Master of Arts / Department of History / James E. Sherow / Whether as a “progressive” or an anti-New Dealer, Casement was always primarily concerned with creating a stable business climate for the beef industry––even though his ideas on methodology changed. Beginning in the 1920s, he argued for the preservation of republican virtue through the language of eugenics. Eugenics may be broadly defined as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” During the Progressive era, Casement primarily supported structural reforms such as conservation and federal regulation of industry. After WWI he became increasingly concerned with the moral direction of the country and believed that stricter individual responsibility—encouraged by limited government—along with eugenic-inspired reforms were necessary to restore the country’s republican virtue. In Casement’s view, the New Deal inaugurated a governmental takeover of private property through unfair taxes for wealth redistribution and production controls that sapped individual initiative, thereby weakening an already weakened populace—especially in the agricultural sector.

Historians have traditionally emphasized the sharp differences between Herbert Hoover’s vision of an associational state and the activism of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. This dissertation highlights an important area of continuity between the economic policies espoused by Hoover—during his tenures as Secretary of Commerce and President—and Roosevelt, focusing on federal efforts to promote the nascent aviation industry from the end of World War I until the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act in 1938. These efforts were successful, and offer a unique arena in which to document the concrete gains wrought by Hoover’s associationalist ideology and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Moreover, both Hoover’s corporatist policies and New Deal efforts to create aviation infrastructure—largely through the auspices of public works agencies like the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration—form a striking example of the government’s ability to successfully foster the development of a new industry, even in the midst of the Great Depression. Significantly, both men’s efforts represented an alternative to nationalization, the path taken by virtually every European nation during the era. This period thus offers the opportunity to examine how both presidents’ aviation policies cohere with their larger visions of government’s proper relationship to the economy, to compare and contrast associationalism and New Deal, and to elucidate aviation’s role in promoting American economic development. During these years government actions expanded from having literally no engagement with commercial aviation to subsidizing airmail routes, creating a regulatory infrastructure to promote safe operations by licensing pilots, inspecting aircraft, approving manufacturing operations, and aggressively promoting flying to the American people. Contextualized by the American public’s well-documented enthusiasm for flying—particularly after Charles Lindbergh’s famous New York-to-Paris flight in 1927—these federal actions created America’s modern air transport network, culminating in the passage of the seminal Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, the construction and improvement of almost a thousand airports around the country, and the growth of a core group of airlines, including United, Delta, and American, that still dominate commercial flying today.

The subject treated in this thesis is the doctrine of the church among the English Calvinistic Baptists in the period, circa 1640-1660. This timeframe covers the significant phase of early Calvinistic Baptist emergence in society and literary output. The thesis seeks to explore the development of theological commitments regarding the nature of the church within the turbulent historical context of the time. The background to the emergence of the Calvinistic Baptists was the demise of the Anglican Church of England, the establishment by Act of Parliament of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and the establishment of a Presbyterian Church of England. The English experiment with Presbyterianism began and ended in the years covered in this work. Ecclesiology was thus one of the most important doctrines under consideration in the phase of English history. This thesis is a contribution to understanding alternative forms of ecclesiology outside of the mainstream National Church settlement. It will be argued in this thesis that the emergence and development of Calvinistic Baptist ecclesiology was a natural development of one stream of Puritan theology of the church. This was the tradition associated with Robert Brown, and the English separatist movement dating from the 1570s. This tradition was refined and made experimental in the work of Henry Jacob. Having developed his ecclesiology in the Netherlands, in 1616 Jacob founded a congregation in Southwark, London from which Calvinistic Baptists would emerge with distinct baptismal convictions by 1638. Central to Jacob's ideology was the belief that a rightly ordered church acknowledged Christ as King over his people. The Christological priority of early Calvinistic Baptist ecclesiology will constitute the primary contribution of this thesis to investigation of dissenting theology in the period.