These are very hard times for students of American political history. Not so long ago they were a peppy and optimistic bunch and believed that they had every reason to be. For those scholars who focused their attention on nineteenth-century politics in particular, the avalanche of revisionist work from the quantitatively and behaviorally oriented “new” political historians, beginning in the late 1950s, as well as the constant outpouring of more traditional work in the genre, had expanded the reach, and deepened the understanding, of American political life after 1800. Much the same was true for politics in other chronological eras as well. The energy and example displayed by the generation of political historians active into the 1980s underscored their major, even dominant role in the study of American history. And there were few signs that anything would check the impressive growth and increasing sophistication of their contributions to historical knowledge.

During July 1910, antiliquor activists hired twenty-three private detectives to raid three illicit saloons in Newark, Ohio. Deputized by the mayor of a nearby town, these agents sought to serve “search and seizure” warrants, which authorized them to confiscate liquor as evidence of illegal sales. In doing so, they assumed the duties of the Newark police, who had refused to enforce county prohibition. But their actions only led to tragedy.

Since many scholars focus on the New Deal as the foundation for modern U.S. governance, it is widely assumed that the United States is characterized by a weak state as compared to the welfare states of Western Europe. Yet, in the wake of World War II, the United States established a national security “warfare state” that rivaled the welfare states of Western Europe in scope of authority and operations and in its isolation from popular forces. The wartime redirection of U.S. state power also resolved the political stalemate stemming from the executive-congressional and business-government tensions roused during the New Deal. In fact, the course of wartime statebuilding was in many ways a response to the political tensions of the New Deal and to the expectation that the organization of wartime mobilization would indelibly define the postwar organization of U.S. state power. As this article argues, wartime mobilization resolved the New Deal political stalemate in large part by granting various segments of the corporate community the opportunity to influence the shape of U.S. national state power.

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.

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

Under the ominous title “Rehearsal for State Medicine,” the 17 December 1938 issue of the Saturday Evening Post told its readers about a new health program sponsored by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency that provided low-interest “rehabilitation loans” to low-income farmers. As an outgrowth of the loan program, the FSA had established cooperative health plans that, for a small annual fee, allowed FSA clients to receive affordable health care. But according to the article's co-authors—Samuel Lubell and Walter Everett—there was much more to the FSA health pro-gram. “What the FSA is doing,” Lubell and Everett claimed, “affords a rare glimpse into what the future might bring.” Their article appeared in the midst of a national debate over health care reform and only months after President Franklin Roosevelt had convened hundreds of doctors, social workers, and public health reformers for a National Health Conference. Charged with the task of making recommendations for a national health program, the conference produced a final report that suggested a range of public policies that might make health care more affordable and accessible. Most controversially, the final report called upon lawmakers to consider creating a program of government-sponsored health insurance. “Though Congress and the nation are debating the prickly issue of state medicine,” Lubell and Everett noted with obvious disapproval, “one Federal agency [the FSA] has jumped the legislative gun and initiated its own program of socialized medicine.” Although they would have rejected the term “socialized medicine,” the architects of the FSA health plans had indeed envisioned a “rehearsal” of sorts.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, national health insurance returned briefly to the political limelight with renewed calls for a single-payer health-care system that would eliminate any significant role for commercial insurers in the provision of health care. Organized labor, however, which had been a longtime proponent of national health insurance, did not warmly embrace the single-payer solution. Instead, much of the national leadership of organized labor supported some kind of employer-mandate solution that would require employers to pay a portion of their employees' health insurance premiums, thus leaving the private welfare state of job-based medical benefits largely intact.

Recently, scholars have shown that welfare state development, across nations, has often incorporated social groups in distinct ways that stratify and divide the citizenry.1 Citizenship has become stratified in terms of gender as policymakers have treated men and women differently in the policymaking process, perpetuating ascribed roles and institutionalizing gender inequality. The American welfare state that was fashioned in the New Deal has long been regarded as a “two-tiered” system that divided men and women as “social citizens,” incorporating them into distinct types of programs for economic security and welfare. How was such stratification of citizenship created in the course of the policymaking process? Some scholars have surmised that policymakers' ideas about gender were responsible for gendered outcomes; others have suggested that preexisting institutional arrangements foreordained the “two-tiered” results. Neither of these approaches, however, has offered an adequate explanation.

