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[NOTE: This is the first of two reviews of this book that I will post. 
Some historians of American economics will be interested in the 
reviews..--RBE] 
 
 
H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by [log in to unmask] (June, 1998) 
 
Ballard C. Campbell.  _The Growth of American Government: Governance from 
the Cleveland Era to the Present_.  Interdisciplinary Studies in History. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.  x + 289 pp.  Bibliographic 
references and index.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-253-32871-3. 
 
Reviewed for H-Pol by Larry G. Gerber <[log in to unmask]>, 
Auburn University 
 
Over the last century, the growth of government has been one of the most 
dramatic developments in American history.  In 1890, the size and scope of 
the state in America was strictly limited.  Spending by all levels of 
government represented only 7 percent of GNP; only one out of every thirty 
workers in the country was a public employee;  and few individuals other 
than Union army Civil War veterans received any direct financial assistance 
from the government.  By 1990, the state had become a dominant factor in 
the nation's economy and in the daily lives of most Americans. Government 
spending had risen to 40 percent of GNP;  one out of every six workers in 
the nation was a public employee; and nearly half of all Americans received 
some form of direct financial benefit from the government. 
 
Ballard Campbell's _The Growth of American Government_ offers a 
comprehensive account of the expansion of the American state since 1887. A 
contribution to Indiana University Press's highly regarded 
Interdisciplinary Studies in History series, the book draws effectively 
from recent literature in political science and sociology to develop a 
general explanatory framework for the growth that Campbell chronicles so 
well.  While the book is obviously intended for classroom use in survey 
courses in American history and government and will contain little that is 
truly new or surprising for experts in the field, scholars will be 
impressed by Campbell's ability to cover so much ground in only 241 pages 
of text.  While the growth of government is a familiar theme, perhaps no 
other historian has so successfully interwoven developments at the 
national, state, and local level over such a long period of time. 
 
Campbell divides the history of American governance into four periods, each 
with its own distinctive polity:  "republican"  (1780s-1870s), 
"transitional" (1880s-1920s), "claimant"  (1930s-1970s), and "restrained" 
(mid-1970s-).  Each period, he argues, has been characterized by a 
distinctive set of policy innovations, fiscal pattern, federal-state 
relations, and economic conditions.  Thus, in the "republican polity" that 
existed during the nation's first century as a primarily agricultural 
society, government functions and expenditures were strictly limited, with 
a consequent absence of direct taxation on the American people, and with 
the local, state and federal governments carrying out clearly 
distinguishable tasks (though local governments bore the primary 
responsibility for public administration and policy formulation). 
 
The "transitional polity" coincided with the onset of full 
industrialization and involved the development of government regulation of 
business, increased public expenditures, the creation of new forms of 
taxation (including the income tax), and a more complex, though still 
largely cooperative, relationship between state and federal governments. 
The "claimant polity" that had its origins in the Great Depression but came 
to maturity in the period of affluence after World War II witnessed a 
tremendous growth in government responsibility for global stabilization, 
the economy, income security, civil rights, and work and environmental 
standards, and it involved the application of federally determined 
standards to many state activities.  In the period of slow economic growth 
in postindustrial America, a "restrained polity" has emerged.  Although the 
overall cost of government has continued to be high, expenditures have 
greatly exceeded revenues, and a movement toward deregulation and 
privatization has developed at the same time that the federal government 
has engaged in increasingly coercive efforts to mandate certain state and 
local actions. 
 
Several major themes emerge from Campbell's study. First, Campbell 
believes that government expansion cannot be attributed to a single causal 
explanation.  The impact of industrialization, interest group pressures, 
partisan politics, and the self-interested activity of state actors all 
contributed to the growth of government, especially at the national level, 
but Campbell concludes that no "one individual, group, or event dominated 
policy making during this transformation. Rather, the Federal role expanded 
in response to numerous pressures, unfolded incrementally, and grew 
cumulatively"  (p. 73).  Nevertheless, Campbell does place the greatest 
emphasis on the socio-economic environment, in particular the demands 
generated by industrialization, as the single most important factor 
bringing about changes in government policy and functions.  He downplays 
the significance of party competition as an underlying cause of the growth 
of government, arguing that differences between the two major parties 
regarding the expansion of government have been minimal, especially when 
one considers expansion of government functions at the state and local, as 
well as at the national level.  Nor does Campbell see elections as being 
critical to the process, since voters have appeared "to act more as 
consumers of public goods than as initiators of new policies" (p. 45). 
 
Interest groups play a larger role in his story than parties or the 
electorate at large, but here, too, Campbell denies the assertion made by 
some scholars that interest groups have been the driving force in the 
development of the American state.  Instead, he contends that they have 
been far more successful in defending benefits and shaping the 
implementation of programs than they have been in causing the enactment of 
new programs and expanding government authority into new realms. 
 
