bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Periodization and Historiography: Studying American Political Development in the Progressive Era, 1890s–1916
Authors: Sklar Martin J.
Published: December 2008

In keeping with the social character of the advancement of knowledge, and in spite of a strong competitive impulse among scholars to magnify small differences into warring schools of thought, the leading historical writings in the past four decades have yielded substantial agreement on the identification of critical trends that were transforming United States society in the period of the 1890s to 1916. Implicitly, at least, they may well have been anticipating the way to resolving some latest of these small differences before they get too far out of hand, such as that between “social history” and “political history” and, in a variation upon the theme, that between “society-centered” (or “movement-centered” or “interest-centered”) and “state-centered” history. The common acknowledgment of critical trends has served newcomers and veterans alike, including partisans on either side of these differences, and historians in the various genres, in the selection of authoritative frameworks of continuing research into the period. In this respect, the historical discipline shares with other disciplines, including those in the physical sciences, attributes held to be common to a “normal science.”
Discussion with Steven Hahn
Authors: Sklar Martin J.
Published: December 2008

I wish to thank Steven Hahn for helping me to think more critically about some of my own ideas and those of others. The substantive questions that he raises will be subject matter for vital ongoing inquiry and thinking among interested scholars for some time to come. He has also raised some very important questions of method that provide the occasion to extend the discussion, briefly, in ways that readers may find of interest, as I do. In what follows, I confine myself to some of the questions of method.
Legitimating Slavery in the Old South: The Effect of Political Institutions on Ideology
Authors: Ellis Richard J.
Published: December 2008

“Hegemony” has become a fashionable catchword in a number of intellectual circles. One encounters it among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even (or, perhaps, especially) literary critics. Many a frustrated radical finds it a useful explanation for the quiescence of the masses. Marxist scholars frequently see it as a liberating departure from Marx's economic reductionism. More mainstream social scientists often detect little harm in it, since the notion that people are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas, seems highly congruent with what they have learned from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.
Political Incorporation and the Extrusion of the Left: Party Politics and Social Forces in New York City
Authors: Shefter Martin
Published: December 2008

The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.
The Supreme Court's ‘Return’ to Economic Regulation
Authors: Shapiro Martin
Published: December 2008

There is a standard historical lore of the Supreme Court's role in the economy and it runs as follows. The due process clause, like the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, was enacted after the Civil War to help blacks. The Supreme Court proceeded to empty the amendment of its protections for minorities and then, from the turn of the century on, used the due process clause to protect business from government regulation. It did so (1) by interpreting the word person in the amendment to include the corporation and (2) by finding that the clause not only for-bade the government from interfering with private property unless it followed fair procedures, but also forbade the government to do so unless it had a good, substantive reason. Substantive due process meant that no statute regulating property was constitutional unless it was reasonable, and the Court was the final arbiter of reasonableness. The Court's approach to reasonableness was that free market laissez-faire was the rule, and government regulation the exception.
Union Politics and Postwar Liberalism in the United States, 1946–1979
Authors: Orren Karen
Published: December 2008

It is evident now that the political structures built in the United States over the last half-century depended for their successful functioning on a set of international conditions that no longer exist. The government programs of the 1930s to protect labor organization, promote high agricultural prices, and provide cheap credit would have caused, had the gold standard not been defunct, massive gold outflows, worsening the already severe economic contraction. The postwar offspring of these programs have multiplied under conditions of international trade and finance that in effect permitted the export of excess economic demand. For the last decade, with international circumstances less obliging, the task of whittling government down or at least controlling its growth has vexed successive administrations.
The Early Nationalization of Political News In America
Authors: Kernell Samuel
Published: December 2008

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found Washington occupying a lowly position in the political life of the country. In a footnote, Democracy in America informs the European reader, “America has no great capital city where direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country.” Throughout the book, he expands on the effects of this decentralization. And we may fairly suspect that as much as any other, this observation led de Tocqueville to concentrate his inquiry on the performance of democracy in communities across the country.
The Burdens of Urban History: The Theory of the State in Recent American Social History
Authors: Mcdonald Terrence J.
Published: December 2008

