The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.

The 1972 abortion-initiative campaign in North Dakota provides an example where elites on one side of an issue were able to provide cues and get supporters to participate in an election while the other side was unable to do so. North Dakota Right to Life through the formation of branch chapters and its work with the Catholic churches became the focus of the anti-initiative campaign. Flush with resources, the NDRL made sure that its supporters turned out to such an extent that initiative voters outnumbered presidential voters in most counties. While the pro-initiative elements proved effective at getting the question on the ballot, they were unable to get their message out, let alone galvanize supporters. The result was confusion among potential supports and lower turnout rates in the most populous counties.

In the last fifteen years or so I have found myself at odds with friends, colleagues, and other luminaries over whether the changes among political activists within the major political parties are real but modest in their impact or whether, as I believe, the changes are fundamental. Most commentaries on political parties by pundits and political scientists give no clue that anything fundamental has occurred. The Democratic party is described as if it were still the party of Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey, and the Republican party is still conceived as tantamount to the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. True, the presidency of Ronald Reagan led to discussions of a strong conservative trend; by and large, however, this trend is treated as an aberration, a product of Reagan's peculiar personality and popularity rather than an indicator of basic change within the Republican party.

In the politically turbulent post–World War II period, proposed federal legislation to expand the welfare state pitted conservative Republicans against liberal Democrats in Congress. The conflict over national health insurance introduced between 1943 and 1947 in the Wagner-Murray- Dingell bill ended in a conservative victory with the bill stalled in committee. The primary constituents of the two sides were American Medical Association (AMA) spokesmen and corporate interests on the political right and labor leaders and public health advocates on the left. By 1946 the conservatives controlled Congress; thereafter liberal congressional reformers defaulted on the national health issue, as they had throughout the twentieth century, to corporate progressives and the tenets of “welfare capitalism.” Government continued as a regulator of “minimum standards” for business and industry. Provision of voluntary health insurance and direct medical services was left to the private sector. The Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program emerged out of the political stalemate over health care in the middle 1940s as a highly efficient and popular prepaid group health plan, innovative in its large scale and total integration of service and facilities. Its survival and growth was due to its acceptability to both liberals and conservatives as a model private-sector alternative to national health insurance or any other form of state medicine.

Administrative law in the United States during the last half century has been dominated by three major themes: (1) the extent to which legislative authority may be delegated to administrative agencies, (2) judicial review of legislative action, and (3) analysis of the formal aspects of agency procedures. At the core of this traditional approach to administrative law—defining its purpose—is the problem of the legitimacy of public administration. Specifically, the issue, to traditionalists, is how far administrative agencies can go before they impinge on the rights of private citizens.

Since Reconstruction there has always been an antipornography movement in the United States. From the heyday of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1880s, to the debates over the Hays code in Hollywood in the 1930s, to the founding of Women Against Pornography in 1979, our society has consistently struggled to resolve two crucial and interrelated questions: First, does pornography incite people to behave in “antisocial” ways or to commit crimes against individuals and society? Second, should the state regulate or censor materials it regards as obscene or pornographic? These debates have always been compelling, drawing authorities from just about everywhere in our culture. Many participants in this running controversy have devoted their lives to its resolution. None has come even remotely close to settling the matter. Today the courts and legislatures continue to argue the pornography question much as they did in the 1860s, when jurists first established that the test of obscenity lay in whether a book has depraved and corrupted the minds of the vulnerable.

Twenty-five years ago H. Stuart Hughes observed that “the study of history is entering a period of rapid change and advance such as characterized the science of physics in the first three decades of the twentieth century.” Amid such ferment, he believed, professional historians could become more “scientific” in stating their assumptions and executing their analysis without sacrificing an “aesthetic” style of discourse. Professor Hughes correctly predicted the professional excitement and intellectual controversy unleashed since the mid-1960s, but he underestimated the extent to which historians’ relative standing in the academy would be adversely affected by external and internal developments. Other social sciences attracted more students, tenure lines, and grant support; they had more success in formalizing their investigations. Many humanistic endeavors (including historical inquiries), critics charge, have concurrently become inscrutable. Historians themselves have expressed serious concern about the future of their discipline. With the Balkanization of knowledge, with a growing number of subfields and specialized journals, historical synthesis seems more and more to be an elusive goal. The current debate over how to “(re)present the past” goes far beyond disputes over approach, style, or ideology.

In a world increasingly dominated by high technology and esoteric scientific knowledge it is not surprising that political scientists and sociologists have begun to ask what role experts and specialists play in the policymaking process. Inaugurated almost a century ago by Weber's seminal essay on bureaucracy and the rationalization of authority, this issue was subsequently developed out of neo-Marxist debates over the relative autonomy of the state into a more explicitly state-centered perspective. Though state-centered theorists have not abandoned pluralism altogether, bureaucrats and policy experts have increasingly taken center stage in policy analyses. These state actors are portrayed as “policy experts,” free from political pressure, focused on making policy recommendations based on the most up-to-date knowledge of the field. Instead of pursuing votes and campaign money, policy experts seek the most efficient answers to social problems, a rationalized process of positivistic scientific inquiry and experiential learning. In most areas of public policymaking, this boils down to the reductive analysis of prior, presumably analogous, policy outcomes, drawing lessons for the future from the successes and failures of the past. Seen from this perspective, policymaking is portrayed as “a deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information.” History thus not only transforms state capacities (as in historical institutionalist accounts) but also directly effects the ways in which policymakers think about social problems. Political scientists refer to this as a “social learning” process.

Scholars examining the controversy over church-state relations in the modern era have concentrated almost exclusively on its constitutional aspects. This is to be expected since the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down epic decisions that have drawn an increasingly sharper picture of the First Amendment's guideline concerning the government's involvement in religion. The Court did, in fact, lead the way in establishing or reestablishing the doctrine called “separation of church and state.” But the Court touched off a furious debate within the states that has intermittently yet persistently influenced public policy since the early 1960s. It is time that scholars examine more closely the participants outside of the Court.

Efforts to modernize public assistance via the Social Security Act of 1935 met significant opposition from states. One manifestation of that resistance was state responsible relative laws in the Old Age Assistance program. Responsible relative laws enforced support by adult children as an eligibility requirement; applicants with children deemed able to provide support were either denied aid, or the grant awarded was reduced. These laws are an example of parent dependency policies that sought to enforce or encourage family members, particularly adult children, to support parents in need. States sought to ensure that all financial resources were exhausted before public funds were spent on OAA. Responsible relative laws were an arena of public assistance that remained under state discretion, and many states used them to control costs and contest federal efforts to modernize relief programs and limit state and local authority.

On August 13, 1782, Alexander Hamilton complained to Robert Morris about the deplorable condition of politics in the state of New York, and especially the condition of taxation. Morris had appointed Hamilton as receiver of continental taxes for New York, meaning that Hamilton was in charge of collecting New York's share of the “requisitions” of Congress. Under Article 8 of the Articles of Confederation, Congress could raise the tax revenue it needed for the ongoing Revolutionary War only by making “requisitions” on the states—that is, by asking each state to raise a specified sum. Like other states, New York was falling short; four years later, an aggressive tax levy in Massachusetts (to pay requisitions and fund the state debt) would provoke the armed insurrection known as Shays's Rebellion. The decentralized regime that Congress had established under the Articles of Confederation made the national treasury depend on the productivity of the state tax systems. Ironically, this very decentralization invited national officials like Hamilton to tackle the problem of tax reform within the states.