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.

In 1956 President Eisenhower signed an amendment to the social security program that created disability insurance. His action marked the end of a sharp debate over disability insurance and the beginning of two decades of consensus concerning the program. Thirty years later, however, major issues have arisen in the disability insurance program that closely resemble the disputes that preceded its passage. Consensus no longer prevails about the goals and administration of the program. In this paper, we describe the history of the social security disability program in terms of an illusive search for a political consensus.2 We first examine the U.S. Senate's 1956 debate over disability insurance. This debate provides a convenient summary of the ingredients of the compromise that sustained the consensus of the next two decades. Then, in an effort to explain what was at stake in 1956, we review discussions about disability that had taken place previously in bureaucratic and professional circles. We next examine the post- 1956 expansion of disability insurance, and we conclude with the dissolution of the compromise.

Historians of the United States have learned much in the past twenty years about the history of what is now called its political culture, and about its environmental history.1 These two dimensions of national life, however, are rarely, if ever, looked at together. The result is that we little understand how powerfully environmental policy is influenced not simply by everyday politics—of that we know abundantly—but by the long-term political mentalities of the Democrats and the Republicans, mentalities which originate not in abstract theorizing, but which grow up naturally within the cultural worlds to be found among the distinctive groups of peoples who line up within one party or the other and remain there, generation after generation. What I propose here is to put political culture and natural resource management history together and see what happens.

The subject of American counterintelligence has generated a considerable amount of scholarship in recent years, the bulk of that research focusing on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Those agencies were and continue to be commonly recognized as having fulfilled the primary role as the nation's intelligence-gatherers. Within this vast intelligence community exists a microcosm in the form of counterespionage, or more euphemistically, counterintelligence.

Thomas Philpott, in his pioneering study, The Slum and the Ghetto, argued that housing reformers were paternalistic, that “regulating tenant conditions … involved regulating the tenement dwellers.” In particular, he pointed out the problems with housing laws that seemingly improved the quality of housing for the poor by setting minimum standards. Instead of improving conditions, however, these regulations simultaneously raised the price of new housing beyond what immigrants and poor workers could pay, while also destroying those buildings, no matter how troubled, that they could afford. In other words, middle-class housing policy, while well intentioned, had a negative impact, because it failed to consider the needs of the population or to provide affordable substitutes for the housing that was eliminated.

Welfare state programs developed later in the United States than in other nations. Today, American programs are less widely accessible, less uniform, and often less generous than programs abroad. Explanations for this relative conservatism usually focus on the lack of a socialist movement or a socialist ideological tradition in the United States. Yet during the Progressive Era, when the gap between the American and European welfare states widened significantly enough for contemporaries to acknowledge it, the forces for social reform had never been stronger in the United States. In many ways these forces resembled those in England, which at the time was laying the foundations for a model welfare state.

In the politically turbulent post–World War II period, proposed federal legislation to expand the welfare state pitted conservative Republicans against liberal Democrats in Congress. The conflict over national health insurance introduced between 1943 and 1947 in the Wagner-Murray- Dingell bill ended in a conservative victory with the bill stalled in committee. The primary constituents of the two sides were American Medical Association (AMA) spokesmen and corporate interests on the political right and labor leaders and public health advocates on the left. By 1946 the conservatives controlled Congress; thereafter liberal congressional reformers defaulted on the national health issue, as they had throughout the twentieth century, to corporate progressives and the tenets of “welfare capitalism.” Government continued as a regulator of “minimum standards” for business and industry. Provision of voluntary health insurance and direct medical services was left to the private sector. The Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program emerged out of the political stalemate over health care in the middle 1940s as a highly efficient and popular prepaid group health plan, innovative in its large scale and total integration of service and facilities. Its survival and growth was due to its acceptability to both liberals and conservatives as a model private-sector alternative to national health insurance or any other form of state medicine.

Butterfield's well-known warning to historians may hold important lessons for the analysis of the contemporary welfare state. In his view, the Whig historians distorted history by interpreting the past in terms of the present. They allowed themselves to become “dispensers of moral judgments” by dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress. Many contemporary explanations of welfare states pose the same problem, not so much because social science intentionally excludes the past, but because the search for rigorous empirical explanations of our present choices and accomplishments is divorced from the past. As Himmelfarb noted in her comments on the study of social history, the investigations of this intricate transformation of nineteenth-century liberal states are now virtually “two cultures.”