Louis Hartz summed up the mission of his historical generation when he wrote, as part of the rationale forThe Liberal Traditionin 1955, that “the way to fully refute a man is to ignore him … and the only way you can do this is to substitute new fundamental categories for his own, so that you are simply pursuing a different path.” Hartz was referring to the influence of Charles Beard and what Hartz called the “frustration that the persistence of the Progressive analysis of America has inspired.” He was arguing that his generation had to stop honoring the progressives by contending with them; the key to destroying their interpretation of American history was the reinvention of American history by means of new conceptual tools.
“The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment
Authors: Katznelson Ira
Published: December 2008

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.
Reply to Professor Katznelson
Authors: Mcdonald Terrence J.
Published: December 2008

Professor Katznelson's essay deserves a lengthy reply, but space limitations require me to keep my response brief. I strongly disagree with the way that he has characterized the thrust of my essay, the point of my other work, and the implications of recent work by other urban historians. But rather than hash over these misinterpretations, I will focus instead on the issue between us that I think has the most relevance for future work on the role of urban politics in American political development: the utility of a focus on the urban political machine.
The New Institutionalism and Normative Theory: Reply to professor Barber
Authors: Smith Rogers M.
Published: December 2008

Nowhere in political science was the “behavioral revolution” of the fifties more pervasive than in public law. Normative debates on constitutional issues were left largely to lawyers or to the dwindling number of scholars in American political thought. Recently, as Professor Sotirios Barber observes, normative inquiries have undergone a resurgence in this section of the discipline, a resurgence within which the bulk of my ongoing work rests (quite impenitently). This resurgence has many sources, one of which is a wider recognition in contemporary political science that ideas can shape political conduct and that empirical inquiries find their ultimate justification in their contributions to normative reflection.
Political Jurisprudence, Public Law, and Post-Consequentialist Ethics: Comment on Professors Barber and Smith
Authors: Shapiro Martin
Published: December 2008

At Professional meetings of political scientists and in journals there have occurred discussions of the future of studies in the field of political science traditionally labeled public law. Now we have the further comments by Rogers Smith in theAmerican Political Science Reviewand Sotirios Barber in this volume ofStudies. The editors ofStudieshave asked me to join in the Smith-Barber dialogue.
The Wagner Act, Again: Politics and Labor, 1935–37
Authors: Plotke David
Published: December 2008

Why write about the Wagner Act again? There is no shortage of commentary, yet disagreement persists on basic questions: Why did the measure pass? Did the Wagner Act make any difference. If so, how?

Here I argue that the Wagner Act was passed by Progressive liberals inside and outside the government, in alliance with a mass labor movement. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) played a major positive role in the emergence of new industrial unions.
The Odyssey of the Juvenile Court: Policy Failure and Institutional Persistence in the Therapeutic State
Authors: Polsky Andrew J.
Published: December 2008

The human services have come to occupy a vital position in the modern welfare state, penetrating nearly all its activities and institutions. Beyond providing a minimum level of support, these services seek to restructure the behavior of their clients so they can better cope with the demands and challenges of modern life. To realize this goal social personnel employ an approach that can most accurately be defined as therapeutic: the situation of the client is viewed as a condition that must be diagnosed; the caseworker establishes a helping relationship; a suitable treatment plan is designed and implemented. Although the middle class voluntarily avails itself of therapeutic services, public intervention by social personnel has a distinctly lower-class bias and an authoritarian character. The middle class purchases therapeutic services from private providers. The state focuses on marginal populations and its subjects usually have no choice about assuming a client status.
The Logic and Legacy of Dred Scott: Marshall, Taney, and the Sublimation of Republican Thought
Authors: Meister Robert
Published: December 2008

The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.
Challenging Industrialization: The Rekindling of Agrarian Protest in a Modern Agriculture, 1977–1987
Authors: Browne William P.
Published: December 2008

