency management, in “Vital
Systems Security;” “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
57

arguing that expertise altered state capacities for emergency management – from the ad hoc
activities identified by the IR models to preparatory measures. Building on Progressive
efforts to make planning a permanent fixture of the American state, New Deal advisors
greatly improved the government’s resources to compile statistical data about and construct
proposals for addressing social problems that plagued the entire nation, without coercive or
traditional liberal measures. They also set the institutional foundation for an innovative
form of federalism. By direct contrast to the integration of the national security state and
the fragmentation of the contract state, planners distributed responsibilities and authorities
to local, state, and regional groups – governmental and non-governmental – and then
coordinated their activities within a cooperative system. The FDR administration utilized
this collaborative arrangement throughout the New Deal to handle problems before they
led to full-scale emergencies, and later repurposed it for WWII mobilization. Since then,
leaders have continued to build upon these institutional ties through structures like the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
I explore further how these achievements transformed economic management.
Planning led to a wholly different conception of the economy than ever before – one that
enframed the economy into a national structure, emphasizing the interrelationships
between disparate industries and sectors. This systemic outlook, in turn, exposed the
weaknesses of early New Deal efforts based on WWI patterns. Seen from the
groundbreaking perspective of the national economy as a whole, policies to balance the
budget and increase taxation to pay for emergency measures were understood as
detrimental to the recovery program. As an alternative, planning advisors devised a
democratic middle-ground for permanent reform. Instead of the problematic interventions
in economic markets of the national security state or the laissez-faire governance of the
contract state, they insisted that deficit spending could be used as a fiscal tool for
stimulating growth during a downturn. Though the FDR administration only began
applying these insights in the late 1930s to address the existing downturn, economic
planning remained vital to the effort to harness the total war economy in the 1940s and
after.
Planning expertise also influenced lasting reforms in the executive branch. While
the prevailing models in IR theory maintain that national emergencies are exogenous
58

shocks, and that they necessarily instigate widespread transformations in the structure of
government, planning essentially made security threats endogenous to existing institutional
systems. Expert advisors in the FDR administration insisted that they could reorganize
institutions in preparation for the possible impact of crises. An executive office was created
for the president to initiate reorganizations as needed. Compared with the fundamental
expansions in executive power of the national security state and the anti-statist solutions of
the contract state, the Executive Office of the President provided constitutional flexibility so
that each institutional site could be subject to different forms of change to deal with
emergencies. It was this structural framework that facilitated alternative policies in total war
mobilization, and later provided the architecture for leaders to permanently embed
constitutional emergency powers in the structure of the American state after WWII.

field of state power
state responsible for managing
economy and national social problems

performative discourse
democratic middle-ground
between dictatorial rule
and laissez-faire management
performative ideas
rise of planning expertise:
enframing the nation, economy, and
administrative machine

institutional development
collaborative federalism:
decentralized and coordinated
federal institutional system

policymaking
from recovery experimentation
to lasting reforms

Figure I.1. Configuration of New Deal statebuilding
59

Chapter 2.
Democratic national planning and collaborative federalism

The very purpose of planning is to release human
abilities, to broaden the field of opportunity, and to
enlarge human liberty. We plan primarily for freedom…
The right kind of planning – democratic planning – is a
guaranty of liberty and the only real assurance in our
times that men can be free to make a wide range of
choices.
– Charles Merriam
1

I. A brief primer on planning in the U.S.

Planning has taken many forms throughout the history of the United States.
2
Yet all the way
up to World War I, it largely took on a consistent pattern. The cultural traditions of liberal
self-government and laissez-faire economics often posed insurmountable barriers to
planning programs led by the government. Much like the contract state model suggests,
anti-statism served to prevent the concentration of powers, leaving responsibility for
planning in the hands of individuals, business leaders, and the private sphere more
generally. With these constraints, the government did not have the resources to adequately
deal with national problems, and during moments of extreme emergency, the American
state was subject to intense political upheaval and institutional reconstruction.
3
Government
action to meet existing crises typically assumed the form expected by the national security

1
Merriam, Systematic Politics, 336.
2
The history of planning in the U.S. has been studied widely and to different ideological ends. See, among
others, Alchon, The Invisible Hand; Clawson, New Deal Planning; Graham, Jr., Towards a Planned Society;
Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology; Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning;” Reagan, Designing a New
America.
3
See Frederic A. Delano, “On National Planning,” Container 24, Folder Speeches and Writings, 1930-1934,
Delano Papers.
60

state model: hastened, dictatorial executive action.
4
These demands, however, did little in
the way of initiating long-term preparations for future emergencies. Once security threats
came to pass, officials reinstated traditional institutional orders and arrangements with
industry, all but ensuring that the pattern would repeat itself.
It was not until the late 1920s that a different approach to planning was proposed to
help prepare the government for catastrophes before they arose, so that brief periods of
coercive emergency rule would no longer be necessary. Mass mobilization for WWI, along
with important technological developments in transportation and communication, exposed
an underlying need for an alternative way of thinking about government responsibility that
was not confined to the prevailing limitations set by liberal anti-statism. Governance in the
modern state, it was argued by Progressives like Frederic Delano, A. Ford Hinrichs,
Herbert Hoover, Lewis Lorwin, Charles Merriam, and Wesley Mitchell, required the
foresight of national planning. Rather than piecemeal or temporary, this type of planning
was essentially national in character, taking the entire nation as its unit of analysis and
addressing a wide array of social problems in their interdependence.
5
Such an analytical
perspective, they asserted, would help organize state institutions for emergencies before
they materialized.
Alongside widespread social movements to expand government responsibility in
the private sector during and after WWI, Progressive politicians, advisors, and experts
became increasingly concerned to ground policymaking in rational, scientific knowledge
about national resources. Despite being seen as an ineffectual leader of economic recovery,
Hoover was integral to a broad transition in government planning. First as Secretary of
Commerce and later as U.S. President, he made several advances in planning before the
stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, which provided an
intellectual foundation for future actions. A testament to this is the various studies he
commissioned to examine the government’s role in resolving national social problems
through planning knowledge, as well as the many Progressives who stayed on as key
advisors in the FDR administration.

4
See Mitchell, The Backward Art, 100.
5
Lorwin, in his Time for Planning, 11, was one of the first to raise these specific points. His insights were later
referred to by New Deal planners, in “Chapter I: What is National Planning,” n.d., Entry 10, Box 10, Folder
Lorwin & Hinrichs, NRPB Records.
61

For many experts at the time – Merriam being the most prominent and vocal
among them – the danger to American democracy did not reside in government planning
but a lack of it. Reliance on the private sphere, it was suggested, had in fact left the U.S.
vulnerable to security crises and dictatorial rule. Intended explicitly as a response to the
inadequacies of traditional liberalism, planning gradually took hold as the foremost method
for constructing sound policies in the face of growing social concerns; and the National
Planning Board was created in 1933 to provide an innovative, systematic way to ground
practical decisionmaking in expert knowledge. The board, led by Delano, Merriam, and
Mitchell, expanded the government’s statistical data-generation and information-gathering
activities about the nation as a whole, greatly improving New Dealers’ ability to manage the
ongoing economic emergency and to prepare for future crisis conditions. Not only their
ideational advances but also their administrative reforms to decentralize and coordinate
planning across the nation helped reduce the need for absolutism and generalized
interventions in social life.
This chapter focuses on how planning discourse and ideas led to significant changes
in crisis governance. Section II shows how Progressives sought to move beyond ad hoc
measures to address issues as they arose by introducing planning as a lasting government
practice to view the relationships between national problems. To put these ideas into
action, President Roosevelt created the NPB. Sections III and IV detail the board’s
research activities, highlighting the contributions of national planning for generating
unprecedented statistical databases upon which officials devised policies to address a range
of social ills. Section V underscores how planning experts claimed that these activities
facilitated a democratic middle-ground between the executive coercion of technocratic
planned societies and the lack of planning associated with laissez-faire management.
Section VI explains how this alternative ideal was implemented through a collaborative
form of federalism, in which planning was decentralized and then coordinated at the
national level through the NPB.

62

II. Enframing the nation: towards national planning
6

The origins of the FDR administration’s approach to crisis governance in the 1930s can be
traced back to the Progressive Era drive to modernize federal relations with business,
starting around the turn of the twentieth century. Until that time, the domestic economy
had essentially been guided by the interests of big business, and the United States
government lacked institutional means for national economic management.
7
Under free-
market principles, industrial modernization had led to widespread problems, like growing
unemployment and unequal economic development. Progressives insisted that government
planning offered the only means to fill the void left by private industry. Expert knowledge,
they argued, could be used as a rational basis for devising sound policies. By grounding
official decisionmaking on expert advice, data collection and analysis, and statistical
information, instead of on ideological whim, the natural and social sciences could become
tools for effective democratic national government.
8

While there was little consensus in the early 1900s about the appropriate role of the
government in resolving nationwide problems, many Progressives – including public
intellectuals Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and Herbert Croly – hoped that WWI would
prompt extensive policy changes concerning economic management.
9
When war broke out
in Europe in July 1914, the U.S. was largely unprepared for what was to come. Although
the federal government, military, and private industries had all transitioned into complex,
interdependent systems by the early twentieth century,
10
they were still no match for the
demands of total war. Perhaps most saliently, the government had only recently created

6
For this section, see generally Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning; Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow,
Ch. 2; Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning;” Reagan, Designing a New America, Ch. 7.
7
Consider, for example, the response to a financial crisis in 1907, just a decade before America entered
WWI. Anxiety about financial instability in the U.S. had been spreading like wildfire. And since there was as
yet no central bank to manage monetary fluctuations, government officials ultimately relied on the influential
Wall Street figure, J. Pierpont Morgan, to plan a recovery and instill further confidence in the market. See
Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege, 22.
8
Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 248, calls this “scientific antipolitics” – an attempt to ground policies in the limits
of existing social conditions, not simply in what was politically feasible at the time. It is important to keep in
mind, however, that this is not an antipolitical move but an expressly political one to shape the art of
government. Indeed, as Karl notes elsewhere, New Dealers were particularly influential in supporting the
supremacy of politics over technocracy. See Karl, Executive Reorganization, 57, and the analysis below in
Sec. V.
9
See Porter, War, 275.
10
See the classic analysis in Skowronek, Building a New American State.
63

formal structures for economic regulation. The production and distribution of goods was
largely left to market forces, and corporations had gradually exerted a stronger influence on
the direction of the economy. At the center of modern economic relations on the eve of
war stood big business – oligopolistic industries and large mass-production firms that
colluded with one another to keep prices high and wages low.
Given that total mobilization required the development of new methods to
coordinate the autonomous actions of various industrial sectors within a nationalized
system, this experience, it was thought, would bolster public support for further
government responsibility. In the face of rapid corporate growth, Progressives pressed state
officials to step in and administer economic functions more directly. Independent
regulatory agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission were established to
encourage competition, rather than monopoly, in industry.
11
The clearest step towards
regulation was to establish a central bank in December 1913. Having been created just
months before war, though, it still did not possess comprehensive, accurate statistical
information regarding the overall functioning of the economy, much less the institutional
means to harness economic markets for wartime industrial production. And so, in the
effort to catalyze war production, the Woodrow Wilson administration often relied on the
cooperation of business leaders, much to the chagrin of Progressives.
Even in the gravest of national emergencies up to that point – total war – the tenets
of liberal self-government and anti-statism appeared insurmountable. In many respects, the
mobilization program was met with widespread concerns about an expanded state role in
governing the economy and other aspects of social life. Detractors saw the Progressive goal
of federal involvement in the private sector as an unwarranted encroachment on civil liberty
or, worse, a persistent threat to industrial autonomy. This cultural backlash encouraged the
Wilson administration to subordinate the need for government planning to the drive for
traditional liberal idealism. Except in instances when President Wilson sought dictatorial
controls to overcome the limitations of these cooperative relations, laissez-faire prevailed as
an essential strategy for mobilization. Officials reached out to industrial leaders and
temporarily suspended anti-trust laws. Following the war, moreover, any semblance of

11
Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 3.
64

federal intervention was abolished as temporary war agencies were dismantled, price
controls were lifted, and transportation systems were returned to private ownership.
12

At the same time that Progressive ambitions were undermined by the war, however,
momentum for government planning was gaining traction in certain circles. Even if Wilson
was encouraged to eliminate all signs of dictatorship following the mobilization program,
the experience invigorated the idea that government could be utilized to address a host of
national problems. Early planning ideas proposed after WWI were limited in ways to stave
off further reproach of government overreach. As a means to appease critics, supporters
suggested that the narrow spatial boundaries of city planning would allow for greater
standardization of administrative functions and policymaking while preventing the
expansion of national dictatorial powers. Advancements centered on activities to plan the
geographic layout, transportation systems, parks, and other aspects of city management.
Numerous associations, institutes, and professional organizations – such as the National
Conference on City Planning and the American City Planning Institute – were established
to provide a forum for debating the contributions of this level of planning. Although
intended as a corrective to the limitations imposed by liberal anti-statism on effective
government action, everyone agreed that planning should be employed in a way that
respected conventional political boundaries between local, state, and federal governments.
Alongside these efforts to localize planning, it was widely believed that planning
would not be perceived as too radical so long as it was confined to certain issue-areas,
particularly that of natural resources. With the rapid industrial modernization that occurred
in the run up to and during WWI mobilization, numerous technological developments
underscored the necessity for planning beyond the limits of established jurisdictional lines.
13

The continental railroad clearly exposed the inadequacies of privatized planning efforts that
stopped at state borders,
14
and modern electrical power and cross-country communication
through the telegraph generated further demands for planning beyond localities. These

12
See Eisner, From Warfare State; Karl, The Uneasy State. See also the analysis below in Ch. 6.
13
See Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning.”
14
Not only did the railroad underscore the need for wider spatial planning throughout the entire country but
also temporal – to order incoming and outgoing trains according to a unified schedule by segmenting time
into different zones. I thank Nick Weller for stressing this point. For more on the difficulties of coordinating
railroad transportation during total war, see below Ch. 6, Sec. IV.
65

technological changes exacerbated the difficulties faced by the American public and
industry, stimulating broad support for a different government role in managing problems
that transcended fixed boundaries. Even at this point, though, it would have been
disadvantageous for political leaders to advocate all-out national planning. There were, after
all, still other levels of planning – state and regional – that needed to be tried before
resorting to a nationwide program led by the government.
The first of these proved central to Roosevelt’s early political career, throughout his
tenure as governor of New York. Roosevelt was adamant about the need for state planning,
and he displayed his unique vision in a proposal in 1929 for a statewide survey of soil and
climate conditions. Unlike those conducted before, this study was intended to analyze the
state’s resources comprehensively. “I have long been interested in the general subject of
city and regional planning,” he claimed. “The present proposed survey of the whole State is
merely an intelligent broadening of the planning which heretofore has been localized. It is a
study for a statewide plan which will include the use of every acre in the whole State. So far
as I know, this is the first time in the United States that the city or regional plan idea has
been extended to take in a whole State. It will, therefore, be of great interest to everyone
who realizes the importance of looking ahead and of using our resources to the best
advantage.”
15
In this and other addresses, Roosevelt repeatedly called for planning that
moved beyond the existing political lines between municipalities, to address the concerns
of the state of New York.
Regional planning was further advanced as a solution to issues that spread across
individual states. It was seen as a way to balance the need for wider planning with the
concerns over top-down planning led by the federal government. Metropolitan areas in the
northeast were especially prone to regional issues, given the relatively short geographical
distance between states compared to the western U.S. The Regional Plan of New York and
Its Environs, a landmark study published in 1929 and chaired by Frederic Delano,
Roosevelt’s uncle and a well-known public administrator, constituted one of the first
attempts to extend thinking and policymaking past city and state limits to consider how to
manage the complications of a bustling, crowded, ever-expanding economic region. The

15
Roosevelt, Public Papers – Volume One, 477; also cited in Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning,” 179.
66

difficulties of planning for Manhattan spread ineluctably throughout the region to include
over thirty counties in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The goal of the study was
to facilitate effective use of the region’s resources by advancing interstate transportation
systems, including highways and railroads, as well as developing more accessible residential
and commercial sites.
16

Despite these far-reaching proposals, it was largely the efforts of President Herbert
Hoover that finally inspired designs for plans to govern problems that stretched across the
entire country, especially those related to the economy. Hoover composed a research
committee in September 1929 to study social trends and devise solutions to nationwide
problems. The Research Committee on Social Trends, as it was named, was headed by
Wesley Mitchell, then director of the Social Science Research Council and Columbia
University economics professor. Mitchell’s colleague at the SSRC and University of
Chicago political science professor, Charles Merriam, acted as vice-chairman of the
committee; and William Ogburn, a sociologist also at Chicago and president of the
American Sociological Society, was selected director of research.
17

The committee struck an important balance between government planning and
industrial autonomy. Though commissioned by Hoover, the committee’s work was funded
through private money from the Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC, and their final
report, Recent Social Trends in the United States, was published not as an official
government document but through the company, McGraw-Hill. This effort to bridge the
gap between the private and public sectors was an important strategy initially conceived to
overcome worries throughout the 1920s about a heightened government role in planning.
It afforded the research committee a certain distance from the influence of the
government, sufficient to quell criticism of overextension.
One of the most important implications of this report was its structural recognition
of the co-evolution of national social processes – that is to say, the notion that changes in
one area or region would produce subsequent changes in other areas. The committee
stated that the foremost contribution of such a perspective was “the effort to interrelate the

16
See Johnson, Planning the Great Metropolis, for a history of this report and its implications for regional
planning. See also Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
17
On this committee, see especially Clawson, New Deal Planning, 30-32; Karl, Charles E. Merriam, Ch. 11;
Tobin, “Studying Society.”
67

disjointed factors and elements in the social life of America, in the attempt to view the
situation as a whole rather than as a cluster of parts.” Insights about national resources were
to be gained, it was suggested, not in the analysis of separate trends, as other studies had
done previously, but in the attempt to understand these trends “in their interrelation – in
the effort to look at America as a whole, as a national union the parts of which too often
are isolated.”
18

Their proposal to enframe planning boundaries across the entire nation
represented a reflective move on the committee’s part to address the heightened
specialization of social research and policymaking at the time.
19
Across the natural and
social sciences, scholars were conducting research in increasingly narrow fields (e.g.,
political science, sociology, economics). This pattern simultaneously delimited clearer
boundaries between academic disciplines and, as a result, threatened to undermine efforts
to capture a comprehensive picture of social problems throughout the country. The
committee members did not see this development as an insurmountable obstacle, however.
It was understood, rather, as an opportunity to construct a modern conception of national
planning on the basis of more specialized modes of knowledge production. The task of the
planner was to incorporate individual areas of research and data collection within a
synthetic whole.
To understand and address the social problems that impacted the entire nation, the
report called for steps to initiate systematic national planning. “[T]he type of planning now
most urgently required,” the committee wrote, “is neither economic planning alone nor
governmental planning alone.” Instead of the piecemeal planning of years past, “[t]he new
synthesis must include the scientific, the educational, as well as the economic and also the
governmental.” All of these factors, the writers emphasized, were “inextricably intertwined
in modern life;” and only in “drawing them all together” was it possible to devise successful
national plans.
20
Along with offering an alternative way to consider social trends in their
interconnectedness, they advocated the creation of a permanent board within the executive
branch to perform these studies. This board would have constituted the first agency of its

18
President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends, xii-xiii.
19
See Alchon, The Invisible Hand, 114-115.
20
President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends, lxxiii-lxxiv.
68

kind, with advisory responsibilities to help the government plan for nationwide problems
through rational planning knowledge, as opposed to expanded executive powers. Though
their petition was not accepted at the time, it became the basis for creating a similar board
just a few years later, led by none other than Delano, Merriam, and Mitchell.

III. A plan for national resource planning

On July 2, 1932, in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at the
Democratic National Convention, Roosevelt promised that if elected he would follow a
wholly different approach to economic recovery than had previously been tried. In direct
contrast to what was generally perceived as a lack of planning and government action by the
Hoover administration, he famously pledged “a new deal for the American people.”
21
Yet
this statement turned out to be only partially accurate, as the FDR administration expanded
on many proposals for planning that had garnered increasing public, academic, and
government support during the 1920s. The true innovation of the New Deal was in turning
these ideas into official national policy.
Hoover’s research committee proved influential to this transition not primarily in
suggesting ways to manage the existing economic depression. Indeed, for the most part, the
report’s statistics, data collection, and analysis neglected the ongoing crisis altogether. Nor
was it helpful simply in introducing a structural understanding of national problems.
Instead, the committee brought together individuals whose insights greatly shaped later
efforts. Delano, Mitchell, and Merriam, all leading experts in their respective fields, worked
closely together throughout much of the 1930s to pave the way for New Deal national
planning. What is more, the report’s suggestion for a national board to consider plans for
addressing the basic political, social, and economic problems that plagued the nation
provided the impetus to establish an unprecedented executive branch agency in spring
1933.
Advocating the creation of a board like the one proposed in Recent Social Trends,
Louis Brownlow, a public administrator and close confidant of Roosevelt, helped link the

21
Roosevelt, Public Papers – Volume One, 659.
69

earlier momentum for planning with the president’s more recent pledge for a new deal.
22

Brownlow suggested that the board be setup as a permanent presidential agency to perform
the planning activities of the national government, headed by a committee composed of
intellectuals at the frontier of planning. This proposed arrangement was intended to move
well beyond past endeavors. As a federal agency headed by civilian planning experts, the
board would impart a far more comprehensive responsibility for the government to
manage national social problems. By comparison with the limited planning activities of
years past, it would constitute an institutional setting within the government for these
experts to continuously advise officials on a range of issues.
Following this recommendation, the National Planning Board was created on July
20, 1933.
23
Under the legislative authority of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933,
the NPB was originally housed in the Public Works Administration, directed by Secretary
of the Interior, Harold Ickes, a Progressive Republican from Chicago. The three members
named for the board’s Advisory Committee each brought different knowledge and
experience to New Deal national planning: chairman Delano, an engineer and railroad
president, brought his experience in Chicago city planning and his leadership skills from
directing the 1929 regional planning study of New York; Merriam brought a scientific
approach to public administration and management; and Mitchell brought his knowledge
of business cycles and economic organization.
24

For these individuals, the conception of national planning advanced in Recent
Social Trends provided the primary inspiration for establishing the board.
25
And with their

22
See Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 284-285.
23
The National Planning Board (1933-1934) and its successor agencies – National Resources Board (1934-
1935), National Resources Committee (1935-1939), and National Resources Planning Board (1939-1943) –
have been the subject of extensive historical analysis. See especially Brinkley, “The National Resources
Planning Board;” Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow, Ch. 5; Clawson, New Deal Planning; Collier and
Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Jones, “A Plan for Planning;” Reagan, Designing a New America;
Warken, A History. Merriam, one of the board’s primary members, also published articles on its
contributions, in “Planning Agencies in America;” “The National Resources Planning Board.” The
genealogical narrative here necessarily glosses over some of the institutional changes in the board’s
composition, in order to highlight the discursive, ideational, and administrative developments pertaining
specifically to democratic national planning. To avoid confusion, I use the acronym NPB throughout.
24
On the backgrounds of these members, see especially Clawson, New Deal Planning, Ch. 5; Hill, “Wesley
Mitchell’s Theory of Planning;” Karl, Charles E. Merriam; Metcalf, “Secretary Hoover;” Reagan, Designing a
New America, Ch. 2-4.
25
Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 235.
70

diverse intellectual backgrounds, these experts quickly adapted a variety of developments in
city, state, and regional planning to the national experiments of the early New Deal.
Situated within the Public Works Administration, the board was conceived specifically to
plan natural resources. In an effort to help the economy recover from depression by
stimulating employment measures and infrastructure development through the PWA,
Ickes initially concentrated the board’s energies on creating a complete system for natural
resource planning. He appointed the board to develop “comprehensive and coordinated
plans” for the regional public works projects of the PWA, in areas including but not limited
to water, roads, buildings, and electric power.
26

By the end of 1933, however, the board was advising the FDR administration on
plans far outside this original mandate.
27
The general aspiration was for national planning to
assume a lasting role in the government, and for the board to be engaged in long-range
plans in issue-areas other than just public works.
28
Even Ickes admitted the appeal of a
focus that expanded beyond the immediate emergency needs of the PWA, when he told
participants at the National Conference on City Planning in 1933: “[W]e hope that long
after the necessity for stimulating industry and creating new buying power by a
comprehensive system of public works shall be a thing of the past, national planning will go
on as a permanent Government institution.”
29

To facilitate this change in directive, within a year of its founding the board was
moved from the Interior to the presidential Cabinet, and was reconstituted as the National
Resources Board. The title change was almost as crucial as the administrative
reorganization. Roosevelt had expressed interest in placing the board under his
supervision, not Ickes’; and for predominately ideological reasons of garnering further
support for the board’s work, he wanted to strike the word “planning” from its name, as
many at the time wrongly conflated planning with totalitarian control. The board members

26
National Planning Board, Final Report, 1. See also Ickes, Back to Work; Ickes, The Secret Diary; J. Smith,
Building New Deal Liberalism.
27
See Brinkley, “The National Resources Planning Board;” Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;”
Reagan, Designing a New America, 186.
28
Brinkley, “The National Resources Planning Board,” 173, notes that planning in the U.S. had traditionally
taken two tracks – one focused on natural resources, the other on socioeconomic development. The NPB’s
efforts, he writes, demonstrated that these need not remain separate tracks but rather should be understood
as inextricably linked.
29
Ickes in National Conference on City Planning, Planning and National Recovery, 22.
71

originally offered “natural resources” as an alternative to the restrictive focus on public
works, but Mitchell believed this too would limit the scope of research to the exclusion of
other social issues related to the socioeconomic condition. Merriam advocated “national
resources,” instead, as an all-inclusive analytic to cover both natural and human resources,
and the president promptly approved.
30

The administrative reordering, even more significantly, transformed the board into
the most comprehensive planning agency in U.S. history up to that point.
31
No longer
under the direction of Ickes and focused solely on PWA activities, the institutional move
allowed the board to engage in what Merriam broadly labeled “a plan for planning” – an
approach to planning that considered social problems within the entire structure of
national, not exclusively natural, resources.
32
The primary function of the newly reformed
board was to advise the president directly on long-range national resource planning, at once
expanding the objects of planning knowledge to national objects and providing a
permanent source of expertise at the government’s fingertips when devising policies.
This plan was initially sketched in Report, a rough cut of the board’s first officially
published work, entitled Final Report – 1933-1934. The draft opened by highlighting the
importance of viewing natural issues, such as water and land policies, flood control, and
forestation, in their interconnection with national resources. “[T]he use of natural resources
is not a thing apart,” the board wrote, “but involved closely in the whole mass of human
activities, with industry, labor, finance, taxation. Natural resources planning is not planning
at all, if it leaves out of account the many vital factors in our economic and social life, the
resultant of which makes a standard of living.”
33

Given the previously inadequate attempts at planning within the PWA’s directive,
the board suggested three specific ways in which national resource planning would expand
the government’s research program.
34
First, as opposed to allowing individualized policies

30
Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 245-246.
31
Clawson, New Deal Planning, xvi.
32
See generally Jones, “A Plan for Planning;” Merriam, “The National Resources Planning Board.”
33
National Resources Board, Report, 2.
34
Ibid., 83; later published in National Planning Board, Final Report, 30. These three points were proposed
by board members in other places as well. See especially Eliot, “National Planning,” 1-2; Merriam, “Planning
Agencies in America,” 206; Merriam, The New Democracy, 146-149; Merriam, The Role of Politics, Ch. V;
Mitchell, The Backward Art, 100.
72

to drift apart through traditional liberalism, it viewed social problems in their
interrelationship and helped coordinate efforts to address these problems. Second, it
introduced an approach of institutional preparedness to begin managing various social
issues before they led to full-blown crises, which, as noted above, had historically opened
the door for dictatorial interventions. Third, these planning activities were based on data
collection and expert analysis, rather than solely political ideology. Taken together, national
resource planning entailed what the board understood as “the systematic, continuous,
forward-looking application of the best intelligence available” to the official decisionmaking
process.
35
Having solidified a new theory of national planning, the board members needed
to get their hands dirty in the proposed research projects, and they soon found out just how
complicated it was to bring their vision to its full potential.

IV. Data collection and synthetic research

Th[e] union of technical knowledge with popular decision
has always been recognized as essential to the survival of
democracy.
– National Resources Committee
36

Throughout the 1930s, the board worked diligently according to their three-pronged
directive. They initiated vast research programs into the social problems facing the nation
and advised the government based on these studies, totaling 370 published works and
countless unpublished manuscripts, drafts, and confidential memos. Committees consisting
of federal personnel, private consultants, and academic experts conducted research on
topics ranging from natural resources (e.g., public works, transportation, electricity) to
problems related to broader social issues (e.g., welfare, housing, the population, economic
inequality) – all with the express objective of viewing the connections between these issues,
as Hoover’s committee had originally proposed. Yet, unlike past Progressive attempts at
planning, which assumed a hybrid private-public nexus, these activities were housed within
the executive branch and were largely supported by public emergency relief funds.
On the road to planning for the effective use of national resources, the foremost

35
National Resources Board, Report, 83.
36
National Resources Committee, Progress Report, June 1939, 1.
73

task identified by these research committees was to compile, collect, and organize basic
data. From the board’s drive for planning, Delano explained in a radio talk in February
1935, “grew the idea that we should attempt to make an inventory of our national
resources, and by national, as the President pointed out, was meant not only the resources
which nature gave us, but also our human resources.” The primary goal was to take “a
broad inventory of our resources – both natural and human.”
37
To be sure, such data-
gathering projects had hitherto been done in a piecemeal fashion through the unreliable
volunteerism of industrial leaders during WWI mobilization and the limited efforts of
Progressive planners in the 1920s. But consistent statistics about national resources – from
public works to income – still remained incomplete in the wake of the depression.
The board offered the following as a preliminary list of materials needed to ground
national plans: population statistics and trends (number, distribution, composition,
characteristics, reproduction rates, health, income, taxes); sociological data (economic
status, vital statistics, health, customs, family relationships, religion, education, leisure,
business history, climatic influences); and general information about industry (types,
production, source of materials, markets, transport, employment, wages, industrial power
sources, ownership and management, labor policy, location trends, failures), agriculture
(soil types, farm sizes, land values, crop production, taxes, delinquency, mortgages,
markets, land use, erosion, ownership, forestry), geology (surface formations, underground
waters, mineral resources), climatology (rainfall, humidity, temperature, winds), surface
waters (type, run-off, drainage projects, water supply, control), public services (water supply,
sewerage, domestic power, gas, telephone), transportation (railroads, highways, waterways,
airways, pipelines), and recreation and conservation (parks, forests, fishing and hunting
preserves, wild life preserves, scenic areas, historic areas, correlation of population and
park distribution).
38

Generating this inventory was no easy feat. For this information, the board not only
needed to create new data but also assemble data already amassed by other government

37
Delano, “The Relation of Land Planning.” Cf. his later claims in “Text of San Antonio Address,” July 9,
1936, Entry 8, Box 76, Folder 081.1 – Delano, NRPB Records. Ickes ultimately agreed with Delano but
focused instead on information only about natural resources, in Address to the Survey Associates, New York
City, February 8, 1934, Entry 8, Box 79, Folder 081.1 – Ickes, Harold L. – Speeches, NRPB Records.
38
Anonymous, “Suggestive Outline: Basic Material for Planning,” Entry 32, Box 33, NRPB Records. See also
National Resources Committee, The Problems.
74

agencies, academics, and private institutions. The board’s work was part of a wider
government movement to gather statistics for constructing a complete view of national
resources. A slew of New Deal agencies were integral to this drive for information
collection, following a “fairly sharp break” in the government’s statistical-gathering
practices, a Department of Commerce report recalls. At the beginning of the crisis, there
was almost a complete dearth of statistical information on which officials could build
recovery efforts. “Research was not thought of as a governmental activity; it was done by
universities, foundations, and large corporations.” It was only starting in 1934, with
pioneers at the NPB and elsewhere taking the lead, that “it became standard operating
procedure in setting up a new Federal Agency to have as part of the initial organization a
division of research and statistics.”
39

Yet the construction of this information was not simply a matter of accessing facts
that were already in existence. It entailed a unique analytical perspective that determined
what evidence was needed, as well as how to present and interpret this evidence in a way
that would be helpful for the challenges of practical policymaking.
40
“We must have facts,”
the board explained in a progress report to the president. “But in a complicated modern
world we must have more than that – the facts must be interpreted and weighed, and they
must be put together and seen together if they are to be wisely used as a basis for action
policies.”
41
A major contribution of the board’s approach to planning, accordingly, was to
integrate data into a structural whole, similar to the Hoover committee’s efforts to identify
national patterns useful to government officials.
While planning first required the collection of vast amounts of data and statistical
information, then, it also involved a specific mode of viewing these disparate aspects of
social life within a totality. In order for various problems to become manageable to state
leaders, it was argued, resources needed to be seen as parts of an interdependent national

39
Duncan and Shelton, Revolution in United States, 31; cited in Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable
Systems.”
40
See the argument in Committee on Local Planning, Country and Municipal Planning: A Statement of
Improved Practices and Procedures, Second Revision, June 21, 1939, Entry 32, Box 14, NRPB Records.
The board, notably, called for standardizing the language and symbols used to collect, display, and interpret
statistical data as a way for researchers to assist a wide range of policymakers. See National Resources
Committee, Suggested Symbols for Plans, Maps, and Charts, April 1937, Entry 32, Box 9, Folder NRC,
NRPB Records.
41
National Resources Committee, Progress Report, June 1939, 1.
75

system. This enframing process was revealingly called “synthetic” research, because
planners synthesized individual data points and pieces of information within a structure. In
this way, a consultant for the board suggested at the time that mapping was the “sine qua
non for planning.” Just as a map brings certain objects into sharper relief by simplifying a
limited subset of the larger reality, a plan is an attempt to envision – literally, map out –
complex national issues in their co-evolution so they become legible, calculable, and
governable to state officials.
42

Taken as a whole, the board’s efforts to construct a broad inventory of national
resources and to assemble this basic information within a synthetic map constituted
groundbreaking advances in government capacities to address nationwide issues. Whereas
in past times leaders relied on dictatorial executive powers to deal with national problems
as they arose, rational planning knowledge fundamentally altered the government’s ability
to manage social life without the need for expanded authorities or widespread
interventions. With the board’s work to collect and represent information about the
population’s wellbeing, economic growth, and industrial production, among other things –
which in the U.S., it should be recalled, were previously the main purview of the private
sector – New Deal experts facilitated an innovative approach to democratic governance
through national planning. Many critics, though, still viewed these supposed contributions
to democracy with distrustful apprehension.

V. Technocracy, American style: a continuously planning society

I have never been convinced that wisdom died with John
Stuart Mill and Karl Marx…. There is a middle ground in
America.
– Charles Merriam
43

In response to growing concerns that New Deal planning constituted a move towards
totalitarian rule, earlier Progressive insights again proved essential to efforts throughout the
1930s to find a middle ground between dictatorship and traditional liberalism. Much in the

42
See Van Leer, “Maps and Planning,” whose insights were consulted by the board, in Entry 8, Box 109,
Folder 086.1, NRPB Records. For the wider relevance of mapping projects, refer generally to Branch, The
Cartographic State; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Scott, Seeing Like a State.
43
Quoted in Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 245.
76

same way that planning had been the subject of heated debate among politicians, experts,
and social critics following WWI mobilization, disapproval of the FDR administration’s
approach to national planning waxed with the rise of totalitarian planned societies in
Germany, Russia, Japan, and Italy.
44
Certain conservative representatives, public
intellectuals, and notable economic theorists like Friedrich Hayek painted democratic
planning as an oxymoron, an illusory ideal that could not be implemented in practice. All
planning, from their view, entailed widespread government control and interventions in the
private sphere.
45

Meanwhile, planning was seen in some circles as the sole protection against
totalitarianism. In May 1935, the American City Planning Institute, American Society of
Planning Officials, American Civic Association, and National Conference on City Planning
all participated in the first joint conference of its kind to discuss the essential place of the
government in national planning.
46
A related symposium in 1937 sought to discern how
planning could remain democratic, given anxieties about totalitarianism abroad and the
wrongly perceived resort to dictatorship during the New Deal.
47
Alongside these and other
academic endeavors, analysts strove to bring democratic planning into the public debate,
front and center. In December 1934, for example, Lewis Lorwin formed the National
Economic and Social Planning Association and began publishing a monthly magazine, The
Plan Age, with essays written by leading intellectuals, including David Cushman Coyle,
Marion Hedges, A. Ford Hinrichs, Harlow Person, and George Soule.
48
Contributors to
the magazine regularly promoted a broad planning role for the government in addressing
social problems.
With these combined efforts, planning began to take shape as the foremost method
to ensure effective management of national social, economic, and political life while
simultaneously preventing the need for totalitarian controls. Far from being inimical to
democracy, planning was seen as the chief defender against dictatorial rule. Merriam was

44
See especially Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow.
45
Hayek was perhaps the most influential exponent of the view that government planning necessarily
represented oppressive control. See Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Ch. 4-6.
46
See National Conference on Planning, Planning for the Future.
47
See Mackenzie, Planned Society.
48
See Lorwin, Time for Planning; Soule, A Planned Society.
77

particularly interested in grounding the board’s research activities in this wider social
movement to combat fears of the planned society. In direct contrast to the prevailing view
which conflated all planning with dictatorship, he consistently warned that without adequate
government planning at the national level, the specter of absolutism loomed large. “[T]he
danger,” Merriam provocatively concluded in a 1935 article for the American Political
Science Review, “is that we drift away from planning, not into a blissful heaven of politics
and economics, to live forever with golden harps and only an occasional Lucifer, but to a
point where force mounts the throne and writes a plan in blood and steel.”
49

As both an academic and active public administrator at the forefront of the
Progressive movement, Merriam was perhaps the most noticeable advocate in the U.S. of
planning as a means to bolster the democratic governance of national problems.
50

Throughout his career, he aimed to bridge the gap between theory and practice, academia
and policymaking. Merriam believed that the natural and social sciences could perform a
necessary advisory role to state officials in the effort to plan for the full utilization of
national resources. Science, in his eyes, would not simply replace politics, as in the
technocracy of the totalitarian states, but would serve democracy by grounding
decisionmaking in rational knowledge about the nation as a whole.
51
Viewed in this way, the
possibilities of planning were potentially endless: it could allow for the fullest development
of human potential and freedom; the fullest development of productive capacity, both
material and human; and the fullest development of resources and rights.
52

Planning sought to bring order to social life through the power of thought, not
through physical coercion or the repression evidenced in the planned societies abroad.
“Traditionally,” Merriam wrote in a memorandum regarding the contribution of scientific
research as a guide for policymaking, “administration has been an art, but an art with skills
and techniques which are now gradually being transformed at many points through the
instrumentalities of statistics, accounting, engineering, psychology, and through refined
forms of analysis and interpretation. What emerges is a body of practice in which there are

49
Merriam, “Planning Agencies in America,” 210.
50
For an excellent account of Merriam’s life in academia and politics, see Karl, Charles E. Merriam.
51
Karl, Executive Reorganization, 70.
52
See Merriam’s arguments in “The National Resources Planning Board,” 1088; “The Possibilities of
Planning.”
78

many kinds of precise measurement, many situations in which accurate forecasts may be
made. Many types of generalizations are appearing, pushing up through the crust of
tradition into the light of rational organization.”
53
Science, in other words, served the
essential role of moving politics away from tradition and towards rational order. It
threatened democracy only when technocracy superseded politics – or, as Merriam so
elegantly put it, when the darkness of totalitarian social order overshadowed the light of
rational organization produced through scientific knowledge.
54

It was along these lines that New Dealers in the NPB began to envision a
“peculiarly American”
55
form of planning – planning that utilized intelligence to promote
democracy, rather than to undermine it. In their Final Report, the board explicitly
juxtaposed national resource planning in the U.S. with the totalitarian models abroad. With
the demand for unitary action in response to the global economic crisis of the 1930s, many
countries had resorted to technocratic controls and indiscriminate government
interventions. Planning in militarist Japan, fascist Italy, communist Russia, and Nazi
Germany, the report found, had “subordinated” the private sphere “to the sovereignty of
the national governmental organization.” For the board members, this move towards the
planned society did not mean that dictatorship constituted “a social panacea” for the
shortcomings of democracy; it merely underscored the need for devising more effective
democratic planning programs.
56
“Fortunately,” they concluded, “a democracy does not
need to borrow dictatorship to learn from lines of progress developed elsewhere.”
57

National planning was designed precisely as a flexible government mechanism to uphold
democratic principles in times of great national crisis and social strife – a task, the board
insisted, that was part of a longstanding tradition to prevent totalitarianism since the dawn
of the American republic.
58

53
Charles E. Merriam, Memo, Entry 8, Box 79, Folder 081.1 – Merriam, Charles E., NRPB Records.
54
This sentiment echoes the Frankfurt School’s concerns around the same time about the catastrophic
possibilities of enlightenment thinking. See especially Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The goal for Merriam, as for these critical theorists – reaching back from Kant, Hegel, and Marx to Nietzsche
and Weber – was to redeem the enlightenment by chastening instrumental rationality to critical reason. For
the impact of these ideas on IR theory, see Levine, Recovering International Relations.
55
National Resources Committee, Planning our Resources, 1.
56
National Planning Board, Final Report, 27, 28, respectively.
57
Ibid., 29.
58
Ibid., 18, 22.
79

Claims such as these were not simply rhetorical devices employed to garner further
support for the NPB’s work. They were, more crucially, put into practice through specific
measures to make national planning an ongoing advisory component of the policymaking
process. Underlying the board’s activities were suggestions for how to maintain democracy
through planning. The goal of national resource planning was precisely to forestall the
onset of dictatorship. Democratic government rested on expert advice, intellectual
creativity, and independent inquiry – not on violence, force, and generalized modes of
intervention in societal life.
59
Thus, the board sought to strike a tentative yet critical balance
between rational knowledge production and official decisionmaking, without resorting to
the pitfalls of technocracy.
60

In order for planning to remain democratic in the sense that it did not constitute a
technocratic system of government rule, the board aimed to establish a middle ground
between the lack of planning of traditional liberal anti-statism and the planned societies
abroad. National planning meant the development of organized ideas about how to
prepare for the future. Yet even as this entailed deliberate actions to anticipate trends and
social problems and to generate plans to address these growing concerns, it most certainly
did not mean the creation of a stable, completed project, like the schemes ordained by
totalitarianism. “Planning... does not involve the preparation of a comprehensive blue print
of human activity to be clamped down like a steel frame on the soft flesh of the
community, by the United States or by any government,” the board’s Final Report stated,
in words that echoed Merriam’s philosophy. “Stubborn adherence to an outworn plan is
not intelligence but stupidity.”
61

“Wise planning,” the board explained further, is not based on the regulation of all
national life but “on control of certain strategic points in a working system – those points
necessary to ensure order, justice, general welfare.” The most democratic and effective
form of planning involved constant adjustment to the social imperatives of the time. “The
essence of successful planning is to find these strategic points as new situations develop,

59
See, e.g., Merriam, Public & Private Government, 70.
60
See the arguments in National Resources Committee, Planning our Resources, 1; National Resources
Committee, Progress Report, June 1939, 1.
61
National Planning Board, Final Report, 30. Cf. Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 245; National Resources Board,
Report, 83-84; National Resources Committee, Planning our Resources, 1.
80

without too great delay, and without seizing more points than are necessary for the purpose
– or for longer time than is necessary for the purpose. Insight, sagacity, inventiveness,
cooperative spirit, are far more important at this point than the club or the prison cell, or
drastic attempts at regimentation.”
62
To identify these strategic points and to utilize them as
the primary focus of government control in light of American democratic values, Merriam
argued in a companion piece for public viewing, “is the highest task of intelligent national
policy – the acid task of statesmanship.”
63

