The nature of party contention and public discourse in the late nineteenth century is one of the least understood and most elusive subjects in American history and historiography. In the period itself many critics condemned the intense partisanship of the two major parties as a sham battle, aimed more at filling offices than fulfilling ideals, and all too often tainted with corrupt motives and methods. In the classic formulation of Englishman James Bryce, “neither party has any principles…. [P]oints of political doctrine … have all but vanished …. All has been lost except office or the hope of it.”

In 1961 I was introduced to the invidious distinctions of race in America at the Sears and Roebuck store in Miami, Florida. I was seven years old when the babysitter took me shopping, spicing up the offer by promising some of those hot cashews whose aroma wafted through the deliciously cool air at Sears. While Myrtle browsed, I spotted a diversion that promised even more variety than the retail behemoth's tentative steps into fashion wear: it was a water fountain. There were two, actually, but the one I set my sights on was labeled “colored.” With thoughts of rainbows and Maypoles whirling through my mind, I headed straight for this ingenious invention that would soon quench all the shades of my thirst. Why hadn't I ever seen multicolored water before? Myrtle's guttural report aborted any further speculation. “Stop,” she boomed from oversized lingerie. Then something very strange happened. Myrtle ran. I had never seen Myrtle move quickly, let alone run. I froze. She grabbed my hand, suspended just inches from the cool silver handle and white porcelain basin. “That's dirty,” she grimaced. “It's for colored people.”

Substance abuse treatment has been a topic of ongoing debate in the United States since at least the 1960s, when the country witnessed the development of several promising new treatment approaches. Although costs to society in connection with substance abuse point to a continuing need for an effective treatment system, there is only a general understanding of the field. Several factors make it difficult to comprehend the treatment structure: the field is comprised of a sprawling combination of public and private facilities, it strives to treat many types of addicts, and it employs a variety of treatment approaches. While there are general studies that attempt to describe the system and its components, few inquiries probe the inside of specific treatment facilities to discern their evolution, mission, and effectiveness. This article, which examines the Antelope Valley Rehabilitation Centers (AVRCs), is one such analysis. Located in rural areas sixty miles from downtown Los Angeles, the AVRCs are Los Angeles County's only directly operated treatment centers. The two centers, at Acton and Warm Springs, are not only the first and fourth largest substance abuse hospitals in the country, but they serve a population larger than that of forty-two states, making them an excellent lens through which to view a portion of the substance abuse treatment system.

Particularly in the past decade or so, New Deal scholarship has taken a new turn, and the period after the mid-1950s has received substantial scrutiny and significant rethinking. Standard accounts of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency have long held that the New Deal was essentially a product of Roosevelt's first term, of the “First New Deal” of 1933 and the “Second New Deal” of 1935. Legislative stalemate, program consolidation and sometimes reduction, and attention to foreign and military affairs then marked the remainder of Roosevelt's presidency. A new and interdisciplinary literature, however, has demonstrated that the later New Deal of FDR's second and third terms was more distinctive and more important than the established view suggests. There has developed an understanding that from 1937 on the New Deal entered an important new phase, a third stage—that there was a “Third New Deal” crucial to understanding the New Deal and the direction of liberal policy and the American state.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the beginning of a discussion of the problem of racial discrimination in employment. The Great Depression, the maturation of civil rights organizations, and the New Deal's change in American principles of property rights and-labor policy helped launch this discussion. Campaigns undertaken by black organizations and federal agencies began to grapple with the idea of race-based remedial strategies to combat discrimination in employment, and our modern concept of equal employment opportunity, which holds that an employer's workforce should contain approximately the same proportion of minorities as are present in the population, first received expression in this period.

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) has been sorely neglected in the history of the relationship of the political actors to the administrative state. There is no full account of the history of the APA, yet there is an increasing need for such a history. There is a growing literature paying renewed attention to the importance of administrative procedures in the politics of the administrative state (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984; McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987, 1989; Moe 1989; Hill and Brazier 1991; Farber 1992; Mashaw 1990; and Bawn 1995). With all this attention being given to the importance of administrative procedure, it is about time to examine the history of the act that established the minimum standards of administrative procedure. The act regulates the procedures for adjudication, access to, disclosure of, and publication of agency information, licensing, rule-making, investigations, tenure of administrative law judges, and judicial review of agency action. Standard accounts of the APA's legislative history such as Galloway's (1946) have conveyed the impression that the APA was a noncontroversial, consensual piece of legislation that provided much-needed reform of federal administrative procedures. The actual history of this act involved a prolonged battle among the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the presidency, the legislature, and interest groups for political advantage in the administrative state that had been created by the New Deal and World War II.

