Clio's Lost Tribe: Public Policy History Since 1978

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 369-394

  Zelizer, Julian E ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012506408     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2000.0025     Document Type: Article

References (145)

1. For an another insightful history of policy history, see Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” The Public Historian 15 (1993): 15-37. My work focuses much more on the professional and intellectual history of what policy historians have written since the 1970s. I would like to thank Edward Berkowitz, Donald Critchlow, Michael Grossberg, Richard Hamm, Michael Katz, Morton Keller, Eric Patashnik, Beryl Radin, and Nora Zelizer for their suggestions. I would especially like to thank Ellis Hawley for sharing his valuable documents with me.
2. Paula Baker, “Remarks at a Roundtable Discussion on the State of Policy History And Its Future,” 27 May 1999, paper presented at the 1999 Policy History Conference, Clayton, Missouri.
3. Edward D. Berkowitz, “The Historian as Policy Analyst: The Challenge of HEW,” The Public Historian 1 (1979): 17-18.
4. For examples of articles that speak to the concerns of the historical profession, see Steven M. Gillon, “The Future of Political History,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 240-55
5. Joel H. Silbey, “The State of American Political History at the Millennium: The Nineteenth Century as a Test Case,” Journal of Policy History 11 (1999): 1-30.
6. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1959)
7. William M. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, 1963)
8. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955).
9. Some of the landmark books that dealt with economic regulation in the Progressive and New Deal eras include Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (Glencoe, 1963)
10. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston, 1966).
11. To be sure, there were moderates who studied the relationship between business and economic policy. For one of the best works in this period, see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, 1966).
12. See, for examples, Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, Mass. 1965)
13. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass. 1968).
14. Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” The American Historical Review 100 (1995): 829-53.
15. Samuel P. Hays, “The Social Analysis of American Political History,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (1965): 373-94
16. Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics (New York, 1970)
17. Joel H. Silbey, Allan G. Bogue, and William H. Flanigan, eds. The History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, 1978).
18. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore, 1989), 68-86.
19. See also Benjamin Franklin Cooling, “History Programs in the Department of Defense,” The Public Historian 12 (1990): 43-63
20. Roger R. Trask, “Small Federal History Offices in the Nation's Capital,” The Public Historian 13 (1991): 47-60.
21. Richard G. Hewlett, “The Practice of History in the Federal Government,” The Public Historian 1 (1978): 30-31.
22. Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Professional Historians and ‘Destiny's Gate,’” The Public Historian 17 (1995): 14-18.
23. Robert Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” The Public Historian 1 (1978): 24-28.
24. Cited in Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, 1987), 8.
25. “Editor's Preface,” The Public Historian 1 (1978): 5.
26. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 512-21.
27. Both quotations cited in Novick, That Noble Dream, 516–17.
28. See, for example, David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the Early Republic (Boston, 1971), and
29. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, 1978).
30. Much of the scholarship on social control was influenced by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1971).
31. Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (1970): 279-90
32. Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization,” Business History Review 57 (1983): 471-93.
33. Ellis Hawley, “Remarks at a Roundtable Discussion on the State of Policy History And Its Future,” 27 May 1999, paper presented at the 1999 Policy History Conference.
34. Michael Grossberg, “A Report of the Conference on the History of American Public Policy,” The Public Historian 1 (1979): 24.
35. The Public Historian, 25.
36. Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History,” 18.
37. James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York, 1991).
38. Joseph Badaracco, “Report of the Conference on the History of American Public Policy,” 2-3 November 1979, and Morton Keller and Thomas McGraw to Ellis Hawley, 23 June 1980.
39. See, for example, Stephen W. Grable, “Applying Urban History to City Planning: A Case Study in Atlanta,” The Public Historian 1 (1979): 45-59
40. Peter N. Stearns, “History and Policy Analysis: Toward Maturity,” The Public Historian 4 (1982): 5-29.
41. See, for example, W. Andrew Achenbaum, “American Medical History: Social History and Medical History,” and
42. Daniel Fox, “History and Health Policy,” in The Journal of Social History 18 (1985): 343-64
43. James Reed, “Public Policy On Human Reproduction and the Historian,” The Journal of Social History 18 (1985): 383-97.
44. David J. Rothman and Stanton Wheeler, eds. Social History and Social Policy (New York, 1981).
45. Herbert G. Gutman, “Mirrors of Hard, Distorted Glass: An Examination of Some Influential Historical Assumptions About the Afro-American Family and the Shaping of Public Policies, 1861-1965,” in Social History and Social Policy, 239–73.
46. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass. 1977)
47. Edward Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (New York, 1980)
48. William Graebner, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution, 1885-1978 (New Haven, 1980)
49. James T. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1980 (Cambridge, Mass. 1981)
50. W. Andrew Achenbaum, Shades of Gray: Old Age, American Values, and Federal Policing Since 1920 (Boston, 1983)
51. Michael B. Katz, In The Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986).
52. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, Mass. 1984).
53. Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Policy (New York, 1973).
54. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York, 1986), 275-84.
55. Robert B. and Rosemary Stevens, Welfare Medicine in America: A Case Study of Medicaid (New York, 1974)
56. Gilbert Steiner, The Children's Cause (Washington, D.C. 1976)
57. Henry Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington, D.C. 1978), and
58. Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, D.C. 1979)
59. Derthick and Paul J. Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation (Washington, D.C. 1985).
60. Novick, That Noble Dream, 522–72.
61. That Noble Dream
62. Donald T. Critchlow and Ellis W. Hawley, Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension (University Park, Pa. 1988).
63. Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension, 6.
64. Donald T. Critchlow and Ellis W. Hawley, eds. Poverty and Public Policy in Modern America (Chicago, 1989).
65. Andrew Abbot, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988).
66. David B. Mock, “History in the Public Arena,” in Public History: An Introduction, eds. Barbara J. Howe and Emory Kemp (Malabar, Fla. 1986). 46.
67. Edward Berkowitz, “History, Public Policy, and Reality,” The Journal of Social History 18 (1984): 79-89.
68. Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time.
69. Thinking in Time, xxii.
70. Hugh Graham later echoed this proposal by claiming that historians were able to understand the “institutions that drive the policy process—their personality and culture, their values and memory, the legacy of their leaders.” Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” Public Historian 15 (1993): 35-36.
71. Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, “Book Review: Thinking in Time,” The Journal of Politics 49 (1987): 607.
72. W. Andrew Achenbaum, “Public History's Past, Present, and Prospects,” The American Historical Review 92 (1987): 1162.
73. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, 1982)
74. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol, and Peter Evans, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985).
75. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” 849.
76. One exemplary publication comes from Sarah Binder. Her recent publication draws on a wealth of historical data to argue that partisan interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the primary factors shaping parliamentary rules for minority rights in Congress. Her work demonstrates clearly how majorities must grapple with rules inherited from the past. Sarah Binder, Minority Rights, Majority Rules: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge, 1997).
77. Ellis W. Hawley, “Remarks at a Roundtable Discussion,” 27 May 1999, paper presented to the 1999 Policy History Conference, Clayton, Missouri.
78. Jeff Shartlet, “Why Diplomatic Historians May Be the Victims of American Triumphalism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 September 1999.
79. For a wonderful overview of the public history movement, see the special issue of their journal, The Public Historian 21 (1999).
80. Otis L. Graham Jr. “The Organization of American Historians and Public History— A Progress,” The Public Historian 18 (1996): 7-10.
81. American Historical Association, Perspectives 37 (1999): 59.
82. Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Professional Historians and ‘Destiny's Gate,’” The Public Historian 17 (1995): 21-24.
83. Page Putnam Miller, “Reflections on the Public History Movement,” The Public Historian 14 (1992): 69.
84. Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton (Cambridge, Mass. 1999), 230-40.
85. Cited in Otis L. Graham, “Editor's Corner,” The Public Historian 15 (1993): 12.
86. For the excellent book that emerged, see Otis L. Graham, Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate (Cambridge, Mass. 1992).
87. One notable example is Michael B. Katz, The “Underclass” Debate Views from History (Princeton, 1993).
88. Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” The Public Historian 15 (1993): 16.
89. “JPH Editor's Note,” Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 350.
90. W. Andrew Achenbaum, “Politics, Power, and Problems: Perspectives on Writing Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 1 (1989): 208.
91. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York, 1989).
92. Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British, and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven, 1993).
93. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994), 306.
94. See also Alice Kessler-Harris, “Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939,” in U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, 1995), 87-106
95. Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge, 1994)
96. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “‘Dependency’ Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State,” Social Politics 1 (1994): 4-31
97. Robyn Muncy, “Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the U.S. Welfare State: The Careers of Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, 1890-1935,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 290-315.
98. For a nuanced and innovative analysis of this issue, see Suzanne Mettler, “The Stratification of Social Citizenship: Gender and Federalism in the Formation of Old Age Insurance and Aid to Dependent Children,” Journal of Policy History 11. (1999): 31-58.
99. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass. 1998)
100. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994).
101. For a pointed critique of this type of policy analysis, see Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, “Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935,” Political Science Quarterly 112 (1997): 217-35.
102. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass. 1992), 539.
103. See also Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State 1890-1930 (Urbana, Ill. 1994).
104. Amy Sue Bix, “Diseases Chasing Money and Power: Breast Cancer and AIDS Activism Challenging Authority,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 5-32.