American government officials experimented with a variety of tools for public administration in the early twentieth century. The regulatory commission became the best known of these new institutional forms, but another Progressive Era innovation with profound and ambiguous implications for U.S. political development was the government-sponsored corporation. Often called “public corporations,” these instrumentalities were created to carry out public purposes, but they were established as separate legal entities to function outside the standard departmental structure of government (and its organizational principles and restrictions). Today, these structures are most prolific at the state and municipal level, where they are generally termed “public authorities.” Since World War II they have been the fastest growing kind of government unit, with, at present, around ten thousand in existence. While everyone perceives these institutions as important players in local affairs, even well-informed citizens are frequently puzzled when it comes to knowing exactly what they are or what they do.

In 1920 the Pennsylvania Railroad sued several small coal companies over water pollution. The lawsuit, ultimately decided in the railroad's favor, overturned an earlier Pennsylvania court decision that granted a property right to pollute, and, more important, now represents a major transitional period in American water policy history. The period marked the end of water policy generated from court decisions and case law, and the beginning of an era dominated by legislative statute and agency interpretation. With the Pennsylvania case, the impacts of nineteenth-century court decisions that sanctioned pollution to encourage business waned as concern for the nation's public health demanded more expansive attention, and industry itself began to experience excessive costs from corrupted water resources. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, lawmakers attempted to institute a new strategy for economic interest in harmony with efforts to improve environmental quality.

Throughout the 1980s, neoconservative governments—fueled by the conviction that the delivery of goods and services is more efficient when left in the hands of the nongovernmental sector, and that nonprofits are more sensitive to personal and individual needs because they are not bound by “bureaucratic” and “majoritarian” constraints—called upon volunteer activity to substitute for the state in many areas of social policy. This doctrine viewed “the relationship between government and the nonprofit sector in terms that are close to what economists would call a zero-sum game.” Advocates of this position believed that once the welfare state dissipated most social welfare activities would be (re)supplied through the expansion of the third sector. Despite the prominence of these beliefs, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

Do party ideologies matter in the making of public policy in the United States? The conventional answer to this question is equivocal. The American parties are generally considered to be less ideological than their Anglo European brethren. More important perhaps, these parties seem to lack the organizational characteristics necessary to implement such ideologies (were they present to begin with). With fragmented leadership in the legislature, a decentralized system of candidate selection and a federalist, divided-powers constitutional regime, the American political system seems inhospitable—if not downright inimical—to party ideology. The American parties, writes Theodore Lowi, are “constituent parties and have almost never been ‘responsible,’policy-making parties.”

A sea-change has occurred in political historywriting since the 1950s. Gone, for the most part, are many of the broad, sweeping generalizations that used to characterize this field. The terms employed in such endeavors—the American Mind, the American Way of Life, American Civilization, the American Spirit (all titles of books published in the mid-twentieth century)—seem anachronistic, if not downright ridiculous, today. Whatever it is that defines the values and direction of American politics, this set of cultural markers seems a good deal more elusive today than it did to scholars like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Richard Hofstadter in the postwar era. In the place of studies of America, the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology have turned to careful, highly focused studies of particular eras, areas, and groups. National character is out, local cultures are in.

Robert Zieger's “Historians and the U.S. Industrial Relations Regime” offers both a crisp historiographical survey of the field and a thoughtful agenda for further research. Iagree with much of what he has to say, particularly concerning our fascination with the first fifteen yearsof modern labor policy (running from the early New Deal through the Taft-Hartley Act) and our relative neglect of the postwar era. Having said this, I want to turn our attention back to 1935, in part because the Wagner Act is such an important and defining moment, and in part becauseZieger casually dismisses critical interpretations of the Wagner Act's passage and logic as “ahistorical” or “ideologically-driven speculations.” As one whose scholarship is caricatured in this way, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Gossip has long been one of the most dismissed fotms of communication. Since the 1920s, nonetheless, some social scientists have attempted to understand gossip and its social utility. These scholars (be they anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, linguists, historians, or feminists) have argued that gossip plays a significant role in a number of both premodern and modern communities. However, despite a growing body of work that examines gossip in the private sphere, there has been almost no discussion of the role of gossip in public policy or, more specifically, in welfare state administration. This article will attempt to rectify that omission by providing evidence of how state administrators in one jurisdiction in two historical periods have utilized gossip to help determine which poor single mothers should receive welfare. I argue that this is not merely a custom of early administrators during the formative years of the welfare state but, rather, that the contemporary welfare state apparatus accommodates, and even encourages, the use of gossip in present-day welfare administration.