During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the successor of John F. Kennedy, signed into law the largest tax cut in U.S. history until 1981, the so-called Kennedy–Johnson tax cut. Many scholars have evaluated it as representative Keynesian tax policy; this article focuses on the effort of the Treasury Department, tax experts such as Stanley S. Surrey and Wilbur D. Mills, the chairman of House Committee on Ways and Means, to reform the federal income tax system comprehensively—making it simpler, fairer, and more equitable—and their defeat by the 1964 tax cut. Through the policymaking and legislative process, the Kennedy administration’s Council Economic Advisers defeated the Treasury and Surrey by domesticating Keynes’s ideas on tax policy. Until the 1964 passage of the tax cut, Mills, with his inconsistent action, abandoned the accomplishment of their ideal tax reform.

From modest beginnings in the systematic analysis of social insurance programs of advanced, industrialized countries, the scope of social policy studies has expanded to encompass myriad programs that seek to mitigate potential risks to employment, income, and economic security.1 At the same time, historical interest on policy development has extended back further in time to contextualize the otherwise excessive concentration on social policy developments of the twentieth century.2 Yet, as the boundaries of epistemology broaden, there remains a curious tendency among policy historians to maintain that what they are studying are the origins of modern social policies.3 Perhaps this focus on modernity is the outgrowth of a perceived need to have such research remain relevant to contemporary social policy debates. Whatever the reason, it does raise the question–What makes a social policy modern?4 To assume that particular social policies are modern suggests that there may be social policies that are not. Do there indeed exist social policies that might be thought of as premodern? If so, do such premodern social policies differ from modern ones not only in terms of particular historical epochs but also in terms of more-substantive distinctions?

Although women have made tremendous gains at work, a striking degree of sex segregation still exists. For a generation of women who were working in low-paying, administrative support positions during the promising era of Title VII, affirmative action did not offer upward mobility. In the 1970s, as employers and regulators began implementing affirmative action amid the gendered structure of internal labor markets, women who were already in clerical roles remained outside the managerial pipeline. Women in 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, sought to bridge the gap between female-dominated clerical and male-dominated managerial ladders using collective action. Yet business and government did not enforce affirmative action such that the clustering of women in low-paid clerical positions constituted discrimination on the basis of sex. Work experience on the clerical ladder remains inadequate training for positions on the managerial ladder.

Historians historicize. They attempt to understand the present and make educated guesses about the future by looking to the past. This attempt at prognosticating “the future of the democratic left” primarily in the United States begins with a broad-brush history of “the left” as equalitarian idea and political movement in the modern world, examines its development in the United States within a context of “American exceptionalism,” discusses its transformation in the 1960s, and assays its struggles in the “present day” of the last three decades. A once-revolutionary impulse, it suggests, has surrendered to the necessity of incremental entitlement politics. As a result, it has subjected itself to the hazards of the pragmatic test, the awkwardness of interest-group politics, and the distinct possibility that even success in the quest for universal social provision would fail to alter existing patterns of inequality.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, religion became a paramount concern for practitioners and analysts of American politics. During the campaign for the crucial 2000 election, probably shaping the balance of power in national politics for years to come, presidential candidates and party leaders made religion a central factor in their strategies.

At the end of Turbulent Years, his classic study of the labor upheavals of the 1930s, Irving Bernstein unexpectedly announces that the American Federation of Labor “gained a decisive and permanent victory.” This is a remarkable admission. Bernstein had devoted the bulk of his study to the failures of the AFL and the emergence of a more relevant alternative, the CIO. Like most authors, he associated the turbulence of the 1930s with the rise of industrial unionism, which addressed the apparent deficiencies of the AFL, notably its preoccupation with skilled workers and neglect of large-scale manufacturing. Still, the AFL grew more rapidly. Bernstein tries to explain: the triumph of the AFL “was hidden by the mystique of power [John L] Lewis had imparted to the CIO, by the highly publicized contemporary successes of SWOC…and UAW…and the deliberate falsification of membership records.” While these factors may account for the misleading imagery of the CIO, they do not explain the behavior of millions of workers who opted for AFL organizations. Clearly other forces were at work.

