• DOI:10.2307/1918256
• Corpus ID: 163658981

Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an “Associative State,” 1921–1928

@article{Hawley1974HerbertHT,
  title={Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an “Associative State,” 1921–1928},
  author={Ellis Wayne Hawley},
  journal={The Journal of American History},
  year={1974},
  volume={61},
  pages={116-140}
}

• E. W. Hawley
• Published 1 June 1974
• Economics
• The Journal of American History

IN recent years, the traditional image of American governmental activity in the 1920s has been substantially altered. Delving beneath the older stereotypes of "normalcy" and "retrenchment," scholars have found unsuspected survivals of progressivism, a growing federal bureaucracy that tried to use as well as serve business groups, and an incipient form of "indicative planning" based on corporatist rather than classical economics. In many respects, they have concluded, the period should be viewed as the beginnings of the "modern era," not as a reversion to past patterns or as a frivolous and wasted interlude between progressivism and the New Deal.' And for some, the 1920s has more current relevance than the decades that followed, particularly in efforts to balance technological needs with America's individualistic heritage, build an international community without policing the world, and work out bureaucratic arrangements that would nourish individual, community, and private effort rather than supplant them.2