litical entrepreneurs to guide into existence new legislation for small manufacturers. In 1950 the Smaller Defense Plants Administration (SDPA) was established. It too, was ineffective. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), one of the largest agencies in the federal government, had survived the Second World War, but tales of its misconduct increased. The new Republican Congress took aim at eliminating the RFC. As the expiration date for the SDPA loomed, a compromise was reached. A Small Business Administration (SBA) was created to assume the roles previously played by the RFC and the SDPA. During the Eisenhower administration the SBA had little effect except as a patronage tool for the Republicans, but the legislation was renewed in 1955, and in 1957 the SBA was given permanent status. The SBA remained a marginal player because of limited funding from the Eisenhower administration and Republican control of the SBAs Loan Policy Board. After John F. Kennedys election the SBA began to grow, and it has continued to do so. Bean notes that by the 1980s, the agency was guaranteeing nearly half of the intermediate and long-term credit extended to small businesses (p. 160).
Bean has given us an important account of how this frequently symbolic small-business legislation came into existence. He shows that the legislation did not have the desired effect, nor was it generally sought by small businesses. The continually repeated and exaggerated warnings of the coming disaster for small businesses were not just premature; they ignored the continuing strength of the small-business sector in the United States. Bean supports his thesis about the importance of political entrepreneurs well, thereby explaining how such legislation could come into existence without strong interest groups to foster it.
A few issues merit more discussion. There were two very different types of legislation for small businesses during the era Bean studied. The legislation of the 1930s was clearly aimed at aiding small retail businesses, whereas the SWPC of the Second World War and the SDPA of the Korean War were aimed at small manufacturing businesses. It is not at all obvious that small retail businesses and small manufacturing businesses had similar interests; in fact, one would expect that often these two groups had conflicting interests. The story of legislation for small independent retailers suggests that after the 1930s this legislation became less and less effective. Did the associations of retail druggists, wholesale grocers, and independent tire dealers, which had been the primary lobbyists in the 1930s, stop lobbying, or was there simply no real crisis small retail businesses could use?
The common thread between the small-retail-business legislation of the 1930s and the war legislation to promote small manufacturing firms is the set of politicians promoting each and the crisis phraseology those politicians used. Bean argues that between 1946 and the Korean War the Reconstruction Finance Corporation picked up some of the funding of small businesses. This argument suggests that the RFC concentrated its activities on small manufacturing firms, not small retail firms. The Small Business Administration created in 1953 was the Republicans means of eliminating both the RFC and the SDPA. If so, it was intended to affect small manufacturing more than small retail businesses. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the different influences of small retail businesses and small manufacturing businesses on the creation and early behavior of the SBA.
In general, Bean argues that the confluence of ideology, crisis, and political entrepreneurship resulted in federal small business legislation. Evidently, the ideology continually lay in the background as political entrepreneurs waited for opportunities to exploit. The emergence of a crisisthe Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean Warbrought the three factors together to produce new federal policies toward small businesses. As Bean points out, from 1953 through the end of the Eisenhower 