"A revolution in ideas and methods": The construction industry and socioeconomic planning in the United States, 1915-1933

During the years 1915 to 1933, a group of reformers, economists, politicians, and industrial leaders sought to use public and private construction as a means of controlling the business cycle and improving the social order in a rapidly urbanizing United States. The dissertation begins with a discussion of the origins of the concept of business cycles and the importance of public and private construction in them. During World War I, these concepts gained greater currency and the federal government gained direct experience in social and economic management. Immediately after the war, numerous groups coalesced around Herbert Hoover, and during the 1920s Secretary of Commerce--later President--Hoover and his allies created institutions and policies aimed at controlling public and private construction across the nation through a network of private governments and countercyclical public works. Institutions created during the decade were intended to eliminate the social disorder and economic waste caused by low rates of homeownership, unplanned urban growth, irrational practices, and cyclical unemployment. It was believed by Hoover and his supporters that these social and economic goals could be achieved without abandoning American traditions of free enterprise and limited government intervention in the economy. This study sheds light on the complex ideas and activist social and economic policies pursued during the 1920s and the early 1930s. It also demonstrates that an important countercyclical economic strategy existed before the so-called New Deal or keynesian "revolutions" and that various New Deal policies were statist versions of Hooverian planning. The study of federal policy toward the construction industry also provides an example of industrial policy relevant to our own era. The sources for the dissertation are drawn from government documents and the personal papers of those involved. Especially important were the papers of Herbert Hoover, Edward Eyre Hunt, and others at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. Other important materials were found at the National Archives, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Government Documents section of the University of Iowa Library.