After more than two decades of “bringing the state back in,” law persists as a neglected stepchild in the history of American state-building. Legal historians have identified a profound transformation in jurisprudence that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they have said relatively little about how radically new conceptions of law influenced public policy during the 1930s.1 Conversely, historians of public policy have written extensively about American political development, the nature of bureaucratic autonomy, and the uses of economic knowledge in upholding the administrative state, but the role of law and jurisprudence in recasting state power has remained elusive.2 Moreover, as William J. Novak has observed, both groups of scholars remain hamstrung by the inherited wisdom of Progressive historiography, and they continue to subscribe to a familiar litany of cases from Lochner to Schechter that undergirds a grand narrative about law's sole function as an impediment to state-building. As a corrective, Novak has urged historians to consider more carefully the “massive amount of everyday lawmaking” and “structural sociolegal changes” rendered invisible by the court battles of the first third of the twentieth century. Although largely unacknowledged in public discussion and debate, such developments ultimately provided critical support for the consolidation and legitimation of the modern American state.3

A recurring theme in American political discourse is how to strike the appropriate balance between protecting the nation against threats to its security without eroding the liberty that is at the heart of its democratic character. Civil liberties versus national security is a choice apparently to be made in every crisis and every war, whether hot or cold. We can trace the debate from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, to the Red Scares that followed both world wars. The classic case of going too far, and the most widely repudiated example, is the illegal mass internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, without charge, during World War II. Today, in what is commonly called the war on terrorism, hawks and doves take up their customary positions on opposing sides of the old argument as they debate the U.S.A Patriot Act, the imprisonment of foreigners at Camp Delta on Guantánamo Bay, and the indefinite detention of American citizens by presidential order.

In 1934 pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson went on a national preaching tour to promote her political sermon “America Awake!” Praising “those staunch souls” who were “lifting up hand and voice” to turn the nation “back to the Faith of Our Fathers,” she challenged what she perceived as the nation's secularizing trends. More than two million people—one in every fifty Americans—attended her meetings in addition to even larger audiences that listened in by radio. While she was traveling through Washington, D.C., her publicist, Guido Orlando, introduced the charismatic preacher to Louisiana Senator Huey Long. According to Orlando, “The Kingfish and the Angel clicked so well that, before I could get Aimee out of there, they had decided to run for President and Vice President on the same independent ticket.” Long's assassination the following year foiled the potential plan, leaving no way to confirm Orlando's account. What can be confirmed from abundant new sources is that McPherson was far more politically active and her influence far greater than historians have realized.