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.

The language of Section 212(e) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. §1182(f), contains a sweeping authorization of presidential discretion to suspend and restrict alien entry into the United States. Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV) first introduced the subsection in 1950 as part of the omnibus immigration bill drafted by his Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee. The specific origins of the language and the original intent behind the subsection remain missing pieces in the extensive scholarly literature on the 1952 INA and legislative history as explored by the courts. This article reveals that the subcommittee modeled the subsection on the sixth proviso of the 1917 Immigration Act, the May 1918 Wartime Measure, and a selective interpretation of Supreme Court precedent. The article reveals further that the original intent behind the subsection was to close perceived loopholes in existing law enabling entry by displaced persons and Communist governmental officials.

This article examines the Supreme Court’s role in the development of federal conscientious objector policy in the twentieth century. Focusing on two key periods—the three years following the end of World War II, and the era of the Vietnam War—I argue that the policy’s evolution was more complex than previous studies have indicated, and that the Court’s changing attitudes toward conscientious objection can be traced to the justices’ increasing but irresolute concern for civil liberties. By the early 1970s, the Court was interpreting federal statutes much more broadly than Congress ever intended, but the justices remained divided over just how broad those interpretations should be. While the end of the draft rendered the question of compulsory military service moot, the Court’s failure to arrive at a clear position on conscientious objection has had lasting implications on other issues.

Why did child abuse become a less significant problem after 1910? This article focuses on frame contestation, and how child-protection organizations gradually lost control of the narrative about fragile families to a competing set of groups—those that emphasized “family saving.” Like many interest groups, the SPCCs developed an “issue frame” in their efforts to publicize their mission, which sought to define a problem (child abuse), attribute blame for that situation (inadequate parents), propose a solution (the removal of children from parents), and encourage others to support their cause. After 1900, however, “family saving” groups identified a problem related to child abuse (fragile families), portrayed poverty as a cause of family instability, and supported policies that sought to preserve families. While advocating for policies that strengthened families, however, they undercut child protectors’ most crucial weapon against child abuse, namely, the removal of affected children from inadequate parents.

Twenty U.S. states permit the indefinite detention of civilly committed sex offenders after the end of their prison sentences if their dangerousness is due to a “mental abnormality.” This article explores the origins of one such law by examining its predecessor, the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939. Passed in the wake of a panic over sex crimes and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940, Minnesota’s psychopath statute extended a 1917 eugenics law providing for the compulsory civil commitment and institutionalization of “defectives” to persons alleged to have a psychopathic personality. Analyzing the 1917 and 1939 laws together shows how one state’s psychopath statute had less to do with psychiatric authority than with the legal and administrative framework established by Progressive-era eugenics. From the 1910s until today, dubious claims about the ability of science to identify potential criminals legitimized politically popular, but constitutionally questionable, forms of administrative and social control.

This article examines the local roots of the American state to complicate existing historiography. It suggests that, for education and law, the state tapped into local social capital to develop capacity. State and local governments relied on the mobilization of citizens’ bodies—civic labor—to provide public goods. In doing so, it suggests that we need to offer a story that captures the myriad ways that Americans engaged in state-building, and how those different forms shaped Americans’ relations with state power.

In 1969, a public debate between President Nixon and Congress took place during the legislative passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and centered on two very different and competing conceptions of how presidential advice should be organized in the Executive Office of the President. It focused on the proposed establishment of the Council on Environmental Quality. The outcome of the ensuing battle represented a complete victory for congressional interests against the expressed wishes of the president. The nature of the debate has been overlooked in the literature on the presidency, but it highlights fundamental issues about agency design and presidential control of the institutional presidency. It also highlights broader concerns about the degree of congressional involvement in shaping the Executive Office of the President.

Histories of American economic policymaking after World War II often describe a “Fiscal Revolution,” in which Keynesian macroeconomic tools replaced the microeconomic regulations and reforms of the New Deal. This article challenges that narrative by demonstrating how the Keynesian economists responsible for the Fiscal Revolution relied upon incomes policies to ensure that inflation would not sabotage efforts to achieve full employment. In the 1960s, the White House Council of Economic Advisers pressed the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to enforce “wage-price guideposts” in order to realize the potential of the Fiscal Revolution. Yet incomes policies also encouraged policymakers to deflect responsibility for inflation onto the private sector’s behavior as an alternative to adopting the painful but necessary fiscal and monetary restraint. As a reliance on the microeconomic control of inflation persisted into the late 1970s, this approach ultimately undercut the Keynesians’ macroeconomic promises and prolonged the misery of stagflation.

Researchers and the public alike have long recognized that in American politics visibility matters. To claim credit for policies, to recruit supporters, and to maintain democratic legitimacy, the lawmaking process must be visible to the American public. Yet little is known about how the public perceived the legislative process during the nineteenth century. This article uses systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of newspapers in Baltimore, Maryland, Portland, Maine, and Charleston, South Carolina, to measure the comparative visibility of lawmaking at the state and federal levels between 1830 and 1880. The research demonstrates how analysis of newspaper coverage can be used to better understand public perceptions of state and federal lawmaking during time periods without polling data. The visibility of congressional lawmaking varied greatly from one state to the next, and competition for coverage between state legislatures and Congress remained strong across the country throughout the studied period.

The campaign to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act has been misunderstood by many historians. Rather than a failed attempt to resuscitate New Deal Keynesianism by an exhausted Democratic Party, it represented a radical effort to reconfigure the political economy of the United States by embracing national planning ideas that were enjoying a revival in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. The fact that this bill proved politically viable challenges historians’ assumptions that this decade saw the American people turn away from “big government” and toward pro-market solutions for social and economic problems. This episode also forces us to reassess our understanding of the Democratic Party in this decade. It suggests that historians have erred in drawing a sharp distinction between the party’s “New Deal” and “New Politics” factions and that the policy goals of those factions dovetailed more often than has been appreciated.

