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Published by EH.NET (February 2001) 
 
Patrick D. Reagan, _Designing a New America: the Origins of New Deal  
Planning, 1890-1943 _.  University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.  Pp.  
xii + 362. ISBN 1-55849-230-5. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Jim Tomlinson, Brunel University, London. 
 
This book provides a detailed account of the evolution of the  
movement for national planning in the US between 1890 and 1943, when  
Congress ended funding for the National Resources Planning Board.  
Much of the account is woven around the careers and ideas of five key  
participants: Frederic A. Delano, Charles E. Merriam, Wesley C.  
Mitchell, Henry. S. Denison and Beardsley Ruml. During the 1920s and  
1930s, these five, Patrick Reagan argues, evolved a distinctive  
version of planning, sharply contrasted with the plans of the  
contemporary authoritarian states of Europe and Japan. The impetus  
for this American form of planning came partly from the experience of  
state intervention to support the American participation in the First  
World War and partly from the Hoover-led attempts to deal with the  
unemployment problem of the immediate post-war years. New Deal  
planning is seen as closely following these precedents, though  
receiving new impetus from the great depression, and moving in a more  
statist direction under the stimulus of Roosevelt's actions to  
counteract the great depression. 
 
The key characteristic of this planning was its attempt to find a way  
between nineteenth-century liberalism, and especially its sharp  
distinction between the public and private sectors, and twentieth  
century collectivism. This third way embodied voluntary co-operation  
between organised business and government (with a token role for  
unions and others) guided by experts working in close co-operation  
with political leaders. These experts would bring to bear the  
knowledge created by the nascent social sciences, and in so doing  
would prevent the economic and social breakdown which in so many  
parts of the world was creating dictatorships of the right and left.  
This version of planning was unambiguously elitist, excluded the  
unorganised, and showed little concern for issues around the  
distribution of income and wealth. Nevertheless, it provided the  
foundations for much of the discussion of planning that became an  
important element in post World War II politics, at least down to the  
1960s. 
 
The biographical approach to the evolution of planning proves an  
effective way of bringing into focus both the convergence of concerns  
and themes which underlay these ideas of planning, and the informal  
networks which transformed the ideas into policy initiatives.  
Equally, the author's aim to place planning in the mainstream of  
inter-war American politics (rather than an 'extremist' response to  
the great depression) is successfully attained. The contingencies of  
history are also nicely brought out in the account of the abolition  
of the NRPB, which was based on a combination of Congressional  
manoeuvrings for power, absurd ideological posturing by Republicans,  
and political maladroitness (and bad faith?) on the part of the  
President. 
 
The author is repetitive in his claims for American exceptionalism  
with regard to planning. (Indeed there is rather a lot of repetition  
even of minor points: we are told at least six times that Congress in  
1943 mandated the sending of the NRPB records to the National  
Archives). This claim for a peculiarly American version of planning  
is sound where the contrast is made with authoritarian regimes like  
the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Japan. But it is less persuasive if  
the comparison is made with other democracies that faced economic and  
social crisis in the 1920s and 1930s. In Britain, for example, as  
Daniel Ritschel in his The Politics of Planning (Oxford, 1997) has  
recently emphasised, the ideology of planning was widely embraced  
across the political spectrum. Many of the ideas articulated at that  
time had close affinity with the contemporary American version of  
planning, though what was also striking in Britain was the wide  
diversity of ideas that could come under that umbrella term. In this  
comparative light America appears less unique, more in a common mould  
of democracies where, many felt, 'planning' would provide a route to  
economic stability which free market policies seemed no longer to  
secure. 
 
 
Jim Tomlinson is Professor of Economic History, and Head of  
Department of Government, Brunel University, London. He has published  
widely in the field of macro-economic policy, industrial development  
and economic history, principally on Britain. His most recent  
publication is _The Politics of Decline: Understanding Post-War  
Britain_, Longmans 2000. 
 
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