American Labor and Economic Citizenship
New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression

This book argues that the period from World War I to the Great Depression was an incubating era when innovative and lasting policy paradigms emerged.

Mark Hendrickson (Author)

9781107559677, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 June 2015

338 pages, 3 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

'Hendrickson's book provides valuable insight into the modestly ameliorative consequences of empirical inquiry in government, academia, and nonprofit foundations that aspired to impartiality.' Alexander J. Field, The American Historical Review

Once viewed as a distinct era characterized by intense bigotry, nostalgia for simpler times and a revulsion against active government, the 1920s have been rediscovered by historians in recent decades as a time when Herbert Hoover and his allies worked to significantly reform economic policy. Mark Hendrickson both augments and amends this view by studying the origins and development of New Era policy expertise and knowledge. Policy-oriented social scientists in government, trade union, academic and nonprofit agencies showed how methods for achieving stable economic growth through increased productivity could both defang the dreaded business cycle and defuse the pattern of hostile class relations that Gilded Age depressions had helped to set as an American system of industrial relations.

Introduction
1. 'Hoovering' in the twenties: efficiency, wages, and growth in the 'new economic system'
2. Wages and the public interest: economists and the wage questions in the new era
3. Enlightened labor? Labor's share and economic stability
4. A new capitalism? Interrogating employers' efforts to cultivate a 'feeling of partnership' in industry
5. Gender research as labor activism: the women's bureau in the new era
6. The new 'Negro problem'
7. Promising problems: working toward a reconstructed understanding of the African American and Mexican worker
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]