In recent years scholars from various disciplines have begun to explore new questions concerning the role of the state in society. This article is related to two aspects of this emerging scholarship, namely, the work of scholars interested in the relationship between the state and the production and utilization of knowledge and the related work of what has been called the historical institutional group. Scholars working on the role of the state in the production of knowledge have abandoned an earlier model that saw the state as a passive recipient of knowledge from the private sector and now emphasize interaction: the state is seen as both a consumer and producer of knowledge. Recent research also suggests that the modern state is increasingly dependent on knowledge in order to demonstrate a rational basis for policy decisions: without such justification, the actions of the state lack legitimacy and are open to challenge and opposition. Related to this increased dependence of the state on knowledge is the conundrum of whether knowledge is acquired in order to develop policy or whether policy is adopted first and knowlege then sought in order to justify action.

Writing in 1978 about the 1960s, William McLoughlin saw America in the midst of the fourth Great Awakening in our history. Awakenings are “periods of cultural revitalization that begin in a general crisis of beliefs and values and extend over a generation or so, during which time a profound reorientation in beliefs and values takes place. Revivals alter the lives of individuals; awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture.” To put it another way, awakenings are revelatory times when large numbers of people anguish over and eventually search out new self-understandings as individuals and as a society. They are like a convulsive quickening in the cultural womb.

Compounded as it is of contrasting forms, the purely national and the purely federal, federalism in the United States is inherently unstable. The division of power and prerogative between nation and states constantly changes, tending normally to become more national. Sometimes change occurs more swiftly and penetrates more deeply than others, and the 1960s were one of those times. One after another, constitutional thresholds were crossed. By the mid-1970s, American federalism had become something very different from what it had been fifteen years before. The place of place in the American polity had been sharply devalued. Autonomous individuals as political actors had gained at the expense of place-based communities. So had groups identified by such rival attributes as race or gender.

At one time, political science greatly influenced the writing of American history. Pioneers of “the new political history” brought critical elections theory, roll-call analysis, the idea of party systems, and a model of ethno-cultural voting to bear on the Jacksonian era, the problem of the coming of the Civil War, Gilded Age politics, and Progressivism in ways that permanently altered interpretation. The influence of political science is not very great now. Political history itself shriveled before the New Social History. Massive energies were applied to writing the history of people who could not vote during most or all of the nineteenth century. The old political models soon had a nonbehaviorist rival, born and bred within the discipline of history itself, the idea of a persistent and transforming “republican ideology,” first and most powerfully described by Bernard Bailyn in 1967. Even within political history, the old models of voting behavior borrowed from political science left an implausible and unsatisfying gulf between voting and platform, political behavior and belief, practice and ideology. The disciplines turned inward again.

Prior to the 1960s, state governments retained primary responsibility for the regulation of water pollution. State officials emphasized voluntarism and close, informal cooperation between regulators and representatives from the major industrial and municipal sources of pollution. During the 1960s and early 1970s, growing dissatisfaction with state pollution control performance in Congress and at the local level acted as the driving force behind the gradual federal preemption of state authority. In the Lake Erie Basin, local advocates of tougher and more effective water pollution regulation looked to the federal government for relief and made common cause with sympathetic members of Congress.

In August 1945 the Truman administration faced a host of dilemmas when it moved to demobilize the American economy and dismantle the system of wartime economic regulations. The new President and many of his top officials lacked executive experience, having assumed their positions less than six months earlier. Given Japan's sudden and surprising surrender, they also had not yet prepared detailed reconversion plans, since most had expected the Pacific War to continue for at least six months to a year longer. And within the administration there was no consensus on two key issues—whether price controls would help or hinder the transition to peacetime, and whether inflation or unemployment was the main threat to postwar prosperity.

On 4 June 1965, President Johnson, in his famous speech at Howard University, endorsed preferential treatment for black Americans and the idea of equality of results. To justify a departure from the ideal of a colorblind state, Johnson offered an alternative that might be called black exceptionalism. In response to the widely held view that blacks, like immigrants, should receive no assistance from the state in their quest to enter the mainstream of society, Johnson asserted that the oppression suffered by blacks made them unique. At the core of his justification was the plight of the black family in slavery and freedom and its impact on black children. “When the family collapses,” he stated, “it is the children that are usually damaged.”1 With words freighted with importance for the future of liberalism, he articulated a new conception of equality, one enforced by an activist state: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity–not just legal equity but human ability–not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” Toward this end, he called for a conference to chart the future of racial liberalism.

As “Lincoln and the Politics of Union” is the only thing that Michael Holt has ever written with which Mark Neely entirely disagrees, I can understand his impatience with the arguments of The Politics Presidents Make. Each of us has a fish of this sort waiting to be fried, and the opportunity afforded by my reference to Holt's essay must have been hard to resist. At least Neely took enough care in seizing this opportunity to acknowledge his “reductionist rendering” of my thesis.

Rogers Smith's American Political Science Review article, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions of America,” poses challenging substantive and methodological questions for the study of American political development. Whether or not it intended to do so, the article has struck a chord in several programs of research. The following colloquy between Smith and me centers on Smith's reading of political culture in terms of “traditions.” In a spirit of advancing our common enterprise, I have sharpened rather than muted the differences between Smith's views and my own in order to bring them into relief in a short space.