Put simply, a fixed governmental system did not constitute sound planning; quite to
the contrary, it often suffered from devastating limitations. Since the national issues of
economic inequality, unemployment, transportation, and resource use – to take just a few –
were ongoing and forever changing, the comprehensive, repressive blueprints of planned
societies were ill-equipped to adapt existing institutional systems to cope with the myriad
problems of modern social life. Democratic planning, by contrast, needed to be “a
continuous process,” to allow for constant examination and adjustment of government
policies in response to the complications that would inevitably arise. It needed to remain a
flexible, adaptable project, open to innovations from society.
64
In this respect, the board’s
efforts represented a clear departure from the planned societies abroad towards a
continuously planning society.
65

VI. Collaborative federalism: decentralizing and coordinating planning

Even more groundbreaking than the board’s discursive and ideational moves to make
planning a continuous, experimental government project were the administrative processes
underlying their actions. The push for national planning in the New Deal did not simply
lead to a centralized agency in the executive branch, modeled on either earlier periods of
emergency rule in the United States or the totalitarian planning seen in other countries.
Indeed, these proposals received incessant criticism from the American public, which
generally considered government-led planning an encroachment on liberal individualism

62
National Planning Board, Final Report, 30.
63
Merriam, “Planning Agencies in America,” 208.
64
See especially Delano, “The Economic Implications,” 21.
65
See Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 259.
81

and the traditional, competitive federal arrangements between local, state, and national
governments. Attempts to create a planned society through controls devised from
Washington, D.C., such as with the aforementioned National Recovery Administration,
were constantly subjected to these very concerns.
66

In addressing these criticisms, New Dealers democratized planning not only by
allowing for collaborative revisions through a continuously planning society but also by
decentralizing the administrative, functional, and jurisdictional responsibilities of the
board.
67
“The truth is,” the board wrote, “that it is not necessary or desirable that a central
system of planning actually cover all lines of activity or forms of behavior. Such planning
over-reaches itself... [O]ver-centralized planning must soon begin to plan its own
decentralization, for good management is local self-government under a centralized
supervision. Thus wise planning provides for the encouragement of local and personal
initiative, realizing that progress may as easily be smothered by over-centralization as by its
opposite... Experience shows that there must be wide ranges of affairs in which
independent criticism, independent judgment, independent initiative is given opportunity
for free growth and development.”
68

If past efforts had centralized authority within the federal government, then the
board sought, conversely, to preserve responsibility for planning in the localities.
69
Contrary
to traditional anti-statism, planning no doubt required the creation of a federal agency in
the executive branch. But its task was not to enforce top-down regulations or to create a
fixed blueprint for all of society to follow; it was, rather, to advise the government and
coordinate the functions of various self-governing actors, including agencies at other levels
of government and outside groups and individuals. Instead of bringing about the wholesale
regimentation of the private sphere, as many feared, democratic planning sought to
produce freedoms while reducing inefficiencies within the national system. For the board,

66
On the National Recovery Administration, see generally Brinkley, The End of Reform; Ciepley, Liberalism
in the Shadow, Ch. 4; Hawley, The New Deal; Himmelberg, The Origins; Perna, “NRA and the Planning
Impulse.” See also the cultural backlash against the Tennessee Valley Authority experiments at the same
time, in Scott, “High Modernist Social Engineering;” Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots. Ciepley,
Liberalism in the Shadow, Ch. 5, outlines the main differences between these approaches and the board’s.
67
See Merriam, “Planning Agencies in America,” 205.
68
National Planning Board, Final Report, 31. Cf. Foucault’s more general insights on neoliberal
governmentality, in The Birth of Biopolitics.
69
Clawson, New Deal Planning, 191; Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 248.
82

national planning and effective democracy went hand in hand.
In this way, the board worked specifically to decentralize and coordinate the
administrative tasks of planning nationwide. This dual commitment was an integral part of
the NPB’s directive from the outset. Only through decentralization, it was argued, would it
be possible to ensure that planning remained democratic and open to revision. “One of the
recurring tasks of statesmanship,” to quote again from Final Report, “is to cultivate and
encourage decentralization.” The board lamented that with contemporary debates about
totalitarian planned societies, “it is often forgotten… that genuine planning really includes
planning to preserve and even create noncontrolled areas of activity as well as planning for
control. Planning is not an end, but a means, a means for better use of what we have, a
means for emancipation of millions of personalities now fettered, for the enrichment of
human life in ways that will follow individual interest or even caprice.” Freedom, after all,
does not follow from the absence of government but rather “always presupposes the
existence of a planned system of public order within which it may operate.”
70

This idea of a decentralized national planning system proved to be a core
administrative feature of the board’s celebrated middle ground between technocratic
control and unwieldy, uncoordinated local action. From its inception, the board advocated
the development of regional planning organizations to facilitate stronger connections
between local, state, and federal levels of government, which simultaneously left state and
local communities in charge of planning and prevented these independent actions from
drifting apart into conflicting agendas. By stimulating and assisting the work of planning
agencies throughout the nation, the board was able to organize various initiatives within an
overarching national administrative structure, without coercing these actors to follow a
static, dictatorial framework.
71

They did not stop there, however. For the problem identified with earlier attempts
to decentralize planning during the Progressive Era was that local and state agencies lacked
an institutional system to coordinate the work between them. Separate planning efforts, as
Hoover’s research committee and the New Deal planning board members stressed, did

70
National Planning Board, Final Report, 31. Cf. National Resources Board, Report, 84.
71
See, e.g., Eliot, “National Planning,” 5; Merriam, “Planning Agencies in America,” 205; National Resources
Committee, Planning our Resources, 4.
83

little to prepare the government to address widespread social issues. Local and state
institutions were often left to govern without the composite knowledge of economic and
social trends that cut across traditional political borders and disciplinary boundaries. Nor
did they have the ideational resources to recognize how their activities related to, or in
some cases conflicted with, the overall federal program. After decentralizing planning
activities, then, coordination of these various levels was the next, and perhaps more crucial,
step.
72

The primary administrative difficulty with this institutional setup, in which planning
functions remained decentralized at various levels and were coordinated through the
executive, was to identify methods to “fit” local activities within “a consistent [national]
program” while at the same time bolstering their ingenuity.
73
This was undoubtedly the
most tenuous and innovative of the board’s contributions to New Deal national planning,
given that it necessitated a fine balance between the countervailing forces of centralization
and disorder, integration and disintegration. On the one hand, planning had to uphold the
cultural ideal of liberal individualism to be considered democratic – planning, that is,
needed to “flow ‘from the bottom up,’” as the board put it, not from the top down.
74
On
the other hand, it was also necessary to establish clear ideational and administrative “links”
between these myriad practices, so that a unified national plan could begin to take shape.
These links, it was said, served to coordinate the planning process across levels and units of
government, which in the end helped officials “view[] national problems as a whole.”
75

For this to work, the board further demarcated the functions of the multitudinous
moving parts across the nation. Local planning agencies were the first point of contact with
the social issues on the ground, so to speak. State planning then provided the necessary
connection between these localized forms of knowledge and national policymaking. Since
the FDR administration’s federalist ideal was to delineate a clear separation of powers
between local, state, and national actors, the board reasoned, “[i]t is only through State

72
Crane, “Objectives of State Planning,” statement submitted for preparation of NRB report, April 29, 1935,
Entry 10, Box 9, Folder NRB Report June 1935 (Proposed Content of), NRPB Records.
73
National Planning Board, Final Report, 26.
74
This spatial analogy is employed explicitly in National Resources Committee, Progress Report, December
1938, 1. See also Committee on Local Planning, Country and Municipal Planning, June 21, 1939, p. 73,
Entry 32, Box 14, Folder Local Planning, NRPB Records.
75
National Resources Committee, Progress Report, December 1938, 1.
84

planning that the programs of the different governments can be harmonized.”

By bringing
together the data collected at these levels and the planning activities across the entire nation
it was possible to paint a complete picture of national resources, viewed in their complex
interrelationship.
76

While these administrative tasks were laid out starkly, the jurisdictional lines
between the different planning actors had to be made pliable as well, so problems that did
not conform to traditional political boundaries could remain manageable. In the past, the
traditional determinants of political borders were primarily environmental in character
(e.g., climate, rainfall, soil condition, topography, natural transportation channels like
waterways, availability of raw materials). With the increasing technological and industrial
modernization of the early 1900s discussed above, however, natural separations became an
inadequate foundation for drawing the boundaries of planning knowledge. National
planning required ideas and policies that moved freely beyond the confines of existing
jurisdictions, extending throughout the entire country. “To accomplish this effect,” Russell
Van Nest Black wrote in a draft report for the board, “many arbitrary political lines must
either be broken over by close cooperation between States, counties, or municipalities
concerns; or, state, county and municipal lines must be redrawn to encompass areas of
greater real social and economic unity.”
77
Of these two options, the former was more
practical, and administrative coordination served as the primary basis to facilitate
cooperation between cities, states, and the federal government.
National planners recommended, in particular, that the U.S. be divided into twelve
regions to coordinate activities throughout the nation (refer to Figure 2.1 below).
78
In this
scheme, authority was centered within each region, rather than solely in Washington, D.C.,
and regional heads reported directly to the board. This administrative ordering proved
beneficial for several reasons. First, it organized the utter chaos of independent planning

76
Ibid., 5. Clark, “Coordinating Local Planning,” similarly notes the importance of decentralization for land-
use planning; and Crane, “Objectives of State Planning,” argues that coordination provides a “composite”
understanding of the nation.
77
Russell Van Nest Black, “National Planning Board Report upon National Plan Research: Chapter I,
Physical Planning – Its Function and Its Relation to Economic and Social Planning,” June 9, 1934, pp. 8-9,
Entry 10, Box 8, Folder Clark, Dr. J. Maurice: Skeleton Summary & 3
rd
Chapter, NRPB Records.
78
For the following, see especially National Resources Committee, Regional Factors; also referred to in Karl,
Charles E. Merriam, 263-264.
85

efforts within a national frame while simultaneously decentralizing authority.
Regionalization, in short, provided what the board referred to as “the welding effect of
interlocking regions upon the national structure.”
79
Second and related, this move helped to
stave off public and congressional backlash that New Deal planning was totalitarian. Third,
structuring the national planning program along regional boundaries allowed for much
needed administrative flexibility when dealing with issues that crossed preexisting, stable
borders between cities and states.
What is more, whereas federalism had been perceived hitherto as an ideally
competitive, conflictual system designed to limit state power, regionalization was conceived
as a collaborative federal project. The board divided planning responsibilities and
authorities throughout the nation in a way that utilized the strengths of federalism without
resorting to either coercive measures dictated by the executive branch or uncoordinated
action. Each unit was situated within a larger institutional system, and national plans were
devised through insights generated from below. In order to formulate solutions to
problems that spread across traditional political boundaries, the board sought to coordinate
planning efforts “up and down, down and up, between the localities and the states and
between the states and the Federal Government,” not through centralized controls that
threatened the autonomy of other actors.
80

In direct response to the widespread fears that national planning required the full-
scale regimentation of social and economic life in the planned society, as was apparent at
the time in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, the board’s efforts democratized planning by
decentralizing administrative functions and controls and by coordinating activities within a
federal system. This setup constituted an extraordinary reformulation of planning that at
once appeased social critics and allowed for more effective management of national
problems. Leaving ultimate responsibility in the hands of those who were closest to the
issues, decentralization improved the processes of information gathering and data
collection, and upheld the cultural ideal of liberal self-government by retaining authority in
local and state governments and various non-state groups. Meanwhile, coordination helped
experts harmonize operations in the field within the broader ideational and administrative

79
National Resources Committee, Regional Factors, ix.
80
Committee on Local Planning, Country and Municipal Planning, 73.
86

structure of the entire country.

VII. Conclusion: the case for democratic national planning

Although this historical account of planning has taken many twists and turns from the end
of WWI to the New Deal, it tells us a lot about the impact of discourse and ideas on
statebuilding. Simply put, the argument in this chapter is that shifts in planning expertise
inspired new forms of institutional development, crisis governance, and national security
policymaking. Prior to WWI, government responsibility to engage in planning on a
national scale was reserved for moments of grave crisis, as the IR theory literature suggests.
The cultural push to leave planning in the private sphere had successfully inhibited efforts
to expand the government’s role beyond temporary involvement in the socioeconomic life
of the nation, as expected in the contract state model. Yet with the growing need to address
nationwide problems, such liberal idealism counterintuitively made the American state
vulnerable. Far from staving off recourse to absolutist powers, anti-statist policies opened
the door for periods of emergency dictatorship, much like the national security state model
contends.
In the 1920s, the fundamental question of how to adequately manage security issues
that spread across the established boundaries of localities and states became a central
friction-point. Progressives recommended national planning as an alternative to the two
primary policy options on the table at the time: laissez-faire management or executive
coercion. To overcome the weaknesses of both approaches, Progressives suggested that
rational planning knowledge could prepare the government for crises, so that future times
of absolutism could be avoided. They put in motion an enframing process to study national
social problems, view resources in their interdependence, and devise national policies.
Resistance to these measures still beckoned at every corner, however, and in an effort to
mollify critics of government-led planning, many of these early moves remained limited to
certain policy issues, traditional political boundaries of competitive federalism, and private
sources of data gathering and research.
It was not until the New Deal that Progressive activities became a more permanent
fixture of the American state. Building on the insights of Hoover’s research committee, the
FDR administration developed a national agency within the executive branch that began
87

coordinating plans between local, state, and federal groups. In line with Merriam and
Mitchell’s previous suggestions to consider social trends and problems as part of a wider
structure, the board transformed the government’s analytical perspective to view the nation
as a whole. They engaged in far-reaching studies, data-collection projects, and statistical
generation, expanding the government’s capacities to manage social problems well beyond
what was previously possible. Their systematic approach, which took the nation as its
primary unit of analysis and national resources as its primary object of knowledge and
policymaking, informed an alternative method of government involvement in social life
throughout the country.
Planning discourse and ideas not only led to a different conception of national
resources but also motivated substantial institutional developments. In the effort to handle
pervasive social problems, the planning board members were concerned, above all, to
escape the vicious cycle of the past, whereby laissez-faire governance was followed by
moments of dictatorship. For this task, they devised a wholly different administrative
system than had ever been attempted. The board distributed planning duties across the
nation to various local, state, and federal groups, including government agencies and non-
state actors. By so decentralizing responsibilities, this setup avoided the concentration of
executive power and effectively countered those critics who believed that all planning
required totalitarian controls. Yet instead of simply delegating authority to the private
sphere, the board established direct institutional ties between various groups involved in
planning through regionalization.
This collaborative federal arrangement, in turn, facilitated an alternative approach
to crisis governance – what planners considered a democratic middle-ground between anti-
statism and the totalitarian planned society. In stark contrast to the lack of government
responsibility associated with traditional liberalism and industrial autonomy, the board
insisted that only through statebuilding could absolutist interventions in the private sphere
be prevented. Planning brought the possible complications of future emergency conditions
into the policymaking space of the present, so that institutions could be reformed ahead of
time. Ordering statistical information about national resources and coordinating activities
within this structural framework, the board was able to ensure sufficient management of a
wide array of social problems, without the need for dictatorial controls. Planning of this sort
88

was not premised on the ideal of controlling every part of national life, as it was, say, in
Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but rather on identifying the specific aspects within the
system in need of improvement.
The following two chapters illustrate further how certain strategic points, as the
board called them, within the national economy and federal organization became subject to
important revisions during the New Deal. With the alternative way of thinking about
national planning first outlined by Progressives in the 1920s and later institutionalized
through the board’s work in the 1930s, socioeconomic and public administration experts
were in a position to examine economic crisis and executive branch reorganization in a
different light. Looking at the myriad aspects of national resources in their
interdependence, the board began to envision the national economy and the state
institutional machinery as complete systems, as machines that could be improved to
address the nation’s problems. From this systemic view, planners were able to identify the
specific parts within these structures that required better management and to propose
innovative, democratic solutions, thereby precluding the need to resort to executive
coercion or liberal self-government.
89

Figure 2.1. Map of planning regionalization
81

81
National Planning Board, Final Report, 10.
90

Chapter 3.
Governing the national economic condition

Free enterprise has far more to fear from lack of planning
than from its development and application to national
resources. Between fascism, on the one hand, and
monopoly and unregulated concentrations of economic
power, on the other, the free industrial system and the
open free market are hard pressed now. It is not planning
that has made difficulties in the smooth working of free
competition… but the lack of it.
– Charles Merriam
1

I. Planning and democratic economic management

In addition to transforming national security policymaking and crisis governance,
innovations in planning led to a different form of economic management as well. Early
New Deal recovery measures patterned on the analogue of World War I had mixed
results. At one extreme, the principles of traditional liberalism were unsuited to the task of
harnessing the national economy. Left to their own devices, private industries lacked the
expertise and institutional capacities to organize a united response to the ongoing
depression. The executive controls and interventions of the National Recovery
Administration, by contrast, aroused widespread suspicion of government overreach, and
provided an inadequate foundation for crafting lasting reforms. It was national planning,
instead, that brought about a stark change in the FDR administration’s approach to
economic management, one that continued well into the World War II total mobilization
effort.
Planning, first and foremost, inspired a new conception of the economy. Starting in

1
Merriam, Systematic Politics, 336-337.
91

1933 and 1934, members of the National Planning Board began constructing a broad
inventory of national resources. Following these efforts, the national economy began to
solidify into an object of knowledge and government management in a way that was not
possible in earlier periods.
2
A structural analytical perspective, promoted above all in
Gardiner Means’ work for the NPB, reordered the socioeconomic world so as to construct
a comprehensive picture of the national economic condition. Based on this view,
economists could simultaneously model how prospective changes in one area might impact
activities in other areas and identify specific problems before they led to crisis. They could
then use this information to advise officials on measures designed to maintain economic
prosperity through precise targets of reform – the strategic points that Merriam and the
board members alluded to – as opposed to generalized modes of dictatorial control.
3

While the board succeeded in developing an unparalleled conceptualization of the
national economic structure, their ideas did not prompt automatic changes in economic
policy. Proponents of macroeconomic theory faced widespread resistance in government
circles. The road for reform proved arduous in large part because such an analytical
perspective led to the unpopular conclusion that early New Deal recovery activities based
on the war analogy had been fundamentally misguided. Numerous advisors – chief among
them Marriner Eccles, Lauchlin Currie, Alvin Hansen, and Wesley Mitchell – argued from
a systemic outlook that underconsumption was the root cause of the downturn, and that the
prevailing policy of budget balancing had in fact exacerbated the problem. They endorsed,
alternatively, fiscal policy as a noninvasive, democratic means to redistribute national
income to consumers and to promote consumption.
Only in the struggle to address a second economic recession that devastated the
country in winter 1937-1938 did the influence of the board’s perspective and its
proponents gain significant traction for policymaking.
4
Even though New Dealers continued
to believe that the government had a responsibility to remedy the economic situation and

2
Cf. Timothy Mitchell’s analysis of Keynesian theory as the foundation for conceptualizing the economy as
an object, in “Economists and the Economy;” “Society, Economy, and the State.” The roots of this idea,
however, extend back at least to Adam Smith’s vision in The Wealth of Nations. See Blyth, Austerity, 112-
113; Polanyi, The Great Transformation.
3
See especially the argument in Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Gruchy, “The Economics.”
4
See generally Brinkley, The End of Reform; May, From New Deal.
92

establish long-term reforms, the downturn set in motion a reevaluation of the government’s
approach to economic management. There was little consensus among Roosevelt’s leading
experts, which culminated in an “intense ideological struggle… to define the soul of the
New Deal,” as historian Alan Brinkley put it. The main points of friction were between
advisors in the Treasury Department, who insisted on austerity measures designed to
tighten the government’s belt (e.g., balancing the increasingly debt-ridden budget), and a
growing contingent of economic planners, who, from the board’s macroeconomic
standpoint, promoted deficit spending.
5

This chapter traces the impact of planning knowledge on New Deal economic
management. Section II returns to the Progressives, who throughout the 1920s encouraged
private industries to coordinate their actions based on an understanding of the
interrelationships between disparate sectors within the economic system. Section III shows
how experts in the FDR administration’s planning board built on these insights to construct
a structural conception of the economy as an interdependent, national machine. From their
systemic perspective, as I demonstrate in Section IV, prominent economists argued that it
was possible to manage the economy without sweeping interventions in economic
institutions or laissez-faire policies based on WWI patterns. This shift in thinking led to
distinct policy alternatives in the late New Deal, which I outline in Section V. Following the
advice of planning experts, the FDR administration began using democratic fiscal policies
to stimulate economic growth, all the way through WWII mobilization.

II. Progressive origins of macroeconomic management
6

A drifting policy will not do. What is sometimes called
laissez faire might better be called ‘lazy’ faire, and only
lazy-minded people will accept it.
– Frederic Delano
7

5
Brinkley, The End of Reform, 30; see also Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Ch. 3. Cf. Stein, The
Fiscal Revolution, Ch. 6.
6
For this section, see generally Alchon, The Invisible Hand; Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow, Ch. 2;
Metcalf, “Secretary Hoover;” Reagan, Designing a New America, Ch. 7. The wider global transition in
conceptions of the economy and economic management, in addition to the many damaging effects of free-
market principles, are traced in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.
7
Delano, “The Economic Implications,” 27.
93

Progressives not only laid the intellectual foundations for New Deal democratic national
planning; they also inspired macroeconomic management. Throughout the early 1900s,
economic fluctuations continually vexed business leaders and government officials alike.
While the orthodox conception of liberal economic theory insisted that the private sphere
was wholly opposed to all regulatory mechanisms and interference in the free market,
Progressive industrialists and economists voiced an interest in mobilizing the government to
help stabilize the economy, so that future inefficiencies could be avoided. The challenge, as
they saw it, was to develop measures that would prevent the disorder of the traditional
absence of planning without resorting to absolute controls.
The problem of economic instability was particularly acute in the effort to mobilize
the nation’s population and resources for WWI. Total mobilization required the
development of capacities to greatly increase production, employment, and consumption.
Up to that point, however, officials lacked a basic understanding of how to accomplish this
extraordinary goal. And without consistent, accurate statistics about the general functioning
of the national economy and industrial productivity in particular, early mobilization efforts
were often slow to switch from peacetime to wartime levels. “The war,” Wesley Mitchell
later recalled, “revealed the defects of the federal machinery for collecting statistics with
startling suddenness.”
8

In order to manage the many complications of this transition, officials required, at
the very least, statistical information about business activities across the country. The need
to pay for mobilization initially inspired government measures to gather data, not about
production but about income. Starting in summer 1915, the Woodrow Wilson
administration devised a revenue policy to meet wartime production demands. The
resulting Revenue Act of 1916 was passed to authorize funding of industrial mobilization
through an unprecedented federal taxation program.
9
This led to a concern to calculate
citizens’ annual salary based on the use of a new analytical tool: national income. Adolph
C. Miller, an economist on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, began
preparing these estimates to evaluate the maintenance of essential wartime production

8
Quoted in Alchon, The Invisible Hand, 26.
9
See generally Brownlee, “Economists and the Formation.”
94

through taxation.
10

Yet aside from these and other piecemeal activities to collect statistics for specific
purposes, mobilization was continually plagued by a lack of adequate data about national
activities as a whole until early 1918, when Wilson wrested away procurement authorities
from business leaders and the War and Navy Departments through the newly reorganized
War Industries Board.
11
The government no longer relied primarily on the voluntary
cooperation of industrial leaders to gather this information but instead sought the advice of
academic experts, such as Mitchell and Edwin F. Gay, to compile disparate statistics into a
comprehensive framework of national economic productivity. Gay, an economist at
Harvard University and dean of the business school, was named the head of the Planning
and Statistics Division for the WIB, and Mitchell supervised the Price Section – both of
which reported directly to the executive on overall mobilization. This change in practice
represented the first organized attempt to bring data-gathering responsibilities within the
American state.
12

Despite Progressives’ hopes that war would galvanize support for national planning,
however, economists generally struggled to keep interest in data gathering afloat in the
postwar period. While mobilization revealed the need for an expanded government role in
collecting statistics about the economy, the new pattern of cooperation between state and
industry, by which business leaders and independent experts assisted officials in accessing
this data, was largely curtailed after wartime production ceased. The American Statistical
Association’s Committee on Business Statistics was particularly involved in collaborating
with trade associations and government agencies to generate monthly statistical
representations of industrial output in 1919 and 1920, but even these plans were ultimately
abandoned.
13

When the war was over, the drive for government data-collection gave way, once
again, to the imperatives of industrial autonomy. Official interest in statistical information

10
See Carson, “The History of the United States,” 154; Lacey, Keep from All Thoughtful Men, 41. National
income became important to macroeconomic management in the New Deal for largely different purposes
than federal taxation, as discussed below in Sec. IV.
11
More on this in Ch. 6, Sec. II & V. The leading study on this board is Cuff, The War Industries Board.
12
Alchon, The Invisible Hand, 29.
13
Metcalf, “Secretary Hoover,” 67.
95

about the economy diminished alongside the widespread push to dismantle wartime
agencies and economic controls. After all, institutional reform during the war was designed
to serve a specific purpose – to fulfill the emergency needs for specialized information and
heightened industrial production – and was subsequently scaled back to resume normal
functions. This general aversion to an overt government role in regulating the economy
stemmed, in large part, from the public’s misgivings about centralized planning directed by
the executive branch.
14

Scores of private research groups were formed to fill this yawning gap following the
war. Among those established to carry on the government’s temporary emergency efforts to
measure economic performance were the Brookings Institution, National Industrial
Conference Board, Twentieth Century Fund, and National Bureau of Economic Research.
The most influential of these for later developments was the NBER, whose key members,
Gay (president) and Mitchell (research director), regularly advocated the continuation of
statistical collection after WWI.
15
The bureau’s staff first set their eyes on the difficult task
of calculating war mobilization’s impact on national income and consumer purchasing
power. The resulting publication, Income in the United States, Its Amount and
Distribution, 1909-1919, was heralded as the most comprehensive project to date to
analyze income size, composition, and distribution – far surpassing earlier efforts to
estimate income purely for federal taxation.
In the meantime, business leaders became increasingly aware of the benefits
garnered by WWI planning, and they began to initiate plans for regularizing production
standards without direct government participation. Herbert Hoover was at the forefront of
this industrial movement to prevent economic inefficiency. Elected as the first president of
the Federated American Engineering Societies in late 1920, he swiftly commissioned a
study to investigate industrial waste. The resulting report, Waste in Industry, was published
in June 1921, and it, too, constituted an important advance in thinking about how to
stabilize economic fluctuations through scientific knowledge. Not only did the study
propose measures to rationalize shop administration and production processes, it also
called for the use of information, data analysis, and economic planning as means for

14
On demobilization, see especially Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, Ch. 12.
15
Metcalf, “Secretary Hoover,” 67-68; Alchon, The Invisible Hand, 35.
96

broader industrial management, beyond the scope of individual businesses.
16

Even more salient than these Progressive insights about scientific rationalization, the
committee outlined an innovative solution to economic problems that bridged earlier
laissez-faire policies of non-interference with the growing demand for state involvement in
the economy. The report suggested ways in which businesses could continue to operate
according to the principle of industrial self-government while simultaneously enlisting the
government’s help to stabilize economic practices across industries. Hoover and others
stressed that the function of the state should be limited to information gathering, statistical
collection, and overall analytical vision. Rather than imposing a top-down blueprint for all
businesses to follow, as in the totalitarian planned societies discussed above in Chapter 2,
this arrangement would assist industrial leaders in their independent attempts to regularize
production, employment, and consumption levels through knowledge about the national
economy as a whole.
Taken with the NBER’s work, Hoover’s proposal was novel in its aim to construct
a middle ground between a lack of planning, which had previously led to periods of great
instability and disorder between industries, and centralized government planning, which
many believed undermined American democratic values. Both reports contributed to the
accumulation of important statistical data about the economy, and both were designed as a
crucial compromise to balance corporate and national interests. The government, as
Hoover saw it, was in a unique position “to mobilize the intelligence of the country, [so]
that the entire community may be instructed as to the part they may play in the effecting…
of solutions” to nationwide problems.
17
Instead of leaving planning solely in the hands of
industrial leaders, who, it was claimed, were likely to view economic issues from the
perspective of their individual business’ interests, the government could help assemble data
collected by various organizations and interpret it through the lens of the entire economic
structure. While microeconomic responsibility for industrial performance remained at the
level of the firm, planning was conceived as a macroeconomic mechanism to coordinate
these activities.
Throughout his tenure as Secretary of Commerce, from 1921 to 1928, Hoover

16
See Metcalf, “Secretary Hoover,” 64-66.
17
Quoted in Ibid., 69.
97

sought to institutionalize these ideals as a basis for official policymaking. Government
programs to collect information about the economy, to be sure, led to vast improvements
in the struggle to stabilize economic fluctuations. They were nevertheless only part of
Hoover’s legacy. He regularly insisted on the cooperation of businesses, trade associations,
and private research institutes, such as the NBER, to prevent future periods of economic
inefficiency, overproduction, and unemployment through comprehensive information-
gathering studies – by no means a trivial undertaking at the time.
Later as U.S. President, Hoover further promoted the use of private resources to
conduct the pioneering study on national social issues, Recent Social Trends, introduced in
Chapter 2. The committee’s findings reiterated what Hoover, Mitchell, Gay, and other
Progressive economists had proposed all along – that more adequate statistics and overall
interpretation were needed to manage economic resources. “To maintain the balance of
our economic mechanism is a challenge to all the imagination,” the report stated. For this
task, the committee called for an expansion of the government’s economic planning efforts,
which at that point remained more of a social ideal than an actual state capacity: “To work
out schemes which could be taken seriously as a guide to production and distribution
would require the long collaboration of thousands of experts from thousands of places. In
addition to the accumulation and sifting of countless figures not now available, planners
would have to decide intricate problems of social theory… To gloss over the difficulties of
the task is no service to mankind; to face them honestly should not discourage those who
have faith in men’s capacity to find their way out of difficulties by taking thought.”
18

In expressing the need to expand government research programs, the committee
signaled an important departure from the economic planning advocated by earlier
Progressives. Even though many business leaders and politicians envisioned an advisory
role for the government – to provide new information and to locate individual industrial
activities within the whole economy – they ultimately did not see national economic
management in the same light as the authors of Recent Social Trends. For Hoover and
others, planning meant that individual businesses should consider their actions in relation

18
President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends, xxxi. It should be noted that Gay
was the leading author of the report’s chapter on economic planning, entitled “Trends in Economic
Organization.”
98

to a national economic structure, not that the government should take the lead in managing
the economy. The main function of the government, from this view, was to compile
statistical data collected by individual firms, trade associations, and private research
organizations, which industrialists could then use on their own to regularize production
within a wider system.
Hoover’s research committee, by contrast, alluded to a more proactive government
role in planning the economy. They advocated an extraordinary compromise between the
demand for industrial autonomy and the growing concerns to manage socioeconomic
fluctuations through state involvement, a compromise that would expand government
responsibility into the private sphere considerably. “[It] seems inevitable,” the report
explained, “that the varied economic interests of the country will find themselves invoking
more and more the help of government to meet emergencies, to safeguard them against
threatened dangers, to establish standards and to aid them in extending or defending
markets.”
19
This transition did not, however, portend the onset of dictatorship. To the
contrary, in the coming years it would come to inspire more effective democratic
management of the economy through government action.

III. Enframing the national economy

Nothing effective can be done in the stabilization of
economic affairs unless the area of planning and control
has the same boundaries as the economic structure.
– Luther Gulick
20

The committee’s break from earlier proposals to keep planning responsibilities in the
private sphere proved integral to later developments in the New Deal. Seen from the
benefit of hindsight, Progressive planning characterized an intermediary stage in the
development of economic crisis governance. For while it proposed a macroeconomic
perspective of the national economy and encouraged individual businesses to work
according to this systemic view, it still ultimately reinforced the notion of industrial
autonomy and administrative decentralization, without the concomitant development of a

19
Ibid., xxxiii.
20
Quoted in Corwin, Presidential Power, 59.
99

federal organization to coordinate these activities into a national program. Looking back on
these initiatives, analysts in the 1930s were convinced that Progressive efforts did not
constitute national planning in the way the term would later come to connote.
21
Advisors in
the FDR administration insisted that government planning required not only rational
knowledge about national resources but also an ideational framework designed to map out
the distinct actions of self-governing businesses within a complete system – put simply, the
enframing of the economy as a national object.
22

In the wake of the Great Depression, New Deal planning experts cited this earlier
lack of government responsibility for national economic management as the central
hindrance to a successful recovery. “The weakness of our American planning in the past,”
the board lamented in their Final Report, “has been the failure to bring the various plans
and planners, public and private, into some form of concert with one another, to develop
public interest planning in concert with planning in the private interest. The plans of
business, the plans of labor, the plans of agriculture, the plans of science and technology,
the plans of social welfare, the plans of government, have not heretofore been aligned in
such manner as to promote the general welfare in the highest degree attainable.”
23
As they
saw it, up to their time economic management had been limited to laissez-faire policies of
government non-interference; planning was left to market forces and free competition.
Even Progressive attempts to synchronize individual business decisions within a
macroeconomic ideational perspective were insufficient to compel the private sphere to act
in the public interest, since the incentives for industries often led to divergent policies and,
in fact, made the nation vulnerable to periods of economic instability.
But if government officials were intent on rectifying the damages caused by the
automatic functioning of markets, they needed to develop coordinated national economic

21
See, e.g., Lorwin, Time for Planning, 9.
22
On enframing in the sense used here, see especially Timothy Mitchell’s work in “Economists and the
Economy;” Rule of Experts; “Society, Economy, and the State.” An important distinction should be noted,
though. Whereas Mitchell traces the structural conception of the economy proposed by the British
economist John Maynard Keynes, the narrative here demonstrates that New Deal planners were more
integral to this development for U.S. policymaking. For Keynes’ influence, see also Adelstein, “The Nation as
an Economic Unit;” Skidelsky, “Keynes & the Reconstruction;” Sweezy, “The Keynesians.” For the
importance of American economists, see especially Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;”
Keyserling, “Discussion;” Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning;” May, From New Deal; Reagan, Designing a
New America, Ch. 8; Stein, The Fiscal Revolution; Stoneman, A History.
23
National Planning Board, Final Report, 22.
100

plans far beyond what was attempted before. Democratic national planning was necessary
to overcome the defects wrought by the traditional economic liberalism of the past. “The
experience of our day,” the board warned, “shows that no system, political or economic,
unless it faces frankly the grave realities of modern economic and governmental life and
boldly takes the initiative in broad plans for a better day, can be protected against explosion
that wrecks and twists while social discontent struggles to build some new structure
promising more to the body and soul of those who feel themselves disinherited by the
existing order of things.”
24

With this plea, the NPB members became increasingly interested in the problem of
how to fully utilize the nation’s economic resources. And in the effort to elaborate a plan
for national resource planning, they divided responsibilities among numerous
subcommittees relating to issues of land, water, industry, urbanism, population, science,
and research. The most important of these for New Deal economic management was the
Industrial Resources Committee, initially created in July 1934 to study industrial
production and employment capacities, and to construct plans for government industrial
regulation based on these studies. Its research division, the Industrial Section, did not start
work until that fall, however, when Gardiner Means was appointed director. A leading
economist on loan from the Department of Agriculture, Means enlisted the help of
renowned socioeconomic experts – such as Lauchlin Currie, Mordecai Ezekiel, Leon
Henderson, and Isador Lubin – to frame long-term national economic plans.
25

In important respects, the board’s economic planning endeavors were the
brainchild of Wesley Mitchell, who throughout the Progressive Era had actively supported
a government role in managing the economy. As the leading economist on the board until
his resignation in December 1935, Mitchell’s theoretical vision influenced their research
activities significantly. He advanced an unorthodox conception of the economy: Whereas
many economists defined the economy as a smooth functioning system disrupted by
temporary periods of instability and change,
26
Mitchell argued conversely that the
economy’s normal state was one of constant fluctuation in the business cycle. Viewed in

24
Ibid.
25
Gruchy, “The Economics,” 61; Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning,” 192-193.
26
Cf. the IR theory models of state institutional development discussed in Chapter 1.
101

this way, a structural, preparatory approach to national economic planning was needed to
continuously manage ongoing complications, rather than relying on piecemeal solutions to
problems as they arose.
27
Indeed, Mitchell did not consider the Progressive attempts at
business coordination in earlier years to be planned action at all but the result of private
interests in reducing inefficiency, which, he believed, were an altogether unreliable basis for
long-term national economic management.
28

And yet, despite his numerous advances in economic theory, Mitchell’s insights
were largely inconsequential to the board’s most ingenious contribution to socioeconomic
planning: the construction of a systemic view of the national economy. In the first place,
Mitchell’s outlook was still colored by the conventional business-cycle tradition in
economics, which saw the ongoing depression as a product of normal ebbs and flows.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this view became increasingly unpopular, as it was premised on the
troubling notion that downturns were a recurring feature in the economic system.
29

Furthermore, aside from his earlier interests in systematic national planning and
understanding the interconnections between social processes, Mitchell was intent on
studying aspects of the economy that could be statistically measured through quantitative
methods. He set his sights primarily on the calculable monetary factors of the economy,
like price, as opposed to conceptualizing how these elements functioned within an
overarching system.
30

It was Gardiner Means, instead, who stood at the forefront of the board’s efforts in
the mid-1930s to develop an innovative understanding of the American economy as a
complex, interdependent structure. Means had long promoted a structural
conceptualization of the American economy. In a lecture at the American Political Science
Association meeting in 1933, for instance, he suggested that “a new pattern of thinking” was
required to address the existing economic depression. This approach, he said in words that
could have been written by others at the NPB, would need to “weld the elements of politics
and economics into an integrated whole having validity in the present day.” By forging this

27
See especially Mitchell, The Backward Art, 100.
28
See Gruchy, “The Economics,” 65.
29
See especially Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 44-47.
30
Gruchy, “The Economics,” 65-66.
102

alternative vision, economists could “creat[e] a pattern of organization” that was neither
laissez-faire in the traditional sense nor totalitarian in the form of state economic control
but rather allowed for a viable democratic alternative between these extremes.
31

To construct this systemic perspective, Means proposed a number of studies as
director of research for the board’s Industrial Section, each of which aimed to incorporate
individual aspects of industrial capacity and production statistics into what he aptly called a
“great mosaic of all industry.”
32
Contrary to focusing on either the production side of the
economy or on consumption, like many studies had done before, this perspective sought to
model the national economy according to the relationships between these aspects – that is,
consumption in relation to production, and vice versa. Means suggested that the board
integrate data about industrial capacity with information on the consumption practices of
different social groups. With this information, he thought it would be possible to construct
“production-consumption patterns,” which could then be used to plot the most efficient
use of resources based on existing consumer demands and productive capacities.
In the same way that earlier Progressives hoped to stabilize industrial fluctuations
and encourage the best utilization of national resources through rational knowledge about
the whole economy, this approach to New Deal economic planning was intended to
promote a balanced economy, in which employment, production, and consumption were
sufficiently coordinated to prevent periods of instability. But unlike with earlier efforts, this
goal, Means soon came to find out, required a deeper understanding of the connections
within and between industries across the country.
33
In order to map out production-
consumption patterns, it was necessary to examine specific industrial problems within a
wider perspective of the American economic system. Daunting as it was, such a formidable
task would take even copious amounts of researchers with an endless funding supply – two
things that Means and the NPB lacked – years to complete.
With insufficient time and resources on his side, Means urged the Industrial
Committee in October 1935, only months after accepting his post, to begin conducting
research according to this directive. “In discussing economic planning,” he wrote in a

31
Gardiner C. Means, Address delivered to the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA,
December 27, 1933, Entry 8, Box 79, Folder 081.1 – Means, Gardiner C., NRPB Records.
32
Quoted in Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning,” 193; for the following, see 194-195.
33
See Ibid., 196.
103

programmatic statement for the board, “it is desirable to distinguish between what might be
called general or overall planning and what might be called piecemeal planning. It is
possible to carry on useful planning for a particular region, or industry, or resource without
having to work out the desirable relationship for other parts of the economy.” Yet no
matter how useful this form of piecemeal planning might have been in the past, it
nevertheless led to many inefficiencies, because it failed to integrate the individual parts of
the economy into “an effectively functioning whole.” The solution, for Means, was not to
do away with piecemeal planning altogether but to merge these insights with structural
planning, “to facilitate a reasonable degree of coordination between the separate parts.”
34

Means frequently proposed that the board initiate a multi-industry study of the
national economy along these lines. From 1935 to 1939, the Industrial Committee worked
on projects to outline seemingly disparate economic activities in their interrelation. Means
organized and managed a team of researchers hired to investigate various aspects of
industrial production and consumption. The analytical net of these information-gathering
assignments was cast widely, ranging from, among other things, national income statistics to
data collection on the availability of natural resources, location of industrial sites, and
employment rates. With the extensive database generated through this intellectual labor,
Means began to envision a structural model of American industry for the purposes of
initiating national socioeconomic plans.
35

The resulting study, The Structure of the American Economy: Part I. Basic
Characteristics, published in 1939, was premised on the board’s novel achievement in
thought, to enframe the national economy as a systemic whole. In the struggle to identify
how the economy could function more effectively after the economic downturn, the report
organized a multitude of economic practices into a coherent national structure. Only by
bringing all of the aspects of economic production and consumption into a “single
functioning whole,” or “single frame of reference,” it was argued, was it possible to identify
specific problem areas and create sound plans to prevent these issues from leading to
further instability.
36
“The American economy,” the report opened, “is the organized activity

34
Gardiner C. Means, Statement, October 12, 1935, Entry 8, Box 79, Folder 081.1 Means, Gardiner C.,
NRPB Records.
35
Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning,” 198-200.
36
National Resources Committee, The Structure of the American Economy, v.
104

through which the 130 million people in this country obtain their daily living.” All the
actions required to sustain modern life – from farming to mining to buying – were
identified as parts of “a huge and highly complex producing organization which constitutes
the national economy.” Though admittedly difficult to grasp the entire economic
organization in its complexity, these daily activities nevertheless “tie[d] together, into an
integral whole.”
37

Understood in this way, the national economy appeared to function like a machine;
and when individual economic processes were perceived in their connection within this
overall economic machinery, Means and the other authors of the report suggested, it was
possible to identify the defective parts in the system. While abstract and perhaps even
unintelligible to some, this mechanical analogy provided an alternative mode of organizing
national socioeconomic life into an interdependent structure with moving parts, allowing
New Deal economists to map normal market flows, detect production-consumption
patterns, and locate the specific strategic points in need of better management.
38
This
perspective, in short, helped economic planners ensure that the wholesale regimentation of
the private sphere was not necessary to stabilize economic fluctuations in production and
consumption. Honing in on the precise problem areas served to limit the overall extent of
government interventions.
From this standpoint, Means became convinced that there were no economic
forces capable of addressing what he identified as a rapid decrease in consumption over the
past decade.
39
In direct contrast to the conventional liberal argument that free industrial
competition would correct any imbalance in the market economy, he concluded that the
government needed to develop policies to ensure a certain level and distribution of
consumer income to catalyze consumption. The board, however, did not initially support
Means’ application of the macroeconomic perspective to national economic planning, and
subsequently asked him to take his conclusions for policymaking out of the final
manuscript. At that point, Means’ insights and the Industrial Section’s research proved
significant as ideational developments to enframe the national economy but did not inspire

37
Ibid., 1.
38
See more generally Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Gruchy, “The Economics,” 68.
39
For the following, see Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning,” 201-203.
105

any great transformation in policy.

