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That's No Guppy, That's Leviathan: Rethinking the Federal Government in the Nineteenth Century

It has long been a shibboleth in historical writing and public debate that the United States government was small and weak during the nineteenth century. With the dramatic exception of the Civil War and Reconstruction, scholars and pundits agree, the federal government had a minimal administrative structure and a small policy footprint before the 1890s. It was only with the adoption of a regulatory state in the early twentieth century and the New Deal that the federal government acquired influence comparable to that of European states. Such a view has bolstered American exceptionalism in both historical and political circles. Even the “new institutionalists” agreed, at least at first. From the late 1970s on, these political scientists, historical sociologists, and historians, who also refer to their school of thought as American Political Development, rejected the view that governments merely mirrored social interests. They insisted that institutional structures, routines, and networks determined political possibilities and shaped policy. During its early years, the state-centered story told by this scholarly movement began at the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen Skowronek, one of the founders of the new institutionalism, described the nineteenth-century American government as “a state of courts and parties.”1 Skowronek’s memorable phrase set the terms of scholarly work and undergraduate lectures for a generation. There have been dissenters from this view. In 1947, Oscar and Mary Handlin argued that local and state governments actively intervened in social and economic affairs between the Revolution and the Civil War. Scholars since then have emphasized state and local governments’ active role in shaping social and economic life.2 But few if any scholars contested the view that the federal government played a minimal role in American social and economic life. This consensus began to crack in the 1990s, as scholars (mostly legal historians and