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The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the U.S. Government: How Congress and Federal Agencies Process Information and Solve Problems. By Samuel Workman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 208p. $99.99.

to disparate voices from below, Planning Democracy emerges principally from official sources, and it shows. We hear little from farmers or others in rural communities across the country, whether included in or excluded from the USDA’s planning efforts. Did planning really encourage deliberation and deepen democracy? Did its effects linger after the formal plans ceased? Yet the Intended New Deal remained stillborn. The central problematic of scholarship around the New Deal during the last generation asks how a Congress dominated by segregationist Southern Democrats shaped myriad policies to tame the market and build the state. That same Congress closed off funding for state and county planning. Gilbert fails to connect his story to that larger project; we do not even learn which chamber killed the USDA’s planning efforts. Nor does he connect the end of the Intended New Deal with the other ways that the conservative coalition shaped and limited reform. If Gilbert fails to tackle the question, one reason surely lies in the agrarian intellectuals’ own understandings of their obligations, around the department’s fiefs and outward to the various networks of land-grant colleges, state Extension services, and agents and farmers on the ground, rather than to their political principals. The book closes the curtain—or, better to say, lays down the trowel—in 1942. By emphasizing his similarities with the other practical-minded agrarian intellectuals, Gilbert says little about the enigmatic Henry Wallace. In 1948, the Iowa farm editor and chicken breeder launched a radical insurgency alongside some of the very men he had fired in the purge of 1935. It would have been salutary to compare both the innovative planning proposals of the Intended New Deal and the Deweyan concepts behind them with the campaign Wallace waged in 1948. Beyond the scope of Planning Democracy, the Intended New Deal went global. Taylor, Tolley, and Wilson all worked on agricultural development for the Ford Foundation in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, as Daniel Immerwahr’s recent book (Thinking Small, 2015) about postwar international community development shows, its record was a decidedly checkered one. Did the farm boys from the American heartland ultimately leave their deepest mark in South Asia? For all his careful reconstruction of the agrarian intellectuals’ hopes and plans, Gilbert is no antiquarian. The Intended New Deal, he suggests, offers contemporary lessons to avoid the perils of needless competition, centralized bureaucracy, and elite control alike, in favor of what Allin once termed “a working democracy in the planning process” (p. 246). Yet the very distance between the agrarian intellectuals’ “last gasp of a democratic Progressivism” (p. 255) and our own time suggests—even more than Gilbert wants to acknowledge—how distant now seems their dream. The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the U.S. Government: How Congress and Federal Agencies Process Information and Solve Problems. By Samuel Workman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 208p. $99.99. doi:10.1017/S1537592716000761