Deal Era Research Articles

Scoring points: politicians, activists, and the lower Federal Court appointment process

This book explores how the lower federal court appointment process became vastly politicized in the modern era. Scherer develops a theory of mobilization, positing that lower court appointments have always been used by politicians for electoral purposes, but because of two historic changes to American institutions in the 1950s and 1960s-the breakdown of the old party system, and a federal judiciary reception to expanding individuals' constitutional rights-politicians shifted from an appointment system dominated by patronage to a system dominated by new policy-oriented appointment strategies. The use of these new strategies not only resulted in partisan warfare during the nomination and confirmation stages of the appointment process, but also led to party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts. Employing exclusive data of judicial decision-making from the New Deal era through the present, Scherer demonstrates that there was little party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts until the late 1960s, and that once politicians began to use elite mobilization strategies, significant party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts resulted. Accordingly, elite mobilization strategies have affected not only politics in Washington, but also the way justice is distributed across the country.

Varieties of Capitalist Development

Wages, benefits, and workers’ rights in the American South lagged behind the national average throughout the New Deal era even after southern states industrialized after the Second World War. This article deepens arguments about a distinctive regional variety of capitalism. It emphasizes how the institutions that define rights and authority over such economic decisions as what kind of jobs to create and how industries should compete constitute the industrial order. The article focuses on the Texas apparel industry and shows that low labor standards were an outcome of choices made by business owners and managers who claimed, and were given, the authority to carry out their visions of economic development. In contrast to previous explanations that have focused on labor exploitation and resistance, I address alternative ways to organize work and market products and the influence of choices from these alternatives on the development of distinctive labor-management relations. The apparel industry developed an efficient form of production that took advantage of an oligarchic political order whose institutional features dated to an earlier era.

When affirmative action was white: an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action. When Affirmative Action Was White demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. This was no accident. With the United States still in an era of legal segregation, the powerful southern wing of the Democratic Party provided the framework for Social Security, the GI Bill, and landmark labor laws that helped create the foundations of the modern middle class. Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farmworkers and through laws that kept administration in local hands, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. The publication of this deeply disturbing work promises to create a national debate on the meaning of affirmative action and the responsibility of government.

Forty Years after the War on Poverty: Interview with Photographer Billy E. Barnes

Click for larger view Figure 1 Influenced by the Farm Security Administration photographers of the New Deal era and the activism of the Civil Rights movement, Billy E. Barnes shot more than forty thousand documentary pictures. All photographs courtesy of Billy E. Barnes. (See http://billybarnes.com.)

German Federalism and Recent Reform Efforts

In both the United States and Germany constitutional lawyers, politicians, and the attentive public speak of “dual federalism.” In the United States this means that the federal government and the states have separate political and administrative responsibilities and their own sources of revenues. In Germany, in contrast, dual federalism means that the federal government, i.e., the executive and legislative branches, are responsible for most legislation, and that the Länder (states; singular, Land) generally administer the laws (in large part through their local governments) on their own responsibility. In both federal systems “dual federalism” has been undermined if not replaced by “cooperative federalism,” generally associated with the New Deal era in the United States and the Finance Reform of 1969 in Germany. In the meantime “intergovernmental relations” has more or less replaced the concept of “cooperative federalism” in the United States, while Politikverflechtung (political/policy interconnection and coordination) is perhaps the more commonly used term in Germany today. In both cases the new terms reflect an interrelationship among federal, regional, and local levels that goes beyond mere cooperation.

Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (review)

