ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the offering of evidence to support the arguments in Chapter 1 by covering the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II. It focuses on how and why the further amplification of the IRP-based compensatory state occurred, and the key role of the corporate–social science nexus in defining and benefiting from it in its quest for legitimacy. Reviewed are the changing socioeconomic, demographic, cultural, religious, technological, and administrative challenges posed by the Roaring 20s and, then, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Illustrated is disappointment with progressivism producing, first, a “return to normalcy,” followed by an “associationalist” administrative reform movement, and, then, a surge of consumerism and stock market over-exuberance. The latter led to a massive expansion of the federal component of the compensatory state by the Roosevelt administration in the wake of the Great Depression. But a significant expansion of the proxy government components of the compensatory state occurred, a networking development informed partly by associationalism. The apparent failure of associationalism during the Depression, as well as the need for war mobilization and fighting, brought calls for the next wave of competing American administrative reform ideas as the Cold War began.
