Building New Deal Liberalism
The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956

A historical study of New Deal public works programs and their role in transforming the American economy, landscape, and political system.

Jason Scott Smith (Author)

9780521828055, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2005

300 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.543 kg

'In this impressively researched study of public works in the United States, Jason Scott smith argues that public investment and state-sponsored economic development are essential to a modern economy and that during the period under examination, public investment was used to spur economic development.' History

This book provides a historical study of New Deal public works programs and their role in transforming the American economy, landscape, and political system during the twentieth century. Reconstructing the story of how reformers used public authority to reshape the nation, Jason Scott Smith argues that the New Deal produced a revolution in state-sponsored economic development. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure laid crucial foundations - sometimes literally - for postwar growth, presaging the national highways and the military-industrial complex. This impressive and exhaustively researched analysis underscores the importance of the New Deal in comprehending political and economic change in modern America by placing political economy at the center of the 'new political history'. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Smith provides a reinterpretation of the relationship between the New Deal's welfare state and American liberalism.

1. Reevaluating the New Deal state and the public works revolution
2. Economic development and unemployment in the early New Deal
3. Making a New Deal state: patronage and the Public Works Administration
4. The dilemma of New Deal public works: people or projects?
5. 'Boondoggling' and the welfare state
6. Party building and 'pernicious political activities': the road to the Hatch Act
7. Public works and New Deal liberalism in reorganization and war
8. Public works and the postwar world
9. Epilogue: public works and the building of New Deal liberalism.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]