Acknowledgements

I received helpful comments on earlier versions of this article at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association; the Midwest Political Science Association; the Department of Political Science, the University of Oregon; the Seminar on Race and American Political Development at the University of Michigan; and the American Politics Seminar Series, the University of Virginia. I would like to thank participants at all of these sessions as well as Anthony Chen, Desmond King, Robert Mickey, Steven Skowronek, and anonymous referees for critical comments.

There is no escaping the New Deal's pivotal place in studies of twentieth-century American politics. Social scientists have vigorously debated the causes of the New Deal's distinctive features and continue to argue about its consequences for subsequent American political development. The predominant perspective advances a coherent linear history in which the central features of New Deal reform shape the understanding of political developments both before and after the 1930s. The era of Progressive reform is viewed as a precursor to the expanded public power and the practice of activist government that was consolidated in the 1930s. The Great Society is the effort to extend the benefits of liberal reform to African Americans, who had reaped only scant benefits from the central achievements of New Deal reform. When this effort went “too far,” it resulted in a far-reaching backlash against activist government. The “rise and fall” of a New Deal order that had the creation of active government at its core has thus provided a central narrative for the study of twentieth-century politics.¹

The notion of a “New Deal order” implies a relatively coherent political configuration in which the development of national political processes and politics form the main focus of inquiry.²

This article argues that the national focus of the New Deal narrative neglects crucial aspects of state politics and policy that limited liberalism and ultimately contributed to its political failure. Indeed, states occupy a peculiar place in the history of twentieth-century state-building and political reform. Although states were an important target for the early twentieth-century Progressive reformers, they largely drop out of accounts that track the development of activist government for the next half-century, apart from occasional references to them as political backwaters. How did states go from being at the forefront of reform to being a drag on the development of active government, and how did their development affect the trajectory of activist government in the United States?

We have very few tools for answering these questions. The dominant approach to understanding states as political actors is fiscal federalism, which posits that interstate competition is the driving factor in determining how states act.³

Rather than viewing states as governed by an invariant structural logic, I argue that they are political arenas with their own distinctive capacities and political logics that must be understood in terms of earlier reform efforts. I show that the timing and pattern of reform in the states and the federal government diverged in the two major waves of early twentieth-century change. Reform efforts during the Progressive Era did not succeed in building the executive power of state governments in the same way that the New Deal did for the federal government. Moreover, in key respects, Progressive reforms actually decentralized power within the states. Nor did Progressive reforms alter the terms of state politics by mobilizing new actors, as the New Deal did with labor. On the contrary, Progressive reforms ultimately amplified elite voices and demobilized ordinary voters. These differences in the pattern of state and federal reform are of enduring significance because the reform impulse that transformed the federal government in the 1930s had no enduring counterpart in the states. In fact, the emphasis on federal action after the 1930s weakened the forces of reform in the states. This is true of states across the nation, not only those in the South.

Taking federalism seriously casts subsequent twentieth-century political developments in a new light. Instead of a “New Deal order,” the United States appears as a layered polity in which federal initiatives were overlaid on state political systems that operated with different administrative capacities and political logics. Here, I assess the consequences of uneven reform in states and the federal government for the larger trajectory of American liberalism. How does a historically-rooted perspective on federalism alter our understanding of the strength and resilience of the New Deal political regime? How does it challenge prevailing explanations for the limits of New Deal innovation and the circumstances that led to its decline?

In this article, I argue that states played a central but poorly understood role in the demise of New Deal liberalism. I challenge the picture of Progressive reform as a simple precursor to the New Deal, highlighting the distinctive political logic – decentralizing and demobilizing – that emerged from Progressive reform. I then show the limited impact of New Deal reform on the states. In the final section, I illustrate some of the consequences of this institutional diversity for the fate of the New Deal regime. This section shows in particular that states lacked both the executive capacity and political will to manage metropolitan growth as new technologies made expansive territorial development possible. The successes and failures of the Progressive Era left most states with a set of rules that allowed metropolitan areas to be carved up into multiple political jurisdictions that fragmented different income and racial groups, with executive capacities that were too weak to alter those rules, and with elite-dominated politics that kept those rules in place. The failure of states to assert authority over metropolitan development patterns greatly exacerbated one of the central political challenges of the 1960s, the racially linked “urban crisis.” At the same time, the legacy of Progressive reform provided protected venues, congenial political mechanisms, and powerful ideological handles for the enemies of activist government.

