Alan T. Waterman, the first director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), often said that a sound federal policy for basic scientific research should have three elements: a research-projects system, fellowship and other education programs, and support for the development of research institutions. Reflecting on the independent federal agency's first decade of operations, Waterman thought it had done well in providing the first two elements but not the third: “.… the inadequacy of the resources available to our educational institutions is a national problem,” he wrote, “and one which the federal government must help to meet.”

It is widely acknowledged that great numbers of the laboring poor experienced increasing immiseration throughout France after the 1760s. Less well known perhaps is the corresponding formation of an influential set of cultural constructions that shaped how the poor were understood. This framework, which might be called an “ideology of poverty,” is best seen in the widely diffused discourse on mendicity that appeared after midcentury. At its core stood the notion of the able-bodied mendiant vagabond, or “beggar/vagrant,” who was characterized as a “professional” deviant with a full-blown menacing and illegal état. This cultural construction provided the animating principle of the ideology that not only powerfully shaped royal and local strategies in treating the poor but also helped to screen out multicausal explanations of poverty and frustrate the development of a genuinely humane assistance program for all categories of poor.

The “Railroad Commission of Texas” conjures up visions of oil and gas and power politics and perhaps the question, What does “railroad” have to do with petroleum? The Railroad Commission (RCT) also brings to mind modern America between 1930 and the 1970s, when the Texas agency controlled from 35 to 45 percent of the oil and gas produced in the United States. These images come from cultural myths of the Lone Star State, from Americans' fascination with conspiracies, and, most telling, from the lack of historical analyses of the commission, its staff, and its regulatory strategies. The prevailing views of the commission are unfortunate ones, for they not only neglect the agency's regulation of railroads, natural-gas utilities, and buses and trucks but also skew the understanding of how the state commission came to regulate petroleum in the first place, how it devised policies for doing so, and how it legitimized itself and defended that legitimacy under the weight of the East Texas crisis between 1930 and 1935.

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.

In 1765, as part of a series of economic and political reforms implemented by the Spanish Bourbons in their American colonies, the tobacco trade of colonial Mexico was monopolized and its management placed in the hands of royal bureaucrats. By the 1790s, Mexico's tobacco monopoly was one of the largest organized industries in colonial Mexico (along with silver mining and textiles) and employed almost 20,000 individuals. In fiscal terms, tobacco revenues were second only to the silver tithe as the most valuable source of government income and accounted for almost one-fifth of total state revenues at the peak of its production. Its organization approximated a vertically integrated industry: Production and supply of tobacco leaf was regulated through a series of contracts that determined who produced tobacco, how much they produced, the prices paid for it, and where it was to be grown. The reorganization of the tobacco trade under Bourbon management resulted in the restriction of tobacco production to one small specific geographical area in southeastern Mexico: the two small villas of Orizaba and Córdoba in the modern-day state of Veracruz. The tobacco produced, in turn, was manufactured into cigarettes and cigars in six state-managed tobacco manufactories, the largest located in Mexico City, the political and commercial capital. Monopoly goods were marketed through government licensed stores throughout Mexico. Private trading and manufacture in tobacco goods became an illegal offense. Compliance with such regulations was enforced by a military corps employed by the monopoly administration, although contraband trade of tobacco was never eliminated.

In recent years we have witnessed a revival of interest in the National Resources Committee (NRC) and its work on national planning. The research shows that the roots of national planning at the NRC are found in the Progressive Era, when individuals sought, through city, regional, and economic planning, to bring order to American society, in the government's management of the economy during World War I, and in Hoover's attempt at macromanagement of the economy. The research also shows that national economic planning, as distinct from other forms of planning, was an important component of the committee's work. In regard to this, researchers have acknowledged that Gardiner Means, as director of the Industrial Section of the Industrial Committee and author of The Structure of the American Economy, Part I: Basic Characteristics, was an important and outspoken advocate of economic planning within the NRC, but they have been less clear as to his specific contributions to economic planning. Moreover, the researchers have not extensively investigated the NRC position toward national economic planning, the economic models from which national economic plans would be developed, and the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the NRC approach to national economic planning. These omissions are not surprising inasmuch as neither Warken's (1979) nor Clawson's (1981) general coverage of the NRC provided much more than a brief and superficial description of the Industrial Section and a listing of its most important publications. Kalish (1963), on the other hand, discussed Means and the Industrial Section in more depth but in such a disjointed manner that it is impossible to grasp the movement toward economic planning that took place in the NRC and the important role Means played in the process. Finally, neither Chapman's (1981 and 1983) nor Jeffries's (1987) discussions of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the activities of the NRC dealt specifically with its impact on Means's work on economic planning.

