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Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change . By Sally McMurry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii, 261. $29.95.

contribution is to offer an explanation of the mid-nineteenth-century transition in political economy of government from active participant to passive observer of economic development. In essence, Gunn's argument is that the particular type of state government that emerged in the post-Revolutionary years of the late eighteenth century was overwhelmed by the demands placed on it as economic life became more complex in subsequent decades. Realizing that this type of government could not cope with the new economic realities, Americans—New Yorkers in the case at hand—checked the dominant but amateurish legislative branch and reformed state government to make it more professional, with greater emphasis on the administrative and judicial functions. The result was a new type of government that did less, leaving economic life to private interests and markets, while doing what was left more professionally. Resenting royal governors and courts, the successful American revolutionaries made their legislatures supreme. These legislatures practiced what Gunn terms a politics of distribution, responding case by case to the demands of individuals and groups for governmental largesse in the form of loans, corporate charters, funding of worthy and not-so-worthy causes, publicly financed and operated canals, and the like. No sense of overall policy, however, was evident in these distributions. Moreover, Gunn notes in an interesting analysis, the legislators themselves turned over rapidly, so that a typical member was an inexperienced amateur. Ultimately, as economic development increased the number of interests seeking legislative largesse and the state's debt ballooned out of control, New York's citizens reacted by limiting the government's power to incur debt, calling for general incorporation laws, electing the principal state officers rather than allowing the legislature to appoint them, and in general establishing a governmental structure that was more democratic and efficient. Whether this was a decline of authority, as Gunn obviously thinks, or a reallocation and decentralization of authority designed to produce better outcomes is an open question. He cites Tocqueville and Chevalier (p. 57) on the absence in early America of anything resembling what a European would call a government, which is hardly consistent with the notion of government authority that is about to decline. One could as well argue that reforms making state government more responsible and efficient served to increase its authority. This would be consistent with Gunn's view that the first glimmers of rational organization and professional public administration, which historians of later eras have celebrated, were contained in the reforms of the late antebellum era in New York. Such quibbles aside, Gunn's book is a penetrating and rewarding look at how American state government evolved to 1860. A hope is warranted that he would turn his talents to a sequel carrying the analysis forward, say, to 1930. It might be called "The Resurgence of Authority" if, as appears to be the case, state government increasingly took on new functions from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. Finally, it may be noted, although Gunn does not, that New York's problems in the 1830s—excess demands for governmental largesse, soaring public debts, constituent politics, and so on—have obvious parallels at the national level today. Good history often helps us to understand better our own times.