The mission of the United States Navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil. Most important, both proslavery and antislavery forces favored, for very different reasons, a substantial naval buildup in the late 1850s. The navy had, however, long been engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling, an activity that also seemed to have broad support at the time. Finally, somewhat more controversially, the navy had been associated with the American Colonization Society’s Liberian enterprise from its very inception, deciding to deploy vessels to Africa in an otherwise unimaginable time frame. The relationship between the presence of slavery and the pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

The 1972 abortion-initiative campaign in North Dakota provides an example where elites on one side of an issue were able to provide cues and get supporters to participate in an election while the other side was unable to do so. North Dakota Right to Life through the formation of branch chapters and its work with the Catholic churches became the focus of the anti-initiative campaign. Flush with resources, the NDRL made sure that its supporters turned out to such an extent that initiative voters outnumbered presidential voters in most counties. While the pro-initiative elements proved effective at getting the question on the ballot, they were unable to get their message out, let alone galvanize supporters. The result was confusion among potential supports and lower turnout rates in the most populous counties.

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

This article analyzes how policy ideas already adopted in Europe, particularly in France, were taken into consideration for the design of Uruguay’s National Public Assistance (NPA) policy. Established in 1910, the NPA was a pioneering government social policy for the time and for the region.

Some have argued that the design of the NPA law followed the secular and republican model instituted in France at the end of the nineteenth century when France established the Assistance Publique, particularly regarding the extent of public assistance to the poor, the role of the state in the provision of health care (as opposed to charity-based provision) and the centralization of health-care services (as opposed to a decentralized health-care system).

We analyze how these revolutionary ideas were discussed by the technicians and politicians who participated in the process that culminated in the approval of the law in Uruguay discussed these revolutionary ideas. We explore the factors that motivated the creation of the commission that developed the law. We also review available documentation on the drafting of the bill and the parliamentary debate that culminated in its approval. We find that the design of the NPA included many ideas diffused mainly from France. The French model was not simply emulated, however. Rather, the authors of the NPA thoroughly analyzed and considered the features and main consequences of the Assistance Publique, suggesting that diffusion in this case was more a process of learning than of simple mimicry.