ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief narrative overview and summary of the development of American national planning efforts and ideas during the period from 1900-1972, including the way in which the rational and incremental approaches have come to dominate American public policy thinking. Multipurpose regional planning commissions, scientific planning studies and literature, and new planning methods spread across the country. As the depression deepened, the hesitant national planning concepts of the 1920s became a flood of ambitious proposals. The national planning proposals came from all sectors of American society, from socialists to the chamber of commerce, and from communists on the extreme Left to multiple centrist approaches to total fascist dictatorship concepts on the extreme Right. The intergovernmental balance of American planning was also changing. National Resources Planning Board leadership and the wave of new federal economic and social programs greatly hastened the shift toward federal power and perspectives in the American public planning process.
