When people think of the origins of American social policy, they usually think of the 1935 Social Security Act, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's second New Deal. That legislation created both old-age insurance, now commonly known as social security, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), recently known as welfare. Though central to today's social policy, these programs were somewhat marginal to New Deal social policy because they dealt with special categories of “unemployable” citizens. The key concern of New Deal social policymakers was instead with those deemed “employable,” and their problems were addressed mainly by another and much less studied program from the second New Deal: the “Works Program” operated mainly by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The lack of attention to the WPA has had important consequences for understandings of American social policy.

Government-sponsored health insurance is a central pillar of the modern welfare state. In advanced industrial democracies, public spending on medical care accounts for an average of 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), making it the largest category of social spending after public pensions.Computed from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Reform of Health Care Systems: A Review of Seventeen OECD Countries (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1994), 38. The comparison with pensions is made by Karl Hinrichs, “The Impact of German Health Insurance Reforms on Redistribution and the Culture of Solidarity,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1996): 653–87. Despite the popularity and resilience of established health programs, however, the introduction of government-sponsored health coverage has been highly controversial everywhere. Few social programs involve the state so directly in the workings of the economy and the practice of a powerful profession. Few entangle the interests of so many diverse and resourceful groups. And few cast in such stark relief the ideological principles at stake. Although the participants in conflicts over health policy have differed from nation to nation, no country has acquired national health insurance without a fierce and bitter political fight.

In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office. For helpful comments, we would like to thank Shana Bass, Michael Brown, Scott James, David Mayhew, Corey Robin, Joel Silbey, Pam Singh, Stephen Skowronek, Tom Sugrue, Rick Valelly, and the anonymous reviewers for Studies in American Political Development. Unlike the administration of his party's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon's presidency would ultimately display a willingness to aggressively confront the then-dominant New Deal order of the Democratic party and, in the process, attempt to forge a new electoral majority. In many ways, Nixon's efforts were shaped by historical and institutional circumstances. The civil rights movement of the early 1960s had successfully pushed Democratic party leaders to take legislative action against racial discrimination in the southern United States, effectively shattering their party's century- old alliance with white segregationists in the region. Meanwhile, efforts by the Supreme Court and Democratic legislators to provide substantive civil rights in areas of the country outside of the South strained their party's relationship with urban and blue-collar white-ethnic voters.See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8; and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Nixon courted these disaffected Democrats in the 1968 campaign through both the “Southern Strategy” and appeals to the so-called “Silent Majority,” a symbolic reference meant to contrast his supporters from the civil rights activists “blamed” for disrupting more traditional ways of life.

Modern state building entails not just the expansion but the transformation of national bureaucratic organizations. Whether in late-modern social revolutions, in the rationalization of industrial states in the late nineteenth century, or in the construction of a national state in America, bureaucratic transformation often involves changes in organizational authority patterns and culture.Wilson's remark is taken from the Annual Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1912: xiv. Reese's remark appears in a letter of Reese, A. G. Rice, Alexander G. Hudson, and F. C. Lucas, to Secretary David F. Houston, June 23, 1916; National Archives, Record Group 16, General Correspondence of the Secretary of Agriculture, Category “Employee Clubs,” College Park, Maryland. Young's speech was given to the Second Annual Banquet of the officers and clerks of the Railway Mail Service centering at St. Louis, on Nov. 18, 1904, (reprinted in Railway Post Office, official magazine of the Railway Mail Association, Jan. 1905, 9, emphasis added). Specifically, many narratives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century state construction suggest that a centralization of authority within the bureaucratic state occurred even as state bureaucracies specialized and as the tasks, “roles” and guiding cultures of civil servants were altered. The centrality of state transformation to late-modern revolutions is defended by Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Stephen Skowronek discusses the importance of organizational transformation in state building in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877– 1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Bernard Silberman argues in Cages of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) that the rise of “the rational state” in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain was typified by the transformation of the administrative role. Recognizing that the Weberian process of bureaucratic rationalization occurs when state bureaucracies assume novel tasks and programmatic complexity (19–24), Silberman suggests that a fundamental change in the orientation of bureaucratic roles occurs during this process. In the case of France and Japan, bureaucracies were characterized by an organizational orientation (a “firm-specific” role entailing organizational control of knowledge and organization- specific loyalties), whereas in the United States and Great Britain, they were characterized by a professional orientation (involving individual control of knowledge and professional ethics). Centralization, specialization and cultural change accompanied one another.

A quarter-century has passed since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. In recognition of the intense debates that continue to surround the question of abortion rights, the editors present the following forum, based on Eileen McDonagh's recent book, Breaking the Abortion Deadlock, published by Oxford University Press. The discussion was first presented at the 1997 Meetings of the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., on a panel moderated by Sue Davis, University of Delaware.