IV. National income and the “underconsumption thesis”

These twin objectives, increased national income and a
more widely distributed national income, comprise the
core of our social and economic policy.
– Arthur Burns
40

It was not until the board’s structural conception of the economy merged with the
“underconsumption thesis,” which came to prominence in the mid-1930s, that proposals
for government economic management garnered further support. This change in directive
can be illustrated by tracing the increasing influence of two economists in the FDR
administration’s planning activities at the time, each employing macroeconomic insights to
argue, like Means did, that a decline in consumption had caused the original crisis and,
hence, that government fiscal policies were the most effective way to stimulate consumer
spending. These economists were Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board, and Lauchlin Currie, Eccles’ assistant and previous consultant for the planning
board’s Industrial Section.
41
If Eccles became the foremost spokesman of this view, it was
Currie who provided the technical economic thinking to support it.
42

Basing policy advice on fundamentally different understandings of the initial
recession, advisors in the FDR administration were ultimately unable to establish a
coherent approach to economic crisis government in the early 1930s. New Dealers had
little understanding of what had led to the 1929 stock market crash. Many saw production
inefficiencies as the leading cause of the downturn, some believed the recession was part of
the long-term fluctuations in the normal business cycle, while still others blamed
government regulatory mechanisms for inhibiting normal market flows. The resulting

40
Arthur E. Burns to Corrington Gill, Memorandum, June 29, 1937, Container 95, Folder The President – 1
Jan. 1936-1940, Hopkins Papers.
41
For the involvement of these thinkers in New Deal economic planning, see especially Brinkley, The End of
Reform, Ch. 4-5; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Sandilands, The Life and Political
Economy, Ch. 3; Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, Ch. 4-7. They are by no means the only ones who supported
these views, however. Stuart Chase, John Maurice Clark, Alvin Hansen, and Wesley Mitchell, among others,
all echoed the sentiment that consumption was the underlying problem that needed to be addressed. They
were nevertheless not as central to official planning measures at the time.
42
Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 165.
106

strategy was necessarily one of pragmatic experimentation – through either direct
intervention in economic markets to establish price and wage controls or traditional liberal
measures of deregulation to allow the economy to correct itself.
Not only were these approaches based on competing ideas of economic
management but they also had contradictory implications for recovery. Lacking a coherent
theory to address what were seen as the major causes of the recession, early New Deal
experiments often comprised an inconsistent combination of inflationary and deflationary
measures.
43
On the one hand, when private spending was at an all-time low, government
relief efforts and job-creation programs through, among others, the Civilian Conservation
Corps and Public Works Administration flooded the market with money, thereby
stimulating economic growth. Yet on the other hand, this staggering increase in emergency
spending led to a massive deficit, which by 1936 had reached its highest peacetime level in
United States history, at $3.5 billion.
44
To balance the budget, many advisors encouraged
high taxation to pay for recovery activities.
Any stimulus that came from these early relief efforts, as a result, was ultimately
offset by the income-decreasing methods used to finance them. The prevailing path to
recovery at once facilitated the flow of money throughout the economy and reduced
consumer income. Underscoring the contradictory effects of this approach, an alternative
consensus began to form among a small subset of New Dealers, suggesting that consumer
practices were the primary contributing factor to economic instability. It became clear that
the essential problem was not that industry lacked the ability to produce enough goods.
Indeed, much of America’s productive power remained dormant in the 1930s. Nor was it
the opposite issue of overproduction. What was seen as the most important cause of the
economic downturn, rather, was a rapid decrease in national income – conceived of as
consumer purchasing power – and thus consumption.
45

This underconsumption thesis grew out of an intellectual movement to reconsider
the importance of national income as a tool for macroeconomic management. An
analytical construct first devised and calculated to help the government pay for WWI

43
See generally Brinkley, The End of Reform, 72-73; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
44
Brinkley, The End of Reform, 73.
45
Brinkley, Ibid., 70, finds that Stuart Chase and Wesley Mitchell were among the first to make this case.
107

mobilization through the unparalleled federal taxation program outlined above, national
income was seen in the early 1930s in a similar fashion – as a mechanism to help relieve
the exorbitant deficit brought on by the early New Deal through taxation. That conception
soon changed, however, and with it came a new understanding of how income could be
used as a specific strategic point in the economic system to stimulate growth. National
income became the crucial link between a structural view of the American economy, like
the one proposed by Means at the planning board, and the effort to devise a government
plan for recovery based on this systemic perspective.
Aside from the activities of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the
1920s – to study the size and distribution of national income – at the start of the New Deal
there was a shortage of information upon which the government could develop an effective
emergency program.
46
Calculating national income was seen as a vital first step towards
assessing the economy. The Department of Commerce began research to estimate income
for the years 1929, 1930, and 1931, in the hope that such statistical collection would shed
light on what had caused the initial crisis. Under the direction of Simon Kuznets, an
economist who was borrowed from the NBER to lead the research team, they published
National Income, 1929-32 as a Senate Document in 1934. The report defined two specific
aggregate variables used in the study: “national income produced,” referring to the net
product of the national economy; and “national income paid out,” referring to total
compensation in money. Shortly thereafter, the conceptualization was revised to include
the actual payments made to individuals, in an attempt to more accurately calculate
consumer purchasing power.
Expansive and unprecedented, this work went a long way towards making income
legible to state officials, so much so that the relative success of National Income inspired
the government to undertake a monthly series of national estimates, including state-level
breakdowns and distributions. From their macroeconomic view, New Dealers used income
level as an indicator of the overall functioning of the economy. The findings demonstrated
that there had been a 40
%
drop in national income paid out from 1929 to 1932, and in the
same period business savings went from a surplus of about $2 billion to a loss of $9.5

46
See above Sec. II. For the following, see especially Carson, “The History of the United States,” 157-160;
Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Marcuss and Kane, “U.S. National Income,” 34-36.
108

billion, producing a drastic decline of 53
%
in national income – all of which served to
bolster the argument that a stark drop in consumer purchasing power contributed to the
original downturn.
47
But the data alone did not imply a government program for how to
increase income and encourage consumption. A void still existed between the diagnosis of
the economic condition and the need for a sound economic theory to construct
government plans for recovery.
48

The void was perhaps most apparent in the official usage of these estimates, when
President Roosevelt was on the campaign trail for reelection in 1936. His core message was
that the fiscal stimulus of previous years through the massively expanded recovery program,
while detrimental to a balanced budget, was the only thing that successfully counteracted
the harmful impact of the depression on citizens’ ability to contribute to economic growth.
In an address at Forbes Field, in Philadelphia, for example, Roosevelt stated that “the rise
and fall of national income – since they tell the story of how much you and I and
everybody else are making – are an index of the rise and fall of national prosperity. They
are also,” he added, “an index of the prosperity of your Government.”
49
And yet, even if
this logic was in line with the growing movement to correlate income levels with the
economic condition, the president’s later policy to rebalance the budget just one year later
contrasted sharply with the conclusions drawn by economists – that only more spending
could bring lasting prosperity. Enter Marriner Eccles and Lauchlin Currie.
Eccles quickly became the most prominent adherent of the outlook that national
income needed better management.
50
Guided by a structural conception of the American
economy, he came to understand the interconnectedness of various economic processes.
51

Much like the Progressive efforts to situate industrial activities within the national economic
system as a whole, this perspective moved far beyond the myopic view of the individual
firm and private interests, to an analysis of the aggregate effects of business, consumer
investment, and government practices on overall economic performance. Since private

47
Statistics are in U.S. Senate, National Income, 3-4.
48
Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy, 69.
49
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – Volume Five, 401-408.
50
A collection of Eccles’ papers and personal recollections illustrate the dynamics of his thought. See his
Beckoning Frontiers; Economic Balance. Useful biographical accounts can be found in Hyman, Marriner S.
Eccles; May, From New Deal, Ch. 3.
51
For the following, see May, From New Deal, 56-57.
109

spending had halted in the wake of the depression and emergency taxation had diminished
consumer purchasing power, the crucial problem, from this vantage, was not
overproduction but a stark drop in income and consumption.
Although Eccles was a privately wealthy banker from Utah, the initial downturn
crushed his faith in traditional economic liberalism and the notion that business interests,
when left uncoordinated, could lead to a balanced, stable economy.
52
He concluded early
on that the economy would not correct itself, as many had contended previously, himself
included. But, being a capitalist at heart, he was also concerned to minimize the use of
direct government controls. Even before New Deal recovery measures began, Eccles
argued that the crisis was due to an inadequate distribution of income. He regularly averred
that a lack of consumer purchasing power was to blame for the depression. In contrast to
the prevailing proposals to balance the deficit, Eccles counterintuitively asserted that the
best path was in fact to invest more. This solution, he explained, would add to the overall
size of national income and redistribute it to consumers while appeasing industrial capitalist
anxieties about government interference in economic markets.
Despite his iconoclastic thinking, Eccles was asked to testify before the Senate
Finance Committee in February 1933.
53
Alongside hundreds of other independent business
leaders, Eccles was virtually singular in his insistence that the way to move forward was to
increase income through government spending. To accomplish this goal, he proposed five
measures: 1) grant more relief funds for the states; 2) increase federal loans for public
works projects across the country; 3) expand investment in agriculture; 4) restructure farm
mortgages; and 5) cancel past war debts. The last of these propositions, in particular, flew
in the face of the austerity measures advocated by mainstream economists at the time; and
with such impressive changes in mind, Eccles pushed even more for an extended
government role to manage the national economy and prevent further instability.
Meanwhile, less than a month later, the FDR administration began crafting their
emergency recovery program. Eccles lamented that measures to instigate economic growth
through structural interventions, specifically those of the National Recovery Administration,
were based on a flawed understanding of the economy. Premised on the false claims that

52
Brinkley, The End of Reform, 79.
53
For the following, see Ibid., 79-80; May, From New Deal, 48-49.
110

the crisis resulted from inefficiencies in production and that overproduction was the
underlying cause of imbalance, Eccles believed that government actions to devise price and
wage codes were fundamentally misguided. “What appears to be overproduction,” he
argued, “is, at bottom, a nation-wide case of underconsumption due to the absence among
tens of millions of American of the effective purchasing power that would enable them to
buy the things they desperately need.”
54
His conclusion flipped the prevailing wisdom on its
head.
As the frenetic experimentation of Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office slowed
by the end of 1933, Eccles’ perspective gained more and more support with New Dealers,
to such an extent that in February 1934 he was invited to join the government as a special
assistant to the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. While there, Eccles met Currie,
a senior financial analyst. The two could not have been more different in terms of
experience. Whereas Eccles prided himself on not having a college degree or any formal
education in economic theory, Currie was an economist by training who had taught at
Harvard University before consulting for the government. Their differences
notwithstanding, they worked well as a team, and they were both enthusiastic supporters of
spending programs as targeted measures to overcome what they saw as the central
economic issue: underconsumption.
55

Together, Eccles and Currie drafted a memorandum late in 1934 for President
Roosevelt, proposing changes in the administration of the Federal Reserve System. In it,
they emphasized the need for greater government involvement. “If the monetary
mechanism is to be used as an instrument for the promotion of business stability,” they
wrote, “conscious control and management are essential.” In order to stabilize economic
fluctuations, “increased governmental and private expenditures” were required “to bring
about a rise in national income.”
56
This claim echoed a belief that both Eccles and Currie
had come to independently – that the government needed to establish a proactive role in
managing the economy through fiscal policies. Impressed by their conclusions, Roosevelt
appointed Eccles to fill the empty chairman post at the Federal Reserve Board, and Currie

54
Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers, 27; also cited in Brinkley, The End of Reform, 80.
55
Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy, 61.
56
Quoted in Ibid., 63.
111

tagged along as Eccles’ assistant.
Currie’s work under Eccles’ direction contributed greatly to the effort to base
government plans on sound economic theory. Uninterested in constructing a general
theoretical vision of the economy, as were Means and the other New Deal planning board
members, Currie sought, alternatively, to develop a pragmatic approach to national
economic governance grounded in a technical understanding of the economic system. Like
Eccles, he reasoned that unless the government increased its emergency relief spending,
thus contributing to the overall flow of money in the economic system, the market would
not recover on its own. Yet the government did not merely need to spend more; it needed
to spend in excess of what it borrowed from consumers.
With the help of Martin Krost, a student Currie had brought from Harvard to the
Federal Reserve, Currie wrote a series of memoranda for Eccles throughout 1935,
highlighting the benefits of this form of deficit spending.
57
In a memorandum submitted in
1935, entitled “Federal Income-Increasing Expenditures, 1932-35,” Currie and Krost
defied the commonly held wisdom that the spending which came with emergency recovery
programs needed to be counteracted with deflationary measures like high taxation. The key
was to increase what they called “the net contribution of the federal government to national
buying power.” Only by investing more than it borrowed from the population could fiscal
measures lead to a significant rise in consumption. In direct contrast to the prevalent view
at the time that the government should balance the widening emergency deficit, they
emphasized the importance of expenditures that increased national income, without at the
same time relying on income-decreasing payment measures.
Following these insights, New Dealers were equipped with both a continuous series
of estimates about the government’s net contribution to national income, as well as a
theoretical understanding of how deficit spending could be used as a mechanism to bolster
consumption.
58
This not only filled the gap between economic theory and government
planning noted above; it also represented a fundamental change in direction regarding
macroeconomic planning – away from early New Deal recovery based on either direct

57
For the following, see Ibid., 68-78; Carson, “The History of the United States,” 165; Collier and Lakoff,
“Vital, Vulnerable Systems;” Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 165-166.
58
Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy, 77.
112

government interventions in economic institutions or deregulatory measures, and towards
the use of fiscal policy as a noninvasive tool for correcting market fluctuations. In sum, a
structural conception of the American national economy helped Eccles, Currie, and others
locate income as the specific strategic point in the system that required more effective
management and, in turn, promote deficit spending as the best way to increase and
redistribute income without the use of broad regulatory controls.

V. Managing the 1937-1938 crisis through fiscal stimulus
59

The impact of deficit spending as a mode of economic management in the mid-1930s
should not be overstated. Like the planning board’s push to enframe the national economy
as an interdependent system, efforts to reconsider government fiscal measures remained
primarily ideational developments, rather than concrete foundations for policy. Slowly,
however, traditional liberal economics gave way to these planning ideas. In the effort to
devise a program to recover from another devastating recession that hit the nation in winter
1937-1938, New Deal advisors underwent a fundamental transformation in their thinking.
Instead of underscoring the need for either an expanded regulatory state or limited
spending, they began to promote fiscal stimulus as a tool for national economic crisis
management.
Few predicted the second recession, given the rapidly improving economic
condition up to that point. With the exception of unemployment, which was still around
15
%
, economic indices confirmed positive changes in production, profits, and consumer
income over the first four years of the New Deal.
60
Reigning statistics found that by the
beginning of 1937, the steel industry was operating at 80
%
of capacity, up from 47
%
just a
couple years prior, and construction spending had increased by roughly 200
%
. Based on the
understanding that an imbalance in production had caused the original downturn, many
believed these changes indicated broader economic recovery. Even those who were less
optimistic about the permanence of these advances found reason to support this

59
For this section, see generally Brinkley, The End of Reform, Ch. 1 & 5; May, From New Deal, Ch. 1 & 5-6;
Reagan, Designing a New America, 196-210; Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, Ch. 6.
60
Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 91. The following statistics are in Brinkley, The End of Reform, 24.
113

conclusion in the substantial increase in national income, from $43 billion in 1932 to $70
billion in 1937. For all intents and purposes, it appeared as though the economy had
recovered from the depression.
The most sanguine about these developments were analysts in the FDR
administration, many of whom perceived the improvements as evidence of the need to
balance the federal budget. Officials were eager to illustrate that the economic emergency
was over, that the New Deal had prevailed in the face of the worst downturn in U.S.
history. There was reason to believe that the crisis had subsided, despite the known facts
that unemployment levels remained high, some industries were slow to show signs of
progress, and private spending was still low. And since the deficit was broadly understood
as a necessary evil to facilitate national recovery through massive increases in relief
spending and public works programs, budget balancing became a major focus of efforts to
eliminate any lasting symbols of the crisis in spring 1937.
61

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., was perhaps the fiercest supporter of this policy. As
Secretary of the Treasury Department, Morgenthau was ultimately responsible for the
government’s fiscal direction. While he admitted that the emergency deficit was justified in
the early years of the New Deal, in the effort to stimulate the economy, Morgenthau was
unwavering in his commitment to a balanced fiscal program.
62
When the economy began
looking better in early 1937, he jumped at the opportunity, insisting that the government
restore economic balance by substantially reducing, if not eliminating, the emergency
expenditures and temporary spending agencies of the New Deal.
In October of that year, Morgenthau worked closely with his staff at the Treasury to
prepare a speech underscoring the need for such measures. Intent on explaining the
benefits of past New Deal deficit spending while also arguing that future recovery required
a change in fiscal path, Treasury aides incorporated these competing ideas in a draft of the
speech. The use of an “unbalanced Federal Budget” to support recovery in the mid-1930s
had “succeeded,” they wrote: “[W]e have licked the great depression.”
63
Thus, to them, the
apparent recovery achieved in 1937 represented a turning point: Now that the economy

61
Brinkley, The End of Reform, 25.
62
Ibid., 26.
63
Quoted in May, From New Deal, 95.
114

had improved, the time had come to repay the debts incurred over the years of deficit
spending.
Yet when the staff met to discuss the draft in mid-October 1937, actual
developments in the economy all but shattered the assumption that recovery had indeed
arrived.
64
Statistical data about overall economic performance suggested that another
recession loomed. Fearing a similar downturn as the one that began years before, people
panicked and sold their stocks. This volatile behavior led to another stock market collapse
on October 19, which many compared to the 1929 “Black Tuesday” crash. Widespread
national economic decline quickly followed, such that by the end of 1937 the stock market
average had plummeted by 33
%
, industrial production levels had dropped by 40
%
and profits
by 78
%
, national income had decreased by 13
%
from its peak at $70 billion months before,
and an additional four million workers had joined the unemployed masses.
Steadfast in his conviction that good government meant economical government,
Morgenthau was reluctant to change his tune in response to the worsening economic
condition, and continued, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, to push the issue of
budget balancing even further. The best program moving forward, in his eyes, was to carry
through with efforts to balance the budget and to define a specific date for realizing this
goal. More than that, Morgenthau became convinced that a balanced budget was not
simply the consequence of a recovered economy – that is to say, reducing emergency
expenditures and deficit spending was not merely a mechanism to abolish the symbols of
depression. It was, rather, the essential process through which recovery was possible. Only
through measures to establish economic balance did Morgenthau believe the economy
would thrive once again.
65

On this point, Morgenthau diverged fundamentally from the program proposed by
Eccles at the Federal Reserve, leading to a critical struggle from winter 1937 to spring 1938,
to define a solution to the crisis. While the recession came as a surprise to most, Eccles
warned of the underlying fragility of the economic condition throughout 1937. He
speculated, in contrast to the prevailing wisdom at the Treasury, that the economy had not

64
For the following, see Ibid., 96-104. Statistics are from Brinkley, The End of Reform, 28-29; Reagan,
Designing a New America, 201.
65
See May, From New Deal, 96-113.
115

yet stabilized to an extent which warranted spending cuts. From his view, efforts to balance
the budget were premature and in fact threatened to weaken the precarious stability of the
national economy. “Recovery is now under way,” Eccles presciently wrote in an April 1937
article for Fortune, months before the second recession, “but if it were permitted to
become a runaway boom it would be followed by another disastrous crash.”
66
This
cautionary account echoed Eccles’ previous concerns about the “dangers” of budget
balancing. Unless the government continued its path of recovery through the vast fiscal
stimulus that came with New Deal emergency programs, he warned, “another drastic slump
will be inevitable.”
67

Where Morgenthau promoted balancing measures like reduced government
investment as the leading approach to recovery, Eccles advocated deficit spending to
maintain high levels of national income and consumption. Relying on the insights in Currie
and Krost’s 1935 study on the net income-increasing expenditures of the government, in a
memorandum written to President Roosevelt in early October 1937 Eccles identified
budget-balancing practices to reduce spending as the major cause of the second recession.
68

It was not the deficit that had contributed to the downturn but a “decline in national buying
power resulting from an excess of cash collections” and decreases in spending. “In order to
maintain consumer buying power and to make possible a technically-balanced budget in
the fiscal year 1939,” he concluded, “it is imperative that Government expenditures be
maintained and, if possible, increased in the next six months.”
69

In different venues, Eccles continued to advocate spending as a path to fiscal
stimulus. In December 1937, for example, he gave an important speech to the American
Farm Bureau Federation and testified at the Committee on Banking and Currency. But it
was his testimony before the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Unemployment
Relief on January 4, 1938, that brought his fiscal plan to center stage. Applying a
macroeconomic perspective to explain why the New Deal program had failed to prevent
another downturn, Eccles found that it was the austerity measures to cut emergency

66
Eccles, Economic Balance, 71.
67
Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers, 296-297.
68
Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 166.
69
Quoted in May, From New Deal, 118.
116

spending in 1937 that had led to the recent crisis. Hesitant to voice his policy advice in
such a setting, Eccles nevertheless boldly claimed that a $1 billion increase in government
spending could sufficiently stimulate consumption and end the recession.
70

This thesis and the hefty spending program that came with it gradually attracted
wider currency in official circles in early 1938. Not only did Eccles present his ideas in
addresses and confidential memos, written with the help of his assistant Currie; he also
played an integral part in informal meetings with other administration officials who shared
similar beliefs about economic recovery, including contributors to the New Deal planning
board’s earlier macroeconomic vision – such as Mordecai Ezekiel, Leon Henderson, and
Isador Lubin – in addition to other key officials like Harry L. Hopkins of the Works
Progress Administration and Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. The common
thread among these advisors was that the government should terminate its current
deflationary measures, to balance the emergency deficit and adopt an extensive spending
program instead.
71
Based on the structural understanding that budget balancing in 1937 had
decreased consumer purchasing power, each of these individuals, in their respective
agencies, consistently underscored the importance of fiscal stimulus to overcome the
recession.
Throughout the early months of 1938, Morgenthau lobbied against the growing
spending consensus to influence national policy. Roosevelt largely resisted the impulse to
change the administration’s approach to recovery, though, often conceding points to both
sides. The decisive moment of change in the president’s outlook came at the beginning of
April, when he was joined by Hopkins at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Hopkins called on Henderson and Aubrey Williams of the WPA, as well as the NPB
economist Beardsley Ruml, to travel to the area and begin writing memoranda to persuade
President Roosevelt that the government should resume spending for full recovery.
72

A memorandum written by Ruml and Henderson on April 1 demonstrates the
impressive case made. In the process of articulating a program to stimulate economic
growth, they argued, fiscal stimulus could take two forms: “national intervention to

70
See Ibid., 121; Eccles, Economic Balance, Ch. VI.
71
May, From New Deal, 123.
72
On the importance of this moment, see Brinkley, The End of Reform, 97-101; May, From New Deal, 131-
134; Reagan, Designing a New America, 207-208; Stein, The Fiscal Revolution, 109-114.
117

stimulate production,” as employed in earlier New Deal measures and in the totalitarian
planned societies abroad; or “[n]ational intervention to stimulate consumption.” Referred
to as the “democratic method,” Ruml and Henderson insisted that fiscal measures to
encourage consumption were more appropriate because they facilitated industrial
competition and gave individual consumers, as opposed to the state, the power to influence
economic markets.
73

Currie’s influential memorandum, “Causes of the Recession,” was the final nail in
the budget-balancing coffin.
74
Originally called on to advise the president roughly one
month after the second recession began, Currie circulated his memo the same day that
Ruml and Henderson urged Roosevelt to begin a substantial fiscal stimulus program to
increase national income. He cited a “profound change in the character of the recovery
movement” between late 1936 and early 1937 as the primary cause of the recession.
Recovery ceased at this time due in large part to a “drastic decline” in government spending
contributions to consumer purchasing power. Given that earlier success resulted from
expenditures in excess of the income-decreasing deflationary measures like taxation, Currie
reasoned, it was imperative that the government increase its spending program beyond the
rigid limits of the established budget.
These memos, taken with the failing economic condition and the expansion of Nazi
power in Europe, stressed the urgent need for action at that time.
75
Though it is impossible
to know exactly what caused the president to change his mind on the government’s
economic recovery program, by April 2, 1938, he had determined that the government
should resume spending at the expense of balancing the budget, which Morgenthau and
others obstinately supported. In mid-April, the administration announced its new fiscal
stimulus program; and referring to the logic in Ruml and Henderson’s memo in his
address to Congress on April 14, Roosevelt requested legislation to approve $3 billion in
further relief expenditures to increase consumer purchasing power.
In a Fireside Chat later that night, President Roosevelt explained to the American
citizenry that such measures were the most effective way to address the limitations of

73
See Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow, 152; May, From New Deal, 133.
74
Quotes are from Currie, “Causes of the Recession.” See also Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy,
87-92.
75
See May, From New Deal, 133.
118

laissez-faire economics, without resorting to dictatorial controls. The purpose of deficit
spending was to catalyze private economic activity and the flow of money directly to the
consumer. “[T]he only sure bulwark of continuing liberty,” he said, “is a government strong
enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough
informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.” Similar to the New Deal
planning board’s efforts to chart a middle course between the mastery of totalitarian
controls and the drift of traditional liberal economics, Roosevelt proposed that the nation
“sail ahead” with the democratic approach of fiscal stimulus. “For to reach a port, we must
sail – sail, not tie at anchor – sail, not drift.”
76

VI. Conclusion: economic planning as a democratic policymaking tool

This chapter investigates the impact of planning on New Deal economic management. It
demonstrates how discourse and ideas led to dramatic shifts in policymaking. Moving
beyond the earlier Progressive insight that the government was in a unique position to
facilitate economic stability by providing business leaders with information about the
overall functioning of the national economy, socioeconomic experts in the New Deal
planning board emphasized the benefits of a structural conception of the economy as a
whole. Instead of relying on the ideal that individual businesses would coordinate their
actions without government involvement, the efforts to enframe the national economy as an
interdependent system greatly enhanced officials’ understanding of economic processes,
making it possible to identify certain strategic points that required better management.
From this structural perspective, advisors made suggestions for how to govern economic
fluctuations, without the use of widespread dictatorial interventions.
These advances in thought proved revolutionary for the move towards a democratic
form of macroeconomic crisis governance. Until then, the inability to produce a complete
view of national economic productivity inhibited official efforts to harness the economy for
war mobilization in WWI, as well as experiments to stimulate economic growth in the early
New Deal. Leaders often relied on the temporary emergency interventions in the economy

76
Quotations are from Roosevelt, Public Papers – Volume Seven, 236-248; also cited in May, From New
Deal, 138-139.
119

expected by the national security state model and the cooperation with industrialists
expected by the contract state model. The resulting struggle was to identify an approach to
manage the economy without these unsuccessful, anti-democratic measures. The New
Dealers’ structural perspective of the national economy helped policymakers pinpoint
specific objects of governance prior to crisis and initiate targeted democratic reforms.
In line with the findings of the board members, a handful of New Dealers began
focusing their sights on the problem of underconsumption in the wake of the depression. It
was believed that the most effective use of national economic resources could be attained
through targeted reforms that sought precisely to enlarge income and distribute it to the
consumer. Government economic management, in this way, did not consist of
interventions in the institutions of the economy (e.g., controlling prices and wages), nor did
it allow for the unregulated capitalism of traditional liberalism. Rather, fiscal stimulus was
understood as a democratic approach to encourage income redistribution and
consumption. The proposed spending program founded on these insights marked a
significant transition in national policy to balance the lack of economic planning that came
with laissez-faire economics and the wholesale controls of the totalitarian planned society.
The friction between these competing ideas led to multiple policy pathways. In the
end, the FDR administration initiated a wholly different approach to economic emergency
management in spring 1938 based on the advice of Eccles, Currie, and a growing
contingent of advisors in support of deficit spending. The shift in economic thinking
demonstrated that it was possible for the government to maintain economic growth through
fiscal measures that did not regulate normal market flows but rather facilitated them in
important ways.
77
Analytically defining the economy as a structural entity enabled officials to
manage the economic condition without resorting to generalized interventions or
temporary expansions of executive authority based on the past war experience. Economists
could model economic activities and identify specific problem areas before they led to
crises; and with this information, policymakers began using government spending as a
democratic tool to increase income and promote consumption.
Economic planning and the related policy of deficit spending remained vital even

77
See Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
120

throughout World War II, as we will see below in Part II. While many scholars argue that
in harnessing the economy for total war New Deal measures were pushed aside in favor of
reinstating the WWI approach, it was planning innovations that most crucially informed
WWII mobilization. New Dealers’ structural conception of the national economy
facilitated an alternative approach to wartime economic management. Instead of employing
government controls or relying on laissez-faire principles, as in WWI, advisors in the FDR
administration understood that nonintrusive fiscal policies could lead directly to growth,
production increases, and employment. Planning helped prevent production bottlenecks
before they deteriorated into crises, and coordinate solutions to inefficiencies between
autonomous industrial sectors. The task of the next chapter is to uncover how New Deal
planning set the institutional foundations for permanent emergency in the executive
branch.

121

Chapter 4.
Reorganizing the federal administrative machinery

The forward march of American democracy at this point
in our history depends more upon effective management
than upon any other single factor… Thus the President
will have effective managerial authority over the Executive
Branch consonant with the demands of democracy and
commensurate with his responsibility under the
Constitution of the United States.
– Louis Brownlow
1

I. The need for administrative reform

As the two previous chapters have illustrated, the many complications of the economic
depression in the 1930s, coupled with earlier technological developments in transportation
and communication, exposed the weaknesses of an American state that had too few
ideational and administrative resources to manage the widespread scope of modern social
problems. Originally lacking the basic capacities to address issues of such size and
complexity as the Great Depression, the FDR administration set out to construct a recovery
program by experimenting with a variety of solutions. In the early New Deal, the typical
manner in which leaders sought to alleviate the economic pressures of the day was
necessarily ad hoc, given the absence of an institutional system already in place for national
crisis governance. Temporary emergency agencies were created and legislation written
based on the past models of coercive and compensatory statebuilding during World War I
mobilization.
With such unprecedented demands for economic recovery, however, the president
and his advisors were largely unable to concentrate on tackling the related problem of

1
Louis Brownlow, Radio Speech, January 13, 1936, Box 16, Folder J-I-10, PCAM Papers.
122

federal organization. By the end of Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office – an historic
period of intense, large-scale institutional upheaval – the executive branch had deteriorated
into disarray.
2
The countless committees, commissions, and agencies established through
these experiments in emergency statebuilding led to massive budget deficits and an utterly
unmanageable government. National planning experts Louis Brownlow and Charles
Merriam were particularly disconcerted about the problem of administrative management
in a democratic state facing extensive social problems. After visiting European countries
that were experiencing significant transformations in liberal-constitutional forms of
government in the mid-1930s, like Poland and Nazi Germany, they determined that the
best way to prevent the rise of dictatorship in the U.S. was to bring executive reorganization
to the forefront of the policymaking agenda.
This chapter traces these changes in outlook, arguing that planning discourse and
ideas transformed statebuilding processes – from piecemeal efforts to deal with
complications after they arose to lasting changes. Section II shows how planners exposed
the limitations of the existing approach to temporary institutional development. Following
Brownlow and Merriam’s advice to delve into the issue further, Roosevelt appointed a
research committee of leading public administration scholars to study the best way to
achieve effective democratic management of the government. Sections III and IV expound
on the committee’s recommendations for reform. They promoted a systemic view of the
American state as a coordinated administrative machine, and advocated specific measures
to make this machinery more manageable from within the executive branch. While the
pathway for setting up a permanent yet adaptable institutional system was by no means
agreed upon by the committee, the president, or congressional leaders, executive
reorganization nevertheless seemed a necessary step to overcome the disorder faced by the
FDR administration.
Conflicting resolutions to these organizational difficulties, as described in Section V,
came to a head in the attempt to draw up reorganization plans between 1937 and 1939.
3

Congress maintained that through their proposed alterations to the federal institutional

2
See generally Dickinson, Bitter Harvest, on the expansion of the executive branch at this time.
3
A thorough description of the contestation can be found in Richard Polenberg’s Reorganizing Roosevelt’s
Government.
123

structure, Roosevelt’s committee threatened to transform the presidency into a
dictatorship. Meanwhile, the president and his researchers insisted that the purpose of
reorganization was purely to facilitate improved overall management. The legislation that
culminated from these deliberations, the Reorganization Act of 1939, represented a
compromise which allowed for a democratic path between the fears of totalitarianism and
the intractability of the prevailing system. With the subsequent creation of the Executive
Office of the President that same year, I argue in Section VI, federal organization became
an administrative process directed by the executive, giving the president the flexibility to
continually address national problems within constitutional boundaries.
4

II. Planning a study on administrative management

One of the perennial complications to arise from the experimental approach to crisis
governance during the early New Deal was that it led to the creation of a vast, intercurrent
governmental structure. The veritable increase in executive agencies transformed the
American state into an unruly institutional mess, which ultimately hindered efforts to plan
for and implement a national recovery program. Indeed, the proliferation of emergency
bodies was so egregious that New York Governor, Alfred E. Smith, famously termed it
“The New Deal’s Alphabet Soup.” After all, within the first few months of his
administration, Roosevelt had initiated recovery measures through the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Emergency Relief
Administration, National Recovery Administration, and Tennessee Valley Authority – to
name just a handful.
These and other agencies were designed, in large part, to deal with specific aspects
of the existing depression, rather than to coordinate the work between them or to establish
lasting reforms. Each functioned relatively autonomously, according to a unique set of
responsibilities, governing rules, and area of expertise; and each, as a result, threatened to

4
See generally Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency; Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;”
Emmerich, Federal Organization; Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning;” Rossiter, “The Constitutional
Significance.” It is worth mentioning that aside from Emmerich’s contribution, these authors interpret
reorganization as a move towards constitutional dictatorship. Karl, “Executive Reorganization,” 4, for
instance, calls this period of reform the era of “antidemocratic revolutions.” The narrative advanced here
seeks instead to reveal the democratic discourse underlying New Dealers’ proposals.
124

impede or conflict with the activities of others. Given this problematic institutional setup,
the need for coordination and overall management was deemed especially critical: “How to
manage the sprawling and brawling executive establishment and how to relate new and
emergency agencies to the regular departments became an acute problem,” as public
administration scholar and advisor for the FDR administration, Herbert Emmerich,
astutely put it.
5

New Dealers became increasingly concerned about this rapid institutional
accumulation. It was understood that without a concomitant transformation in the
president’s administrative capacities to coordinate specialized emergency agencies into a
unified system, the recovery program would suffer from widespread inefficiencies and
redundancies. In carrying out his responsibilities as manager of the government, the
president was often inhibited by existing arrangements. Congress controlled the
departmental organization of the executive branch, as well as the appropriations, making it
difficult to manage executive departments without interference. The president also had
minimal functional authority over the operations of the numerous independent regulatory
commissions, commonly regarded as “the headless fourth branch of government,” created
during the New Deal.
In his consultant work for the FDR administration, Louis Brownlow was perhaps
most unnerved by these shortcomings. The studies conducted by the National Planning
Board had, from his view, all but overlooked the problem of how the president was going
to be able to manage the proposed advances in national resource planning described in
Chapter 2.
6
As early as winter 1933, Brownlow voiced his anxieties to influential board
members, insisting on the benefits of conducting a study about overall federal
administration. In a luncheon with Charles Merriam on November 30, Brownlow saw an
opening to combine the board’s planning activities with the growing concerns of
management.
7
They concluded that while the onus for running the government rested
predominately with the president, he did not yet have the resources at his disposal to
effectively address the growing responsibilities asked of him in a modern state rife with

5
Emmerich, Federal Organization, 48.
6
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 299.
7
Ibid., 314.
125

pervasive social problems.
8

This early attempt to start tackling the complications of an increasingly
unmanageable government was important for bringing the issue to the New Dealers’
attention. The National Planning Board members, however, were quickly consumed with
what were seen as more pressing projects in their plan for planning. Resources were
stretched thin by the comprehensive data collection, statistical generation, and synthetic
research studies launched in 1933 and 1934. The chief task to catalogue national resources,
unparalleled at the time, undermined Brownlow and Merriam’s efforts to put management
on the top of the list of needs for democratic national planning. The demand to recover
from the existing emergency trumped the push for long-term goals like reorganizing the
executive branch to facilitate better management.
It was not until October 1935, when Roosevelt requested Merriam to write a
memorandum on the subject, that the issue of federal organization was placed back on the
agenda. Merriam’s memo, entitled “Proposed Study of Management in the Federal
Government,” advocated that the president commission a study on the best way to address
limitations in administrative control of the executive branch. He argued that administration,
when cultivated properly, was among the most valuable resources available to the
government but, when overlooked, as it had been in the recent period, it could severely
paralyze the hope of achieving democracy during times of crisis and even, for that matter,
normal times. The memo is worth quoting at length, to illustrate Merriam’s reasoning:
One of the greatest assets of America is that of
executive skills, sometimes developed in industry,
sometimes in education and engineering, sometimes in
the domain of government. The city manager, the large
scale industrial executive, the national executive officer,
are examples of leadership which have justly attracted
attention everywhere.
From the point of view of national planning of natural
and human resources, it is evident that management is of
fundamental importance. Management and
administration are national resources of incalculable
importance, highly developed in various sections of our
national activities. Our resources have meaning and effect
in proportion to the skill with which they are managed by
those responsible for their administration. In particular it
is clear that it is important to canvass with the greatest care

8
Ibid., 326.
126

the arrangements by and through which the planning
function and agency can best fit into and be more
effective in our national organization. The [NPB] is
conceived as a general staff to the Executive and in order
to be most useful must be adjusted with the greatest pains
to the other technical functions and agencies of the going
concern known as administration.
The over-all administration, supervision or
management of the technical services... present a different
problem in view of the rapid increase of functions, the
development of specialized ability, the increasing number
of industrial and scientific contacts, the necessity for
continuity in administration, and a form of over-all
administrative supervision or management. Steps have
already been taken... in the coordination of long-time
planning policies through the [NPB].
It would be possible to make a thorough study of this
whole problem as it develops in American public life – a
study directed toward the institutional arrangements,
general understandings and practices which would most
effectively aid the Executive in the double task of
management plus political leadership and direction.
.... Such a study might involve, roughly an
examination of the trends, emerging problems and
possible rearrangement of such national services as are
directed primarily toward what may be called
management in the larger sense of the term. The research
would go back some distance... reviewing the
development of functions and mechanisms and the
problems arising in their growth and interrelationship.
9

A number of points deserve emphasis. First and foremost, Merriam conceived of
management as a central aspect of governance in a state confronted by increasingly national
issues. Just as executive management was integral in areas like business and education, the
memo highlighted that it was also necessary to develop a federal institutional structure in
which the president could act as overall manager of the United States government. Without
administrative capacities for effective leadership, Merriam warned in the memo as in other
venues, the president was ill-equipped to meet his duties and was likely to resort to
dictatorial measures in striving to overcome these limits. Thus, in the effort to plan the
effective use of national resources, both natural and human, it was essential to make
management a top priority of the FDR administration’s approach to statebuilding.

9
Charles E. Merriam, “Proposed Study of Management in the Federal Government,” October 1935, Box 1,
Folder A-II-1, PCAM Papers. It is also reproduced in Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 327-328.
127

For this to occur, secondly, Merriam urged the president to consider reorganizing
the executive branch in a way that would provide the administrative resources to deal with
the growing issues faced across the nation. The memo sketched a novel approach linking
federal organization with the concerns of management, one which conflicted directly with
the conventional wisdom held at the time – that federal organization was static, only subject
to periodic instances of institutional change.
10
Contrary to the established view, Merriam
introduced the neologism “administrative management” to describe the president’s need
for capacities to coordinate government programs without congressional interference,
unnecessary competition between agencies, or overlapping assignments. Viewed in this
way, reorganization was conceived as an ongoing, dynamic process to plan for and adjust to
the problems at hand. The ultimate goal was to provide the president with the capacity to
carry out his constitutional responsibilities as manager of the government, without further
expansions in executive power.
11

Third, the memo recommended the type of study required to identify the points
within the administrative system in need of reform. As Merriam saw it, a study of
administrative management would not simply be concerned with the internal
administration of the executive branch, that is, with changing the institutional makeup of
specific bureaus, agencies, and commissions. Rather, it would attend to the more pervasive
issue of how to assist the president in becoming an effective democratic political leader. At
stake in the proposed study was how to reorganize the executive branch so the president
had the resources to coordinate the entire federal administrative machinery, specifically up-
to-date information about national resources and access to a planning agency to research
topics that cut between different departments and levels of government.
12

On this last point, Merriam insisted that the planning board should play an integral
role in facilitating democratic administrative management in the American state. The
memo clearly outlined the reasons for conducting a study of overall management, and it
identified civilian planning experts as the advisors best suited to oversee such a formidable
task. For both Merriam and Brownlow, administrative management was an issue that the

10
See the advice given to Merriam in Lewis Meriam’s memo, “An Executive Staff Agency,” October 10, 1935,
Box 1, Folder A-II-2, PCAM Papers. More on this below in Sec. IV-VI.
11
See generally Karl, Executive Reorganization; Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance.”
12
See Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 332, 348; Meriam, “An Executive Staff Agency.”
128

board was poised to resolve. Not only was it already engaged in projects that segued
perfectly into the issue of federal organization but its resources as an executive agency and
its systemic vision of national social processes in their interdependence also seemed useful
for contributing a viable solution to the problems of an unmanageable government.
Democratic national planning was regarded as a necessary executive function that could
help the president address a wide array of problems across the country without the use of
dictatorial rule.
What has been lost historically is this deep connection between the NPB’s
activities to initiate, for the first time in U.S. history, an enduring government program for
national resource planning and Merriam’s proposed study of administrative management
that gained traction in late 1935.
13
Yet even at this early stage, the relationship was clear to
many New Dealers. Board chairman Frederic Delano agreed with the assessment that the
NPB would contribute greatly to the research, though he was well aware that they did not
have the funds to complete it alone. He forwarded Merriam’s memo to Harold Ickes of
the Department of Interior on October 30, saying he was in favor of Brownlow heading
such a research project instead, as long as it was delayed until after the 1936 election. By
mid-December, Ickes had written to Roosevelt requesting that he approve the study on
overall management.
Having identified the appropriate group to conduct the study, then, the question
that remained was how it would be funded. In a meeting with Ickes, Delano, Merriam, and
Charles W. Eliot 2
nd
(executive officer of the NPB) on February 20, 1936, President
Roosevelt spoke about his hope to name a research committee that would conduct the
study through the auspices of the board’s Advisory Council and would be supervised by
Brownlow, who had initially suggested the idea. He was generally opposed to the notion of
relying exclusively on private funding from institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, as
other administrations had done in the past, in an effort to bridge official research projects
with private interests. Roosevelt, after all, did not want an outside report that could possibly
conflict with his thoughts on administrative management.
14
Instead, he agreed to make
additional government funds available through the emergency resources of the planning

13
See the argument in Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning,” 183; Karl, Executive Reorganization, Ch. 6.
14
See Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 333-334; Karl, Executive Reorganization, 205-207.
129

board.
After the meeting, Merriam and Eliot corresponded with Brownlow, who was
vacationing in Florida, to draft a synopsis of the proposed study. Brownlow emphasized
that the committee should focus on developing a better understanding of the myriad
difficulties faced by the president while at the same time offering explicit policy
recommendations. “What is needed,” he scribbled on hotel stationary, “is a careful study
of the managerial and administrative relationships of the President to all the far flung and
complicated agencies of the Federal government…. Over-all management requires
coordination of all these relationships to make effective the President’s responsible control
but without depriving him of coordinated information and recommendations and without
adding to his burdens and by diminishing the number of agencies reporting directly to
him.”
15
The study, from this perspective, should concentrate on giving the president the
administrative resources commensurate with his constitutional responsibilities to manage
the growing complexity of the government and national problems. Brownlow and the
others certainly had their work cut out for them.

