This volume addresses statebuilding in the Progressive Era, and the years leading up to and immediately following it, by considering institutions, policy areas, reformers, and sites of development that have largely evaded the analytical gaze of researchers who explore the roots of the modern American state. In doing so, this book hopes to add to the richness and complexity of the literature concerning development in this era by bringing forward new cases for consideration. More fundamentally, though, these cases reveal themselves as crucial sites of statebuilding—the making of black and monogamous citizens in the postbellum years, the racial and...

The post-Civil War years were busy ones for activists, government agents, and federal government lawyers. As the war ended, the Constitution was amended and Congress passed legislation to facilitate the shift of African Americans from bondsmen (and women) to free citizens. Freedmen’s Bureau agents operated in an uncertain legal environment initially, often in opposition to the actions of the reestablished southern states’ legal systems. In part, they served as agents for individuals who were legal citizens but did not yet have the full capacity to exercise and defend their rights. Soon afterward, the Fourteenth Amendment underlined congressional authority to legislate,...

On July 30, 1907, the Georgia House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming margin to pass a bill mandating statewide prohibition. The bill had already successfully cleared the state Senate, and the signature of Governor Hoke Smith was assured. Statewide prohibition would take effect on January 1, 1908, as Georgia became the first state in the South ever to adopt the policy, and the first in the nation to do so since 1889. In the wake of the House vote, crowds of temperance advocates, white ribbons waving, chose two symbolic venues to stage their celebration: the offices of the Atlanta...

Progressive Era cities faced garbage disposal problems. As mounting trash filled streets, dumps, and rivers, municipal officials in Pittsburgh and New Orleans considered a new and expensive solution, reduction, in which trash was converted into profitable byproducts such as grease and fertilizer.¹ In 1895, Pittsburgh awarded a reduction contract to the American Reduction Company while a year earlier New Orleans awarded one to the Southern Chemical and Fertilizer Company. Both cities followed a remarkably similar trajectory: garbage became a problem, reduction was a solution, the cities chose reduction, and controversy followed. However, while Pittsburgh built the plant and flourished, the...

No subject has been more marginal to scholarship on American political development than animals. Indeed, Stephen Skowronek’s seminal study of statebuilding is perfectly silent on the topic in spite of the fact that one of his major case studies is the army, an organization centrally concerned throughout the nineteenth century with managing horses, draft animals, and other livestock.¹ Yet animals are and long have been critical to human social and economic organization and their management has always been a critical function of American governments. It could hardly be otherwise in a society so heavily dependent on animal power. Recent research...

As scholars such as Elisabeth Clemens have demonstrated, statebuilding in the United States has never been a purely linear process. Over time, there has been no wholesale, systematic progression, culminating in the centralization of power in autonomous national agencies. Instead, political entrepreneurs and public officials have ultimately fashioned a muddled, fragmented government that mixes national efforts with those of state, local, and private actors to create a bewildering array of governing structures—in short, Clemens’s “Rube Goldberg state.”¹

However, wildlife protection is one policy area where the march from provincial to centralized governance proceeded in a relatively linear fashion. Beginning...

At the turn of the twentieth century, reformers in Chicago, deeply concerned about social conditions and moral influences on children, created a juvenile court system. This innovation led to the extension of the juvenile court idea and other institutional efforts in child saving across the nation and gave rise to social programs at the city, state, and federal level. The origin and early development of the juvenile court system provides an important case study in Progressive Era statebuilding and the public-private collaborations that initiated and sustained it. Nonstate actors and organizations played a vital and dynamic role in pressing the...

In the second year of the New Deal, the federal government continued to grapple with the daunting economic problems of the Great Depression, especially with the ongoing problems of the nation’s financial system and the continuing plague of extensive unemployment. One of the most important pieces of legislation of the “First New Deal” formulated in the second session of the 73rd Congress and explicitly designed to deal with the overwhelming problems of unemployment and the nation’s housing market was the National Housing Act of 1934. The intent of the Act was to address the ongoing stagnant state of the nation’s...