In 1927, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the national organization founded in 1899 by veterans of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, appeared destined for historical obscurity. The organization that would later stand with the American Legion as a pillar of the powerful twentieth-century veterans' lobby struggled to maintain a membership of sixty thousand veterans. Despite desperate attempts to recruit from the ranks of the nearly 2.5 million eligible World War veterans, the VFW lagged behind in membership both the newly minted American Legion and even the Spanish War Veterans. The upstart Legion alone, from its 1919 inception throughout the 1920s, averaged more than seven hundred thousand members. Indeed, in 1929, Royal C. Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on World War Veterans Legislation and a member of both the Legion and the VFW, described the latter as “not sufficiently large to make it a vital factor in public sentiment.” And yet, by 1932, in the middle of an economic crisis that dealt severe blows to the membership totals of almost every type of voluntary association, the VFW's membership soared to nearly two hundred thousand veterans. Between 1929 and 1932, the VFW experienced this surprising growth because the organization demanded full and immediate cash payment of the deferred Soldiers' Bonus, while the American Legion opposed it. Thus, by challenging federal veterans' policy, the VFW rose out of relative obscurity to become a prominent vehicle for veteran political activism. As important, by doing so the VFW unwittingly set in motion the protest movement known as the Bonus March.

In December 1969, Governor John Bell Williams of Mississippi, one of the most notorious southern segregationists, proposed a $1 million program financed by the Mississippi state legislature to file school desegregation suits in northern states. “For fifteen years we have been on the defense,” Williams said. “Now we are going on the offense.” Williams's campaign was just one example of an odd but familiar trend that had emerged by 1970. Some of the most determined southern segregationists became enthusiastic supporters of northern school desegregation. In January 1970, the attorneys general in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida announced plans to intervene as friends of the court in a Pasadena, California, school desegregation case. In February 1970, the governor of Louisiana appealed to citizens of his state to fund a nationwide television campaign calling for equal treatment between northern and southern schools. Most important, that same month, U.S. Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi carried the fight to the floor of the Senate. He introduced an amendment to a federal education bill that called for equal desegregation efforts in both the North and the South, regardless of whether the segregation resulted from state action or residential patterns. Stennis complained that the federal government was pursuing a regional desegregation plan. His ostensible goal was to bring about “one uniform policy” on school desegregation, “applicable nationwide.” But the real motivation, which almost every southern official conceded, was the hope that accelerated desegregation in the North would spark a broader, national backlash against school desegregation.

The decline of traditional industries, or “deindustrialization,” has been a topic of growing interest among American historians. Most of the existing literature illuminates the experiences of individuals, communities, and companies directly affected by plant closures. Historians have recently begun to explore public policy responses to industrial decline, although policymaking on this issue at the state level has received almost no attention. State government has nevertheless been an important locus of activity for dealing with deindustrialization. This is not surprising, considering the importance of the states in the American federal system and the fact that industrial decline often concentrates in particular areas of the country at a given time.

Since the late 1960s, federal civil rights enforcement initiatives in health have been half-hearted and ineffective. The historical failure of the federal government to address the possible role of racial discrimination has taken place despite considerable evidence that, for a number of services, racial and ethnic minorities continue to receive inferior treatment to that accorded to whites. In many cases, these treatment differences remain even after controlling for socioeconomic and insurance statuses, and standard covariates such as patient age, health status, and gender.