III. The President’s Committee on Administrative Management
16

Following this advice, Roosevelt composed the President’s Committee on Administrative
Management in March 1936. Brownlow was appointed chairman; and since his ideas were
a central impetus for initiating the study, the group became more commonly known as the
“Brownlow Committee.” To support in translating Brownlow’s vision into practice, the
president sent other letters of appointment to Merriam and Luther Gulick, a professor at
Columbia University and president of the Institute of Public Administration. The White
House also released letters to Congress and the press announcing the intent of the
committee. In light of the hasty expansion of executive functions and emergency agencies
created over the previous few years to address the economic depression, the
announcement stated, the committee was selected specifically to conduct “a careful study of

15
A complete version can be found in Louis Brownlow, February 1936, Box 1, Folder A-II-6, PCAM Papers;
also reproduced in Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 334-335.
16
On the intellectual origins of this committee, see especially Karl, Executive Reorganization.
130

the organization of the Executive branch of the Government… with the primary purpose of
considering the problem of administrative management.”
17
At that point, it seems,
Merriam’s neologism was beginning to garner wider usage beyond just the committee.
Even though the government did not allocate funds until a few months later, the
PCAM members got right to work assembling a team of twenty-six researchers under the
guidance of Joseph P. Harris (director of research). The staff included scholars with a
range of expertise related to public administration, management, and policy: G. Lyle
Belsley, A. E. Buck, Laverne Burchfield, Robert H. Connery, Robert E. Cushman, Paul T.
David, William Y. Elliott, Herbert Emmerich, Merle Fainsod, James W. Fesler, Katherine
Frederic, Patterson H. French, William J. Haggerty, James Hart, Arthur N. Holcombe,
Arthur W. Macmahon, Harvey C. Mansfield, Charles McKinley, John F. Miller, John D.
Millett, Floyd W. Reeves, Leo C. Rosten, Spencer Thompson, May C. Trackett, Schuyler
C. Wallace, and Edwin E. Witte. All committee members were considered brilliant minds
at the time,
18
and many of them – especially Brownlow, Merriam, and Emmerich – came to
even further prominence later on for institutional developments in total war, as we will see
below in Chapter 5.
The committee members first met together in New York on May 9-10, 1936, to
discuss the purpose and practicalities of the study.
19
They were in agreement that because
the president had hitherto been constrained by Congress to reorganize the executive
branch, the foremost research assignment was to determine the best way to give the
president the resources needed to facilitate more effective managerial control of the
government. The goal was not, however, to devise a way to extend dictatorial powers. On
the contrary, it was precisely to preserve democratic government in an age plagued by
widespread social problems, security threats, and crises, all of which threatened to
undermine democracy. The committee viewed the presidency as the sole institution
capable of galvanizing national unity across the many specialized, autonomous emergency
agencies established in the wake of the economic downturn.
20
Yet they believed that only

17
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – Volume Five, items 43 and 43A, 144-146.
18
Karl, Executive Reorganization, 211.
19
A transcript of the meeting can be found in Box 1, Folder A-II-22, PCAM Papers.
20
See Emmerich, Federal Organization, 3; Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 268.
131

when equipped with the institutional capacity required to manage the government could
the president stave off the recourse to dictatorship evidenced in the totalitarian planned
societies abroad.
21

To begin this arduous task, the FDR administration drafted a bill permitting the
allocation of $100,000 from the 1935 Emergency Relief appropriation for the study. A host
of independent projects were initiated on topics ranging from taking stock of the prevailing
conceptions of administration
22
to assessing past attempts at institutional coordination. In
the latter regard, the committee took a special interest in the activities of the National
Emergency Council. Several folders in the committee’s archives contain confidential
memoranda and reports that detail the NEC’s functions, successes, and shortcomings.
23

Initially established in November 1933 to alleviate the disorder that arose from the
extensive growth of emergency agencies in the early New Deal, the experiences of the NEC
afforded committee members a unique view into prior experiments to achieve effective
administrative management.
Reviewing these efforts, the PCAM was somewhat mixed about the NEC’s overall
contribution to federal organization. The council’s purpose had been to provide
information to the president about emergency activities nationwide, coordinate inter-agency
collaboration problems, harmonize the work being done by field agencies with the
overarching national recovery program, and serve in an advisory capacity to the president
on broader issues of crisis governance. It provided the first venue of its kind for the heads
of independent agencies to meet with the president, on occasion. From the very beginning,
Brownlow recalls, “an utterly new step was taken in the effort at co-ordination,” when
council members decided to appoint directors in each state with supervisory
responsibilities over every emergency agency.
24
Alongside the planning board’s efforts to
gather statistics about national resources around the same time, the NEC helped propel
information-gathering projects far beyond what was previously possible. The collection of
adequate data and the flow of this information directly to the president were principal

21
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 349.
22
See Schuyler C. Wallace, Concepts, Hypotheses and Expedients, or Alternatively: Principles, Concepts and
Considerations, October 24, 1936, Box 4, Folder C-II, PCAM Papers.
23
See especially Box 13, Folders G-II-a and G-II-b, PCAM Papers.
24
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 320.
132

contributions of the NEC.
25

On its face, the council appeared to provide an exemplar for how Roosevelt’s
research committee could begin to resolve the issue of administrative management. The
NEC’s aspiration to provide the president with resources to coordinate a recovery program
paralleled the board’s work to nationalize planning projects across the country. The
president himself spoke highly of the council, as “a wonderful essay in democracy.” But the
NEC’s influence waned in the years after it was created. In 1934 it held twenty-two
meetings; in 1935 only seven; and in 1936 the number dropped even further to a total of
three. Roosevelt’s assessment was that the NEC “was too big to do much actual work. It
had to be split up into committees and subcommittees until in the end I couldn’t take it any
more.”
26
From the Brownlow Committee’s viewpoint, this pattern was indicative of the
NEC’s waning relevance. While “a useful and effective instrument of coordination of the
emergency program during the initial stages,” Harris concluded, “with the passing of the
emergency period its importance and usefulness has declined.”
27
Designed as one of the
most comprehensive coordinative bodies of its kind, it failed to offer the president the
means to successfully manage the growing surplus of emergency agencies. These
disappointments ultimately constituted the NEC not as an ideal to emulate but as a model
to reject.
A better model was to be found in the NPB. Their attempts to decentralize and
coordinate national planning across the countless government agencies, independent
consultants, and other non-state actors proved essential to the Brownlow Committee’s
determination to provide the president with the administrative capacity to manage the
executive branch through democratic processes. Just as Brownlow and Merriam had
stressed earlier, the core purpose of the committee was to bring innovations in planning to
bear on the issue of overall administrative management. Despite being technically separate
from the board’s research activities, the committee was created as a direct extension of the
ideas espoused by these planners and thus carried on the intellectual lineage of President

25
For the emphasis placed on collecting information and sharing it with the president, see transcripts of the
NEC meetings in Seligman and Cornwell, New Deal Mosaic.
26
Quoted in Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 321.
27
Joseph P. Harris, “Confidential Memorandum on the National Emergency Council,” August 28, 1936, Box
13, Folder G-II-b, PCAM Papers.
133

Hoover’s Committee on Recent Social Trends, to construct democratic policies on the
basis of cutting-edge research in the natural and social sciences.
28

Building on the insights of leading public administration experts, Roosevelt’s
research team began to sketch a framework in early November 1936, detailing what would
be included in their report. Brownlow suggested the following points as the basis for the
committee’s intervention:
The report should declare:
That managerial direction and control of all
departments and agencies of the Executive Branch of the
Government should be centered in the President;
That while he now has popular responsibility for this
direction and control he is not equipped with adequate
legal authority or administrative machinery to enable him
to exercise it; and
That certain changes in law and administrative
practice are required to restore the Executive to that
position of power balanced with compensating
responsibility which is the clear purpose and intent of our
Constitutional system.
He advised, more precisely, that the report should recommend the creation of a White
House secretariat to coordinate executive agencies; that a single administrator be appointed
at the top of each agency; that the president be given reorganization authorities, subject to
congressional veto; that the temporary emergency agencies established to address existing
crises be placed within the permanent institutional arrangements of the government by
executive order; and that the president continue to have direct lines of communication with
the research and ideational resources of the planning board.
29

IV. On the administrative machinery of democratic government

[A]n up-to-date democracy requires not only a program
but up-to-date machinery for carrying it out.
– Charles Merriam
30

28
See Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 265.
29
Louis Brownlow, Memo, November 5, 1936, Box 1, Folder A-II-33, PCAM Papers. Also reproduced in
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 376-377.
30
Charles E. Merriam, “Conflicts in Modern Democracy,” speech given before the National League of
Women Voters, April 1938, Box 16, Folder J-I-11, PCAM Papers.
134

Brownlow’s skeletal outline served as the basis for the committee’s official
recommendations to President Roosevelt. After weeks of revisions, a finalized version of
the report was completed in January 1937.
31
The study, as will become clearer in the
following sections, painted a rather different picture of what was at issue than was typically
advanced by proponents of reorganization. Instead of envisioning the state as a solidified
institutional structure that could be altered only in extraordinary periods to bring about
greater economic efficiency, the Brownlow Committee understood it as an interdependent
administrative machine. Seen in this way, reorganization was considered an ongoing
process through which the president could be given resources for more effective overall
management of the government. Similar to the planning board’s concurrent efforts to
enframe the national economy and rebalance economic activities, the goal of the PCAM’s
proposals was to order the state administrative machinery such that the president could
better manage the moving parts.
The report, Administrative Management in the Government of the United States,
began as Brownlow had intended it – with a description of the novelty of the presidential
institution to bolster democratic rule, and the fundamental need for overall management
through the executive.
32
It nevertheless underscored the numerous difficulties faced by the
president in trying to manage the government, given the increasing scope of modern
problems and the rampant organizational disarray brought on by the early New Deal to
address the existing depression. “The President needs help,”
33
the committee implored:
1. The structure of the Government throws an
impossible task upon the Chief Executive. No President
can possibly give adequate supervision to the multitude of
agencies which have been set up to carry on the work of
the Government, nor can he coordinate their activities
and policies.
2. The normal managerial agencies designed to assist
the Executive in thinking, planning, and managing, which
one would expect to find in any large-scale organization,
are either undeveloped or lacking.
3. The constitutional principle of the separation of
powers and the responsibility of the President for ‘the
executive Power’ is impaired through the multiplicity and

31
What follows is not a detailed analysis of the report but rather an illustration of the central points made by
the committee to promote democratic statebuilding.
32
President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Administrative Management, 1.
33
Ibid., 5.
135

confusion of agencies which render effective action
impossible.
4. Without plan or intent, there has grown up a
headless ‘fourth branch’ of the Government [composed
of independent regulatory commissions], responsible to
no one, and impossible of coordination with the general
policies and work of the Government as determined by
the people through their duly elected representatives.
5. For purposes of management, boards and
commissions have turned out to be failures. Their
mechanism is inevitably slow, cumbersome, wasteful, and
ineffective, and does not lend itself readily to cooperation
with other agencies....
6. The conspicuously well-managed administrative
units in the Government are almost without exception
headed by single administrators.
7. Owing to the multiplicity of agencies and the lack
of administrative management there is waste, overlapping,
and duplication, which may be eliminated through
coordination, consolidation, and proper managerial
control.
34

With these growing concerns, the committee set out to propose ways to improve
the governmental administrative machinery in the American state. They based the
rhetorical foundations of their report on the notion that if democracy was to prevail under
the weight of significant threats, both international and domestic, then the president would
need to become a more effective leader, with modernized governing systems and capacities
at his disposal. The previous year, Brownlow and Merriam had visited Poland and Nazi
Germany to attend conferences with leading experts on the science of public
administration. Although they had become increasingly concerned about the role of
administrative management in the U.S., the experience, in which representatives from
fascist countries tried to undermine the notion of legislative control over executive
functions, shook Brownlow and Merriam’s faith in liberal-constitutional government to the
core, and it encouraged them to lay out explicitly how executive reorganization would
bolster democracy in America.
35

Everyone on the committee was in agreement that institutional change in the
executive branch was necessary to improve the president’s capacities for overall
management. Reorganization, from their perspective, was not simply a pragmatic tool to

34
Ibid, 32.
35
See especially Karl, Charles E. Merriam, 268; Oren, Our Enemies and US, 75-76.
136

decrease government expenses and improve economic efficiency, as was commonly
purported by congressional leaders. Instead, it sought to produce an altogether different
kind of efficiency, which rested on “two factors: the consent of the governed and good
management.” This required more than piecemeal developments; it called for effective,
democratic management to “be built into the structure of a government just as it is built
into a piece of machinery.” “Stated in simple terms,” the report explained, “these canons of
efficiency [i.e., democratic accountability and administrative management] require the
establishment of a responsible and effective chief executive as the center of energy,
direction, and administrative management; the systematic organization of all activities in the
hands of a qualified personnel under the direction of the chief executive; and to aid him in
this, the establishment of appropriate managerial and staff agencies. There must also be
provision for planning, a complete fiscal system, and means for holding the Executive
accountable for his program.”
36

To this end, the committee proposed five specific institutional changes to
strengthen the president’s managerial resources: 1) provide him with six executive
assistants, helping to lessen some of the administrative duties; 2) revive the civil service; 3)
improve fiscal management by bringing control of accounts back within the executive and
giving Congress the authority to audit expenditures through an independent agency; 4)
establish the National Resources Planning Board, a successor to the NPB, as a permanent
executive agency to coordinate government programs; and 5) create two new cabinet posts
and bring every executive agency under one of the major executive departments.
37

These recommendations were meant to bolster, instead of undercut, democracy.
“There is but one grand purpose [of reorganization],” the report stated: “to make
democracy work today in our National Government; that is, to make our Government an
up-to-date, efficient, and effective instrument for carrying out the will of the Nation. It is for
this purpose that the Government needs thoroughly modern tools of management.”
38
The
expectation, put simply, was that reorganization would help the president fulfill his

36
President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Administrative Management, 3.
37
See Ibid., 4; Brinkley, The End of Reform, 21-22; Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 21.
38
President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Administrative Management, 4.
137

constitutional responsibility as leader of the nation, without giving him dictatorial powers.
39

To strike this tentative balance, it was necessary to equip the president with wide-ranging
managerial resources. The committee even went so far as to rebuke critics of these
measures, declaring, “[t]hose who waiver at the sight of needed power are false friends of
modern democracy. Strong executive leadership is essential to democratic government
today. Our choice is not between power and no power, but between responsible but
capable popular government and irresponsible autocracy.”
40

Among the committee’s recommendations to further develop the president’s
resources for overall administrative management, two stand out as novel foundations for
democratic rule. First is the connection to the planning board. In response to the pressing
question “How can the President deal most readily with these scattered and important
agencies and their relation to the over-all view of administrative management?”, the
committee advocated the creation of a permanent planning board to replace the temporary
committee originally set up in the Public Works Administration to help plan the full use of
natural resources. “Unless some overhead central agency takes an over-all view from time
to time, analyzes facts, and suggests plans to insure the preservation of the equilibrium
upon which our American democracy rests,” the committee reasoned, “there is danger that
it will be badly upset.”
41
A planning board gave the president the ideational capacities to
take such a comprehensive view.
After social issues could be understood through the lens of national planning,
however, more than ideas were needed to guarantee democratic solutions. In this respect,
the NPB provided the administrative resources to link local, state, and regional agencies
with the federal program while at the same time avoiding dictatorial, technocratic controls.
“The safeguarding of the citizen from narrow-minded and dictatorial bureaucratic
interference and control is one of the primary obligations of democratic government,” the
report explained. “It can be accomplished only by so centralizing the determination of
administrative policy that there is a clear line of conduct laid down for all officialdom to
follow and then by so decentralizing the actual administrative operation that the

39
Ibid., 64-65.
40
Ibid., 53.
41
Ibid., 28.
138

Government servant remains himself one of the people in touch with the people and does
not degenerate into an isolated and arrogant bureaucrat.”
42

The planning board’s activities were thus essential to the push for improved
democratic administrative management. With a clearer understanding of national social
processes and the establishment of a well-ordered administrative system to coordinate
planning activities, the president could manage government programs without resorting to
dictatorship. On the one hand, while it provided the president with the rational knowledge
needed to address a wide array of problems across the country, the board did not establish
a technocracy. Its duties were purely advisory; the task of devising policies from the board’s
suggestions was left to elected officials. On the other hand, the board helped facilitate
better organization between local, state, and federal agencies. Yet it did so not by using
dictatorial controls but by decentralizing planning functions and coordinating them through
an administrative machinery overseen by the president.
The second, and more hotly contested, proposal to facilitate democratic rule was to
equip the president with the capacity to manage the federal administrative machinery,
which the committee understood as the president’s foremost constitutional responsibility.
Effective top management, from their standpoint, did not require dictatorship, yet it did
mean developing stronger executive leadership. Of utmost importance in realizing this goal,
according to the report, was to improve the “machinery of the government.” For only
through administrative coordination and collaboration would the countless departments,
divisions, and agencies begin to function together as a unified national system. The
committee offered the following as concrete initiatives to build democratic management
into the governmental administrative machinery: 1) provide twelve major executive
departments; 2) authorize the president to determine the appropriate assignments of these
departments; 3) equip the president with the modern arms of management; and 4) extend
the principle of executive accountability to Congress through the creation of an
independent audit and report on fiscal activities.
43

More crucially, they insisted on making reorganization an administrative process

42
Ibid., 33.
43
Ibid., 2-4.
139

led by the president.
44
“To render the Executive truly responsible for administration and its
efficiency,” the report stated, “he must be required to accept the responsibility for the
continuous administrative reorganization of the Government.” Instead of leaving this
responsibility in others’ hands, the committee urged that it become an ongoing executive
function: “The work of reorganization is a continuing task growing out of and intimately
related to the day-to-day work of the executive agencies. It is a task that cannot be done
once and for all. It will require continuing attention. The assignment of the multitude of
present activities to appropriate departments is not something which can be carried out
ruthlessly on a wholesale blue-print basis without doing serious damage to the work and
without destroying executive responsibility… In other words, the task of reorganization is
inherently executive in character and must be entrusted to the Executive as a continuing
responsibility.”
Echoing the planning board members’ language to prevent a totalitarian planned
society, Roosevelt’s research committee explained that the purpose of reorganization was
not to institute “a nice blue-print” for the entire government to follow.
45
The goal, rather,
was to furnish the president with the means to manage ongoing problems in a timely
fashion, without having to go through the cumbersome procedure of attaining
congressional approval. “What we want,” the report suggested, “is not a streamlined,
chromium-trimmed government that looks well in the advertisement, but one that will
actually deliver the goods in practice.”
46
By making federal organization an ongoing
executive responsibility, the committee insisted that the president would be in a better
administrative position to manage the government while simultaneously being more
accountable to Congress and the American public.

44
On this contribution, see especially Emmerich, Federal Organization, and the discussion below in Sec. VI.
45
President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Administrative Management, 36-38.
46
Ibid., 38.
140

V. Contesting the committee’s proposals in Congress

[R]eorganization of government machinery... does not
conflict with the principle of the democratic process... It
only makes that process work more efficiently.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
47

With the report in hand and several committee members on his side, President Roosevelt
met congressional leaders at the White House on January 10, 1937. The meeting was of
monumental importance on the road to devising a plan for executive reorganization. It was
the first time anyone apart from the research team had seen the contents of the study.
Concerns about the debilitating lack of administrative resources were central to the
discussion. “The problem of better administrative management,” Roosevelt opened, “is
one that has troubled me for some time.... The President’s task has become impossible for
me or any other man.” He insisted, in direct contrast to congressional proposals to
reorganize the government for economic reasons, that “the main objective of this
reorganization plan is... better organization and better management.”
48
Thus began a
lengthy and contentious battle with Congress to redefine the purpose of reorganization
along the committee’s lines.
At the same time that Roosevelt began working with Brownlow and Merriam to
establish his research committee, Congress was also involved in assembling a team to study
the thorny problem of reorganization. Democratic Senator from Virginia, Harry Byrd, led
the committee; and the Brookings Institution, with its ample resources and knowledge of
government administration, was solicited for research assistance. The House was brought
in later, at President Roosevelt’s request, to conduct a related study under the direction of
Texas Representative, James Buchanan. All three committees were originally intended to
be complimentary, focusing on different sides of the same reorganization coin. Their work
was marked by a clear division of labor: the president’s committee would focus on
improving overall management of the government from the executive, whereas the
congressional committees would focus on ways to make government more economical by
alleviating institutional conflicts, inefficiencies, and overlaps.
49

47
In Graves, Reorganization of the Executive Branch, 384.
48
A complete transcript can be found in Emmerich, Federal Organization, Appendix I.
49
See Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 36.
141

A number of developments essentially guaranteed a collaborative atmosphere
throughout 1936, in the lead up to the release of the Brownlow Committee’s report. Byrd
regularly worked with Brownlow and Gulick on the issue of reorganization. He was so
impressed by their expertise that he initially requested Brownlow to head the Senate study
and the Institute for Public Administration (of which Gulick was president) to carry out the
research.
50
Lewis Meriam of Brookings was even more amenable to cooperation. His
thoughts, after all, were more than just aligned with that of the president’s committee – they
helped shape the executive conception of reorganization. As early as October 1935, he
wrote an influential memorandum to Charles Merriam, arguing that a detailed study of how
to achieve effective democratic administrative management was needed.
51
This not only
reinforced Merriam’s beliefs on the subject but also motivated the presidential committee’s
entire outlook. From that moment onward, Lewis Meriam remained the chief point of
contact at Brookings for the PCAM.
Yet when the Brownlow Committee’s proposals were sent to Congress in January
1937, it quickly became evident that the seemingly complimentary points of distinction
between the research teams were in fact sources of deep, insurmountable contention.
Opposition between the committees was stark. When it came to identifying the core
underlying rationale for executive reorganization, as well as the processes through which it
should be effected, the groups were often at loggerheads. Congressional leaders insisted
that the goal of reorganization should be economic efficiency, and they regularly lamented
that this concern was altogether absent from the Brownlow Committee’s recommendations.
Byrd, in particular, believed that executive institutional reform needed to address the
problems of an increasingly imbalanced budget in the wake of the New Deal recovery
program, and he became one of the leading impediments to the proposed reorganization
plans for improved overall management.
52

To be sure, this view was not unique to Congress at the time but was part of a much
wider historical tradition in the U.S. Reorganization had long been considered a legislative
measure utilized in a piecemeal fashion to reduce the overlap of functions and

50
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 337; Karl, Executive Reorganization, 208; Polenberg, Reorganizing
Roosevelt’s Government, 31-32.
51
See Meriam, “An Executive Staff Agency.”
52
Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 33.
142

responsibilities between agencies. Implicit in this form of institutional development was the
assumption that the government machinery, when properly ordered, was essentially self-
regulating.
53
Just as many trusted that the economy would correct itself according to the
demands of the market,
54
there was a widespread belief – stretching back to the eighteenth
century – that greater administrative and economic efficiency could be achieved gradually,
through disjointed periods of institutional change initiated by Congress. And the early New
Deal was no exception to this rule. The FDR administration initially carried on the
longstanding convention of reorganization as a means to rationalize the state institutional
structure, making government more economical.
The issue of economic efficiency was put front and center in the months following
the release of the presidential committee’s proposals. Brownlow and Gulick frequently
urged Brookings to postpone the release of their study, due to fears that it would provoke
further opposition in Congress.
55
Upholding their cooperative arrangement, the president
of Brookings, Harold G. Moulton, agreed to furnish Brownlow with drafts of their report
as they were completed in February and March 1937. Yet it was apparent that the two
committees diverged on several fundamental assumptions about executive reorganization.
Despite his many attempts to bring their views into closer agreement, Brownlow was
ultimately incapable of convincing Moulton to budge on their position. Meanwhile,
Congress pressured Brookings to deliver its report sooner rather than later, and their
recommendations were presented on March 23,
56
inciting a fervent clash of ideas between
the groups.
The primary sources of conflict were threefold – efficiency, analytical perspective,
and the separation of powers – each of which escalated in importance. On the first point,
Brookings and Congress were quite distinctive from the Brownlow Committee. While
Meriam deviated from the common wisdom held by congressional leaders – that
reorganization would lead to government savings and a more balanced budget – he was
practically alone in his thinking at Brookings.
57
Moulton, by contrast, was especially

53
See Karl, Executive Reorganization, 191.
54
See especially Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, Part II.
55
For the following, see especially Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 38-39.
56
See Brookings Institution, Investigation of Executive Agencies.
57
See Meriam and Schmeckebier, Reorganization of the National Government.
143

concerned about the lack of attention paid to the issue of economic efficiency in the
presidential report. Much to his dismay, the goal of improving administrative management
overlooked what he and others in Congress believed were most salient: economic
efficiency and financial administrative reform. In one instance, when members of each
committee met together to discuss their various proposals, Moulton went so far as to
suggest that this constituted more than just a difference of emphasis; for him, it was a
difference of an “irreconcilable character.”
58

A compelling illustration of this conflict can be found in their debates about the
role of the Comptroller-General, a legislative agency created in 1921 to manage executive
spending.
59
The central schism between the committees rested in their claims about where
authority for financial control should be located – in an agency that reported to Congress,
like the Comptroller-General, or in an executive department. On the one hand, the
president’s committee insisted that executive expenditures should be separated from
congressional audit. They sought to take back fiscal control while giving post-audit authority
to an independent agency. Brookings, on the other hand, argued that the responsibility to
ensure fiscal accountability was a congressional function, and that the Comptroller-General
should retain its pre-audit authority to determine the legality of executive spending ahead of
time.
To make matters worse, the committees confronted the problem of reorganization
from opposing analytical perspectives. The president’s committee understood
reorganization as a means to achieve the goal of effective administrative management.
Viewed from the position of the presidency – in essence, observing the myriad agencies
and executive departments from above – it was clear that reorganization could help provide
the president with the resources to carry out his duties as overall manager. As historian
Barry Karl explains with unparalleled eloquence, “The President’s committee had sat at
the desk of the President and looked down at the government for whose operation he was
constitutionally responsible. What they saw,” he concludes, “was a sprawling chaos which
the President, any President, would be unable to manage because he lacked the one

58
Quoted in Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 38.
59
For the following, see especially Karl, Executive Reorganization, 253; Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s
Government, 23-25, 39.
144

necessary power for bringing the government within his grasp – the power to organize it.”
60

Far from the temporary, ad hoc modes of reorganization tried in the past, then, these
improvements required a comprehensive theory not just of reorganization as such but its
role in facilitating democratic management of the government.
Brookings and Congress sharply contested this view. They took what can be
considered a bottom-up perspective, which began by locating the inefficiencies experienced
within specific agencies and organizations. “[A] satisfactory plan of organization,” the
Brookings committee wrote in a memorandum to Byrd on March 27, 1936, “can be
arrived at only by proceeding from the particular to the general, from the parts to the
whole. What is needed is a series of special studies of the various service fields with a view
to ascertaining what changes might be most likely to effect efficiency and economy.”
61
Seen
from this vantage, Brookings and Congress alike argued from the outset that reorganization
needed to remain a pragmatic, piecemeal solution to institutional shortcomings, rather than
a continuous process initiated by the executive to modernize the president’s administrative
resources.
Starting from these opposing analytical standpoints, the committees espoused rival
views on the separation of powers and responsibility for executive reorganization. The
president’s committee emphasized the desirability of redefining both the administrative
functions of the president and the legislative responsibilities of Congress through
reorganization measures. “We believe that good government, efficient government,
democratically controlled government,” Brownlow wrote to Moulton, roughly one year
after both studies were commissioned, “can best be achieved (a) by centering all
administrative responsibility in a single chief executive, and (b) centering in a legislative
body power to determine policy by law and appropriation and to hold the executive
account by interrogation on plans before authorization and on results after execution.”
62

The committee thought of reorganization, in short, as a step towards improved overall
management. Their proposals did not attempt to extend additional powers to the president
by wresting them away from other branches but instead to place control of reorganization

60
Karl, Executive Reorganization, 254.
61
Quoted in Ibid., 253; see also Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 40.
62
Louis Brownlow, Memorandum, March 11, 1937, Box 2, Folder A-II45a, PCAM Papers. For Moulton’s
response, see Harold G. Moulton, Memorandum, April 1937, Box 2, Folder A-II-45c, PCAM Papers.
145

permanently within the executive.
Congress, however, was distrustful of this ideal to make reorganization an executive
function. From their perspective, reorganization had always been and should remain a
legislative act approved through Congress. The thought of allowing the president to
determine the scope of institutional change in the executive branch was especially
frightening, because it appeared to defy the traditional separation of powers between
branches of government.
63
Congressional leaders wondered how they could provide checks
and balances against the abuse of executive authority, if they were no longer permitted to
oversee reorganization programs or reject them outright when they deemed the
recommended actions excessive. These points of disagreement were never resolved, and
the strife significantly worsened in the search for a feasible route to executive branch
reorganization in the coming years – a solution that not just one group but everyone found
acceptable.

VI. Reorganization as a continual administrative process

Only a few days after President Roosevelt first met with congressional leaders to discuss his
committee’s proposals, he formally sent them to Congress on January 13, 1937. Along with
the study, he delivered a special message (drafted by Gulick), in which he endorsed the
adoption of its recommendations for reorganization. “Now that we are out of the trough of
the depression,” the message implored, “the time has come to set our house in order. The
administrative management of the Government needs overhauling.” Institutional reform
was necessary, Roosevelt famously went on to argue, because “[a] government without good
management is a house builded on sand.” The many years of recession had severely tested
the principles of democracy; and in several places outside the U.S., dictatorship had
become the triumphant rallying cry of the masses and leaders facing exorbitant economic
pressures. In the context of growing social anxieties, the president implored, “Will it be
said ‘Democracy was a great dream, but it could not do the job?’ Or shall we here and
now, without further delay, make it our business to see that our American democracy is

63
See Karl, Executive Reorganization, 188.
146

made efficient so that it will do the job that is required of it by the events of our time?”
64

The enclosed plans for reorganization were designed to give the president the
administrative resources commensurate with his constitutional responsibilities as top
executive of the government. And yet, despite these assurances, Congress and the
American public grew wary of the committee’s proposals, passionately contesting them at
every turn. The recommendations were met with widespread backlash, which rose to a
crescendo in 1937 and early 1938. The intended legislation was termed the “dictator bill,”
much like the anti-statist sentiment expected by the contract state model, since it was seen
as furnishing the president with far-reaching powers to control the entire government, as
well as social life, in the U.S. The bill, it was argued, was designed to give dictatorial powers
to one person, thereby abolishing the constitutional separation of powers and severely
diminishing the influence of Congress and the Judiciary. Across the aisle, critics raised
concerns that the plans for reorganization constituted a shift towards absolutist rule.
Democratic Senator of Nebraska, Edward Burke, for example, exclaimed that he was “not
willing, in the search for efficient management, to establish one-man rule in this country.”
65

With these growing concerns, the original plan was shot down in spring 1938.
The president and his research committee were taken aback. Congressional
hostility to the bill, they believed, had little of substance to stand on; and the claim that
reorganization would result in dictatorship was a belated criticism, spurred on not by the
actual contents of the proposal but primarily by ideological opposition to Roosevelt’s court-
packing scheme around the same time. The committee replied to the rising concerns over
dictatorial powers with a damning report of their own. Its author, John Miller, outlined
what they saw as the myths that had been propagated in the aftermath of the congressional
disapproval. He argued that negative appraisals had no basis in the proposal itself but were
egregious machinations designed to sully Roosevelt’s reputation. Responding specifically to
the assertion that the reorganization plan was extralegal, Miller noted that the policy advice
in the bill was “neither new nor revolutionary.” No special authorities would be given to the
president, he explained. “Deprived of its ‘wolf’s clothing,’” the reorganization plan was

64
The full message to Congress is in Graves, Reorganization of the Executive Branch, 131-135. See also
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 14-15.
65
Quoted in Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 126.
147

intended “to increase the efficiency of democracy and help it ward off political doctrines
that threaten to destroy it.”
66

Joseph Harris, a leading public administration expert and director of the
presidential committee’s research team, went even further to challenge the fallacious
concerns raised by Congress regarding the concentration of powers in the executive
branch. The argument that reorganization would lead to dictatorship, he maintained, “is
wholly unfounded and absurd. It cannot be supported by anything that is in the bill. It is
based upon vague generalities and has been made by persons who are ignorant of what is
actually provided in the bill. An analysis of the provisions will show that this charge is
absolutely false.”
67
Not only was there nothing in the actual proposal that warranted the
epithet of dictatorship but the bill was actually intended to eliminate the need to resort to
such absolutist measures. “The establishment of efficient administration to carry out the
policies determined upon by the legislative body,” Harris wrote, “is essential to prevent the
rise of dictatorship. Dictatorships have universally sprung up because of the inability of
democratic government to get things done.”
68

In the end, the rejection of the bill proved to be only a minor setback, as another
proposal was developed, in part by legislative leaders, to assuage concerns over
dictatorship. Introduced to Congress in spring 1939, the new bill passed the House after
just three days of debate, and the Senate acted equally as fast. The proposal was signed into
law in April as the Reorganization Act of 1939. Even if some of the language had been
altered to appease critics, the Brownlow Committee’s original goals remained largely intact.
While Roosevelt was not given the authority to reorganize the executive branch through
executive order, he was now able to submit reorganization plans to Congress. These plans,
only subject to revision by the joint action of the president and Congress, instead of the
congressional veto used in the past, effectively made the president an active participant in
the legislative process.
69

66
John Miller, “Reorganization Fallacies,” Box 2, Folder A-II-56, PCAM Papers.
67
Joseph P. Harris, “Memorandum on the Argument that the Reorganization Bill Concentrates Authority in
the President and Creates a Dictator,” March 31, 1938, Box 16, Folder J-I-21, PCAM Papers.
68
Joseph P. Harris, “Memorandum Concerning the Concentration of Authority in the President by the
Reorganization Bill,” March 14, 1938, Box 7, Folder C-XLV-2, PCAM Papers.
69
See Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 413; Karl, Executive Reorganization, 257.
148

Based on reorganization plans submitted after the passage of this act, the Executive
Office of the President was created on September 8, 1939, by Executive Order 8248. The
FDR administration structured the EOP precisely according to the Brownlow Committee’s
specifications – as an institutional system to facilitate the president’s constitutional duties as
top manager of the government. This administrative machinery helped institutionalize
many aspects of the modern presidency:
70
the Bureau of the Budget was transferred to the
EOP, the president was given administrative assistants, a permanent national planning
board was established in the executive office, and the framework was tentatively outlined
for a federal office to coordinate the activities of various national emergency agencies in the
event of a future crisis.
71

Even more important than these institutional reforms and administrative transfers,
through the act reorganization became a continuous presidential process. Until the release
of the committee’s report, federal organization was generally considered static, open to
revision solely in extraordinary times of emergency. It was thought, in the same vein as the
predominant models of statebuilding in IR theory, that fundamental changes in the
structure of the American state were brought about only when outside pressures became so
great that the existing administrative order needed to change to address existing problems.
Yet this perspective, as Emmerich of the PCAM explains, “is predicated on a concept of a
static federal executive structure” that inevitably overlooks “the constantly changing nature
of human organizations.”
72
Following this commonly held view, control over the
administrative structure was traditionally left in Congress’ hands, and the president was
given temporary reorganization authorities only in exceptional periods.
For years, a growing contingent of public administration scholars working on the
problem of government management – most prominently, Emmerich, Harris, Merriam,
John Miller, and Schuyler Wallace – noted the devastating consequences of this view on
policymaking, and instead stressed the need for a more fluid notion of the state institutional
structure. “The government is not static,” Miller wrote in a committee memo; “it is
dynamic, constantly developing and changing... Unless there is continual attention given to

70
See Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance.”
71
We will return to this final aspect below in Ch. 5, Sec. III.
72
Emmerich, Federal Organization, 7.
149

problems of administrative organization, the machinery of government becomes unsuited
to the task which it has to perform.”
73
Wallace was similarly convinced that the common
understanding of organization as stable was “fallacious,” imploring that “far from being
static, administration is at all times dynamic, constantly in the process of adaptation and
change.”
74

The reorganization act fundamentally transformed the practice of federal
reorganization to better fit the vision of the president’s committee. In direct contrast to the
prevailing conception of sporadic, disjointed periods of reorganization, it effectively made
administrative reform an ongoing executive function. “Federal reorganization,” Emmerich
wrote, “is essentially a continuing process. It is going on all the time as a result of both
internal and external pressures. Structural change is incessant.” “The ability to initiate
promptly needed organizational change,” he continued, “is an essential tool of
administrative management” in the modern American state.
75
Thus, by allowing the
president to initiate and oversee this process, the committee’s proposals ultimately gave the
president the administrative resources needed to manage not only the vastly expanded
governmental institutional machinery but also the acute social problems faced by the
nation, without the need for further expansions in executive power.

VII. Conclusion: enduring institutional reform, at last

With the managerial responsibilities of the national government significantly increasing in
light of modern technological developments and rapid industrialization in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, it became abundantly clear to many public administration
experts that the conception and practice of executive reorganization needed overhauling.
The economic depression of the 1930s was only the most recent illustration, in a long
historical line, demonstrating that the presidency was equipped with inadequate
administrative capacities to accomplish the task of effective, democratic government in an
age of widespread social ills. Ever since the beginning of the American republic, the

73
John Miller, “Organization and Management of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government,” Box 2,
Folder A-II-56, PCAM Papers. Cf. Harris, “The Purpose.”
74
Shuyler C. Wallace, Concepts, Hypotheses and Expedients, 3, 4-5.
75
Emmerich, Federal Organization, 7-8.
150

problem of federal organization had been subject to heated political debate between the
branches of government. But it was only in the FDR administration that we begin to see a
fundamental transformation in the executive administrative process to initiate institutional
development.
In the past, each time the executive required additional resources to deal with new
risks or security issues, the president would ask Congress to expand his managerial
authorities, and each time the emphasis was on how to create more economical, efficient
government. Broad powers for reorganization were given to the president temporarily in
times of extreme national peril but were terminated after the crisis ended. When Roosevelt
took office, he too sought emergency reorganization authorities for the purpose of
rationalizing the sprawling – and increasingly more expensive – state administrative
structure created in the early New Deal. And yet, however transformative these moments
may have been, decades of piecemeal institutional change to bring about further economy
had done little to initiate wholesale reform.
The President’s Committee on Administrative Management revolutionized this
timeworn outlook. They proposed an overall view of administrative management, and
advocated that reorganization become an executive task to adjust institutional arrangements
to address modern problems as they arose. When seen from above, it was evident that the
president needed different resources to meet his responsibilities as democratic leader of
the government. He required, in short, the ability to continuously revise the administrative
machinery of the American state without congressional interference. This did not entail the
extension of extraconstitutional dictatorial authorities, it was argued, but instead was the
primary tool designed to prevent the onset of absolutism. In the same way that democratic
national planning sought to establish a flexible system for coordinating planning efforts and
macroeconomic management, New Dealers constituted a state structure in the executive
that was eminently adaptable to ongoing social issues – even those brought on by national
economic crisis and total war.
As we will come to see, in the effort to transition from peace to war beginning in
1939 New Deal planning experts clashed with other prominent advisors in the FDR
administration. While military and industry leaders generally pressed to reinstate the WWI
patterns associated with the national security state and contract state models, administrative
151

planners struggled to move President Roosevelt away from a mobilization plan modeled on
WWI, which they believed would yield too much authority to outside actors. Central
among those who pushed back against the prevailing approaches to institutional
development were none other than members of the PCAM, namely Brownlow, Merriam,
and Emmerich. Along with fellow planner Harold D. Smith (Bureau of the Budget
director), they recommended that an office for emergency management be placed within
the newly minted Executive Office of the President, so that Roosevelt would have the
resources to effectively govern wartime emergencies without interference from Congress,
the military, or industry. This proposal, more than any other, set the groundwork for a
range of alternative policies in total war and after.

