Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929

The modern, centralized American state was supposedly born in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Kimberley S. Johnson argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooperative federalism was not born in a Big Bang, but instead emerged out of power struggles within the nation's major political institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


Examining the fifty-two years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression, Johnson shows that the "fi...