No administrative agency figures more prominently in American political development than the Post Office Department (POD). In peacetime (and frequently enough in wartime), the Post Office has employed far more Americans than any other agency of state. Indeed, at several junctures in American history, the department employed more Americans than any other organization, public or private. As Richard John's landmark analysis in Spreading the News shows, the patronage system and the very integrity of the nineteenth-century party system would have been inconceivable without the size and expansive reach of the Post Office. Nor would nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political life so fueled by the widespread distribution and consumption of newspapers, petitions, and pamphlets have been imaginable in the absence of the national postal network. So too, the deepest challenges of political reform at the turn of the century eliminating patronage, reducing administrative corruption, and challenging monopolies in telegraph and railroads all centrally involved the POD. Over two centuries, the Post Office has “spread the news”; operated banks; built roads; experimented in air transport; shuffled military supplies; waged campaigns against pornography, consumer fraud, and sedition; and managed a national telegraph system during world war.1. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

It is no longer newsworthy to say that the American Founding Fathers were implicated deeply in the institution of slavery as slaveowners, slave traders, or just silent collaborators.1. For modern historiography, the foundational text is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), which answers Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” See also Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968). For forceful recent statements, Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ÔTreason Against the Hopes of the World',” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221; Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For forceful older statements, Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 2d ed. (1964; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972). Sympathy endures, especially for Jefferson, as in the dismissal of Finkelman's essay as “the prosecution's case” in Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259 n.74. The fact that this could have seemed to be news in the 1970s and 1980s is, of course, a testament to the power of racism in American society for three centuries. The fact that Thomas Jefferson's DNA test could have shock value in the late-1990s may be even worse.2. See, e.g., the cover story, Barbra Murray, et al., “Jefferson's Secret Life,” with accompanying articles including Lynn Rosellini, “Cutting the Great Man Down to Size,” U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 9, 1998. Now that the intellectual task of reducing the iconic status of slaveholding “fathers” has been largely accomplished, however, serious questions remain about the meaning of slavery at the founding. There is more to it than the hypocrisy of whites or even the oppression of blacks. Social historians have described both the sufferings and the heroic self-defense strategies of Africans and African Americans in this period, both slave and free, in detail.3. The historiography of slavery has moved back from the previously dominant antebellum era. For earlier works, esp. Peter H. Wood Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983). More recently, Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: the End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: the Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Scholars no longer can pretend that “Americans,” much less “plebeian” Americans, were all white at the outbreak of the Revolution, whether they were assembled in the Boston streets or South Carolina lowcountry.4. For a recent argument to this effect, Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Yet a substantive consideration of the meaning of these facts for the nation-state that was built in the Revolution is still missing. What was the impact of slavery on the political institutions whose creation was the triumph of the “fathers” of the founding generation? Aspects of the answer are well known: the removal of Jefferson's pathetic slavery clause (blaming Britain for American slavery) from the Declaration of Independence, the compromises that placed the three-fifths clause into the Constitution along with the fugitive slave and slave trade abolition clauses, the checkered career of the Northwest Ordinance as a ban on slavery in the territories, and the Haitian Revolution's reality-check on the libertarian enthusiasms of white Southerners.5. On these issues, in the order cited in the text, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996); Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 343–70, and Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: the Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1989): 21–51; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), and Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

In 1933, the U.S. Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). A cornerstone of the New Deal, the AAA offered government payment to farmers who cut production of basic crops such as wheat, cotton, and corn. Originally designed to lift agriculture out of the depths of the Great Depression, government farm programs evolved over the next several decades into a complex policy regime of price supports, acreage controls, and government loans.

In 1908, the Supreme Court struck down Section 10 of the Erdman Act of 1898 in the notorious case of Adair v. United States.1 Section 10 made it a misdemeanor for employers in the railroad industry to blacklist members of railroad unions or to require employees to sign “yellow-dog” contracts, that is, contracts promising that the employee would not join a labor union. The Court ruled that Section 10 was unconstitutional because it interfered with the “liberty of contract” allegedly protected by the United States Constitution.

In 1978, organized labor formally abandoned its longstanding commitment to public-sector solutions to achieve universal health care. Over the following fifteen years, it embraced private-sector solutions premised on a government mandate that would require employers to pay a portion of their employees health insurance premiums. In many respects, this about-face on the part of organized labor is neither remarkable nor puzzling. After all, labor's prior commitment to national health insurance1. The term national health insurance has many meanings. As used here, it refers to health-care reform proposals modeled on the Canadian experience in which the government replaces private insurance with its own public insurance system, thus eliminating the commercial health insurers. Commonly referred to as “single-payer” plans today, proposals for national health insurance can vary enormously on important details like financing, budgeting, taxation, and the role of individual states. had coexisted with its deep and abiding attachment to the private welfare state of job-based benefits dating back to the 1940s.2. Donna Allen, Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964); Joseph W. Garbarino, Health Plans and Collective Bargaining (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Raymond Munts, Bargaining for Health: Labor Unions, Health Insurance, and Medical Care (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Beth Stevens, “Labor Unions, Employee Benefits, and the Privatization of the American Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 233–60; and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, “Hospitals, Insurance, and the American Labor Movement: The Case of New York in the Postwar Decades,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 74–95. American labor unionists have tended to be strident pragmatists compared to their European counterparts, who have been more consistently animated by a larger social democratic vision. Furthermore, American unions have a long history of deferring to the Democratic party.3. Indeed, some analysts characterize labor's relationship with the Democratic party as a “barren marriage” or “abusive relationship.” Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 52; and Joel Rogers, “The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: Labor and Independent Politics,” in Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, ed. Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Boston: Mariner, 1997), 255. Arguably, labor's support for national health insurance had been primarily rhetorical since the early 1950s, when the industrial unions began to rely on collective bargaining to achieve health-care security for their members. Once President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) retreated from national health insurance in the face of the new anti-government, dereg- ulatory, deficit-conscious environment that emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s, one may conclude that labor “naturally” abandoned ship as well.