The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people's rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Americans today worry about concentrated power in private industry to an extent not seen in generations. Not only do they find diminished diversity of service-providers and producers, but they are disquieted by the power of a few large companies to shape and constrain democratic processes. Americans across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have sounded alarms about the overlarge power of business in both public and private life. While many of the technologies and industries that worry Americans are new, the concerns they've raised are not unprecedented. Antimonopoly and American Democracy traces the history of antimonopoly politics in the United States, arguing that organized action against concentrated economic power comprises an important American democratic tradition. While prevailing narratives tend to treat monopoly as a risk to people mainly in their roles as consumers—by causing prices to increase, for example—this study broadens the conversation, recounting ways in which monopolism can hurt ordinary people without directly impacting their wallets. From the pre-revolutionary era to the age of Big Tech, the volume explores the effects that historical monopolies have had on democracy by using their wealth and influence to dominate electoral politics and regulation. Chapters also highlight a range of sites of economic concentration, from land ownership to media reach, and attempts at combating them, from labor organizing to constitutional revision. Featuring original scholarship from some of the world's leading experts in American economic, political, and legal history, Antimonopoly and American Democracy offers important lessons for our contemporary political moment, in which fears of concentrated wealth and influence are again on the rise.

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today's corporate policy debates in proper context. From the nation's founding to the present, Americans have regarded corporations with ambivalence-embracing their potential to revolutionize economic life and yet remaining wary of their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. Although corporations were originally created to give businesses and other associations special legal rights and privileges, historically they were denied many of the constitutional protections afforded flesh-and-blood citizens. This comprehensive volume covers a range of topics, including the origins of corporations in English and American law, the historical shift from special charters to general incorporation, the increased variety of corporations that this shift made possible, and the roots of modern corporate regulation in the Progressive Era and New Deal. It also covers the evolution of judicial views of corporate rights, particularly since corporations have become the form of choice for an increasing variety of nonbusiness organizations, including political advocacy groups. Ironically, in today's global economy the decline of large, vertically integrated corporations-the type of corporation that past reform movements fought so hard to regulate-poses some of the newest challenges to effective government oversight of the economy.

"On rare occasions, an anthology comes along that reshapes scholarship in an entire field. "The Democratic Experiment" shows how to join culture and class, elections and the growth of the state, taxes and political theory into a fresh, unromantic understanding of power in the public sphere. With this splendid volume, a new political history has finally come of age."--Michael Kazin, author of "The Populist Persuasion: An American History"

"Political history is back. In a whirlwind of pent-up energy, this volume announces that questions about governmental capacity, suffrage and citizenship, sedition, constitutional amendment, court reform, inflation and consumerism, interest group electioneering, local government experimentation, antitax and antibussing revolts, the role of liberalism, and the partisan politics of family values are (and must be) on the agenda of historians. Its long-awaited return from the desert finds it better and stronger, more nuanced and inclusive, than before its exile. Readers will rejoice."--Elizabeth Sanders, author of "Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1887-1917"

"Those who have wondered what the future holds for American political history need wonder no more. In form and exposition, in theory and practice, "The Democratic Experiment" gives all the notice one could want of the exciting new directions that the genre is taking, and introduces the scholars who are leading its renewal."--Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation, Chicago

"This superb collection of essays bring a welcome sophistication to the historical study of American politics--its culture and institutions."--Joyce Appleby, author of "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans"

"This is a terrific book--ambitious, iconoclastic, elegant, persuasive, exciting. The authors aim to reorient historians, rope in political scientists, and--at their most ambitious--reread America. They succeed on nearly every dimension. Each chapter raises issues that both historians and political scientists will be keen to engage. The collection adds up to a sustained, coherent whole, argued in many different keys and pitches. Very nice work indeed."--James A. Morone, Brown University, author of "Hellfire Nation"

"This book represents a job extremely well done. It offers a richer historical account of democratic conflicts than have most historically savvy political scientists. I particularly appreciate the attention to the nineteenth century, which is rarely explored in such depth among scholars of political history. Moreover, I do not think there is another volume that engages democratic conflict as comprehensively as does this one. "The Democratic Experiment" will enrich our understanding of liberal and democratic aspirations in America."--Sidney M. Milkis, University of Virginia, author of "Political Parties and Constitutional Government"

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare , William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance. |This analytical study describes the growth of a close but uneasy relationship between the United States and Taiwan during the first half of the 1950s. Accinelli focuses on the importance of the Taiwan issue in United States' relations with the People's Republic of China and Great Britain.