America’s political history is a fascinating paradox. The United States was born with the admonition that government posed a threat to liberty. This apprehension became the foundation of the nation’s civic ideology and was embedded in its constitutional structure. Yet the history of public life in the United States records the emergence of an enormously powerful national state during the nineteenth century. By 1920 the United States was arguably the most powerful country in the world. This book traces that evolution and offers an explanation of how it occurred.
I am not the first person to see a contradiction between theory and practice in American civic life. Many eminent observers have noted this discrepancy. Yet the dynamics that account for the accretion of political power over the nation’s history warrant further analysis and clarification. This explanatory deficiency is partially due to the belief that there was no state in America until the twentieth century. The nation’s republican ideology, which pivoted around the notions of liberty and democracy, and the federal system, which fragmented power across governments and space, made it appear that the United States was “stateless,” at least in the European sense of the term. This book argues that the state in America is rooted in its colonial experience and evolved over subsequent decades. The first task of this book is to synthesize evidence for this contention by reviewing governance at all levels of the American polity—local, state, and national—between 1754 and 1920. I do not claim that my summary represents a comprehensive inventory of public activity, for the archive of American governmental actions is immense and largely unorganized. But I hope my synthesis offers a valid representation of the historical reality.
The second task of this book is to explain the dynamics that propelled the expansion of the American state. Answering “why” depends heavily on tracing “how” the development occurred, an assignment that argues the utility of a historical perspective. The roots of the American state were situated in its British colonial history and the Revolution, which established the base from which civic action evolved over the next century and a half. The narratives used in this book are intended to capture the situational character of a sequence of critical events that lined this historical path, one filled with crises of war, economic depression, and political confrontation. Narrative story lines cannot, however, fully illuminate the dynamics of political change. Concepts that delineate broad, sometimes amorphous megainfluences are required to tease out more subtle causal dynamics. The Paradox of Power poses five critical causal elements: war, geography, economic development, identity (including citizenship and nationalism), and political capacity. This last factor embraces law and constitutionalism, administration, and political parties. The structure of the book emphasizes the role of these orienting concepts.
The third task of this book is related to the direction of historical writing about American government. There are several parts to this story. Historians seldom used the concept of the nation-state in their writing until political scientists in the 1980s and afterward addressed the topic, a period when civic history had begun to lose much of its former attraction for historians. Designating the state as the point of orientation can help rekindle interest in the nation’s civic past and fill in gaps in our understanding of it. Another part of the task facing scholars of American governance is to envision the polity in its entirety, which means integrating municipal, town, county, and state governments into the portrait of governmental history. Beginning in the 1890s, writing about America’s political past focused increasingly on the federal government, but an exclusive focus on national history does an injustice to civic life in the United States. Major dimensions of American governance, now and in the past, are undertaken locally. This fact poses formidable challenges to researchers, given the massive number of governmental entities in the United States. There is, however, an immense literature of original documents and secondary works available to facilitate this task. My synthesis of governance during two centuries necessarily rests primarily on the work of other scholars. Mining these studies and original sources can be—and probably should be—an interdisciplinary enterprise, as no one discipline has a monopoly on method and theory.
Several talented historians read portions of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions: my thanks to Philip R. VanderMeer, Michael Les Benedict, James Leamon, Alan Lessoff, and William B. Murphy. I also benefited greatly from the comments by two anonymous readers for the University Press of Kansas and my editor David Congdon. Collectively, their advice has substantially improved the book. So too has Linda Lotz’s editing of my prose, affirming the axiom that a good editor is an author’s best friend. I also want to express my appreciation to the authors of the books and articles that informed my understanding of American governance and statebuilding. The scholarly works cited in the pages that follow, as well as numerous uncited works, are a testimony to why an extended historical portrait is a community effort.