FEDERALISM AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

Studies that take federalism as their departure point make several different kinds of arguments. Arguments about fiscal federalism posit that states are inherently less able than the federal government to implement redistributive policies because interstate competition makes states especially attentive to the voice of business interests. The threat of capital flight leads states to eschew those measures that increase costs for business, as is the case with redistributive social policies.⁴

Analyses of social policy examining the 1930s through the 1970s have emphasized the first two explanations in accounting for the constraints that states placed on the development of social policy, especially policies targeted at women and minorities.⁷

Suzanne Mettler's account of state social welfare policies after the New Deal provides more leverage for understanding how states differ from the federal government by identifying specific powers that shaped state action. She highlights the role of the police power, which gave state laws a preliberal cast until the 1960s when federal judicial rulings restricted the application of the police power.⁸

In this article, I take a similarly historical approach to federalism, showing how historically-specific features of state politics and structure are essential for understanding the way states influenced the trajectory of liberalism. By comparing the differently timed and focused episodes of reform in the states and in the federal government, however, I clarify the scope for reform in each of these separate political arenas. This approach accounts for differences in the types of actors operating at different levels of government and outlines the political strategies made possible by the disconnections between levels of jurisdiction in American politics. These institutional disconnections help constitute what Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek have termed multiple orders or “intercurrence.” In emphasizing multiple orders, their article demonstrates how institutional disconnections between federal and state levels actors not only limited but also undermined liberalism during its high tide in the 1960s.⁹

The concept of multiple orders posits that polities do not exhibit a single ordering principle but rather are made up of institutions that have distinct historical antecedents and that were created to achieve diverse, often contrary, objectives. In the United States, I show, states and the federal government operated throughout the twentieth century with quite distinct logics as a result of their disparate reform experiences. These divergent experiences produced distinct institutional legacies and possibilities for subsequent politics as key groups reached different accommodations with political authorities at different levels of jurisdiction. As a result, the important effects of policy legacies and feedback mechanisms operated quite differently in the states and the federal government.¹⁰

Progressive reform, which had an enduring, albeit uneven impact in the states, encompassed a notoriously diverse set of initiatives. Central among its goals were the elimination of the patronage and corruption on which political parties thrived, the incorporation of benefits of scientific expertise into political life, and the building of new administrative agencies staffed by experts. In pursuing these goals, Progressives sought to enhance the executive capacities of state governments and to decentralize authority away from state legislatures toward reformed local governments. These aims also lay behind Progressive laws designed to discourage organized party politics. Because efforts to enhance the power of state executive branches largely failed, the most enduring legacies of state-level Progressive reform were the decentralization of power to local governments and the restraints on organized politics, which demobilized politics and amplified the political voice of customary elites. The New Deal was, by contrast, animated by the need for public intervention to alleviate severe economic depression. It successfully augmented executive power and brought new constituencies into politics. However, this major transformation of American political life, I show, did little to alter the politics of states during the three decades after the 1930s.

The distinct tempos of reform and divergent political logics of reform had significant implications for the politics and political capacities of states. First, states across the union, not just in the South, remained incomplete democracies well into the 1970s. The pattern of Progressive successes and failures left state politics biased toward the interests of traditional elites. The malapportionment of state legislatures, which Progressives and their successors were not able to alter until the 1960s, ensured that traditional elite interests – including small business, real estate, agriculture, and insurance groups – had a political voice in state legislatures that far exceeded their proportion of the population. The weak executive in most states meant that governors were poorly positioned to counter legislatures. Where Progressives were most successful, they heightened these elite-biases by restricting the organizational bases of parties, eliminating the central organizational vehicle of nonelites.¹¹

Second, Progressive reform in the states limited the policy tools available to reformers in state executive branches at the same time that it multiplied the channels of influence open to their opponents. Decentralized authority over land use deprived states of the power to influence the development of metropolitan America as large cities were spilling over their boundaries. Once delegated, this power proved impossible to reclaim.¹³

The elite-biased politics and the limited policy tools in the states after the New Deal had important repercussions for the challengers of liberalism. As Keith Whittington has noted, “American federalism allows dissenting political voices to find strongholds in state and local governmental institutions from which to launch contrary policy initiatives.”¹⁴