Reviewed by: Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II Richard Gribble C.S.C. Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II. By Kevin E. Schmiesing. [Studies in Ethics and Economics.] (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 2004. Pp. xvi, 185. $75.00 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) In Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II, Kevin Schmiesing, a research fellow in history at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has provided scholars and others interested in American Catholicism a thorough, well organized, and adeptly written intellectual history of Catholic social thought on economic policy and systems during the first half of the twentieth century. This monograph fills a lacuna by its revisionist presentation of how American Catholic thinkers addressed problems and proposed solutions to the social question from the publication of Rerum Novarum (1891) to the beginning of Vatican Council II. The book in every way is a significant contribution to the literature. Schmiesing initially presents his basic theme, that Catholics who wrote on economic issues between 1891 and 1962 did so, based not solely on strictly authentic Catholic social teaching, but rather on the same complex set of factors that informed the views of non-Catholics of the period. He well supports his thesis through an informative introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion that analyze in chronological order how American Catholic social thinkers have addressed economic issues during this seventy-year period. Starting in Colonial and early nineteenth-century America, Schmiesing shows how American Catholics made no reference to church documentation when addressing economic social issues of the day. During the age of reform, 1890 to 1940, the author demonstrates that various opinions on the meaning and application of Rerum Novarum were used by American Catholic social thinkers to show Catholicism's compatibility with the virtues of middle America. People like William Kerby, his famous student John Ryan, and William Stang applied Leo XIII's social encyclical differently, but they also used various economic theories, denying the idea of the absolute character of economic laws. Even the conservative [End Page 867] German-American Frederick Kunkel used contemporary ideas in his thinking. Speaking of Rerum Novarum, Schmiesing concludes, "The ways in which they [social thinkers] applied its mandates to the American situation varied widely" (p. 46). Schmiesing then reviews the 1920's and the New Deal era showing how Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno was variously understood and applied by such notables as John Ryan, Dorothy Day, Virgil Michel, and Frederick Kunkel. The author concludes by reviewing how Catholic social thinkers in the 1950's, where debates on anti-Communism and capitalism dominated the scene, continued to present their views drawing from the views of non-Catholics as well as church teaching. Schmiesing's monograph has several important features that enhance its usability. The prose is very clear, concise, and well organized. Readers are provided information and analysis in rapid order. This is a very scholarly work as evidenced by the numerous, detailed, and informative endnotes. The author provides readers with a highly functional bibliography that is arranged by subject for easier reference. Another significant element of this book is the author's choice to introduce readers to economic thinkers who are rarely if ever mentioned in the literature, including James Gillis, C.S.P., Edward Keller, C.S.C., and Goetz Briefs. Within the Market Strife is a scholarly achievement that adds greatly to American Catholic scholarship of the twentieth century. Professional and interested readers of Catholic intellectual history will find this volume a welcome addition to their bookshelves. Richard Gribble C.S.C. Stonehill College Copyright © 2005 The Catholic University of America Press

Accountability in Accounting? The Politics of Private Rule-Making in the Public Interest

Over recent decades governments have increasingly delegated domestic and international regulatory functions to private-sector agents. This article examines the reasons for such delegation and how private agents differ from public ones, and then analyzes the politics of regulation post delegation. It argues that the key difference between delegation to a public agent and delegation to a private one is that in the latter case a multiple-principals problem emerges that is qualitatively different from the one usually considered in the literature. An agent's action will be determined by the relative tightness of competing principal–agent relationships. This tightness is a function of the relative importance of each principal for the agent's financial and operational viability as well as its effectiveness in rule making. Further, the article posits that exogenous changes in the macro-political climate can deeply affect the nature of principal–agent relationships. The authors test their hypotheses about the politics of regulation in the postdelegation period through the study of accounting standards setting in the United States, a case of delegation of regulatory authority to a private agent that goes back to the New Deal era and has received renewed public attention in the wake of recent corporate financial scandals.

The Meaning of Liberalism/Conservatism on the Mature Rehnquist Court: First Amendment Absolutism and a Muted Social Construction Process

