Winning the war on the home front and overseas meant that citizens of different races, religions, and ethnic appellations needed to work together peacefully in the “arsenal of democracy.” Prior to America's entrance into the war, community leaders recognized that selected social problems must be addressed in order to promote domestic harmony and boost urgently needed defense production in war communities. Instead of viewing the war years as distracting community interest from social problems, social welfare organizations pressed localities to acknowledge and act to alleviate ongoing difficulties that presented themselves, sometimes in dramatic fashion, as serious obstacles to the war effort. Race riots in Harlem and Detroit, the “zoot-suit” struggles on the West Coast, “khaki-wacky” girls who chased after servicemen, the erosion of child labor laws, significant population shifts across the nation, and a record number of teenage dropouts highlighted the structural cracks in American society. Clear understanding of the expedient nature of wartime social work mobilized efforts to establish national and local strategies that would enable wartime programs to continue into the postwar era.

In the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (“RTAA”), Congress delegated its constitutionally granted power to set tariffs to the President. Trade agreements negotiated under the RTAA required no ex post congressional approval. Instead, the broad authority conferred upon the President was subject to congressional renewal every three years. Tariff reductions also were no longer made unilaterally via omnibus tariff legislation, but rather bilaterally via trade agreements and in exchange for comparable tariff reductions from foreign trading partners. The RTAA dramatically altered the governance structure that had controlled U.S. trade policymaking for over a century, laying a new institutional foundation that made U.S. postwar participation in, and leadership of, global trade liberalization and expansion possible. Indeed, the RTAA is arguably the most important piece of trade legislation of this century. It also is an unusual case of congressional delegation of policymaking authority to the President. Representative Hamilton Fish (R-N.Y.) called the RTAA “a betrayal of our representative form of government [that] amounts to an open admission by Congress that … it is now incompetent and unfit to legislate properly, intelligently and in the public interest.” The press described the RTAA as a “radical departure in commercial policy.” What accounts for this extraordinary delegation, especially by a legislative body better known for guarding its power than for giving it away?

“Historically, geographically, and commercially New York and the industrial district in the northern part of the state of New Jersey constitute a single community,” declared the Interstate Commerce Commission in the New York Harbor case in 1917. In spite of that overwhelming fact, the railroads in the port region had never worked cooperatively to manage New York harbor. Instead, competition led them to invest vast sums in individual terminal facilities and prevented them from using those facilities jointly to solve the urgent transportation problems of the region. This failure to cooperate took on national importance during World War I, when the collapse of service at the port led President Woodrow Wilson to federalize the railroads. In light of the failure of private managers to coordinate their efforts more effectively, the ICC endorsed the idea that dramatic public steps should be taken to encourage greater cooperation among railroad companies: “It is necessary that the great terminals at the port of New York be made practically one,” the commission affirmed, “and that the separate interests of the individual carriers, so long an insuperable obstacle to any constructive plan of terminal development, be subordinated to the public interest.”

With this apparent blessing from the ICC, the New York, New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission was created in 1917 to recommend a cooperative, bi-state solution for the port.

Courts, both state and federal, often play a substantial role in the adoption and implementation of changes in public policy. Properly understood, the impact of court decisions must be examined in the context of actions and reactions by other branches of government, political parties, and interest groups. Among the most transformative court decisions over the last half century are those involving legislative reapportionment and minority voting rights. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal courts restructured the nation's political institutions through decisions striking down malapportioned legislatures and local governing bodies through what used to be termed the “reapportionment revolution,” perhaps the only revolution ignored altogether by historians. Shortly thereafter the courts extended their attack on quantitative vote dilution (which the “one-person, one-vote” standard is designed to address) to include protection against electoral rules that dilute the voting strength of racial minorities.

During the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission took on the powerful American Medical Association, hastening the end of the medical profession's domination of the health-care industry. The pivotal confrontation was the FTC's administrative action (the “FTC proceeding”), commenced in 1975, against the AMA. According to the FTC, ethical restrictions on physician advertising, solicitation, and contract practice bore no reasonable relationship to procompetitive concerns, the touchstone of the FTC's public-interest calculus. By eliminating these restraints, FTC commissioners and attorneys cut the ties that bound rank-and-file physicians to their national, state, and local medical societies, thereby undermining the structure of organized medicine. Stripped of its organizing principles and enforcement mechanisms, the medical establishment weakly resisted the formation of large-scale provider networks and the integration of insurance products and delivery systems, known as health maintenance organizations or HMOs.

The third Conservation movement was summoned to life between Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring (1962) and the Santa Barbara Oil Spill at the end of the movement-spawning Sixties, and would be called by a more nature-evoking term—environmentalism. Looking back from there, those of us with some historical memory were struck by how far we had come from the first Conservation crusade led by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot, or the second led by FDR in the 1930s. In those early days they thought the problem was loss of forests, soil erosion, water and air pollution, and that the solutions were National Parks and National Forests watched over by civil servants in their gray or tan-brown uniforms, along with a Soil Conservation Service for farmers.

