The recent flood of books on the failures of the European social democratic parties in the 1980s suggests that since the turn of the century the democratic left failed to see political opportunities provided by the growth of the welfare state. Two factors make the apparent political oversight of particular interest. First, the historical sequence of enlarging benefits and programs was remarkably similar across countries. Second, early in their development the social democratic left developed fairly detailed policy initiatives for the economy but had much less detailed proposals for social policies and programs. Broadly speaking, the left usually perceived social programs and policies as marginally important instruments for macrosocial change in income redistribution and transfer of wealth but of little political importance. These tendencies are most apparent in the postwar construction of national welfare states but are visible at various critical junctures in political decisionmaking since 1900.

In Volume 4:3 of the Journal of Policy History, Walter E. Williams was incorrectly identified as a member of the faculty at George Washington University. Professor Williams teaches at George Mason University.

In 1913 the California legislature took a momentous step to improve the wages and working conditions of its women workers by passing a controversial new form of social welfare legislation, a minimum-wage bill, which established the Industrial Welfare Commission. The mandate gave the commission extensive power: not only to establish a minimum wage for each industry employing women, but to regulate hours and working conditions as well. Although reformers had been building an edifice of protective legislation for women for three decades, the creation of a government body with such wide-ranging authority over virtually every aspect of women's wage work was unprecedented. A handful of states passed similar legislation, but few rose above the challenges by opponents to actually implement the law in a meaningful way. The California Industrial Welfare Commission, in contrast, established wage, hour, and sanitary standards in women's occupations from canneries to movie studios. Responsibility for the success of the California law rested on the administrative brilliance of one woman, Katherine Philips Edson, the law's chief sponsor and then leading commission member. Under her guidance the commission slowly and judiciously improved working women's conditions and won public acceptance of the innovative form of state intervention.

Few terms have recurred so often in the work of American social welfare historians as “deserving” (or worthy) and “undeserving” (unworthy). These concepts, of course, describe criteria employed by private and government agencies to determine eligibility for social welfare assistance. A special object of concern in the literature has been their use, in particular misuse, by charity organizations and welfare agencies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It has become commonplace to acknowledge the exceptionally adversarial nature of business-government relations in the United States. When compared to their counterparts in Germany, France, Japan, and the Nordic countries, American business executives have much more autonomy from the state; and yet, there is also greater distrust between business and government. Such adversarial relations, many students of comparative political economy argue, puts the United States in the late twentieth century at a disadvantage. Faced with competitors in the world market who cooperate with their respective governments on investment, training, and long-term sectoral development, American corporations compete in global markets under a considerable handicap.

Social scientists Lawrence J. R. Herson and John M. Bolland describe the connection between the city as government and the city as an urban place in terms of “rules that direct and constrain behavior on behalf of the collective good; services that make collective living possible; and money—raised through taxes—that pays the people who enforce the rules and provide city services.”

Americans have planned for their downtowns within a continually changing framework of images and assumptions about the nature of central business districts. During each decade since World War II, discussion of downtown problems and possibilities has been dominated by a distinct set of assumptions that has conditioned academic research, federal policy, and local planning. From decade to decade, experts on downtowns have chosen different themes as central to the interpretation of downtown growth, change, and policy needs. As the understanding of the situation has changed, so have the preferred planning solutions and public interventions.

The presidential years of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are synonymous with the culmination of the Second Reconstruction. This study examines the civil rights legislative strategies of presidents Kennedy and Johnson as they dealt with what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The history of the U.S. space program can be rather neatly divided into two distinct periods. The first, which begins with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and runs through the end of Project Apollo in 1972, is sometimes referred to as the “golden age” of space exploration. This period was characterized not only by its impressive scientific and technical successes but also by the fact that it possessed a highly supportive social, economic, and political environment. Buoyed by fears and rumors of Soviet achievements in space, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the 1950s and 1960s usually had little trouble securing an annual budget sufficient to maintain an ambitious set of projects (both manned and unmanned) that stretched from near-earth orbit to the outer reaches of the solar system.

On 30 June 1971, the tradition-bound U.S. Post Office, long steeped in politics, ceased operating as a cabinet-level department. The next day marked the birth of the U.S. Postal Service, a government corporation. This transformation, arguably the most fundamental restructuring of a major federal agency in American history, ended 180 years of congressional postal ratemaking. By ceding ratemaking authority to a commission, Congress hoped to elevate sound pricing principles and scrupulous administrative procedures over the impressionistic claims and political influences that had characterized the legislative process. Yet the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act could not wipe away two centuries of history. Ratemakers—whether legislators before 1971 or administrators thereafter—frequently found themselves confronted with mailers invoking tradition, history, and social values to bolster their arguments. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the struggle to find junk mail's proper place in postal policy.

I have spent my professional career studying and writing about American politics. I have yet to integrate satisfactorily the antipolitical attitudes that remain so prevalent among intellectuals in our system. Perhaps I take it as a personal defeat that a lifetime of teaching and research can have so little impact. Whatever the cause, I still register astonishment upon encountering the variety and depths of disdain for the American political system within our academies. The most recent evidence of the pervasiveness of antipolitics to come to my attention is that contained in three fine studies of philanthropy and policy institutes (or “think tanks”). They are the subject of this review essay.

In the late 1980s, congressional investigations revealed patterns of influence peddling, lack of oversight, and poorly targeted expenditures at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, criticizing both the content and administration of various federal housing initiatives. Some commentators have concluded that the dogged preference for a private-sector strategy and the privatization of public activities in the Reagan administration—goals pursued while the agency suffered dramatic budget cuts—are at the root of recent HUD embarrassment.