152

Part II.
Laying the foundation for an emergency-war machine

[T]he establishment of the Executive Office, the effective
co-ordination of the tremendously widespread federal
machinery, enabled the United States to win World War
II and meet the consequent problems with which the
nation had to deal.
– Louis Brownlow
1

Throughout 1939, as diplomatic and military relations in Europe were rapidly deteriorating
in the lead-up to World War II, United States government officials considered how to
convert existing institutional systems to defense mobilization. On January 4, President
Roosevelt delivered his annual message to Congress. Typically, such an address would be
used as a platform to outline the general state of the nation. But these were no ordinary
times, and the speech quickly turned into a call to arms. Convinced that the hard-fought
peace struck to end World War I was being undermined, Roosevelt spoke solemnly of the
urgent need for domestic administrative reforms, national defense preparations, and global
leadership “in the face of storm signals from across the seas.” “All about us,” he warned,
“rage undeclared wars – military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments
– military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression – military and
economic.”
2
The situation could not have been more disturbing.
For several years following Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in the Weimar Republic
in 1933, the Nazis had taken the lead in abolishing the shackles imposed by the Versailles
Treaty, which mandated that Germany not only make territorial concessions and pay
reparations for the damage caused by WWI but also demobilize its troops and stop arms

1
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 416.
2
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1939 Volume, 1.
153

manufacturing and trading altogether. With absolutism on the rise at home and a
militaristic foreign policy, the Nazis began dismantling the agreement, line by line. They
introduced compulsory military conscription to rebuild the armed forces, reoccupied the
demilitarized zone in the Rhineland, and began a campaign to engulf parts of Europe
through brute force. Meanwhile, Italy and Japan, for their parts, also violated the terms of
the peace on numerous occasions, all but confirming Roosevelt’s fears that world war lay in
the not-too-distant future.
3

Echoing across the Atlantic and reverberating in the halls of government offices
throughout Washington, D.C., these escalating international concerns were not simply
perceived as Europe’s alone. The president was in good company in worrying that
developments abroad threatened to destroy the livelihood of the American people, or,
what amounted to the same thing, their longstanding traditions of democracy and limited,
constitutional government. “There comes a time in the affairs of men,” Roosevelt
impressed on Congress, “when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but
the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very
civilization are founded.”
4
The time for such measures, it seemed, was upon them, as the
tenuous peace in Europe was rapidly crumbling under the pressures of German
expansionism and the spread of dictatorship.
Despite incentives to keep the U.S. out of what were seen by some skeptics as
Europe’s problems, it was clear to executive officials that something needed to be done.
“We have learned that God-fearing democracies of the world which observe the sanctity of
treaties and good faith in their dealings with other nations cannot safely be indifferent to
international lawlessness anywhere,” Roosevelt said. “They cannot forever let pass, without
effective protest, acts of aggression against sister nations – acts which automatically
undermine all of us.”
5
Provocative and insightful, these words struck a chord among
congressional leaders and the American citizenry alike. No longer could they simply stand
by as another war threatened to consume the world in flames. Government action was
deemed necessary, and the FDR administration had a responsibility to prepare for the

3
See generally Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis; Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes.
4
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1939 Volume, 2.
5
Ibid., 3.
154

worst that might arise from the storm brewing in Europe.
Short of total mobilization, a program to transition from peace to national defense
would become the main policy agenda moving forward. “For,” the president explained, “if
any government bristling with implements of war insists on policies of force, weapons of
defense give the only safety.”
6
The aim for the time being was to ready the nation for war
under existing neutrality laws, according to a three-pronged approach. First, by bolstering
armed forces against potential enemy attack on the civilian population and strategic
locations, and then by utilizing and expanding industrial facilities to begin production of
essential war goods. The final aspect was to accomplish these tasks while retaining the
support and participation of the American people. This, as Roosevelt put it, would
simultaneously provide the “staying power to see things through” and safeguard democracy
in time of crisis.
7
Yet it also proved the most challenging.
When compared with the totalitarianism witnessed abroad, democracy appeared
unequal to the swelling demands of total war. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist
Japan had all succumbed to government interventions and absolute rule in order to pull
their economies out of the global depression that had broken out just a handful of years
before, in the early 1930s,
8
and this essentially sealed their fate as they began charting a
course for war. These countries, along with Soviet Russia, demonstrated the effectiveness
of dictatorship in bringing populations under a regimented mobilization plan, taking
command of economic markets, and centralizing control of national resources. President
Roosevelt nevertheless warned of its potentially devastating consequences. Just as the
cunning sirens of Greek mythology employed their beauty and music to lure sailors to
crash against the cliffs, the president was certain that an appeal to dictatorship would spell
the downfall of democracy.
In an effort to avoid such a catastrophic conclusion to the American democratic
experiment, the FDR administration patently rejected the paths that had been laid out
before them. Upon reviewing past efforts in WWI, Roosevelt and his inner circle of
advisors were intent on pursuing an alternative approach modeled on the democratic

6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 4.
8
See Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors, Part III.
155

national planning expertise that had gained significant traction in the late New Deal. The
president was convinced that various reforms in the New Deal had become so integral to
the American state that they would prove useful even in the event of a war. “Our nation’s
program of social and economic reform is… a part of defense, as basic as armaments
themselves,” he said. “Never have there been six years of such far-flung internal
preparedness in our history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to
command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital…”
9
In part, this was a
rhetorical move to galvanize further support for previous efforts. But more than hot air,
these developments were essential to the attempt to pave an alternate route for total war.
The piecemeal recovery efforts implemented in the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Emergency Relief Administration,
Public Works Administration, and Tennessee Valley Authority, among others, contributed
significantly to the nation’s overall preparedness for war. Through their disparate activities
and approaches to crisis management, New Deal agencies produced an unparalleled
institutional configuration for the government to cultivate natural resources, such as water,
power, farming, and flood control; provide healthcare and social welfare to wide segments
of the population; address laborer-employer difficulties; and govern the common economic
troubles of the 1930s. Taken together, the president explained, “We have… forge[d] new
tools for a new role of government operating in a democracy – a role of new responsibility
for new needs and increased responsibility for old needs, long neglected.”
10

Though these recovery activities went a long way towards addressing the economic
depression, few of the agencies survived to make any impression on wartime statebuilding.
11

Thus, for many scholars looking back, the New Deal served a temporary purpose to
address the existing economic downturn, and proved irrelevant in the shadow of total war.
It was wartime industrial mobilization, after all, that finally ended the Great Depression.
The dire need for increased production capacities, means for resource extraction, and
infrastructure projects in total war catapulted employment levels and economic growth to

9
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1939 Volume, 6.
10
Ibid.
11
The PWA is a glaring exception. It was tasked with constructing internment facilities for roughly 120,000
Japanese-American citizens and foreigners along the west coast of the U.S. Even still, these actions had
nothing to do with administrative reforms. See J. Smith, “New Deal Public Works.”
156

unprecedented heights, far beyond the myriad recovery experiments of the 1930s. New
Deal crisis governance, one scholar claims, was “dwarfed” by the extraordinary
statebuilding activities to meet the external pressures of war.
12
Leaders, as renowned
historian Richard Polenberg argues, “shunt[ed] aside various reforms,” essentially “putting
New Deal relief agencies out of commission.” “[T]he experience gained in fighting the
depression was of limited use in waging war.”
13
Even President Roosevelt bolstered this
outlook at the time, when he announced in December 1943 that he would no longer be
“Dr. New Deal” but would focus instead on becoming “Dr. Win the War.”
14

Part II of this dissertation demonstrates, to the contrary, that New Deal planning
expertise proved essential to the war effort. If one were to conceive of statebuilding solely
as material processes to expand executive branch institutions and presidential authorities,
then it makes sense to identify a clear departure from New Deal measures and a return to
WWI patterns. Yet the common analytical tendency to overemphasize the material aspects
of institutional development blinds scholars to the enduring influence of planning
discourse, ideas, and administrative reforms. While most New Deal agencies had already
been disbanded, officials did not simply abandon the momentum for democratic national
planning and emergency preparedness in their struggle to transition from economic reform
to war mobilization. Specific innovations in preparatory emergency management laid the
foundation for policymakers to follow a different form of statebuilding than was previously
possible in wartime. In particular, the Executive Office of the President was swiftly
repurposed for defense organization, and the tentative framework for constitutional
executive emergency authorities became a full-fledged Office for Emergency Management
by January 1941 – still almost a year before the U.S. officially declared war.
These developments facilitated a stark break not from the New Deal, as is often
assumed, but from WWI. Rather than addressing mobilization concerns through bouts of
unwieldy industrial cooperation interrupted by temporary expansions in executive
dictatorial powers, as in WWI, the FDR administration followed the democratic middle-
ground carved out by New Deal expert advisors. Administrative management through the

12
J. Sparrow, Warfare State, 6.
13
Polenberg, War and Society, 82, 3-4, respectively. Cf. Saldin, War, the American State; B. Sparrow, From
the Outside In.
14
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1939 Volume, 571.
157

executive office afforded Roosevelt the legal flexibility to continually reorganize the
government as needed in dealing with war emergencies. Even though there was institutional
growth specific to war needs, these changes were implemented through prevailing
constitutional authorities and were situated within the existing structure of the executive.
Furthermore, when constructing plans for civilian defense, domestic transportation, and
industrial mobilization, leaders utilized the institutional ties first forged in the New Deal to
form collaborative federal relationships with local and state communities. It was the
groundbreaking configuration created through these efforts that not only allowed officials to
coordinate a national mobilization program while upholding democratic ideals but also
contributed to America’s overall success in the war (see Figure II.1 below).
To make this case, I employ a counterfactual logic,
15
suggesting that without New
Deal developments in discursive and ideational practices about planning, it is likely that
WWII mobilization would have paralleled WWI practices, much as the IR theory models
expect. For one thing, when executive officials were deciding how to ready the nation for
war in 1939, there was immense pressure to reinstate the WWI patterns, in which military
and industrial leaders took charge of mobilization. In the interwar period, military planners
arranged numerous studies investigating how to prepare for another total war, were one to
arise. Their final proposal, the Industrial Mobilization Plan of 1939, advocated for a path
that would not only bolster the influence of private industry as the central force for
economic management but also extend authority over non-civilian procurements and
production to the armed forces. Since it was grounded in WWI measures, the plan was
widely supported by industrialists and military leaders.
16

Not only did opposing interests make this option appear reasonable, the shared
structural burdens of total war made it nearly inevitable. Modern warfare at that time was
widely understood as total in that it required all-out mobilization of the nation’s population
and resources to extract, produce, and transport the goods and armaments needed for
combat on the front lines. With such a convoluted task, complications were almost bound
to arise. Problems lurked in virtually every corner – raw material deficits could stifle

15
On the merits of counterfactual analysis, see especially Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry, Ch. 5.
16
See especially Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Production for War; Koistinen, Planning
War.
158

manufacturing; production inefficiencies could cause bottlenecks; labor strikes, foot-
dragging, and enemy attacks could bring production to a screeching halt; redundancies
between industries could lead to wastefulness; civilian consumption of essential goods
could result in shortages; transportation issues could prevent the flow of armaments to
battle sites.
17
Yet in tracing the contested creation of the EOP and OEM, I demonstrate the
critical role planning expertise played in transforming executive emergency powers, not
simply for WWII but also from that point on.

17
See generally Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II;
Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War.
field of state power
president as top manager of government;
state responsible for governing
all types of national emergency

performative discourse
democratic middle-ground
between dictatorship and laissez-faire
performative ideas
national planning expertise:
technocratic crisis governance

institutional development
institutional preparedness
and collaborative federalism
through executive office

policymaking
preparatory emergency management

Figure II.1. Configuration of WWII statebuilding
159

Chapter 5.
Ordering the mobilization institutional system

When the history of our period comes to be written, I
have no doubt that the verdict will be that the President
was greatly aided in his tremendous task of coordinating
the diverse elements involved in the mobilization of the
national resources for a total war by this device of the
Office for Emergency Management.
– Louis Brownlow
1

I. Rediscovering the wartime machinery

Louis Brownlow, an invaluable advisor for institutional developments in both the New
Deal and total war mobilization, was certainly correct about one thing: the structure created
through the Office for Emergency Management was perhaps singularly responsible for the
effective coordination of national defense and economic mobilization during World War
II. He has since been proven wrong, however, about the importance given to this
administrative device in prevailing historical narratives. Aside from that written by the
advisors, secretaries, and representatives directly involved in the FDR administration’s
activities to convert the American state for war,
2
little attention has been paid to the OEM,
specifically the central part it played in ordering virtually every aspect of wartime defense
preparations and industrial production into a unified national system. Secondary literature
tends to dismiss the OEM altogether, claim that it was of minor significance, or otherwise
offer platitudes about its nominal administrative contribution.
3

1
Brownlow, The President and the Presidency, 108.
2
See especially Brownlow, “A General View;” Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 425-432; Emmerich,
Federal Organization, Ch. 4; Harris, “The Emergency National Defense Organization;” McReynolds, “The
Office for Emergency Management.”
3
Exceptions to this rule include Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Rossiter, “The Constitutional
Significance.” I thank Andrew Lakoff for first pointing me to the OEM as an integral institutional
160

An illustration of this tepid reception can be found in the work of historian Paul
Koistinen, who has devoted several volumes to wartime developments in the United States.
In his magisterial Arsenal of World War II, Koistinen argues emphatically that “OEM was
of the greatest significance to economic mobilization for war,”
4
and yet he quickly
disregards the OEM in haste to delve into the political economy of warfare. The office, he
finds, “remained relatively unimportant… before the nation entered hostilities, and it
gradually became inactive after Pearl Harbor.” Its ineffectiveness was apparently due to the
poor leadership abilities of William H. McReynolds, the first OEM Liaison Officer
charged with reporting the activities of various emergency agencies directly to the president.
“Although a knowledgeable administrator who was thoroughly familiar with the ways of
Washington, he was not a leader, disliked the job, shunned publicity, could be petty and
devious, stressed procedure and detail, and viewed himself more as the president’s eyes
and ears than as an executive.” Because of these deficiencies, Koistinen asserts that the
OEM was superseded in spring 1940, before it was even in full operation, by the
reactivation of the National Defense Advisory Commission, a council first established for
defense planning in World War I.
5

But this distorts the OEM’s role in defense organization, which was to coordinate
emergency measures within a national program, not to initiate, lead, or execute. Common
misconceptions such as this, I would contend, result from the analytical lens through which
scholars view institutional developments. Much ink has been spilled tracing the abuse of
presidential powers to expand coercive capabilities along the arduous path to total
mobilization. Much less energy, accordingly, has been expended looking at the complex
administrative machinery built for this task. And even when analysts do investigate
statebuilding processes, as does Koistinen, they focus predominately on agencies that had
direct, actionable authority to participate in mobilization.
6
In so doing, they overlook the

development. I expand on his work by situating the creation of the OEM within primary archival sources and
discursive struggles between state agents, and by emphasizing how the OEM reshaped policymaking in total
war, allowing for a democratic form of crisis governance.
4
Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 15-16.
5
Ibid., 17. More on the NDAC below in Sec. IV & V, and in Ch. 6.
6
Luther Gulick, in “War Organization,” 1174, fruitfully distinguishes between “action agencies,” which were
tasked with specific mobilization needs, and “coordinating agencies,” which were intended to keep confusion
and redundancies between action agencies to a minimum. The OEM was of the latter type.
161

OEM, since it was given only organizational, liaison responsibilities. This structure
nevertheless provided Roosevelt with the legal foundation and institutional framework to
carry out his duties as top executive, just as the President’s Committee on Administrative
Management discussed in Chapter 4 had impressed upon him years before. Almost all of
the wartime agencies were placed within the OEM, so that the president retained overall
control of the crisis government.
The purpose of this chapter is thus to follow up on Brownlow’s appeal to give the
OEM its rightful place in the annals of WWII total mobilization. In contrast to the
predominant views, I demonstrate how this administrative system transformed statebuilding
in time of war. Were it not for the OEM, leaders would have likely been compelled to
allow industry leaders and military strategists to harness the national economy, as they had
in WWI through the compensatory approach. Yet the OEM struck a crucial alternative
that assisted the executive in managing crisis governance activities nationwide. It provided
the institutional adhesive to bring together the actions of countless emergency agencies into
a coordinated program – all without the use of either traditional liberal policies of non-
interference or dictatorial interventions. What follows is a genealogical account of how the
OEM was built into the American state as a preparatory emergency management device,
well in advance of the U.S. officially entering the war.
Section II traces a strand of interwar military planning that advocated for the
continuation of the WWI model, in which military and industrial leaders, rather than the
executive, managed mobilization. Sections III and IV look at how officials in the FDR
administration struggled to devise an alternative to this increasingly popular proposal.
Instead of simply reinstating the earlier forms of institutional development, they
repurposed the innovations in New Deal national planning, to retain administrative control
of the mobilization program within the executive through the OEM. Sections V and VI
analyze more specifically the implications of this groundbreaking route. Planning experts
insisted that an institutional system like the OEM offered distinct benefits: it was a
preparatory emergency device that diminished the need for exceptional expansions in
authority; it provided the legal foundation for the president to continuously reorder the
administrative structure of the government without changing the dynamic between branches
of government; and, perhaps most importantly, it facilitated a collaborative federalist
162

project that decentralized mobilization activities and then coordinated them at the national
level. This novel institutional arrangement, as we will see further in Chapter 6, allowed for
more effective and democratic policies in total mobilization.

II. Interwar military planning and the continuation of the WWI model
7

In the immediate aftermath of WWI, executive officials and congressional representatives
were generally uninterested in continuing economic mobilization planning.
8
And yet, it
became increasingly obvious that the government would benefit from a detailed study of
the lessons learned from the mobilization experience, especially in relation to military
services. A clear vision of how to successfully harness the economy for another potential
total war, it was reasoned, ultimately depended on their ability to assess what worked and
what failed in the WWI program. Mobilization, to be sure, had become increasingly more
functional as time went on, but by the end of the war, there were still substantial gains
needed for the government to be able to successfully manage a wartime economy in the
future. For this task, Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1920, extending
peacetime authorities to the War Department for procurement and economic mobilization
planning. In 1921, this authority was transferred to a Planning Branch in the War
Department. And then, in 1922, the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board was
established to further coordinate procurement and emergency planning of the Army and
Navy.
Throughout the 1920s, these two groups – in the War Department and in the
Army and Navy Munitions Board – engaged in activities to devise a mobilization plan
based on the lessons of WWI.
9
Their early plans were largely preliminary and piecemeal –
they emphasized military procurement while neglecting wider issues of economic
production and organization – and thus provided a shaky foundation that was anything but
comprehensive. As time went on, however, military planners expanded their focus,
concentrating not only on procurement but also on economic coordination through the

7
For this section, see especially Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, Ch. 1;
Koistinen, Planning War.
8
See above Ch. 3, Sec. II. Also see Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, Ch. 12.
9
See especially Koistinen, Planning War, 50-54.
163

military. Yet even as they made substantial strides in the late 1920s to solidify broader
economic mobilization plans, when their intentions to make the military the primary mover
were clarified, some business leaders – chief among them Bernard Baruch, who had
chaired the primary mobilization in WWI, the War Industries Board – criticized that such
a program would give the military too much authority to commandeer industry.
10

The military advisors went back to the drawing board, revised their proposal, and
drafted the first of what turned into several versions of the Industrial Mobilization Plan.
Initially submitted in 1930 and subsequently revised three times, with the last version being
accepted in summer 1939, the IMP gradually became perhaps the most widely supported
guide for the FDR administration as they turned their eyes to the task of preparing defenses
for war in Europe. Whereas the earlier drafts underscored the role of the military in
managing mobilization, with each iteration the plan came to resemble WWI patterns.
More and more, the War and Navy Departments focused their studies on the impact of
the War Industries Board, which had been established in August 1917 to coordinate
mobilization activities between the often acrimonious industrialists, military leaders, and
executive branch officials.
11
The board sought to strike a balance between public and
private interests by delegating managerial authorities to a single businessman as chair of the
board. These industrialists left an indelible mark not only on WWI mobilization but also
interwar military planning, pushing the discussion further away from executive control and
towards a compensatory model.
Simply put, the final draft of the IMP was based on three general goals for
successful mobilization: to ensure that 1) sufficient supplies would be produced for the war
effort; 2) consumer demands would simultaneously be met; and 3) decentralized economic
management would be sustained throughout the war.
12
The plan advised that a government
economic control agency, called the War Resources Administration, be established at the
first sign of another war emergency. Similar to the War Industries Board in WWI, this
agency would initiate and enforce all measures necessary to harness the economy for
production. A civilian administrator would be chosen from industrialists to head the board,

10
Ibid., 56.
11
See especially Cuff, The War Industries Board. We will return to the WIB in Ch. 6.
12
See Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 4.
164

assisted by an Advisory Council comprised of military leaders – from the WRA staff,
representatives of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, and the Chief of Staff and Chief
of Naval Operations – as well as officials from other government emergency agencies.
The role of the War Resources Administration, as laid out in the IMP, was of
special importance. Although planners had previously been criticized for leaving too much
control within the military services, the WRA was devised in such a way as to minimize
further disapproval on this front. At the time that the WRA would be inaugurated, the War
and Navy Departments would cease to have command over all of economic mobilization,
and the WRA instead would become a superagency, serving directly under the president
and run by leading businessmen, in charge of harnessing the private economy for war
through various subdivisions and agencies. The WRA, in other words, would centralize
authority and responsibility over mobilization in the hands of industrialists, much like the
contract state model suggests. As the IMP stated, “All economic functions which must be
exercised in time of war are interrelated and interdependent. It is therefore highly
important that one major emergency agency be created to coordinate the performance of
these functions, and that other agencies be set up only as the necessity arises, to
supplement the work of the key agency.”
13

At first blush, it may seem odd that military planners would be willing to cede so
much control to business, but they did not arrive at this position on their own. They were
encouraged by industrialists like Frank A. Scott, an early chairman of the WIB in 1917,
and Bernard Baruch, who acted as WIB chairman in its final operating year. Baruch was
particularly engaged in promoting a vision of industrial mobilization grounded in the WWI
experience. He “knew no limits in his interwar drive for economic mobilization plans
based on” the WIB, Koistinen writes.
14
Baruch not only presented his ideas to civilians and
military leaders; he also wrote articles in popular outlets, such as Atlantic Monthly, and
even used his personal connections with politicians and members of the media. Baruch’s
interests in endorsing the WWI program were perhaps to be expected, given his intimate
connection and responsibility for mobilization as WIB chairman. Nevertheless, it was clear
that in promoting the actions of the WIB, his stance was also a defense of a compensatory

13
Quoted in Ibid., 5.
14
Koistinen, Planning War, 46.
165

approach to mobilization, which relied on big business and private interests, as opposed to
government controls, regulations, and interventions.
15

Not only did industrialists bolster the legacy of the WIB but, what is more, the
FDR administration also established the centrality of business-led economic management
in important ways throughout 1933. This is especially true of the early New Deal recovery
experiments tried through the National Recovery Administration. Citing the WWI
mobilization effort as precedent, officials molded the NRA closely after the previous war
boards. Many critics abhorred this economic control agency and military planning alike,
suggesting that they threatened to bring about a lasting partnership between the military and
industry.
16
Even though a full-scale military-industrial complex was still decades away, these
interwar developments helped solidify the reputation of WWI mobilization as an ideal
arrangement between state and industry for prospective times of war.
By the time officials began to prepare defenses and industries for war, in 1939, the
IMP had sparked a heated conflict regarding how specifically to implement a successful
mobilization program. Based in large part on the WWI experience, which placed business
and military leaders at the forefront of government planning, procurement, and
mobilization activities, the IMP had wide support outside of the executives in the FDR
administration. The IMP was intended to give full control of war mobilization to the armed
forces and private industrialists, and the War Resources Administration would be tasked
with coordinating these activities nationwide. Much like the pattern laid out in WWI by the
War Industries Board, and then extended in early New Deal by the National Recovery
Administration, the plan generally called for state capacities to be expanded through
voluntary means, rather than through excessive coercion within the executive branch. Yet,
for the public administration advisors in the FDR administration, this proposed
arrangement would undermine the president’s constitutional responsibility as overall
manager of the government, and they continuously struggled against business and military
leaders to shape institutional development throughout WWII.
Before moving on to this discursive clash, it is worth emphasizing a grave oversight
in studies that focus exclusively on interwar military planning. Koistinen devotes an entire

15
Ibid., 47.
16
Ibid., 3.
166

book, Planning War, Pursuing Peace, to this issue. He is meticulous in his analysis of how
the IMP came to fruition – the central players involved, their quarrels, and so on – and
how it then influenced discussions of mobilization starting in 1939. The Civilian
Production Administration also accounted for how interwar planning impacted
decisionmaking, in their comprehensive Industrial Production for War. Both of these
narratives focus solely on military planning, however, neglecting the concomitant
developments in New Deal national planning discussed above in Part I. But the IMP was a
road not taken. It provides a counterfactual to underscore the contentions between groups
concerning the best way to move forward with mobilization. Though the IMP had
widespread support among military and industrial leaders, experts in the FDR
administration fought to retain managerial control for mobilization in the executive. For
this, they looked not to the WWI model of compensatory statebuilding but rather to
advances in democratic national planning.

III. Provisioning for the OEM – autumn 1939

The reason [Roosevelt] was able to pull the rabbit out of
the hat at the right moment was that several months
before he had always carefully installed it there.
– Louis Brownlow
17

After a Nazi attack in Poland, President Roosevelt proclaimed a “limited” national
emergency on September 8, 1939. “[A] national emergency exists,” he stated, “in
connection with and to the extent necessary for the proper observance, safeguarding, and
enforcing of the neutrality of the United States and the strengthening of our national
defense within the limits of peacetime authorizations.”
18
Though the U.S. technically
remained neutral over the next two years, officials began to utilize the peacetime authority
granted by the Reorganization Act of 1939 to reform executive institutions in preparation
for national defense. The Executive Office of the President was established at this time to
give the president administrative control of the government, especially if a global war were
to breakout. By allowing him to administer any future mobilization program without direct

17
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 423.
18
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1939 Volume, 488-489.
167

congressional or military interference, this structure, it was believed, would facilitate
Roosevelt’s constitutional duties as top executive.
In the months leading up to his proclamation, Roosevelt met regularly with public
administration advisors to discuss the creation of the EOP, widely considered then and
now as a groundbreaking institutional development. The president enlisted key members
of his earlier Committee on Administrative Management, along with Bureau of the Budget
Director, Harold Smith, to begin devising plans. The most remarkable part of these
deliberations was the proposal, introduced by Roosevelt himself, to include a provision for
an unparalleled federal emergency management organization in the executive branch, one
that would coordinate the numerous temporary relief agencies already existing while also
housing those possibly required in the future. Smith detailed the debates about
incorporating this machinery in the EOP in a daily journal, which, to this day, remains
largely untapped as an archival source.
19
His notes shed light on how the OEM was
conceived, before the threat of war materialized.
As early as July 1939, the prospect of transforming the president’s administrative
resources through an executive office had become central to New Dealers’ vision for
reorganization. In a private conference with Herbert Emmerich, Luther Gulick, Charles
Merriam, and Smith, Brownlow told President Roosevelt that they had a “grand
opportunity” to bring administrative functions permanently under executive supervision –
something that had never been done before. “[N]ow was the opportunity,” Smith recalls,
“to make clear the Executive’s position in our Democratic form of Government,
particularly in relationship to the aides at his disposal under the reorganization plan.”
Everyone at the meeting concurred that if they were to follow through with this plan, it
would constitute a momentous contribution towards modernizing democratic
administration in the American state. And just a few days later, on July 31, Roosevelt
requested that they write a memorandum along these lines, regarding “the role of the
Executive in the scheme of Government… and relat[ing] this role to the tools that would be

19
These can be found in Container 1, Folder Daily Memoranda, July-Sept. 1939, Smith Papers. Koistinen
utilizes these sources as well, but mainly for the purpose of dismissing the OEM. The narrative that follows is
based primarily on Smith’s recollections at the time, many of which were not explicitly documented by others
who also attended the meetings, except for Brownlow’s general statements in A Passion for Anonymity, 425-
432.
168

made available to the Executive in carrying out his task. If this can be done,” he concluded
optimistically, “it will be a document of historical significance.”
20

The significance of such a document was not realized, however, until roughly a
month later, when in late August Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin agreed to a “non-
aggression” pact. All eyes turned to Europe, as many saw the treaty as a plot to enable
Germany to invade Poland without substantial opposition. The mounting international
crisis provided a compelling reason for the FDR administration to solidify a draft order for
executive reform. Roosevelt was generally favorable to the Brownlow Committee’s
suggestions to create the EOP based on the previous authorization of the Reorganization
Act of 1939, which entailed transferring the Bureau of the Budget to executive direction,
giving the president administrative assistants, and establishing a permanent national
planning board.
21
In Smith’s words, the president met the proposal “with a good deal of
enthusiasm.” But he also suggested several changes, not the least of which was to provide
for a liaison office, in the case of a proclamation of national emergency, with a top
administrative assistant to lend the president support in dealing with crisis matters.
22

For all intents and purposes, this was the first recommendation of its kind to install
an emergency device in the state institutional structure prior to the existence of a direct
threat to U.S. national security. Roosevelt’s proposed alterations to the executive order
were motivated by his general antipathy to any plan that required him to delegate
administrative authority to industry and the military,
23
and they represented a decisive shift
in the available paths of institutional development for war. He advocated the creation of an
executive office for emergency management, in large part, as a means to place future
defense mobilization activities and wartime federal organization within his managerial
control, instead of in the hands of businessmen and military leaders, like the Industrial
Mobilization Plan intended. The Woodrow Wilson administration’s past experience
weighed heavily on his mind; Roosevelt wanted to avoid having outside actors run the

20
Smith, entries July 28 & 31, 1939.
21
See above Ch. 4, Sec. VI.
22
See Smith, entries August 27 & 28, 1939. It should be noted that Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 428,
claims he originally conceived of this addition. His account, however, marks the contribution several days
after Smith’s entry.
23
See Emmerich, Federal Organization, 68.
169

national program, as was the case in WWI. Skeptical of this pattern, Roosevelt’s idea to set
up an executive crisis machinery, as Smith put it, situated “emergency problems under the
immediate direction of the President.”
24
This would have the effect of permitting the
president “to do most anything he may see fit to do in the way of organization in his own
Office to meet an emergency.”
25

Fears of waning powers in wartime were not unjustified. Support for reinstating the
line of economic management first tried by the Wilson administration had been growing
throughout the 1930s. Many believed mobilization was best left to industrialists and military
strategists, not government leaders. In early August 1939, at the same time that officials
were devising the order for the EOP, Roosevelt established the War Resources Board as a
civilian advisory group to review the program laid out by the Industrial Mobilization Plan
mentioned above. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., then chairman of the Board of the United
States Steel Corporation, was selected to head the WRB and to counsel the president on
economic mobilization policies. Much to the president’s chagrin, Louis Johnson, Acting
Secretary of War, had apparently exercised independent powers under statute to initially
create the board without consulting him,
26
and the board’s final recommendations
ultimately backed the plan modeled on WWI measures
27
– a path that was growing
increasingly unpopular among advisors in the FDR administration. It was clear that the
War and Navy Departments were intent on implementing a method of mobilization that
emphasized the responsibility of industry and the military, instead of the executive,
28

thereby igniting an ongoing struggle to define the best approach moving forward.
The WRB’s recommendations and Johnson’s actions infuriated Roosevelt to such
an extent that he confided in Brownlow: “If I were to set up a scheme such as
recommended by this report [the IMP], turning over the sole administration of the
economy of the country, even the public relations of the White House, to a single war
administrator – even though he were appointed by me – I would simply be abdicating the
presidency to some other person. I might choose that person, but I would be expected to

24
Smith, entry September 3, 1939. Cf. Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 424.
25
Smith, entry August 29, 1939.
26
See Smith, entries September 4 & 5, 1939.
27
See Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 8.
28
Koistinen, Arsenal for World War II, 16.
170

select him from a small group of big businessmen whose names were submitted to me by a
committee, most of the members of which would desire above everything else in the world
that some person other than ‘F.D.R.’ were President of the United States.”
29

Several of his advisors were also quick to voice their concerns. Thomas Corcoran, a
legal counselor and an integral part of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust from years past, lamented
that the IMP would essentially appoint “a bunch of economic royalists.” He worried that
with the military and industrialists managing mobilization, many necessary relief efforts
would be pushed aside in favor of heightened national security, like they had been in
WWI. Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, similarly deplored the tendency to give
industrialists substantial influence over the government in total war, saying he feared many
New Deal recovery programs would be forgotten as a result.
30
Brownlow went even further
in telling the president that if he were to agree to the terms of the plan, thus allowing
business elites and military leaders to oversee prospective war plans, he “would do a little
bit better to resign.”
31
The tension between the groups was palpable, and the stakes equally
high.
On September 3, as Brownlow, Merriam, and Smith met to revise the draft
executive order concerning the national emergency defense organization, across the
Atlantic England and France officially declared war on Germany. “It may be of some
significance on this fateful day in world history,” Smith remarked, “that the Orders we were
working on were arranged for several days ago in anticipation of the major crisis beginning
this third day of September.”
32
Nonetheless, since the details of the reorganization plan
were still being hammered out, Roosevelt was adamant that his closest advisors not speak
about the contents of the executive and administrative orders that were in development,
especially to those who favored the competing scheme laid out in the IMP. The meeting
did, however, give those involved a degree of confidence that through their proposal the
president would retain overall administrative authority of emergency measures, in the event
that the crisis in Europe warranted further actions for national defense.

29
As recounted by Brownlow, in A Passion for Anonymity, 425.
30
Smith, entry September 4, 1939.
31
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 425.
32
Smith, entry September 3, 1939. Cf. Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 428.
171

Soon thereafter, President Roosevelt decided that the orders should be given wider
consideration by those who were to take part in the transition to defense mobilization,
namely, Stettinius and others at the War Resources Board. He asked Brownlow to present
the plans for reorganization to General Edwin M. Watson, a military secretary from the
War Department. Yet when Brownlow explained the proposed administrative changes, he
felt as though he had botched the presentation. For, as Smith writes, “the General became
curious as to the nature of the Orders, particularly concerning the emergency management,
he went up in the air and said the President couldn’t do this; that the War Resources
Board was going to run the show or words to that effect.” Apparently, Watson believed
Brownlow had thought of the organizational scheme without the president’s blessing. After
all, nobody up to that point had heard about the plans. Watson was thus concerned that
the quest for managerial control through a coordinative emergency body in the executive
office would “sidetrack” the board’s work entirely, leaving him and other military leaders
out to dry.
33

Conflicts regarding the WRB and its relationship to the prospective emergency
agency reached their climax in a meeting on September 7, just one day before the official
declaration of a limited national emergency. The president crossed out two of the
organization charts proposed by military officials, which would have given the board price
control and regulatory authorities. Enraged at such boldness, Roosevelt exclaimed: “What
do they think they are doing, setting up a second Government?” Instead, he indicated that
the WRB would have to get all of their plans approved by him. Smith then presented the
administrative order they had been working on, allowing for the formation of a “Liaison
Office of Emergency Management” in the EOP. But by the end of the discussion,
Roosevelt had acquiesced to Watson’s apprehensions, concluding that he should “soft-
pedal” this part of the order. He cut it out entirely, except for a single sentence that stated
the president could create such a liaison office as he saw fit. Upon leaving the meeting,
Watson was relieved that the section on emergency management was substantially edited,
as he hoped, along with others at the WRB, that they would be in charge of any future
mobilization measures.
34

33
Smith, entry September 5, 1939.
34
Smith, entry September 7, 1939. Unfortunately, the earlier draft of the order is not in the archives. From
172

In the end, the final wording of Executive Order 8248 on September 8 toned down
the president’s original intention considerably. Given that it was still unclear whether the
European conflict would eventually constitute a direct threat to the U.S., the order simply
stipulated that an “office for emergency management” could be established “in the event of
a national emergency, or threat of a national emergency,” yet it did not initiate any specific
administrative reforms.
35
An accompanying presidential statement (written by Brownlow)
determined, even more precisely, that it had always been “necessary to establish
administrative machinery in addition to that required for the normal work of Government.”
“Set up in a time of stress,” the statement explained, “these special facilities sometimes
have worked at cross-purposes both within themselves and with the regular departments
and agencies. In order that the Nation may not again be caught unaware, adequate
resources for management should be provided in advance of such periods of emergency.”
36

This was the day, to extend Brownlow’s metaphor, the rabbit was put in the hat, but it was
not pulled out until many months later.

IV. Forming the OEM – spring 1940

[T]his proviso of the Executive Order… was a novel and
unprecedented feature in that it permitted the
government to act immediately in time of an emergency.
– Louis Brownlow
37

Though the order did not inspire any concrete policy changes, it proved advantageous in
the coming years of institutional preparedness for national defense. The deliberations
concerning executive direction of war mobilization through an unprecedented emergency
management office laid the groundwork for an alternative approach compared with the
widely supported plan for a decentralized system of economic management directed by
businessmen and military leaders. By the time the president proclaimed a limited national
emergency, the War Resources Board had already been instated and was intent on

what Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 428-429, tells us, though, it appears that the edited parts were
included in the supplementary presidential statement quoted below.
35
Executive Order 8248, September 8, 1939.
36
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 428-429; Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 16.
37
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 429.
173

following the precedent of WWI compensatory statebuilding outlined in the Industrial
Mobilization Plan of 1939. With the order on September 8, however, President Roosevelt
signaled his determination to retain control over wartime administration in the executive.
To the extent that it provisioned for the future development of an executive administrative
machinery for national crisis governance, the order was “ingenious and far-sighted,”
according to Emmerich.
38
In the years leading up to the war, it provided the foundation for
the president to initiate defense preparations while simultaneously honoring America’s
commitment to neutrality.
Decisions concerning defense and industrial production were ultimately deferred at
that point, since many believed the war in Europe was still in its “phony” stage.
39
In
addition, domestic debates about foreign policy remained unsettled on the issue of how the
United States should be involved – if at all. A variety of programs were proposed in an
effort to bolster national defenses, each reminiscent of the earlier experiences in WWI:
business leaders advocated the formation of an administration directed by a civilian, like
Bernard Baruch had in Wilson’s War Industries Board; the Treasury Department urged
the establishment of the Board on Mobilization of Industries Essential to National
Preparedness, authorized by 1916 legislation; and the War Department claimed that it
could handle the tasks of clearing contracts and determining production requirements
through the Army and Navy Munitions Board, much as it had during WWI.
40

On top of all this confusion regarding which policy direction to take were powerful
countervailing forces that opposed war altogether.
41
Ever since the advent of total war in
WWI, there had been a widespread isolationist movement insisting that the nation uphold
its pledge to neutrality. Wary of the heightened militarism evidenced in wartime and the
increasingly global role played by American leadership, the general public often resisted
plans that required participation in another European conflict, which, up until the Japanese
attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, was seen as having little to do with U.S.
interests. Indeed, non-intervention was such a popular sentiment that within a year after the

38
Emmerich, Federal Organization, 71. Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance,” 1209, insightfully calls
this an “office-in-embryo.”
39
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 429; Koistinen, Arsenal for World War II, 16-17.
40
See Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 17.
41
For the following, see especially Emmerich, Federal Organization, 67.
174

antiwar organization America First was created in September 1940, it had become one of
the biggest in U.S. history, at around 800,000 members. What is more, the term
“merchants of death” was widely used in the 1930s as an epithet for the industrialists who
actively contributed to the past mobilization effort, so much so that Senators employed it
throughout the Nye Committee hearings between 1934 and 1936 that attempted, albeit
unsuccessfully, to link business profit interests to U.S. involvement in WWI.
With the growing complexities of this domestic political backdrop, it was not until
May 1940, after the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway, the Low Countries, and France,
that the president and his advisors began to seriously consider implementing wartime
emergency measures. When international pressures intensified, as Brownlow writes, “the
lull came abruptly to an end,” and it became apparent that the leadership needed to act
swiftly to launch a program for national defense.
42
Remarkably, however, rather than follow
the suggested paths modeled on WWI efforts, officials in the FDR administration explicitly
avoided them all. The president favored, instead, the formation of an innovative federal
institutional system based on New Deal democratic national planning and the executive
and administrative orders from the previous year. The stipulation allowing for an executive
emergency office in the event of a national crisis permitted the government to begin
transforming state capacities for defense in late spring 1940, once the European war was
deemed critical to U.S. national security and interests abroad. In part, this move was made
in an effort to stave off further criticism from the prevalent antiwar movement, but it was
even more to ensure that the president could initiate preparedness measures under
neutrality laws, without abdicating authority to business and the military.
From the president’s view, the first task along these lines was to re-form the WWI
Council of National Defense and its concomitant National Defense Advisory Commission.
Roosevelt had long planned to take this step, following Wilson’s lead, and first made his
intentions clear in fall 1939, when involved in drafting the orders to establish the executive
office.
43
Brownlow convinced him, however, that the best way to strike an alternate route for
defense mobilization than the ones that would undermine the president’s administrative
authority would be to recreate the council in the EOP, directly under his purview. “That, I

42
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 429.
43
See Smith, entries August 29 & 30, 1939.
175

think, Mr. President, will give you the necessary power to control the operation of the
council and enable you to grant or to withhold power, to create or dissolve subsidiary
agencies and committees, and to retain control over them all.” While Roosevelt had
thought about invoking the National Defense Act of 1916, which was still in effect, to bring
back the council and the NDAC, he had not considered how it would function within the
executive office. The president was sympathetic to Brownlow’s idea and even offered him
the chairman position.
44

Even at this premature stage, then, it was evident that by reinstating the NDAC in
the same administrative line as the EOP, the president could maintain control of national
defense. Instead of giving authority directly to industry and the military, this organizational
setup was conceived as a flexible system to carry out Roosevelt’s constitutional duties as top
manager of the wartime government. It proved so contrary to the prevailing wisdom that
Brownlow admitted: “From the point of view of the report of the War Resources Board of
1939, of the various editions of the industrial mobilization plan, and, I believe, of the great
majority of professional administrators in business and government, the new organization
was a monstrosity. It had no head but the President, which was a very difficult thing for
anybody in the Executive Department to understand. It had no chairman except the
President himself, something very difficult for people in business to understand…”
45
He
thus warned the president that in order for their unconventional strategy to work, Roosevelt
should appoint civilian experts who had little desire to take charge of the commission. In a
phrase that has since become intimately connected to Brownlow’s reputation as a sage
policy guide, he insisted that the executive office needed skilled advisors who had “a
passion for anonymity.”
46

In this regard, for the head liaison position of the defense program, William
McReynolds was an obvious first-choice alternative to Brownlow, who had to decline
Roosevelt’s earlier offer due to health reasons.
47
McReynolds, or “Mac” as his friends in the
administration commonly referred to him, began his tenure in the government as a

44
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 425-426.
45
Ibid., 431.
46
Ibid., 426.
47
The following is from Emmerich, Federal Organization, 79.
176

stenographer in the Post Office Department but quickly moved up the ranks to inspector.
After that, he was made deputy director of the Bureau of Efficiency for many years, and
then in 1933 became Henry Morgenthau, Jr.’s administrative assistant in the Farm Credit
Administration and later in the Treasury Department. When it came time to reorganize
the state for defenses in spring 1940, as the conflict in Europe escalated to new heights,
McReynolds received enthusiastic reviews to serve in the executive as the primary contact
between the president and future defense agencies. Far from the inept administrator
painted by the historian Paul Koistinen, McReynolds proved a “shrewd” assistant, in
Emmerich’s eyes. Smith also raved about him in his journal, writing that he was “one of the
ablest administrators in the Government.”
48

President Roosevelt once more called upon Brownlow, Merriam, and Smith to
draft a secret plan for administrative reform – this time, though, with the express goals of
creating an Office for Emergency Management, appointing McReynolds as its chief liaison
officer, and placing the NDAC in this executive emergency structure. Their primary
concern, as they understood it, was still to “avoid” setting up a “super-government
independent of the President, operated by either the military or outside personnel.”
49
For
the past inclination, in both WWI and the early New Deal, had been to “super-impose” ad
hoc emergency agencies on top of the existing federal organization without much planning
or careful consideration. This undoubtedly caused confusion and duplicated
responsibilities; even worse, it directly undercut the president’s authority as sole executive
of the national government. “[I]t is rather strange,” Smith mused, that in periods of
emergency “there is a tendency to forget that the President of the United States is the head
of the executive department of the Government, and no group can very well be placed
above him.”
50

In an effort to avoid any further resort to this form of emergency statebuilding, the
FDR administration’s plan for reform was “designed to marshal all of the existing services
in the interests of national defense.”
51
This arrangement, the advisors reasoned, would

48
Smith, entry May 22, 1940, Container 1, Folder Daily Memoranda, 1940, Smith Papers.
49
Smith, entry May 23, 1940.
50
Smith, entry May 25, 1940.
51
Ibid.
177

provide a “very flexible” approach to crisis planning and governance through the executive.
By establishing direct lines of communication and administrative authority between the
president, his liaison officer McReynolds, and the various emergency agencies, Roosevelt
would remain the “king-pin in the organization.”
52
Not only would this offset the attempts
by industrialists and the military at the time to manage war mobilization activities but it
would simultaneously reinforce the Committee on Administrative Management’s earlier
hopes to make institutional reform a continual executive function. Founded on the legal
precedents outlined in the Reorganization Act of 1939 and Executive Order 8248, the
proposal was intended to help the president reconstitute units of the crisis government as
necessary, without having to attain congressional approval beforehand.
To this end, the president clarified the role of the executive office in managing
governmental responsibilities during times of national emergency. An administrative order
signed on May 25, 1940, officially established the OEM and outlined its functions as
follows:
(a) Assist the President in the clearance of
information with respect to measures necessitated by the
threatened emergency;
(b) Maintain liaison between the President and the
Council of National Defense and its Advisory
Commission, and with such other agencies, public or
private, as the President may direct, for the purpose of
securing maximum utilization and coordination of
agencies and facilities in meeting the threatened
emergency;
(c) Perform such additional duties as the President
may direct.
53

McReynolds was subsequently chosen as the head Liaison Officer of the OEM to provide
sufficient contact between the president and the defense agencies.
54
While at this point the
office’s duties and McReynolds’ part in it were still vaguely defined, the president and his
advisors had finally succeeded in their hope to form an executive emergency office to
coordinate the national program.
A few days later, on May 28, the Council of National Defense and the NDAC were

52
Smith, May 23, 1940.
53
Administrative Order, May 25, 1940.
54
Harris, “The Emergency National Defense Organization,” 4-5, refers to this position as “the ranking adviser
to the President on all matters within the jurisdiction of the emergency defense agencies.”
178

revived in this system, as originally envisioned by Brownlow and the president (refer to
Chart 5.1 below). Like in WWI, the commission initially consisted of seven civilian
experts, each with the passion for anonymity so famously urged by Brownlow, and each
responsible for a particular segment of defense-related research and planning: Stettinius of
the earlier War Resources Board was chosen for Industrial Materials; William S. Knudsen,
president of General Motors, for Industrial Production; Sidney Hillman, president of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, for Employment; Chester C. Davis, former
administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, for Farm Products; Ralph
Budd, president of a railroad company and the Association of American Railroads, for
Transportation; Leon Henderson, a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
for Price Stabilization; and Harriet Elliott, a political scientist from the University of North
Carolina, for Consumer Protection.
55
The following month, the NDAC organized yet
another area of specialty, National Defense Purchases, ran by executive vice-president of
Sears, Roebuck and Company, Donald M. Nelson. And later, several more subdivisions
were added to carry out further functions, including, among others, the Bureau of Research
and Statistics and the Division of State and Local Cooperation, both of which became
central to civil defense, transportation coordination, and economic management.
56

