Hollywood. The name was magical. The lure was overwhelming. Generations of Americans spent untold hours in darkened theaters captivated by this fantasy world. Girls swooned over the latest Hollywood heartthrob while boys dreamed about a life of adventure and glory. As their pioneer ancestors before them, thousands trekked westward to Hollywood in search of fame. Most were rejected, but a lucky few were “discovered” and became “stars”—the royalty of the twentieth century.

In 1927, the biennial report of the State Board of Charities and Corrections of the Commonwealth of Kentucky warned that “the feeble-minded of the colored race present a greater menace than do the white.…We do desire to point out the utter lack of any provision for colored feeble-minded.” In spite of this admonition, southern states took little notice of their black feebleminded population. Nineteen years after the Kentucky report, the South Carolina Director of Public Welfare admitted that “the care of mentally deficient and mentally ill persons in the same institution is distinctly undesirable, but…the Hospital's efforts to secure provision of a separate training school for mentally deficient negroes have to date been unsuccessful.”

On 3 October 1983, the Heritage foundation celebrated its tenth anniversary and the opening of a new $9.5 million headquarters on Capitol Hill. By the time President Ronald Reagan had taken the podium and described the celebration as “an extraordinary moment, not only in the history of Heritage Foundation, but…in the intellectual history of the west,” it was probably clear to most of the 1,300 guests that the foundation had come a long way in its ten years of existence.

During the twentieth century the United States has called upon its economy to support a war effort four times: for World War I, World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam War. The experience of these four military buildups has led to a formal body of mobilization planning incorporating a number of implicit assumptions as to an appropriate mobilization posture. This article reviews the mobilization record of each war and traces the development of the accompanying mobilization doctrine.