This analysis explores why a farmers-led social movement mobilized against federal government policy in the late twentieth century. It also explores where that revolt may lead and whether it was different from previous farm protests. Was it, as populist rhetoric of the 1980s charged, a reflection of structural changes in farmers' own agricultural production systems? Or was it simply a case of farmers wanting more federal income support? The distinction is important because the answer determines producer commitment to the central agricultural development premises of U.S. public policy. Farmers always have promoted the agrarian value of hardworking independence. Yet they also have been caught, especially since midcentury, in a cycle of farm industrialization. Technical innovation and federal agricultural policy have combined to make industrialization unavoidable for individual farm operators who want to remain as full-time, commercial growers. Has there been a link between the dissenting politics of farm protest and industrialized agricultural change? This linkage is the subject of concern in the following pages. Why industrialization might well have caused policy dissent is examined first.
Executive Liberation: Review of Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Executive Power. New York: Free Press,1989. 358 + xxivpp.
Authors: Wolin Sheldon S.
Published: December 2008

Taming the Prince has a claim on our attention not only for its theoretical qualities and for its politics but because at one time both would have been considered extreme. As a theory it is possibly the first attempt to compose a philosophical discourse about a singular political office, variously named kingship, prince, executive, or president, and to situate it within the con-text of (what used to be confidently called) “the history of political philosophy.” Mansfield's treatise is distinctive, not as a history of an idea or of a concept, indeed not historical in the usual understanding of that term, but as the passionate assertion of an expansive conception of the executive, virtually Gaullist in its grandeur, in its contempt for interest-politics, its dismissive silence about parties, and its scorn for democracy.
Executive Power and the Passion for Virtue
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C.
Published: December 2008

To be taken seriously is the hope of a serious author, next to which being agreed with is a petty affair. If this sentiment sounds inhuman, and too good to be true, it is because it abstracts from the desire for recognition, which can take the form of desire for political power. Sheldon Wolin takes my bookTaming the Prince1seriously as—as if it were!—an important political influence. He flatters the all-too-human side of my soul by fastening on the book's conclusion and working backwards from that.
Economic Visions and Political Strategies: American Labor and the State,1865–1896
Authors: Hattam Victoria
Published: December 2008

After the Civil War, a new wave of workers' protest swept the country as trade lunions, third parties, eight-hour leagues, and a host of other reform associations sprang up in many cities and towns. For the three decades following the war, no one organization was hegemonic. Instead, there was a proliferation of associations, often advocating quite different programs of labor reform. Accounts of the more prominent organizations such as the Knights of Labor (KOL,) Populists, and American Federation of Labor (AFL) are well known. These institutions, however, represented only the tip of the iceberg and were surrounded by more obscure associations such as the Workingmen's Union, the Workingmen's Assembly, the Workingmen's Convention, the Union Labor party, and the United Labor party, to name only a few. Several attempts were made to unite these disparate associations into a single front, but the efforts were largely unsuccessful and often had difficulty surviving for more than a year. The Junior Sons of '76, the National Labor Union, and the United Labor party each disbanded as participants failed to agree on a common platform of postwar reform.
Constituting Corporations and Markets: Railroads in Gilded Age Politics
Authors: Berk Gerald
Published: December 2008

In 1884, a committee of dissenting bondholders for the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway entered a federal district court in Illinois to complain that St. Louis Federal Judge David Brewer had, at the request of the notorious robber baron, Jay Gould, thrown the road into receivership prior to default. Judge Walter Gresham (whom the Populists would try to recruit for their 1892 presidential candidate) listened sympathetically and put the eastern division of the road into a separate receivership. For the time being, a key link, in Gould's national system was broken in two. Soon, however, the courts and bondholders capitulated, and Gould succeeded, at the expense of the sanctity of property and contract, in revolutionizing the corporate doctrine of receiverships to assimilate huge national systems.
Bringing the Bosses Back in: The Irish Political Machines and Urban Policy Making
Authors: Erie Steven P.
Published: December 2008

