In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call “Marie.” The complaint read, “Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs.” According to the surviving records, Marie's “truancies from home” alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of “six blacks from home.” As incidental as slipping “blocks” into “blacks” may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.

In the early 1970s, fifty years after its first appearance in the U.S. Congress, the Equal Rights Amendment came the closest it ever would to ratification. The ERA declared: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” After sailing through Congress in 1972 with bipartisan support, the amendment went to the states for ratification. The response was positive and immediate: Hawaii approved the ERA the same day, twenty-one other states approved it before the end of the year, and eight more states the following year. Yet, by 1982 the amendment lay dead, having fallen three states short of the thirty-eight states needed for ratification.

For those who subscribe to the theory of ldquo;responsible parties,” party platforms should offer voters a basis for choosing between the parties and give politicians the basis for a mandate. As Krehbiel points out, U.S. platforms are routinely dismissed as “amorphous” and “hardly ever … (serving) effectively as constraints during the campaign or after the election.” Yet, for better or worse, party platforms are the only authoritative statement of national party positions available, so political scientists have frequently used them as a basis for studies of party policymaking. Contrary to expectations based on the stereotype of “irresponsible” U.S. parties, studies by Gerald Pomper, Jeff Fishel, and others show that U.S. parties make fairly specific policy promises and are able to carry most of them out, even under the adverse condition of divided government. Cross-national studies show that although U.S. parties are not as successful as parties in parliamentary regimes, they look surprisingly good in international comparisons.

In 1970, Elizabeth Wickenden, a longtime activist on behalf of public social provision and a broker between voluntary social welfare agencies and the federal government, despaired of a quiet revolution occurring in social service provision. “Virtually unchallenged and undebated,” she observed, “the principle established with the first large-scale federal welfare program, the Federal Emergency Welfare Administration [sic], that public funds should only be expended by public agencies, was quietly repudiated.” Through a series of domestic initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 and amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967, the federal government had begun to channel a significant amount of money through nongovernmental organizations. To older activists like Wickenden, who had fought hard to build the public infrastructure of the welfare state, such a trend was troubling, as it seemed to indicate a dwindling commitment to public social provision that had informed New Deal social policy.

During the 1980s illegal drug use in Britain appeared to be increasing at an alarming rate and spreading across the country on an unprecedented scale. An apparent growth in the use of heroin caused particular concern: the number of known heroin addicts rose from just over two thousand in 1977 to more than ten thousand by 1987. Moreover, heroin use was being reported in urban areas throughout the country. This was in contrast to previous decades, when it was thought that drug use was largely confined to London. By 1985 the Conservative government was able to assert that “the misuse of drugs is one of the most worrying problems facing our society today.” Growing fears about drug use prompted a flurry of activity from both central and local government, from law enforcement bodies, voluntary organizations, and health professionals.

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.

Within two years of the triumphal, if belated, passage of the 1949 Housing Act, America's public housing program was on the defensive, reeling from an onslaught of local opposition. Progressives had hoped to build 135,000 units of public housing a year, but were soon met with a furious backlash. Afraid of government competition, the National Association of Home Builders and the U.S. Savings and Loan League mobilized local opposition by sending out “kits” to their members with prepackaged ads for local newspapers reading “Can you afford to pay somebody else's rent?” The result was an avalanche of local referenda, and voters across the country blocked new construction. In California, Proposition 10 made all new projects contingent on local referenda, and Los Angeles voters threw out their mayor over his support for public housing. In other cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, race played a major role in thwarting local housing authority plans. Despite a massive postwar housing shortage and a well-argued set of progressive ideals, public housing supporters struggled to keep their program alive in the early 1950s. The election of 1952—with Republicans capturing the presidency, the House, and the Senate for the first time since 1930—meant the prospects for the survival of public housing looked bleak at best.

