Partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of contemporary American politics. This was not always the case; for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, social issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights played no role in politics. Where and when did the partisan divide begin? Did the initiative come from state or national parties? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? We have constructed an original database of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1960 to 2018. These platforms allow us to trace position-taking on these issues and generate estimates of platform ideology. By the time national parties took positions, we show, they lagged state-level position-taking. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we show that state party system polarization did not occur around any critical moment but rather was incremental.

The Social Security Act of 1935 and its 1939 amendments included federal programs for maternal and infant welfare, child welfare services, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Inclusion of these programs is largely owing to women reformers’ long advocacy for public assistance to families in need. The Social Security Act nationalized aspects of the program championed by the Children’s Bureau, itself a product of women’s civic organization and institution building. These advances laid the ground for crucial components of the contemporary American welfare state, which included surveillance and intrusion into the lives of ADC families and the perpetuation of a system of subnational administration that reproduced racial inequality. Yet critics of these female reformers have not fully considered the institutional constraints they faced and the policy transformations they did not control. This article considers the policy achievement of maternalists in terms of its policy failures by considering the bureaucratic struggles of female reformers once they reached access to federal policymaking, culminating in the Committee on Economic Security that led to the Social Security Act. We consider the strategies from a place of both access and marginalization as they jockeyed for bureaucratic territory with others with different claims to expertise.

The American state was a republic of patrons and clients throughout the Long Nineteenth Century. Unequal ties of hierarchy and reciprocity went far beyond the partisan administration and electioneering that we associate with the spoils system. As a form of “belated feudalism,” clientelism proved resilient because it was a familial property relation embedded within a diverse and changing society. Officeholding politics subsumed a host of racialized and gendered dependents—White men of lower status, women, children, and the enslaved—into the penumbra of the state, which itself was governed via the extended party household. What elements of patron–client relations endured or changed from the colonial inheritance until the New Deal? This article reinterprets the republic’s classical age, first, by exploring the origins of party patrimonialism, and then, by examining the dynamics of officeholding political economy and the rise of markets for patronage. Political rule before the New Deal had a different orientation. Clientelism fused older lineages of dependence with the kind of profit-seeking exchanges typical of the burgeoning capitalist economy. It was this mixed state, at once patrimonial and capitalist, that proved so difficult to reform at the turn of the twentieth century.

This study charts Bayard Rustin’s contentious career as a biographical subject, from 1987 to 2013. Interpreting biographies of Rustin as “ethically constitutive stories,” I argue that shifting accounts of his life-history address public debates over issue definition and political conduct in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. At stake in rival portrayals of Rustin, then, is not just memory of him but the very idea of civil rights, including how and by whom such rights were—and ought to be—pursued. The article examines the production and reception of two distinct waves of biographical representation, with close attention to how each narrates the pursuit and proper locus of civil rights. I end with notes toward an alternate rendering of Bayard Rustin. Instead of recovering his singular authority vis-à-vis the Civil Rights Movement, the concluding “story” reckons with the manifold history of black politics by reappraising the specificity of “black and gay” peoplehood.

This article tracks the buildup of the South Carolina criminal legal system between 1867 and 1899 through three eras of its state penitentiary: from the politics of reform to convict leasing to the prison plantation. To track the delayed emergence and unusual trajectory of South Carolina’s criminal legal system, I argue that two approaches became entangled after the Civil War: On the one hand, a modern, nationalized politics of reform, and on the other, a decidedly Southern vision of crime and punishment haunted by the afterlife of slavery. It was the tension between—and variegated blending of—these two approaches that yielded a hybrid carceral project and set the trajectory for the state’s criminal legal system as it entered the twentieth century.