During the middle years of the Great Depression, urban taxpayers across the land became targets of a massive advertising campaign. This fact alone does not offer the historian much cause for surprise. Advertising, massive or otherwise, always has been common fare for American consumers. What made this particular campaign different from most others was its peculiar agenda: convincing Americans to pay taxes. The central players were the National Pay-Your-Taxes Campaign (NPYTC) and the Citizens' Councils for Constructive Economy (CCCE). Both began in 1933 and embodied the interests of a diverse coalition of good-government reformers, academics, bureaucrats, and investment bankers. Almost all the founding members had one thing in common: They depended heavily on the consumption of tax money.

Study of the origins of public policy has achieved an important place among historical scholars. For instance, historians have published many valuable studies explaining the origins of regulatory agencies in industries such as natural resources, energy, and transportation, including the origins of agencies responsible for enforcing safety standards. Scholars have treated road construction, the subject of this article, in a similar fashion, seeking to comprehend the principal factors informing the origins of state and federal road building programs. Not surprisingly, then, scholarly examinations of the Interstate Highway System, which exercised such a remarkable influence on the economy, as well as on the social and physical landscapes of the nation, have remained focused on explications of the origins of policy.Perhaps this particular preoccupation has been due to what historians Peter N. Stearns and Joel A. Tarr have identified as a tendency to equate policy origins with “a policy message.” But Stearns and Tarr contend that studies of “origins do not carry such an inherent message and subsequent stages of policy development must also be explored. “

It is axiomatic that historians perform research that focuses upon past occurrences. However, research into public policy occasionally requires that historians deal with issues relating to events that have never taken place. A good example of this historical anomaly is nuclear energy policy.

The Reagan agenda embodied a single broad goal for domestic policy: to redefine the scope of public authority to limit the extent of state intervention in the market. This goal found a concrete expression in attempts to reverse welfare-state policies, restructure the tax system, and lighten the “regulatory burden.” The Reagan revolution was extended to antitrust. A number of top appointees were representatives of the Chicago school, a conservative group of economists and attorneys characterized by a faith in the efficiency-promoting nature of markets and a grave pessimism regarding government intervention in the economy. They rejected the political and social goals of antitrust and argued that the market rather than the state was best suited to determine the most efficient forms of economic organization.

“How shall we be governed in an atomic war? Who will make the decisions for defense and survival, and what compulsions will support their peremptory execution? What will be the measure of our cherished liberties?” Clinton L. Rossiter, the distinguished authority on the Constitution, asked these questions at the height of the cold war, a time when relations with the Soviet Union had become very troubled and, at home, red-baiting political campaigns, intolerance, fear, and repression had destroyed much of the liberalism of the New Deal.

Students of American corporate political behavior have long asked whether or not the corporate sector acts collectively to influence the public policy process. Corporate concentration of wealth in the late nineteenth century first suggested particular business interests enjoyed a privileged political position. After World War II American pluralists, while conceding that economic concentration posed a threat to democracy, noted that economic concentration could not be translated into political privilege without a high degree of corporate political unity. In this respect, they reasoned that big business was unlikely to engage in collective action because of the divisive nature of economic competition. For a long while, this optimism about the market's policing powers assuaged most fears of corporate political domination, even though several scholars offered contrary evidence. The recent corporate political mobilization, however, has renewed the debate on corporate political unity.

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.

Thinking big about the development of social policies in the United States has become fashionable. Until recently, occasional comprehensive histories of social provision in America focused on single periods of reform ferment, such as the Progressive Era, or the New Deal, or the Great Society. Then, James T. Patterson's 1981 book America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980, and Michael B. Katz's 1986 book In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, provided overviews of American attitudes toward poverty and attempts to do something about it from the nineteenth century to the present. These authors were clearly perplexed by the devolution of the antipoverty efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society into the political stalemates of the late 1970s and the conservative backlashes of the 1980s. Their books seem to be trying to use rich descriptive overviews of the past to gain some perspective on where American “welfare reforms” might go in the future.