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

World War II was a time of unprecedented industrial growth and urban and suburban expansion in California. War mobilization ushered in new types of postindustrial and technology-based industries. Military bases were established up and down the Pacific Coast. Factories suddenly materialized, supplying military hardware, jobs, and, in turn, attracting a new wave of migrants.

In the best-selling book Civil Action, Jonathan Harr depicts an environmental pollution tale of frightening contamination and endless litigation in a small Massachusetts town during the 1970s and 1980s. A quixotic and some-what foolish lawyer pursues two giant and evil corporations through the legal system, seeking justice for his hapless working-class clients. In the end, the solitary lawyer falters when faced with the overwhelming economic and (seemingly underhanded) legal power of the corporations. Justice is not served, if it truly ever is, until the might of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) intervenes to force the business interests to admit some wrong and shell out some money.

In January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order creating a National War Labor Board (NWLB) to arbitrate wartime industrial disputes. Roosevelt's order provided enormous power for the board, which could, on its own motion, intervene in any labor conflict it deemed a threat to “the effective prosecution of the war” and subsequently impose settlements on the parties. In practice, the board replaced free collective bargaining for the duration of the war. Most scholars of the era agree that the NWLB, operating at a time when New Deal labor policy was still in formation and many unions had not yet become entrenched in their industries, had a profound impact on the evolution of the American industrial relations system during the war and thereafter.

Despite a superficial similarity to earlier labor boards, the NWLB was a curious creature born, in the words of one of its members, “out of deadlock,” and of a breed uncommon on the American political landscape. The board's authority was nominally grounded on an agreement by a 1941 national labor-management conference to eschew strikes and lockouts in lieu of arbitration. Yet this conference had reached an impasse and its “agreement” had been forced on the business delegates by Roosevelt.

Environmental policy and politics in the United States have changed dramatically over the past three decades. What began in the late 1960s as an heroic effort by an incipient environmental movement to conserve dwindling natural resources and prevent further deterioration of the air, water, and land has been transformed over more than three decades into an extraordinarily complex, diverse, and often controversial array of environmental policies. Those policies occupy a continuing position of high visibility on the political agenda at all levels of government, and environmental values are widely embraced by the American public. Yet throughout the 1990s environmental policies and programs were characterized as much by sharp political conflict as by the consensus over policy goals and means that reigned during the early to mid-1970s. As the twenty-first century approaches, there is considerable value in looking back at this exceptional period to under-stand the nature of the transformation and its implications for the future.

Policy history has straddled two disciplines—history and policy analysis—neither of which has taken it very seriously. What unites those who study policy history is not that they are ”policy historians“ per se, but that they organize their analysis and narrative around the emergence, passage, and implementation of policy. Rather than a subfield, as the historian Paula Baker recently argued, policy history has resembled area studies programs. Policy history became an interdisciplinary arena for scholars from many different fields to interact. While founders hoped that policies would become an end in themselves, rather than something used to understand other issues, scholarship since 1978 has shown that the two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, some of the most innovative scholarship has come from social or political historians who have used policy to understand larger historical phenomena. In the process, the work provided a much richer understanding of how policymaking evolved.

The history of sexual liberation is inextricably bound with the history of scientific rationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the basic moral consensus on sexual liberation has proved capable of accommodating a wide variety of scientific methodologies, from the cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead to the biological taxonomy of Alfred Kinsey. Two recent works, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, and James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, critique their respective subjects' specific scientific practice only to reaffirm the general practice of sexual science and its underlying (a)moral consensus. In this article, I will examine the treatment of methodological issues in these books as a reflection of the historical profession's participation in the moral bankruptcy of the social sciences. Freeman's empirical deconstruction of Mead's Samoan research and Jones's empirical reconstruction of Kinsey's life both skirt substantive moral issues by affirming a hopelessly nineteenth-century ideal of scientific objectivity. Each book, in its own particular way, fetishizes fact at the expense of argument and obscures the nature of intellectual developments of interest to historians of every moral and methodological orientation.

The emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s has stimulated much debate on the extent to which race and class have been or should become central concerns of modern environmentalism. Leaders in the environmental justice movement have charged that mainstream environmental organizations and, in turn, environmental policy have demonstrated a greater concern for preserving wilderness and animal habitats than addressing health hazards of humans, especially those living in cities; have embraced a “Save the Earth” perspective at the expense of saving people's lives and protecting their homes and backyards. Some advocates of environmental justice have gone so far as to dissociate their movement from American environmentalism altogether, rather identifying with a broader social justice heritage as imbedded in civil rights activities of the 1950s and 1960s.