| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Patrick D. Reagan. Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943. (Political Development of the American Nation: Studies in Politics and History.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 362. $40.00.

In this book, Patrick D. Reagan reports three central findings: that great continuity characterized pre-1933 and New Deal planning programs; that the United States exhibited a distinctive approach to planning; and that the work of New Deal-era planners was influential in the shaping of public policy in the postwar era. Through biographical chapters that examine the careers of the five men who comprised the variously named New Deal planning apparatus, Reagan is largely successful in demonstrating the validity of the first two propositions, but his book is less convincing in arguing for the third. He makes it clear that Frederick Delano, Charles Merriman, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Henry A. Dennison, and Beardsly Ruml, all of whom held key positions at one time or another in the New Deal planning agency eventually called the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), embodied continuity with earlier planning initiatives. They built on their rich pre-1933 experience in city planning, war mobilization, and Hooverian associationalism. At the same time, these men recognized that the Great Depression called for greater state involvement. Rejecting statist models of planning prevalent in the 1930s, they also departed from Herbert Hoover's nongovernmental associationalism to posit a distinctive American variant of economic and social planning. . . .

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