ABSTRACT
This Chapter provides a survey of American national planning literature during the period from 1900-1972. The multiple New Deal planning experiments, together with the operations of the National Resources Planning Board and vigorous debate about planning implications, gave the national planning concept an extensive and diverse exposure within an active, fragmented and pluralistic public policy process. The social sciences also turned away from ambitious macro-societal perspectives and theories to new analytic concerns micro-level, empirical, scientific research. A series of problems left untouched since the 1930s came home to roost in a new agenda of social, civil rights, environmental, economic, and national security problems. The first Nixon administration provided a moratorium in national planning evolution, a waiting period in which national planning pressures and ideas could move in many directions. The national planning impulse was strengthened by a movement away from "rugged individualism" to collectivist concepts of the "public interest" in a mass society.
