Reviews for Internal improvement

The average rating for Internal improvement based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-12 00:00:00 John Douglass This book deals with government funded infrastructure in the early 1800s. Two years ago this couldn't have seemed less relevant. Now, with terms like "shovel ready" obnoxiously insinuating themselves into press releases and news reports, it offers some surprising revelations about the nature of US infrastructure and the continuities of the debates over its funding. Most surprising to me was the variety and inventiveness of government support in that era. By the first decade of the century there were already government set-aside funds for road and canal improvements (that could either be appropriated by Congress or distributed by an executive officer), special grants to state governments for their own funding projects, generalized revenue sharing plans, and stock subscriptions to private companies. There was even the full panoply of regulations of private contractors working on these projects. These old time canals had practically every contemporary fed requirement outside Maintenance of Effort. Yet one difference this book does highlight between their era and our own is their ceaseless debate on constitutional interpretation. Now confined mainly to the courts and the press, in this era every congressman and every president took upon themselves the task of interpretation, and Presidents and Congressmen invoked the constitution and its original intent in almost every bill. The field was still wide open, and Marshall and his court had not yet monopolized this task. I completely disagree with the book's conclusions (that federal planning would have saved the canals), but that doesn't mar the work of the rest of the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-05 00:00:00 Barry Chin Larson looks at a very important phenomenon in the early republic, although it's kind of boring on the surface. This book argues that positive use of government for constructive purposes was an assumed power. Internal Improvements charts how this assumption transformed during the nineteenth century into a myth that the US government was always laissez faire. This argument is very much a reaction against Reagan era politics. The issue of positive government hit the rocks because the federal government was unable to overcome initial expectations about a virtuous republic. As Wood discusses, American politicians learn the hard way that self-interest has more staying power in politics. Those who wanted positive government vs those who wanted more of a protector of market forces didn't win any political arguments, but the failure of certain canal projects scandalized later ones. Ultimately by the 1820s Americans increasingly fall back on market forces to determine the "natural" or "inevitable" result. Probably the most important part of this process was Madison's rejection of the Bonus Bill which would have created a permanent fund for Internal Improvements. Politicians saw the necessity for such an institution, they were (rightly) afraid that such a permanent fund would inevitably be corrupted, enlarged, and upset the nation's tenuous sectional balance. By the Civil War the meaning of the Revolution had basically become a defense of property rights (really? Horowitz) and entrepreneurial freedom. The ultimate consequence was a post-bellum system where railroad barons like Jay Gould (White-Railroaded) could put the entire nation at its feet, which was certainly not the intention of the founders. Ultimately forwards the argument that the Federal Government is necessary for order and that people like Madison are good.