- Hardcover: 316 pages
- Publisher: University Press of Kansas (March 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0700615628
- ISBN-13: 978-0700615629
- Product Dimensions: 24.4 x 15.9 x 2.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 658 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,451,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Book Description
Most historians have credited New Deal initiatives in economic regulation and social welfare policy with bringing about the modern American state. Michael Fein now reveals the surprising story of how road building paved the way to the modern state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how public works policy emerged as a third critical pillar in support of state building.
Paving the Way shows that the growing transportation needs of a steadily industrializing nation reconfigured state politics, bringing about a revolution in governance as it reshaped the landscape. Examining state and local policy developments from half a century before the New Deal, Fein describes how the transition from rutted wagon trails to smooth highways shifted road-maintenance responsibility from local residents to state engineers. Focusing on New York State, a national leader in infrastructure development, Fein demonstrates that its citizens gradually became more comfortable with state bureaucracy because it resulted in better roads.
This conferral of political legitimacy on state engineers by the general populace proved instrumental in the consolidation of engineers' power, translating their professional expertise into a new kind of politics. Fein charts five distinct road-building policy regimes to explain how a basic function of governance--providing public ways--evolved from 1880 to 1956. He also explores the contested nature of these regime changes, as cycling and automobile clubs, construction and real estate interests, hard-nosed agrarians, urban bosses, and professional engineers sought to shape highway policy to their advantage.
Fein argues that these state-local power negotiations were important rehearsals for the overall centralization of bureaucratic authority in the mid-twentieth century. Although other traditionally local policy concerns such as education and social welfare would undergo similar transformations, road building was the first major policy area in which older relations between citizens and governing institutions were replaced by modern intergovernmental arrangements.
Paving the Way reminds us that what we take for granted today as a basic function of government bureaucracy was once an open and even controversial question. It offers a new perspective on federal power, arguing that the modern American state rested on the rise of a more complex federalism than has been supposed.
From the Back Cover
"Fein offers keen interpretive insights about the contested policies and politics that shaped a complex American federalism in the twentieth century. His book makes a compelling argument for the importance of public works policy in the evolution of American political development and makes a significant contribution to U.S. transportation and mobility history."--Raymond A. Mohl, author of The Making of Urban America
"A path-breaking and indispensable book for understanding the evolution of the American highway network."--Clay McShane, author of Down the Asphalt Path: American Cities and the Automobile
"A conceptually very important book."--Mark H. Rose, author of Interstate: Express Highway Politics
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5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent work, Oct 17 2011
By Wiwat - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880-1956 (Hardcover)
I used this book as a text in one of my Senior courses in Political Science. The theme of the course was Bureaucratic Growth and Development. Fein's book was well-recieved by the students. The book carefully lays out the slow and deliberate accretion of authority by the Highway Department in New York and the eclipse of the local institutions that had dominated highway policy. Without the usual conspiracy theories or hagiography that attaches to many accounts of highway development policy. One of the arguements of the book, that the state highway building process and institutional structures were established well before the expansion of federal highway funding in the U.S., is nicely developed. The only shortcoming of this fine book is its price. I wish it were published in a paperbound edition. I look forward to reading more of Prof. Fein's work.
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