The United States Army, natural resources, and political development in the nineteenth century.

Polity, September, 2002 by Klyza, Christopher McGrory

Scholars of American political development rightly emphasize that prior to the early twentieth century, the administrative capacity of the executive branch was diminutive. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century the federal government undertook a number of natural resources policy initiatives. Rather than creating new agencies to administer these initiatives, the federal government turned to an existing governmental entity--the United States Army. During this "state of courts and parties," the federal state needed some administrative presence to help carry out its largely development-oriented distributive policies, while toward the end of the century, as a new American state was being built, the Army served an important role in providing patchwork administrative capacity...

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