My work

I am currently an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I am also a Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, until September 2011. From 2005-2010 I was a D.Phil. student in the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History, supervised by Dr. Gareth Davies and Professor Avner Offer. I have also taught undergraduate courses in twentieth-century American history at Oxford and the University of Reading and worked as a Mellon Fund Research Assistant in my final two years at Oxford.

Two centuries ago James Madison wrote “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy.”[1] Yet remarkably today America has no official means of systematically assessing national progress. The Gross National Product (GNP) has often substituted for such a yardstick; however even before its first appearance in a 1944 budget message the measure’s creator warned that the “welfare of a nation” can “scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”[2] The economy appears to ‘grow’ as a result of war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, crime, family breakdown, and cleaning up pollution; and GNP takes no account of income inequality, non-market activity, or the sustainability of growth. Social scientists have long urged the creation of a broader gauge of national well-being, one that takes account of a range of factors that contribute to quality of life.

This book explores the most important effort to do so, namely the quest to institutionalize a ‘Social Report of the President’, designed to shift public debate towards consideration of how government policies could improve the condition of the natural environment, raise educational attainment and public health standards, foster equality of opportunity, and address crime levels and other social problems. The United States was the first country to publish a Social Report: first under the Hoover Administration, and then – forty years later – under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But, while a great deal of social measurement was incorporated into governance procedures as a result of the social reporting drive, a Social Report never came to be institutionalized in American government, in contrast to the situation in some seventeen other nations.

The quest to institutionalize a social report was a focal point in debates over the fundamental role of the state in America: how far beyond the realm of simply facilitating the market the state should have ventured into addressing social and environmental issues, and how much prominence such forays should have been given in discussions of the government’s achievements. At the close of the 1970s, the federal government was able to base its policies on a range of economic indicators, as published in the annual Economic Report of the President. However, as President Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser lamented, “What is lacking is a statement of social description and policy which either falls outside economic concerns or is difficult to measure in dollar terms.” It was an omission in the government’s reporting, the aide continued, which “seems to signal both in image and significance that only the dictates of economic theory matter” and made it difficult to “measure our progress toward administration social goals”.

The social report debate, especially from the 1960s onwards, was one locus of a struggle over whether federal policies should have been set according to expanding the private economy, or, by contrast, whether social stability, and non-economic aspects of the nation’s quality of life, should have been given stronger consideration. Viewed in this way the debates are of key historical significance, for this dichotomy mirrors theoretical frameworks proposed for understanding modern political development. For example Ellis Hawley advocates conceptualizing the history of social policy within liberal welfare states as being dictated primarily by public officials concerned to preserve their own political and institutional bases of support whilst mediating between contrasting imperatives from two broad constituencies: on the one hand a constituency situated in the property-based marketplace, concerned to expand economic activity; on the other, a political constituency concerned to raise social welfare by establishing buffers against the reach of the market.[3] Given that when the calculation of the Gross National Product was set (in 1947) it was explicitly designed to measure business cycle activity rather than citizens’ economic welfare (as discussed in chapter two of my book), the history of attempts to offset its use as a gauge of national progress matches the struggle between the two constituencies which Hawley identified.

The institutions which produce economic and social statistics furnish the evidence with which public policy is appraised, even the concepts through which policy is considered. The political actors who struggled over the nation’s social and economic reporting infrastructure throughout the twentieth century were often well aware of how important this framing function was in influencing policy debates, as when an aide to President Lyndon Johnson proposed the social reporting idea “to make clear that you are deeply concerned with the ‘quality’ as well as the ‘quantity’ of life in America.” This nexus between institutions and ideas makes the quest to institutionalize a social report a uniquely insightful case study in American political development, shedding new light on social reform movements and public policy from the Progressive Era to the age of Reagan. It means that the study could contribute to remedying the situation identified by a recent survey of American Political Development literature which found that there is too often a stark division between those studies which treat institutions as the causative factor in accounting for political change, and those that assign the responsibility to ideas; my work necessarily considers their inter-development, conceptualizing political change as the result of ideas outgrowing institutional constraints.[4]

Much political history emphasizes the importance of the public face of politics – elections, parties, public opinion. Such work tends to lend credence to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s notion that alternating cycles of reform and reaction characterize American politics.[5] This study is concerned with a more subterranean politics that complicates standard efforts to demarcate political periods. It follows the work of historians Brian Balogh, Louis Galambos, Samuel Hays and Robert Wiebe, who have all contributed to an ‘organizational synthesis’ for analyzing American political development which emphasizes the capacity of institutions to structure the environment of ideas, and to develop somewhat independently of the vacillations of electoral politics.[6] It is only by taking a similar approach that this study is able to explain the fact that the infrastructure for social reporting was often strengthened during periods historians typically tend to think of as dominated by anti-statist ideology, such as the Hoover presidency, 1950s and 1970s. Furthermore, through developments in social reporting, the study considers the role of social scientist experts in government in general and advances an argument for understanding the period from the late 1920s to the early 1970s as an ‘age of expertise’, characterized by a confidence that transcended ideology in the capacity of expert knowledge to solve complicated social problems. As Brian Balogh has noted “organizational scholarship has rarely made it past the New Deal. For the most part, the organizational synthesis remains rooted in the Progressive Era.”[7] Those monographs which have examined postwar institutional developments have often been case studies insufficiently integrated into overall narratives of America’s political development.[8] When one considers the degree to which the federal state has expanded in size and influence in precisely the period – the decades since 1940 – for which there is such a deficit in the literature, the need to remedy the situation appears urgent. This study proposes a more expansive understanding of the Progressive Era, beyond 1920, and more generally a revision of conventional periodizations of political era to shift the focus on to the development of the federal state. In sum, my book attempts to broaden the organizational synthesis field both chronologically and thematically.

  1. [1] Gaillard Hunt (ed.), The Writings of James Madison (1900), p.103 ↩
  2. [2] Simon Kuznets, ‘National Income, 1929-1932’, 73rd US Congress (2nd Session), Senate Document No. 124, p.7 ↩
  3. [3] Ellis Hawley, ‘Social Policy and the Liberal State in Twentieth-Century America’ in Donald Critchlow and Ellis Hawley (Eds.) Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension (1988), pp.117-41. Economic historian Karl Polanyi proposed a similar schema in his long-celebrated work The Great Transformation (1944) ↩
  4. [4] Brian Glenn, ‘The Two Schools of American Political Development’, Political Studies Review (2004), 2, pp.153-65. See also Robert Lieberman, ‘Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change’, American Political Science Review, (2002), 96(4), pp.697-712 ↩
  5. [5] Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (1986) ↩
  6. [6] Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction (1991); Louis Galambos ‘The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History’ The Business History Review (1970), 44(3), pp. 279-90; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (1967) ↩
  7. [7] Brian Balogh, ‘Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America’ Studies in American Political Development (1991), 5, p.120. Much of Balogh’s work is the exception to this rule. ↩
  8. [8] See the literature surveyed by Louis Galambos in ‘Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis’ The Business History Review (1983), 57(4), pp.471-93 ↩