There were no paupers aboard the First Fleet, nor any poor laws. There were paid officials of the central state under the direction of the Home Office; there was a military force of Marines, some with their families; and there were convicts, state dependents who legally were no longer the responsibility of a parish but were under the control of the Home Office. The labor of the convicts, but not their persons, was assigned to Governor Phillip, who in turn would assign that labor as he thought fit in the colony, subject of course to instructions from his superiors. Who needed a poor law in a jail?

In the summer of 1918, the white chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Major Joel E. Spingarn, called for urgent congressional action on mob violence. He seized the opportunity of a post in the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) of the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C., to put forward a “constructive programme,” the central idea of which was the passage of a bill to make lynching in wartime a federal offense. Attempting to exploit the peculiar circumstances of the national emergency and the expansion of federal powers during World War I, Spingarn also proposed a series of more modest initiatives designed to lessen discrimination and raise black morale. The official reaction to the arguments he advanced in support of his program sheds light on the reluctance of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson to develop a policy on race relations. It also suggests some of the problems and hazards facing a would-be reformer working from within.

The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) had come to symbolize everything that is wrong with the American welfare state. Benefit levels have always varied significantly from state to state and seldom have been adequate anywhere to move recipients above the poverty line. Until the 1960s some local administrators discriminated against certain categories of recipients, particularly blacks and unwed mothers. Overt discrimination is now rare; instead, potential beneficiaries must negotiate a series of seemingly neutral administrative hurdles whose cumulative effect is to discourage many of those eligible from applying. Conservatives claim that AFDC subsidizes a broad range of socially-undesirable behaviors, from idleness and a lack of civic obligation to out-of-wedlock births and permanent dependence on public assistance. Liberals dispute these claims but cannot or will not make an affirmative case for the program. Program administrators at the national and local levels have never been strong champions. Opinion polls consistently show that most Americans favor “helping the poor” but not “welfare,” which they equate with AFDC. Finally, beneficiaries view receipt of AFDC as stigmatizing and degrading. Low benefit levels and the lack of decent-paying jobs create a moral climate in which many single mothers receiving AFDC must lie to the Internal Revenue Service and their case workers about working on the side in order to make ends meet.

In the last fifteen years or so I have found myself at odds with friends, colleagues, and other luminaries over whether the changes among political activists within the major political parties are real but modest in their impact or whether, as I believe, the changes are fundamental. Most commentaries on political parties by pundits and political scientists give no clue that anything fundamental has occurred. The Democratic party is described as if it were still the party of Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey, and the Republican party is still conceived as tantamount to the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. True, the presidency of Ronald Reagan led to discussions of a strong conservative trend; by and large, however, this trend is treated as an aberration, a product of Reagan's peculiar personality and popularity rather than an indicator of basic change within the Republican party.