The Presidency and the American State: Leadership and Decision Making in the Adams, Grant, and Taft Administrations
Although many associate Franklin D. Roosevelt with the inauguration of the robust, dominant American presidency, the roots of his executive leadership style go much deeper. Examining the presidencies of John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Howard Taft, Stephen Rockwell traces emerging connections between presidential action and a robust state over the course of the nineteenth century and the Progressive Era.
By analyzing these three undervalued presidents' savvy deployment of state authority and their use of administrative leadership, legislative initiatives, direct executive action, and public communication, Rockwell makes a compelling case that the nineteenth-century presidency was significantly more developed and interventionist than previously thought. As he shows for a significant number of policy arenas, the actions of Adams, Grant, and Taft touched the lives of millions of Americans and laid the foundations of what would become the American century.
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Marshalling the work of presidential historians and scholars of American Political Development, along with rigorous study of three overlooked presidencies, Stephen Rockwell's The Presidency and the American State reveals a radically novel view of the American presidency. Through a careful and masterfully written account of the political lives and presidencies of John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Howard Taft, Rockwell demonstrates the power of the American state through presidential action far earlier than "sleepy" accounts of the administrative state have argued. The result is a dynamic, innovative, and truly satisfying revisitation of American history itself.
--Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University, author of How Governors Built the Modern American PresidencyStephen Rockwell's The Presidency and the American State unites two threads of scholarship that have too long been separated: studies of the American presidency and the literature on state development. Rockwell convincingly demonstrates in this long overdue re-examination that we need to understand what presidents do through the lens of how they use state power, not by preemptively assuming theories in which modern presidents are more capable or have greater authority than those of the past. The book is a must-read for students of the Presidency and the American state more broadly.
--William D. Adler, Northeastern Illinois University, author of Engineering Expansion: The U.S. Military and Economic Development, 1787-1860
