In January 1938, James Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School, author of much of the New Deal's securities legislation, and a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to deliver the prestigious Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School. His subject was “The Administrative Process.” Of particular interest to Landis was defining the correct relationship between courts and the administrative state. According to Landis, the interaction between agencies and courts “gives a sense of battle.”1 He continued: “Here one is presented with decisions that speak of contest between two agencies of government— one, like St. George, eternally refreshing its vigor from the stream of democratic desires, the other majestically girding itself with the wisdom of the ages.”2

Admitting, then, that it is eminently desirable to reduce the action of the organized public force to the minimum … shall we not say that government can not relieve itself from the necessity of frequent and minute interferences with industry in any other way to so great an extent as by, 1st, insisting on the thorough primary education of the whole population; 2d, providing a strict system of sanitary administration; 3d, securing by special precautions the integrity of banks of savings for the encouragement of the instincts of frugality, sobriety, and industry? Each of these things is contrary to the doctrine of Laissez faire; yet I, for one, can not find room to doubt that, on purely economical grounds, the action of the State herein is not only justifiable but a matter of elementary duty.

As winter descended on Washington in December 1878, the Forty-fifth Congress gathered for what promised to be a hectic third and final session. Emotions ran high. In this era, Congress habitually reserved much of its business for these brief, intense “lame duck” sessions that fell between the election of legislators in November and the adjournment of Congress the following March. Compounding the usual sense of urgency was the startling result of the recent election: the Democratic party had gained control of the Senate and, when the next Congress convened, would control both the Senate and the House for the first time since before the Civil War. Senate Republicans well understood that they had but a few precious months to close ranks and enact legislation on some of the burning issues of the day: civil rights, the currency, the tariff. Yet when the session opened, none of these issues made their way to the floor. Instead, and despite howls of protest from senators eager to move on to what they plainly regarded as more urgent concerns, the Senate assembled on many afternoons for several weeks to debate a completely different matter: a proposed law concerning the rights of inventors. At this critical juncture in American politics, the Senate found itself embroiled in a long and complex discussion of the virtues and deficiencies of the patent system.

One way of approaching the following essays is to pause here at the beginning and consider the peculiarity of the conversation we will be overhearing. In this volume we will be listening to a group of scholars who are Catholic, Episcopal, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secularist in their varied backgrounds. They are considering the place of religion in public policymaking. The peculiarity arises if we think about American public life historically. For one thing, we are listening to people who most likely would not have been inclined to interact with each other at the outset of the twentieth century. More than that, they are talking about something that hardly anyone a hundred years ago would have thought even needs discussing.

Study of the origins of public policy has achieved an important place among historical scholars. For instance, historians have published many valuable studies explaining the origins of regulatory agencies in industries such as natural resources, energy, and transportation, including the origins of agencies responsible for enforcing safety standards. Scholars have treated road construction, the subject of this article, in a similar fashion, seeking to comprehend the principal factors informing the origins of state and federal road building programs. Not surprisingly, then, scholarly examinations of the Interstate Highway System, which exercised such a remarkable influence on the economy, as well as on the social and physical landscapes of the nation, have remained focused on explications of the origins of policy.Perhaps this particular preoccupation has been due to what historians Peter N. Stearns and Joel A. Tarr have identified as a tendency to equate policy origins with “a policy message.” But Stearns and Tarr contend that studies of “origins do not carry such an inherent message and subsequent stages of policy development must also be explored. “

Scholars assessing Richard Nixon's contribution to the desegregation of Southern schools have often been unimpressed. His biographer Stephen Ambrose concedes that there was some White House contribution, but observes that “Nixon had to be hauled kicking and screaming into desegregation on a meaningful scale, and he did what he did not because it was right but because he had no choice.” The political scientist Michael Genovese concurs, telling us that Nixon sought to “withdraw the federal government from its efforts at desegregation.” A recent civil rights dictionary concludes that this was “the first successful presidential candidate to be opposed to civil rights enforcement,” adding that “many of his tactics thwarted the furthering of school desegregation.” The noted civil rights historian, William Chafe, meanwhile, contends that “Nixon repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to the politics of polarization”; “continued to embrace” southern evasions that “had been invalidated by the Supreme Court”; and used “the power of the presidency to delay, if not halt completely, federally imposed school desegregation.” And Kevin O'Reilly, in an overview of presidential leadership on civil rights, finds the 37th president to have been essentially indistinguishable from the race-baiting George Wallace. Nixon resented the Alabamian, he reveals, because “he wanted the gutter all to himself.” Considering a number of contenders, he concludes that “school desegregation emerged as the administration's most important and enduring (anti)civil rights crusade.”

