Politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

This essay follows political and policy change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by tracking the impact of Reconstruction and rapid industrialization on electoral politics and political development. The early-twentieth-century state developed gradually and unevenly, building on innovations of the 1880s and 1890s and debates that began during Reconstruction. Progressive reform moved in two directions: toward good government and efficiency, a line traceable to liberal Republicanism; and toward the amelioration of class tensions aimed more at curbing the arrogance of the rich than improving the lot of the poor. Policy reflected most of all southern and agricultural preferences, even as the great drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to do with industrial power and vicious labor conflict. This essay explores anomalies concerning the press, race, Progressivism and the South, and liberalism and conservatism.

Health Policy

This article reviews the history of the U.S. health care system and important themes in the scholarly literature pertaining to the subject. It argues that understanding the politics of health care, including the structure of government programs such as Medicare, requires careful attention to the private sector’s economic framework. This essay traces the development of modern medicine, health care systems in the 20th century, private health insurance, and federal and state health care policy.

The Long Shadow of Prohibition

This chapter examines the legacy of Prohibition and prohibitory policies for twentieth-century U.S. alcohol and drug policy. It traces twentieth-century alcohol and drug policy from nineteenth-century antecedents through the Harrison Act, National Prohibition, the Marijuana Tax Act, the Boggs Act, and the regulatory regime established during the War on Drugs in the closing decades of the century. The chapter demonstrates how federal agencies tasked with enforcing drug legislation, notably the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Drug Enforcement Administration, both emerged from and furthered prohibitory policies. It concludes that alternatives to the current War on Drugs, such as decriminalization or legalization, have been hampered by the historic investment in prohibitory policies.

Civil Rights Policy

This article discusses the evolution of U.S. civil rights and civil liberties through the lens of Supreme Court decisions. It traces the evolution of negative rights against the state and positive liberties from nineteenth-century property rights decisions through early-twenty-first century decisions regarding same-sex marriage. It also traces the shift in the Court’s approach to rights cases from one in which the state is regarded as a threat to individual rights to one in which the state plays a complex role of balancing rights claims. As well, the article demonstrates that rights claims and cases have become more complex as notions of the “public interest” become more contested when the pursuit of general interests has a disproportionate effect on the interests of particular social groups.

Social Welfare Policy

This chapter examines the main themes in social welfare policy. These themes include the assumption that poor people are responsible for their own poverty; a belief in the marketplace as the best means of addressing human needs; and a consequent wariness of federal social welfare interventions. Analyzing social welfare policy’s multiple and conflicting roles, it then traces these themes as they have manifested themselves throughout U.S. history. The chapter concludes by contending that while these historical factors may have all contributed to less comprehensive social welfare policies, their inadequacies effectively reopen the issue of what social welfare should become in the twenty-first century, when neoliberalism and rising income inequality have heightened the fears of so many Americans about their declining standard of living.

Religion and American Politics

This article surveys the intersection of religion and politics in America from the colonial era to the present, with a particular focus on the controversies surrounding religiously inspired political causes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article argues that religion (and, in particular, Protestantism and Catholic Christianity) has always played a central role in American politics, and that religious ideologies have inspired both liberal and conservative political movements. In the colonial era and the early American republic, controversies over religion focused primarily on disputes about church establishment and religious liberty, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, controversies over religion and politics increasingly centered on debates over religiously inspired moral regulation. Whether the issue was the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century or regulation of abortion in recent decades, America’s culture wars were usually political contests between competing sets of religiously inspired arguments.

Voting Rights

The development of the voting rights of three American groups—white males, women, and African Americans—is described in this essay in order to account for differences in the patterns of enfranchisement, disfranchisement, and, in the case of African Americans, reenfranchisement. Despite property qualifications, white male suffrage was much broader during the colonial and early national period than is often realized. Black suffrage has always been inextricably intertwined with partisan advantage. Women’s suffrage took so long to attain and the movement had to narrow its goals so much to win that female votes made little impact on politics until many years after 1920. The Voting Rights Act, which reenfranchised many African Americans after 1965, has always depended for its impact on Supreme Court decisions, which have passed through repeated cycles of support and restriction and have recently severely undermined protections, leaving minority voting rights at the mercy of “voter suppression” laws passed by their partisan enemies.

Third Parties

Since the 1830s the American two-party system has included other minor parties. This essay describes eleven of them, beginning with the Anti-Masonic Party and ending with Ross Perot’s Reform Party. The most noteworthy of the group include the American (Know-Nothing), Free Soil, People’s (Populist), Progressive, American Independent, and Reform parties. Third parties in America have always suffered from structural arrangements that included single-member legislative districts and “winner take all” election rules, and yet they have persisted. Between the 1830s and 1890s most parties grew out of populistic movements that espoused an egalitarian ethos and railed against entrenched elites. Around 1900, movement-based parties began to give way to “interest group” organizations, but in the twentieth century three third parties led by strong individuals (Theodore Roosevelt [1912], George C. Wallace [1968], and H. Ross Perot [1992]) received 27, 13, and 19 percent of the popular vote for president, respectively.

Environmental and Energy Policy

This chapter explores the interrelated nature of the environmental and energy policies in the United States, particularly since 1900. As new technologies made new sources of energy viable, formal and informal political arrangements and laws were used to prioritize the United States’ ability to acquire necessary supplies. During the twentieth century, the essential need for energy has defined the concept of geopolitics and even served as a rationale for war. By the 1970s and 1980s, a separate policy mandate moved environmental concerns into formal local and federal politics. Although these applications of policy developed distinct from one another, a general chronology of their development from 1900 to the present demonstrates the growing interplay between environmental policy and energy management. In the twenty-first century, a new paradigm of economic development has moved energy and environmental policies together to wrestle with complex issues, including the sustainability of energy supplies and climate change.

Tax and Fiscal Regimes in the United States

This essay traces the long swings in the development of fiscal and tax regimes over the course of American history. The first was a republican swing that began during the colonial era and continued until the Civil War, producing tax systems that relied heavily on tariffs and property taxes. The second was a capitalist-state swing, creating much greater reliance on protective tariffs. This swing began during the Civil War, weakened during the early twentieth century, and continued until the financing of World War I began in 1916. A progressive swing, associated with the rise to fiscal dominance of the income tax, continued through the rest of the twentieth century but weakened significantly after 1945. Another swing began during the late 1970s and produced a “neoliberal” or “retroliberal” regime in the first decade of the twenty-first century.