Mathew Carey promoted the high tariff as a political expression of humane sentiments that relieved American workers of the misery caused by low wages and unemployment. This made him an early example of a state-builder working outside the state itself, building ideological frames and using emotional appeals to promote the expansion of state capacity. Although other aspects of his protectionism appealed to the republican tradition, Carey meshed his sentimental appeal with the liberalism. Later reformers integrated sensibility with liberalism by reference to the rights of vulnerable parties, but Carey added an appeal to an enlightened self-interest that allowed American manufacturers to profit while protecting workers. Although he became a well-known advocate for the organized provision of social welfare, his continued opposition to the widespread distribution of outdoor relief also suggests that he viewed the policy as a circumscribed federal social-welfare measure providing work rather than direct aid.

The rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s propelled the war on drugs. The experience of Canton, Ohio, shows how the response to crack solidified mass incarceration. A declining industrial city of 84,000 people in northeast Ohio with deep-seated racial divides, it was overwhelmed by aggressive, enterprising crack dealers from outside the city. In response, politicians and residents united behind the strategy of incessant arrests and drastic prison sentences. The law-enforcement offensive worsened conditions while pursuing African Americans at blatantly disproportionate rates, but few people engaged in reframing the drug problem. Instead, a punitive citizenry positioned punishment as the principal remedy. The emergency foreclosed on more comprehensive assessments of the city’s tribulations, while the criminal justice system emerged as the paramount institution.

This article reveals how the politics of federalism in the 1920s stifled the U.S. Children’s Bureau’s ability to collect national data on the workings of the Sheppard-Towner Act. The Bureau staff’s reliance on state administrators for data hindered their efforts to collect standardized national statistics on the states’ use of federal dollars. Ultimately, this barrier contributed to Sheppard-Towner’s defeat in 1929. Though the law was short-lived, the problems the Children’s Bureau encountered administering it provide insights into how federal matching grant programs began to shape federal and state relations before the New Deal. As this article shows, Bureau staff learned from their experience administering Sheppard-Towner that they needed to implement more stringent federal oversight over state-level accounting in their administration of Title V of the Social Security Act.

The United States Constitution requires the government “to provide for the common defense.” As a prime topic featured prominently throughout the legislative blueprint of American society, the “common defense” is conspicuously uncommon in today’s policy scholarship and education. Ironically, the policy discipline largely ignores defense issues despite defense serving as the catalyst for establishing policy studies as an academic field in the 1940s. Through decades of military conflict since and obvious relevance to practitioner behavior, defense issues remain ironically absent the public policy scholarly landscape and are instead hosted primarily within strategic and security studies mediums. This article offers an historical examination of the evolution, development, and scholarly shifts in defense policy over time. It also presents perceived reasons for the lack of defense policy dialogue, recommends approaches to reintegrate the topic back into the scholarly discourse, and concludes arguing defense policy warrants greater attention in academic scholarship and teaching.