In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call “Marie.” The complaint read, “Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs.” According to the surviving records, Marie's “truancies from home” alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of “six blacks from home.” As incidental as slipping “blocks” into “blacks” may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.

In mid-nineteenth century America the asylum became the foundation of public policy. This ubiquitous institution was regarded as a symbol of an enlightened and progressive nation that no longer ignored or mistreated its severely and chronically mentally ill citizens. The faith in an institutional policy was embodied in a vast and costly system of state mental hospitals that by 1940 had an inpatient population of about 450,000. Despite the presence of serious problems, there was little disposition to call into doubt the wisdom of institutional care and treatment. Even though mental health policy was formulated within a decentralized and divided political system, there was no doubt that a holistic and clear consensus prevailed.

In the early 1970s, fifty years after its first appearance in the U.S. Congress, the Equal Rights Amendment came the closest it ever would to ratification. The ERA declared: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” After sailing through Congress in 1972 with bipartisan support, the amendment went to the states for ratification. The response was positive and immediate: Hawaii approved the ERA the same day, twenty-one other states approved it before the end of the year, and eight more states the following year. Yet, by 1982 the amendment lay dead, having fallen three states short of the thirty-eight states needed for ratification.

Money, wrote Pennsylvanian Francis Rawle in 1725, is “the vital spirit and blood of the body politick.” Is not money, another pamphleteer contended, “the blood of life, which circulates from member to member, throughout the whole body of all living creatures?” It followed that the tokens acting as the medium of value could be anything, “whether it be pewter, silver, spelter, brass or paper, matters not which.” Americans in fact used provincial tax credit notes for money, along with other specie substitutes: “bills of credit” were issued to public creditors and could be employed by the holder or others to pay public obligations like taxes. They were “in value equal” to coin and, like coin, could be passed from hand to hand in the meantime. It was their circulating property—”the ready currency of the thing”—that controlled.

The British National Health Service (NHS) was created shortly after the end of World War II and formally came into being on its “Appointed Day” in July 1948. The NHS has been seen as the crowning achievement of the postwar Labour government's “welfare state” by both the general public and academic commentators. As Rodney Lowe points out, by the late 1940s opinion polls showed it to be by far the best-received part of Labour's social policies; and in popular perceptions the terms “NHS” and “welfare state” were often viewed as synonymous. Lowe himself, while carefully noting the problems that attended the birth of the health service, nonetheless sees it as an “idealistic” institution and remarks that in no other Western country, not even social democratic Sweden, “were the whole population and the full range of medical need (Beveridge's principles of universalism and comprehensiveness) so quickly realized by a free service.” Another respected commentator, Rudolf Klein, similarly highlights the exceptionally wide-ranging remit of the NHS, claiming it as a “unique experiment in social engineering.”

No U.S. history textbook mentions Robert Allen, George H. Crosman, John H. Dickerson, Thomas Swords, or Stewart Van Vliet. Yet in certain respects they were five of the most important government officials in the nineteenth-century United States. Each was a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster's Department, a bureau of the U.S. army entrusted with military procurement. During the Civil War, the supply depots in which they worked—in Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—were indispensable adjuncts to the Union war effort. The magnitude of the procurement project was unprecedented: in four years, these five officers alone paid contractors and civilian employees $350 million. This sum amounted to nearly one-third of the total of over $1 billion that the Quartermaster's Department as a whole spent to equip the Union army. No other single project, in either government or business, involved the expenditure of such an enormous sum. In an age in which few Americans made $2 a day, $350 million was equivalent to the total wartime income of one hundred thousand households. Adjusted for inflation, this was roughly equal to the entire federal budget during the administration of President James Buchanan (1857–61).

The state of policy history is good. This is a dramatic change from only four years ago, when I started an article in this very journal about the evolution of policy history by asserting: “The future of policy history remains unclear.” At the time, my statement reflected the sentiment shared by many fellow policy historians who did not feel that professional opportunities had fully caught up with the intellectual vitality of the subfield.