American government officials experimented with a variety of tools for public administration in the early twentieth century. The regulatory commission became the best known of these new institutional forms, but another Progressive Era innovation with profound and ambiguous implications for U.S. political development was the government-sponsored corporation. Often called “public corporations,” these instrumentalities were created to carry out public purposes, but they were established as separate legal entities to function outside the standard departmental structure of government (and its organizational principles and restrictions). Today, these structures are most prolific at the state and municipal level, where they are generally termed “public authorities.” Since World War II they have been the fastest growing kind of government unit, with, at present, around ten thousand in existence. While everyone perceives these institutions as important players in local affairs, even well-informed citizens are frequently puzzled when it comes to knowing exactly what they are or what they do.

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.

In 1927, the biennial report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the Commonwealth of Kentucky warned that “the feeble-minded of the colored race present a greater menace than do the white.…We do desire to point out the utter lack of any provision for colored feeble-minded.” In spite of this admonition, southern states took little notice of their black feebleminded population. Nineteen years after the Kentucky report, the South Carolina Director of Public Welfare admitted that “the care of mentally deficient and mentally ill persons in the same institution is distinctly undesirable, but…the Hospital's efforts to secure provision of a separate training school for mentally deficient negroes have to date been unsuccessful.”

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is one of the most utilized models in water policy and administration. One of the crucial components in IWRM is collaboration, where multiple stakeholders negotiate solutions. This article explores the role of collaboration in one of the most contentious water conflicts in the nation—the Klamath River. The range of stakeholders is enormous and complex, including Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, recreationists, environmentalists, advocates of endangered species, two states, and multiple federal agencies. The parties in the Klamath Basin negotiated three settlements to resolve many of the major issues. However, the U.S. Congress failed to approve the settlements in late 2015, effectively ending this long-term effort to resolve these vexing issues through collaborative negotiations. This conflict is analyzed using a multimethod approach, and discusses how the failure of the settlement process can provide insights into the role of collaboration in IWRM, and suggests refinements to the model.

The United States made Marshall aid to European countries (1947–51) contingent upon bilateral agreements about major issues of economic and social policy. Because the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Britain coincided with the inception of the National Health Service (NHS), the bilateral agreements negotiated between Britain and the United States addressed the relationship between economic recovery and a new health policy that offered universal coverage for services that were fully funded from tax receipts.

In an obscure footnote to his groundbreaking study of deindustrialization in Detroit, Thomas J. Sugrue notes that “the history of industrial renewal in postwar American cities is still largely unwritten.” A review of the historiography of the postwar city confirms this statement. Historians have carefully explored the problems of low-income housing provision, red lining, and urban racial conflict, as well as the destructive consequences of federally subsidized highway construction, urban renewal, and suburbanization. With only limited exceptions, however, few scholars have examined the history of local policy strategies that addressed the disappearance of urban manufacturing jobs.

The executive order process can be a long and complicated one, as directives may wind their way through various agencies before finding their way onto the president’s desk. Even after these orders have been issued, federal agencies will have a wide degree of latitude under certain conditions as it pertains to implementing them. In this article, I study the history of three separate presidential directives, two dealing specifically with environmental issues and one with general regulatory issues, in order to provide a picture of the process from inception to implementation. I consider three cases and explore the factors that drive presidents in choosing when or whether to issue an order and those that drive federal agencies to react as they do. This article encourages scholars to reconsider what they consider “unilateral,” pointing to the instances in which presidents must engage in bargaining within the executive branch they ostensibly head.

During July 1910, antiliquor activists hired twenty-three private detectives to raid three illicit saloons in Newark, Ohio. Deputized by the mayor of a nearby town, these agents sought to serve “search and seizure” warrants, which authorized them to confiscate liquor as evidence of illegal sales. In doing so, they assumed the duties of the Newark police, who had refused to enforce county prohibition. But their actions only led to tragedy.