In the early 1920s, legal and economic experts in the U.S. Treasury Department played a pivotal role in developing U.S. fiscal policy. Thomas S. Adams was one such expert and a key architect of the World War I fiscal state. After the war, Adams envisioned an innovative business tax that could have been the first broad-based, national consumption tax in the United States but was rejected by populist lawmakers. Later, Adams would be identified as one of the intellectual pioneers of the modern value-added tax (VAT)—a tax that has been adopted in nearly every developed country in the world except the United States and has also come to underwrite expansive, progressive social-welfare spending. How did a tax that began with an American expert fail to take hold in the United States? Democratic forces in the shape of organized political and economic interests both facilitated and frustrated the development of seemingly rational tax laws and spending policies crafted by fiscal experts. While Adams learned firsthand how these democratic forces influenced the relationship between expertise and state capacity, this missed opportunity to enact a comprehensive national consumption tax also influenced the peculiar development of the modern American fiscal and social-welfare states.

Birth registration formed a key part of the administration of white supremacy between Reconstruction and World War II. In the allotment of Indigenous lands and the enforcement of de jure segregation by states, birth registration served an important ideological and administrative function. Because allotment policy combined property transmission with family reorganization, it made documentation of identity more important to the federal Indian Office. The Office imposed nuclear family structures on complex kin networks to establish access to land title, and it used documentation to alter family relationships to fit with American property law. During the same years, southern states used birth registration to fix racial identity in order to determine access to school, marriage, and many other benefits. Racial classification through birth registration, in other words, worked less to record the truth than to help produce it.

James Q. Wilson (1931–2012) ranks among the most influential political scientists and policy intellectuals of the past fifty years. This new account of Wilson's journey from liberal to conservative highlights his time at Harvard University in the 1960s, during the height of liberal authority and the emergence of the New Left, and draws from archival materials and records at MIT, Harvard, and RAND, and from a range of Wilson's writings on administration, urban affairs, and crime. It situates Wilson in the organizational nexus in which he worked, analyzing his thinking as it shifted from a preoccupation with incentives and running organizations (“organizational maintenance”) to disincentives and punishing people (“order maintenance”). Wilson, the nation's leading institutionalist, formed his conservative ideas in the praxis of university administration—a venue typically ignored by scholars but one that influenced his understanding of organizations and crime.

The idea that friendship and dialogue are the first steps to making a better world has a history. During the first half of the twentieth century, American Protestants powered a national movement for dialogue and cooperation among people of different races. In the 1940s and 1950s, Black leaders in predominantly white ecumenical Protestant institutions created a series of workshops and dialogue guides that popularized the notion that interracial exchange would lead to action. Backed by their institutions’ financial, moral, and organizational resources, they transformed both the interracial movement and dominant understandings of how to change society. Yet, while Black ecumenical leaders insisted that facilitating interracial exchange was just the beginning form of action in ending discrimination, they unintentionally facilitated problematic assumptions about the standalone power of “first steps” in creating a more equitable society.

In the second half of the twentieth century, three Jewish men were stripped of their American citizenship after spending significant time in Palestine/Israel and engaging in statutorily defined “expatriating acts.” Integral to the doctrine of liberal citizenship, in fact, were illiberal mechanisms of individual and categorical exclusion from citizenship intended to protect the sovereignty of the nation-state. These mechanisms gained particular expression in state agents’ deliberations about the citizenship status of Jews, especially after the establishment of Israel. The emergence of dual citizenship as a legal possibility—the result of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the expatriation of one of the men considered here—reveals the shifting ambitions of American state power, while also exposing the enduring ways in which U.S. government entities, from Congress to administrative agencies to the courts, justified the state's power to transform citizens into aliens.

American Jewish support for Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War was in part the result of an emotional mobilization. American Jewish fundraisers constructed an extensive public-relations apparatus and formulated strategies for honoring supporters and shaming shirkers. They, along with journalists for the Jewish press, interpreted events through the lens of information provided by the newly formed Israeli government. Fundraising, however, could succeed only by responding to donors’ emotional proclivities, and expressions of solidarity with Israel in Jewish media were laterally reinforcing as well as shaped from the top down. These findings underscore the role of positive emotions in generating “groupness.”

