Since many scholars focus on the New Deal as the foundation for modern U.S. governance, it is widely assumed that the United States is characterized by a weak state as compared to the welfare states of Western Europe. Yet, in the wake of World War II, the United States established a national security “warfare state” that rivaled the welfare states of Western Europe in scope of authority and operations and in its isolation from popular forces. The wartime redirection of U.S. state power also resolved the political stalemate stemming from the executive-congressional and business-government tensions roused during the New Deal. In fact, the course of wartime statebuilding was in many ways a response to the political tensions of the New Deal and to the expectation that the organization of wartime mobilization would indelibly define the postwar organization of U.S. state power. As this article argues, wartime mobilization resolved the New Deal political stalemate in large part by granting various segments of the corporate community the opportunity to influence the shape of U.S. national state power.

Under the ominous title “Rehearsal for State Medicine,” the 17 December 1938 issue of the Saturday Evening Post told its readers about a new health program sponsored by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency that provided low-interest “rehabilitation loans” to low-income farmers. As an outgrowth of the loan program, the FSA had established cooperative health plans that, for a small annual fee, allowed FSA clients to receive affordable health care. But according to the article's co-authors—Samuel Lubell and Walter Everett—there was much more to the FSA health pro-gram. “What the FSA is doing,” Lubell and Everett claimed, “affords a rare glimpse into what the future might bring.” Their article appeared in the midst of a national debate over health care reform and only months after President Franklin Roosevelt had convened hundreds of doctors, social workers, and public health reformers for a National Health Conference. Charged with the task of making recommendations for a national health program, the conference produced a final report that suggested a range of public policies that might make health care more affordable and accessible. Most controversially, the final report called upon lawmakers to consider creating a program of government-sponsored health insurance. “Though Congress and the nation are debating the prickly issue of state medicine,” Lubell and Everett noted with obvious disapproval, “one Federal agency [the FSA] has jumped the legislative gun and initiated its own program of socialized medicine.” Although they would have rejected the term “socialized medicine,” the architects of the FSA health plans had indeed envisioned a “rehearsal” of sorts.

Throughout the 1980s, neoconservative governments—fueled by the conviction that the delivery of goods and services is more efficient when left in the hands of the nongovernmental sector, and that nonprofits are more sensitive to personal and individual needs because they are not bound by “bureaucratic” and “majoritarian” constraints—called upon volunteer activity to substitute for the state in many areas of social policy. This doctrine viewed “the relationship between government and the nonprofit sector in terms that are close to what economists would call a zero-sum game.” Advocates of this position believed that once the welfare state dissipated most social welfare activities would be (re)supplied through the expansion of the third sector. Despite the prominence of these beliefs, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

A sea-change has occurred in political historywriting since the 1950s. Gone, for the most part, are many of the broad, sweeping generalizations that used to characterize this field. The terms employed in such endeavors—the American Mind, the American Way of Life, American Civilization, the American Spirit (all titles of books published in the mid-twentieth century)—seem anachronistic, if not downright ridiculous, today. Whatever it is that defines the values and direction of American politics, this set of cultural markers seems a good deal more elusive today than it did to scholars like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Richard Hofstadter in the postwar era. In the place of studies of America, the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology have turned to careful, highly focused studies of particular eras, areas, and groups. National character is out, local cultures are in.