“Historically, geographically, and commercially New York and the industrial district in the northern part of the state of New Jersey constitute a single community,” declared the Interstate Commerce Commission in the New York Harbor case in 1917. In spite of that overwhelming fact, the railroads in the port region had never worked cooperatively to manage New York harbor. Instead, competition led them to invest vast sums in individual terminal facilities and prevented them from using those facilities jointly to solve the urgent transportation problems of the region. This failure to cooperate took on national importance during World War I, when the collapse of service at the port led President Woodrow Wilson to federalize the railroads. In light of the failure of private managers to coordinate their efforts more effectively, the ICC endorsed the idea that dramatic public steps should be taken to encourage greater cooperation among railroad companies: “It is necessary that the great terminals at the port of New York be made practically one,” the commission affirmed, “and that the separate interests of the individual carriers, so long an insuperable obstacle to any constructive plan of terminal development, be subordinated to the public interest.”

With this apparent blessing from the ICC, the New York, New Jersey Port and Harbor Development Commission was created in 1917 to recommend a cooperative, bi-state solution for the port.

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

In January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order creating a National War Labor Board (NWLB) to arbitrate wartime industrial disputes. Roosevelt's order provided enormous power for the board, which could, on its own motion, intervene in any labor conflict it deemed a threat to “the effective prosecution of the war” and subsequently impose settlements on the parties. In practice, the board replaced free collective bargaining for the duration of the war. Most scholars of the era agree that the NWLB, operating at a time when New Deal labor policy was still in formation and many unions had not yet become entrenched in their industries, had a profound impact on the evolution of the American industrial relations system during the war and thereafter.

Despite a superficial similarity to earlier labor boards, the NWLB was a curious creature born, in the words of one of its members, “out of deadlock,” and of a breed uncommon on the American political landscape. The board's authority was nominally grounded on an agreement by a 1941 national labor-management conference to eschew strikes and lockouts in lieu of arbitration. Yet this conference had reached an impasse and its “agreement” had been forced on the business delegates by Roosevelt.

The history of sexual liberation is inextricably bound with the history of scientific rationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the basic moral consensus on sexual liberation has proved capable of accommodating a wide variety of scientific methodologies, from the cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead to the biological taxonomy of Alfred Kinsey. Two recent works, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, and James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, critique their respective subjects' specific scientific practice only to reaffirm the general practice of sexual science and its underlying (a)moral consensus. In this article, I will examine the treatment of methodological issues in these books as a reflection of the historical profession's participation in the moral bankruptcy of the social sciences. Freeman's empirical deconstruction of Mead's Samoan research and Jones's empirical reconstruction of Kinsey's life both skirt substantive moral issues by affirming a hopelessly nineteenth-century ideal of scientific objectivity. Each book, in its own particular way, fetishizes fact at the expense of argument and obscures the nature of intellectual developments of interest to historians of every moral and methodological orientation.