Recently historians have ventured a multifaceted critique of boss rule, suggesting that the very existence of the political machine has been exaggerated, that machines did not materially affect patterns of political mobilization, had only a limited role in the making of public policy, and (contrary to pluralist theory) did little to improve the welfare of the ethnic working class. For these revisionists the boss was really a bit player in the era when he allegedly held center stage. As Terrence McDonald argued the case in the last installment of this annual, “ethnicity, patronage, and the machine” represent unduly narrow ways of viewing urban political development. According to Jon Teaford and David Thelan, urban political history needs to replace the party boss and his ethnic clientele with interest groups—business, labor, taxpayers, and consumers of municipal services—and their impact on local policies concerning economic development, taxation, and service delivery. In their view, the study of public policy making must take precedence over the allocation of party patronage.
“Policy Feedbacks” and Political Change: Contrasting Reagan and Thatcher's Pension-Reform Initiatives
Authors: Pierson Paul
Published: December 2008

For those interested in understanding the role of government in modern life, important public policies have long been objects of close scrutiny. Traditionally, however, policies were treated only as outcomes that needed to be explained. More recently, there has been growing interest in the political consequences of policy development. Policies are no longer seen simply as effects, with attention focused on why these policies emerged. Policies have important repercussions as well: once adopted, they restructure the political and social environment that produced them.
The Shaping of a Virtuous Citizenry: Educational Reform in Massachusetts, 1830–1860
Authors: Emirbayer Mustafa
Published: December 2008

In his “Ninth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education” (1846), the Secretary of the Board, Horace Mann, discussed the teaching of moral and civic virtues inside the classrooms of American public schools. “The question now arises,” he declared, “and it is a question on which the worth or worthlessness of our free institutions is suspended—whether [our schools] be put in requisition to impart a higher moral tone to the public mind; to enthrone the great ideas of justice, truth, benevolence, and reverence in the breasts of the people.” For Mann, of course, the answer was self-evident: it was the special task of public schooling to carry out “a revolution…down among the primordial elements of human character” itself. “[E]very fibre in the nation,” he declared, “should be strained to the endeavor…. It is the mission of our age to carry this cause one step further… in its progress of development.”
Analyzing the Development of Education in America
Authors: Dougherty Kevin J.
Published: December 2008

Social scientists have long been interested in the development of education. Mustafa Emirbayer and Clyde Barrow, whose essays appear in this volume, have many illustrious predecessors including political scientists Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir; economists Max Weber, Albert Fishlow, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, and Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin; and sociologists Emile Durkheim, John Meyer, Martin Trow, Randall Collins, Joseph Ben David, Julia Wrigley, and Margaret Archer.
Rejoinder
Authors: Emirbayer Mustafa
Published: December 2008

It is quite true, as Kevin Dougherty points out, that “we need a theoretical perspective [in the study of American educational history] that synthesizes the various theories of social conflict and social integration,” and that incorporates as well the insights of state- or policy-centered analysis. Such a perspective, indeed, is explicitly and deliberately what I elaborate in the above essay.
The Making of an American House of Lords: The U.S. Senate in the Constitutional Convention of 1787
Authors: Swift Elaine K.
Published: December 2008

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution saw the Senate as their paramount creation. To James Madison, it was “the great anchor of the government,” and in his seminal plans for a new national government, the Senate figured as the most prominent and powerful institution, to be endowed with a potent combination of legislative, executive, and judicial prerogatives that were greater and more wide-ranging than those of either the House or the president. In the four months that the Framers met in Philadelphia, they spent more time and energy deliberating on the Senate than on any other single institution or issue, devoting most of the first seven critical weeks to the upper house, and thereafter, though more scattered, the equivalent of another week or two of consideration. In contrast, they focused on the House, executive, and federal judiciary for a few weeks each at most, and spent even less time on such vital issues as sectionalism and slavery. By the end of the Convention, the Framers had created an imposing chamber, possessing far more power and autonomy than any other upper house heretofore created in independent America. Small wonder, then, that in assessing the work of the Convention, the influential delegate from Connecticut, Roger Sherman, pronounced it “the most important branch in the government.” Smaller wonder still that the Framers would comprise over half the membership of the first Senate.
Identity and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States
Authors: Herrigel Gary
Published: December 2008

