| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kimberly S. Johnson. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929. (Princeton Studies in American Politics.) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2007. Pp. 226. $35.00.

Kimberly S. Johnson brings a political scientist's tools to bear on a problem in the history of American federalism, with considerable success. Textbooks divide early twentieth-century federalism into two eras. Under "dual federalism," a legacy of the nineteenth century, state and federal governments were, in James Bryce's famous metaphor, a factory in which two machines were furiously at work, their components seemingly intermingled but never in contact. When the Great Depression wrecked this elegant mechanism by bankrupting the states, the New Deal responded with a vast expansion of grant-in-aid programs. The money came with strings attached, however, and a "new" or "cooperative" federalism resulted in which national officials increasingly had the last word. We always knew, of course, that grant-in-aid programs existed before the 1930s, but these anomalies could be finessed as early responses to the modernization of American society and precursors of truly national structures to come—or at least they could as long as scholars equated "nationalism with centralization and centralization with progress" (Barry Karl, The Uneasy State [1983], p. 3). Reject those assumptions, and the federal programs of the Gilded Age and Progressive era becomes a puzzle. If not "merely a New Deal state-in-waiting" (p. 5), what were they?

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