'Make it national!' Economic expertise and the development of the Progressive economic policymaking system, 1890-193

Americans replaced the political parties with a new economic policymaking order in the Progressive era and 1920s. This dissertation focuses upon the careers of Emory Johnson, Solomon Huebner and Joseph Willits, three colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School, to show how newly-professionalized economists led the move to build this new regime of expertise and administration. They created a complex new system that reflected the very economic and political divisions they had hoped to reform, however. Too often experts ignored the opportunity to build a new national order and used their skills to help private interests compete. Why?;This dissertation draws upon intellectual and economic history to describe the origins of a complex public and private policymaking order informed by Americans' persistent preference for private action and economic development's pervasive process of creative destruction. These experts worked from a parochial nationalism that continued to reserve a place for local interests and emphasized private businessmen's responsibility for the common good. Thus they turned state service to securing privileges for private interests and sought to promote enlightened decision-making at the firm level. The emergence of corporate business and an administrative state at the center of the American economy also produced new sectoral and political peripheries struggling to survive.;These forces shaped the Progressive era's new policymaking arrangements. Economists manned the new state bureaus devoted to supervising corporate industry. But university scholars also provided the federal government with a reservoir of temporary expertise forestalling further bureaucratic growth. These experts often leavened the state's managerial agenda with a concern for the difficulties of non-corporate industries. Many industries remained entirely beyond the state's concern however. They turned directly to university economists for help. Together they built new institutions for single-industry and regional economic stabilization and management. The temporary experts who pervaded the new administrative state and the new private institutions they ultimately built comprised crucial parts American economic policymaking that historians have as yet ignored. When we consider them we see a Progressive policymaking system more complex than the state itself.