State actors--legislators, executives, and bureaucrats--all contributed to 
the expansion of government.  Elected officials may not have been forced by 
grass-roots pressures from the electorate to expand the size and functions 
of government, but Campbell describes a process whereby politicians found 
that they could gain electoral support by extending benefits and services 
to particular groups of voters.  Non-elected officials also had 
self-interested reasons for expanding the functions of government, and 
hence the size and prestige of the bureaucracy.  In the end, however, 
Campbell argues that "it is futile to look for a magic bullet that explains 
a phenomenon as complex as the transformation of government ... [T]he 
incremental process of policy making followed the course of least political 
resistance" and "built on existent policy" (p. 52). 
 
Another major theme of _The Growth of American Government_ is the 
continuing impact of America's republican origins.  As expressed in both 
Americans' ideological predisposition to be suspicious of government power 
as a threat to individual liberty and in an enduring constitutional 
structure characterized by federalism and a system of checks and balances, 
the nation's republican tradition has played a critical role in shaping the 
growth of the American state.  Although the United States long ago departed 
from many of the principles and practices that characterized the early 
republic, Campbell persuasively argues that the ideological legacy of the 
American Revolution and the structure of government established by the 
Constitution in 1789 have continued to impede the development of a cohesive 
state capable of long-range planning and coordinated policy formulation and 
implementation.  Even as they have come to support a tremendous expansion 
of the functions and size of government, Americans have maintained an 
essentially ambivalent attitude about the power of the state, and 
especially about the increasingly centralized authority of the federal 
government.  Campbell recognizes that it is impossible either to describe 
or explain the growth of government in the United States by focusing 
strictly on Washington.  One of the great strengths of this book is that it 
presents a unified narrative that underscores the importance of the 
changing relationships that developed between local, state, and federal 
governments over the last century.  In the late nineteenth century, not 
only did local governments play a far greater role in the daily lives of 
the American people, spending considerably more than half of all money 
allotted for public purposes, but each level of government performed 
relatively distinct tasks and interacted very little with the other levels 
of government.  The story of the growth of government in the United States 
is not simply a story of centralization of all power and authority in 
Washington, but rather of the growing interdependency of local, state, and 
federal governments and a consequent blurring of the distinct lines of 
responsibility that once existed.  Campbell's recurring references to 
developments in Arlington, Massachusetts serve as a highly useful case 
study of such change over time.  Moreover, as Campbell shows, the last half 
century has actually seen state revenues increasing more rapidly than 
federal revenues.  Local government has clearly lost its position as the 
most significant level of government in the United States, but state 
responsibilities have increased almost as dramatically as federal 
responsibilities since the end of World War II. 
 
While Campbell offers an impressive overview of the growth of American 
government over the last one hundred years, he acknowledges that a major 
issue relating to that growth "is not the primary consideration of this 
book":  the question of whether the expansion of government functions was 
"constructive, inevitable, or counterproductive" to the public good and 
whether such expansion tended to favor certain groups or classes of 
Americans over others (p. 54). 
 
Campbell may not tackle this issue head on, but he certainly conveys the 
impression that he is generally in sympathy with "liberal"  efforts over 
the past century to use the power of government to reduce the risks of 
living in the modern interdependent world.  At the same time, however, a 
recurring, though not strongly emphasized, theme in Campbell's account is 
the ability of privileged groups in society to reap disproportionate 
benefits from government programs once those programs become established. 
Thus, in agriculture, one of the first important areas of government 
intervention in the economy, in the long run "the real beneficiaries of 
agricultural policy were a comparatively few successful farmers and many 
businesses that processed and sold their commodities" (p. 127). Similarly, 
in what has become the most costly area of government spending, income 
security, members of "the middle class, not the poor, were the principal 
beneficiaries" (p. 152).  Campbell concludes that "regardless of the 
intentions of lawmakers, the effect of many economic policies was to convey 
valuable benefits to particular classes of individuals," and that, in most 
instances, those classes consisted of interest groups that already enjoyed 
a privileged position in society. 
 
Only in the final stages of the claimant polity, when issues of civil 
rights and environmental protection became central to the liberal agenda, 
did the expansion of government functions promise to advance the interests 
of the underprivileged or the polity as a whole.  This expansion of the 
liberal agenda, however, coincided with intensifying global competition and 
a slowdown in the rate of economic growth, so that a backlash set in 
resulting in the rise of what Campbell tentatively calls the "restrained 
polity" of the last twenty-five years. 
 
Campbell remains uncertain whether the restraint of recent years 
represents the emergence of a truly distinctive fourth era in the history 
of American governance, or whether it constitutes only a "subera" (or 
temporary interlude) in what will later be viewed as the continuing 
domination of the "claimant polity."  One can hardly blame Campbell for 
leaving open the question of whether future historians will look back at 
the late twentieth century as the culmination of the polity introduced by 
the New Deal or as the beginning of a new post-New Deal order.  _The Growth 
of American Government_ is an important and impressive work of synthesis.  
While refraining from obvious partisanship, Campbell does not avoid making 
interpretive judgments that make this work far more than a simple 
narrative.  Instructors looking for a single and easily accessible work to 
help students understand the expansion of the American state would do well 
to consider this book. 
 
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