I present evidence from Rehnquist Court First Amendment speech and religion cases from the 1990s to the present. I ask whether these cases of the mature Rehnquist Court support the thesis that the Supreme Court continues to be in its decision-making and innovative in doctrine as it meets the demands of our more complex and diverse society. I conclude the essay with some thoughts as to why the First Amendment jurisprudence of the mature Rehnquist Court is far more muted than its cases involving privacy, abortion choice, and homosex ual rights, and I suggest what we can expect from the Supreme Court in the future. It was not until the 1991-1992 term that it was possible to begin to decipher the direction that doctrine would take in the Rehnquist Court because it takes a few years for the justices' visions of polity and rights principles ? and their application to constitutional questions ? to coalesce. It was not until the 1991-1992 term that we have what I will call the mature Rehnquist Court, a Court that consisted of a majority of mem bers representing a new era in American Politics, a post-New Deal era in which a majority of justices were selected by conser vative Republican Presidents who began to question many of the assumptions about whether we should have faith in government as compared to economic and social markets as venues of polit ical change. The landmark decisions of the 1991-92 term of the Supreme Court included cases in which the mature Rehnquist Court did not turn its back on precedent or on the tests and principles that had been developed by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969) and Warren Burger (1969-1986).1 Evidence from the landmark cases of the 1991-92 term of the Rehnquist Court support the view that it was constitutive, not simply in its decision-making, as had been the Supreme Court under Chief Justices Warren and Burger. The basic tenets of the approach are the follow ing: 1) the Supreme Court does not make its choices instrumen tally ? that is, it does not choose an outcome and then simply use polity and rights principles to support that outcome; 2) the Supreme Court does not decide cases in ways that are similar to those used by legislative or bureaucratic policy-makers; instead, there is a constitutive decision-making process in which mem bers of the Supreme Court engage in a textured and sincere debate about which polity and rights principles are applicable to a case and how to apply them; 3) the Supreme Court is aware of new ideas, scholarship, and methods of problem definition cre ated by the interpretive community, and over time it incorporates these into its decisions; 4) polity principles, such as when to fol low precedent, when to trust elected bodies or courts, and when to trust different levels and branches of government to make constitutionally important decisions are as important to Rehnquist Court decision-making in these 1991-92 landmark cases as they were in the Warren and Burger Court eras; and 5) the Rehnquist Court, now dominated by Reagan-Bush appointees, like the Court in previous eras, finds justices protect ing their autonomy, and that of the Supreme Court as an institu tion, from the influence of the President, the majority coalition, and politics directly.2 If justices on the Rehnquist Court are simply instrumental in their decision-making, that is, if they simply follow election returns or their own policy wants or those of the president/ majority coalition that appointed them, and use principles sim ply to support predetermined policy wants, what might we expect from the Rehnquist Court, which consists of so many members who were selected by conservative Republican presi dents? We would expect the Rehnquist Court to reject long-held polity and rights principles and precedents from the Warren and Burger Court eras. Moreover, we would expect few additions to the rights of individuals generally and, most importantly, few additions to the rights of what I will call subordinated groups ? women, homosexuals, and minority races, or perhaps a signifi cant reduction in the rights of members of such groups. We should also expect the Supreme Court to overturn Supreme Court decisions that the presidents and majority coalitions which appointed the members of the Rehnquist Court have opposed in such a public and determined way. If, however, the mature Rehnquist Court follows the constitu tive approach, not election returns, and is not simply instrumen tal in its approach, we would expect it to define new individual rights, to be counter-majoritarian when fundamental polity and rights principles are about to be undermined, and to innovate as they define individual rights and the powers of government.

Democracy and Public Discussion in the Progressive and New Deal Eras: From Civic Competence to the Expression of Opinion

Democracy and Public Discussion in the Progressive and New Deal Eras: From Civic Competence to the Expression of Opinion

Freedom from want: American liberalism and the idea of the consumer

In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified four essential human freedoms. Three of these-freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion-had long been understood as defining principles of liberalism. Roosevelt's fourth freedom-freedom from want-was not. Indeed, classic liberals had argued that the only way to guarantee this freedom would be through an illiberal redistribution of wealth. In Freedom from Want, Kathleen G. Donohue describes how, between the 1880s and the 1940s, American intellectuals transformed classical liberalism into its modern American counterpart by emphasizing consumers over producers and consumption over production. Donohue first examines this conceptual shift through the writings of a wide range of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social critics-among them William Graham Sumner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Richard T. Ely, Edward Bellamy, and Thorstein Veblen-who rethought not only the negative connotations of consumerism but also the connection between one's right to consume and one's role in the production process. She then turns to the politicization of these ideas beginning with the establishment of a more consumer-oriented liberalism by Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl and ending in the New Deal era, when this debate evolved from intellectual discourse into public policy with the creation of such bodies as the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Deftly combining intellectual, cultural, and political history, Freedom from Want sheds new light on the ways in which Americans reconceptualized the place of the consumer in society and the implications of these shifting attitudes for the philosophy ofliberalism and the role of government in safeguarding the material welfare of the people.