In this article, I show how these opponents of New Deal liberalism continued to operate in state political arenas long after the New Deal. In the context of the racially divided metropolis, these opponents of liberalism were able to recast their arguments in the context of two new institutional settings that states had played a critical, if unacknowledged, role in creating the postwar urban ghetto and the homogeneous white suburb.¹⁶

DECENTRALIZATION AND DEMOBILIZATION: THE LOGIC OF PROGRESSIVE REFORM

The Progressive Era is often described as a precursor of the New Deal, and, in many ways, it was.¹⁷

When measured against subsequent developments, such Progressive rhetoric and aspirations support the linear narrative of twentieth-century political reform. This view, however, obscures two key features of Progressive reform that differ in substantial ways from New Deal reform. The first is the issue of centralized government, where both in aspiration and in outcome, Progressives differed from the subsequent New Deal model. The second are the related issues of democracy and political mobilization: Where the New Deal enacted substantive reforms that mobilized new constituencies into politics, Progressives sought structural reforms that constructed barriers to certain kinds of political participation while opening new channels for participation that bypassed established political institutions. Both ended up amplifying voices of traditional elites in state politics. Because Progressive reforms had an enduring impact at the state and local levels, these differences in reform objectives marked a sharp divergence between the logics of federal and state politics.

The Progressives, Centralization, and Decentralization

Progressives wanted governments at all levels of the federal system to be guided by professional expertise, shielded from the corruption and patronage associated with party politics, and powerful enough to counter the overwhelming power of big business. At the dawn of the twentieth century, states were singularly unfit for the task. During the last half of the 1800s, states had become notoriously weak governments. Although they had once engaged in major public projects – New York state built and financed the Erie Canal in the 1820s – a wave of state bankruptcies beginning in the 1840s, put an end to such activity. To prevent the recurrence of such defaults, states rewrote their constitutions to sharply limit the debt they could incur. Deprived of financial flexibility, state governments lost the initiative that had characterized their early decades. In their place, private corporations emerged to take charge of internal improvements. Dominated by their legislatures, states became adjuncts to private development as powerful economic interests plied state legislators with cash and other inducements.²⁰

The antidote was greater centralized authority. Expanding state administrative capacities through such measures as civil service reform and strengthening the power of governors were thus centralizing projects at the heart of Progressive governmental reform efforts in the states. These initiatives met with uneven success. In half the states, governors did win greater power through such measures as longer terms, enhanced budgetary authority, and greater executive branch authority. And, prior to the New Deal, seventeen states reorganized their executive branches to create more capable and efficient governments.²¹

On the whole, however, these efforts fell far short of building reliable state executive authority and administrative capacity. Even in states where governors won new powers, their ability to manage the executive branch was sharply limited. A 1950 survey of state governments conducted by the Council of the States found that governors continued to be hampered by insufficient authority over the rest of the executive branch.²²

Even where reforms succeeded in reorganizing state administration along more accountable lines, factionalism and patronage politics undercut executive authority. For example, in Illinois, which, in 1917, was the first state to adopt comprehensive administrative reform, “reorganized government became the foundation for the most highly developed spoils machine in state history.”²⁵

Progressive efforts to enhance state revenue raising capacities were likewise a disappointment. Thirteen states enacted personal and corporate income taxes between 1913 and 1922, but these taxes were rarely designed as progressive levies. Moreover, even in the handful of states that had income taxes, such taxes delivered only a small proportion of total state revenues – real estate and personal property taxes played a far more significant role.²⁷

Disappointed aspirations for building greater state capacities were not the only reason that Progressives failed to create more centralized power in states. In the domain of state and local government relations, Progressives actively sought greater decentralization. Although, in 1872, Dillon's Rule had famously pronounced local governments to be “creatures of the state,” in fact, cities were much more vital polities, and, in many cases, had significantly larger budgets than their states. For some Progressive reformers, breaking the links between states and their cities was a key way to limit corruption. Accordingly, many early reform efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to enhance the power of cities vis à vis states by ensuring local governments more formal autonomy. Progressive claims of state interference in local affairs became a rallying point for advocates of home rule.²⁹

State deference to local control was evident in state laws governing processes of local incorporation and annexation. In most states, permissive state statutes presented very low bars for areas that wished to incorporate as new political jurisdictions. Petitions to the state by a small number of local residents or landowners were the main requirement.³¹

States unquestionably deferred to localities on one critical matter: During the Progressive Era, states ceded to localities their formal powers to regulate land use by granting them zoning authority. From the first decade of the century, cities, including Los Angeles and New York, had experimented with zoning regulations.³³

