Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929. By Kimberley S. Johnson. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii, 226 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-11974-8.)

Abstract

Kimberly S. Johnson, a political scientist at Barnard College, Columbia University, offers a welcome reminder to historians of the modern United States: New Deal policy making was not a seamless transition to more centralized policy making in Washington. Rather, it was based on a federalist heritage of power sharing among the states and the national government that stretched back to the nineteenth century. While James Patterson, in his important book The New Deal and the States (1969), analyzed the 1930s and the consequences of New Deal policy on the states, Johnson focuses on the period before the 1930s and on congressional attempts to respond to national issues with mixed national-state policy solutions. She argues that the transition to the executive-directed national policy-making model Patterson identified for the 1930s originated in a nuanced balancing act shaped by Congress from the end of the Civil War to the 1920s. This book is generally a product of political science (it begins with a definition of the “new New Federalism,” followed by a chapter on context, three case-study chapters, and a conclusion), but it rests more on its historical case-study analyses than on pathbreaking political science technique. The notes are valuable reading in themselves, for they reflect an overview of federalism that includes contemporary sources and secondary analyses from the 1960s to recent times.