The aim of this research note is to begin to develop the idea that trade unions are historically constructed as much through considerations of social identity as they are through calculations of economic self-interest, market power, or functional adaptation in the face of changes in the division of labor. By social identity, I mean the desire for group distinction, dignity, and place within historically specific discourses (or frames of understanding) about the character, structure, and boundaries of the polity and the economy. Institutions such as trade unions, in other words, are constituted through and by particular understandings of the structure of the social and political worlds of which they are part. In making this argument, it should be immediately said that I in no way intend to claim that trade unions are only to be understood through the lens of identity or that they do not engage in strategic calculation either in labor markets or in the broader political economy. The point is that action along the latter lines presupposes some kind of commitment on, and even resolution of, issues concerning the former. The discussion below focuses on the emergence of trade union movements in the United States and Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It Attempts first to develope the two cases as constituting a paradox and then, second, explains the paradox with an argument about identity.
Federalism and the Demise of Prescriptive Racism in the United States
Authors: Young Richard P. , Burstein Jerome S.
Published: December 2008

Not so long ago, nearly all African-Americans living in the United States were subject to a multitude of racial restrictions officially prescribed and enforced by state governments and their local subsidiaries. Most of the Jim Crow system dated from 1890–1910. By the middle of the twentieth century, this system was well established, so much so that many people assumed that it had always existed and that it expressed the timeless folkways of the South. However, in what strikes the historian as an astonishingly brief period during the 1950s and 1960s, the edifice was largely torn down. The puzzle is this: How could any institutional apparatus so deeply embedded, long-standing, and apparently strong be toppled so quickly? Although many scholars have discussed aspects of the puzzle, no one has offered a simple, clear, and compelling explanation. We aim to do so in this essay.
Reconstructing the Federal Judiciary: The Chase Impeachment and the Constitution
Authors: Whittington Keith E.
Published: December 2008

Only the United States supreme court justice has ever been impeached. In January 1804, the House of Representatives began a formal inquiry into the official conduct of Associate Justice Samuel Chase and approved eight articles of impeachment in November of that same year. The Senate held a trial of the justice in February 1805, which concluded with his acquittal on March 1. On the final article of impeachment, Chase escaped removal by four votes.
State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal
Authors: Brown Michael K.
Published: December 2008

In what sense were the 1940s a turning point for the postwar development of the American state? This is an odd question since the decade is not usually considered a moment of lasting political transformation, as were the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, it is more characteristically rendered as a period of political stalemate, memorably captured by Samuel Lubell's description of Harry Truman as “The Man Who Bought Time.” Yet the choices of the 1940s have been recently characterized by Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski as far more significant than hitherto understood. Out of the conflict and debate over the New Deal emerge, they argue, a rather “crisp choice … about the character of the national state,” one that decided between alternative models of state-economy relationships.
On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American state
Authors: Katznelson Ira , Pietrykowski Bruce
Published: December 2008

“Rebuilding the American State” was written in the manner of abozzetto: it is a sketch drawn to reshape interlocking analytical and historiographical conversations and to suggest pathways joining the era of Roosevelt to the qualities and conundrums of postwar Democratic party liberalism. We underscored the key role of what might be called the long 1940s, stretching from the economic and political crisis faced by the New Deal in 1937–38 to the election in 1952 of the first Republican president since Hoover. We claimed that institutional and policy decisions taken across a number of domains in this period coherently recast the state and, in so doing, the contours and possibilities of American politics. We argued as well that old and new institutionalist approaches to state capacity have shared an unfortunate propensity to inventory organizational resources without regard to the normative and practical policy visions that define the content of what it is the state actually is meant to accomplish. In this light, simple dichotomous distinctions between weak and strong states appear as too blunt to sharply etch our understanding of the past half-century of American political development.
On Evidence and Interpretation: Reply to Katznelson and Pietrykowski
Authors: Brown Michael K.
Published: December 2008