The Great Depression, World War II, and Keynesian Revolution all contributed to a transformation in the role of the state in the economy. By the postwar period, it had become politically imperative, as well as intellectually sanctioned, for the state to assume responsibility for addressing unemployment. Certain Western governments were willing and able to go to great lengths to ameliorate joblessness, and in some cases prevent it, while others seemed capable or inclined to go less far. As anyone who studies unemployment in a comparative context knows, Sweden and the United States present a vivid contrast in how seriously governments undertook this responsibility and to what degree they were willing to extend the control of the state in the market conomy. It is precisely because these two nations stand at virtually opposite poles in the commitment to eliminating unemployment and in implementing policies toward that end that many scholars have sought to compare them. Compared to the United States, Sweden's policy objectives have been much more ambitious, its policy instruments more diverse and capable of intervening more extensively in the labor market, and its budgets for training, relocation, and job-creation schemes substantially larger. In short, in Sweden we find the government doing more, and in the United States we find it doing less.

There is widespread agreement among scholars that Franklin D. Roosevelt created the modern presidency, and he serves as their paradigm of successful presidential leadership. James MacGregor Burns, Richard Neustadt, Clinton Rossiter, and others who took their cues from them found in FDR the ideal heroic president. He combined extensive and sustained popularity, partisan support, skillful power-sensitive bargaining and persuasion, adept use of the prerogatives of the office, and consummate performance of the multiple roles of the president to make the American constitutional system work.

By the 1950s, two contrasting strategies of white leadership were emerging in the South: “massive resistance” and “moderation.” Both were equally committed in principle to a defense of segregation, but they employed different tactics: The former trumpeted “defiance,” the later counseled “delay.” The strategists of-“massive resistance,” who for a decade largely dominated politics in Alabama and Mississippi, were convinced that any concession, even a tactical one, would be a dangerous break in the dike of segregation. They believed that defiance could deter the federal government from enforcing the university desegregation decisions and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954; 1955). On the other hand, the strategists of “moderation,” who gained political ascendancy in South Carolina, maneuvered within the law, first to postpone implementation of Brown, and then to determine the minimum amount of desegregation that blacks would accept, which would not at the same time inflame white racists. In effect, they used skillful tactics of delay to “moderate” both white racism and black aspirations. Ultimately, they were more successful in achieving their objectives than the resisters, because they avoided sweeping federal interventions.

Since the onset of the Cold War, and particularly after both superpowers began to amass large arsenals of nuclear weapons, military planners in the East and West have encouraged efforts to develop defenses against nuclear attacks. Both sides have made effective use of “passive” defenses, such as the hardening and dispersal of weapons systems likely to be the prime targets of a preemptive strike and the provision of shelters for command authorities and vital communications centers. Both sides have also tried, but with far less success, to develop “active” defenses, but against the varied and daunting challenge of modern strategic systems, all such efforts so far have been largely in vain, even though they have been undertaken at considerable expense and with great technical sophistication. The main reason is that every advance in active defense has been offset by compensatory improvements in offensive forces.

A number of American cities experienced urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. Historians and others who have chronicled the urban changes of those decades have cited economic redevelopment as the motivating factor in the rebuilding of the downtown and the relocation of the black population from that area. For example, Carl Abbott in his analysis of Sunbelt cities noted that “the rebuilding of downtown districts was intended to secure two related economic goals.” The first was to make the city more appealing as a center of investment and business activity as opposed to competing cities; the second was to enhance the downtown area in light of suburban development which might attract business away from the central city. Clarence Stone-in his study of Atlanta's renewal also indicates the primacy of economic factors as the motivation for rebuilding the city's downtown and uprooting the black population.

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.

Twenty-five years ago H. Stuart Hughes observed that “the study of history is entering a period of rapid change and advance such as characterized the science of physics in the first three decades of the twentieth century.” Amid such ferment, he believed, professional historians could become more “scientific” in stating their assumptions and executing their analysis without sacrificing an “aesthetic” style of discourse. Professor Hughes correctly predicted the professional excitement and intellectual controversy unleashed since the mid-1960s, but he underestimated the extent to which historians’ relative standing in the academy would be adversely affected by external and internal developments. Other social sciences attracted more students, tenure lines, and grant support; they had more success in formalizing their investigations. Many humanistic endeavors (including historical inquiries), critics charge, have concurrently become inscrutable. Historians themselves have expressed serious concern about the future of their discipline. With the Balkanization of knowledge, with a growing number of subfields and specialized journals, historical synthesis seems more and more to be an elusive goal. The current debate over how to “(re)present the past” goes far beyond disputes over approach, style, or ideology.

The minimum wage was conceived as an attack on poverty within the work force. Americans first defined “sweated labor” as a category and a social problem, then wrote solutions into law which fundamentally changed that definition and undermined the original purpose. First, in 1912, a problem of economic exploitation of workers became a problem of women unable to protect themselves. Transformed into an issue of the rights of labor, in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) a radically new minimum wage law left those most in need unprotected.