Abstract
A little more than a century ago, George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” (1905, p. 284) With that in mind it is amazing how similar the First Great Depression (FGD) of 1837-1848 was to the economic crisis of the past several years. Roberts’ book is based on careful archival research that is quite uncommon in the study of public administration anywhere. He notes in his appendix on method and acknowledgement that one of the problems with public administration research is that it avoids the historical mode of inquiry, next to considering reform as technical exercise rather than as a problem of political economy, and to a preference for studies about discrete administrative or managerial innovations rather than broad surveys of the evolution of the role of government that should include attention for the influence of national and international economy, power relations between states, technological innovations, domestic political conditions and culture, and institutional heritage on the architecture of government over time (p. 215). He dubbed his method the macrodynamics of administrative development, which is somewhat visible in Leonard White’s four-volume administrative history and, more important, acknowledges the need of attention for both human agency and institutional context (Roberts, 2010, p. 13).
As said, the study is well written and shows the extent to which economic crisis can ripple out into something far larger. In the case of the FGD, the depression was started by a real estate and land speculation boom that paralyzed credit among American financial institutions. In the spring of 1837, no one knew who was solvent and who was not (p. 85). What began with distrust between (English) financiers and (American) businessmen, spread to distrust between the executive (especially Presidents Van Buren and Tyler) and the legislature at the federal level, to distrust between workers and employers, distrust between landlords and tenants, and distrust between governments (p. 205). Roberts’ study provides indeed a macroperspective on this long depression. It would have been easy to analyze this period on the basis of economic data, but he set himself the more difficult task to describe the FGD in its various manifestations and their interconnections: real estate and land bubble (chap. 1), enormous states’ debts to English and Dutch investors followed by defaulting on payments (chap. 2), the federal government’s lack of some degree of regulatory oversight over the banking world and lack of control of its own expenses (chap. 3), the antigovernment violence in various places (chap. 4), and the war in Mexico (chap. 5). Each of these chapters is a case studies embedded in the larger case study of the depression. In addition, in each chapter that distant world comes alive with quotations from contemporaries; we can almost feel how people felt back then. If the widespread desolation and hopelessness left a deep impression on Charles Dickens, who visited the United States from January to May 1842 (pp. 14-15), how much more must Americans have seen and felt it?
The depression had several consequences. First, although people until the late-1830s believed in self-governance, by the end of the 1840s it was only a minority that supported popular sovereignty (p. 81). Second, an executive that became stronger vis-à-vis the legislature (through the use of presidential veto, 207). Third, states had to accept new restrictions on their roles as financiers or even owners of banks (p. 209). Fourth, in several of the major cities at the East Coast integrated police forces, replacing a system with county sheriffs, daytime constables, and nighttime nightwatches, were established to better deal with outbreaks of domestic violence and unrest (Philadelphia 1847; Boston 1854; p. 172). And the parallels? Then as now the United States is heavily dependent on foreign money; what was England is now China. The political dynamics in the summer of 2011 (during the federal debt crisis and the lack of collaboration between the executive and legislative branches) is not unlike that in 1842 (p. 213). The difference is that the current economic conditions are not as dire as those of 170 years ago.
The book is well written and in my view an attractive example of how administrative history informs the present. That we do not take the time to be informed about how the past helped shape the present is not only a feature of American society but also certainly increasingly the case in Western Europe (Raadschelders, 2010). Whether we can learn from the past is debatable. Would we be totally rational, I suspect we would, but people are not always rational and act on, among other things, greed and the belief that they are entitled to have more than what they can actually afford. They also are rather herd-like creatures, thinking that the luck befalling on others who speculated will shine on them too. It is the human condition of greed, belief in luck, and so forth, that prevents people from learning from the past, but it does never hurt to be reminded of that past, time and again.