In the 1960s and 1970s, when the judicial rights revolution was in full swing in the United States, poverty lawyers and allied legal scholars urged the courts to add to the expanding catalog of constitutional rights certain social and economic rights—to housing, education, and a minimum decent subsistence. The advocates of welfare rights were not deterred by the absence of pertinent constitutional language. After all, if the Court could find a right to privacy in the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights, who knew what else might be discovered there? Those efforts to constitutionalize what were historically matters of legislative discretion had only partial success. The Supreme Court did hold that, once government grants certain statutory entitlements such as welfare and disability benefits, the recipients have a constitutional right not to be deprived of those benefits without procedural due process. The Court declined, however, to find that the entitlements themselves were constitutionally required.

The dark side of European history, the waves of persecution, the pogroms, and the explosions of political and ethnic violence have produced movements of refugees throughout the period of recorded history. There is nothing new in the phenomenon of forced displacement, of individuals and groups being suddenly uprooted and tragically torn from ties of nationality, of home, of family. One of the marks of social progress in Europe has been precisely the range of responses that have been developed to handle such movements of people, responses that have resulted in a codification of laws and the evolution of international institutions which, particularly in the twentieth century, constitute a remarkable example of internationalism and human solidarity. Such social progress has never been smooth; indeed it is disfigured by historical moments of great cruelty and shame where states have denied asylum to persons in acute distress. Worse, as the experience of Nazi Germany demonstrates, European states of immense sophistication and cultural richness have been capable of unspeakable savagery, which has led to the creation of enormous human displacements within Europe and beyond. Nevertheless, the right of asylum itself has become established as a norm of civilized international behavior in Europe and many millions of persecuted and marginalized people have benefited from it. Many millions more have within their family history an experience of someone who was forced to move, victimized by repression of their race, religion, their nationality, their opinions; and elsewhere, those who perished in ghettos, concentration camps, and unmarked killing fields.

In the summer of 1918, the white chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Major Joel E. Spingarn, called for urgent congressional action on mob violence. He seized the opportunity of a post in the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) of the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C., to put forward a “constructive programme,” the central idea of which was the passage of a bill to make lynching in wartime a federal offense. Attempting to exploit the peculiar circumstances of the national emergency and the expansion of federal powers during World War I, Spingarn also proposed a series of more modest initiatives designed to lessen discrimination and raise black morale. The official reaction to the arguments he advanced in support of his program sheds light on the reluctance of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson to develop a policy on race relations. It also suggests some of the problems and hazards facing a would-be reformer working from within.

This article argues for the importance of reframing the history of school desegregation in the United States beyond Black and white and beyond the regional frames through which this history has been interpreted. In Western states, most Latino children attended schools segregated not by law but by custom starting in the early twentieth century; Latino students also encountered de facto segregation in the Eastern and Midwestern cities with large Puerto Rican populations by the 1950s. Parents, students, advocates, and activists protested the inequality of educational outcomes for Latino children over many decades, developing distinctive strategies to address the combination of racial and language-based discrimination faced by Latino students. Yet, because they were marginalized in political debates in the 1960s and 1970s and because most national-level historical scholarship on school desegregation focuses on Black and white participants, Latinos’ role in this aspect of our national civil rights history has remained obscured.

This article analyzes the attitudes of Dutch employers toward social policy in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has evolved from an emphasis on power to an emphasis on preferences. Moving away from the traditional view that unions and social democrats forced social laws on employers, recent scholars suggest that firms saw specific advantages in the introduction of social laws. However, I show that the attitudes of Dutch business representatives, rather than seeking these specific advantages, merely reflected a willingness to consult, inspired by their macroeconomic view. Employers expressed the wish to attain an organized form of capitalism and accepted regulated forms of codetermination. Once the consultative platforms were in place, employers pursued strategic goals, such as labor peace and disciplining the unions. This paved the way for accepting welfare state expansion. In sum, mid-twentieth century business interests were strongly oriented toward coordinated capitalism.

