No one will be surprised by the general theme of this book: the enduring tension between the federal and state governments, between the center and the periphery of the American political system. Not unique to the United States, the distinctiveness of the pull between central and other American governments is that it’s constitutionalized, part of the original structure of American governance, not just a feature of government that has emerged over the course of time.
Gary Gerstle is by no means the first historian to take up the subject; an inescapable ingredient of American public life, it demands treatment in any history of the nation’s civic affairs. But rarely have recent historians tackled it directly, preferring instead to emphasize the growth of the American national state alone and to ignore the changing fortune, role, and influence of the individual states whose integrity and character are protected by the federal system under the Constitution. Simply by placing national-state tension at the core of what is, in effect, a survey of American political history, Gerstle gives us a fresh history of the national past. But it’s history in a new key in many other significant ways, too.
Gerstle’s first new key: Where other historians of the American national state commence their story with the Civil War, Gerstle distinctively begins his in the late 18th century, when the nation composed itself out of independ-ent colonies into a federated nation of semi-independent states. This is not an unfamiliar story. But what’s new is Gerstle’s emphasis, lost on so many of his colleagues, on the powers and responsibilities that the central government managed to take to itself even before the Civil War clothed it with vast new authority. Where other historians merely note what occurred before 1860, Gerstle insists that we acknowledge the substantial achievements of the federal government even by then. It had already protected the nation’s security in war and peace while expanding its borders; it ran a postal system, distributed land, and welcomed settlers, all the while responding to voters’ preferences (particularly under Democratic administrations) to keep itself lean and economical.
The states weren’t far behind. With “a staggering freedom of action,” they regulated moral life, built schools, improved internal transportation through roads, canals, and railroads, and regulated slavery. In these respects, they, too, were responding to the people’s desires. In analyzing how all of this came to be, Gerstle makes a conclusive case that the national state set its foundations after the revolution, not the Civil War, even while at the same time the states maintained wide freedom to employ their many powers.
Gerstle’s second new key is a strikingly original departure. He not only brings the states into the picture in relating the inconsistent growth of central government power; but unlike other historians before him, he locates the source of the conflict between central and state governments in the states’ possession of their police power—the residual authority left to the states under the Constitution, authority not incorporated into federal authority by the 14th Amendment and often ensured by court decision. That power may have eroded over the years but still remains, in Gerstle’s view, intrusive and restraining—and always potentially more so.
As Gerstle notes in a review of the history of police powers in the United States, those powers had their roots in the British monarch’s prerogative, were given legitimacy by William Blackstone, and were incorporated into American jurisprudence by federal and state court decisions. And until the protections guaranteed to Americans under the Bill of Rights were gradually incorporated to include protection against state governments after the Civil War, the states were left pretty much free to use their police powers as they wished, as often they still are. This left the states most notoriously free to protect slavery until it was outlawed by constitutional amendment in the 1860s, and then free to return the Southern freedmen to peonage for another hundred years.
Gerstle’s third new key is an analytical innovation. He distinguishes three distinct strategies that all branches of government have used to build the powers of the federal government at the expense of the states. This is the core of the book, whose substance can only briefly be summarized, and another pathbreaking interpretive approach. As Gerstle sees it, the first of these strategies has been what he terms “exemption”—that is, the pursuit of those “activities in which the central government freed itself from constitutional constraints.” The second is “surrogacy”—”attempts by the federal government to use one of its enumerated powers . . . to achieve unenumerated policy goals.” The third is “privatization”—”initiatives undertaken by the central state to persuade private groups in American society to do work that it, the federal government, was not authorized or willing to take on itself.”
No one has previously ventured this kind of typology, and Gerstle’s grouping of various endeavors under one or the other strategy gives a new twist to old tales. More than that, it reveals how a historian can put his politics to analytical use in such a way that they serve understanding, not ideology. Gerstle is clearly a man of the left. But he doesn’t offer a leftist interpretation of his subject. Yes, he doesn’t appear to be a fan of state police powers, given the way they’ve often been deployed. And he’s keen to unmask the inconsistencies in those who decry federal, but not state, intervention in people’s lives. But though, like all history, this book reveals his intellectual commitments, like the best kind of history it’s not biased. It lays out what Gerstle thinks the evidence will bear, and it has to be evaluated on those grounds. In those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.
Part of its success lies in Gerstle’s overarching theme: the transformation over two centuries in the meaning of “liberalism” and in the location of “liberal” politics. In the revolutionary era, and well into the 19th century, liberals assumed that once their fellow citizens were freed from coercive government, social issues, including inequality, would open themselves to solution. But this kind of classical liberalism eventuated not in a reduction of social and economic inequality but in its intensification. That forced a reworking of liberalism’s meaning, a reworking that has taken place over two centuries until liberalism today is taken to be the worldview of those who believe that only government can alleviate the worst evils, discrimination, and the inequalities of modern existence. But which government? That’s the unresolved rub of all politics, American politics included.
In a book of this breadth, one has to be disappointed that it doesn’t go even further than it does. Preferring to emphasize federal rather than state authority, Gerstle doesn’t probe deeply enough into state police powers. He doesn’t show in enough detail how the jurisprudence of police powers developed in the 20th century after being established in the 19th, and how the balance between federal and state authority fluctuates from era to era. Readers will also wonder how the broadening of full citizenship and voting rights to all Americans affected the greater legitimization of federal authority. And what, say, of the American tradition of voluntary associations, which Alexis de Tocqueville made so central to his interpretation of democracy in America? Surely nongovernmental organizations have rendered unnecessary a more powerful set of federal and state institutions along the lines of those on the continent for social policing and social action. They have served both conservative and liberal purposes.
By no means is this a book for historians only. It should be widely read, its arguments widely considered. And the evidence Gerstle adduces ought to be sobering for everyone. For the plain fact of the matter is that every polity has to balance freedom with order and individual preference against community norms. In the United States, the federal system has made that balance more difficult to calibrate and more open to variety. Each of us has an idea as to where that balance ought to be struck. But it will never be struck once and for all; it will have to be adjusted as circumstances and citizens’ views (and votes) change.
Gerstle draws one lesson from this history: “A restoration of the states to the position of privilege they enjoyed in the 19th or early 20th centuries seems improbable.” Yet the states have proven themselves to be theaters of experimentation and legislation that can deeply affect national politics. That said, “The recent turn toward the states . . . underscores the constraints imposed on the central state by an 18th-century Constitution and the near impossibility of altering the Constitution so as to give government in the United States new tools to address its 21st-century problems. In this respect, America remains bound by its 18th-century origins.”
If any additional large lesson can be drawn from Liberty and Coercion, it is that the hope of getting government—federal, state, or local—”off our backs” is a vain one. The question is which government we wish to be on our backs and for what reasons. The federal system, the mixture of governments at the national and state levels, has always proved to be a source of both opportunity and limitation—in Gerstle’s terms, of liberty and coercion—for those who live under it. That is the paradox of American government.
James M. Banner Jr. is a historian in Washington.
