Post-Civil War Capitalism and Progressive Period Article Review

What we can take from this is that their pluralistic society was always being threatened. No matter how far a pluralistic society would come in theories, those individuals without the same morality could immediately endanger and void new theories.

Carpenter focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the U.S. during the Progressive Era, questioning why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent writers of new policy and why the Interior Department did not (Carpenter 2001, 4). To explain these developments, Carpenter gives an essentially new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts.

In Carpenter's opinion, bureaucracies with very distinct goals are able to achieve autonomy when they are able to create and keep a reputation among different coalitions for offering services that are also very distinct (Carpenter 2001, 4) (which is what happened with the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture). The coalitions give agencies the ability to resist political control and they make it expensive for politicians to ignore the ideas of the agencies (4). Basically, Carpenter shows how organizational networks helped bureaucrats achieve autonomy while expanding their mission of their agencies. They were able to insert themselves into wide networks that were made up of different individuals and organizations that were able to cut across economic, social, and ethnic boundaries (4).

Carpenter (2001, 43) believed that federal agencies only exited to "carry out with a minimum of forethought the laws that Congress had passed and that the courts had legitimized and interpreted…" (Bertelli & Lynn 2006, 18). Bertelli and Lynn (2006) argue that public management (i.e., administration by unelected officials of public agencies and activities based on authority given to them by policymakers) comes from the principles of American constitutionalism.Public management should be a constitutional institution, they claim, which is required for successful governance under the separation of powers.

Woodrow Wilson said, "Civil-service reform is thus but a moral preparation for what is to follow. It is clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as a public trust, and…opening the way for make it businesslike" (Cook 1996, 69; Wilson 1941, 494). At the center of his discourse, Herbert Croly said that there had been a "general relaxation of American moral fibre" (1996, 69; 1914, 207). What Cook is getting at is that there was a major push for a popular government. Both Croly and Wilson believed in constitutional forms, but there were pushes for the majority to have a direct say in what was happening in the government; they sought to put an end to the threat of government tyranny (1996, 71).

Wilson said that government once had a "few masters," but in modern times it has "scores of masters" (1941, 200). "Where government once might follow the whims of a court, it must now follow the views of a nation" (200). Wilson explains that we have taken the simple and made it complex when it comes to government duties. For the majority to have say, however, in the ways of government, things would have to become more complex. To include the people is to put back the moral fiber in our public administration; the people should be considered the moral fiber.

Bibliography

Bertelli, Anthony. & Lynn, Lawrence. Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Carpenter, Daniel P. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862 -- 1928......