The British National Health Service (NHS) was created shortly after the end of World War II and formally came into being on its “Appointed Day” in July 1948. The NHS has been seen as the crowning achievement of the postwar Labour government's “welfare state” by both the general public and academic commentators. As Rodney Lowe points out, by the late 1940s opinion polls showed it to be by far the best-received part of Labour's social policies; and in popular perceptions the terms “NHS” and “welfare state” were often viewed as synonymous. Lowe himself, while carefully noting the problems that attended the birth of the health service, nonetheless sees it as an “idealistic” institution and remarks that in no other Western country, not even social democratic Sweden, “were the whole population and the full range of medical need (Beveridge's principles of universalism and comprehensiveness) so quickly realized by a free service.” Another respected commentator, Rudolf Klein, similarly highlights the exceptionally wide-ranging remit of the NHS, claiming it as a “unique experiment in social engineering.”

Significant differences in the availability of new medicines in the United States and the United Kingdom became apparent in the 1970s. This article examines the history of drug regulation in the two countries and argues that the divergence was the result of distinctive regulatory approaches that emerged simultaneously throughout the twentieth century. The British approach was based largely on informal, nonstatutory controls, while the American approach relied heavily on centralized regulatory controls. The article argues that the nature of business-government relations has played a significant role in the divergence. The impact of these divergent approaches is apparent in the contemporary regulatory framework, especially with respect to determining the effectiveness of new drugs.

Between 1965 and the end of the century, welfare—that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—expanded dramatically; came under attack from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; and then, in the 1990s, was virtually eliminated as a federal program through legislation that had broad, bipartisan support. Throughout that process of growth and declension, social scientists played central roles in shaping perceptions of welfare, most significantly by examining the impact of welfare on the work ethic, on family structure, on gender relations, on poverty, and on inner-city, black communities. This is an enormously complex story, and I have engaged it by focusing on four influential texts, each by a prominent social scientist: Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), otherwise known as the Moynihan Report; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1982); Martin Anderson's Welfare: The Political Economy of Welfare Reform in the United States (1978); and David T. Ellwood's Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (1988). Although this approach inevitably oversimplifies somewhat, it also makes possible a more intensive critical reading of these key historical documents.

In his article “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,” Andrew Workman argues for a revised “institutionalist” understanding of the creation of the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Specifically, Workman includes interest groups, networks of policy intellectuals, and intragovernmental relations in an institutionalist account of the origin of the NWLB. Existing accounts that focus on the government's dependence on labor unions (Sparrow) or partisan politics (Katznelson and Pietrokowski; Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder) do not explain the complex origins of this key wartime board.

Bartholomew Sparrow takes exception to some aspects of my article on the origins of the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Although claiming “no great quarrel” with my argument, research, or the topic of my project, he raises two large points of criticism and follows with a number of minor objections. I'll address each in turn.