The development of zoning is characteristic of the disappointments of much of Progressive reform. Championed by city planning professionals as a tool for guiding urban growth in conformance with expert ideas, it quickly turned into a tool for advancing business interests. City planners, members of a quintessential Progressive Era profession, sought to use their expertise to create a more beautiful and rationally developed city. They exemplified the Progressive faith in the value of expertise and saw zoning as a mechanism to put professional planners in charge of urban design. Their ideas about using planning to physically improve cities swept across the country in the first decades of the twentieth century. National meetings sponsored by the American City Planning Institute and the National Conference on City Planning touted the benefits of zoning for creating cities that were beautiful, healthy, and efficient.

Realtors and development firms interested in land subdivision quickly saw the utility of zoning for the preservation of property values.³⁵

For developers, zoning was an attractive way to regulate development without conceding too much regulatory power to the state. During the 1920s, land development and homebuilding firms entered the process of suburban development and were making fortunes in the wave of development that accompanied the innovations in transportation during the early twentieth century. In the 1910s, the urban population grew by 22.3 percent but suburban population grew at twice this rate.³⁷

Once zoning was declared constitutional, states moved rapidly to enact legislation that would grant localities the power to zone. The groundwork for this diffusion was well prepared. In 1921, even as the constitutionality of zoning remained in doubt, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover appointed an Advisory Committee on Zoning, which issued a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act in 1924. Four years later, a successor committee drew up a Standard City Planning Enabling Act.³⁸

However, even at this early stage of metropolitan development, just as suburbs were becoming established features of the metropolitan landscape, city planners began to press for new arrangements to minimize the negative impact of metropolitan development on cities. City governments – often in collaboration with local foundations, and business groups – initiated metropolitan surveys that documented the emerging metropolitan problem and offered recommendations to solve them.³⁹

The triumph of zoning and the failure to enact state laws to regulate suburban land development would make it possible to create a very new kind of American political community. The expansion of the police power and its delegation to municipalities gave localities power over previously sacrosanct private property rights.⁴¹

Progressives and Demobilized Democracy in the States

The second major way in which Progressive reform differed from the New Deal was in its impact on political participation. The signature impact of New Deal social and economic reforms was to mobilize new constituencies into politics. The NRA's 7a clause set off a massive wave of union organizing, which transformed the Democratic Party as new labor organizations intertwined with the party apparatus.⁴³

The main impact of Progressive reform on state legislatures was to limit their scope of operation. By investing more power in the executive branch, especially by creating myriad state commissions, Progressives sought to replace politics with expertise. At the same time, they hoped to amplify the people's voice by creating the various tools of direct democracy. They did not seek to build state legislatures capable of deliberating and enacting complex public policy. For example, there was no movement to induce state legislatures to meet annually rather than in the biennial sessions that were the practice in all but a handful of states. By 1943, only three states (New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey) met in annual sessions.⁴⁵

A continuing source of frustration for Progressive urban reformers was the domination of state legislatures by rural interests. Despite numerous struggles over reapportionment, Progressives did not succeed in altering the rural bias of state legislatures.⁴⁶

In the states where Progressives were most successful, they created new channels of influence with the instruments of direct democracy. Progressives won their greatest political victories in the states when they were able to mobilize new voters into politics.⁴⁸

The notion of the Progressive Era as a precursor to the New Deal rests largely on its policy aspirations. Because its achievements fell far short of its aspirations, Progressive reform left states with a weak institutional base, ill-suited to the kind of expert-driven active government the Progressives envisioned. Despite the efforts to build executive capacity, power in states remained highly decentralized and state governments had little capacity to promote state-wide social or economic perspectives. Where Progressives were most successful, political parties lost their ability to organize state politics, but the result did not amplify “the people's” voice. Instead, local elites in business and agriculture dominated these demobilized polities.

