Contemporaries Book

So many of the institutions we take for granted today -- from the Reserves and National Guard, to the federal civil service, to credentialed professions like doctors and lawyers -- came into being in the decades around 1900. We treat these things as facts of life, as inevitable solutions to straightforward problems, but they have a history. And as Skowronek shows, that history was in large part one of political conflict.

Take the military. After the crash demilitarization following the Civil War -- from over a million men in the Union Army at the end of the war to 25,000 less than a decade later, an amazing story in itself -- there followed a multi-cornered struggle between the state governments that saw state militias as a valuable source of patronage and prestige; the line officers, mainly engaged in the violent suppression of the Indians; and the reformist staff officers in DC, who dreamed of a professional military on European lines. The by-no-means-predetermined outcome was the hybrid system of a professional federal military with significant state-based components (the National Guard) that persisted through two world wars and shapes the way the burden of fighting in Iraq is distributed today.

Skowronek tells similar stories, in great detail, about the creation of the federal bureaucracy and modern system of business regulation. We need more of this. There's the old history of great men, the new history from below, but not enough histories of institutions. (A nice companion piece is David Noble's America by Design, which, while more overtly political and with more of a focus on business as well as the state, carries essentially the same story through WWI and the '20s. What others?)

And it's not unreadable. Of course you *do* have to be interested in the history of the Interstate Commerce Commission, but you also get to learn about people like Roscoe Conkling, who was simultaneously a master of patronage & corruption -- dominating New York state politics through his control of hiring at the New York customhouse -- and a leading supporter of Reconstruction, and fought both against merit hiring and professional standards for the civil service, and for the rights of African-Americans long after most of the Republican Party had abandoned them to solidify its business base. "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues..."