Mehrotra’s award-winning book is truly a tour de force.1 It chronicles a transformative period in the development of the American fiscal state during which the old fiscal order—characterized by indirect, hidden, mercilessly regressive, and partisan taxation—gave way to a direct, transparent, steeply progressive, and professionally administered tax regime.
The new revenue system “dramatically altered fiscal burdens and profoundly revolutionized federal government finances” (6). It also reshuffled social, political, and economic life in the United States. According to Mehrotra, the fiscal reordering that occurred between the late 1870s and the financial crash of 1929 “reallocated across both income classes and national regions the economic responsibility of financing the growing needs of a modern industrialized democracy” (11). Moreover, it remade the “social meaning of modern citizenship” and expedited “a fundamental change in political arrangements and institutions” that ushered in a “proto-administrative state” (11, 14). If these changes were not enough, the...