THE LIMITED IMPACT OF THE NEW DEAL ON THE STATES

The political impact of the New Deal was so sweeping that it is presumed to have rocked all of American politics. Yet, the effect of the New Deal on the states was surprisingly small. Not only did states themselves initiate few significant institutional or policy changes in response to the Great Depression, they resisted federal efforts to build state capacities. In contrast to the picture of dramatic change at the federal level during the 1930s, the story in the states was much more one of continuity.⁵¹

Political Divergence: States and the Federal Government during the New Deal

James T. Patterson's analysis of the New Deal highlights the striking contrast between the ongoing conservatism in the states and the liberalism developing in the federal government.⁵²

In a handful of states, “little New Deals” explicitly sought to mimic the liberal impulses of the federal government. In some of the most successful, such as New York and Massachusetts (which was receptive to much of the New Deal even though it was controlled by Republicans), enduring changes in the administration of relief and in labor laws were enacted. But in most states where New Deal liberalism made an appearance, it arrived late and left early. For example Democrats controlled both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature and the governorship only between 1936 and 1938. When Republicans reassumed power in 1938, they began to roll back Democratic measures, targeting labor laws in particular.⁵³

The transience of Democratic power in the states is striking. At the federal level, Democrats won control of both Houses of Congress in 1932 and held onto them – with only a brief interlude of Republican rule in the 1950s and early 1980s – for fifty years. Although these Democratic majorities would never be as liberal as those at the height of the New Deal, they were able to strike compromises that allowed many of the key social policy achievements of the New Deal to endure. And even when legislative progress stalled in the 1940s and 1950s, liberal Democrats could use congressional committees and administrative agencies to develop their policy agenda.

In the states, the rhythm of reform differed. In even the most liberal states, the New Deal did not influence state politics until 1936, leaving the wave of reform momentum at the national level little time to build in the states. Even in the states with the strongest support for the New Deal nationally, Democrats only briefly rode Roosevelt's coattails to power in the mid-1930s. By 1938, most of their majorities had evaporated. An examination of the thirty-five nonsouthern state legislatures shows that during the 1930s, only 40 percent were controlled by Democrats; 40 percent had divided legislatures, and 20 percent had Republican legislatures. In the 1940s, the picture for Democrats darkened considerably: Democrats controlled only 23 percent of nonsouthern state legislatures during that decade, Republicans 63 percent; 14 percent of the legislatures experienced divided control.⁵⁵

Three major obstacles kept New Deal Democrats from replicating their national success in the politics of nonsouthern states, where they might have been expected to thrive. First, legislative malapportionment limited the legislative power of Democrats in many states. Malapportionment certainly muted the impact of labor's growing political strength in the states. The overrepresentation of rural areas and the chronic underrepresentation of metropolitan areas in state legislatures worsened between 1910 and 1960.⁵⁶

In other states, the disjuncture between state and national party control was reinforced by weak state parties, a legacy of Progressive reform. In their study of California voting patterns, Michael Rogin and John Shrover, for example, demonstrate a persistently weak correlation between the vote for president and the vote for governor in the 1930s and 1940s. The practice of cross-filing, the off-cycle scheduling of gubernatorial elections combined with the weakness of parties and the importance of the press to hinder the growth of the Democratic party at the state level.⁶⁰

Finally, issue-oriented liberal Democrats were outnumbered in most states by traditional organization Democrats, who were themselves often arrayed into warring factions. As a result, even when Democrats were victorious in state politics, their victories did not mean the same thing as at the federal level. Most northern industrial states, where much of the strength of organized labor was concentrated, were dominated by what Mayhew called typical party organizations or they suffered from persistent factionalism.⁶²

The Impact of New Deal Politics on the States

Although federal action affected politics in the states during the New Deal, it did little to help strengthen activist liberal Democrats in the states. New Deal spending, for example, often had quite unintended consequences for Democratic power in the states. In Michigan, for example, Democratic victories at the national level “had the peculiar effect of motivating party members to do even less than before to elect Democrat to statewide positions” since the election of a Democratic governor would have taken control over party patronage away from the national committeeman who was the highest ranking Democrat.⁶⁵

Roosevelt's one concerted effort to influence state politics – his attempted 1938 “purge” southern Democratic New Deal opponents – failed spectacularly at the hands of state party leaders.⁶⁸

A less well-examined but enduring impact of the New Deal was its effect on the mobilization of interests in states. Although the New Deal mobilized new interests into politics, it did little to alter group politics in the states and may have, in fact, attenuated the liberal voice in the states. During the Progressive Era, proponents of activist government focused heavily at the state level. National organizations such as the American Association for Labor Legislation coordinated action in support of social and labor legislation in states across the country. After the New Deal, however, most liberals turned their sights and adapted their organizations to influence national policy arenas.⁷⁰

