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American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression

American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression

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Mark Hendrickson
Cambridge University Press, 2013-05-27
EAN 9781107028609, ISBN10: 1107028604

Hardcover, 332 pages, 23.1 x 14.5 x 3 cm
Language: English

Once viewed as a distinct era characterized by intense bigotry, nostalgia for simpler times and a revulsion against active government, the 1920s have been rediscovered by historians in recent decades as a time when Herbert Hoover and his allies worked to significantly reform economic policy. Mark Hendrickson both augments and amends this view by studying the origins and development of New Era policy expertise and knowledge. Policy-oriented social scientists in government, trade union, academic and nonprofit agencies showed how methods for achieving stable economic growth through increased productivity could both defang the dreaded business cycle and defuse the pattern of hostile class relations that Gilded Age depressions had helped to set as an American system of industrial relations.

Advance praise: 'Mark Hendrickson has crafted an important narrative that explains how early twentieth-century American business leaders, social scientists, and political activists worked to regulate, stabilize, and strengthen a newly configured national economy. He demonstrates how their efforts were ironically paralleled by the emerging resistance of marginalized and underrepresented groups (women, African Americans, and Mexican Americans) to the worst excesses of an economic system that, while possessed of many virtues, also subsisted on inequality and injustice.' Michael A. Bernstein, Tulane University