In my essay I questioned two premises of Ira Katznelson's and Bruce Pietrykowski's interpretation of the failure of the Third New Deal: whether conflict over the New Deal during the 1940s can be understood as a debate over the developmental and fiscalist modes of state-economy relations; and whether an approach rooted in the analysis of bureaucratic missions and functions is a useful way to get at this question or, more generally, the broader issue of how to link state capacity with political choice. My own assessment of the evidence led me to reject their interpretation of the failure of the Third New Deal and to advance an alternative way of thinking about the question of state capacity and political choice. Now, in their very interesting rejoinder, Katznelson and Pietrykowski have raised some important issues that help clarify our differences and show what is at stake in this discussion. I should like to respond briefly to their comments and clarify my own views.
State Formation and the Decline of Political Parties: American Parties in the Fiscal State
Authors: Coleman John J.
Published: December 2008

The shifting salience of political parties is a central issue in American political development. From the debates over colonial “parties” to debates over the relevance of realignment theory in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have attempted to assess the impact of political parties on political development. One topic that has provoked particularly extensive debate is the status of parties since World War II. Scholars point to confidence gaps, realignment, and institutional displacement, among other factors, to explain the postwar decline of political parties. But there are problems: Analytical frameworks explaining decline cannot account for recent signs of party resurgence; frameworks explaining resurgence typically account for little of the decline. Those focused on one aspect of the party system (e.g., parties in Congress) rarely offer insights on other aspects (e.g., parties in the electorate). What is needed is an approach that places parties within their structural settings. If these settings change, parties may change.
Beyond Progressivism: Charles A. Beard's Social Democratic Theory of American Political Development
Authors: Barrow Clyde W.
Published: December 2008

In one of his last published works, Vernon Louis Parrington authored the introduction to a book entitledThe Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government. In it he endorsed the book's claim that ratification of the U.S. Constitution had been accompanied by “bitter class divisions.” In Parrington's view, the struggle for ratification was accurately described as both a political “clash between aristocracy and democracy” and an economic class struggle “between the greater landed and financial interests and the agrarian interests” of the new republic. He concurred with the author that “the two [struggles] in reality were one.” Hence, he suggested, relative to this historical context, the Constitution should be regarded as “a deliberate and well considered protective measure designed by able men who represented the aristocracy and wealth of America; a class instrument directed against the democracy.”
“Direct Democracy” and Social Justice: The Progressive Party Campaign of 1912
Authors: Milkis Sidney M. , Tichenor Daniel J.
Published: December 2008

During the 1992 presidential contest, the press and pundits alike characterized the challenge posed by H. Ross Perot and the political organization he created, United We Stand America, as the most significant assault on the two-party system since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Campaign. In one sense, this comparison is more penetrating than these observers imagined, for the impressive showing of Perot was emblematic of the candidate-centered, plebiscitary electoral politics that Roosevelt and the Progressive party championed in 1912. Given that Perot ran without partisan attachments and refused to cede authority to the rank and file of a new reform movement, however, the allusion has proven to be as ephemeral as the public opinion polls it relies on. The Progressive party was born during the 1912 election as more than an aegis for Roosevelt's ample desire for power; it embodied the aspirations of reformers whose quest for a vehicle of political, social, and industrial transformation was at least a dozen years old.
Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns: Hardrock Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy on United States Public Lands, 1870–1985
Authors: Klyza Christopher McGrory
Published: December 2008

From the mid–1800s through the mid–1980s, the federal government initiated programs to manage three types of resources on the lands that it controlled. The discovery of gold in California and elsewhere in the West prompted the first government policy in the 1860s. Debate over the nation's forests began in the 1870s, and a system of national forests to be managed by a federal Forest Service was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And in the 1930s, the government finally began to manage the lands no one wanted, its grazing lands. The federal government continues to be an active manager of national resources. Indeed, with control of nearly 30 percent of the nation's land, it is the largest land manager in the country.
Three Models of Secular Constitutional Development: India, Israel, and the United States
Authors: Jacobsohn Gary Jeffrey
Published: December 2008

As a subject for serious investigation, constitutionalism in faraway places seems finally to have come of age. To appropriate the famous metaphor from the First Amendment arena that is the concern of this paper, it is as if, until relatively recently, a “wall of separation” had shielded both scholarly and judicial analysis of American constitutional issues from the experience of other polities. As a result, too often constitutional inquiry has been denied the illumination and insights of comparative research. My specific aim in this article is to explore the concept and practice of the secular constitution within three nations that are committed, albeit in different ways, to the principle of religious liberty.
The Lincoln Propositions and the Spirit of Secession
Authors: Abbott Philip
Published: December 2008

