Andrew S.

Terrell
Spring 2010

Précis: Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,
1877-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

In his monograph, Stephen Skowronek, asserts country-wide institutional changes following the Civil War

beckoned an administrative evolution of the American state. The period 1877-1920 was surveyed because it marked

a great shift in American statecraft. The 19th century American state was portrayed as a “great anomaly” among

Western institutions. Skowronek’s study, thus, takes the period of administrative change and divides it between the

era of patching and of modern state development more defined by European critics of the former American state.

Each of these eras went through periods of state building themselves culminating in the formation of the modern

bureaucratic system. A large theme of the study challenges the consensus that such statecraft came about in the New

Deal period and expanded thenceforth. At the root of American political problems after the Civil War was the move

towards modernization and industrialization unmatched even by the Union’s esteems in the mid 19th century. To

accommodate the changing state, “parties and courts” were patched yet remained until the turn of the century. The

ultimate rise of the bureaucratic supremacy, according to Scowronek, was because short sighted fixes had not

adequately reacted to the rising power of the so-called new elites and the Great War. One infers a power vacuum

was expanding and soon filled in the period under review in this work.

The major impact of this monograph to history and political science was the notion that state powers

evolution in America began much earlier than the 1930s. Skowronek points out the three fundamental changes that

tend to prompt government expansion: crises, class conflict, and complexity. Historians have to take each of these

and understand their implications. Crises have the power to change state structure and policy rapidly. In the period

studied, no decade was without a crisis. The new elite rising and new middle class expansion (organized labor)

ushered in class conflicts. Social interactions evolved in each subsequent decade after the Civil War as mass

urbanization, industrialization--modernization all in all--swept the country. My question is which of these forces in

modern state development were more prominent in the progressive era? Furthermore, had Congress responded more

aggressively to the changing political system, what could have been averted in later decades if anything? One

believe this goes back to the consensus that the FDR administrations marked a sharp shift in bureaucratic power. At

the very least the culmination of events that Skowronek examined was the modern presidency. Whether one points

at Taft and Wilson or FDR is trifling in the context that the shift to the modern political system began during

reconstruction. Perhaps this was the larger point the author was trying to make: that bureaucratic supremacy over

older institutions was inevitable by the end of WWI.