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Published by EH.NET (July, 2000)  
 
Patrick D. Reagan, _Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal 
Planning, 1890-1943_. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. 
xii + 362 pp. 0 (cloth), ISBN: 1-55849-230-5.  
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Robert Cuff, Department of History, York University  
(Toronto). <[log in to unmask]>  
 
 
Patrick Reagan, an historian at Tennessee Technological University, has  
written a first-rate study of executive-level attempts at economic and  
social planning during the 1930s and early 1940s. The National Resources  
Planning Board (1939-1943) and its bureaucratic predecessors, the civilian  
agencies most central to the story, have received varying degrees of  
attention in New Deal historiography. In _V Was For Victory: Politics and  
American Culture During World War II_ (1976), for example, John Morton Blum 
made conservative congressional attacks on NRPB after Pearl Harbor symbolic 
of a general wartime backlash against New Deal liberalism, a theme now  
common in accounts of the wartime domestic scene. Taking a broader  
perspective, Otis Graham in _Toward A Planned Society: From Roosevelt to  
Nixon_ (1976) interpreted New Deal efforts at policy planning as part of a  
useable past for erstwhile planners in the late 1970s. More recently, Alan  
Brinkley in _The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War_  
(1995) has traced NRPB\'s role in policy struggles over the meaning of  
liberalism for the postwar social order.  
 
Reagan takes these and other studies into account but also makes his own  
distinctive contribution. On the interpretative level, no one has so firmly 
linked the national planning impulse of the 1930s to the intellectual and  
organizational history of the pre-New Deal era. In this sense, _Designing a 
New America_ may be read as an archaeological excavation of New Deal  
managerial ideals. In making the case for continuity, or for a broader  
historical context, Reagan provides an impressive synthesis of recent  
historiography (and an excellent primer for graduate students) on an array  
of issues related to the planning impulse: including progressive-era urban  
reform, mobilization during World War I, welfare capitalism, social science 
policy-making, and inter-war attempts at voluntary economic stabilization.  
 
 
Biographical studies of key Board members comprise five of the book\'s 
eight  
chapters, an approach, of course, that reinforces the sense of linkage  
between the 1930s and networks of policy advocates in prior decades.  
Included are detailed portraits of Franklin Roosevelt\'s uncle Frederic A.  
Delano, a former railroad executive whom Reagan regards as the father of  
New Deal planning: University of Chicago political scientist Charles  
Merriam, institutional economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, Massachusetts  
business executive Henry S. Dennison, and Rockefeller foundation manager  
Beardsley Ruml. While all five chapters draw on primary as well as  
secondary sources, and all are worth reading, those on the lesser-known  
Delano and Ruml contain the freshest material. Ruml\'s career trajectory  
from philanthropy manager to a member in 1935 of Roosevelt\'s planning 
board  
is particularly intriguing.  
 
In a certain respect, the biographical material is so strong that the  
reader comes away a bit uncertain about the story\'s administrative  
dimension--of how and why the National Planning Board of 1933 evolved into  
the NRPB of 1939, and what exactly those agencies did during their ten-year 
existence. I also think the author repeats the description of a seamless  
historical web a bit too often when he might better have added a page or  
two on what exactly had changed in approaches to nation-wide planning in  
the period he covers. But these are simply quibbles about a piece of work  
that\'s impressive as both interpretative scholarship and original 
research.  
 
 
Robert Cuff teaches at York University. He has written on economic planning 
during World Wars I and II.  
 
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Published by EH.NET (July 2000). All book reviews are archived at EH.Net. 
 
 
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