Description: Reconstructing the story of how reformers used public authority to reshape the nation, Jason Scott Smith argues that the New Deal produced a revolution in state-sponsored economic development. The scale and scope of this dramatic federal investment in infrastructure laid crucial foundations--sometimes literally--for postwar growth, prestaging the national highways and the military-industrial complex. This impressive and exhaustively researched analysis underscores the importance of the New Deal in comprehending political and economic change in modern America.
Brief description: Jason Scott Smith is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He previously held a Mellon Fellowship in American Studies at Cornell University, where he was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History and the Department of Government. In 2001-2 he was the Harvard Newcomen Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where he taught courses on the history of capitalism. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including the Journal of Social History, Pacific Historical Review, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
Review Quotes: "What lay at the center of the New Deal? Was it the emergence of a new regulatory state? Or of a new welfare, laborite, corporate, or consumerist one? Arguments for each exist. But in this provocative, elegantly written, and massively researched study, Jason Scott Smith maintains that its real center lay elsewhere...Smith has given us a major work deserving of a wide readership."
Business History Review