"Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State provides detailed case studies of congressional legislation relating to railroad regulation, labor relations, and social policy and analyzes party and faction divisions in the House and Senate. It finds evidence of a fairly cohesive movement on the part of Congressmen from the South and Midwest to extend the regulatory powers of the federal government. However, many congressional progressives had serious reservations about the creation of powerful, partially autonomous regulatory agencies, and at key points their misgivings weakened the reforming impetus.

Moreover, in rebelling against the disciplines of party government, the progressives themselves damaged the major source of central direction in congressional policymaking. Progressive reform undermined the system of party government without displacing it, ensuring that the modern American state would be a hybrid structure in which newer forms of governance coexisted with elements drawn from the older "state of courts and parties.""--Jacket.