American Labor and Economic Citizenship concedes much of what we already know about the “New Era” thinking of Herbert Hoover and his sympathetic travelers in business, academia, and nonprofits. This loosely defined doctrine rather naïvely assumed that the voluntary actions of business, gently nudged by the state, could guarantee permanent economic stability and prosperity for all; its corporate-dominated (and, I might add, European corporatism–inspired) model assigned organized labor the role of junior partner at best; and it failed to recognize that deeply entrenched gender and racial inequalities required statist solutions. From these starting points, however, Mark Hendrickson launches into a superb reexamination of 1920s political economy, insisting that the vision of the Hooverites was “something more than the sum of warmed-over paternalism, welfare capitalism, employee representation schemes, and experiments in scientific management” (p. 2).

More specifically, Henrickson argues first that “policy makers in the 1920s were well on their way to establishing a coherent and consumerist vision of economic policy, one in which the state would play an important role in facilitating economic growth and efficiency” (p. 8). Rather than taking consumers for granted, New Era theorists saw consumption as intimately linked not only to citizenship but also to the macroeconomic health of the economy. Second, according to Hendrickson, the scope of public concerns did not retreat in the 1920s, as we normally assume, and neither did social science adopt the apolitical and neutral posture we often ascribe to it. New Era experts “saw empiricism as a path rather than an alternative to social reform” and linked racial and economic amelioration (p. 24). Both inside and outside of government, “advocates for African American, Mexican, Mexican American, and women workers developed a contending body of expertise that worked quite deliberately to challenge the notion that economic growth alone could be counted on to generate a fair and equitable society” (p. 14).

The book's first half explores how disparate experts, both inside and (mostly) outside of the state, theorized a more harmonious, bountiful, and public-good-oriented “New Capitalism” than historians have recognized. For example, Hoover's American Engineering Council, the organized labor–affiliated Labor Bureau, and the United States Public Health Services studied the steel industry and successfully advocated for the eight-hour workday. The National Bureau of Economic Research promoted the macroeconomic and social benefits of higher wages, demanding a larger share of the national income for workers so as to maintain their purchasing power and, hence, economic stability. The second half of the book persuasively argues that New Era social scientists, “legitimated by the state,” used research to forcefully challenge gender and racial status quos (p. 246). The nascent federal Women's Bureau “was a far more aggressive advocate for wage justice and against job discrimination than has been recognized” (p. 197). During its brief existence, the Division of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor nationalized the “Negro problem” created by the Great Migration and attacked racial stereotypes; similarly, the National Urban League debunked racist myths about Mexican migrant workers as well as the falsehood that most returned to Mexico.

Hendrickson is forthright about the limitations of New Capitalism. Studying ethnic minorities and labor markets could do little to arrest the decade's prevailing racism and tribalism. And while New Era thinkers promoted a “feeling of partnership” between capital and labor, several Russell Sage Foundation studies—for example, of Filene's Department Store, of a paper mill and bleachery, and of the Rockefeller plan for miners that emerged in the wake of deadly coal battles—revealed that employee representation programs and other efforts to “share” decision making with workers were decidedly biased toward management. They could hardly have been otherwise given the continued trend toward the broad diffusion of corporate ownership and distant shareholder control. Even as methods for tracking and understanding wages became more sophisticated, economists largely missed the fact that substantial real wage gains belied rapidly rising inequality and markedly increased capital shares of national income. Unions did not challenge the consensus of “growth through cooperation toward production efficiencies,” and overall, the era's cadre of experts did not recognize that consumption gains lagged behind productivity gains, let alone construct a meaningful welfare state to bring the two into alignment (as would happen during the golden era of American capitalism after World War II) (p. 14).

Nonetheless, American Labor and Economic Citizenship buries once and for all the old shibboleth that New Era thought was merely whitewashed laissez-faire. The era's social science represented a broad consensus to expand the range of public issues, not contract it; thus, Russell Sage's Mary Van Kleeck was overly stingy when she wrote, “So long as this tendency toward concentration of great wealth exists, there can hardly be any new capitalism” (p. 154). Hendrickson's argument that we should date the arrival of a consumerist vision of abundance to the 1920s rather than the late 1930s or 1940s is not entirely original, and indeed he reviews the work of scholars such as Alan Brinkley, Kathleen Donohue, and Meg Jacobs who have also ably traced the important contributions of 1920s consumptionist economists. (It is also worth keeping in mind that these economists only anticipated the one-third of the Keynesian Revolution concerned with demand management via fiscal policy; they did not call for a new monetary regime centered on low, long-term interest rates or compensatory deficit spending.) In addition, the theme of citizenship promised in the book's title is underdeveloped. Still, Hendrickson shows that a wide range of interests beyond the usual suspects in academia promoted the macroeconomic benefits of mass consumption and a more equal society.

Perhaps the most exciting implications of this study relate to the trajectory of racial thinking in American liberalism. In the 1920s, social scientists were obviously unable to force the majority of white Americans to address racial and gender inequalities. But their activist-minded research did change discourses and lead to modest reforms, which casts doubt on current conclusions that progressives either largely abandoned racial matters after the post–World War I race riots—because they deemed racial attitudes intractably irrational—or reframed racism into an individual psychological malady rather than a material one. The New Era paved the way for the civil rights movement as much as the Keynesian demand management state.