Whether secession movements in Europe draw support from the disintegration of the Soviet Union into multiple units based on separate national identities or whether there are also independent centrifugal forces, the “right to secession” has emerged as a pressing question of democratic theory, one which is intertwined in complex ways with the current debate over the foundations of modern democratic society. This essay seeks to clarify the issue of right to secession through a critical examination of a single modern statesman: Abraham Lincoln.
Race Policy, Race Violence, and Race Reform in the U.S. Army During World War II
Authors: Kryder Daniel
Published: December 2008

No ceremonies marked the fiftieth anniversary of the wartime riots in New York, Los Angeles, Beaumont, Detroit, and Mobile. American political culture, if not recent historical analysis, continues to associate “the Good War” with national unity rather than unrest. But race tension was palpable to contemporaries. For example, ten months prior to Pearl Harbor and six months before a deadly shoot-out between black soldiers and white military policemen occurred in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that town had already earned the nickname “Uncle Sam's Powder Keg.” Less than ten miles from the city lay Fort Bragg, the nation's largest army camp, and visitors sensed a “seething undercurrent” of race friction coursing through the camp and the city. Thousands of black artillery trainees visited the downtown area each week, drinking and milling about in the streets. Because very few establishments welcomed their business, there was little else for them to do. A cab driver, asked about the city's hostile mood, replied that “the trouble is not ‘Is there trouble,’ but ‘What kind of trouble is it going to be and when is it going to pop?’” Similar questions animate this research, which explores the relationship between the Second World War mobilization and War Department practices and policies, on the one hand, and racial confrontations and violence involving soldiers, on the other.
Why Did the Whigs Die (and Why Didn't the Democrats)?: Evidence from National Nominating Conventions
Authors: Reiter Howard L
Published: December 2008

Institutional survival can be a concern for any organization, but for long-standing and well-established institutions such as major political parties survival is usually taken for granted. When a party suffers crushing defeat in a national election, alarmist journalists may attract attention with head-lines suggesting its imminent demise, but not since the Civil War has the viability of the Democrats and Republicans been seriously in question. Therefore, the conditions under which a major party maintains itself has not been a focus of scholarship regarding American political parties.
The Early American Origins of Entitlements
Authors: Jensen Laura S.
Published: December 2008

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called “entitlements.” From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the “health security” proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an “end to welfare as we know it.” Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that “welfare” reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.
The Endurance of New Deal Liberalism
Authors: Plotke David
Published: December 2008

The increase in writing by political historians and political scientists about the United States in the 1940s registers concerns aboutorigins– after some major endings, notably of Democratic political predominance and the Cold War. That decade also saw the beginning of serious national efforts at reform in racial politics.
State Resistance to Authority in Federal Unions: The Early United States (1790–1860) and the European Community (1958–94)
Authors: Goldstein Leslie Friedman
Published: December 2008

These quotes point to a puzzle, the puzzle with which this study begins: Within the past forty years, national member-states not only accepted the interpretive authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as the supreme decision maker for conflicts between member-state authority and central federal authority of the European Community (since 1994, the European Union) but also accepted this court's dictates that the treaties forming the community had constitutional status as supreme law in every member state and that European-level law had higher law status within every member state, superseding any national law to the contrary. Indeed, European member-state acceptance of this development advanced much more rapidly than state acceptance of the U.S. Supreme Court in its first several decades. Yet this pattern of respective acceptance of central federal authority runs counter to prevailing understandings of sovereignty.
The Collapse of Constitutional Originalism and the Rise of the Notion of the “Living Constitution” in the Course of American State-Building
Authors: Gillman Howard
Published: December 2008

