The Creative Society -- and the Price Americans Paid for It

by Louis P. Galambos

"The Creative Society -- and the price Americans paid for their
creativity" is about four ongoing problems that the United States had to
solve in the long twentieth century, from the 1890s through the presentday.
One of them was what the author calls the innovation crisis in
American capitalism; another was the governance crisis in domestic
politics; a third was an urban crisis over life and death in the nation's
cities; and the fourth was created by the necessity to establish a new
relationship to the rest of the world. The need to provide solutions to
these problems created a great demand in American society for
expertise, and that gave rise to a broad professionalization movement
that the author tracks through the century. Sometimes the experts were
successful, sometimes they failed. For better and worse, they changed
America's public sphere, its government, its economy, and its role in the
world. They altered our lives and helped to mold a new society that
continues to work toward solutions to these fundamental problems.
This paper is a prospectus for a book being written and thus the essay
attempts to skim over the surface of more than one hundred years of
history and almost a century of professional historiography.

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

The former editor of the 21-volume Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Louis Paul Galambos is professor emeritus in history and at Johns Hopkins University, where he has worked since 1971. Galambos earned a B.A. in history (1955) from Indiana University, an M.A. in history (1957) and Ph.D. (1960) from Yale University. He previously served as an Assistant Professor (1960-1966), Associate Professor (1966-1969), and Professor (1969-1970) at Rice University, as well as Professor (1970-1971) at Rutgers University.