Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933

by Morton Keller

A leading scholar of twentieth-century American history looks again at the beginning of the century, this time giving us a remarkable portrait of the emergence of modern society and its distinctive transformations and social problems. As in Regulating a New Economy , his earlier book on the changing American economy, Morton Keller integrates political, legal, and governmental history, now providing the first comprehensive study of the ideas and interests that shaped early twentieth-century American social policy.

Keller looks at the major social the family, voluntary associations, religion, and education. He examines important social the rights of the individual, the regulation of public mores (gambling, drugs, prostitution, alcohol abuse), the definition and punishment of crime, and social welfare policy (poverty, public health, conditions of labor). His final area of concern is one that assumed new importance after 1900: social policy directed at major groups, such as immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, and women.

The interpretive theme is fresh and controversial. Keller sees early twentieth-century American government not as an artifact of class, race, and gender conflict but as the playing out of tension between the Progressive thrust to restore social cohesion through the principle of order and organization and two other, mutually antipodal, social the weight of the American past and the growing pluralism of modern America. The interplay among these elements--Progressivism, persistence, pluralism--shaped early twentieth-century social policy. The result was no clear victory for any one of these public attitudes, but rather the emergence and delineation of most of the social issues that have dominated American public life for the rest of the century.

Hardcover

First published July 29, 1990

Reviews

[David Bates]

Morton Keller’s 1994 work Regulating a New Society is preoccupied with the social anxieties of a modernizing society and the tools it sought to use to create and enforce order. Keller examines the development of social policy at the state and federal level in the United States, with comparisons to other western nations, and is a part of Keller’s series on changes in United States policy from 1900-1933, following Affairs of State and Regulating a New Economy, with evidence drawn mainly from public policy and law journals, analyzing various policy questions and proposals. Keller chooses to ignore the political interests and aims which divided proposals by ideology, party and region, and instead seek the underlying commonalities. “However varied were the goals of social policymakers,” he tells us, “they had a shared sense that the good society was efficient, organized, cohesive . . . it is important to recognize how much overlap there was in social ideologies during the early 1900s.” Keller also draws together the pre- and post-World War I decades on the basis that many proposals first begun before the war came to fruition in the 1920s, while acknowledging that economic preoccupations shifted to issues of national identity during and after the war years. The portrait that emerges is of policy driven by interest groups rather than classes, and mainly preoccupied with an anxious search for order through the expansion of state regulation as a response to the rapid changes in American life wrought by industrialization and immigration. Keller takes a pessimistic view of these policy innovations, and has a keen eye for proposals that are in essence about control of groups deemed morally suspect, despite surrounding rhetoric about improving society.

Despite the detailed analysis Keller presents on different policy topics, it becomes clear that choices he has made in terms of eliding the difference between left and right and pre and post-war have been in the service of creating a sinister portrait of social control. While his judgments often have some merit, Keller’s generalizations and methodological focus on the language and techniques in his evidence base of policy literature raise questions about the premises from which his analysis proceeds. Racial segregation, for instance, is placed within the context of other social regulations emerging across the policy spectrum because the ends it sought were couched in proposals of a similar scientific and technical language, because it had as its object social control, and because it was sometimes championed by proponents of other Progressive policies in the South. Yet often the issues at stake, such as segregated railroad cars, had been subjects of controversy for decades prior. This raises the question of the extent to which the spread of the scientific management principles animating the developing private economy had created a legitimizing and enabling rhetoric for regulation, a social prestige for regulation, or whether, as Keller has it, anxious adaptation to a new society drove regulation. Additionally, joining of the more left leaning pre-war decade and the conservative post war decade combined with a focus on regulation in itself creates a false picture in which progressive measures for labor regulation like child labor laws lose momentum and wither while conservative measures based on policing the labor of workers flourish. These changes say less about the inherent nature of the power of the state to regulate than the political back and forth between the interests of labor and management.