Yet while theoretically this organization was a simple conversion of its WWI
predecessor, practically, as a part of the OEM, it functioned in quite a different way. In
particular, it assisted the FDR administration in preparing for future emergencies without
abdicating power to the military or industrialists. The decision to bring back the NDAC in
the OEM structure represented a stark refusal of the compensatory approach to
statebuilding mapped out in WWI and later advocated by proponents of the Industrial
Mobilization Plan.
57
However popular this trajectory had become among business and
military leaders, advisors in the FDR administration ultimately detested it. They worried
that the plan would provide for a single civilian administrator to run mobilization outside
the traditional channels of democratic government decisionmaking. These concerns, as it
turns out, were not far-fetched. If implemented, the IMP would have given industrialists

55
See Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 430; Koistinen, Arsenal for World War II, 18.
56
See below Ch. 6, Sec. II-IV.
57
For the following, see especially Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 23-24.
179

powers over mobilization that were even greater than those during WWI, and the military
would have also been afforded wider influence in the program than before.
By direct contrast to this model, the organizational setup chosen, in which the
OEM coordinated the NDAC’s actions, helped ensure that managerial control remained at
the president’s fingertips. Unlike before, when the NDAC reported directly to the Council
of National Defense, the WWII council was recreated solely for the purpose of
establishing its commission, and quickly became irrelevant to defense planning. Each
member in the NDAC was tasked solely with advisory responsibilities. Appointed as
individual advisors, these experts conducted research individually and then made
recommendations up the administrative chain through the OEM Liaison, McReynolds,
who simultaneously served as the commission’s secretary. To prevent the formation of an
extra-governmental body ran by civilian industrialists, as Roosevelt and his inner circle
feared, the NDAC had no chairman besides the president himself. All coordination
between the moving parts of the NDAC was thus done in the executive by the newly
formed OEM. According to an official account, this setup made the president “ex officio
chairman.”
58

V. Piecing together the machine – summer 1940-winter 1941

Looking back on these initial organizational moves, completed over a year before the
United States entered the war, many advisors intimately involved in the mobilization effort
marked this the beginning of the planning and early operations stage of the war – a time in
which the government made great strides to plan, contract, and build capacities for
industrial production and defense while retaining its neutrality status. With the skeletal
apparatus of a future wartime American state in place, from summer 1940 to winter 1941
the FDR administration set out to piece together this machinery by incorporating new
agencies, as well as fostering the growth of those that were already established. Executive
officials utilized the OEM as a coordinative device to allow for the flexible and
constitutional ordering of these activities. Although still not officially involved in the war,
such institutional preparations, as President Roosevelt explained in a Fireside Chat, were

58
Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 23.
180

intended “not only to speed up production but to increase the total facilities of the nation,”
so that the U.S. would be ready to meet impending wartime difficulties.
59
Over time, they
proved more successful than other measures attempted in the past to govern mobilization
crises, through either dictatorial controls or laissez-faire management.
Developments abroad in late spring 1940 did not simply inspire the establishment
of a preparatory administrative system in the OEM but also persuaded the president to
request congressional support for defense planning to bolster military strength and hasten
industrial conversion to war.
60
In May, Roosevelt pressed Congress to review military
advances in Europe, which, he insisted, justified unprecedented appropriation requests of
$896,000,000 for defense and an additional $286,000,000 in contract obligations. Congress
approved legislation the following month, making these funds available. In the summer
months, as the Nazis successfully backed down British forces, one of the last strongholds
against the spread of dictatorship in Europe, the president asked for even more
appropriations to expand production facilities and purchase additional weapons. All told,
Congress made roughly $1.75 billion (including the previous demands) available by
legislation accepted on June 26; and on July 10, Roosevelt sought authorizations of about
$5 billion total, which were later granted in September.
Many detractors grew suspicious of the FDR administration’s intentions with these
record-breaking defense appropriations, especially given that they were ostensibly
requested under the banner of neutrality. President Roosevelt was quick to explain,
however, that these actions, though extraordinary, were necessary to prepare the nation’s
defense for a possible war and, even more crucially, did not exceed the principles of
neutrality nor prevailing legal standards in the U.S. “This is not complete, immediate
national mobilization,” he assured critics. The measures taken were, in his view, part of the
ongoing authority granted through the Reorganization Act of 1939 and the OEM, and
would not involve exceptional executive powers or legislation. “We are trying to expend
about a billion and a quarter dollars more than the normal process. And in order to do
that, it has seemed wise to put into effect what has been ready and planned for a long, long
time, under an existing statute, without having to go and propose something entirely new in

59
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1940 Volume, 237.
60
For the following, see Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 21.
181

the way of legislation that would take weeks and months and a great deal of pro and con
discussion, partisan and otherwise, and would probably end up in practically the same thing
that we have on the statute books now.”
61

What is more, not only were these appropriation requests legitimated through
existing statutory authority and congressional approval but the administrative side of things
– that is, the institutional measures required to translate these funds into actual policy –
were also limited at this early stage. The defense system initially constructed in mid-1940
through the OEM was still in its early stages of development, comprising, as the Bureau of
the Budget put it, a “partial administrative machinery for partial industrial mobilization.”
62

The monetary and institutional resources demanded at that point, in short, remained
within the boundaries established by neutrality laws and earlier New Deal reorganization
authorities. Only later did the defense structure come to full fruition in a mature wartime
machine in the OEM. And even these institutional changes, far from requiring expanded
executive powers, were facilitated through flexible constitutional adaptations, rather than
through extralegal channels.
Nevertheless, such a partial administrative machinery could only bend so much to
the burdens faced before it, too, proved unmatched to the demands of total war. Thus, as
the threat posed to U.S. interests heightened throughout 1940, the FDR administration set
out to reorganize the OEM in early 1941. On January 7, Roosevelt elaborated the position
that the OEM would take in helping him with the overwhelming task to convert the
American state for war mobilization and defense. An administrative order defined the
following as its primary functions and duties:
(a) To advise and assist the President in the discharge
of extraordinary responsibilities imposed upon him by
any emergency arising out of war, the threat of war,
imminence of war, flood, drought, or other condition
threatening the public peace or safety.
(b) To serve as a division of the Executive Office of
the President, with such subdivisions as may be required,
through which the President, during any emergency, may
coordinate and supervise and, in appropriate cases, direct
the activities of agencies, public or private, in relation
thereto.

61
Quoted in Ibid., 23.
62
Ibid., 40.
182

(c) To serve as a channel of communication between
such agencies and the President concerning emergency
activities, to keep the President currently advised of their
progress, to assemble and analyze information concerning
additional measures that should be taken, and to assist in
the preparation of recommendations for any necessary
legislation.
(d) To provide and maintain liaison during any such
emergency with other divisions of the Executive Office of
the President and with other agencies, public or private,
for the purpose of bringing about maximum utilization
and coordination of their services and facilities.
(e) To advise and assist the President upon or before
termination of any such emergency with respect to any
measures that may be needful to facilitate a restoration of
normal administrative relations and to ameliorate the
consequences of the emergency.
(f) To perform such other duties and functions with
respect to any such emergency as the President may from
time to time direct.
63

The details of the order should not be glossed over as mundane alterations. With
these changes, the FDR administration at once redefined what constituted a national
emergency and established the OEM as the primary structure for governing these threats.
64

In the same way that we saw New Deal planners enframe the government’s responsibility to
address social issues well beyond the traditional concerns of war, the wording of the order
stressed that the OEM’s chief purpose was not merely to facilitate effective governance in
the existing defense period but, more impressively, in the event of any national emergency.
“[R]egardless of its particular cause” – whether due to war, economic depression, drought,
flood, earthquake, famine, epidemic, or whatever else threatened public safety –
McReynolds wrote in a Public Administration Review essay on the organizational rationale
underlying the OEM, a national emergency exists “[w]hen these catastrophes are of more
than local importance and become matters of national concern because their impact is
seriously felt throughout the country.”
65

Beyond this all-encompassing definition, however, it was widely understood that the
authority for identifying and declaring when such a threat existed rested with the president
alone. McReynolds and other public administration advisors – including Brownlow,

63
Administrative Order, January 7, 1941.
64
See especially Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security.”
65
McReynolds, “The Office for Emergency Management,” 132.
183

Emmerich, and Merriam – insisted that the U.S. Constitution vested in the president the
responsibility to take charge of managing problems that affect the entire nation. In these
periods, as top executive of the federal government, Commander-in-Chief of the armed
forces, and the foremost elected representative of the American citizenry, McReynolds
writes, “the President must exercise more direct and immediate control over [government
administration] than in normal times.”
66
They were in good company in believing that the
task of furnishing the president with the administrative tools required to meet national
emergencies was essential to bring crisis governance within the executive’s control. And the
OEM was just the sort of organization that could effectively accomplish this goal.
Yet while the type of emergency was purposefully left open-ended, the order
defined government tasks more clearly than ever before. Above all, the OEM was designed
to serve as the primary administrative housing for all emergency agencies. With such a
broad mission, it became, as Emmerich put it, “a kind of overall tent” for the entire
mobilization program.
67
It was, in Clinton Rossiter’s words, an “administrative sky-hook”
used to “suspend[] the vast hodge-podge of wartime agencies.”
68
No federal administrative
structure of this kind had existed previously. Even though it did not have direct authority to
engage in mobilization activities, the OEM came to serve as a “holding company,” ordering
the national emergency organization according to a clear line of communication and
authority – all the way from those on the ground to the advisors in the executive branch.
69

In this capacity, the OEM proved so revolutionary that it made even the NDAC
obsolete as the primary coordinator of the mobilization program, a role for which the
commission was originally envisioned during WWI. Discontent with how the NDAC was
functioning mounted to such extremes during 1940 that, in February 1941, the president
reallocated emergency funds originally made available to the NDAC to be transferred to
the OEM. Despite only being charged with advisory assignments, many of the divisions
began to operate as if they had direct authority to engage in mobilization activities. There
was so much confusion regarding the vague, broad tasks of the commission that the FDR

66
Ibid., 131.
67
Emmerich, Federal Organization, 127.
68
Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance,” 1209.
69
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 457. See also Brownlow, The President and the Presidency, 108;
Emmerich, Federal Organization, Ch. 4; Rossiter, “The Constitutional Significance,” 1209.
184

administration believed the NDAC should be broken up into separate parts within the
OEM framework. Among other things, the Office of Production Management was
established to combine several functions of the NDAC, including labor, production, and
research, and was given authorities beyond planning and consultation to begin initiating
production priorities. In addition, price stabilization and consumer protection were moved
to the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply; the division of state and local
cooperation was transferred into the Office of Civilian Defense; and transportation went to
the Office of Defense Transportation (refer to Chart 5.2 below).
70

More than just a holding company for these and many other emergency agencies
throughout the war, though, the OEM was also the primary “legal device” through which
the president could continually initiate administrative changes as required to address war
needs. According to the Bureau of the Budget, the constitutional bases for wartime
institutional reforms were “provided with considerable prevision” as early as fall 1939,
when the EOP was first created and the outline for a tentative office for emergency
management was initially documented.
71
The orders described above essentially laid the
foundation for the president to harness the administrative structure of the national defense
system yet to come. In line with the former Committee on Administrative Management’s
proposals to reconstitute organization as an ongoing executive function, instead of a
legislative task,
72
the creation of the OEM ensured that the president would be able to
initiate reforms without the need for prior congressional authorization.
With the ground cleared for such a path, the FDR administration built upon these
early legal precedents as they moved ahead with planning and mobilization in 1941. Almost
the entire defense apparatus was constructed in the OEM before the U.S. entered the war
at the end of that year, following the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
73
As the OEM’s
responsibilities were amplified, it took on a special legal role in facilitating flexible
institutional change during the defense planning stage of the war.
74
Since the authorities

70
See Gulick, “War Organization,” 1169-1170.
71
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 44. See also Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 429;
Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Harris, “Wartime Currents and Peacetime Trends,” 1146.
72
See above Ch. 4, Sec. VI.
73
Gulick, “War Organization,” 1168.
74
For the following, see especially Emmerich, Federal Organization, 127; Emmerich, “The Administrative
Legacy.”
185

given by Congress through the Reorganization Act of 1939 officially expired on January 21,
1941, the president had no reorganization authorities until eleven months later, when the
First War Powers Act was passed on December 18. In this interim period, the OEM
provided the primary legal mechanism to establish scores of emergency agencies within its
administrative structure, via executive order (for a complete list, refer to Table 5.1 below).

VI. Collaborative federalism – democracy through the OEM

We must find an instrument which guarantees us against
the totalitarian tendencies of centralization, assures us a
continuity of purpose and action, and, at the same time,
gains its strength and its power directly from the people of
the community which it is serving.
– Langdon Post
75

It would be easy to dismiss the OEM system as simply an expansion of dictatorial executive
powers, like the national security state model expects in periods of emergency. After all,
one of the primary concerns of the public administration experts who helped the president
create the OEM was to ensure that managerial control of the mobilization program
remained in the executive branch, as opposed to in private industry or the military. Asked
who was the “boss,” Roosevelt would regularly retort: “I am.”
76
Under immense pressure to
constantly adapt institutional resources to the burdens of total war, state agents were hard-
pressed to follow the coercive-intensive modes of development utilized in the past. And
yet, despite all of this, the OEM did not serve to undermine the tenets of American
democracy by enforcing a totalitarian blueprint for mobilization; rather, it upheld
democracy by facilitating a collaborative federal project.
Even if it was necessary for the president to take command of the crisis government
and for all groups – from local and state governments to private agencies and non-profit
organizations – to become involved in the effort to prepare national defenses for war, it was
equally essential to advisors in the FDR administration that executive leadership remain
beholden to the political will of the American people. While almost everyone in

75
Langdon Post to Harry Hopkins, “Memorandum on Authorities as a New Administrative Instrument for a
War Defense Economy,” n.d., Box 303 – Sherwood Collection, Folder Book 2: Organization of
Government for War (Presidential Emergency Powers), Hopkins Papers.
76
Brownlow, A Passion for Anonymity, 431.
186

government conceded that the struggle to meet the national emergency of war required the
temporary disruption of normal decisionmaking practices, nobody was prepared to give up
democratic principles and procedures. Aside from its obvious structural benefits – namely,
clear lines of administrative and legal authority for mobilization – the OEM not only
outlined the institutional framework within which actors participated in the national defense
program but also actively encouraged their voluntary cooperation.
Elsewhere in the world, such a precarious balance between executive control and
democratic accountability would no doubt have been viewed as a hindrance on effective
crisis governance. But in the FDR administration, advisors and officials alike were
convinced that it was the only way to secure the population from the existential threat of
war while simultaneously achieving democracy. Perhaps no one understood the benefits of
this middle ground more than Langdon Post, an administrator for the U.S. Housing
Authority. Post wrote an incisive memorandum for Harry Hopkins – his former boss in the
Federal Emergency Relief Agency, a rare advisor who had successfully transitioned from
relief administrator in the New Deal to one of the most influential diplomats in WWII –
offering an original vision for how to achieve democratic governance in war through the
creation of a new administrative instrument.
77
Though he suggested that such an instrument
could be found within the housing sector, the conclusions he reached were remarkably
similar to what many advisors saw as the primary contributions of the OEM’s
organizational logic.
Post’s memo argues that at the core of an effective national program, including but
not limited to the ongoing defense needs, “is actual community responsibility for the
success of that program” – responsibility ensured not by the appeal to moral or emotional
sentiments but rather grounded in “obligations imposed by law and carried out by authority
and power written into that law.” “Upon this basic principle,” Post explains, “we can build
and administer any national program we wish without disturbing our democratic
machinery. This is building a program from the ground up, deriving its strength and
support from the communities charged with the direct responsibility for its success and
administered by people responsible primarily to the community they serve, and secondarily

77
For the following quotes, see Post, “Memorandum on Authorities.”
187

to the government in Washington. In this way a real partnership can be formed, held
together [b]y mutual objectives and obligations, and carried out with joint responsibilities
and authority.” Simply put, what Post suggested was a collaborative form of federalism, in
which local and state governments and private agencies retained control over their
administrative duties while the national government provided the overall planning and
coordination of these specialized activities at the federal level.
Of course, Post admitted that the alternative option, a government that “derives its
strength from the top, centers all responsibility in one unit of government and consolidates
all its powers in one central authority,” could be more efficient at forcing people
throughout the country to act according to national interests. But along the way to a
successful program, this would have required the renunciation of democracy, an altogether
deplorable choice not only to Post but to practically everyone in the U.S., officials and
citizens equally. In a time of total war, Post concluded, “[T]he potential possibilities
inherent in the administration of a national program designed to integrate our productive
and distributive facilities through the medium of local or regional authorities [are]
enormous.” By harnessing the power of local communities through genuine responsibility,
collaboration would help cultivate a united democratic front to address any national crisis.
This principle rationale was not lost on others in the FDR administration. The
route outlined by Post largely paralleled what both the Committee on Administrative
Management and the planners at the National Planning Board had attempted during the
New Deal, in their efforts to decentralize and then coordinate economic and administrative
planning activities, as well as provide the president with the administrative resources
needed to facilitate democratic leadership through a reformed executive office. Over the
years, planning experts had learned the importance of moving well beyond the traditional
model of crisis governance, whereby leaders were unprepared and had to rely on ad hoc
institutional developments to address catastrophic conditions after they arose. Typically in
the past, this approach led to inefficiencies across emergency agencies; and a lack of
existing administrative capacities for the president to supervise activities nationwide meant
that local measures were left to their own devices, often drifting apart from the national
program. What made these periods especially alarming to New Dealers was that in order to
overcome such complications, officials relied on the anti-democratic solutions of the
188

national security state: dictatorship and widespread government interventions. Citing these
deficiencies in the examples of WWI mobilization and early New Deal recovery, planners
pushed the issue of preparedness more and more throughout the 1930s.
78

The way to avoid the difficulties of the past, as individuals in the FDR
administration saw it, was to carve out a middle ground between absolutist rule and liberal
self-government. Instead of the president simply arrogating crisis powers on a whim or
delegating these powers to independent actors, the key was to leave as much operating
authority with the various emergency agencies while at the same time coordinating these
separate activities through an executive office at the highest level of government. In this
scenario, as McReynolds of the OEM explains, “immediate responsibility for making
decisions regarding a specified emergency function is brought from the regular agencies
involved into the Executive Office of the President where it may be discharged from an
over-all point of view by an appropriate officer reporting directly to the Chief Executive.”
79

The OEM was constituted precisely with this administrative function in mind.
Shortly after taking over for McReynolds as the OEM Liaison Officer and special
assistant to the president in April 1941, Wayne Coy said as much in several compelling
addresses. Coy began his public service in the federal government as an administrator for
the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal, and later served as an assistant to
the U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippine Islands and assistant administrator in the
Federal Security Agency, making him an excellent candidate to fill McReynolds’ shoes –
and fill them he did. Coordinating independent activities within the national program was
undoubtedly the most difficult task faced by both men. But in sharp contrast to
McReynolds, who shunned publicity, Coy not only promoted the activities of the OEM in
public speeches across the U.S. throughout 1941
80
and in widely read publications like
Atlantic Monthly and the American Political Science Review,
81
he also sought to give more
active guidance to the emergency defense agencies by ramping up the liaison and

78
See the chapters above in Part I.
79
McReynolds, “The Office for Emergency Management,” 136.
80
See Wayne Coy, Address to Franklin College, Indiana, June 9, 1941, Container 26, Coy Papers; Wayne
Coy, Address to Indiana University, October 30, 1941, Coy Papers (also presented at Oberlin College on
December 5, 1941).
81
See, e.g., Coy, “I. Basic Problems;” Coy, “Teamwork in Washington;” Coy, “The Men of Government.”
189

informational duties of his position.
In one illuminating example, Coy spoke to Franklin College in June 1941 about the
urgency of being prepared for total war through an administrative system based on the
OEM.
82
He began with the assertion that a policy agenda based on evading involvement in
the European war was no longer feasible at that point. “Casting off the narcotic delusion of
security,” he said in provocative, stirring words, “we have accepted the necessity of pouring
a substantial part of our productive capacity into the insurance of our future survival
through a powerful military machine.” Two concerns arose with the construction of this
machinery, according to Coy: First, can we build it strong enough to defend against a
foreign attack? Second, can we build it in such a way that we do not abandon our
democratic traditions?
The latter of these questions proved most fundamental to the OEM’s responsibility
as the government’s primary coordinative device during WWII. The OEM was the central
institutional site through which the president cultivated relationships and devised functional
standards for war mobilization, in a way that was not possible in early periods. As part of
this extraordinary administrative framework, each individual emergency agency was
afforded the freedom to operate independently on their specific tasks while being
coordinated at the national level through the OEM liaison, without the need for dictatorial
controls, expanded executive powers, or reliance on compensatory measures – a tentative
balancing act that, in the same vein as Post’s memo and New Dealers’ past ambitions,
successfully garnered support for the national program through a collaborative federalism.

VII. Conclusion: institutional preparedness for war

Coy concluded his speech at Franklin College with a thought-provoking appeal: “Let no
historian look back upon our age and say that democracy failed to maintain itself as a
government or as a way of life because it could not solve the problem of utilizing the
resources at its command.” In many ways, it was the OEM that made Coy’s plea come to
fruition. The administrative structure created through the OEM furnished the executive
with the capacities to prepare for war and manage the nation’s resources during

82
For the following, see Coy, Address to Franklin College.
190

mobilization without undermining America’s commitment to democratic principles and
procedures. To say or imply that it had little relevance to statebuilding in WWII, as many
scholars have, would thus be to overlook not only what the advisors in the FDR
administration believed to be true but also what the history of mobilization demonstrates –
that the OEM was integral to the institutional organization for war and helped democratic
crisis governance succeed against the spread of totalitarianism.
What has been lost in prevailing historical accounts is the glaring continuity
between the OEM in WWII and the earlier New Deal momentum for democratic national
planning and executive reorganization described above in Part I. While it is clear that the
pressures of war in Europe inspired President Roosevelt to first consider administrative
reforms for national defense and, of course, influenced what was required for mobilization
to be effective, total war itself did not determine the path of institutional development
taken. Instead, past efforts in the 1930s to make the president an effective, democratic
leader of the government shaped how mobilization was implemented, specifically the form
taken by the OEM. Advisors in the FDR administration carried over the New Deal drive to
give the president administrative resources to perform his constitutional duties as top
executive, gradually converting the skeletal institutional framework outlined in 1939 into a
fully developed machinery for wartime national emergency management.
This mode of argumentation helps explain why the government was better
prepared for what was to come in WWII than the Wilson administration was upon entry
to WWI. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks on December 7, 1941, the American
state had already developed much of the machinery required for defense mobilization and
harnessing the economy for wartime production. Many of the alliances struck between
industry and the armed forces were forged in the early years of defense planning through
the emergency agencies coordinated by the OEM, and these agencies provided the
foundation for the security apparatus built after the U.S. officially entered the war late in
1941 (refer to Charts 5.3 and 5.4 below). Even though the demands of total war
necessitated further legislative action and institutional change as mobilization carried on
through 1945, the administrative machine initially constructed during the defense period
191

prepared the government far beyond what was possible in earlier years.
83

With the institutional system already intact when the U.S. declared war, the
subsequent problems faced by the FDR administration were of a fundamentally different
kind than those experienced in forming the OEM. Having created the machinery, its
separate operating units for each war resource, and its coordinating mechanisms to
integrate the planning and execution of the various wartime agencies at the federal level, the
difficulty in wartime was to swiftly reorganize the existing structure to the ongoing demands
of total war, especially the complications involved in civil defense preparations,
transportation, and industrial production. The remaining line of action was to manage the
machinery that was already established.
84
As Luther Gulick, a leading public administration
scholar and central member of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management,
put it, the assignment was to implement an “evolutionary approach to war organization”
initiated through periods of flexibility and institutional reordering.
85
In this task, as in others,
the OEM proved indispensable.
It was the institutional structure created through the OEM, as we shall examine in
the following chapter, that laid the foundation for democratic policy alternatives in total
war. The OEM provided an unprecedented administrative framework for executive leaders
to coordinate the WWII mobilization into a national program, without resorting to the
dictatorial or compensatory measures employed in WWI. The OEM functioned as a
preparatory emergency device that facilitated planning for wartime crises in civilian defense,
transportation, and industrial production ahead of time. It provided the necessary channels
of communication, liaison, and coordination to bring together the various emergency
agencies and private actors involved in mobilization. Time and again throughout the war,
officials struggled to prevent the need for expansions in coercive powers by utilizing the
OEM administrative machine. The OEM not only made total mobilization more
democratic and effective but also expanded the array of available policy options at the FDR
administration’s disposal.

83
See Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 92.
84
See Ibid., 277.
85
Gulick, Administrative Reflections, 27-28. See also Gulick, “War Organization.”
192

193

194

195

196

Table 5.1. List of Agencies Coordinated through the OEM
Name Date Created Date Abolished Notes
National Defense Advisory
Commission (NDAC)
May 28, 1940
NDAC Division of Industrial
Materials
Transferred to OPM
NDAC Division of Industrial
Production
Transferred to OPM
NDAC Division of Labor
Transferred to OPM on March
17, 1941 (EO 8629)
NDAC Division of Agriculture
Succeeded by Office of
Agricultural Defense Relations in
the Department of Agriculture
NDAC Division of Price
Stabilization
Transferred to OPACS
NDAC Division of
Transportation

December 18,
1941 (EO 8989)
Absorbed by ODT
NDAC Division of Consumer
Protection
Transferred to OPACS
Bureau of Research and
Statistics
June 20, 1940
Transferred to OPM on January
7, 1941 (EO 8629)
National Defense Research
Committee
June 27, 1940
Setup by order of the Council of
National Defense
Division of State and Local
Cooperation
August 5, 1940 Transferred to OCD
Office for Coordination of
Commercial and Cultural
Relations between the
American Republics
August 16,
1940

Defense Communications
Board
September 24,
1940 (EO
8546)

Name changed to Board of War
Communications on June 15,
1942 (EO 9183)
Office of Production
Management (OPM)
January 7, 1941
(EO 8629)
January 24,
1942 (EO 9040)
Absorbed by WPB
Division of Defense Housing
Coordination
January 11,
1941 (EO
8632)

Took over for NDAC Defense
Housing Coordinator
Office of Price Administration
and Civilian Supply (OPACS)
April 11, 1941
(EO 8734)
August 28, 1941
Combined NDAC Price and
Consumer Divisions; transitioned
into OPA
Office of Civilian Defense
(OCD)
May 20, 1941
(EO 8757)

Office of Scientific Research
and Development
June 28, 1941
(EO 8807)

Office of the Coordinator of
Inter-American Affairs
July 30, 1941
(EO 8840)

Office of Price Administration
(OPA)
August 28,
1941 (8875)
Took over for OPACS
Office of Defense Health and
Welfare Services
September 3,
1941 (EO
8890)

Took over for Federal Security
Administrator of the Council of
National Defense
Office of Facts and Figures
October 24,
1941 (EO
8922)

197

Office of Lend-Lease
Administration
October 28,
1941 (EO
8926)

Office of Defense
Transportation (ODT)
December 18,
1941 (8989)

Assumed functions of the NDAC
Transportation Division
National War Labor Board
January 12,
1942 (EO
9017)

Assumed functions of the
National Defense Mediation
Board
War Production Board (WPB)
January 16,
1942 (EO
9024)

Took over for Supply Priorities
and Allocations Board
War Shipping Administration
February 7,
1942 (EO
9054)

Office of Alien Property
Custodian
March 11, 1942
(EO 9095)

War Relocation Authority
March 18, 1942
(EO 9102)

Created as a part of Japanese
Internment in accordance with
EO 9066 on February 19, 1942
War Manpower Commission
April 18, 1942
(EO 9139)

Office of War Information
June 13, 1942
(EO 9182)

Assumed responsibilities of the
Office of Facts and Figures,
Office of Government Reports,
OEM Division of Information,
and several branches of the
Coordinator of Information
Office of Economic
Stabilization
October 3,
1942 (EO
9250)

Committee on Fair
Employment Practice
May 27, 1943
(EO 9346)

Was previously part of the OPM
and later the War Manpower
Commission
Foreign Economic
Administration
September 25,
1943 (EO
9380)

Source: Office of War Information, United States Government Manual, Fall 1942; Office of War
Information, United States Government Manual, 1945; U.S. Information Service, United States
Government Manual, March 1941; U.S. Information Service, United States Government Manual, Spring
1942.
198

Chapter 6.
Managing the total mobilization program

In the absence of drastic interwar developments, World
War II mobilization most likely would have picked up
where World War I mobilization left off. Significantly
affecting America’s political economy, however, the Great
Depression and the New Deal had far-reaching
consequences for harnessing the World War II economy.
– Paul Koistinen
1

I. From total mobilization to permanent emergency

So far in this dissertation, I have demonstrated the impact of national planning on crisis
governance, economic management, and administrative reorganizations in the New Deal.
Furthermore, the previous chapter showed how, in the struggle to retain managerial
authority for total mobilization, executive officials repurposed New Deal planning
innovations in the early years of World War II defense preparations through the executive
institutional development of the Office for Emergency Management. At virtually every
point in this narrative, we have seen how the discourse and ideas of expert advisors
facilitated a democratic break from the dictatorial and noninterventionist options available
at these times, which generally correspond to the expectations of the analytical models in
IR theory. This final historical chapter ties all of these pieces together by explaining how
changes in planning expertise and statebuilding led to concrete policy alternatives in total
war and, in turn, conditioned the possibility for permanent emergency in the U.S.
Even as the IR theory models represent actual policy choices that were on the table
during WWII, executive leadership in the FDR administration explicitly avoided the
option to simply reinstate earlier patterns. They sought to address the complications of

1
Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 500.
199

total war not through coercion- or capital-centric approaches but by converting the
democratic middle-ground first experimented with in the New Deal. Planning provided a
compelling alternative for officials to preserve overall managerial control over mobilization
while at the same time upholding their commitment to democratic ideals and procedures.
The OEM allowed for a collaborative federal system in which authority for mobilization
was decentralized to various local and non-state actors, and then coordinated at the national
level, without dictatorial interventions or unwieldy free-market principles. Nothing even
remotely resembling this configuration was created in World War I, nor did anyone
propose such an administrative system based on the lessons learned from that experience.
What remains to be explained is how the OEM shaped policymaking during
WWII and paved the way for enduring emergency powers. My argument, simply put, is
that New Deal national planning transformed the processes of institutional development
and crisis governance in total war and after. To make this case, I examine key differences
in mobilization practices between WWI and WWII for several issue-areas. Section II
shows how placing civil defense within the collaborative federal system of the OEM greatly
improved communication between the different levels of the program and made
coordination more effective nationwide. Section III argues that difficulties in transportation
were no longer resolved through executive controls of private transportation systems, as
before, but through planning between agencies in the OEM. Section IV traces how
economic management was coordinated through the OEM administrative framework, and
how the structural conception of the national economy introduced in the New Deal helped
advisors prevent bottlenecks and inefficiencies without intrusive government controls.
Section V elaborates on how these changes fundamentally revolutionized American
statebuilding. During WWII, national planning expertise and the executive office carved
out a unique space for liberal-constitutional government in crisis. Not only were leaders in
the FDR administration able to legally reorganize the wartime institutional apparatus as
needed to deal with emergencies, they also organized the OEM in such a way that experts
could coordinate the efforts of local, state, and regional communities into a unified national
mobilization program – all while avoiding the dictatorial authorities witnessed abroad. Yet
even as this pathway was taken precisely to limit the resort to absolutist controls, it also,
paradoxically, opened the door for permanent emergency. Giving the president enduring
200

constitutional authorities for administrative management, outside legislative control,
planners essentially embedded emergency authorities in a modern, intercurrent American
state. Temporary institutional developments would no longer be necessary, because the
foundations for crisis governance had already been laid.

II. Civilian defense and the promise of collaborative federalism

We must all realize the necessity of planning in advance
to cope with any attack which may be made upon our
great production centers.
– Ralph H. Burke
2

In total war, a fundamental complication was to successfully prepare for and defend against
a potential enemy attack. Following the official declaration of war on April 6, 1917,
President Wilson immediately set up a Section on Cooperation with States in the Council
of National Defense. Within sixty hours, Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, had sent a
telegram to each state governor, imploring them to meet at a joint conference on defense,
to be held in Washington, D.C. In his address to the conference the following month,
Baker underscored the urgency with which they should prepare for what was widely
considered a total war: “Modern war is no longer what war was aforetime, in the sense of
relatively few people being selected out of a nation and sent off to compose its military
force. Under modern conditions, the whole nation is at war and it is at war as much in the
home and in the factory and on the farm as it is on the fighting front.”
3
Given the utter
totality of modern warfare, the Wilson administration deemed the creation of councils in
each state a high priority, to begin preparations to defend the civilian population.
Although numerous committees and agencies had already been established to
conduct certain aspects of defense preparations and initiate war mobilization, there was still
a need for a national governmental body to coordinate these disparate activities. State
councils were envisioned as an intermediary between the local actors involved and the
officials in the executive branch. “It was obvious,” an annual report of the CND recalled,

2
Burke, in Plant Protection Conference, Sixth Regional Office of Civilian Defense, April 1 and 2, 1943,
Chicago, IL, Entry 57, Box 29, OCD Records.
3
Quoted in “Activities of State and Local Councils of Defense,” Entry 10, Box 20, Folder 55 – World War I,
OCD Records.
201

“that decentralization was necessary and that the work of these organizations should be
directed by some central body in each State. On the other hand, it was equally necessary
that there be some centralizing organization at Washington to act as a clearing house
between the States, to secure uniformity when uniformity was desirable, and to make the
services of the organizations in the several States available to the various branches of the
Federal Government.”
4

At the inaugural meeting of state governors, the CND distributed a plan of
organization and an outline of the functions they were to perform – everything from the
finance, legal advising, and coordination of defense, to the supply of medical resources,
state protection, and transportation in the event of an emergency brought on by enemy
attack. This was the first time that such a comprehensive assignment had been undertaken
to order defenses across all states into a national program, and so how to deal with
potential complications was a constant subject of debate. “The means of accomplishing the
task” of cooperation between local, state, and federal actors, President Wilson explained to
the conference attendees, “are very complicated, because we must draw many pieces of
machinery together and we must see that they act not only to a common object but at the
same time and in a common spirit.”
5
These words rang truer than perhaps even Wilson
could have predicted.
During the course of the war, the institutional machinery created for the purpose of
uniting popular morale behind the defense effort regularly clashed. The jurisdictional lines
of authority remained unclear, and confusion over responsibilities persisted. There were
widespread tensions between the countervailing forces to grant autonomy to different actors
and the overall need for coordination among them. The state councils came into conflict
with other sections of the CND (e.g., the Woman’s Committee), federal agencies, and non-
state organizations (e.g., the Red Cross). Due to a lack of communication between these
groups, inefficiencies and redundancies proliferated. As the Secretary of War put it,
“Federal authorities have, not infrequently, caused confusion by going directly to the State
Councils with recommendations – sometimes with conflicting recommendations.”
6

4
Annual report of the Council of National Defense section concerning State Councils of Defense, Entry 10,
Box 20, Folder 55 – World War I, OCD Records.
5
Quoted in “Activities of State and Local Councils of Defense.”
6
Letter from Newton D. Baker, July 24, 1918, Entry 10, Box 20, Folder 55 – World War I, OCD Records.
202

In order to address some of these limitations, the CND communicated a resolution
to the state councils in January 1918, mandating that all requests be made through a single
chain of command. But even this effort did little to solve the problem of inefficiency
between the organizations involved in defense, and another idea for avoiding
uncoordinated action was presented at the second national conference of the state councils.
Which was to create a “War Board” with councils in each state and local community where
there were federal representatives, so as to better integrate local, state, and national
programs.
7
While the proposal came rather late in the war, and was only tested for a brief
time before the Armistice in November 1918, this device represented an important
advance in the cooperation between units of government. The lines of authority sought
before, with local and state communities remaining autonomous yet responsible to a
hierarchical command, were retained, but the War Board served as a clearer administrative
resource for resolving conflicts.
8

Decades later, as the FDR administration also looked to prepare for a total war, this
earlier experience was crucial for establishing interdependent networks of communication
and authority across the country. In organizing and coordinating the nation’s resources for
defense, President Roosevelt re-formed the National Defense Advisory Commission of the
CND within the Office for Emergency Management, on May 28, 1940.
9
A few months
later, in August, the NDAC Division of State and Local Cooperation was established to
carry over the Wilson administration’s ambition to manage the various parts of the defense
program through state councils. Then-Liaison Officer of the OEM, William McReynolds,
expressed in an NDAC meeting on August 1 that the division would “provide leadership
for the states in establishing their defense organizations and… serve as a point of contact
between the national, state, and local governments on defense problems.”
10
With Frank
Bane as director, the division’s responsibilities would be to act as the primary channel of
communication for defense, receive reports from state and local councils concerning
coordination issues, clear information between the different actors, and advise the NDAC

7
See “Activities of State and Local Councils of Defense.”
8
See Carey, “State Councils of Defense,” 134.
9
See above Ch. 5, Sec. IV.
10
William H. McReynolds, “Commission Minutes,” August 1, 1940, Entry 4, OCD Records.
203

about the most effective use for state and local communities.
In a memorandum that was sent to state governors announcing the creation of the
division, Bane solicited their participation, imploring, “Preparation for our national defense
requires cooperative effort with unity of purpose throughout the country.” He reasoned
that since the constitutional and legal authorities for defense were dispersed among local,
state, and federal governments – each with its own policies, programs, and institutional
systems – the NDAC division would constitute a national administrative machinery to
utilize and coordinate, rather than coerce, the agencies already in existence. Through the
“blending of powers and harmonious collaboration, public and private organizations,
groups and individuals may participate effectively in preparation for our mutual protection
against any threat of danger,” he said.
11

It was not long after Roosevelt revived the NDAC that the Division of State and
Local Cooperation began studying WWI defense measures through the state councils. In a
report on past activities, the authors suggested that while the state councils were admirable
in their efforts to institute a coordinated system, “the gears of the machinery set up for this
purpose clashed audibly throughout most of the war effort.” They found that there were
many instances of “friction” between the organizations involved in civil defense.
12
William
D. Carey, a scholar at Columbia University who later went to work for the Bureau of the
Budget, argued further that these inefficiencies were the result of a “lack of prevision.”
“The Defense Councils,” he wrote, “were conceived in anxiety and delivered in
distraction.”
13
It was the disorderly, haphazard way in which defense was implemented that,
many advisors looking back believed, had caused so much headache and confusion over
how to move forward with coordination.
The desire to create a collaborative federal arrangement for national defense, then,
was shared in both times, but the question of how they were to implement such an ideal
was still left unanswered. Nor did the NDAC division in WWII offer an adequate solution.
Much like its WWI precedent, it continually suffered from a lack of clearly recognized

11
Memorandum, “State and Local Cooperation in National Defense,” August 2, 1940. Cf. remarks made on
Bane’s behalf, in Meeting Minutes, Southern Governors’ Conference, New Orleans, LA, March 15-17, 1941,
Entry 1, Box 6, Folder 337 – Southern Governors’ Conference, OCD Records.
12
“Activities of State and Local Councils of Defense.”
13
Carey, “State Councils of Defense,” 133.
204

authority. The division typically relied on voluntary cooperation – Bane claimed in March
1941, for example, that “the focal point of the National Defense Program… is shifting more
and more from Washington to the states and localities”
14
– yet it was not given powers to
manage these self-governing groups. Other federal emergency agencies, local communities,
and non-governmental actors frequently called into question the division’s authority to
organize defense. And even though division officers maintained regular contact with
defense councils by attending meetings, conventions, and regional conferences,
15
from the
beginning there was insufficient coordination between the moving parts of the defense
program; emergency measures at the local and state levels were not successfully
harmonized with those of the national government.
In an attempt to better integrate defense preparations, many advisors in the FDR
administration advocated that the division become an independent office within the OEM
machinery, separate from the advisory duties of the NDAC. The president commissioned
the Bureau of the Budget to study the overall condition of civilian defense. They
concluded that it would be beneficial to create a new federal agency with clear authority to
operate the civilian defense activities of local, state, and regional communities through the
OEM.
16
Wayne Coy, the OEM Liaison Officer, began drafting an executive order to
establish such an office.
17
Afterwards, a presidential committee consisting of Coy, Harold
D. Smith (BoB director), and William C. Bullitt was appointed to consider the problems
of the existing defense program. As early as April 1941, the committee members spoke
with President Roosevelt about removing civilian defense from the NDAC and placing it
squarely within the OEM organizational structure.
If the main difficulty experienced in the past was in coordinating actors at all levels
of government, then one possible solution was to develop a single administrative agency for
defense preparations in the executive office. On May 20, 1941, this ideal was translated

14
Quoted in Funigiello, The Challenge, 46.
15
See Elwyn A. Mauck, “Civilian Defense in the United States, 1940-1945,” Ch. II, Entry 231 & 232, Box 1,
OCD Records.
16
See Ibid.
17
At the time, he called it the “Office of Home Defense,” but, in order to avoid confusion with the special
meaning attached to home relief in the New Deal, the name was changed shortly thereafter to “Office of
Civilian Defense.” See Container 3, Folder Conferences with President Roosevelt, 1941, April 4, 1941, Smith
Papers.
205

into reality with the creation of the Office of Civilian Defense. The OCD absorbed the
responsibilities of the NDAC division, in the hopes that as its own office in the OEM
system, it would be better-equipped to organize defense at local, state, regional, and federal
levels. Because no federal agency had yet taken charge of coordinating the defense
program through state and local councils, the existing machinery still had not been fully
utilized through the NDAC division. “The basic objective of the Office of Civilian Defense
as a central contact agency,” a memorandum explained, “will be to bring about the greatest
possible utilization of state and local resources in the national defense program.”
18
In
addition to serving as the central organizing device for defense, the OCD was also
appointed to initiate plans for protecting the civilian population against air raids and to
develop civilian volunteer participation programs. New York City mayor, Fiorello H.
LaGuardia, was chosen as the first director.
Even as the OCD streamlined executive managerial control over defense, it most
certainly did not function as a coercive body. Just as planning activities in the New Deal
were decentralized and coordinated through an executive board,
19
the OCD combined the
goals of statebuilding and liberal self-government in an alternative arrangement. On the one
hand, it established a hierarchical institutional architecture – what members of the OCD
called a “Washington-regional-state-local channel of communication” – to harmonize the
defense activities of actors throughout the country. On the other hand, by setting up this
overarching administrative machinery, the OCD preserved the principles of local, state,
and industrial autonomy. It afforded other government agencies, non-state organizations,
and civilian communities the opportunity to collaborate without imposing the totalitarian
controls of the planned society. Through the OCD, various groups became “vital
mechanisms” for translating national plans into action on the ground, and they were able to
contribute to defense in their own way.
20

Since the OCD’s work was intended to be as decentralized as possible, so that each

18
Memorandum on Program and Organization, November 6, 1941, Box 2, Folder 14, Office of Civilian
Defense – 1941, OCD Records.
19
See above Ch. 2, Sec. VI.
20
Quotes are in Memorandum on Program and Organization. Cf. the claims in Mauck, “Civilian Defense,”
Ch. XV; “Civilian Aspects of the National Defense Program,” Draft, March 20, 1941, Box 2, Folder 14 –
Office of Civilian Defense, 1941, OEM Records; Robert McElroy, “Narrative Account of the Office of
Civilian Defense,” Ch. II, Entry 231 & 232, Box 1, OCD Records.
206

community had the flexibility to govern itself, one of the chief complications remaining was
to coordinate activities within the overarching framework of national defense planning.
Regionalization was understood as the key to correcting this oversight, and in a similar
move to the one taken by New Deal planners less than a decade before,
21
the OCD divided
administrative responsibilities for civil defense into nine regions, with an office and director
in each. Planning extended the boundaries of national defense past existing jurisdictional
lines. Foreseeing possible complications with organizing a response to defense-related
emergencies, the OCD engaged in activities to enframe the regional map around major
metropolitan centers – those centers of industrial production that were seen as prime target
areas for a potential enemy attack. “If air raids ever came,” an OCD memo states, “the
structure would be at hand for as much central leadership, coordination, and direction as
might be necessary to bring separate states and cities into effective joint action.”
22

Within this groundbreaking institutional network, OCD director, LaGuardia, was
intent on persuading the American citizenry that an enemy attack was imminent and that
the OCD was necessary to prepare the nation. Air-raid defense was of utmost importance,
he claimed in October 1941, because “total war recognizes no boundaries” and “every city
is now a legitimate target of attack.”
23
The OCD’s resources, accordingly, were channeled
towards civilian protection schemes. For this task, they studied and disseminated
information to the public on how to respond to an attack-related emergency (e.g., ensuring
adequate provision of police, fire, and medical services); they sustained the connections
between local, state, and federal governments initiated by the NDAC division; and they
cultivated relationships with non-governmental agencies, such as the Red Cross, and local
community volunteer groups.
Yet while the OCD members tackled their assignment of civilian protection from
the outset, they initially lagged on other responsibilities, and the office’s reputation and
effectiveness suffered as a result.
24
Beginning in early winter 1941, they took further steps to
expand their program by developing two more functions: 1) the coordination of relations

21
See above Ch. 2, Sec. VI.
22
Memorandum on Program and Organization.
23
Quoted in Funigiello, The Challenge, 51.
24
See Mauck, “Civilian Defense.”
207

and activities between all defense agencies and state and local communities; and 2) the
promotion of civilian participation in defense activities.
25
Smith of the BoB also suggested
to President Roosevelt in mid-December 1941 that the OCD needed a full-time director,
rather than someone like LaGuardia, who only devoted part of this time to the position, as
he was still Mayor of New York City at the time. Roosevelt made LaGuardia accept James
Landis as executive officer, on January 2, 1942. These changes in focus and leadership
portended an even greater transformation in the role that the OCD played in civil defense.
As director, Landis concentrated on reorganizing the OCD even further by
strengthening field organization, recruiting top administrative personnel, and reshaping
agency programs to offset criticism from the press and Congress.
26
Most saliently, he shifted
OCD functions to emphasize civilian war services. Up to that point, the office generally
overlooked the need to secure production facilities essential to the national economy and
war effort. Just as WWI defense activities had been centered on population security, the
OCD was originally concerned with constructing an administrative structure to bring civil
defense into an ordered national program. As production demands increased throughout
1941, however, it became apparent that industrial factories and other systems integral to the
arsenal of democracy were perhaps even more vulnerable to attack than the population.
The enemy, it was beginning to be believed, would select precise targets to disrupt
America’s production flow and mobilization program, as opposed to generalized strikes
aimed at diminishing civilian morale.
Ralph H. Burke, an OCD coordinator for the Chicago metropolitan area, best
summarized this fear in an address to regional OCD offices. Attacks on industrial centers
“are definite possibilities,” he implored, “for if the enemy is able to extend his attacks to
civilian centers in the United States, as he has in other belligerent countries, the production
centers which abound in this region offer most inviting targets… As the Axis nations see
their invincible armies and mechanized divisions crumbling, as they see the constant flow
of troops and supplies continue in spite of their U-boats, they will in desperation look for
other means to disrupt our war effort. The central region of the United States is the great
workshop and supply base. What more likely target could the enemy seek? Look at your

25
See Memorandum on Program and Organization.
26
See Mauck, “Civilian Defense.”
208

map or your globe and you will realize how easily attainable this target would be for an air
squadron to reach over the North Pole…. Consider plant protection as insurance against
enemy action. You may never need it; we hope not; but if you do, the protection will be
worth every bit of thought, effort and money you have put into it.”
27

To put it another way, the very systems created to secure the people against the
threat of war through an emergency-war machine had become the primary objects of
security and government protection.
28
A Committee on Protective Measures for Strategic
Facilities was established in fall 1941 to investigate government programs to secure vital
facilities. On November 17, the committee submitted a report to Brigadier General L. D.
Gasser (OCD assistant director), concerning the need for a federal mechanism to
coordinate defense. “Into the framework” of the OCD, the report finds, “must go planning
and action for safeguarding those important supply, production, storage, transportation,
and communication facilities vital to national defense. These are the lifeblood and nerve
system of our national economy. Their continued function must be assured. Herein lies
the task of the program for facility security.”
29
Not only did the OCD need to continue
protecting civilians from possible air-raids but it also needed to begin securing systems vital
to war mobilization that were considered vulnerable to attack or sabotage.
With these mounting concerns, a Facility Security Program was created in the
OCD, in May 1942. Extending the OCD’s earlier emphasis of civilian protection, the
program was tasked with defining what qualified as essential facilities, and with assuring
their protection. This entailed, first and foremost, “a selection of facilities whose security is
essential to the national economy and vital to defense,” and only secondarily, a program to
secure those facilities.
30
They deemed communication systems, air commerce, highways,
railways, forests, mines, gas and water utilities, public buildings, and storage facilities of
prime importance. The program recruited volunteer inspectors to determine what
protective services were critical. Counter-sabotage measures usually took the form of
heightened policing at industrial locations and strategically important transportation points.

