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.

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.

The Democratic Party faced a crisis of political legitimacy in the late 1960s as distrust and protest permeated its electoral base. In response, the Democratic National Committee established the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, tasked with restructuring the party’s presidential nomination process. Contrary to the conventional historical narrative of the McGovern-Fraser Commission that has focused on a supposed displacement of the party’s old guard by radical insurgents, this article instead argues that the main impetus for reform came from national party leaders seeking to build up the legitimacy and authority of the National Committee. Commission Chair George McGovern and the DNC used a particular reform rhetoric that charged state parties with the corruption of the political process, necessitating rescue by an empowered national party. This focus on the nationalizing impulses behind McGovern-Fraser serves to shift our attention away from ideological struggles and toward institutional motives.

This article investigates the reasons for the adoption and rejection of liquor dispensaries in the years prior to the adoption of national prohibition in the United States. Southern municipalities were the primary dispensary locations, largely due to the permissiveness of local option laws in the South. Municipalities with dispensaries were often retreating from prohibition and dispensary supporters argued that publically run liquor stores were the next best thing. Beyond the South, states that explored dispensary adoption also were those repealing prohibition laws, suggesting a larger pattern whereby prohibition preceded dispensaries rather than following them.

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.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt shaped the role of the modern president in part with his relentless pursuit of grand policies and his ability to marshal historic legislation through Congress. In this article, I focus on one legislative tactic employed by FDR that has received little attention—the detailing of Executive Branch staff to select Senate committees. This tactic, effectively a blending of legislative powers, was used to implement FDR’s ambitious postwar domestic agenda as detailed in his Second Bill of Rights. I find that the tactic, used late in FDR’s presidency, was moderately effective, served as a substitute for the personal energy FDR applied to the presidency in his first term, and created a backlash that contributed to the adoption of the Legislative Reform Act of 1946. With these findings I conclude that FDR deserves credit as a transitionary figure for the modernity of Congress, as well as the presidency.

Environmental policy is about fixing a problem—a large, complex, foundational problem. From the 1960s to the end of the century, the United States engaged this problem on a wider scale and with more energy than ever be-fore, as a part of a global, multinational effort in this direction. Seen from our experience and vantage, what are the prospects ahead of humanity and nature in the ongoing negotiation of our relationship?

Huzza! My brave boys, our work is complete;

The world shall admire Columbia's fair feat;

Its strength against tempest and time shall be proof, And

thousands shall come to dwell under our roof:

Whilst we drain the deep bowl, our toast still shall be

Our government firm, and our citizens free.

Portugal was a pioneer in state-led cooperative development. In 1867, the parliament passed legislation encouraging workers to organize their own collective businesses. In the view of the ruling elite, this would prevent the emergence of a class cleavage between labor and capital, contributing to the stability of the liberal economic and political order. Combining the historical method with John Kingdon’s multiple-streams approach to policy formulation, this article examines the complex array of domestic and external factors that shaped this policy intervention. Additionally, the study explores the impact of the policy on the involved stakeholders. Far from fulfilling the expectations of its promoters, the law on cooperatives seems to have only marginally stimulated the growth of the sector. Moreover, the government’s support to cooperatives seems to have undermined the legitimacy of the model in the eyes of a labor movement that was starting to see its interests as opposed to those of the ruling class.

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.

Traditional accounts of the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the U.S. Constitution largely ignore the role of the major political parties. We argue that partisan politics was an integral part of the constitutional politics of this period. The need to manage divisions within both parties’ electoral coalitions during the transition from the third to the fourth-party systems led to the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment without support from either national party. While most accounts trace prohibition’s demise to widespread noncompliance and the graft it generated, we argue that elite congressional support for prohibition gave way when civil service reforms removed federal prohibition agents as patronage resources. We also argue that by giving states control of designing state conventions, and thereby risking state malapportionment of conventions, Democrats succeeded in overcoming the traditional fissures that divided their southern and northern wings.

At the behest of the Roosevelt administration in 1935, the U.S. Senate established a special committee to investigate lobbying activities by opponents of the “death sentence” of the Public Utility Holding Company Bill. Chaired by Hugo L. Black (D-Ala.), the “Black Committee” expanded its mission into a more general probe of anti–New Deal organizations and individuals. The committee used highly intrusive methods, notably catch-all dragnet subpoenas, to secure evidence. It worked closely with the IRS for access to tax returns and with the FCC to obtain copies of millions of telegrams. When the telegram search became public information, there was a major backlash from the press, Congress, and the courts. Court rulings in 1936, resulting from suits by William Randolph Hearst and others, not only limited the committee’s powers but provided important checks for future investigators, including Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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.