Research Article
Censorship, Ratings, and Rights: Political Order and Sexual Portrayals in American Movies
- Richard A. Brisbin
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- 20 September 2002, pp. 1-27
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Between 1966 and 1971, a remarkable change occurred in the regulation of the sexual content of American movies. A policy of government and industry cooperation in the censorship of sexual portrayals and messages in American general release movies disappeared. Indeed, the collapse of movie censorship appeared quite abrupt. In 1966 state, local, and industry censors nearly kept actor Elizabeth Taylor, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, from turning into the camera and uttering “You son of a bitch.” By 1971, A Clockwork Orange would contain a scene of rape, frontal nudity, and an accelerated sequence depicting a ménage-à-trois. Such a change signals a synoptic shift in the morality policy governing an industry with significant influence on public tastes.
Workers' Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History
- Christopher Howard
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- 20 September 2002, pp. 28-47
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Workers' compensation was the first social insurance program to gain widespread acceptance in the United States, and as such became one of the foundations of the modern American welfare state.
The original and more gendered name for this program was workmen's compensation. The term “workers' compensation” did not become common until the 1970s. I will use both names in this article, depending on the context. Most states passed workmen's compensation laws between 1911 and 1920, and all but two states did so by 1935. The other major social policy innovation of this era were mothers' pensions laws, which were targeted at the poor children of single mothers. These laws also spread rapidly in the 1910s and were on the books in virtually every state by 1935.Although minimum wage and maximum hours laws for women also passed in many states prior to the New Deal, they have generally received less scholarly attention than workmen's compensation or mothers' pensions. The major histories of the American welfare stateEdward D. Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Edward D. Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform revised ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935, 2nd ed. (1968; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986; Charles Noble, Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 6th ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999); Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). always acknowledge the importance of workmen's compensation and mothers' pensions in the early twentieth century, and some authorsBarbara J. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 413–35. argue that these two programs established the major fault lines of social provision – between social insurance and public assistance, between employed male workers and unpaid mothers – for the rest of the century.
Migration, Radicalism, and State Security: Legislative Initiatives in the Canadas and the United States c.1794–1804
- Barry Wright
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- 20 September 2002, pp. 48-60
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Comparison of Canadian and American state security legislation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals striking similarities. This is somewhat surprising, given the political and constitutional gulf between the loyalist British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the revolutionary U.S. republic. Indeed, Murray Greenwood's study of treason laws and their administration in the United States, Lower Canada, and Great Britain during the period of the French Revolution highlights the contrasts between the liberal American approach and the repressive alarmism of Pitt's government which was taken even further by British colonial administrators in Lower Canada.
F.M. Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800,” in Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837, ed. F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241. Differences extended to other matters related traditionally to state security, such as the availability of habeas corpus and formal protections of judicial independence from executive and partisan influence.
The Reconstruction of Constitutional Privacy Rights and the New American State
- Ken I. Kersch
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- 20 September 2002, pp. 61-87
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Scholars have accorded the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a uniquely important place in the annals of American political development. During this period, the nation underwent transformations from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial society. Underlying these transformations was a revolution in the nature of the country's political economy, which shifted rapidly from a longstanding proprietary-competitive order to an unwonted corporate-administrative one.
Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. Specifically Sklar defines “proprietary-competitive” as capitalist property and market relations in which the dominant type of enterprise was headed by an owner-manager (or owner-managers), or a direct agent thereof, and in which such enterprise was a price-taker, rather than a price-maker, price being determined by conditions of supply and demand beyond the control of the enterprise short of anticompetitive inter-firm collusion. By the new “corporate-administrative” order, he means a political economy characterized by the capitalization of . . . property in the form of negotiable securities relatively widely dispersed in ownership, a corresponding separation of ownership title and management function, and management of the enterprise by bureaucratic-administrative methods involving a division, or a specialization of managerial function, and an integration, or at least a centralization, of financial control. It is meant to designate “a process occurring not merely in a few notable firms, or in a sector of the economy . . . but pervasively, and hence involving the change in the broader economy from price-competitive to administered, or ‘oligopolistic,' markets” (Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 4 n.1). This transformation fundamentally altered traditional forms of work and management in the private sector, leading to the preeminence of a wage-labor system, the separation of corporate ownership from control, and the rise of bureaucratized and professionalized business management.See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977). At the same time, a “new American state” was formed with its own analogous cadres of governing professionals, professionals who in the new administrative agencies asserted increasingly centralized control over the nation's economy and civil society.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
The Washington–Du Bois Controversy and African-American Protest: Ideological Conflict and Its Consequences
- Ramón G. Vela
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- 20 September 2002, pp. 88-109
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The twentieth century was the century in which African-Americans fought their way into American democracy. But it did not begin that way. From 1895 until 1915, Booker T. Washington advised African-Americans, with considerable success, to adopt a different course. He believed that blacks were unlikely to attain equal rights through political protest. Hence, they should stop fighting racial segregation and political exclusion. Equality would come only after blacks had attained a substantial level of economic success. In order to achieve this, African-Americans would have to build their own institutions – schools, businesses, and the like. Thus, Washington advised accommodation, economic initiative, and racial self-help. And his was not idle advice, for Washington became the most influential black leader of his day – possibly of any day.