27
Plant Protection Conference. Cf. Henry L. Lohr’s remarks at the same conference: “If we are attacked, of
course, the industrial areas are going to be the main and prime targets.”
28
Cf. Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security.”
29
Untitled Report, November 17, 1941, Entry 57, Box 29, OCD Records.
30
Ibid.
209

A different approach was required to protect against air-borne attacks. Program officers
proposed camouflaging essential facilities through blackouts or smokescreens, and they
began testing the effectiveness of these actions at various sites.
While the overall concern to prepare national defenses for possible enemy attack
was shared by leaders during WWI and WWII, both programs were implemented in
different ways. Whereas the Wilson administration often relied on temporary executive
centralizations to manage the limitations of the existing defense structure, the WWII
federal administrative framework of the OEM allowed for a more dynamic approach to
statebuilding for defense preparations. Rather than instituting dictatorial measures to direct
the activities of various groups, the FDR administration was able to coordinate the
independent efforts of local, state, and regional communities into a collaborative program.
Defense planning was predicated on the notion that actors with differing expertise could
cooperate to continually revise the national program as needed, without a rigid top-down
agenda. What is more, with the alternative understanding of the national economy as a vast,
integrated system, WWII civil defense needs expanded beyond the earlier population
security concerns to include protection of facilities vital to war production.

III. Coordinating domestic transportation through the OEM system
31

In our own present emergency, transportation is so vitally
important to our national safety and national economy it
must be considered foremost among national issues in
relation to its effect upon the efficiency and total potential
production of the nation as a whole.
– J. K. Lowell
32

Another central complication faced in total war was to develop adequate transportation
capacities to distribute essential materials, armaments, and troops for the mobilization
program. Domestic transportation during WWI was predominately handled on the
railways, and the burden of coordination initially fell to private companies. The Wilson
administration’s National Defense Advisory Commission only began setting up

31
For this section, see generally Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, Ch. 6; Cuff, “United States
Mobilization;” Kerr, American Railroad Politics; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 250-253; Koistinen,
Mobilizing for Modern War, 254-256.
32
J. K. Lowell, “Transportation,” Box 4, Folder 22 – Office of Defense Transportation, OEM Records.
210

transportation for war in early 1917. Daniel Willard, a railroad executive who led the
NDAC’s transportation activities, elected to utilize the so-called cooperative committees,
which combined the advisory assignment of government agencies with the expertise of
industries. In an effort to better organize the use of existing transportation systems and
businesses, the NDAC worked closely with the American Railway Association, a group that
advocated for commercial interests. Through this alliance between government and
industry, Willard struck a resolution with railroad executives in mid-April 1917, days after
the United States entered the war, shoring up their commitment and assistance to
coordinate independent railways into a national system.
The agreement established the Railroad War Board, consisting of five railroad
presidents tasked with coordinating actions for war mobilization.
33
The board sought to
make transport of goods and armaments more efficient by increasing freight-train loads and
limiting non-essential, passenger travel at certain times. But railroad companies, still under
private control, ultimately failed to meet the intense stresses placed on transportation
throughout 1917, and the board had insufficient capacities to manage these shortcomings.
First and foremost, as the country began its push towards full mobilization, the financial
state of the railroad industry had become dire. With increased operating costs, it was not
always in companies’ interest to pool resources, since the earnings of some businesses
would have been more affected than others. And because anti-trust laws had been
suspended for wartime, the government did not have direct authority to force railroad
companies to comply when they defected.
Labor posed another set of problems for effective railroad transportation.
34
The
Selective Service Act, passed in May 1917, gave the president legal authority to draft able-
bodied men in their twenties, of which there were roughly 70,000 rail workers. In 1917,
moreover, labor strikes had reached an all-time high, at some 4,450, and unions had
planned to organize a nationwide strike by the end of the year, threatening to debilitate the
mobilization program, already devastated by the pitiful operations of railroad companies
across the country. To make matters worse, as time went on there were more and more

33
For the following, see Annual Report to the President for the Year 1942 (marked Confidential), Container
203, Folder Office of Defense Transportation, Hopkins Papers. Cf. Kerr, American Railroad Politics.
34
For the following, see Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 143-145.
211

equipment shortages and railway congestions. Various government agencies and military
departments responsible for industrial mobilization had issued priority orders without
taking into account the existing lack of resources to sustain the extraordinary traffic. The
ongoing crisis was also exacerbated by the snowy conditions of winter 1917-1918, causing
significant delays in railway transportation.
While at first the Wilson administration tried to assuage labor disputes and cure
railroad inefficiencies through conciliatory actions (e.g., supporting unions and collective
bargaining rights or attaining the voluntary cooperation of railway association executives),
they increasingly utilized expanded executive powers. As transportation issues began
paralyzing the national mobilization effort, President Wilson seized control of
transportation in December 1917 through the legislative authority already set by the Army
Appropriations Act of 1916 and later extended through the Railway Control Act of 1918.
The pressures of total war had become so great and the national mobilization program so
disjointed that this coercive move was considered essential to reorder the system most vital
to wartime transportation: railways.
35
“Neither the President nor anybody else in the
Administration wanted to take them over,” said Secretary of the Treasury, William G.
McAdoo. “It was done as an imperative war measure.”
36

Although such a coercive move would no doubt have faced widespread opposition
in peacetime, the necessities of war made it indispensable, and there was little resistance.
The U.S. Railroad Administration was created for the purpose of nationalizing
transportation through the executive branch. With McAdoo appointed as director-general,
the administration sought to improve the financial state of companies and to rationalize the
fragmented rail system across the country into a unified arrangement by commandeering
private properties that belonged to railroad industries; by prioritizing certain types of freight
travel; and by stopping passenger traffic to allow for essential transportation of military
supplies, troops, and armaments.
37
Free-market competition and monopolization was
virtually eliminated in favor of government control. The Railroad Administration
determined freight rates, resource allocation, and even wages, in an effort to quell labor

35
Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 256.
36
Quoted in Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 145.
37
See Rogers, “Presidential Dictatorship,” 137.
212

unrest and the ever-present threat of unionized workers organizing a strike.
The results of the government’s experiment to direct transportation were mixed.
38

On the one hand, the financial condition of transportation industries improved, and
businesses were compensated for their efforts, so much so that some Progressives
advocated that government control become a more permanent solution to inefficiencies in
the continental rail system. On the other hand, even though companies were reimbursed
an annual rent equivalent to operating costs, the value of these payments gradually declined
due to inflation, and business leaders pushed to retain control from the government. It was
not until March 1920, well over a year after the Armistice, that the Wilson administration
gave back the railroad system to owners – and not without caveats. The legislation
sanctioning the return of railways to private management, the Transportation Act of 1920,
authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission to set rates, determine expenditures, and
regulate the construction of facilities for years to come.
Liberal self-government in the railroad industry had been transformed, such that by
the start of WWII, there were several groups that had already been tasked with promoting
the efficient flow of traffic on railways, highways, and waterways. The Association of
American Railroads was created in the mid-1930s, combining the responsibilities and
expertise of a handful of other industry-promoting groups, like the earlier American
Railway Association utilized in WWI. Additionally, the Interstate Commerce Commission
had garnered further influence in the interwar period to organize transportation across the
country. Yet their capacities to address issues at the local level remained limited, and their
regulatory powers over private companies were still constrained. One clear option for the
FDR administration would have been to amplify the authorities of these organizations,
striking a compensatory path through the WWI cooperative committees. They decided,
instead, to develop a single agency to coordinate transportation problems through the
executive, without coercive measures.
Shortly after May 1940, when Roosevelt revived the NDAC in the Office for
Emergency Management, the commission consisted of seven distinct advisory areas, one of
which was transportation. The NDAC’s Transportation Division was run by Ralph Budd,

38
For the following, see Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, 146-147, 152-153.
213

president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad and the Association of
American Railroads. In contrast to other NDAC sections that were more engaged in the
mobilization program, there was a general lack of urgency to organize transportation, given
that the ICC was already managing a surplus of transportation facilities. Furthermore, as a
railroad executive, Budd was intent on avoiding further government intrusion in the private
planning of transportation; he believed that his division could be most useful in an
advisory, rather than a domineering, role.
39

Thus, in an effort to minimize the government’s influence, the NDAC division
vigorously sought out industry cooperation. Budd created subdivisions for each
transportation sector – from railways to highways to inland waterways – and these
committees assisted private companies by making recommendations about equipment use,
developing priorities, and advising on issues related to congestion, resource allocation, and
defense against sabotage.
40
Even these activities were negligible, however, because the
division largely relied on the voluntary assistance of industry leaders, trade associations, and
“dollar-a-year” advisors to prepare transportation systems for mobilization. “Protecting the
transportation sector from the regulatory hand of the government,” Koistinen remarks,
“remained Budd’s first priority.”
41
And just as private companies were ill-equipped to
handle the substantial increases in traffic during WWI, the NDAC division’s compensatory
practices threatened to disrupt the flow of essential materials and troops, as defense began
ramping up for another total war.
As early as spring 1941, not even an entire year after the NDAC started its defense
activities based on WWI patterns, various planning experts in the National Resources
Planning Board
42
and Harold Smith at the Bureau of the Budget started drafting proposals
for alternative institutional arrangements for transportation. They uniformly recommended
the establishment of an agency in the OEM administrative structure, so that planning and
action could be directed by someone who was not a business leader in the transportation
industry, and thus could be more hands-on than Budd had been through his compensatory

39
Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 25.
40
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 157.
41
Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 26.
42
A successor to the National Planning Board discussed above in Part I, especially Ch. 2.
214

approach.
43
Meanwhile, the BoB enthusiastically opposed efforts by industrialists on the
production side of mobilization at the time to take over transportation functions, and
instead proposed the creation of a separate transportation agency in the OEM.
44

In summer 1941, Ralph Watkins, assistant director of the planning board, wrote a
personal letter to Isador Lubin, a longtime economist in the FDR administration, declaring
the “urgent need for unified transport control through an emergency transportation office.
It is not a question of an imminent breakdown in the transportation system, but rather one
of making more effective use of our transportation plant.” He forwarded the letter to OEM
Liaison Officer, Wayne Coy, trusting that the OEM, instead of simply decentralizing
transportation to private industries, would provide a stable institutional structure for overall
coordination. “Perhaps the most disquieting aspect of the whole problem lies in the present
tendency toward breaking up transportation authority at a time when the urgency of the
situation requires integration of authority. I am convinced that sooner or later we shall have
to provide for an energetic exercise of coordinated control over transportation by an
impartial governmental agency devoid of attachment to any branch of transportation. The
longer we wait,” he concluded, “the more confusion we shall have to contend with, because
of the present tendency toward atomization of transportation authority.”
45

Watkins pressed the issue in the months leading up to war. He studied the
inefficiencies of coordination in the NDAC division, which he faulted for being constrained
by the prevailing arrangements between government and industry. “There is urgent
necessity for coordinating the operation of a multitude of Government agencies and of the
various modes of transportation,” he wrote in a memorandum to Coy. “There is
insufficient coordination among the various transport media, and there is no agency within
the Government which is prepared to deal with the transportation problem as a whole…
Because of the lack of a coordinated agency for transportation, there is growing confusion
with respect to responsibility, and many agencies are seeking to do these things which could
more properly be done elsewhere.” While time was of the essence in preventing

43
See Frederic A. Delano to Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 24, 1941, Box 14, Folder 104 – Transportation
Division of OEM, Ralph Budd, Commissioner, 1941, OEM Records.
44
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 158.
45
Letter, Ralph Watkins to Wayne Coy, July 31, 1941, Box 14, Folder 104 – Transportation Division of
OEM, Ralph Budd, Commissioner, 1941, OEM Records.
215

transportation issues before they arose, Watkins maintained that the NDAC machinery was
not fit for the task. What was needed, he argued, was a single agency for transportation
located in the OEM.
46

Debates about how to prepare transportation systems for total mobilization
remained unsettled until December 1941. Within a few days of the attacks on Pearl
Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into WWII, Watkins and Frederic Delano
(planning board chairman) urged the president to create a transportation agency, based not
on the WWI compensatory or coercive models but on national planning expertise and the
institutional framework already in existence. On December 18, Roosevelt signed an
executive order establishing the Office of Defense Transportation in the OEM, and the
NDAC division was gradually phased out. The office’s general responsibilities were to
coordinate transportation policies and activities, survey domestic transportation for war
mobilization, protect the interests of transportation before those of other federal agencies,
and maximize the use of transportation facilities. Joseph B. Eastman, then-chairman of the
ICC, was appointed director. His thorough knowledge of transportation, combined with his
distance from private industry, made Eastman an obvious choice for taking transportation
in a new direction.
47

Though the office’s responsibilities were wide-ranging and its authorities equally
broad, Eastman was careful not to overstep his boundaries. Like Budd of the NDAC, he
generally abhorred the idea of resorting to executive coercion to coordinate transportation,
as the Wilson administration had in winter 1917-1918. He was intent on addressing
wartime transportation requirements with as little government interference in the private
sphere as possible; and under his direction, the ODT actively sought out the cooperation
of industry executives.
48
Yet far from simply being an extension of the NDAC division, the
ODT diverged considerably from its predecessor. Well-connected at the ICC, Eastman
relied on his relations with the commission to form the ODT’s staff, and the two agencies

46
Memorandum, Ralph Watkins to Wayne Coy, October 11, 1941, Box 14, Folder 104 – Transportation
Division of OEM, Ralph Budd, Commissioner, 1941, OEM Records. A couple months later, Watkins
forwarded a pamphlet to Coy, written by J. K. Lowell, proposing that transportation be organized through a
national agency. See Watkins to Coy, February 21, 1942, Box 4, Folder 22 – Office of Defense
Transportation, OEM Records.
47
See Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 158; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 250.
48
See Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 159; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 250-251.
216

came to resemble each other in their regulatory functions and cooperative outlooks. More
importantly, as an organization within the OEM machinery, the ODT was able to utilize
existing channels of communication to coordinate transportation through collaboration
with industry, rather than through the coercive or decentralized authorities employed
before.
Eastman, perhaps more than most, understood all too well the crucial importance
of transportation for overall mobilization. “Transportation will not escape [wartime
hardships],” he explained on February 5, 1942. “The vital thing in transportation is to
prevent, if possible, any result which will cripple or impair the war effort, and I do not need
to tell you that the whole industrial mechanism of the country which is being thrown in full
force into the war effort is dependent at every turn upon transportation for its successful
functioning.” There was no doubt that such an essential duty could have been more easily
implemented through absolutist measures of “whip and spur,” like those witnessed across
the Atlantic, say, in Nazi Germany. But Eastman was concerned, above all, to ensure the
full utilization of transportation facilities and companies through a collaborative approach.
The ODT’s mandate, in his eyes, was preparatory – to study prospective traffic in times of
emergency, plan solutions before problems arose, and organize existing facilities ahead of
time – so that government interventions could be avoided. “[W]e cannot afford to wait
until the flood comes before the necessary plans are made,” he implored.
49

Interdepartmental coordination for railroad use among executive emergency
agencies, the military, and industry leaders became more effective than ever through the
OEM system.
50
In 1940, the railroads carried more than 61% of the nation’s freight loads,
and within a few years that number had risen to 72%. Over the same period, passenger
travel on the railways increased as well, from 9% to 35%. Situated within the OEM
administrative framework, transportation and civil defense also came into closer
harmonization. Precisely because railroads were considered essential to the functioning of
the national economy, they were a primary object of the defense preparations against an
enemy attack discussed in the previous section. When a problem was identified in one

49
Joseph B. Eastman, Chicago Traffic Club, Palmer House, Chicago, IL, February 5, 1942, Box 4, Folder 22
– Office of Defense Transportation, OEM Records.
50
For the following figures, see Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II, 251.
217

area, the OEM provided networks and authority to organize a solution, swiftly and
efficiently.
51

By the start of the war, railway facilities were largely up to the task of total
mobilization. The NDAC division, following the WWI example, had initially focused their
energy predominately on issues related to the railroads, in part because Budd was
entrenched in that industry. But entry into WWII led to other obstacles besides those
concerning the railways, and the NDAC overlooked sectors that needed further attention,
most important of which were the highways. During the interwar years, the accessibility of
passenger-car transportation saw dramatic advances, and automobile travel, like railroads,
had become vital to the national economy. The difficulty in wartime was to manage
diminishing rubber supplies to meet the rise in demand for tires, without interrupting the
flow of workers and, hence, industrial production. No such problem existed in 1917, nor
through most of 1941. It had only become serious in December 1941, Eastman wrote to
President Roosevelt, with “the tremendous increase in the production of war materials.”
52

Experts in the National Resources Planning Board worked diligently to analyze the
implications of this general shift in transportation patterns for the mobilization program.
Wilfred Owen, in particular, played an important role in recognizing the fundamental
problem of tire consumption, both civilian and military. He conducted numerous studies
about laborers’ reliance on rubber-tired vehicles for transportation to and from work,
concluding that wartime production depended almost entirely “upon the availability of
reliable passenger car transportation.” “Without such transportation,” he wrote in a
memorandum to Ralph Watkins, “industry would be crippled.”
53
With the close
cooperation between executive agencies facilitated by the OEM framework, the planning
board members were able to advise their counterparts in the ODT and other production
offices on how to address the problem.
In handling rubber shortages, the agencies responsible for overseeing the industrial

51
Activities to protect railroad infrastructures provide an insightful example of how this system worked in
practice. See Eastman to LaGuardia, January 29, 1942, and LaGuardia to Stimson, February 6, 1942, Entry
10, Box 104, Folder 381-8 – Transportation Division, OCD Records.
52
Annual Report to the President for the Year 1942.
53
Confidential Memorandum, Wilfred Owen to Ralph Watkins, January 22, 1942, Box 11, Folder 72 –
National Resources Planning Board, Frederic A. Delano, Chairman, 1941, OEM Records.
218

side of mobilization quickly put a moratorium on the sale of new tires and began regulating
automobile tire and gasoline consumption. The effort to ration tire usage turned into a
complex administrative problem, which the ODT was poised to resolve. Since the motor
transport industry was widely fragmented throughout the country, with over four million
private owners and 600,000 carriers, it would have been virtually impossible to institute a
uniform, top-down plan for controlling the highway system.
54
A collaborative form of
governance was considered more advantageous, and the ODT was just the coordinative
device for the job. It provided the expertise and overall analytical perspective of
transportation as a whole needed to manage rubber consumption among local, state, and
private groups. By early January 1942, they had built a program around the existing state
defense councils of the Office of Civilian Defense, focused on establishing community
organizations and local boards to ensure compliance nationwide.
55

Just as the ODT addressed freight travel on the railways through a collaborative
federal system, so too with highway transportation. Yet in this area, more than in any other,
the ODT struggled to strike an effective compromise between the goals of decentralization
and coordination. Despite their concerted efforts, the rubber shortage worsened
throughout 1942, and it became clear that the existing institutional arrangement was
unsuitable. The issue was not that the ODT lacked sufficient authority to overcome these
limitations. It was, rather, that under Eastman’s direction, transportation had become too
decentralized to successfully organize the activities of various agencies and companies
involved in rationing rubber. His commitment to industrial self-government had
undermined the ODT’s executive responsibility.
56
As Watkins of the planning board put it:
“I am afraid that somebody will have to shock Mr. Eastman into an appreciation of the
necessity of a drastic and energetic job.”
57
What was needed to overcome these difficulties
was not absolute rule but a more effective balance between centralization and industrial
autonomy.

54
See Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 168.
55
Ibid., 164.
56
See the conclusions in Wilfred Owen, “The Rubber Shortage: Its Effect on Transportation,” April 15,
1942, Box 4, Folder 22 – Office of Defense Transportation, OEM Records.
57
Confidential Memorandum, Ralph Watkins to Wayne Coy, March 13, 1942, Box 4, Folder 22 – Office of
Defense Transportation, OEM Records.
219

While the WWII transportation program began on similar ground as WWI, in the
end it could not have been more different. The aim throughout the war was to assist the
transportation industry in prioritizing production requirements, clearing transportation
routes of congestion, and furnishing carriers with resources to manage issues on their own,
without direct government control. Even as this approach experienced challenges in the
effort to address rubber shortages, collaborative federalism remained the principal method
for attaining a democratic middle-ground.
58
Like with other aspects of the WWII
mobilization program, the transportation functions of the national government were
established in the OEM during the defense stage, well before the U.S. officially entered the
war. The OEM equipped the president with the constitutional flexibility to gradually
convert transportation activities to the ongoing complications faced, all while remaining
within existing legal boundaries. It also provided agencies a direct channel of
communication with other executive offices and local, state, and private groups to organize
transportation into a unified program.

IV. Governing the national economy and industrial production
59

We are engaged now in a war to defend our way of life.
Let’s be sure that in the speed of our effort, we don’t
overlook and lose the freedoms we are fighting to
preserve. In an industrial nation such as ours, industrial
freedom… must be one of them.
– Floyd B. Odlum
60

For total mobilization, perhaps even more important than civilian defense and domestic
transportation was to ensure efficient production of essential goods and armaments. Even
as the government made significant strides in economic management before WWI, the
Wilson administration largely expanded state mobilization capacities by restructuring the
government’s relationship with industry – in part because they still lacked the resources to

58
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 172.
59
For this section, see especially Cuff, The War Industries Board; Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II;
Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War; Novick, Anshen, and Truppner, Wartime Production Controls.
60
Floyd B. Odlum, address before the American Business Congress, New York City, December 9, 1941, Box
12, Folder 83 – Division of Contract Distribution, OPM, Floyd B. Odlum, Director, 1941-42, OEM
Records.
220

centralize economic controls within the executive but also because of longstanding laissez-
faire principles that made coercion-centric modes of governance impracticable.
61
Executive
officials experimented with various methods of regulatory control and industrial
cooperation for economic management, forming a loosely knit “government-business
regulatory alliance.”
62
Choosing to incentivize industrialists to commence wartime
production without government interventions, they drew up contractual agreements and
offered economic benefits like increased profits to those who participated in and compiled
data on mobilization. Business leaders were also called in as government advisors, known
as “dollar-a-year men”, since they were usually paid a $1 salary for their services.
On this front, the most critical emergency agency created to manage government-
business relations was the National Defense Advisory Commission for the Council of
National Defense. Established in fall 1916 as a government body to support the
autonomous actions of businesses across the country, the commission consisted of seven
civilian experts – Howard Coffin, Hollis Godfrey, Bernard Baruch (later chairman of the
War Industries Board), Franklin Martin, Daniel Willard, Julius Rosenwald, and Samuel
Gompers – tasked with investigating and advising the Wilson administration on issues of
defense emergencies related to transportation, mobilization, and economic production
potential. As an advisory board, the NDAC was “ingenious,” according to Koistinen.
63
Not
only did it allow maximum latitude in working through the exigencies of the mobilization
process and provide flexibility to guard against congressional interference; it also achieved a
crucial balance between private and public sectors. Since the government lacked the
information necessary for economic management, the NDAC compiled data from various
private firms through cooperative committees, which worked with industrialists to collect
statistics and prioritize industrial war needs accordingly.
But while these arrangements succeeded early on, they were soon overwhelmed by
the pressures of total war, and compensatory practices quickly became the chief
impediment to an effective mobilization program. Throughout spring 1917, the War and
Navy Departments thwarted the government’s actions to manage civilian production

61
See especially the arguments in Eisner, From Warfare State; Karl, The Uneasy State.
62
The phrase is Koistinen’s, in Mobilizing for Modern War, 105.
63
Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 159.
221

requirements through the NDAC. As a result, production bottlenecks multiplied,
businesses were unable to keep up with requests, and the NDAC began to take on
additional responsibilities, beyond their authorized advisory role. The business-military-
executive partnership proved increasingly ineffective as production demands amplified
dramatically in summer and fall 1917, after the U.S. declared war. In the absence of an
overarching institutional framework to integrate activities across the country, mobilization
continually suffered from inefficiencies between industries. Statistics were often inaccurate
foundations for official policymaking, bottlenecks and redundancies mounted to such
extremes that industrial facilities could not keep up with production requests, and the
uncoordinated program came to a screeching halt in winter months.
64

One of the primary ways in which the Wilson administration overcame these
failures was through the use of widespread executive powers and direct command of
economic markets. Numerous legislative delegations expanded officials’ authorities to
harness the economy and implement controls through what constitutional scholar Edward
Corwin has termed “vast unchannelled powers”
65
for mobilization: Congress gave Wilson
the authority to control transportation systems; nationalize industries and compel them to
produce armaments for war; seize raw materials and commodities deemed essential to the
war effort; establish regulations on manufacturing and consumption of war necessities; and
strengthen the executive branch’s control of mobilization.
66

This final development proved especially critical for bringing mobilization
authorities within the American state. With production inefficiencies mounting, the need
for a centralized government body had become more and more apparent to leaders. New
emergency agencies were established to facilitate executive direction of the economy for
war, most important of which was the War Industries Board. In the months leading up to
the creation of the WIB, executive leaders had begun drafting a plan to transform the
mobilization institutional system.
67
From late May through July 1917, the Wilson

64
Ibid., 105-106.
65
Corwin, Presidential Power, 47.
66
See generally Corwin, Presidential Power; Corwin, Total War; Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan; Koistinen,
Mobilizing for Modern War; Rogers, Crisis Government; Rogers, “Presidential Dictatorship;” Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship.
67
For the following, see Cuff, The War Industries Board; Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, Ch. 9.
222

administration’s main goal was to develop an agency to coordinate industrial production.
On July 28, they made their intentions to create a WIB known. It would “act as a clearing
house for the war industry needs of the Government, determine the most effective ways of
meeting them and the best means and methods of increasing production, including the
creation or extension of industries demanded by the emergency, the sequence and relative
urgency of the needs of the different Government services, and consider price factors, and,
in the first instance, the industrial and labor aspects of the problems involved, and the
general questions affecting the purchase of commodities.”
68

Activated on August 1, 1917, the WIB signaled a move towards centralizing
national economic management in the executive. It was originally composed of seven
members, chosen from both private industry and the military: Frank A. Scott was
chairman; Lt. Col. Palmer E. Pierce represented the Army and Rear Adm. Frank F.
Fletcher represented the Navy; and Bernard Baruch, Lugh A. Frayne, Robert S.
Brookings, and Robert S. Lovett were all responsible for respective sections concerning
raw materials, labor, finished goods, and priorities. Through the WIB, the Wilson
administration strove to strike a better balance between the expanded interventions of the
NDAC and the uncoordinated activities of autonomous industries across the nation. Of
utmost importance was to carry on the earlier compensatory tradition while avoiding
inefficiencies and the need for executive control.
On paper, the WIB represented a clear step towards consolidating economic
controls in the American state. Until that time, industry retained a great deal of latitude to
direct production, and many authorities still resided with the traditional procurement
agencies of the armed forces. The WIB bolstered executive leadership over industrial
mobilization by wresting authority for priorities and regulation away from business leaders
and the War and Navy Departments, which had hitherto constituted obstacles to
government-led mobilization efforts. Yet even with these advances, in its early operating
months the WIB experienced many of the same complications that had plagued the
NDAC. Above all, the WIB had insufficient powers to manage the national mobilization
program. While it symbolized a transition in the executive approach to economic

68
Quoted in Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 205.
223

management, the board remained decentralized, gave substantial authority to the private
sphere, and was overwhelmingly shaped by business interests and laissez-faire principles.
69

Business leaders and trade associations played an even more vital role in the WIB than
they had in the NDAC.
As the mobilization program began its decline in winter 1917-1918, it became clear
that the WIB needed to be reformed to regain order of the economy. And in spring 1918,
the Wilson administration made a number of improvements to the WIB system. They
generally expanded the board’s authority as a coordinating agency and took back control
from the War and Navy Departments. Bernard Baruch, an influential civilian industrial
leader who had been integral to the NDAC’s work, became chairman of the newly
reorganized WIB in March, and was given widespread powers to direct the American
economy.
70
But the passage of the Overman Act in May 1918, giving the president virtually
unlimited powers to temporarily reorganize the executive branch as needed to meet the
exigencies of total war, was even more crucial. Wilson used the legislation to strengthen the
WIB, without significantly transforming its functions. A compromise was reached between
the WIB, the military, and private business regarding how to move forward with
government management of industrial production.
Despite these important advances in state capacities to mobilize the economy for
war, the program was still not without its defects after spring 1918. Most importantly,
reliable statistics regarding national industrial production remained incomplete. The
Requirements Division of the WIB, created to compile data from a myriad of industrial
agencies about what resources were needed for production, was ultimately unable to
achieve this goal. Even with the improvements in government economic planning through
the work of Edwin F. Gay and Wesley C. Mitchell at the WIB,
71
the claimant agencies were
unreliable when it came to submitting their requirements, and the WIB still had little
authority to force them to comply. Without regular access to this information, the board
could not adequately plan production, and the government, in effect, could not entirely
harness the national economy for war mobilization.
72

69
Ibid., 214.
70
See Cuff, “Bernard Baruch;” Cuff, The War Industries Board, Ch. 5.
71
See above Ch. 3, Sec. II.
72
See Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 252; Novick, Anshen, and Truppner, Wartime Production
224

Along with insufficient coordination, then, a general incapacity to grasp the
functioning of the national economy as a whole was a central limitation faced during WWI.
Lacking the proper economic knowledge and institutions to engage in the unprecedented
form of total warfare, the Wilson administration regularly leaned on the voluntary
cooperation of industrialists, and temporarily expanded executive authorities to centralize
production controls when these arrangements failed. In stark contrast to this pattern, the
FDR administration followed an entirely different approach to wartime economic
management – one that combined the strengths of both executive institutional development
and industrial autonomy, without the need for coercion. National planning organized the
cooperative actions of private industrial communities within a cohesive national program.
The macroeconomic perspective first advanced by New Deal planners helped prevent
bottlenecks by identifying specific target areas in need of reform, and the administrative
machinery of the Office for Emergency Management helped eliminate redundancies and
inefficiencies between fragmented industries.
A principal contribution of New Deal planning to WWII mobilization was
precisely the construction of a total picture of national resources that was missing in the
Wilson administration. Looking back on earlier efforts, expert advisors in the FDR
administration’s planning board were convinced that several factors had limited industrial
production in WWI: 1) a cultural drive to minimize the scope of government control in
the economic sphere; 2) a lack of reliable statistical information upon which to formulate
plans; and 3) an incomplete understanding of the problems of total war and its
ramifications for the economy. “[T]here was not an inclusive grasp of the economic life of
the nation,” planners Lewis Lorwin and A. Ford Hinrichs wrote. “Rather there developed a
jig-saw puzzle view of America. Pieces were fitted together here and there on the table.
Striking parts were first studied. Even at the close of the war there were large numbers of
pieces of prosaic, monotone blue sky – the incidental of civilian life – that were
unorganized.” Throughout the mobilization process, economic management had been
fragmented and ad hoc, as opposed to comprehensively planned. “[W]e were dealing with
specific problems as they arose, rather than with a total view of our resources.”
73

Controls, 28-30.
73
Lorwin and Hinrichs, “Chapter II: Economic Planning and Control During the War,” Entry 10, Box 10,
225

New Deal activities to enframe the economy, discussed above in Chapter 3, proved
vital to the FDR administration’s efforts to conceive of the economic system as a national
whole. On the eve of WWII, Bureau of the Budget director, Harold Smith, remarked
specifically on the innovations of the structural conception of the economy put forth by
Gardiner Means and others at the planning board in 1939. He found the report, The
Structure of the American Economy, “enlightening – and necessary as a prelude to better
understanding” the economic condition of the nation. It was “one of the first major efforts
to put the pieces of the national economy together in order to look at the whole.”
74
Smith
and other advisors were convinced that by viewing the national economy as a complex,
interdependent system, officials could prepare for production shortages, inefficiencies, and
bottlenecks and recommend reforms before crises arose, without the need for the
temporary expansions in executive controls or dictatorial interventions of the past. For this
purpose, the BoB and the National Resources Planning Board, a direct outgrowth of the
New Deal planning board, were critical to the tasks of generating this systematic perspective
and ensuring the coordination of statistical information during the war.
75

These ideational developments are overlooked altogether by the analytical
frameworks in IR theory; the national security state and contract state models do not
examine the influence of expert ideas on domestic statebuilding and policymaking.
Nevertheless, we can see the impact of planning knowledge definitively in the process of
selecting locations for wartime industrial plant construction. Prior to the advent of total war,
businesses determined the geographical distribution of industry across the country, largely
devoid of government involvement. Oftentimes, this was based on issues of production
efficiency, proximity to natural resources and labor power, and the burden of
transportation traffic in the area.
76
“The primary aim of a private industrialist in locating a
plant [was] to select the location which [would] enable him to assemble materials, process

Folder Lorwin & Hinrichs, NRPB Records.
74
Harold D. Smith, September 17-20, 1939, Container 1, Folder Daily Memoranda, July-Sept. 1939, Smith
Papers. For the report, see above Ch. 3, Sec. III.
75
See Harold D. Smith, “The Bureau of the Budget as an Instrument of Management,” address given to joint
meeting of the American Political Science Association and American Society for Public Administration,
Chicago, December 29, 1940, Box 1, Folder 9 – Bureau of the Budget, OEM Records. On the influence of
economists and statisticians in WWII, see especially Lacey, Keep from all Thoughtful Men.
76
See, e.g., National Resources Planning Board, Progress Report, 1940-1941.
226

them, and deliver the product to his customers at minimum cost.”
77
Following this method,
however, existing production capacities were insufficient to meet the demands of total
mobilization, and the need to expand industrial facilities was deeply felt in both WWI and
WWII.
To manage this problem, executive officials charted vastly different courses. While
the Wilson administration played an insignificant role in industrial location, the FDR
administration deemed it necessary to oversee this process, and they employed planning
expertise to that end. Early in the WWII defense preparations stage, in August 1940,
President Roosevelt tasked the NRPB with developing long-range plans in relation to
wartime national economic management. Chief among their concerns was the issue of
industrial location. They began reviewing patterns in European countries, to determine
where wartime industries should be developed, as well as the rationale underlying this
choice. The purpose of these studies was to advise business leaders and executive officials
on the most appropriate sites on which to build the facilities for mobilization. Like before,
these planners primarily focused on time and efficiency as the primary factors in industrial
location. But as the emergency-war machine began to take shape, they expanded their
attention to include security from enemy attack in their recommendations.
78

Planning discourse and ideas also carved out an alternative institutional path for
harnessing the wartime economy through the executive, as we saw above in Chapter 5. It
bears repeating that in the interwar period, several plans were developed by military
advisors in the War Department and the Joint Army and Navy Munitions Board,
advocating the continuation of the WWI compensatory model of economic management.
The Industrial Mobilization Plan generally advised that military and business leaders be in
charge of industrial production measures, like they had been in WWI. And just as the
Wilson administration relied on the cooperative committees and trade associations of the
NDAC, the FDR administration initially followed suit by reinstating the NDAC in May
1940 within the institutional framework of the Office for Emergency Management.
President Roosevelt explained these moves in a Fireside Chat on May 26, 1941.

77
National Resources Planning Board, Industrial Location and National Resources.
78
See especially P. Sargant Florence, “Location of War Plants in Britain,” Entry 34, Box 2, Folder P. Sargant
Florence – Studies on Industrial Location Factors, Dec. 1940, NRPB Records.
227

According to him, the purpose of creating the OEM and reviving the NDAC was primarily
to encourage the construction of new industrial facilities and to accelerate ongoing
production activities, so that the government would be prepared “to meet emergencies of
the future.”
79
Similar to its predecessor, the new NDAC comprised civilian experts tasked
with an advisory assignment to effect the conversion from peacetime to wartime production
through voluntary cooperation.
80
But over time, it became more and more evident that the
NDAC alone could not manage the economy in total war. Throughout 1940, the president
made numerous requests to expand the federal budget for the defense and industrial
mobilization program.
81
The commission was gradually phased out in early 1941, with its
functions being dispersed to new emergency agencies in the OEM.
In this respect, the OEM began to take on further responsibilities to organize and
coordinate industrial production, and it inspired an alternative approach to economic
management than was possible through earlier compensatory patterns. First and foremost,
whereas private industrialists managed the WWI mobilization program, the OEM
structure ensured that executive officials in the FDR administration retained managerial
authority. Wary of delegating control of industrial production to a single business leader,
like in Wilson’s War Industries Board, President Roosevelt created the Office of
Production Management in January 1941 within the OEM. As the production mechanism
of the national program, the OPM ensured that the president remained overall manager of
the economy. Even though the War and Navy Departments maintained control of military
requirements, contracts, and purchasing, the OPM had full legal authority to plan and
execute civilian defense mobilization.
82
With this move, Roosevelt thwarted the Industrial
Mobilization Plan aspiration to place an industrial administrator in charge of directing
production, as well as the pressure to institute centralized controls over economic markets.
Another contribution of the OEM system was in relation to intercurrent
institutional developments. Throughout 1941, the objective of industrial preparedness
quickly gave way to the requirements of total war. Following a proclamation of “unlimited”

79
Roosevelt, The Public Papers – 1940 Volume, 237.
80
Harris, “The Emergency National Defense Organization,” 5.
81
Office for Emergency Management, Functions and Administration, 6, 8, respectively.
82
Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 93-95.
228

emergency on May 27, 1941,
83
mobilization expenditures soared to new heights.
Government spending for war that year totaled $6.7 billion, and in December alone, when
the U.S. officially declared war on Japan and Germany, expenses swelled to a monthly rate
of almost $2 billion.
84
While the OPM helped facilitate an acute transition from early
defense measures to wartime production, officials required expanded state capacities to
meet these heightened demands. They created new emergency agencies for managing
industrial production in the OEM, including the Office of Price Administration and
Civilian Supply (to fill the gap in executive organization of military production) and the
Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (to prioritize production of essential goods).
85

In initiating these administrative reforms, further legislative authority was not
needed. Rather, the OEM provided the constitutional flexibility for the president to make
these changes as needed in the defense preparations stage of WWII. By the time America
entered the war, the state institutional machinery for harnessing the economy had already
been constructed in the OEM. Alliances between industrialists, military leaders, and
executive officials were established through the existing agencies in 1941, and these
agencies constituted a partial foundation that was built upon during war. It was only in mid-
December that the FDR administration sought additional executive authorities for wartime
reorganization in the First War Powers Act.
Aside from the defense preparations stage, 1942 was perhaps the most important
year in terms of forging the tools needed to successfully mobilize for total war. On January
6, Roosevelt announced the administration’s goals for industrial production: 50,000 planes,
45,000 tanks, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns, and eight million tons of shipping.
86
For this task,
the president hoped for a monumental rise in wartime appropriations, up roughly $43
billion from the previous year to total $50 billion in 1942, and altogether, industrial
production increased more than three-and-a-half times: munitions output totaled $32.5
billion and government-financed construction of industrial facilities totaled $14.1 billion.
87

83
“Text of Proclamation,” New York Times, May 28, 1941.
84
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 93.
85
Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 113-114; Koistinen, Arsenal of World
War II, Part Two.
86
Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 236.
87
Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War, 201-202, 205.
229

The principal OEM agencies for this purpose were the War Production Board and later
the Office of War Mobilization. They accomplished these tasks not through dictatorial
controls nor traditional laissez-faire principles. Instead, planning of the national economy
proceeded through the OEM administrative system, which upheld the ideal of industrial
freedom while coordinating the voluntary production activities of private business.
New Deal planning helped make economic management in total war not only more
democratic but also more effective. Planning determined the ideal locations for
constructing industrial facilities for war. Through industrial location surveys and studies, the
FDR administration’s planning board increased production efficiency while decreasing the
likelihood of enemy attack. The OEM facilitated the organization of previously fragmented
industrial sectors by providing business leaders with data about how their individual efforts
related to the overall mobilization program. With this statistical information, they could
better prioritize production of armaments and essential goods, limit redundancies across
industries, and prevent bottlenecks before crises arose. The OEM, in short, combined the
best of both statebuilding and liberal self-government, without establishing the absolutist
controls of the national security state or the unwieldiness of the contract state.