“How They Ignore Our Rights as American Citizens”: Puerto Rican Migrants and the Politics of Citizenship in the New Deal Era

In the spring of 1936, following a spate of political violence amid Nationalist agitation in Puerto Rico, US Senator Millard Tydings proposed a bill granting the island independence from the US. Many Puerto Ricans had been pushing for independence since the US takeover in 1898, but the Tydings bill did not represent a concession to those demands. Rather, its impossibly punitive terms—involving the end of all New Deal federal assistance programs, the quick implementation of a full US tariff on Puerto Rican goods, and the withdrawal of all US government infrastructure and military within six months—advertised it as a quick fix to the political embarrassment due to Puerto Ricans’ intensifying anti-American sentiment.

“How They Ignore Our Rights as American Citizens”: Puerto Rican Migrants and the Politics of Citizenship in the New Deal Era

“How They Ignore Our Rights as American Citizens”: Puerto Rican Migrants and the Politics of Citizenship in the New Deal Era

From the courts to the state legislatures: social justice feminism, labor legislation, and the 1920s

The Progressive Era, a period of important social and political activism which stretched from 1890 through the end of World War I, now offers a rich, diverse historiography.1 In contrast, the 1920s...

Assessing Deregulation: The Clash between Promise and Reality

There is a general consensus that public utility services such as electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, and water are an integral part of the infrastructure of modern soci ety. These services are typically provided by complex systems of capital-intensive networks that link centralized supply with a wide range of diverse customer classes. Accessibility to these services becomes critical if each sector of society is to realize the maximum potential gain to be derived from the employment of these services to enhance productivity, income growth, and the attainment of societal goals. While there may be agreement on the relationship between public utilities as infrastructure and the gains to society, there is no consensus regarding the appropriate organization and governance of the industries supplying these services. For more than 100 years there has been a sharp dichotomy between those who would have government play a major role through direct intervention and regulation, and those who would leave the development and operation of these industries to private initiative within the context of free market incentives and penalties. Among the earliest proponents of government regulation were the institutional economists who played a significant role in shaping the content and form of regulation during the Progressive and New Deal eras. Institutionalists participated in developing new regulatory commissions, the methods of control, and the adaptation of the regulatory process to changing industry structures. By the 1940s, the work of the institutionalists had become well accepted as a part of the regulatory framework that had been put in place at the federal and state levels. A central feature of the institutionalist approach continues to be a belief in the need for government intervention to constrain market power and assure full access to utility services for all types of

The "New Property" Theory of Welfare Rights: Promises and Pitfalls

The "New Property" Theory of Welfare Rights:Promises and Pitfalls Elizabeth Bussiere (bio) While always central to the U.S. liberal lexicon, the idea of security has loomed very large in political discourse since 9-11. The destruction of national landmarks, coupled with a faltering economy, has aroused a foreboding sense of insecurity even among the solidly middle class. Yet it is the poor who are the most vulnerable. A recent study should give pause to those who advocate stiffening the work rules under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Increased numbers of children are living in households without either parent, a disconcerting development given that TANF was touted as a means of strengthening families. The "stresses of the new welfare world — loss of benefits, low-wage jobs at irregular hours and pressure from a new partner needed to pay the rent" contribute to family break-up.1 Ironically, some TANF recipients' plights have deteriorated because of their own dogged efforts to be conscientious employees. In August 2002 a New York City mother was charged with neglect and lost custody of one of her children after she had gone to her welfare-to-work job at the city's human resources office, leaving her kids with their substance-abusing father. The mother was at work when one child injured himself while the drunken father slept.2 The heightened sense of physical insecurity compels Americans to rethink the principles of our social contract. This essay provides an analysis of the "new property" theory of Charles A. Reich, a Yale University law professor during the 1960's whose theory about insecurity influenced poverty lawyers and Supreme Court justices. Originating in the McCarthy era, Reich's ideas have added resonance for those uneasy about the war on terrorism. In the mid-1960's Reich published two prominent articles advocating that all government benefits, including professional licenses and welfare grants, be reconceptualized as "new property." The fragile "boundary" between the individual and the State needed strengthening to provide the citizen a safe haven from government authority. Since private property was the functional equivalent of a secure "island," Reich sought to convert "government largess" into "new property" rights. While the catalyst for his theory was government's suppression of political dissent, later Reich became aware of other government excesses, e.g., government-sanctioned "midnight raids" designed to catch welfare mothers having out-of-wedlock sexual relations.3 Reich's explanation of the new property theory is suffused with the classical liberal language of "negative liberty" — the freedom of the individual to act unencumbered by political restraints. The Supreme Court incorporated Reich's libertarian language into its Goldberg v. Kelly decision in 1970, requiring government to provide pre-termination hearings to welfare recipients.4 [End Page 1] [Begin Page 4] Yet, as Gregory Alexander's essay reveals, Reich's new property theory contained a conception of "positive liberty" encompassing a right to subsistence. Holding that the poor's subsistence rights flow from their "rightful share in the commonwealth," Reich argued that the U.S. welfare state could never assure individual "well-being and dignity" without providing a "vested legal right" to public assistance. Government had a duty to respect both the negative rights under the Constitution's Due Process clauses and a positive, substantive right to welfare assistance, which he viewed as codified in the Social Security Act of 1935. Unlike Professor Alexander, however, I maintain that Reich's new property theory contained ideological contradictions that undermined a positive theory of welfare rights. Nevertheless, I conclude that Reich's ideas deserve reexamination today because he grappled seriously with a set of circumstances that is eerily familiar today. The Political Contexts of Charles A. Reich's "New Property" Theory Reich's new property theory originated as a civil libertarian reaction against the abuses of government authority during the McCarthy era and the wide discretion that had accrued to bureaucratic officials since the New Deal era. While a law clerk to Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black, Reich thought about recasting property rights in order to give greater protection to civil liberties. Barsky v. Board of Regents, in 1954, was a pivotal case for Reich. Dr...

