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

The desegregation of southern schools, mandated by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), presented a dilemma for national politicians of both parties. “If presidents felt they should speak up, or act to enforce court rulings,” a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1969, “they risked offending conservatives, segregationists, and the South. If they wanted to sit tight, they invited the wrath of liberals.” Even presidents who were capable of acting in other areas of civil rights were content to assume a low profile on school desegregation, assign responsibility for this area of policymaking to subordinates, and enforce it only under external pressure, usually from the federal courts.

The G.I. Bill of Rights, formally known as the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, remains in the public consciousness as one of the most significant social policies ever enacted in the United States. Established for returning veterans of World War II, its terms of coverage were strikingly broad and generous. Fifty-one percent of veterans used the educational provisions: 2.2 million pursued a college education or graduate degree, and 5.6 million attained vocational or on-the-job training. The law also offered extensive unemployment benefits, which were used to the full by 14 percent of veterans. It also offered low-interest loans for the purchase of homes, farms, and businesses, which were used by 29 percent of veterans.

The state of policy history is good. This is a dramatic change from only four years ago, when I started an article in this very journal about the evolution of policy history by asserting: “The future of policy history remains unclear.” At the time, my statement reflected the sentiment shared by many fellow policy historians who did not feel that professional opportunities had fully caught up with the intellectual vitality of the subfield.

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.

Within two years of the triumphal, if belated, passage of the 1949 Housing Act, America's public housing program was on the defensive, reeling from an onslaught of local opposition. Progressives had hoped to build 135,000 units of public housing a year, but were soon met with a furious backlash. Afraid of government competition, the National Association of Home Builders and the U.S. Savings and Loan League mobilized local opposition by sending out “kits” to their members with prepackaged ads for local newspapers reading “Can you afford to pay somebody else's rent?” The result was an avalanche of local referenda, and voters across the country blocked new construction. In California, Proposition 10 made all new projects contingent on local referenda, and Los Angeles voters threw out their mayor over his support for public housing. In other cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, race played a major role in thwarting local housing authority plans. Despite a massive postwar housing shortage and a well-argued set of progressive ideals, public housing supporters struggled to keep their program alive in the early 1950s. The election of 1952—with Republicans capturing the presidency, the House, and the Senate for the first time since 1930—meant the prospects for the survival of public housing looked bleak at best.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States created modern resource management—a collection of administrative bureaucracies that reversed long-standing policies of distributing lands into private hands and instead managed the public domain from Washington. The creation of these powerful, independent agencies underlay a broader effort to reorganize and enlarge the national government. The very same administrators who built the new conservation bureaucracies—Gifford Pinchot of the Forest Service, James R. Garfield of the Department of Interior, and Frederick Newell of the Bureau of Reclamation—also led President Theodore Roosevelt's drive for reorganization of the executive branch.

Most public problems can be approached in many ways. Urban noise, the honking of car horns, for example, could be tackled by building effective mass transit and discouraging automobile use, by forbidding the use of horns within city limits and fining violators, by encouraging harmonious social circumstances, or at least stress-reduction education programs, to make drivers less aggressive, by developing horns that target sound waves only at offending motorists, or by encouraging everyone to wear noise-reduction earphones. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases can be solved by encouraging chastity and fidelity as virtues, by strictly criminalizing transmission, or by prescribing antibiotics after the fact. Such varying approaches are qualitatively different. They do not just reflect distinct degrees of statutory intervention. States that adopt divergent solutions may, in a similar fashion, be fundamentally different from one another, not just stronger or weaker versions of an abstract ideal of public authority.

This article follows the ways through which the concept of juvenile delinquency has been created in the legal and social discourse in Israel. It compares the discourse and resulting social policies regarding juvenile delinquency mainly in two social groups: “middle-class” offenders (youth from high socioeconomic families who immigrated to Israel before 1948); and “lower class” offenders (Middle Eastern “Oriental” youth from low socioeconomic families who came mainly during the 1950s from Asia Minor and North Africa). Societal reactions to juvenile delinquency during the period studied were highly variable, depending on the ethnicity, gender, and social class of the offender.

Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood's most prominent political activists, devoted much of his time to the Screen Actors Guild. Throughout the course of Heston's long acting career, the guild shifted its policy emphasis on several occasions. During the 1960s, when Heston served on the executive board, the guild adhered to its traditional strategy of focusing on wages, benefits, and working conditions. At that point, Heston took a moderate approach toward guild business, often showing his willingness to compromise. In the 1970s, the guild leadership was captured by more “liberal” actors who wished to expand the union's activities into social and political channels not directly related to the job of acting. In the 1980s, the guild's leadership became even more militantly liberal. The resulting policy shifts provoked a reaction from Heston and a number of other conservative actors. It quickly became evident that Heston was no longer willing to compromise; he began to take an ideological, hard-line approach to guild matters. He not only led the conservatives in a successful campaign to return the guild to its original policy focus, but he also shaped federal labor policy with his efforts. Convinced that safety mechanisms were needed to protect guild members from a politically active board in the future, Heston advocated federal policies that would allow union members to withhold part of their dues if they disagreed with the political activities undertaken by union leadership.

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.

During the past generation the South largely has abandoned its traditional commitment to the Democratic Party and emerged as an increasingly strong bastion of the Republican party. In 2004, George Bush won 58 percent in the South but only 48 percent in the rest of the country. (Throughout this article the South is defined as the former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma.) In contrast, as recently as 1960, John Kennedy carried the South; excluding the South, Nixon beat Kennedy. The South's commitment to the Democrats lasted more than 150 years, from the days of Thomas Jefferson until the 1960s. How, then, do we explain the decline of the Democrats and the rise of the Republicans in the South in the past forty years?

During the 1980s and 1990s in countries across the globe, new populist protest movements and radical political organizations emerged to challenge traditional parties, ruling elites, and professional politicians, and even long-standing social norms. The revolts against politics-as-usual have arisen from many kinds of social groupings and from diverse points on the political spectrum. Through the 1980s, in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America, populist discontent erupted intermittently. But the end of the Cold War, particularly in Europe, unleashed a torrent of popular movements and political parties opposed to what the discontented perceived as the corruption and deceitfulness of the political classes and their corporate patrons. Some protest movements promoted more democracy, pluralism, and economic opportunity; some expressed intolerance, bigotry, and xenophobic nationalism.

What do we mean by the term “policy history”? In conventional usage, “history” refers to one of two kinds of investigation: the study of something that happened at some point in the past, or the study of how something came to be what it is. It is this second usage—the idea of policy history as an unfolding story of policy development—that I want to examine in this essay. Understanding the sources of policy often requires that we pay attention to processes that play out over considerable periods of time.

Henry David Thoreau's influential essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all.’…the character of the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” Thoreau's statement summarizes a central thesis in political theory, what has become a historical constant in the minds of researchers seeking to explain the development and parameters of the American welfare state. This thesis is that any power given to the government is subtracted from the liberty of the governed, a concept best captured by the term “antistatism.” Thus, Lipset contends that the United States is dominated by an encompassing liberal culture that honors private property, distrusts state authority, and holds individual rights sacred. Similarly, according to Huntington, Americans live by a creed that views government as the most dangerous embodiment of power. For Morone, American government is a “polity suspicious of its own state.” Hartz, too, asserts that the master assumption is that “the power of the state must be limited.”