In constitutional studies, the topic of “original intent” is typically treated as a debate within normative constitutional theory about the most appropriate way for interpreters to orient themselves to the text of the Constitution. The central question is whether American constitutionalism, properly understood, obligates interpreters to base decisions on what the framers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution or whether it obligates interpreters to adapt general constitutional principles to changing circumstances or more enlightened sensibilities. Originalism views interpretation as a matter of decoding a set of specific instructions but runs the risk that our institutional arrangements and conceptions of justice will be inappropriately tied to the antiquated experiences and prejudices of generations long gone – what Corwin referred to as “rotting structures” or “discarded” and “unworkable” theories. Non-originalism, or some notion of the “living Constitution,” encourages judges to keep the Constitution relevant for contemporary concerns and purposes but runs the risk that this will lead them to enforce a version of the fundamental law that was never formally authorized by the people.
Women, Policy, and Party, 1920–1970: A Rational Choice Approach
Authors: Harvey Anna L.
Published: December 2008

The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the success rate of U.S. women's organizations pursuing congressional support of legislation designed to remove barriers to the progress of women in economic, political, and social arenas. While women's organizations, including both older organizations such as the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (NFBPWC) and newer organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), had lobbied Congress before 1970, that year saw their first major lobbying success. House passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 was followed in 1972 by full congressional passage of the ERA and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act (prohibiting sex discrimination in education), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Women's Educational Equity Act in 1974, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the (unprecedented) congressional extension of the ratification period for the ERA in 1978, as well as a host of measures prohibiting sex discrimination in federal programs. The legislative success of women's organizations has continued, albeit with some fits and starts, into the 1980s and 1990s with pension equity reform, child support enforcement legislation, child care subsidies, and parental leave legislation as important examples. As documented by numerous scholars, in all these cases women's organizations provided the primary lobbying support for the successful legislation.
Law, Rights, and Local Labor Politics in California, 1901–1911: Reflections on Recent Labor Law Historiography
Authors: Clark Thomas
Published: December 2008

In a 1987 essay on labor and the American constitutional order, Leon Fink observed that, in “American labor history the law has yet to be fully explored.” Fink's observation is less true today than when he made it some ten years ago; indeed, even as the essay appeared, a number of historians, legal scholars, and political scientists were already beginning to construct new interpretations of American labor history by focusing on the complex and often decisive impact of the law and legal discourse on labor strategy, politics, and ideology. Although Fink's wide-ranging essay surveyed labor's encounters with the Constitution from the antebellum period to the post-World War II era, he concentrated on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which organized labor moved away from a broad politics of reform toward a more conservative, apolitical trade unionism. Fink notes that it was during this period of “‘exceptionalist’ drift” – when the developmental trajectory of the American labor movement be gan to diverge from its European counterparts – that “legal issues took on their most determining historical role.”
Southern Leviathan: The Development of Central State Authority in the Confederate States of America
Authors: Bensel Richard
Published: December 2008

War has probably been the single most important influence on the development of central state authority in the United States. Although the state-centered mobilization of economic resources and manpower that accompanies military conflict is commonly conceded to have had this effect throughout American history, the centralizing influence of the Civil War on the southern Confederate government has not been accorded the precedent-setting importance it deserves. The consolidation of economic and social controls within the central government of the Confederacy was in fact so extensive that it calls into question standard interpretations of southern opposition to the expansion of federal power in both the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods. Southern reluctance to expand federal power in those periods has been attributed variously to regional sympathy for laissez-faire principles, the “precapitalist” cultural origins of the plantation elite, and a general philosophical orientation hostile to state development.
Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB
Authors: Moe Terry M.
Published: December 2008

The claim that institutions “matter” is a subject of lively debate in the study of politics today. It is also something of a nonissue that is not really being debated at all. The reason it can be both at once is that the claim is loaded with theoretical baggage. If it is taken to mean that the actions of politicians or bureaucrats are in fundamental respects autonomous of social interests, the statement can easily prove controversial. If it is taken to mean that institutional context shapes the decisions of political actors, or that the relation between social interests and political outcomes varies with the institutional setting, then there is not much to debate; for there has long been a virtual consensus among students of politics that institutions do matter in these general respects.
Organized Labor and the Invention of Modern Liberalism in the United States
Authors: Orren Karen
Published: December 2008

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.