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Author:
G. William DomhoffThe argument inspiring this book can be put very simply: who has more power in the United States, the federal government or the owners and managers of large income-producing property? I say the big property owners dominate the government, even on seemingly liberal issues like the Social Security Act of 1935, which gave Americans their pension system and welfare benefits. My designated opponents, the state autonomy theorists, say elected politicians and appointed officials run the show, with a little bit of help from liberal reformers and academic experts. I counter that the experts and politicians matter to some extent, but are secondary to the corporate rich, and I cite chapter and verse. Sometimes experts and government officials have a little room to maneuver, but most experts are less independent than state autonomy theorists imagine, and most elected officials are dependent on help from the corporate rich to win and stay in office. That goes for many Democrats as well as virtually all Republicans.
The terrain of disagreement will be the New Deal and the Progressive Era, when reformers and liberals probably had their greatest impact in American history. State autonomy theorists have based most of their claims on those eras, so that is where I have to engage them. The issues will be such important policy decisions as the origins of subsidy payments through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the decline and fall of the National Recovery Administration between 1933 and 1935, the origins of the Social Security Act of 1935, and the importance of the military in shaping the industrial mobilization for World War II. The wide range of social legislation that was proposed during the Progressive Era also will be analyzed in an attempt to understand why some bills passed and some did not. Following the case studies, the final chapter will present an explanation for the great acclaim that was accorded to one state autonomy book on the Progressive Era by mainstream social scientists who are not of the state autonomy persuasion.
It would be ideal if I could base all of my critiques of case studies by state autonomy theorists on new empirical findings of my own doing. Although my previous books are grounded in network analysis, content analysis, archival digging, and interviews, I am not able to do original research as fast as state autonomy theorists can turn out their interpretative histories based on secondary sources. Thus, my original research for this book is primarily confined to my new analysis of the Social Security Act. However, I also present some new archival findings on the origins of the Agricultural Adjustment Act that contradict the claim by some state autonomy theorists that it was created by government economists who were working in the public interest. Moreover, we are not entirely at a loss for "new" information for the chapters where I could not do original research because there are sources that the state autonomy theorists overlooked as well as new studies since they wrote the claims I will critique.
Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8 are completely new efforts that were written especially for this book. Chapters 3 and 6 are extensively revised versions of earlier papers. Chapter 7 builds on a short book review-essay by adding much new material and extending it greatly. Due to the revisions and extensions of the three chapters that are based in previous work, the book is a seamless whole with a clear thesis and progression. This seamlessness was not difficult to accomplish because I envisioned this book when I was writing the earlier essays.
My deepest thanks to Harvey Molotch and an anonymous reader for Aldine de Gruyter for helpful comments that greatly shaped the tone of the book and sharpened my argument. I am also extremely grateful to Jeff Manza for very useful general discussions of many of the issues analyzed in this book and for his valuable reading of the final three chapters. Walter Goldfrank gave me very helpful commentary on the two final chapters, and Richard Hamilton was equally helpful on Chapters 6 and 7. I derived exceptional benefit from Gwendolyn Mink's extensive help on Chapter 7, for which I am deeply grateful. I thank the late Grant McConnell, Richard Kirkendall, Bill Friedland, and Michael Goldfield for their many useful substantive comments on an earlier version of Chapter 3, and Jordon Schwarz Frank Kofsky, and Val Burris for their excellent suggestions on an earlier version of Chapter 6. I am grateful to Craig Reinarman for his invaluable comments on tone and substance in a very early version of what became this manuscript. The mistakes that remain are mine, but I hope the collective help of these fine colleagues and scholars has made the mistakes fewer and less glaring.
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