ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to pull together some of the key historical strands, evolutionary trends, environmental variables, and social scientific developments that led to this peculiar situation and to assess this national planning void in a planning society in a planning world. From the sweep of ideas and events of American national history during the 1900-1972 period, a series of key trends can be identified that bore on this peculiar national planning situation. The national planning idea became rapidly and closely identified with negative, "foreign" ideological labels, which hampered efforts to adapt it into the mixed democratic-capitalistic-welfare system that gradually developed in the United States. The societal role of theory changed substantially as American public policy and national planning experience evolved. The dominant business orientations of American society for many years emphasized an individualist, competitive view of society antithetical to large-scale planning of any type.
