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.

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.

The battle over abortion in America is seemingly endless. The longstanding nature of the conflict is due in part to the ability of both the “pro-choice” or abortion rights movement and the “pro-life” or antiabortion countermovement to continue to organize support for many years. The pro-choice movement is particularly remarkable in that it has not only survived for more than twenty-five years, but it has grown stronger since achieving its greatest victory, legalization of abortion in 1973.

In 1965 abortion was illegal in every state in America except when the woman's life was endangered. Eight years later, in its decision in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that a woman's decision to have an early elective abortion was constitutionally protected.

It is difficult to imagine two fields of scholarly inquiry with so much in common and yet so little interaction as diplomatic and policy history. Policy, policy process, policymakers, policy origins, policy intentions, policy consequences—those terms and ones of a similar stripe roll just as easily off the tongues and word processors of diplomatic historians as of self-described policy historians. Moreover, the questions asked and the methods employed by the two groups of scholars bear a striking resemblance. Both fields focus perforce on the state and state-centered actors, concern themselves with elite-level decision making, interrogate fundamental issues of power within societies, and concentrate overwhelmingly on the twentieth century to the relative neglect of earlier periods. Each field occupies as well an embattled position within the larger historical profession, where social and cultural history have predominated since the 1960s.

In most accounts, the modern American “tax revolt” begins with Proposition 13, passed by California voters in June 1978. In this telling, the revolt represents an antigovernment, antiliberal shift among white homeowners instrumental in the “rise of the right” and the fall of the “New Deal order” that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and his subsequent tax cuts. This article challenges that account by demonstrating that the revolt began more than a decade before Prop 13 as approval rates for local levies and bonds reached all-time lows. This local revolt was not limited to whites, nor did it portend rising conservatism. Instead, it was rooted in lower- and middle-income Americans’ frustrations with steep rises in unfair, regressive taxes during the post–World War II decades. The Kennedy-Johnson “Growth Liberals,” who were busy cutting progressive federal taxes at the same time that regressive state and local taxes were soaring, missed this pocketbook squeeze, thereby setting the stage for later events like Prop 13.

On the evening of 21 November 1918, more than one hundred people gathered at Sullivan's Hall in Denver, Colorado, to celebrate voters’ recent approval of the Act for the Relief of the Adult Blind, a statewide initiative commonly referred to as blind benefits or blind pensions or blind aid. The new law guaranteed up to $300 annually in cash relief for each impoverished blind resident. The evening's entertainment included piano, violin, and vocal solos and duets as well as readings of poetry and literature. While people listened, they enjoyed a simple assortment of sandwiches, pies, and doughnuts. The electoral victory capped years of hard work by a small group of dedicated activists, most of whom were themselves blind. One leader of the local blind community, Mrs. Jennie Jackson, addressed the gathering to thank those who had helped to secure the initiative's approval and to proclaim joyously that “the adoption of this bill will be a great benefit to many of the blind of this state.”

The adoption of Proposition 13 in 1978 sent shock waves throughout the American polity. California's attack on property taxes was not the first fiscal limitation adopted in the 1970s, but it carried clear national implications that the earlier measures lacked. By successfully challenging the political establishment, the initiative drive in the Golden State energized campaigns elsewhere to restrict taxes. The echo of Proposition 13 reverberated in Massachusetts, whose voters approved a cap on property taxes (Proposition 2 ½) in 1980. Citizens on the nation's two coasts had signaled thumbs down on fiscal affairs in their states.

The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.

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.

During the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Mexican American civil rights went from being an addendum to civil rights for African Americans to a stand-alone policy with a bureaucracy, federal programs, and an independent rationale. Ever since President Harry Truman accepted civil rights in the Democratic platform in 1948, federal policymakers and politicians tried to fit Mexican Americans, and other minority groups, into the civil rights mold they had carved out for blacks in the South. While subject to severe discrimination and disadvantage, Mexican Americans did not face the consistent statutory segregation and discrimination faced by blacks. Federal civil rights policy for Mexican Americans through the mid-1960s consisted of New Frontier and Great Society funding programs to which Mexican American organizations could apply for money to develop and carry out projects in their communities. By the end of Richard Nixon's first term, a federal bilingual education program was established, agencies and committees existed whose sole function was to coordinate Mexican American programs, and Mexican Americans were recognized by policymakers as a distinct minority group with unique needs that required particular federal remedies.

At the end of Turbulent Years, his classic study of the labor upheavals of the 1930s, Irving Bernstein unexpectedly announces that the American Federation of Labor “gained a decisive and permanent victory.” This is a remarkable admission. Bernstein had devoted the bulk of his study to the failures of the AFL and the emergence of a more relevant alternative, the CIO. Like most authors, he associated the turbulence of the 1930s with the rise of industrial unionism, which addressed the apparent deficiencies of the AFL, notably its preoccupation with skilled workers and neglect of large-scale manufacturing. Still, the AFL grew more rapidly. Bernstein tries to explain: the triumph of the AFL “was hidden by the mystique of power [John L] Lewis had imparted to the CIO, by the highly publicized contemporary successes of SWOC…and UAW…and the deliberate falsification of membership records.” While these factors may account for the misleading imagery of the CIO, they do not explain the behavior of millions of workers who opted for AFL organizations. Clearly other forces were at work.