When incorporating the press into historical narratives, scholars have often relied on published newspaper and magazine articles without interrogating how those pieces were produced. This article relies on the under-used archival papers of journalists in the early Cold War period to argue that they actively created a Washington consensus on foreign policy that kept economic determinism out of the U.S. public's understanding of policies like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In private, however, the more anticommunist public narrative was contradicted by a discourse that emphasized the importance of access to colonial raw materials. This private discourse was enabled by the Washington press corps’ social spaces, which were segregated by race and gender and helped create a worldview that acknowledged the hypocrisy of the U.S. government but not their own.

In 1974, Congresswoman Bella Abzug introduced the Equality Act, the first federal gay rights legislation. A high-profile ally, Abzug occupied a unique space in the gay rights movement, and the Equality Act cemented her as the premier political intermediary for gay rights. Owing to her prominence, Abzug attracted a geographically and ideologically diverse constituency of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans. Gay activists as well as isolated individuals reached out to Abzug as a conduit for their grievances and political hopes, and her support unified gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans around a national focal point at a time when the movement was fractured and regional. In the period after Stonewall, Abzug was gay liberation's most meaningful national intermediary. Routinely undervalued in the history of the gay rights movement, Abzug's legislative advocacy reveals the centrality of political allyship within the struggle for equality.

In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become the nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet the DARE program accomplished much more than teaching kids to resist drugs. DARE shifted the responsibility of preventing drug use from social and public-health policy to local, police-led, educative projects that taught personal responsibility, the value of morally strengthened families, and respect for the authority of the police. By stressing the consequences of poor behavior and demanding respect for law and order, DARE attempted to cultivate popular consent for policies that divorced drug use from social and economic conditions. DARE's approach helped justify reductions in social welfare spending and the expansion of policing and incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s.

In the mid-1950s, the Eisenhower administration and Congress erupted in a sharp partisan debate over how to pay for the novel National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, slated to become the most expensive and expansive public works project in United States history. Republicans advocated for interest-bearing bonded debt borrowed from banks, while Democrats preferred to avoid debt service costs and apply a direct tax-and-pave approach to the enormous state building project. The chosen fiduciary practices promised to be as permanent as the physical infrastructure they paid to construct and maintain. Consequently, the fraught episode saw the two parties contest not only transportation infrastructure and the capital supply upon which it depended, but indeed the very nature and future of American political economy. When the tax-and-pave approach prevailed, it saved taxpayers interest costs, but came with its own perilous consequences as it set near-limitless development in motion.

In the late twentieth century, the American prison system expanded in ways that denied women, and especially working-class and women of color, adequate medical care with regard to HIV-AIDS and their reproductive, chronic, and other illnesses. The experience of living within a racist, misogynistic, and privatized prison system shaped women's organizing on the inside, inspiring forms of mutual aid among prisoners and compelling the formation of inside–outside alliances. Activists not only addressed HIV-AIDS, but also the absence of all the healthcare that incarcerated women failed to receive. Their efforts highlight the systemic and cyclical problems diverse groups of women have faced within the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the United States, as well as women's interpersonal, organizational, and legal efforts to overcome them.

The fate of caring labor was up for grabs in the 1970s, when Americans debated how to value feminized work—paid or unpaid, professional or service-oriented, performed in one's own home or beyond it—as women's social roles shifted. President Richard Nixon and his allies proposed reassigning caregiving functions to volunteers as a way to resist new demands on the welfare state and shrug off unmet social needs. Although many women's groups objected, their varied approaches to feminized labors also kept them from forging a united response. Recovering these volunteering wars offers up a vital perspective on the conflict between postwar movements advancing broad rights claims and the New Right's frontal assault on the “undeserving.” Manipulating notions of benevolence, Nixon and his associates found new ways to puncture the social safety net—a process that political leaders from both major parties would emulate and accelerate.

Three Black women pose for a photograph mid play, a golf course stretching out behind them. With slight smiles, they squint in the sun at the camera, taking a break from the meditative intensity of the game. Two women wear skirts, or maybe one is sporting a culotte, bobby socks, and at least one of them seems to be wearing a regulation cleated shoe. A breeze blows fabric against legs. Each holds her club atop a golf ball, their bodies and the flagstick casting shadows on the putting green (see Figure 1). They are members of the Par-Links Black Women's Golf Club, formed in California's East Bay in 1958. Advertising for new members in the Oakland Black newspaper, the California Voice, the club held its first tournament the following year at Tilden Park Golf Course in Berkeley. “… challenge or be challenged,” the group cheered: “Your place on the ladder depends on your win.”