Modern American State Research Articles

New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State

New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State

William J. Novak, New Democracy. The Creation of the Modern American State

William J. Novak, New Democracy. The Creation of the Modern American State

New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State by William J. Novak (review)

New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State by William J. Novak (review)

Concrete Leviathan: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Inequality in the Age of Liberalism

AbstractThis article explores how the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways prompted litigation that altered the course of administrative law and governance from the 1960s onward. By that time, the construction of the interstate system had become synonymous with thedestructionof neighborhoods and parks bulldozed to make way for the “concrete monsters,” as some came to call the interstates. Ensuing protests—“freeway revolts”—pressed for altered construction practices and participatory roles for citizens and communities in the state building process underway. This article explores the legal consequences of interstate highway protest, and advances two arguments. First, freeway revolts brought distinctive reforms to the practices of modern American state building, particularly when they produced the canonical Supreme Court caseCitizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe(1971). Second, despite the reformist inclinations present inOverton Park, the case created an unequal legal and physical landscape of state building. ContrastingOverton ParkwithNashville I-40 Steering Committee v. Ellington(1967), a case dealing with racial discrimination and community destruction, reveals the mechanics of a legal regime that cemented racial and class hierarchies in place across long horizons of space and time via the interstate system's durable, nation-spanning asphalt limbs.

The State before the State: A Critique of New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, by William J Novak

Abstract This essay is a critical appraisal of William Novak’s New Democracy, published in March 2022. A sequel to The People’s Welfare, published in 1996, New Democracy continues Novak’s revisionist account of American state building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, the book draws attention to the years between the American Civil War and the onset of the Great Depression as the formative period of the American administrative–regulatory state, assailing a historiography that has credited the epoch of the New Deal as the definitive creative moment of the modern American state. Assessing New Democracy’s evidence and arguments, the essay finds that Novak’s book makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of state advocacy, but fails to offer definitive empirical measures for its central claim that the New Deal origin of the modern American state is a myth. Examining the philosophy of history that lies beneath New Democracy’s arguments, the essay holds that Novak’s claim that history is irreversibly linear markedly constricts the interpretive possibilities open to him and to those who may follow his lead.

Review of William J. Novak’s New Democracy – The Creation of the Modern American State

Review of William J. Novak’s New Democracy – The Creation of the Modern American State

State‐level social safety nets for families coping with job loss

AbstractCritics of the modern American welfare state allege that safety net benefits discourage work by providing sufficient resources to replace earned income. Yet, research in social policy has long depicted the US safety net as parsimonious and inadequate relative to its European counterparts, even when considering benefits from programs that reward favorable work histories. Other theories predict variability across states and regional clustering even amid low overall spending. Moreover, the recent COVID‐19 outbreak has exposed the insufficiency and lack of resilience of the major US safety nets in the face of unprecedented unemployment. This study examines the benefit expenditures on three safety net programs available to American families with recently unemployed breadwinners—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Unemployment Insurance—as a proportion of median annual income for a given state‐year between 1997 and 2017. We examine the overall spending as well as variability and clustering across states. We find that the average benefit expenditure comprises only 42% of median income, and while there is substantial variability around this average, only one state is above 78%. We also find that spending levels appear to be regionally clustered. We conclude that safety nets for the recently unemployed and their families are weak relative to earned income and that the extent of this weakness varies by state, with some regional patterning.

“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

AbstractProgress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal authority. These four processes rise and fall over time, each charting its own history and unfolding according to its own logic. These processes usually work against each other. But occasionally they align with each other so that the state can pursue and achieve even difficult and challenging policy aims in a focused way. We sketch the outlines of Forceful Federalism and demonstrate its explanatory power with a case study of Forceful Federalism in action: James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Meredith case exemplifies the convergence of the four dimensions of Forceful Federalism and marks the first time the modern American state was thus mobilized on behalf of civil rights. The case offers suggestive evidence that Forceful Federalism was a necessary condition for the emergence of the Civil Rights State.

Layering and the foundations of the modern American surveillance state, 1970-2020

ABSTRACT The U.S. Congress established the foundation of today’s surveillance state nearly a half century ago as it sought to regulate and prevent criminal activity: the Banking Secrecy Act to target tax evasion by individuals and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to create oversight of wiretapping activities by law enforcement. Over time, additional functions were layered onto the existing institutional infrastructure, such as combating illicit drugs. September 11th, 2001 served as a critical juncture, reorienting the regime yet again to support the counter terror mission, despite persistent inefficiency and simultaneous risks to the civil liberties of Americans.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Socialism

W. E. B. Du Bois’s socialism has provoked debate for decades. His democratic theory and critique of political economy champions democratic socialism. In this article, I offer a philosophical reconstruction of the normative foundation of his democratic socialism in three steps. First, I argue that his philosophy of the modern democratic state supports the people’s advance of the principle of free and equal citizenship or civic equality. Next, I present his critique of the modern American welfare state, which asserts the fair value of political liberty and democratic control over productive activities. Finally, I introduce the method of the excluded groups from Darkwater as an ideal procedure for guiding democratic deliberation in a profoundly nonideal public sphere. The method foregrounds the voices of excluded groups to correct asymmetrical relations of practical power and to infuse democratic reason with practical intelligence, namely, new content and values that can lead to the development of a democratic socialist state.

Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America by Ronit Y. Stahl

Reviewed by: Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America by Ronit Y. Stahl Jessica Cooperman (bio) Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America. By Ronit Y. Stahl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 348 pp. Separating church from state is an idea that sounds eminently manageable in theory but has proven close to impossible in practice. There is perhaps no institution that offers a better example of the deeply intertwined nature of religion and the modern American state than the military chaplaincy. In Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, Ronit Stahl offers a profoundly valuable new analysis of the military chaplaincy and its engagement with American conceptions of religion, race, gender roles, and the boundaries of state power. Earlier histories offer very solid accounts of the institutional growth and triumphs of the military chaplaincy but stop short of exploring what the institution can reveal to us about the complex dynamics of religion and the American state. Stahl’s broadly researched and well-contextualized book successfully fills this void and clearly demonstrates what the chaplaincy tells us about the history of religion in America over the past century. Stahl opens her study with World War I, when at the instigation of General John Pershing, with the assistance of his friend and confidante Episcopal Bishop Charles Brent, the chaplaincy was expanded and transformed into a professionalized component of the military, officially charged with providing for the spiritual needs of all American servicemen. As a result of both these new organizational policies and the multiple religious affiliations of the soldiers, the military chaplaincy became a crucial cite for developing a new, tri-faith—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—understanding of American religion. Stahl follows the evolution of this tri-faith vision and examines the ways that the idea of a normative Judeo-Christian American religious tradition was celebrated and institutionalized by the military during World War II, and then challenged and transformed from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. As Stahl demonstrates, throughout this century of American military and religious history, the chaplaincy always offered more than just comfort to soldiers; it was a mechanism through which religious, racial, and gendered communities negotiated for recognition and rights from the American government. During World War I, Jews and Catholics struggled for that recognition. By the time the country emerged from World War II, they had largely achieved the status of religious insiders so long as they were willing to conform to military policies designed to promote a shared, liberal Judeo-Christian tradition. Stahl offers an [End Page 249] engaging description of the careful editing of scripts for the radio show Chaplain Jim to showcase the ways that this tradition was shaped and broadcast to the American public during the war. She also describes the ways that the racial and religious biases embedded within this definition of American religion made it woefully inadequate to addressing the needs of African American soldiers serving in a still segregated military, or of Buddhist soldiers, some of whom served in the military while their families struggled in US internment camps. By the time the US entered the war in Vietnam, Stahl makes it clear that the tri-faith model of American religion no longer reflected either the realities of American society or the demands of American soldiers and citizens. Buddhist soldiers still struggled against a Judeo-Christian conception of American religion, and they were now joined by growing numbers of Muslims in the military. African American soldiers and chaplains demanded religious engagement with issues of racism and social justice. Other religious groups, like Greek and Russian Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventists, and Mormons, who had earlier been uncomfortably categorized under “General Protestantism,” wanted recognition of their own distinctive traditions within the institutions of the military. In each of these cases, Stahl uses her study of religion in the military as a lens for considering both the chaplaincy and changing American attitudes and policies regarding religious freedoms more broadly. In the final chapters of the book, Stahl examines some of the changes in the structure of the contemporary military chaplaincy...

Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization

Post-1968 U.S. History:Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization Bruce J. Schulman (bio) In 1967, amidst the political turmoil of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the New Left and the mobilization of movement conservatism, Richard Hofstadter wrote a new preface to accompany the 20th anniversary edition of his 1948 book, The American Political Tradition and The Men Who Made It. Somewhat sheepishly, Hofstadter reflected on the enterprise that had become known as Consensus History, an approach that current events and a decade of historical scholarship had seemed to undermine. Looking back at his younger self, Hofstadter explained that he had attempted to look at American politics from "outside the tradition itself." From that "external angle of vision the differences that seem very sharp and decisive to those who dwelt altogether within it had begun to lose their distinctness, and that men on different sides of a number of questions appeared as having more in common, in the end, than originally imagined" (p. xxvii). Put another way, the intense partisan rivalries and passionate ideological allegiances, the differences that seemed to separate Democrats from Republicans, liberals from conservatives, South from North, even whites and non-whites, masked an essential consensus—a set of shared assumptions, norms and structures that narrowed the range of policy outcomes and reinforced a particular set of power relations. Although few contemporary scholars embrace the label, something like consensus history has made a comeback: "Neo-Consensus History" dominates the historiography of the United States since the late 1960s. Deploying a variety of methodologies and focusing on a wide range of historical actors, scholars of recent American history have attempted to "move beyond" red and blue, left and right, North and South, even in some cases black and white. In this historiography, an enterprise that spans intellectual history, political history, the history of political economy, urban history, and the history of race relations, the partisan competition and political conflict that attracts so much attention from pundits and defines conventional narratives of contemporary U.S. society is mostly noise. The editors of an anthology of new work in American political [End Page 479] history assert that dominant paradigms, ideas such as the New Deal order, the conservative ascendancy, and red-blue polarization, "obscure deeper forms of consensus around global capitalism, white privilege, patriarchy, and notions of American exceptionalism. . ."1 Of course, consensus history retains an unsavory reputation. Identifying a scholar with it has long been a kind of dismissive insult; the brand implies an uncritical, rah-rah celebration of American exceptionalism (a charge that applies to writers like Daniel Boorstin, though not to Hofstadter, who bemoaned the consensus he identified).2 Although consensus literally means agreement, for Hofstadter and other likeminded historians, it did not signal comity—or the absence of vociferous argument—but a set of structures that shape the choices of political actors and restrict the possible outcomes. In recent years, several strains of scholarship that Hofstadter might recognize as neo-consensus history have taken root in the historiography of the recent United States: the carceral state interpretation, which frames the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration as the defining feature of the modern American state and the bedrock of contemporary U.S. politics; a spatial analysis that locates in the suburbs a set of attitudes and policy preferences that cut across regions and partisan divides; the theory of neoliberalism, which not only dismisses the significance of partisan division within the United States but submerges differences among western industrial nations; and an intellectual history version associated most prominently with Daniel Rodgers that sees a common vocabulary and intellectual orientation bridging left and right. These neo-consensus histories illuminate structural phenomena much as Hofstadter's generation did, but consider broader sets of historical actors and work from deeper archival bases than the analyses of elite politicians and intellectuals that occupied the original consensus historians. In different ways, these four scholarly trends advance a common enterprise: they identify forces more fundamental and enduring than the partisan and ideological conflicts that seem to dominate contemporary American politics. They also point out a paradox, a sort of cognitive dissonance. If Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative...

Torrie Hester. Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy.

Since 1892, the United States has deported a whopping fifty million immigrants. The vast majority of deportations—95 percent—occurred after 1970, but Torrie Hester turns our attention to the early formation of U.S. deportation policy, arguing that the fundamental logic and practices developed between 1882 and 1924 created the deportation regime we live under today. Hester’s careful reconstruction of early policymaking, scrutinizing both landmark court cases and the often hidden work of administrative officials, yields a rich study. Deportation joins an expanding literature on gatekeeping as a fundamental aspect of the modern American state. Hester begins with the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and the well-known court cases that grew out of them, as establishing the fundamental doctrines that guided deportation policy for the future. The Supreme Court in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893) upheld the sweeping power of Congress to expel any noncitizen it wished, by any means it thought proper, tying deportation to the absolute sovereign power of the state to police its jurisdictional borders and protect against national security threats. The court’s impassioned dissenters denounced the expulsion of resident immigrants as punitive and a flagrant denial of due process, arguments that failed to prevail but revealed fractures in the emerging deportation regime. Deportation expanded, but not without challenges.

Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State

Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State

Constitutionalization as Statecraft: Vagrant Nation and the Modern American State

This essay showcases the contribution of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation (2016) to one field of scholarship that the book scarcely mentions: the historical literature on the American state. In Goluboff's account of the fall of the “vagrancy law regime” in the “long 1960s” I see vital questions about the nature of the modern American state and the endurance of older, seemingly antithetical modes of governance. Given the trends that state-focused scholars have illuminated—for example, toward centralization of power and the protection of individual rights—what allowed for vague, locally enforced vagrancy laws to survive so late into the twentieth century? What ultimately triggered their demise? In mining Vagrant Nation for answers, this essay also urges scholars to contemplate “constitutionalization” as a form of statecraft. In giving a constitutional law framing to the grievances of “vagrants,” federal courts reinforced key tenets of the modern American state, including the supremacy of national law over competing legal orders and the desirability of being a rights-bearing member of the nation-state. Simultaneously, these court decisions left open other, more “modern” possibilities for regulating the kinds of people (poor, nonwhite, unpopular) whom vagrancy laws once ensnared.

Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State by Daniel Sledge

Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State by Daniel Sledge

Coping with Compassion: Role Transformation Amongst Oregon Food Pantry Directors

In stark contrast to the robust social safety nets found in many developed nations around the world, the modern American welfare state is increasingly operated by a variety of non-governmental actors and voluntary organizations. The operation of this welfare regime depends on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats confront new circumstances, their discretionary decisions change. Normative institutionalism and the concept of bricolage are used to explore how discretionary decisions change within an organizational role in the context of a voluntary organization. Understanding this process of bricolage sheds light on the decision-making processes of street-level bureaucrats, explains how behavior in an organizational role shifts over time, and points to the dynamic nature of institutions. We present an in-depth qualitative study of the emergency food network in Oregon as a critical case to illustrate this argument.

Introduction: The People’s Welfare, Law, and the Modern American State

Introduction: The People’s Welfare, Law, and the Modern American State

From the Well-Regulated Society to the Modern American State

From the Well-Regulated Society to the Modern American State

Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, and Bruce Ackerman, editors. The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State.

Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, and Bruce Ackerman, editors. The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State.