V. Postwar anxieties, collaborative federalism, and inverted totalitarianism

Involvement in WWII greatly expanded the national planning board’s mission. Aside from
planning the full utilization of national resources – natural, economic, and social – as they
had done since 1933, over the years they became heavily involved in planning for the
future of postwar America. Luther Gulick, a public administration scholar who had been
closely involved in leading the New Deal Committee on Administrative Management
examined in Chapter 4, organized these research programs. In line with earlier efforts to
produce a democratic form of governance, advisors insisted that the government secure “a
greater freedom for the American people” after WWII.
88
Recommendations included the
demobilization of the armed forces, war industries, contracts, and economic controls.
Additional plans were proposed to sustain cooperative partnerships between government
and private enterprise, improve physical facilities, and engage in transportation, energy,

88
Quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 376.
230

land, and water projects.
89

Two general anxieties were central to the National Resources Planning Board’s
struggle throughout WWII to redefine the peacetime national security role of the
American state. First and foremost, experts in the FDR administration were concerned that
full demobilization of the institutional machinery for wartime emergency management, as
had been the case after WWI, would cause the U.S. economy to revert back to prewar
stagnation, diminished national income, and high levels of unemployment. Thus, in stark
contrast to the lack of government oversight of demobilization following WWI, advisors in
the NRPB began planning postwar readjustment as early as spring 1941. Their work
continued throughout the war, studying how to shift the American state from the necessities
of total mobilization to peacetime conditions of a demobilized armed forces, a prosperous
national economy, and democratic procedures and constitutionally limited government.
90

At the heart of their proposals was how to convert the wartime economy – ending
contracts, lifting price controls, ensuring full employment, and so forth – without returning
to the depressed economic conditions of the 1930s. The Post-War Agenda Section of the
board was particularly interested in preventing the return of earlier economic troubles
experienced during the Great Depression. A number of reports advanced suggestions for
how to sustain a high-production, full-employment American economy: After Defense –
What? (1941); Security, Work, and Relief Policies (1941); After the War – Full
Employment (1942); and Demobilization and Readjustment (1943) all served to explain
how the U.S. could reconvert industry while ensuring wartime economic productivity and
employment levels.
91
Perhaps even more importantly, they advocated the maintenance of
deficit spending, stimulus, and national income, rather than a return to earlier practices of
heightened taxation and budget balancing to pay for government emergency programs.
“Unless the gap left by the drop in expenditure can be filled,” planners noted early on, in a
memorandum to Wayne Coy of the OEM in May 1941, “incomes will fall and the
economic machine run down.”
92

89
See Merriam, “The National Resources Planning Board,” 1080.
90
See Katznelson, Fear Itself, 368-369.
91
See generally Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 473.
92
“Discussion Notes, Production and Employment Group,” Meeting on May 8, 1941, Box 11, Folder 71 –
National Planning Association, 1941, OEM Records.
231

In addition to the continuation of economic planning, the second anxiety
underlying proposals for postwar development regarded the peacetime structure of the
American state. Many in the public and government alike had grown increasingly worried
that a “garrison state” of sorts would take form after the war, in which political-military
elites commanded state institutions indefinitely.
93
Along with their concern for reconversion
of the national economic machinery, expert advisors hoped to prevent the resort to
permanent emergency rule and absolute dictatorship by overhauling the executive branch
of the government. The requirements of total war demanded massive expansions of the
national defense administrative structure through the creation of temporary emergency
agencies within the OEM. Some of these agencies had been dismantled or converted into
different institutional arrangements throughout the mobilization program. Others, however,
were still intact at the end of the war; and it was essential to figure out how to adapt them to
the task of normal democratic governance.
On September 18, 1944, President Roosevelt clarified his intention to reorganize
the federal government as soon as the war concluded. “Upon the termination of
hostilities,” he wrote in a letter to Harold D. Smith (director of the Bureau of the Budget),
“we must proceed with equal vigor to liquidate war agencies and reconvert the Government
to peace… The transition from war to peace should be carried forward rapidly, but with a
minimum of disorder and disruption. Only careful planning,” Roosevelt determined, “can
achieve this goal.”
94
The president requested, more specifically, that the BoB advise him on
the process through which the wartime institutional machinery could be adjusted to
peacetime conditions. They continued their studies until the Japanese surrendered, just
one year later, in September 1945, proposing that the executive office be returned to the
ideas of executive management originally outlined by public administration advisors during
the late New Deal.
A few days after the war officially ended, Harry S. Truman, who had taken over
presidential duties following Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, appointed a committee to
make specific policy recommendations for reconversion based on the planning board’s

93
See especially Lasswell, “The Garrison State.” Cf. Friedberg, In the Shadow; Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the
United States.”
94
Quoted in Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War, 498.
232

studies. The committee – consisting of Smith from the BoB, the director of the Office of
War Mobilization and Reconversion, and legal advisor Samuel I. Rosenman – endorsed
the termination of many wartime agencies, and the Truman administration quickly got to
work dismantling the WWII machinery. By the end of 1945, the Office of Civilian
Defense, Office of War Information, Office of Economic Stabilization, Office of Strategic
Services, and War Production Board, among others, had all been broken up. And the
reconversion responsibilities, economic stabilization activities, and priorities functions of
these agencies were all coordinated by the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
By no means was the fate of the American state sealed in these months following
WWII. Nevertheless, plans for economic reconversion and demobilization sought to
ensure a successful transition to peacetime democracy; and they were grounded in a shared
belief held by members of the armed forces, the executive office, and Congress that
wartime alliances would persist. “Consistent with the euphoria and relief that had
accompanied the end of the war,” historian Ira Katznelson writes, “a tone of cooperation
prevailed” in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
95
There was little sense of an imminent
security threat brewing elsewhere in the world, much less in the Soviet Union, which, as
Melvyn Leffler put it, was an “exhausted, devastated nation.”
96
In a 1943 book, the public
intellectual Walter Lippmann went so far as to suggest that the alliance between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union would last in the years to come, given America’s interests in ensuring
that European powers were contained.
97
He was soon proven wrong, however, as were
countless advisors who maintained that democracy would carry the day.
Over subsequent years, the mood of cooperation rapidly disintegrated, and postwar
statebuilding took a peculiar turn for the worse. By 1947, a third and even more vexing
anxiety had swept through the nation, one that all but destroyed the FDR administration’s
hope that democracy would continue after the war. Officials in the Truman administration
had grown more and more troubled by the apparent security threats posed by the Soviet
Union and the ever-present possibilities of a nuclear war. Many statebuilding efforts from
that point on sought to prepare institutions for these dangers by permanently mobilizing for

95
Katznelson, Fear Itself, 408.
96
Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 5. Cf. more generally Hogan, A Cross of Iron.
97
See Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy.
233

war and nuclear attack, as if the country were engaged in actual hostilities. With Congress’
assistance, President Truman created an American state with lasting executive powers for
dictatorial crisis governance, leaving security policies utterly unaccountable to other
branches of government and the public.
For many scholars looking back, this era foreshadows a fundamental
transformation in the American state. With the external threats of the Cold War looming
after WWII, the Truman administration secured dictatorial powers through constitutional
delegation. International pressures of impending war catalyzed executive institutional
growth for continuous mobilization and heightened militarism. Premised on the fear of
nuclear annihilation, dictatorship began to take permanent form. The National Security
Act of 1947 was the first piece of legislation in a long line throughout the Cold War that
centralized foreign policy and national security decisionmaking within the executive. In
addition to merging the Departments of War and the Navy, the act institutionalized many
aspects of the modern U.S. security bureaucracy, including the National Security Council,
Central Intelligence Agency, and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
98

The cooperative relations between public and private sectors struck to mobilize for
WWI and WWII also laid the foundation for what has since become known as the
“military-industrial complex.”
99
The overwhelming tendency in the Cold War was for the
state to stimulate private businesses to produce armaments, conduct research, and develop
technologies for security purposes, instead of nationalizing these activities. Given the
numerous pressures to expand state power to deal with the security issues of that time,
these scholars are puzzled by the question of why the American state did not grow as much
as it could have.
100
Because of the longstanding anti-statist tradition in the U.S., we are told,
statebuilding activities aimed to preserve the values of liberal self-government by limiting
the government’s directive scope and by relying largely on private resources to expand
capacities for crisis governance.
101

98
See Leffler, A Preponderance of Power; Stuart, Creating the National Security State; Unger, The
Emergency State; Zegart, Flawed by Design.
99
See Koistinen, “Mobilizing the World War II Economy.”
100
See especially Friedberg, In the Shadow; Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States;” Hogan, A Cross of
Iron.
101
Friedberg, “Why Didn’t the United States,” 114.
234

While both of these tracks are indeed central to the historical construction of the
modern American state, they do not explain an even more pivotal change in U.S.
statebuilding: the transition from temporary emergency reforms before WWII to enduring
crisis governance ever since. This shift, I would argue, was part of a wider transition in
planning expertise and technocratic rule (see Figure 6.1 below). Planning incorporated
future emergency needs into the institutional architecture first experimented with in the
OEM, so that temporary statebuilding measures were no longer necessary. After WWII,
the drive to prepare state institutions to govern the catastrophic potential of crisis
conditions before they happened endured. Following the FDR administration’s lead, the
institutional system originally created through the OEM became a central model for
governing national security threats related to nuclear war, civil defense, and natural
disasters. Consistent with the past approach, Cold War institutions like the Office for
Defense Mobilization and Federal Emergency Management Agency provided a site within
which experts could plan for the devastating effects of emergencies and devise a national
response through decentralized, coordinated state powers.
102

Along the way, however, Roosevelt’s initial promise – that only through the
installation of a preparatory emergency device like the OEM in the American state could
government leaders achieve democracy in crisis – was broken, and democratic governance
was effectively eroded from that point forward. Postwar developments conditioned the
possibility for what political theorist Sheldon Wolin has aptly called an “inverted” form of
totalitarian rule.
103
In Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated, we find the clearest exploration of
the consequences that these institutional developments had on American democracy
following WWII. “Inverted totalitarianism…,” he explains, “while exploiting the authority
and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power… and
most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and
the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The
result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive
identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate

102
See especially Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Collier and Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable
Systems;” Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency;” Roberts, Disasters and the American State.
103
See Wolin, Democracy Incorporated; Wolin, Politics and Vision, Ch. 17. Cf. the arguments in Bacevich,
Washington Rules; Hedges, The World As It Is; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Mills, The Power Elite.
235

power.”
104
Only in combination with business and military elites did executive officials
successfully demobilize the citizenry and abandon democracy.
Cold War inverted totalitarianism built on the institutional frameworks developed
during the FDR administration, yet it differed starkly from the earlier emphasis on
democratic crisis governance. The centralizing forces, absolute rule, and physical
compulsion of the national security state were integrated with the countervailing tendencies
of the contract state towards decentralization, laissez-faire governance, and the separation of
powers. On the one hand, whereas in traditional totalitarian states populations were
mobilized by charismatic figures who took control of the government, armed forces, and
national economy through sheer coercion, governance in the U.S. was only partly state-
centric. Instead of pure absolutism, inverted totalitarianism was marked by extensive
corporate interests and military power. On the other hand, the state did not simply take a
back seat to business interests, allowing private industry to manage itself. Quite to the
contrary, state authority and corporate influence were infused in an alarming configuration
that had not previously been possible.
“The result,” Wolin laments, “is an unprecedented combination of powers
distinguished by their totalizing tendencies, powers that not only challenge established
boundaries – political, moral, intellectual, and economic – but whose very nature it is to
challenge those boundaries continually.”
105
The genius of such an arrangement is that state
power was no longer exercised through brute coercion or limited government alone but
rather through methods that ensured the tranquility of the masses – “the depoliticization of
the citizenry,” as Wolin put it – while appearing to defend and uphold democracy.
106
At the
same time that institutional arrangements preserved traditional liberal values by limiting the
scope of government intervention domestically, they also served, paradoxically, to unmoor
state rule from the limits of democratic accountability and international norms of restraint.
By entrenching the extremes of absolutist rule and laissez-faire management within a
decentralized institutional configuration, executive authority became essentially boundless.
The demand for traditional liberalism led directly to a condition in which the

104
Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, xxi.
105
Ibid., xxii.
106
Ibid., 59.
236

American public were far less willing to oppose anti-democratic security policies. With the
creation of an autonomous national security apparatus, modern militarism was constituted
by a stark separation between the citizenry and those who were employed to carry out state
violence. Unlike in the wars of the past, Cold War practices detached the state from the
everyday existence of society; and as the division became more severe, civic responsibility
for the state diminished.
107
We were left without a genuine democratic system in which the
citizenry delegated powers to representatives and held leaders accountable to their political
will; what we had, instead, was a democracy in name only, one in which the citizenry was
actively managed and their political will was intimately connected with that of the state. It
would not be too far of a stretch to say that the American people have been freest when
they were complicit in the project of national security.

VI. Conclusion: the American state as crisis governance machine

The foregoing historical account does not exhaust all aspects of crisis governance during
total war and in the immediate years after. It nevertheless illustrates vast differences
between the mobilization programs in WWI and WWII, most of which go unnoticed by

107
See generally Bacevich, Breach of Trust; Bacevich, Washington Rules.
field of state power
collaborative relations between
executive, military, and industry

performative discourse
permanent emergency
performative ideas
technocratic rule

institutional development
enduring intercurrent system

policymaking
inverted totalitarianism

Figure 6.1. Configuration of emergency-war machine
237

the prevailing analytical models in IR theory (refer to Table 6.1 for a summary). The
Wilson administration relied heavily on compensatory measures throughout WWI, but
when crisis conditions arose in the winter of 1917-1918, officials employed coercive
executive authorities to address the inadequacies of laissez-faire arrangements between
government and industry. In direct contrast, the FDR administration sought to retain
managerial control in the executive from the start of WWII. National planning expertise
expanded the objects of government management, and the Office for Emergency
Management facilitated preparatory institutional reforms to plan for wartime complications
through existing constitutional authorities. Taken together, these developments
transformed statebuilding into a democratic, collaborative federal system.

Table 6.1. Summary of changes in total mobilization

WWI WWII
executive
powers
compensatory
measures followed
by coercion
managerial control,
constitutional
flexibility in the OEM
object of
governance
civilian population,
railways, disjointed
private industries
vital systems,
highway systems,
national economy
institutional
development
address crises as
they arose through
new powers
manage crises before
they arose through
existing powers
shape of
statebuilding
capital- and
coercion-intensive
democratic middle-
ground: collaborative
federalism

To be sure, there were many similarities in civil defense measures. Executive
officials, in both periods, aimed to establish clear lines of communication and
administrative authority for defense between local, state, and federal emergency agencies,
as well as non-governmental organizations. Yet lacking an organizational structure like the
OEM, the Wilson administration regularly faced difficulties coordinating these activities
and did not have the planning expertise to deal with complications ahead of time.
Conversely, the FDR administration was able to create an effective program by situating
civil defense preparations in a single agency within the OEM: the Office of Civilian
Defense. National planning ideas, furthermore, expanded the scope of which objects were
238

considered at risk – from the civilian population in WWI to predominately industrial
centers and other vital systems in WWII.
108

Domestic transportation also experienced sweeping changes. At the beginning of
both wars, the cultural ideal of industrial self-government precluded the creation of an
overarching administrative system in the executive to manage transportation issues as a
whole, throughout the entire country. Industries were largely left to their own devices, with
the help of a select few private associations and government commissions. In WWI, this
dearth of regulatory mechanisms became insurmountable as mobilization demands
increased in late 1917; and the Wilson administration opted for coercive controls and the
seizure of transportation. In WWII, a single federal agency was established to decentralize
transportation authorities to industrialists while coordinating these disparate activities within
the national framework of the OEM. The existing institutional organization was converted
to the purpose of defense transportation, without resorting to expanded executive powers.
Finally, total war presented unparalleled demands on the economy, far beyond
what was required in peacetime. The difficulties in preparing industry for this process were
shared in WWI and WWII: existing industrial facilities needed to be equipped and new
facilities built to address war requirements, skilled laborers needed to be employed, raw
materials needed to be procured, and civilian consumption of essential war goods needed
to remain limited. To meet these burdens, executive officials sought the cooperation of the
private sphere, yet they did so in very different ways. Whereas the Wilson administration
relied on laissez-faire principles and military and industry leaders to manage the economy,
the FDR administration bolstered the ideal of industrial self-government by coordinating
independent business activities within the executive administrative structure of the OEM.
This account not only points out central differences between WWI and WWII but
also underscores the role of planning expertise in bringing about lasting changes to the
American state (see Table 6.2 below). As fighting dissipated in fall 1918, the Wilson
administration clarified their approach to reconvert the wartime apparatus for peace.
109

Administrative reforms during the war were temporary, and were ultimately dismantled to

108
On the governance of vital systems, see generally Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Collier and
Lakoff, “Vital, Vulnerable Systems.”
109
On demobilization, see especially Ibid., Ch. 12.
239

resume normal functions. Only agencies that proved useful for postwar readjustment were
transferred to existing executive departments; others were disbanded altogether, and
production controls through the WIB were removed within a reasonable timeframe. The
WIB gradually dissolved its functions, allowed remaining industrial contracts to expire, and
was officially terminated in January 1919. No executive agency coordinated the
demobilization process, due to the general public aversion to an overt governmental role in
managing the economy and misgivings about lasting centralized emergency authorities.
Demobilization after WWII contrasts starkly with the pattern set out by the Wilson
administration just decades before. Were it not for advances in New Deal national
planning expertise, we would have likely seen something similar to what the IR theory
models envisage. The pressures and complications of total war were largely the same in
both times, and proponents of traditional liberal ideology had gained increasing support
throughout the interwar period, especially in the widely popular Industrial Mobilization
Plan. Yet for each issue-area, we see diverse policies and outcomes. The source of these
changes cannot be found in the exogenous shock of war, nor in longstanding principles of
anti-statism, but instead in the endogenous transformations brought about through
planning. Advances in planning expertise during the 1930s impacted dramatically the shape
of crisis governance in the U.S. during the 1940s. And these changes had lasting effects on
the historical construction of the American state as a permanent emergency-war machine,
well into the Cold War and after.

Table 6.2. Historical transformation of the American state
WWI &
early New Deal
late
New Deal
WWII &
early Cold War
timing
post-crisis: institutional
developments to address
existing emergency
planning expertise gained
traction for policymaking
in mid- to late-1930s
pre-crisis: flexible
institutional developments
through existing authority
shape
compensatory measures
followed by coercive
executive measures
democratic national
planning & executive
institutional preparedness
collaborative federalism:
decentralized and
coordinated program
outcome temporary converted to total war repurposed

240

Conclusion.
Practicing criticism after 9/11

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right
as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of
assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged,
unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we
accept rest… Criticism is a matter of flushing out that
thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not
as self-evident as one believed, to see what is accepted as
self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing
criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.
– Michel Foucault
1

Although this genealogical narrative centers predominately on the FDR administration, it
has devastating consequences for how we practice criticism after 9/11. In the years since the
terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the impact of international crisis on the American
state has become a topic of extensive debate and scholarly analysis, not only in IR theory
but in American politics, political theory, law, and history as well. The resurgence of
interest in emergency statebuilding has inspired countless studies related to the preventive
side of the war on terror – everything from the erosion of civil liberties in favor of
heightened security,
2
to the expansion of executive emergency powers,
3
to the growing use
of private military contractors and drones in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
4
These studies,

1
Foucault, “Practicing Criticism,” 154-155.
2
See, e.g., Butler, Precarious Life; Cole, Justice at War; Cole and Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free; Danner,
Torture and Truth; Greenwald, No Place to Hide; Herman, Taking Liberties; Johns, “Guantanamo Bay;”
Posner and Vermeule, Terror in the Balance.
3
See, e.g., Ackerman, Before the Next Attack; Ackerman, The Decline and Fall; Agamben, State of
Exception; Cole and Dempsey, Terrorism and the Constitution; Fein, Constitutional Peril; Goldsmith, The
Terror Presidency; Posner and Vermeule, The Executive Unbound; Posner, Not a Suicide Pact; Scheppele,
“Law in a Time of Emergency;” Scheuerman, “Survey Article;” Scheuerman, “The Powers of War and
Peace;” Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced.
4
See, e.g., Pelton, Licensed to Kill; Scahill, Blackwater; Singer, Corporate Warriors.
241

to be sure, disagree in certain substantive respects, especially about the role of legality, the
types of emergency measures employed, and the forms of state power. Yet they all
mistakenly assert that 9/11 changed everything. The existential threat of terrorism, it is
often argued, dramatically unsettled traditional institutional constraints on executive
authority in the U.S., catalyzing new arrangements that have since become path-dependent.
One line of discourse has gained significant traction in recent years. In an effort to
explain the apparent crisis of limited democratic governance in the war on terror, many
critics have turned to the infamous work of Weimar jurist Carl Schmitt, whose scholarship
was cited by Nazi leadership to legitimate their rise to power in Germany during the 1930s.
Indeed, it was at these very times that the public administration experts Louis Brownlow
and Charles Merriam discussed in previous chapters visited Germany and concluded that
executive reorganization was necessary to prevent a similar resort to dictatorship at home.
Nonetheless, according to Schmitt, national crises are an inherent feature of liberal-
constitutional systems of government, such as in the U.S. Principles like competitive
federalism, the separation of powers, and the detailed enumeration of executive authority,
though designed as universal laws to ensure limited government, cannot possibly account
for all situations. Emergencies – events for which there are no predetermined laws for
action – are bound to arise. The most a constitution can do to prepare for conditions of
existential national security threat is to name who may take control of the government in
these times. Crisis governance leads to executive rule that is both boundless and dictatorial
– what Schmitt called “sovereign exceptionalism.”
5

Schmitt’s legacy has been resurrected after 9/11 – as a source of both analytical
insight and ideological difference. Prominent leftist political theorists – Giorgio Agamben
and Judith Butler – as well as many liberal jurists and pundits – including but not limited to
David Cole, Glenn Greenwald, Susan Herman, Stephen Holmes, and Jules Lobel – have
explicitly diagnosed the rise of a permanent emergency state in the U.S. to liberal-

5
On these points, Schmitt was arguing directly against liberal jurists of his day, particularly Hans Kelsen, who
insisted that constitutional systems defined permanent limits to executive power. See Schmitt, Legality and
Legitimacy; Schmitt, Political Theology. For critical appraisals of Schmitt’s influence, see especially
Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics; Levinson, “Constitutional Norms;” McCormick, “The Dilemmas of
Dictatorship;” Neocleous, Critique of Security; Scheppele, “Law in a Time of Emergency;” Scheuerman,
“Survey Article.”
242

constitutional failures in the post-9/11 era.
6
These critics generally corroborate Schmitt’s
view that the need for an effective government response to existential threats accelerated
the statebuilding processes through which powers were redistributed to the executive.
Following the attacks on 9/11, the argument goes, the president became the sole ruling
authority and lawmaker. The authorities traditionally associated with Congress and the
Judiciary were “absorbed” by the executive, Butler argues, leaving presidential
decisionmaking “accountable to no one and no rule.” “The state of emergency is
potentially limitless and without end, and… the prospect of an exercise of state power in its
lawlessness structures the future indefinitely.”
7

While maintaining that the war on terror is exceptional, these scholars depart from
Schmitt in their normative assessment of these developments. Whereas Schmitt prescribed
exceptionalism as a necessary tool, the post-9/11 literature opposes the legitimacy of this
form of statebuilding. Critics point out the rise of exceptionalism not to promote it but to
disrupt what they see as the unlimited expansion of emergency powers. Most problematic,
from this critical perspective, is that extraconstitutional dictatorial emergency rule has
become an enduring fixture of the post-9/11 American state. In defending against the threat
of terrorism, officials have seized lawmaking authorities; suspended the liberties of
suspected terrorists, as well as the American citizenry, through heightened domestic
surveillance; and eroded due process through the extraordinary rendition, torture, and
indefinite detention of political enemies in extralegal sites. These measures, it is argued,
fundamentally altered the separation of powers, allowing the executive to remain
unchecked. The war on terror, as Agamben warns, “threatens radically to alter ...the
structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms.”
8

Much in the same way, my normative ambition in this dissertation is to inspire
dissent against permanent emergency in the U.S., but I suggest that these commentators
close off critical discourse in two fundamental ways. First, following the exceptionalism

6
See Agamben, State of Exception; Butler, Precarious Life, Ch. 3; Cole, Enemy Aliens; Cole and Dempsey,
Terrorism and the Constitution; Cole and Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free; Greenwald, No Place to Hide;
Herman, Taking Liberties; Holmes, The Matador’s Cape.
7
Butler, Precarious Life, 71, 72, 65, respectively. Cf. Agamben, State of Exception; Schwarz and Huq,
Unchecked and Unbalanced.
8
Agamben, State of Exception, 2. Cf. Butler, Precarious Life; Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and
Unbalanced; Unger, The Emergency State.
243

narrative, critics are unable to explain the historical dynamics of institutional development
in the U.S., particularly the creation of enduring, constitutional emergency powers. The
rule of law, from their view, does not define a flexible set of guidelines but rather provides
an identifiable, stable boundary to executive authority at all times.
9
Prior to 9/11, it is often
claimed, this “network of laws” effectively guaranteed the separation of powers; an
“ongoing dialogue between the three branches of government” was “in living operation.”
10

These principles were ostensibly abandoned in the war on terror. Defying the
constitutional system of limited government, officials implemented a unitary approach to
national security policy. “[A]ny historical sense of evenly balanced authority as between the
President and the Congress,” Victor Hansen and Lawrence Friedman determine, “faded in
the days following the attacks of September 11, as the scale tipped decidedly toward
increased executive power in respect to national security decision-making.”
11

However, the assumption that there was a clear separation of powers that the Bush
administration “deliberate[ly] dismantl[ed]”
12
after 9/11 is historically unfounded. If this
dissertation has any value for contemporary debates, it is in undermining this common
assertion, demonstrating instead that the war on terror was made possible by specific
activities to manage national emergencies over the last century.
13
A wider understanding of
these developments disabuses us of the folk wisdom that before 9/11 there was a set of
constitutional norms and principles against dictatorial rule which have since been undone.
The post-9/11 American state is not merely an exceptional break from traditional
constitutional constraints. Rather, barriers to effective crisis governance have been
consistently undermined through the congressional delegation of dictatorial authorities to
the president. The lack of congressional and judicial oversight concerning matters of
national security is endemic to broader transformations in constitutional powers in the
Executive Office of the President during the late New Deal and WWII.
In addition to neglecting the history of congressionally delegated emergency

9
Herman, Taking Liberties, 8.
10
Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72.
11
Hansen and Friedman, The Case for Congress, 13. See also Butler, Precarious Life, 71-72; Fein,
Constitutional Peril; Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced.
12
Holmes, The Matador’s Cape, 232.
13
Cf. Collier and Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security;” Neocleous, Critique of Security; Roberts, Disasters and the
American State; Tichenor, “Historical Set Points.”
244

authority, the second limitation of post-9/11 critical discourse is that it discounts the
painstaking linguistic-interpretive work which goes into legalizing security practices in the
war on terror. In an effort to ensure that emergency measures do not become further
entrenched in the constitutional structure, commentators advocate the development of
legal mechanisms to rein in executive authority. The critical task, from their perspective, is
to demand that national security policies remain constrained by the normal rule of law and
procedures of limited government – or, as Cole puts it, to “reestablish[] the system of
checks and balances that Bush [and his legal advisors] so aggressively sought to dismantle in
the name of our protection.”
14
While the proposal to bind state actions to the U.S.
Constitution is hardly controversial, Cole argues that it is perhaps the most radical critique
offered after 9/11, precisely because executive actions to suspend civil liberties and
permanently detain terrorist suspects “ha[ve] so fundamentally challenged th[e] very idea”
of limited government.
15

Despite the appeal of such claims, they are anything but radical. Officials are often
at pains to define the constitutional norms that guide emergency measures, and in many
instances, have employed constitutionally- and congressionally-sanctioned devices to
manage a range of national crises, without the need for exceptional expansions in executive
authority. After 9/11, conservative jurists worked diligently to enact the preventive
emergency powers of the president – not by “jettison[ing]” the rule of law, as Cole and
Lobel suggest,
16
but by redefining the boundaries of the legal framework. As Jack
Goldsmith argues in an autobiographical account of his tenure as head of the Office of
Legal Counsel, The Terror Presidency, while “[m]any people think the Bush
administration [was] indifferent to wartime legal constraints,” the opposite is in fact the
case: “[T]he administration [was] strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001, this war
has been lawyered to death. The administration has paid attention to law not necessarily
because it wanted to, but rather because it had no choice.... These men and women did not
believe they were breaking the law, and indeed they took extraordinary steps to ensure that

14
Cole, Justice at War, 17. See also Ackerman, Before the Next Attack; Cole and Dempsey, Terrorism and
the Constitution; Matheson, Presidential Constitutionalism.
15
Cole, Justice at War, 51.
16
Cole and Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free, 2.
245

they didn’t.”
17

Precisely because legality has become synonymous with legitimacy in our time,
officials have made a substantial effort to ensure that state security measures conformed to
the legal framework. Jurists in the OLC – among others, Jay Bybee, Patrick Philbin, Robert
Delahunty, and John Yoo – provided the legal expertise to support preventive security
measures in the war on terror, contending that if the rule of law proved too inflexible,
liberal-constitutional procedures would break under the pressure of terrorism.
18
Just as the
decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq were deemed to be within existing legal
boundaries, so too were heightened domestic surveillance, indefinite detention in
Guantanamo Bay, and the use of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture) as a means to
gather intelligence from suspected terrorists.
19
Much the same can be said of the more
recent use of unilateral executive authority to engage in drone warfare, airstrikes in the
Middle East, and surveillance programs worldwide. “[F]ar from suspending the law,” Mark
Neocleous concludes, emergency powers are “are entirely constitutional.”
20

The post-9/11 literature maintains that policies in the war on terror are illegitimate
because they are extralegal. Yet in grounding their critical interventions on the premise that
emergency powers should conform to constitutional limits, they cannot effectively
undermine forms of state violence that are enacted through the law. If the genealogy in this
dissertation shows us anything, it is that insisting on the rule of law is perhaps the least
effective form of critique,
21
rather than the most radical, as many commentators purport.
American democracy has just as easily been undermined through constitutional practices as
it has been upheld. Illegitimate security measures have been implemented by direct
reference to the U.S. Constitution and congressionally delegated authorities. Not only have
traditional checks and balances been legally eroded during almost every period of
emergency in U.S. history but these powers have, more importantly, become a lasting part
of the constitutional framework since WWII and the onset of the Cold War. We are left

17
Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 69 (emphasis added).
18
See especially Yoo’s logic in The Powers, 11. Or as conservative jurist Richard Posner, Not a Suicide Pact,
7-8, argues: “Constitutional law is intended to be a loose garment; if it binds too tightly, it will not be adaptable
to changing circumstances and will leave too little room for the play of democratic forces.”
19
For a collection of memoranda related to torture, e.g., see Danner, Torture and Truth.
20
Neocleous, Critique of Security, 71.
21
Ibid., 74.
246

without an adequate basis to critique the security measures of the preventive paradigm.
Even scholars who have called for an explicit focus on the historical roots of the war
on terror only attempt to locate the precedents of current security practices in earlier times,
rather than to identify the specific conditions of possibility for the post-9/11 American state.
Neal Katyal and Richard Caplan, for instance, suggest that state spying during the FDR
administration provides the clearest historical example of extralegal powers for domestic
surveillance. Others like David Cole, Louis Fisher, Geoffrey Stone, David Unger, and John
Yoo have – for varying ideological purposes – focused on the suspension of civil liberties in
past times of national security crisis. As antecedents to the post-9/11 preventive paradigm,
they cite the Sedition Act of 1798 to limit critical speech against the government; Abraham
Lincoln’s extraordinary use of executive privilege to suspend habeas corpus in the Civil
War; encroachments on the liberties of immigrants, industrial workers, and war detractors
during WWI; the FDR administration’s decision to intern roughly 120,000 citizens and
foreigners of Japanese descent during WWII; and the persecution of alleged communists,
draft dodgers, and protestors throughout the Cold War.
22

From this perspective, it is clear that liberal-constitutional norms, such as the
separation of powers between branches of government and limits on executive authority,
have long been subject to revision during periods of extreme national emergency. At
virtually every point in U.S. history, government officials have infringed on liberties in the
name of providing security from attack, both foreign and domestic; and these actions have
typically been taken with the express approval of Congress and the Judiciary. The threat of
war has historically led to the suppression of critical speech, invasion of privacy, indefinite
detention, military tribunals, racial profiling, and mandatory conscription – all of which
have been repurposed, albeit in different ways, after 9/11. Critics, therefore, emphasize that
leadership in the war on terror is no exception to historical patterns, and even more to the
point, that it is largely equivalent to the repressive security practices utilized in the past.
“[T]he view that we have recently moved into a permanent state of emergency,” Neocleous
determines, “is historically naïve.”
23

22
See Cole, Enemy Aliens; Fisher, The Constitution and 9/11; Katyal and Caplan, “The Surprisingly Stronger
Case;” Stone, Perilous Times; Unger, The Emergency State; Yoo, The Powers of War and Peace.
23
Neocleous, “The Problem with Normality,” 194.
247

Naturally, the parallels between post-9/11 and earlier times of emergency are
startling. However, even as these historical claims push back against the common
misconception that post-9/11 is merely an extraordinary period, they stem from a
fundamentally different kind of historical analysis than the one proposed in this dissertation
based on genealogy. To suggest that the war on terror is not without precedent, and that
executive powers have been consistently expanded during crisis, is to look back and find
snapshots that correspond with practices in the war on terror.
24
Without a doubt, this
approach helps explain some aspects of U.S. history, but it, ironically, tells us very little
about our present condition. In isolating particular events and showing how they are
analogous to today, this scholarship falls victim to both the presentism and finalism of
historical research mentioned above in the Introduction.
25
Simply put, if post-9/11 is not
seen as exceptional, it comes to appear as the necessary development along a continuous
line of ever-expanding executive powers and illiberal measures.
By stark contrast to both these ahistorical and historical accounts, genealogy aims
precisely to recover the contingent foundations of the post-9/11 American state, including
not only the preventive paradigm but also domestic emergency preparedness. Like a diver
in search of a pearl,
26
genealogical research swims through the murky waters of history to
locate the specific disruptions in the past that opened the conditions of possibility for the
present. While along the way one might lose sight of specific developments and
precedents, this approach nevertheless identifies the discursive, ideational, and institutional
foundations for permanent emergency in the U.S., well before the war on terror. In Parts I
and II of this dissertation, I demonstrate how developments in national planning expertise
during the FDR administration fundamentally transformed crisis governance and domestic
institutional development from that point onward. These innovations help explain the
pivotal transition in American statebuilding from temporary emergency measures before
WWII to lasting crisis since the early Cold War.
Because of changes like these, the FDR administration has been hailed, in more
historically minded scholarship, as the founder of permanent emergency in the U.S. “The

24
Cf. the critique in Tichenor, “Historical Set Points.”
25
See above Introduction, Sec. III.
26
I borrow this analogy from Hannah Arendt’s Introduction to Benjamin, Illuminations.
248

precedents he set, and his successors’ decisions to continue down the same paths,” David
Unger maintains, “make FDR the godfather of America’s emergency state.”
27
His
suspension of normal government procedures and separation of powers, in addition to his
heightened surveillance programs, insistence on government secrecy, and detention of
political enemies in internment camps, mark some of the early precedents of the post-9/11
war on terror.
28
Following in these footsteps, it is often claimed, officials continued
Roosevelt’s legacy of preventive security measures throughout the Cold War and into post-
9/11. No longer was crisis governance employed merely as a temporary means to manage
emergencies as they arose; rather, it became an ongoing part of national security and
foreign policymaking, suspending democratic procedures and principles indefinitely.
The argument in this dissertation is rather different. Genealogy is not concerned
with tracing the historical antecedents of certain security policies that have become so
prevalent in the post-9/11 era. It is not about finding the origins of preparatory or
preventive measures in the war on terror. Indeed, these can be found throughout U.S.
history, and would tell us very little about our time. The genealogical narrative presented
above attempts to locate, instead, the conditions of possibility for a post-9/11 intercurrent
American state. IR scholars of statebuilding – and historians as well – have consistently
overlooked the fundamental transformations brought about during the FDR
administration. Without their advances in planning expertise, technocratic governance, and
executive institutional preparedness in the EOP and OEM, U.S. statebuilding likely would
have returned to the more traditional paths after WWII, as it had in earlier moments of
demobilization following WWI. But leaders repurposed existing collaborative institutional
arrangements for the new security threats of the early Cold War, transforming the
American state into a permanent emergency-war machine.
From such a genealogical narrative, the remaining task is to identify how we can
employ this history to transform our present condition. The critical ambition of genealogy
is not simply to recover the specific institutional configurations proposed by the FDR
administration, many of which have lived on in different ways throughout the Cold War

27
Unger, The Emergency State, 29.
28
On espionage, see Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War. Katyal and Caplan, “The Surprisingly Stronger Case,”
argue that WWII surveillance serves as a precedent for post-9/11 measures. Cf. Agamben, State of
Exception; Neocleous, Critique of Security.
249

and even after 9/11. Despite their concerted efforts to construct a democratic American
state in the face of widespread national crisis – from economic depression to total war –
planning advisors in the 1930s and 1940s essentially laid the ground for what was to come.
The goal in uncovering these contingent historical foundations, rather, is to reclaim the
FDR administration’s hopes for democracy as we ourselves attempt to deal with existential
security threats and national emergencies. “The task to be accomplished,” critical theorists
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno explain, “is not the conservation of the past, but
the redemption of the hopes of the past.”
29

One of the central takeaways of this history is that we cannot simply rely on other
branches of government to guarantee that executive officials are held accountable to
democratic principles in periods of emergency. We as citizens must take back
responsibility for the state by actively striving to restructure state institutions along the lines
first advanced by the FDR administration, principally to write the obligations of the
citizenry back into the state. Far from merely institutionalizing disharmony and allowing for
fragmented political views, this requires the creation of an institutional configuration that
fosters genuine contestation about the future of the American state and people, and about
how to achieve democracy in moments of extreme security threat. It requires the creation
of institutional sites within which we all can critically examine the future of the state,
question the moral dilemmas underlying national security policies, and rethink our
priorities for governance.
Such a space for political, agonistic debate was dismantled in the postwar years, yet
it is precisely this space that must be recreated based on the hopes of the FDR
administration. We must reconstitute our state institutional system as a collaborative federal
project, in which people – not only officials but also everyday individuals – can engage in
the political process of struggling to produce change, and thus can take responsibility for
the American state. For “[t]he state,” as the activist-playwright turned President of
Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, once put it, “is not something unconnected to society,
hovering above or outside it, a necessary and anonymous evil. The state is a product of
society, an expression of it, an image of it. It is a structure that a society creates for itself as

29
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xv.
250

an instrument of its own self-realization. If we wish to create a good and humane society,…
we must create a good and humane state. That means a state that will no longer suppress,
humiliate, and deny the free human being, but will serve all the dimensions of that being.”
30

30
Havel, Summer Meditations, 121-122.
251

References

A brief note on sources: I have separated the sources used for this study into four categories:
archival sources, official documents, other materials, and secondary sources. The first two are
standard. The last two, however, deserve some further attention. The genealogical approach
employed in this dissertation suggests that the discourse and ideas of state agents matter for
institutional development and statebuilding. Therefore, what might appear in some studies as
secondary sources (e.g., academic articles and books of expert advisors) are understood here as
primary sources, in the sense that they perform the American state and contribute to crisis
governance and policymaking. These types of sources are under the heading “other materials,”
while all those written by people who were not directly in these activities are under the heading
“secondary sources” (e.g., theoretical literatures).

I. Archival sources

Coy Papers: The Papers of Wayne Coy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
Delano Papers: The Papers of Frederic A. Delano, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park,
New York.
Hopkins Papers: The Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park,
New York.
NRPB Records: Records of the National Resources Planning Board, Record Group 187, National
Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
OCD Records: Records of the Office of Civilian Defense, Record Group 171, National Archives
and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
OEM Records: Records of the Office for Emergency Management, Record Group 214, National
Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
PCAM Papers: President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Franklin D. Roosevelt
Library, Hyde Park, New York.
Smith Papers: The Papers of Harold D. Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New
York.

II. Official documents

9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission Report: The Attack from Planning to Aftermath. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Brookings Institution. Investigation of Executive Agencies of the Government, Report to the
Selected Committee to Investigate the Executives Agencies of the Government.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937.
Bureau of the Budget. The United States at War: Development and Administration of the War
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Bush, George W. “President Discusses War on Terrorism.” In Address to the Nation, World
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Civilian Production Administration. Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War
252

Production Board and Predecessor Agencies, 1940-1945. Washington, D.C.: Civilian
Production Administration, 1947.
Duncan, Joseph W., and William C. Shelton. Revolution in United States Government Statistics:
1926-1976. Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1978.
Graves, W. Brooke, editor. Reorganization of the Executive Branch of the Government of the
United States: A Compilation of Basic Information and Significant Documents, 1912-1948.
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Meriam, Lewis, and Laurence F. Schmeckebier. Reorganization of the National Government:
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National Planning Board. Final Report – 1933-34. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1934.
National Resources Board. Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
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National Resources Committee. Planning our Resources, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, March 1938.
-----. Progress Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1938.
-----. Progress Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1939.
-----. Regional Factors in National Planning. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
December 1935.
-----. The Problems of a Changing Population. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1938.
-----. The Structure of the American Economy: Part I. Basic Characteristics. Washington, D.C.:
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National Resources Planning Board. Industrial Location and National Resources. Washington,
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-----. United States Government Manual, 1945. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
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President’s Research Committee on Social Trends. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New
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Approve, 1936. New York: Random House, 1938.
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253

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