"Ideology, Strategy, and 'Self-Regulation' in the 1920s Construction Industry: Reassessing Herbert Hoover’s 'Associative State'"

In May 1922, at the urging of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, a group of building-trades stakeholders formed the American Construction Council (ACC). The Council’s goal—shared by Hoover as well as by the ACC’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt—was to modulate fluctuations in the business cycle using “self-regulation” to encourage building in lean times and discourage building in boom times. Each month, after deliberating over statistics gathered from the Council’s members, the ACC would issue an opinion about state of the industry and the national economy.
The ACC was a key component of Hoover’s broader effort to pursue public goals through cooperative arrangements. These arrangements ranged from information-sharing to standard-setting, sometimes relying exclusively on business associations, sometimes on the authority of the federal government. Together, these initiatives amounted to what historian Ellis Hawley called the “Associative State.” Thanks to the novelty of FDR’s involvement, many scholars of 1920s associationalism have mentioned the ACC in passing. This paper examines the Council’s origins and activities in more detail.
Aspects of this story are at odds with some persistent generalizations about Hoover’s associational activities during the New Era. Contrary to what readers of the “Associative State” literature might expect, the ACC was in fact largely ineffective—even before the Crash of 1929. Its activities provoked significant controversy and opposition. And, it represented only one part of Hoover’s strategy for manipulating the business cycle through the construction industry. Finally, the history of the ACC suggests that associationalism was not a complex expression of antistatist ideology, as Hawley and others have argued. Rather, the case of the ACC suggests something closer to Robert D. Cuff’s characterization of associationalism as a rhetorical strategy employed to evade political resistance.