Over the past three decades environmental objectives have emerged in the West with considerable strength and influence to reshape public attitudes. Until World War II agriculture and raw-materials extraction still dominated the region's economic and political views.' But in recent years the West has begun to change rapidly. New residents have brought with them new attitudes toward natural resources. Increasingly, those resources are thought of as an environment to enhance individual and regional standards of living rather than as material commodities alone. An indigenous environmental constitutency has become more vigorous in challenging the previously dominant extractive economy of lumber, grazing, and mining.

Hollywood. The name was magical. The lure was overwhelming. Generations of Americans spent untold hours in darkened theaters captivated by this fantasy world. Girls swooned over the latest Hollywood heartthrob while boys dreamed about a life of adventure and glory. As their pioneer ancestors before them, thousands trekked westward to Hollywood in search of fame. Most were rejected, but a lucky few were “discovered” and became “stars”—the royalty of the twentieth century.

In the last decade, drug usage has become a matter of great concern in American society. Questions abound about who uses drugs and why. Surveys that purport to answer questions such as these remain suspect because of fears that respondents either may be lying or, in fact, may not be the real habitual consumers of drugs. The presumed link between drug usage and violent crimes is an act of faith in a society that perceived itself to be under siege from drugs throughout the 1980s. No prominent public official, whether it was President Ronald Reagan or William J. Bennett, who served as President George Bush's first director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, could ease the sense of alarm and foreboding evoked by drugs. How could the traffic in drugs be stopped? How would America's streets be made safe again?

Drug wars. Few topics generate more ccontroversy or provoke more debate. Few topics conjure up more futile and dismal images among the American population. Few topics are more synonymous with defeat. Never has our government been mired in a conflict so enduring or fought against an enemy so utterly impossible to conquer. For seventy-five years—nearly four times longer than both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam combined—the federal government has been waging an endless war against seemingly impossible odds.

In 1927, the biennial report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the Commonwealth of Kentucky warned that “the feeble-minded of the colored race present a greater menace than do the white.…We do desire to point out the utter lack of any provision for colored feeble-minded.” In spite of this admonition, southern states took little notice of their black feebleminded population. Nineteen years after the Kentucky report, the South Carolina Director of Public Welfare admitted that “the care of mentally deficient and mentally ill persons in the same institution is distinctly undesirable, but…the Hospital's efforts to secure provision of a separate training school for mentally deficient negroes have to date been unsuccessful.”

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

“We are, most of us,” Mary Van Kleeck said in November 1957, “getting too old to talk.” Near the end of more than two hours of interrogation by officials of the State Department's Passport Office, Van Kleeck tried to impress upon her questioners the commitment to social research and to social justice that underlay her career. The Passport Office, however, was more concerned about her Communist front and party affiliations, and she was in their offices that Thursday morning appealing their refusal to renew her passport. She was seventy-three years old and retired from public life. She wanted to travel, as had been her practice, to Holland, her ancestral home and the home of her closest friends. “I date way back of you young people,” she told her two interrogators. “I think the work of my generation and our attitudes in international affairs is one of sympathy … to developments in other countries.” But, she continued, “I don't think you people who don't know the period prior to the First World War can possibly see how deep our concern is.”

On 3 October 1983, the Heritage foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary and the opening of a new $9.5 million headquarters on Capitol Hill. By the time President Ronald Reagan had taken the podium and described the celebration as “an extraordinary moment, not only in the history of Heritage Foundation, but…in the intellectual history of the west,” it was probably clear to most of the 1,300 guests that the foundation had come a long way in its ten years of existence.

Liberal historians have traditionally played down or neglected the achievements of the Eisenhower administration in the area of civil rights. At the same time, they have overstated the contributions of liberal Democrats and understated the role congressional Democrats played in obstructing civil rights in the 1950s. The liberal bias of most historians has led to a distorted picture of the political dynamics affecting the struggle for black equality. The fact is that the Democrats, as a party, were not so liberal in the 1950s as they have often been portrayed, and the Republican party was not so conservative. The positions of the parties in fact were not so clear-cut as they became in the next decade. Neither party forcefully and openly advocated full equality for blacks; both reflected the dominant racism of white society. Granting that, however, the Eisenhower administration was not the obstructionist barrier to civil rights that historians have often portrayed.

The work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Atchafalaya (Uh-CHAFF-a-LIE-uh) Basin in southern Louisiana is an especially revealing example of the problems facing government agencies trying to balance conflicting economic and environmental demands. The basin contains precious wetlands and wildlife and major economic resources such as oil, gas, timber, and fish. It is also the center of one of the most hydrologically dynamic areas in the world. For the Corps, the basin serves as a vital part of the flood-control system for the entire lower Mississippi Valley. The problem was to reconcile this purpose with the continuing need for resource exploitation and increased concern for protecting the environment. In the Atchafalaya Basin, science proved its limitations and the art of politics its worth. This was a natural laboratory that taught engineers and environmentalists alike.

One thing that all parties in the American drug-policy debate agree upon is the desirability of eliminating the traffic in illicit drugs and the esurient criminal syndicates that control it. There are two divergent strategies for achieving this end. The first is the war on drugs. The second, which emerged in the late 1980s as a highly controversial alternative to the drug war, is controlled legalization. What follows is a historically informed critique of both approaches.

Imagine, if you will, that you live in the richest, most influential nation on earth. This is a country whose political system has been consciously adopted by neighboring heads of state seeking to duplicate the same stability and prosperity in their own societies. It is a country that has certainly experienced unprecedented growth and cultural achievement in its past two hundred years and thus contains some of the most magnificent and intellectually exciting urban centers in the world. You would be justifiably proud to live in such a place.

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.

Between 1876 and 1917, government philosophy toward telephone regulation began moving away from laissez-faire and toward some kind of involvement in economic affairs. However, while some early studies of regulation suggest business hostility to that policy, AT&T actively sought regulation, jogging government and the public in that direction. But this study is not just a restatement of the interest-group-capture theory, as offered by such economists as Stigler or historians as Kolko. Regulation resulted from the convergence of interests of many affected players, including residential and business telephone subscribers, the independent telephone companies that competed with AT&T, and the state and federal governments, as well as AT&T. I employ a multiple interest theory to account for telephone regulation, but unlike other studies using such a framework, I suggest that government is an independent actor with impact on the final policy outcome, and not merely an arena where private interests battle for control over policy outcomes, as is so common among other multiple interest studies of regulation.

Since its first widespread use during World War I, the public corporation has figured prominently as an instrument of government on the federal and state level. Its policy domain has progressively expanded from wartime financing and procurement to broadly defined developmental, lending, and investment activities. Functioning outside the regular structure of the executive branch, the public corporation operates as a separate legal entity invested with independent borrowing authority and the power to retain earnings derived from its activities. The institution's proliferating presence on the political landscape reflects the continuing appeal of its hybrid form, designed to wed market efficiency to the pursuit of public purposes.