When Good Government Meant Big Government

Brian Balogh, author of The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century:
When Good Government Meant Big Government provides an authoritative history of the United States’ twentieth-century evolution into a nation equipped with a powerful central government. That path, Tarbert argues, was forged with the help of a powerful set of business-oriented elites eager to import corporate practice into the federal government and keen to demonstrate that the most egregious racist excess damaged America’s reputation as a “nation of laws.”

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, author of Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt:
There have been dramatic fights in recent years about the size and scope of government and whether the country needs another New Deal. In When Good Government Meant Big Government, Jesse Tarbert offers new insights into those conflicts by tracing how self-described “public men” took inspiration from big businesses in their efforts to clean up and expand an executive branch that had become large, unwieldy, and ineffective before WWI.

Louis Hyman, author of Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary:
In When Good Government Meant Big Government, we see American policy makers look, for the first time, to the corporation for inspiration in how to run the country, only to find that America could not be as easily ruled as the market. In this sweeping and writerly history, Tarbert lays bare the prehistory of our own times, as early twentieth-century reformers struggle with how to manage big government, white supremacy, and economic dislocations.