Organized labor was something of an exception to this pattern because states continued to control policies of central concern to labor, including workman's compensation and unemployment insurance. Although the AFL's state federations, affiliated to the national AFL-CIO after 1956, continued to lobby in state legislatures, labor's political engagement took on a much more narrow cast in states than it did nationally, which reflected its AFL organizational base. State federations lobbied vigorously on issues related to labor's organizational survival but were much less reliable when it came to the broader social policy issues that the national AFL-CIO identified as priorities. And, in this notoriously decentralized federation, the much more liberal national organization had relatively little power to induce state and local organizations to alter their priorities.⁷²

Federal Efforts to Build State Administrative Capacity

In Washington, New Dealers recognized that the limited administrative capabilities of the states made them poor partners for implementing and extending New Deal policies. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, liberal policymakers prodded the states to enact legislation that would develop new capacities, but had limited leverage to induce significant changes there in the short run.

Many New Deal agencies prodded the states to enact legislation that would make it easier for the two levels of government to work together.⁷³

Federal efforts to build up state planning capacities had an even more marginal impact. The efforts of the National Resources Committee (NRC) to establish state planning agencies were short-lived and superficial.⁷⁶

In his account of New Deal and post New Deal politics, Sidney Milkis tells a story of growing administrative and executive power triumphing over political parties. Frustrated at his failure to bend state parties to his will, Roosevelt created new executive administrative capacity. As such he sought to “transcend” party politics rather than reconstruct them. The story in the states during the years of the New Deal was nearly the reverse. States failed to build enduring administrative or executive capacities and the issueless politics of partisan and factional struggle continued to dominate.

Despite the greatly enhanced power of the federal government during the 1930s, the New Deal did not transform the bottom-up character of American political parties nor did it alter the internal workings of state politics that made states such inhospitable terrain for advancing the liberal goals or activist government. As Patterson notes, “Problems presented by state courts, unfair apportionment, and state constitutions were soluble by state action alone.”⁷⁸

For the twenty-five years following the New Deal, the distinct reform trajectories in states and in the federal government were evident in the continued appetite for policy innovation in Washington compared with the listless activity in most states. Even though the political mobilization and reform energies of the New Deal had ebbed, supporters of a more active federal role worked from within the federal bureaucracy to expand public powers and to develop ideas for new initiatives that would be ready when the national political tides turned.⁷⁹

In the states, the situation was quite different. For the most part, states lacked the executive capacity to generate and promote new policy ideas. State bureaucracies did not draw the kind of educated policy experts that staffed the federal government; instead poorly-funded state agencies typically attracted patronage and other types of political appointees with little interest in promoting policy changes. State legislatures were more likely to be controlled by politicians with little interest in policy innovation, and, because most met biennially and, for only part of the year at that, they were poor settings in which to lay the groundwork for future initiatives. Together, these features meant that state-level politics continued to provide an open political arena for antireform forces long after they had been forced to vie for power at the federal level.

STATES AND THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF EXIT

If New Deal reforms had completely displaced the states as significant policymakers, the slow pace of change in the states would have mattered little for the later development of liberal policy and politics. In fact, because states retained important powers, the divergence in the trajectories of state and federal political change had far reaching consequences. Scholars have just begun to explore the repercussions of these different time lines for the development of liberalism in the United States.⁸⁰

In this section, I illustrate one of the most significant consequences of federal/state divergence – the persistence of the racially divided metropolis. The federal role in creating the divided metropolis – especially through housing and transportation policies – has been well documented, but the critical significance of the states has been largely unexplored.⁸¹

By inscribing racial inequalities into political boundaries, the new metropolitan political geography made inequalities more enduring and more difficult to remedy. Moreover, geographically-reinforced inequalities blocked economic opportunity for African-Americans and limited their incorporation into the growing middle class just as the federal government was dismantling the edifice of southern segregation. Starting in the mid-1960s, federal efforts to promote opportunity for African-Americans in housing, education, and employment each foundered when confronted with the legal force of local autonomy.⁸⁵

As the 1960s drew to a close, several high profile federal commissions surveyed the condition of urban America, seeking to explain the civil disorders and to propose remedies. One of the central problems they identified was the sharp racial division between city and suburb. The National Commission on Urban Problems noted that the federal government had begun to reverse the policies that had promoted racial segregation, and it urged the states to reassert their control over land use as one of the most important ways to loosen “the white suburban noose around the inner city.”⁸⁶

The divided metropolis not only exacerbated the enormous barriers to promoting racial equality, it also helped to undermine labor's organizational strength in politics. The great victory of organized labor in national politics in the 1930s was not matched by broad success in the states. Scholars have examined the failures to organize the South and the resultant regional imbalance in labor strength.⁸⁸

After the New Deal, organized labor relied heavily on city-based Central Labor Councils to carry out its nationally-devised political goals.⁸⁹

Finally, the divided metropolis provided fertile ground for new ideas about the role of government. Homogeneous suburbs gave the foes of activist government a venue in which to adapt their antigovernment ideology to the new conditions of postwar life. The disjunctures between federal, state, and local politics allowed institutional space for political losers in the New Deal regime – that is, the opponents of liberal activist government – to regroup.