While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers’ job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers’ organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia’s AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania’s teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.

It is common for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be considered one of the most conservative religious groups in the United States. What is less well understood is as to when the relationship between Mormonism and American conservatism began. While some historians point to the social upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s as the glue that united Mormons and conservatives, the connection began decades earlier during the Great Depression. Leaders of the Mormon Church interpreted Roosevelt’s New Deal as the fulfillment of eschatological prophecy. Envisioning themselves saving America and the Constitution at the world’s end, Mormon authorities established their own welfare program to inspire Latter-day Saints and Americans in general to eschew the New Deal. Anti–New Dealers used the Mormon welfare plan to construct a conservative ideology. Accordingly, Mormons are essential elements in the formation of a political movement that revolutionized the United States.

The debate over the practice of proxy adoption sheds light on changing notions of proper intercountry adoption practices and standards of family planning as they developed in the mid-twentieth century. The practice of proxy adoption was born out of a loophole in U.S. immigration legislation, initially used by Americans to adopt European orphans after World War II. After the Korean War, the practice was again utilized to bring Korean children in even greater numbers to the United States. Through proxy adoption, adoptive parents bypassed the standard checkpoints of the adoption process as established by U.S. social welfare agencies. Although initially hailed as a humane practice, proxy adoption was ultimately banned in 1961 after a successful antiproxy adoption campaign waged by a coalition of social welfare workers, Catholic leaders, and U.S. senators. The role of Catholic agencies in this debate is essential, yet remains largely unexplored. This article sheds light on this significant and underresearched history of the Catholic institutions involved in the proxy adoption debate.

The Catholic agencies, namely the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Catholic Committee for Refugees, stood apart from both the government social welfare establishment and other humanitarian actors. Their actions must instead be understood through the context of their own institutional history of domestic social welfare programs and overseas humanitarian work, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article analyzes their relationship with the U.S. social welfare establishment, as well as joint advocacy efforts to reform intercountry adoption practices.

During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.

The tension between democratic institutions and the project to integrate international markets for trade and investment has been an enduring feature of the contemporary era of globalization. This article analyzes how officials in the executive branch navigated this tension in the making of inward foreign direct investment policy during the 1970s. Based on recently declassified archival sources, it traces how top officials in the Ford administration decided to establish a new interagency committee in order to appear responsive to congressional pressure and still leave its “open door” investment policy intact. Yet this measure only marked the first step in resolving their political dilemma. Lower-level functionaries then had to manage the problem of how to give the new committee the appearance of strength while also maximizing its discretion to be weak. Overall, this article contributes the first comprehensive account of both phases of the policy-making process using new archival evidence.

More than three million children in the United States are currently enrolled in charter schools, with increasing enrollments despite strong evidence of academic gains. This historical analysis moves beyond a focus on academic outcomes and traces the success of the charter school movement, in part, to the foundational premise of restoring agency to educational stakeholders. State-mandated schooling was a counterintuitive feature of American policy that chafed against the founding ideals of the Republic and gradually engendered resentment among mostly white conservatives. Concurrently, in the aftermath of Brown, factions of African American policymakers began to look for equitable educational alternatives. The unlikely alliance of these two antithetical constituencies resulted in the creation of a unique—albeit fragile—coalition and the passing of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and paved the way for the nation’s inaugural charter school policy passed in Minnesota in 1991.

This article reconsiders the history of the Community Action Program (CAP). I argue that the CAP is best understood as a bold attempt at administrative experimentation and reform. Using original archival materials, I show that policymakers involved the CAP’s design outlined three models of community action: coordination, collaboration, and mobilization, which communities drew upon when implementing the program. Drawing upon an original dataset of ninety-eight community action agencies (CAAs), this article provides a synthetic assessment of the CAP’s implementation. I show that while the 1967 Green Amendment curtailed the CAP’s experimental and participatory ethos, most CAAs operated relatively harmoniously with local governments and social welfare groups to fight poverty. By looking beyond the dramatic clashes between CAAs and local governments and focusing on the multiple ways in which CAAs seized upon the CAP’s experimental nature, this article provides a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the CAP’s historical legacy.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, American policymakers engaged in an extensive campaign against illegal gambling in an effort to turn the tide in the government’s crusade against organized crime. At the grassroots, however, voters endorsed a different form of state expansion to beat back the mob menace. Between 1963 and 1977, fourteen northeastern and Rust Belt states enacted the first government-run lotteries in the twentieth-century United States on the belief that legalized gambling would undercut the mob’s gambling profits. While gambling opponents pointed to Las Vegas as proof that organized crime would flourish following legalization, supporters argued that illegal gambling was already pervasive, so the state may as well profit from this irrepressible activity. The history of gambling legalization challenges narratives on the popularity of law-and-order politics and offers a new perspective on crime policy in the post–World War II period.

This exploration of the politics of land-use reform in New York’s vast Adirondack Mountains provides a revealing window onto the ambiguities, evolution, and importance of environmental liberalism during the 1970s. A distinctive set of circumstances, featuring forceful advocacy by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and propitious political timing, led to the creation in the early 1970s of one of the most ambitious state-level environmental reforms in modern American history. But implementation during the mid- and late 1970s proved challenging. Environmental management by a new regional agency that possessed powerful regulatory authority over all public and private lands in the region produced discontents, distrust, and organized opposition among both developers and property-rights advocates on the right and environmental advocates on the left. The result was an uneasy, enduring legacy: the new regulatory institution and key environmental planning ideas of the early 1970s and the later, wide-ranging discontents would coexist in similar forms for decades to come.