Whether they were supporters or opponents of New Deal liberal policies, southern Democrats and northern Catholics in the dominant New Deal Democratic coalition refused to increase the discretionary power of elite federal bureaucrats who would probably be recruited disproportionately from the educated Protestant upper middle class of the North and Midwest and educated at a handful of Ivy League universities. Successive plans for executive reorganization, which would have put the president in charge of a rationalized continental European–style administrative state, never made it through
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