The Long, Winding Road to Laissez-Faire

Abstract

At first glance, John Larson's Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States might seem to retell a familiar story. Like George Rogers Taylor, whose classic The Transportation Revolution (1951) was first published a half century earlier, Larson offers a detailed synthesis of pre-Civil War efforts to improve the young nation's infrastructure. Like the authors of the commonwealth studies of the 1940s, Larson focuses on government initiatives in the hopes of discovering antecedents-and, in his case, alternatives-to present-day policies and practices. Yet Larson adds a refreshing and often eloquent twist to the old story. Debates over internal improvements, in Larson's hands, become a means for understanding how abstract discussions over republicanism evolved as the first two generations of national and state leaders faced the very tangible challenges of (literally) building the nation. Internal Improvement's most significant contribution is its primary focus on federal, rather than state, support for roads, bridges, canals, and railroads. For nearly fifty years, virtually all the literature on internal improvements, which is quite substantial, has studied state-sponsored or mixed-enterprise projects, in large part because so few federal initiatives actually reached fruition. Yet Larson sees opportunity in failure. What makes Internal Improvement so compelling is that Larson reveals the importance of roads not taken-or, even, built. To understand the subtleties of how the founders (and subsequent generations of politicians) envisioned the federal government's role in economic development, Larson suggests, we need to look beyond the physical legacy that they left behind. Only by giving equal attention to projects they debated and then abandoned, often with a great deal of rancor, can we fully appreciate what the young nation might have accomplished had self-interest not trumped republican idealism, had voters not lost faith in elected officials' ability to dispense equitably the public largess.