In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon referred to Aid to Families with Dependent Children as “the program we all normally think of when we think of ‘welfare.’” When President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” in the early 1990s, everyone knew that he meant AFDC. “Welfare” had become a code word for public assistance given mainly to unmarried mothers, mostly young women of color. Few terms evoked as much hostility among Americans as “welfare.” No other public benefits carried its stigma. The political left, right, and center all attacked it.

On June 5, 1920, Congress established the Women's Bureau, charging it to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” Support for the bureau was such that the House passed the bill by a vote of 255 to 10, and the Senate passed it without a recorded vote, though the Monthly Labor Review noted that “there was some opposition.” During a decade when policymakers celebrated the fruits of economic abundance garnered with only the lightest touch from the state, bureau leaders and investigators saw gender research as a form of labor activism that would advance the cause of all workers. The bureau provided a unique site for discourse and deliberation concerning labor standards that did not exist in any other branch of the federal government. No other organization in the federal government thought harder about how policies could be constructed to protect workers, irrespective of gender, from the continued harsh reality of employment in American industry. Along the way, advocates of protective legislation for women sought not only to protect the particular interests of women workers, but also to drive a wedge through a post-Adkins understanding of the “right to contract” and to expand the number of issues that should be seen as affected with a public interest.

Judicial review may be the most publicly contested aspect of American constitutionalism. When courts void legislation, they implicitly seem to strike at the heart of the principle of separation of powers. The act inherently suggests that the elected legislature is not always the legitimate representative of the people and that democratic majoritarianism is not the fundamental principle of American politics. Because judicial review can be described in opposition to ideas often deemed fundamental to American constitutionalism, the origins of judicial review have intrigued scholars of politics, history, and law. For the last century, the origins inquiry has started from the assumption that the origins of judicial review lie in an idea, an intellectual doctrine about judicial power. In fact, the origins of judicial review lie in a pre-Revolutionary practice and idea of limited legislative authority.

When the Bureau of Land Management (blm) was formed in 1946, the agency and the lands it managed had an ambiguous identity and future. Formed by President Truman through the merger of the General Land Office and the U.S. Grazing Service, the blm inherited the remaining 450 million acres of public-domain lands in the American West and Alaska, which I will refer to simply as “the public lands.” With those lands, the blm also inherited a set of property-rights regimes—that is, a set of property rights, privileges, and relationships that control land and resource access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation—that were strongly reflective of the nineteenth-century frontier era. They were marked by private initiative, self-regulation by public lands users, and common-law principles of prior use and appropriation. Indeed, public lands users often acted as if they held common-law rights to the public lands, claims that western congressmen defended through appropriations and oversight.

Dangers to life and health abound. Even among the subset known to medicine and science, however, there is no guarantee that any particular danger will rise to the level of a recognized public health problem or elicit a response from the makers of public policy. The path from knowledge to policy is not straightforward; scientific consensus does not lead automatically to policy consensus. Judgments of what dangers should be most feared, how to explain them, what to do about them, and even whether they are public health problems at all are the outcome of social processes. A couple of examples may help to clarify these points.

On 3 June 1977, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) denied an immigrant visa to a Filipino woman, Zenaida Porte Rebultan, when she acknowledged that she was a lesbian. Rebultan qualified as a second-preference alien for purposes of immigration because every other member of her immediate family had already moved permanently to the United States. The INS declared her excludable, however, under section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to which “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, or sexual deviation, or a mental defect” were “ineligible to receive visas and shall be excluded from admission into the United States.”

As late as the 1970s, only a handful of scholars called themselves children's historians. Thirty years later, much had changed. Though nobody possessed an accurate headcount, a new historical field had emerged, with a burgeoning literature, Web sites, and specialized societies.

Between 1965 and the end of the century, welfare—that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—expanded dramatically; came under attack from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; and then, in the 1990s, was virtually eliminated as a federal program through legislation that had broad, bipartisan support. Throughout that process of growth and declension, social scientists played central roles in shaping perceptions of welfare, most significantly by examining the impact of welfare on the work ethic, on family structure, on gender relations, on poverty, and on inner-city, black communities. This is an enormously complex story, and I have engaged it by focusing on four influential texts, each by a prominent social scientist: Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), otherwise known as the Moynihan Report; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1982); Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978); and David T. Ellwood's Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (1988). Although this approach inevitably oversimplifies somewhat, it also makes possible a more intensive critical reading of these key historical documents.

One thing that all parties in the American drug-policy debate agree upon is the desirability of eliminating the traffic in illicit drugs and the esurient criminal syndicates that control it. There are two divergent strategies for achieving this end. The first is the war on drugs. The second, which emerged in the late 1980s as a highly controversial alternative to the drug war, is controlled legalization. What follows is a historically informed critique of both approaches.

The campaign to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act has been misunderstood by many historians. Rather than a failed attempt to resuscitate New Deal Keynesianism by an exhausted Democratic Party, it represented a radical effort to reconfigure the political economy of the United States by embracing national planning ideas that were enjoying a revival in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. The fact that this bill proved politically viable challenges historians’ assumptions that this decade saw the American people turn away from “big government” and toward pro-market solutions for social and economic problems. This episode also forces us to reassess our understanding of the Democratic Party in this decade. It suggests that historians have erred in drawing a sharp distinction between the party’s “New Deal” and “New Politics” factions and that the policy goals of those factions dovetailed more often than has been appreciated.

In the summer of 1989, an extended strike by the various “Baby Bell” telephone companies, including those of New York, Massachusetts, California, and thirteen other states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, brought to public attention the importance of health and hospital insurance to the nation's workers. In what the Los Angeles Times headline proclaimed was a “Phone Strike Centered on the Issue of Health Care,” workers at NYNEX, Pacific Bell, and Bell Atlantic went out on strike over management's insistence that the unions pay a greater portion of their hospital insurance premiums. In contrast to their willingness to grant wage concessions throughout most of the 1980s, the unions and their membership struck to protect what was once considered a “fringe” benefit of union membership. What had been a trivial cost to companies in the 1940s and 1950s had risen to 7.9 percent of payroll in 1984 and 13.6 percent by 1989. Unable to control the industry that had formed around hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and insurance, portions of the labor movement redefined its central mission: the fringes of the previous forty years were now central concerns. In the words of one local president engaged in the bitter communication workers strike: “‘It took us 40 years of collective bargaining’ to reach a contract in which the employer contributed [substantially to] the costs of health care, ‘and now they want to go in one fell swoop backward.’”

This paper traces the political development of Congressional gun control issue framing (with a specific focus from the early 1990s to the present), demonstrating that there have been two primary contexts in which gun control policy has been debated over this time frame: as a component of general crime control and as a specific response to mass shooting events. It identifies the primary historical, political, and electoral forces shaping the gun control debate in a given period while distinguishing the critical changes that drove the evolution from a crime control to a mass shooting focus. It assesses the degree of policy coherence and electoral salience specific to each context, illuminating why “gun control as crime control” had bipartisan Congressional support in the early 1990s and identifying what comparative disadvantages hinder the mass shooting focus of the present while also recognizing that the latter unfolded against a backdrop of heighted partisan polarization. The paper concludes that although one cannot compare the crime control and mass shooting framing contexts in a political vacuum, the electoral implications particular to each are relevant for understanding legislative action or inaction in Congress over the past thirty years, if more so in some periods than others.

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.