The presidency is now thought of as a representative institution. I argue that the idea of presidential representation, the claim that presidents represent the whole nation, influenced the political development of the institutional presidency. Specifically, I show that the idea was the assumption behind creating a national budget system in the United States. While the challenge of World War I debt prompted Congress to pass the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the law’s design owes much to reformers’ arguments that the president lacked institutional tools to fulfill his representative role. Congress institutionalized presidential representation in budgeting by including two key components: a formal license for presidential agenda setting in the budget process and an enhanced executive organizational capacity with the Bureau of the Budget. However, the law also revealed the problems raised by attempting to provide the “proper organs” for presidential representation, which push against the written constitutional frame.

Historians of public policy, who typically share a conviction that historical analysis can clarify the options available to policymakers, have witnessed this decade's quickening debate over the role and control of American higher education with, in one of Yogi Berra's immortal phrases, a sense of “déjà vu all over again.” Political leaders have continued, in a near vacuum of historical knowledge, to manipulate present variables and project them into the future with little awareness, beyond current political memory, of their past consequences, or of a legacy of political and cultural tradition that would constrain their manipulation. At the national level of debate, which is not where educational policy in the United States historically has been made, the level of historical awareness generally has been greater than at the state level. In the flurry of national commissions and foundation reports that probed the deficiencies of American higher education in 1984–85, the historical evolution of the college curriculum was addressed in reasonably informed historical terms.1 Even though the urgency of debate in the 1980s was fueled by the common pain of recession and post-baby-boom retrenchment, and also by fears of increasing vulnerability to oil boycotts and Japanese economic competition, the national elites who wrote the reports were mindful of the roots of Big Science in the Manhattan Project. Their ties to the academic establishment were intimate, and their historical memories embraced the wisdom of the liberal arts as well as the efficacy of land-grant agriculture and Silicon Valley.

The “exceptional” nature of American politics has been a favorite theme of scholars since Tocqueville. One of the more famous “exceptions” has been the distinctive development of its welfare state. The United States has perennially been portrayed as the laggard among advanced industrial societies. Indeed, it adopted public pension and insurance programs at a later date than most European societies, and its programs cover smaller portions of the population and address fewer social problems.

Legal scholars draw distinctions between government regulation and adjudication in the courts. Regulation is the more direct way to mandate safe behavior. A regulatory commission requires what it considers safe, and forbids everything else, leaving individuals, corporations, and governments the choice of complying or facing punishment. The rules regulators establish determine how thick a retaining wall must be, how many parts per billion of a substance will be tolerated, or how far a car window may roll down. Failure to meet a safety standard is a violation, whether or not an accident results. Regulators and courts can force compliance with standards and procedures even if no harm has occurred.

There was a period in America when the political science and history disciplines were not that far apart. Both approaches to analyzing civil society had evolved out of an old Anglo-American tradition where these two subjects, along with philosophy and literature, were all considered in relationship to one another. During the formative years of the American research university, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century, both disciplines shared common founding fathers. A classic example was Charles Beard, whose influence spanned both areas of scholarship. Indeed, it was a breakaway faction of the American Historical Association that formed the American Political Science Association.

In response to New Deal legislation, veteran reformer Molly Dewson exclaimed: “I cannot believe I have lived to see this day. It's the culmination of what us girls and some of you boys have been working for for so long it's just dazzling.” Historians have subsequently confirmed Dewson's judgment that female New Dealers had been hawking their agenda for a long time before Franklin Roosevelt's administration finally bought it. Indeed, Clarke A. Chambers, Susan Ware, and J. Stanley Lemons have carefully documented the activities of a large contingent of women who inaugurated their battle for public welfare programs during the Progressive Era (1890–1920), continued their fight through the 1920s—a decade that one activist called the “tepid, torpid years”—and stood ready with their programs when the Great Depression renewed the possibility of federal welfare legislation in the 1930s. Now we need an explanation for the continuity of this female commitment to public welfare programs: Why was it that middle-class women played such a prominent part in sustaining the Progressive Era's social welfare agenda into the 1930s.

According to the most influential metanarratives in American social-policy history, religion has been virtually irrelevant to the development of American welfare in the twentieth century. In crude terms, the main story line is that public welfare replaced religion—for good. The chief alternative story agrees that religion was replaced—but for bad. More carefully, the mainstream story portrays a “quasi-welfare state” supplanting the fragmentary assistance offered by local sectarian, voluntary, and municipal programs, and measures welfare progress by the growth of government provision at the expense of private and religious action. The competing interpretation regards the creation of the government welfare system to constitute, in Marvin Olasky's terms, “the tragedy of American compassion,” because effective, personal, and spiritual assistance was replaced by bureaucratic programs unable to address the deepest needs of the poor. Although the two stories evaluate the outcome differently, they agree about the disappearance or irrelevance of religion to American public welfare.

