In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House determined to reverse twenty years of federal policy toward electric utilities. His predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, had aggressively expanded public power, but Eisenhower considered this “creeping socialism,” and he intended to restrict it.

Between the 1930s and early 1960s, U.S. economic policy underwent an important transformation, described by economist Herbert Stein as “The Fiscal Revolution in America.” During those years, policymakers utilized Keynesian ideas to promote prosperity, and the fiscal revolution reached its peak after John F. Kennedy proposed a growth-boosting tax cut despite the unprecedented peacetime consequence of running a deficit in nonrecession conditions. This article explores how that revolution developed during the postwar period. It challenges the argument that the business community shaped and consolidated the fiscal revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, this article shows that liberal economists played a crucial role in fashioning Keynesianism’s postwar consolidation, so much so that the brand of that doctrine implemented in the early 1960s owed much to their efforts and was significantly different to the one championed by the business community.

When the Newlands Reclamation Act was passed in 1902, it inaugurated an ambitious program of federal dam-and canal-building aimed at opening public land in the West to homesteading through irrigation. Ordinary Americans from all walks of life were to be given the opportunity to take out homesteads on land where the Reclamation Service had made water available; the land was free, but the cost of building the dams and canals was to be repaid to the federal government over a ten-year period. The overriding goal of federal Reclamation in the early years was to reinvigorate the agrarian tradition of America by making usable otherwise useless public land.

“Historically, geographically, and commercially New York and the industrial district in the northern part of the state of New Jersey constitute a single community,” declared the Interstate Commerce Commission in the New York Harbor case in 1917. In spite of that overwhelming fact, the railroads in the port region had never worked cooperatively to manage New York harbor. Instead, competition led them to invest vast sums in individual terminal facilities and prevented them from using those facilities jointly to solve the urgent transportation problems of the region. This failure to cooperate took on national importance during World War I, when the collapse of service at the port led President Woodrow Wilson to federalize the railroads. In light of the failure of private managers to coordinate their efforts more effectively, the ICC endorsed the idea that dramatic public steps should be taken to encourage greater cooperation among railroad companies: “It is necessary that the great terminals at the port of New York be made practically one,” the commission affirmed, “and that the separate interests of the individual carriers, so long an insuperable obstacle to any constructive plan of terminal development, be subordinated to the public interest.”

With this apparent blessing from the ICC, the New York, New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission was created in 1917 to recommend a cooperative, bi-state solution for the port.

“Coal is, perhaps, the most indispensable article used by man. Without it, in time, we should return to a state of barbarism.” So proclaimed the president of Pennsylvania's Pequa Railroad and Improvement Company in 1849. The importance of coal, the official explained, lay in its utility as an energy source, for which he hailed it as unsurpassed: coal was “‘hoarded labor’”—a “treasure reserved by nature to promote and perfect our civilization.” The railroad official's florid tribute to the mineral fuel was hardly disinterested: the Pequa Railroad had ambitious plans to ship a great deal of coal. Yet it effectively underscored the enormous role of coal in nineteenth-century America. It was an age in which, as countless industry boosters proclaimed, coal was king.

On Thursday, 5 July 1945, the British electorate appeared to draw a line under the prewar political world. This electorate turned the wartime government, led by the Conservative party, out of office. Moreover, it dismissed the Conservatives in favor of a party that still harbored doubts about its proper governing role, namely, British Labour. The scale of this reversal was additionally unprecedented. Labour had only ever formed minority, shortlived governments before; its last such venture, in 1929, had seen the party take power just in time to acquire responsibility for the Great Depression. The Tories had thus returned to effective leadership in 1931, such that Tory electoral and governmental dominance was still the context for the 1945 election. Now, however, Labour had returned with not just an absolute but an enormous majority in Parliament: it gained more seats than the Tories were left holding. And this over a party that had arguably weathered the Great Depression and saved the nation in a world war.

“It is a cesspool, it is a source of infection for the body politic,” Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) warned his fellow senators in 1973 about the private financing of elections. “[I]f it doesn't stop, there are going to be good men in this hall right here today who are going down the drain, not that you are guilty, not that you have done anything wrong, but that the public is disenchanted with all of us, and they are going to want somebody new and say I want a fresh one here.” From 1971 through President Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress enacted the boldest campaign finance reforms in American history, including strong disclosure laws, public financing for presidential elections, contribution and spending limits, and an independent enforcement commission. Despite these reforms, after only a decade under the new laws, citizens still felt that campaign finance was corrupt.

Although actual classroom practice has changed far less than one might imagine over the past hundred years, the function and the meaning of American public education have become profoundly different. There are few occupations whose day-to-day activities have changed as little as have those of school-teachers, but the relationship of schools and society has become very different than it was in 1900.

In the countless conversations about U.S. immigration policy that I have had with Mexican Americans of varied backgrounds and political orientations, seldom have my interlocutors failed to remind me that “We were here first,” or that “This was our land and you stole it from us.” Even a moderate Mexican American politician like former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros sounds the same theme in a national news magazine:

It is no accident that these regions have the names they do—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Colorado, Montana.…It is a rich history that Americans have been led to believe is an immigrant story when, in fact, the people who built this area in the first place were Hispanics.

Since the presidency of Richard Nixon, policymakers have sought “energy independence” as the goal of energy policy. But that goal, unclear to begin with, has grown more opaque over time. “Energy independence” has meant different things at different times with no clear definition. Nevertheless, the goal is evocative, with symbolism that draws on key narratives from American history. This article argues that the idea of “energy independence” has become a trope and as such a major component of the energy-policy discourse. It describes the shifting (often only apparent) definitions of the trope both in energy-policy rhetoric and in energy legislation, and also explains how the discourse has shifted in recent years due to resource development and the realities of climate change.

Courts, both state and federal, often play a substantial role in the adoption and implementation of changes in public policy. Properly understood, the impact of court decisions must be examined in the context of actions and reactions by other branches of government, political parties, and interest groups. Among the most transformative court decisions over the last half century are those involving legislative reapportionment and minority voting rights. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal courts restructured the nation's political institutions through decisions striking down malapportioned legislatures and local governing bodies through what used to be termed the “reapportionment revolution,” perhaps the only revolution ignored altogether by historians. Shortly thereafter the courts extended their attack on quantitative vote dilution (which the “one-person, one-vote” standard is designed to address) to include protection against electoral rules that dilute the voting strength of racial minorities.

The idea of policy history arises from an awareness of“something missing.” In the view of some social scientists, politics and public policy too often have been treated ahistorically by their disciplines, with evidence subordinated to theory. For some historians, the apparent waning of disciplinary interest in political history has been similarly distorting. Because of these things, social scientists, political historians, and more than a few social historians increasingly function as “policy historians,”as scholars especially alive to the vagaries and contingency of public policy and its history.

This article examines the local roots of the American state to complicate existing historiography. It suggests that, for education and law, the state tapped into local social capital to develop capacity. State and local governments relied on the mobilization of citizens’ bodies—civic labor—to provide public goods. In doing so, it suggests that we need to offer a story that captures the myriad ways that Americans engaged in state-building, and how those different forms shaped Americans’ relations with state power.