Reflex Actions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early Twentieth Century United States

In Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas, eds, Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011)

This essay looks at American civil service reformers’ debates over the administration of U. S. colonies after 1898 and their understandings of colonialism’s impact on metropolitan American politics and vice versa.  Some reformers hoped the colonial state would sponsor innovations in “pure,” expert governance that would—by what they called “reflex action”—spark innovations in the metropole.