“A favored child of the state”: Federal Student Aid at Ohio Colleges and Universities, 1934–1943

Higher education scholars are familiar with the close relationship between American higher education and the federal government after World War II. The G.I. Bill and Cold War concerns for maintaining the nation's technological advantage made the federal government the major benefactor of postsecondary growth. The seismic shifts of that era, though, tend to overshadow earlier developing ties between the federal government and the colleges and, more specifically, the roots of direct federal aid to college students. This article seeks to redress that problem by exploring the subtle ways that federal aid became integrated into the visions and plans of the leaders of American higher education in the years prior to World War II. By examining New Deal Era college aid at a variety of institutions of higher education in the state of Ohio, we can uncover how the earlier courtship between the federal government and the colleges helped clear the way for later, more profound changes.

Voter Knowledge and Constitutional Change: Assessing the New Deal Experience

This Article is the first to empirically test the theory that voters' knowledge of politics increases during periods of major constitutional change, enabling them to exercise greater control over policy outcomes by disciplining political leaders. Previous research has repeatedly shown that most voters have very low political knowledge levels during times of normal politics. It is therefore important to determine whether such dangerous ignorance persists even during periods when massive constitutional change is on the political agenda. Sadly, the evidence presented here shows that it does. Scholars such as Bruce Ackerman and Akhil Amar have argued that the supermajority amendment requirements of Article V of the Constitution should be set aside because in periods of constitutional change, voters pay heightened attention to politics, increase their levels of political knowledge, and force politicians to conform to the popular will. Article V is seen as inhibiting the will of the majority. These arguments are the latest in a 200-year history of criticism of Article V's supermajority requirements. Ackerman's heightened attention hypothesis is opposed by the theory of rational ignorance, which predicts that voter knowledge of politics should remain low at virtually all times because the insignificance of any one vote to electoral outcomes makes it irrational to invest large amounts of time and effort in the acquisition of political knowledge for the purpose of becoming a better-informed voter. Voter Knowledge and Constitutional Change uses evidence from the New Deal era of constitutional change to test the two theories against each other. The New Deal period was the most significant era of constitutional change in the last 100 years of American history, and is cited by Ackerman and other scholars as a key test of the heightened attention theory. I look at both survey evidence of voter knowledge and qualitative evidence of the degree of constraint from public opinion experienced by political leaders. Both types of evidence strongly support the rational ignorance hypothesis and contradict the heightened attention theory. Survey data shows that voter knowledge increased very little or not at all during the 1930s. Qualitative evidence from three major New Deal policy initiatives that challenged existing constitutional constraints on federal government power show that these policies were developed by political leaders who perceived no increase in constraint by public opinion and in fact saw the voters as largely ignorant. These results cast doubt on both the empirical validity of the heightened attention hypothesis and the normative validity of the major criticisms of Article V. If most of the electorate remains severely ignorant of politics even during periods of massive constitutional upheaval, Article V's supermajority requirements may be necessary to ensure that constitutional change is not enacted through the manipulation of voter ignorance. A supermajority requirement ensures that any constitutional change must get the support of the more knowledgeable minority within the electorate as well as the relatively ignorant majority.

