IN 1937, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT EMBARKED on what one of its chief chroniclers would later call “one of mankind’s countless recent efforts to take command of its destiny.” It wasn’t meant to be so. Casa Grande—a farm project in Arizona that was administered by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal “alphabet agency”—was basically intended to ameliorate the extreme poverty of farmhands in the Dust Bowl and Southwest. In very small circles of conservative policy thinking, Casa Grande would become something of a fable, a cautionary tale about human beings and government intervention. But there might also be a cautionary tale about that cautionary tale—about the ways lessons can be overlearned, and the fact that ideas can have unintended consequences, too.
With characteristic humor, Edward C. Banfield began his most controversial work by remarking he must appear an “ill-tempered and mean-spirited” man. By all accounts, this wasn’t true of the renowned political scientist—but Banfield’s manner of challenging liberal dogmas imbued him with a dyspeptic aura.
It wasn’t always thus. Banfield started as a New Dealer working for the FSA. In this capacity, he visited Casa Grande twice in 1943. When the arch–New Dealer Rexford Tugwell launched a public policy program at the University of Chicago, the school that proved to be a fountainhead of so much of intellectual conservatism, he enticed Banfield to join him. Banfield’s doctoral dissertation made a deep study of Casa Grande and its failure. Although he then remained a liberal, voting for Adlai Stevenson in 1952, his belief in liberal social policy was rapidly eroding. According to his student and friend James Q. Wilson, by 1956 Banfield’s faith in planning had deserted him.
Banfield’s dissertation was published in 1951 as Government Project, a title so blandly generic and universal that it all but guaranteed the book’s obscurity. It fell out of print, but for years became something of a cult text in conservative intellectual circles, although less so in the quarter century since Banfield’s 1999 death. The release last year of a new edition, published by the American Enterprise Institute and edited by AEI political scientist Kevin R. Kosar (who is married to a granddaughter of Banfield), is an opportunity to revisit both this quietly influential work and the broader legacy of its author.
