Particularly in the past decade or so, New Deal scholarship has taken a new turn, and the period after the mid-1950s has received substantial scrutiny and significant rethinking. Standard accounts of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency have long held that the New Deal was essentially a product of Roosevelt's first term, of the “First New Deal” of 1933 and the “Second New Deal” of 1935. Legislative stalemate, program consolidation and sometimes reduction, and attention to foreign and military affairs then marked the remainder of Roosevelt's presidency. A new and interdisciplinary literature, however, has demonstrated that the later New Deal of FDR's second and third terms was more distinctive and more important than the established view suggests. There has developed an understanding that from 1937 on the New Deal entered an important new phase, a third stage—that there was a “Third New Deal” crucial to understanding the New Deal and the direction of liberal policy and the American state.

The 1930s and 1940s saw the beginning of a discussion of the problem of racial discrimination in employment. The Great Depression, the maturation of civil rights organizations, and the New Deal's change in American principles of property rights and-labor policy helped launch this discussion. Campaigns undertaken by black organizations and federal agencies began to grapple with the idea of race-based remedial strategies to combat discrimination in employment, and our modern concept of equal employment opportunity, which holds that an employer's workforce should contain approximately the same proportion of minorities as are present in the population, first received expression in this period.

Prior to the 1960s, state governments retained primary responsibility for the regulation of water pollution. State officials emphasized voluntarism and close, informal cooperation between regulators and representatives from the major industrial and municipal sources of pollution. During the 1960s and early 1970s, growing dissatisfaction with state pollution control performance in Congress and at the local level acted as the driving force behind the gradual federal preemption of state authority. In the Lake Erie Basin, local advocates of tougher and more effective water pollution regulation looked to the federal government for relief and made common cause with sympathetic members of Congress.

Rogers Smith's American Political Science Review article, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions of America,” poses challenging substantive and methodological questions for the study of American political development. Whether or not it intended to do so, the article has struck a chord in several programs of research. The following colloquy between Smith and me centers on Smith's reading of political culture in terms of “traditions.” In a spirit of advancing our common enterprise, I have sharpened rather than muted the differences between Smith's views and my own in order to bring them into relief in a short space.

Karen Orren's critique wages more war with itself than it does with my main arguments and evidence, most of which she does not engage directly. The bulk of my essay was devoted to textual critiques of Tocqueville, Myrdal, Hartz, and a number of more recent authors. I argued that their assumptions that liberal democratic traditions formed the core of American political culture led to inadequate accounts of major systems of ascriptive hierarchy, especially racist, nativist, and patriarchal ones. Orren mentions none of the authors I critiqued except Carol Pateman, whom she invokes in a paragraph ending, like a third of her paragraphs in her first two sections, with a rhetorical question about my view, not a forthright contrary proposition. Her failure to address my specific critiques, and her recurring reliance on questions to do the work of affirmative arguments, make it unclear precisely how far she is defending the authors, challenging the criticisms, and disputing the evidence to which my essay was largely devoted.