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An “Experimental Garden for the Propagation of Political Hybrids” At the foot of Capitol Hill lay the United States Botanic Garden, a fruit of the largely abortive attempt during the early national period to convert the nation's capital into a center of scientific endeavor. Here exotic plants were to be collected and displayed to enhance the knowledge of the nation's nurserymen and promote the improvement of agriculture. By the eve of the Civil War, such ambitious purposes had been largely forgotten; the botanic garden served largely as a pleasant place for congressmen and their friends to take the air on summer evenings and listen to the concerts given by the naval band from the Capitol terrace. From time to time in Washington's history, it has seemed appropriate to regard the whole city as an “experimental garden” where policy initiatives designed for wider application might be tried and tested. That was especially true during and immediately after the Civil War.

In this provocative study, Robert Harrison provides new insight into grassroots reconstruction after the Civil War and into the lives of those most deeply affected, the newly emancipated African Americans. Harrison argues that the District of Columbia, far from being marginal to the Reconstruction story, was central to Republican efforts to reshape civil and political relations, with the capital a testing ground for Congressional policy makers. The study describes the ways in which federal agencies such as the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to assist Washington's freed population and shows how officials struggled to address the social problems resulting from large-scale African-American migration. It also sheds new light on the political processes that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the onset of black disfranchisement.

“The federal regulation of the railroads,” suggests Gabriel Kolko, was “the first example of national Progressivism, and possibly its most important single illustration.” Railroad companies, dependent for their very existence on privileges and sometimes subsidies conferred by government, had long been recognized as “affected with a public interest” and therefore liable to government supervision to a degree that other forms of business enterprise were not. For a generation state and federal governments had struggled with the economic and legal problems of railroad regulation. During the Progressive Era, in the shape of federal rate making by an independent commission, a solution was found that was wholly characteristic of government-business relations in the early twentieth century. The political struggles that brought it into being exemplify the processes that created the new American state. Most early studies of railroad regulation identified advancement of the “public interest” as the primary, if not the sole, objective. The most obvious variety of “public interest” was that of consumers in low fares and freight rates, but the interest of the “people,” in relation to the railroads, was more commonly identified with that of their immediate customers, the farmers, merchants and manufacturers that shipped their goods by rail, who were characteristically depicted as small producers at the mercy of powerful corporations. The purpose of regulation was to protect the “unorganized” against the “organized.” Most recent scholarship gives pride of place to private, rather than public, interest in the politics of regulation.

First published in 2004, Congress, Progressive Reform and the New American State uses a series of case-studies of reform legislation in Congress during the early twentieth century to explore the nature of progressivism and the processes of political change which resulted in the establishment of the modern American state. Among the topics covered are railroad regulation, labor relations, social policy of the District of Columbia, Republican insurgency, and the nature of Democratic progressivism. This work will be of interest to students of twentieth-century political history, the history of Congress, and the origins of the modern American state.