105. See also William B. Turner, “Lesbian/ Gay Rights and Immigration Policy: Lobbying to End the Medical Model,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 208-25.
106. Edward Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur Cohen (Lawrence, Kan. 1995).
107. See, for example, Frederic S. Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning: Gardiner Means, the American Keynesians, and National Economic Planning at the National Resources Committee,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 186-212
108. Peter Skerry, “The Ambivalent Minority: Mexican Americans and the Voting Rights Act,” Journal of Policy History 6 (1994): 73-95
109. Julian E. Zelizer, “‘Where Is the Money Coming From?’ The Reconstruction of Social Security Finance, 1939-1950,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 399-424
110. Meg Jacobs, “The Politics of Purchasing Power: State-Building, Political Economy, and Consumption Politics, 1909-1959” (Ph.D. diss. University of Virginia, 1999)
111. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995)
112. Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1992).
113. Hugh Davis Graham, “Race, History, and Policy: African Americans and Civil Rights Since 1964,” Journal of Policy History 6 (1994): 12-39
114. Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 (New York, 1990).
115. Gareth Davies showed how Lyndon Johnson's initial campaign against poverty framed its programs within popular American ideals of individualism and self-sufficiency. The book traces why these efforts were abandoned by the 1970s, but also hints that those older programs offered a vision of federal assistance that might have been more successful politically. See Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kan. 1996).
116. Hugh Davis Graham, “Legacies of the 1960s: The American ‘Rights Revolution’ in an Era of Divided Governance,” Journal of Policy History 10 (1998): 284.
117. Martha Derthick, “Crossing Thresholds: Federalism in the 1960s,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 64-80.
118. Helene Silverberg, “State Building, Health Policy, and the Persistence of the American Abortion Debate,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 311-38.
119. For another insightful example of international comparison to understand alternatives, see Gareth Davies, “Understanding the War on Poverty: The Advantages of a Canadian Perspective,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 425-49.
120. Alfred E. Eckes, “Revisiting Smoot-Hawley,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 295-310.
121. Michael W. Flamm, “Price Controls, Politics, and the Perils of Policy by Analogy: Economic Demobilization After World War II,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 335-55.
122. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996).
123. David T. Beito, “Mutual Aid, State Welfare, and Organized Charity: Fraternal Societies and the ‘Deserving’ and ‘Undeserving’ Poor, 1900-1930,” Journal of Policy History 5 (1993): 419-34.
124. Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1997).
125. Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, 1998).
126. Timothy J. Minchin, “Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961-1980,” Journal of Policy History 11 (1999): 347-378.
127. Jo Freeman, “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties,” Political Science Quarterly 101 (1986): 327-28.
128. For examples, see the following articles: Gary Mucciaroni, “Political Learning and Economic Policy Innovation: The United States and Sweden in the Post-World War II Era,” Journal of Policy History 1 (1989): 391–418
129. William R. Childs, “Origins of the Texas Railroad Commission's Power to Control Production of Petroleum: Regulatory Strategies in the 1920s,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 353-87
130. Douglas Clark Kinder, “Shutting Out the Evil: Nativism and Narcotics Control in the United States,” Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 468-93
131. Carl Abbott, “Five Downtown Strategies: Policy Discourse and Downtown Planning,” Journal of Policy History 5 (1993): 5-27
132. Marc Allen Eisner, “Discovering Patterns in Regulatory History: Continuity, Change, and Regulatory Regimes,” Journal of Policy History 6 (1994): 157-87
133. Matthew Lasar, “The Triumph of the Visual: Stages and Cycles in the Pornography Controversy from the McCarthy Era to the Present,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 181-207
134. Daryl Michael Scott, “The Politics of Pathology: The Ideological Origins of the Moynihan Controversy,” Journal of Policy History 8 (1996): 81-105.
135. Robert Kelley, Battling The Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), 319-24.
136. See also Kelley, “The Interplay of American Political Culture and Public Policy: The Sacramento River as a Case Study,” Journal of Policy History 1 (1989): 19
137. Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York, 1986), and
138. Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge, 1994).
139. In my own book, I tried to show how political culture influenced Representative Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the tax policy community between the 1940s and 1970s. See Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975 (Cambridge, 1998).
140. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge, 1987).
141. Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America (New York, 1999).
142. Marc Allen Eisner, “Institutional History and Policy Change: Exploring the Origins of the New Antitrust,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 261-89.
143. Keller, Affairs of State. In his more recent work, Keller continued to pursue these themes. See, for example, Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, Mass. 1990).
144. Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (Cambridge, 1991), 326.
145. John Earl Haynes, “Applied History or Propaganda? The Influence of History on Farm Credit Legislation in Minnesota,” The Public Historian 10 (1988): 32-33.