Winning the war on the home front and overseas meant that citizens of different races, religions, and ethnic appellations needed to work together peacefully in the “arsenal of democracy.” Prior to America's entrance into the war, community leaders recognized that selected social problems must be addressed in order to promote domestic harmony and boost urgently needed defense production in war communities. Instead of viewing the war years as distracting community interest from social problems, social welfare organizations pressed localities to acknowledge and act to alleviate ongoing difficulties that presented themselves, sometimes in dramatic fashion, as serious obstacles to the war effort. Race riots in Harlem and Detroit, the “zoot-suit” struggles on the West Coast, “khaki-wacky” girls who chased after servicemen, the erosion of child labor laws, significant population shifts across the nation, and a record number of teenage dropouts highlighted the structural cracks in American society. Clear understanding of the expedient nature of wartime social work mobilized efforts to establish national and local strategies that would enable wartime programs to continue into the postwar era.

During the twentieth century the United States has called upon its economy to support a war effort four times: for World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam War. The experience of these four military buildups has led to a formal body of mobilization planning incorporating a number of implicit assumptions as to an appropriate mobilization posture. This article reviews the mobilization record of each war and traces the development of the accompanying mobilization doctrine.

The purpose of this issue is to explore the possible political futures of parties and movements of the “democratic left” in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Poland, and Russia. The task could not proceed without clear definition, or definitions, of the “democratic left” because of national variations. There is “liberalism” or “progressivism” in the United States of many hues, but with no “social democracy” or politically viable socialism to the left. Socialism, in the old sense, of ownership of the means of production, has died in Britain, and the present government of “New Labour” refers to itself as the “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. But there is much controversy at home whether “social democracy” has been also jettisoned in favor of a kind of “neoliberalism” that has embraced markets and trimmed social security. The large, democratic parties of the left in France and Germany derive from traditions of “social democracy” that have challenged many capitalist values and institutions, whether from Marxist or non-Marxist perspectives, and sought to establish a state and society organized around principles of social justice. These parties may win national elections but are torn between old left politics and the need to form larger coalitions in order to win. One might ask, Why include Poland and Russia? The purpose was to ask if new democratic forms of “social democracy” could be discerned in the ashes of defunct communist systems that might bear some resemblance to the politics of Western Europe.

During the mid-1960s, the governments of the United States and Canada each declared “war” on poverty. The former venture has received far greater scholarly attention, and for obvious reasons: its high-profile inception, the broader spirit of Great Society liberalism that it embodied, the profound crisis of American society and politics within which it soon became embroiled, the rapidity with which its prescriptions and hopes were extinguished. By comparison, the Canadian War on Poverty seems an unimportant venture, and one that lacks the stuff of which drama is made. It has, accordingly, been neglected by scholars on both sides of the 49th parallel.

During the Clinton administration, for the first time in almost twenty years, the character and direction of the U.S. industrial relations regime has become a matter of serious public debate. Clinton-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) William Gould IV has sought with some success to revivify an agency that in the 1980s had come to seem almost superfluous. The 1994 report entitled The Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations (Dunlop Commission) stirred debate on the role of unions in the nation's future. Organized labor has sought, with some limited success, to place such critical topics as striker replacement on the national agenda. Meanwhile, congressional conservatives have sponsored measures to curb new organizing strategies such as “salting” anti-union workplaces with union activists. Even more moderate politicians, with support from at least some sections of the labor community, have proposed measures aimed at drastic recasting of the Wagner Act's Section 8(a) (2), which outlawed company unions, so as to permit so called “team” approaches to employee representation. The shake-up in the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the federation's launching of an unprecedented program of political mobilization, which in turn has drawn Republican counterfire reminiscent of the rhetoric of the 80th Congress, increases the possibility that basic matters of federal labor policy may, after a long absence from mainstream public discourse, may return to center stage.