An essential element of the task that political losers confront is, as William Riker pointed out, rhetorical.⁹¹

In linking localism with racial separation, property rights, and antistatism, the new conservative ideology offered a positive alternative to New Deal liberalism that resonated across the country. Homeownership was a common denominator that linked residents; defense of property rights was a value that resonated deeply. Tom Sugrue has shown how the idea of “homeowners rights” animated the white working-class opponents of racial integration in Detroit during the 1950s.⁹⁴

By the 1980s, a distinctive suburban pattern of political behavior and preferences had emerged.⁹⁶

The political geography of postwar metropolitan America helps explain why conservative alternatives to activist government resonated so widely across the country. The expanding scope of liberal national government after the 1930s coincided in time with the unfolding of a very different set of ideas about the role of government in metropolitan areas across the country. When the New Deal's style of activist government confronted sharp economic challenges in the 1970s, the antitax, small government ideology that had flourished in the hothouse environment of white suburbia was already waiting in the wings.

The state-generated exit options that had helped to create the divided metropolis sapped liberalism's political strength by shaping new interests and ideologies from the bottom up. Local political boundaries provided culturally-resonant mechanisms for limiting the reach of redistributive government. In an era when formal racial barriers were falling and open defense of racial segregation was become increasingly unacceptable, the new political geography shaped the terms on which race would become politicized over the following decades.

CONCLUSION

Any macro-analysis of American politics must address and attempt to resolve the divergent impulses that simultaneously thrived in such a decentralized polity. The conventional narrative sees twentieth century reform in a straight line: Progressive reform was a dress rehearsal for New Deal reform; the New Deal centralized politics and built new central state capacities; and the Great Society overreached, provoking backlash. In this article, I have presented an alternative perspective highlighting the inescapable fact that states, fundamentally, were not part of the New Deal regime.

Taking federalism seriously, I suggest, alters the traditional narrative in three ways. First, it draws attention to the differences in the timing and outcomes of reform across the levels of government, suggesting that, as a consequence, states and the federal government exhibited distinctive political logics and capabilities. Twentieth-century American political development was not a straight drive toward more centralized politics and more inclusive democracy. Rather, Progressive reforms decentralized state power in important ways and demobilized voters without changing the socioeconomic biases in representation that legislative malapportionment created. In this sense, Progressive reform left the states more elite-dominated and reinforced, rather than remedied, the states' status as incomplete democracies. This was true not only of southern states – the usual focus of arguments about federalism – but of states across the country.

This perspective also highlights the importance of studying the mechanisms of connection and disconnection across levels of the federal system. Although significant changes at the federal level might send shock waves throughout the political system, shifts in state policy and politics can lag considerably, as was the case after the 1930s. In some arenas, changes at lower levels of government might not only lag, they can actually move in the opposite direction. Moreover, federal changes could also induce unexpected political outcomes in the states. The mobilization of liberal activists in the states actually declined in the wake of the New Deal as these groups turned their sights toward the federal government.

Finally, the approach to federalism I have developed here directs attention to the way institutional diversity at different levels of government shapes public capacities and the political will to address major social challenges, emphasizing in particular how such institutional differences influence the subsequent development of the winners and losers of earlier political battles. In twentieth-century American political development, local opponents of activist government used state-delegated powers to craft new political jurisdictions that served as exit options limiting their responsibilities for redistribution. The divided metropolis that they created left African American urban migrants with fewer resources and higher barriers to opportunity. It also directly undermined federal efforts to remedy racial discrimination and open opportunity across a range of policies. The new political geography fueled a racially charged debate about the role of government that dominated American politics for the next three decades. In the process, it provided multiple arenas in which the foes of liberalism could consolidate their power, refine their appeals, and develop their evolving justifications for restricting the scope of federal activism.