Scholars point out a tension between racial justice and disability rights activism. Although racial minorities are more likely to become disabled than whites, both disability activism and the historiography of disability politics tend to focus on the experience and achievements of whites. This article examines how disability rights activists of the 1970s sought to build a united movement of all people with disabilities and explains why these efforts were unable to overcome cleavages predicated on race. Activists drew from New Left ideas of community and self-help as well as the New Right rhetoric of market freedoms to articulate a vision of liberation for people with disabilities. Though they yearned for racial solidarity, in practice, activists could not overcome institutions that separated antipoverty and racial politics from disability policy, nor could they figure out how to incorporate minority voices in an identity-based movement forged around disability rather than color.

The desegregation of southern schools, mandated by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), presented a dilemma for national politicians of both parties. “If presidents felt they should speak up, or act to enforce court rulings,” a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1969, “they risked offending conservatives, segregationists, and the South. If they wanted to sit tight, they invited the wrath of liberals.” Even presidents who were capable of acting in other areas of civil rights were content to assume a low profile on school desegregation, assign responsibility for this area of policymaking to subordinates, and enforce it only under external pressure, usually from the federal courts.

The cultural fission created by the controversy over birth control and abortion, as Juvenal's satiric comment above indicates, has a long and bitter history. The emergence of the modern state, however, transformed cultural differences into political acrimony as reproduction rights became public policy. In the United States, reproductive rights in the post-World War II period became a matter of political controversy when the federal government began to fund family planning programs domestically and abroad in the 1960s.

In the mid-1960s, Charles G. Sellers, Jr., was perhaps the most widely respected historian of the Jacksonian era. The author of several seminal articles on the period, he was in the midst of writing a multivolume biography of James K. Polk, two volumes of which had already appeared. Sellers's knowledge of the intricacies of Jacksonian politics, his comprehension of the importance of state politics, and his understanding of the relationship between society and politics were unrivaled. The second volume of his study of Polk received the Bancroft Prize, and Jacksonian scholars eagerly awaited the appearance of the promised third volume, covering the most crucial years of Polk's presidency.

It has become an article of faith that political history has fallen on hard times in recent years. “[T]he status of the political historian within the profession,” William E. Leuchtenburg observed in his 1986 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) has “sunk to somewhere between that of a faith healer and a chiropractor.” Hugh Davis Graham, in an insightful analysis of policy history, reached a similar conclusion. “The ranks of traditional political history are depleted,” he wrote in 1993, “their assumptions and methods discredited along with the Great White Men whose careers they chronicled.”

This article offers the first comprehensive history of the development of mandatory disclosure rules for the cost of consumer credit. In contrast to prior studies, which begin with the creation of federal disclosure rules in 1968, this story starts with state-level laws that were drafted before World War I. By looking back over a longer time period, it reveals the challenges involved in defining “truth” in lending, and how the perceived purpose of a regulatory technique like mandatory disclosure may change over time. Although the modern APR disclosure metric has come to seem natural and inevitable, history shows that lenders and policymakers once hotly debated the design of disclosure rules, with each faction claiming the mantle of “truth.” Moreover, policymakers did not always view disclosure as a means to increase price competition, obviating the need for direct price controls. Disclosure was once a complement to usury laws, rather than a substitute.

The FDA has dramatically decreased the regulatory review time for new drugs since the early 1990s. For example, according to the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD), which conducts triennial analyses of new drug approvals in the United States, the average FDA review time for approved New Chemical Entities (NCEs) decreased from 35.6 months in 1984–86 to 16.8 months in 1996–98. Thus, in a little more than a decade, the FDA has essentially cut its average review time in half. In addition to the declining review times, the agency's workload, as measured in terms of the number of drugs approved each year, also rose considerably in the 1990s. Specifically, the agency approved a total of 232 NCEs between 1993 and 1999, compared to just 163 approvals during the previous seven-year span—a 42 percent increase. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the agency's decreased review times and increased workload, respectively. Thus, over the past decade the FDA has approved more drugs and done so in less time than at any other period in history. Simply stated, this change in regulatory performance, especially the declining review times, has been absolutely stunning.