No U.S. history textbook mentions Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, or Stewart Van Vliet. Yet in certain respects they were five of the most important government officials in the nineteenth-century United States. Each was a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster's Department, a bureau of the U.S. army entrusted with military procurement. During the Civil War, the supply depots in which they worked—in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—were indispensable adjuncts to the Union war effort. The magnitude of the procurement project was unprecedented: in four years, these five officers alone paid contractors and civilian employees $350 million. This sum amounted to nearly one-third of the total of over $1 billion that the Quartermaster's Department as a whole spent to equip the Union army. No other single project, in either government or business, involved the expenditure of such an enormous sum. In an age in which few Americans made $2 a day, $350 million was equivalent to the total wartime income of one hundred thousand households. Adjusted for inflation, this was roughly equal to the entire federal budget during the administration of President James Buchanan (1857–61).

The commonly accepted story about the U.S. welfare state is that it developed between the 1930s and the late 1960s and then suffered a series of policy and political setbacks during the 1970s, which triggered a political backlash. Conservative politicians from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan successfully harnessed white middle-class anger over government programs in order to roll back the welfare state. At first glance, the fate of federal programs that subsidize apartments for low-income tenants confirms this narrative: the federal government created housing programs during the New Deal; it added to them significantly during the 1960s. In the late 1960s and 1970s, bad press, conservative attacks, and policy mistakes triggered cutbacks in the 1980s.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States created modern resource management—a collection of administrative bureaucracies that reversed long-standing policies of distributing lands into private hands and instead managed the public domain from Washington. The creation of these powerful, independent agencies underlay a broader effort to reorganize and enlarge the national government. The very same administrators who built the new conservation bureaucracies—Gifford Pinchot of the Forest Service, James R. Garfield of the Department of Interior, and Frederick Newell of the Bureau of Reclamation—also led President Theodore Roosevelt's drive for reorganization of the executive branch.

The history of policies affecting individuals with intellectual disabilities has received attention from social historians interested in gender and family, from the emerging discipline of disability studies, and from scholars interested in the evolving role of eugenic arguments and medical genetics in American life. That history has received less systematic study from the community of policy analysts and scholars traditionally concerned with welfare, poverty, and public health. This is unfortunate because the history of policies affecting intellectual disability offers at least three significant lessons.

In this article I want to give at least a thumbnail sense of the background assumptions, policy contours, and vehicles for American Catholicism in engaging in public policy discussions. To do so, I will eventually concentrate on one major recent public policy discussion in the United States: the debates on welfare reform that led up to, and continue vigorously even after, the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. I do so because American Catholic institutions, including the United States Catholic Conference and Catholic Charities U.S.A., played a crucial and continuous role in these debates about welfare reform. Indeed, New York's Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, a vigorous opponent of the proposed welfare reform bill, in excoriating his fellow liberals for signing on to the bill, could lift up the example of the Catholic bishops' lobbying and exclaim: “The bishops admittedly have an easier time with matters of this sort. When principles are at stake, they simply look them up. Too many liberals, alas, make them up!” This particular debate (which is not, by any means, over) also helps to show some of the unique assumptions behind proposals found in Catholic interventions in the policy sector. In what follows, I will develop, briefly, four sections or subthemes to the paper:

1. Catholilc Social Thought: Five Background Assumptions for Policy: Human Dignity; The Common Good; Solidarity; Subsidiarity; Justice

2. The Move from Background Assumptions to Policy

3. Catholic Policy Proposals: Their Style and Instrumentalities

4. Catholicism and Welfare Policy

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the course of American health research was increasingly shaped by politically-aggressive activism for two particular diseases, breast cancer and AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Even as national stakes rose, both in dollars spent and growing demands on the medical system, breast cancer and AIDS advocates made government policy-making for research ever more public and controversial. Through skillful cultivation of political strength, interest groups transformed individual health problems into collective demands, winning notable policy influence in federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Activists directly challenged fundamental principles of both government and medical systems, fighting to affect distribution of research funds and questioning well-established scientific methods and professional values. In the contest for decision-making power, those players achieved remarkable success in influencing and infiltrating (some critics said, undermining) both the politics and science of medical research. Between 1990 and 1995, federal appropriations for breast cancer study rose from $90 million to $465 million, while in that same period, NIH AIDS research rose from $743.53 million to $1,338 billion.