Legislative Responses in Times of Financial Crisis – New Deal Securities Legislation, Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Their Impact on Future German and EU Regulation

The German Federal Government and the High Level Group of Company Law Experts set up by the European Commission have recently published proposals to foster the development of deep and liquid German/European capital markets. The proposed regulation shows remarkable resemblances to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA). By comparing the SOA to the U.S. securities legislation of the New Deal era this article critically reviews the American answer to the recent corporate scandals. The authors doubt that the SOA has the capability of substantially improving the situation. In the long-run it may even cause adverse effects for U.S. capital markets. The future German/European regulatory approach has to avoid any overregulation and should not overstress investor protection, since investor protection should only be seen as a means to an end, i.e. the preservation of deep and liquid capital markets. The legislator should decide, whether it wants to rely primarily on a strong internal corporate governance structure or if it wants to follow a more market-based approach. As the recent U.S. legislation shows, a combination of internal and external corporate governance elements easily runs the risk of leading to inefficient overregulation. Thus, any hybrid approach has to be carefully balanced.

Lochner's Feminist Legacy

This essay is a review of Julie Novkov's Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the Progressive and New Deal Years. The book, which discusses the controversy over laws for women, has some important strengths. Novkov deserves praise for considering a wide range of Lochner-era cases and for reading many of the related legal briefs, an often overlooked but extremely important source for constitutional history. Novkov also provides some compelling analysis. For example, she is one of the few scholars to recognize that the liberal Holden v. Hardy and not the strict Lochner v. New York was the leading case on the constitutionality of protective labor legislation case for much of the so-called Lochner era. The book is also very good at its primary task - explaining how considerations of sex affected legal arguments regarding protective laws for workers during the period studied. On the other hand, several flaws make Constituting Workers, Protecting Women less valuable than it might have been. First, Novkov pays almost no attention to any form of economic analysis. For example, Novkov never seriously considers whether economic logic suggests that maximum hours laws or minimum wage laws that applied only to female workers actually aided them. Novkov also fails to discuss the empirical evidence regarding the effect of sex-specific protective labor laws. Moreover, Novkov shows no interest in the public choice aspects of protective labor legislation for women, noting only in passing that protective legislation was often promoted by labor unions that excluded women to prevent women from competing for jobs held or sought by union members. A second problem with Constituting Workers, Protecting Women is that its perspective on constitutional change overemphasizes the importance of legal argument at the expense of both important personalities and crucial political developments. For example, remarkably for a book by a political scientist about constitutional law that culminates in the New Deal era, Franklin Roosevelt's name does not appear in the index. A third problem with Constituting Workers, Protecting Women is that Novkov overstates the importance of the debate over protective laws for women in the general debate over the constitutionality of police power legislation. And finally, Novkov fails to grapple seriously with the views of judges such as Justice George Sutherland, who invalidated protective laws for women in part because these classical liberal judges sincerely believed in legal equality for women. Despite the reservations noted above, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women is recommended for readers interested in constitutional, labor, and women's history. While it does not deliver everything the author promises, or that this reviewer would have liked to have seen, it is a cogent account of an important legal and historical controversy. The definitive book on protective labor legislation and women during the Lochner era, however, remains to be written.

Catholic and Protestant Social Discourse and the American Welfare State

ABSTRACT John Tropman (1986, 1995), among others, develops the notion of a Catholic ethic which he juxtaposes to the more traditional (at least in America) notion of the Protestant ethic as theorized by Max Weber (1905). Using his work and discourse analysis as our starting points, we attempt to construct our own complimentary conception of the Catholic ethic through a series of readings of historical documents and make a case for comprehending the general tone and direction of the discourse on the American welfare state during the New Deal and Great Society eras under the idiomatic rubric of this ethic. Subsequently, we will make the case for understanding the social and political discourse surrounding the proposal and passage of TANF in light of the more traditional Protestant ethic. The ultimate goal of the work is to re-frame the welfare debate in America as a struggle not just between competing methods of “problem solving,” but, more importantly, as a paradigmatic competition between two divergent aspirants for political-cultural hegemony in the arena of American social discourse.