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“Since its founding, the American state has relied both upon what we now call ‘traditional’ administration — public, hierarchical, and bureaucratic — and upon more privatized approaches to governance involving state and non-state actors and institutions in contractual relationships and networks. Studying past public-private governance schemes affords new opportunities to understand why, how, and under what circumstances state actors eschew direct public action in favor of boundary-spanning arrangements. I demonstrate this by presenting a case study of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a new Federal entity created in 1940 by President Franklin Roosevelt. NDRC relied upon contracting and an existing scientific community to create a highly effective network of scientists and laboratories spanning the public, for profit, and nonprofit sectors. Beyond presenting novel empirical evidence, I contribute to theory by providing new insights into the factors and conditions that spur state actors to adopt a networked approach to governance, and by proposing the concept of a ‘twilight’ network, defined as a network whose structure and behavior are legal, yet simultaneously overt and covert. I also show that qualitative, detailed historical research may valuably extend our understanding of public-private governance arrangements and the ‘state of agents.’”