In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard:

Between 1966 and 1971, a remarkable change occurred in the regulation of the sexual content of American movies. A policy of government and industry cooperation in the censorship of sexual portrayals and messages in American general release movies disappeared. Indeed, the collapse of movie censorship appeared quite abrupt. In 1966 state, local, and industry censors nearly kept actor Elizabeth Taylor, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, from turning into the camera and uttering “You son of a bitch.” By 1971, A Clockwork Orange would contain a scene of rape, frontal nudity, and an accelerated sequence depicting a ménage-à-trois. Such a change signals a synoptic shift in the morality policy governing an industry with significant influence on public tastes.

Workers' compensation was the first social insurance program to gain widespread acceptance in the United States, and as such became one of the foundations of the modern American welfare state.The original and more gendered name for this program was workmen's compensation. The term “workers' compensation” did not become common until the 1970s. I will use both names in this article, depending on the context. Most states passed workmen's compensation laws between 1911 and 1920, and all but two states did so by 1935. The other major social policy innovation of this era were mothers' pensions laws, which were targeted at the poor children of single mothers. These laws also spread rapidly in the 1910s and were on the books in virtually every state by 1935.Although minimum wage and maximum hours laws for women also passed in many states prior to the New Deal, they have generally received less scholarly attention than workmen's compensation or mothers' pensions. The major histories of the American welfare stateEdward D. Berkowitz, America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Edward D. Berkowitz and Kim McQuaid, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform revised ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935, 2nd ed. (1968; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986; Charles Noble, Welfare As We Knew It: A Political History of the American Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 6th ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999); Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). always acknowledge the importance of workmen's compensation and mothers' pensions in the early twentieth century, and some authorsBarbara J. Nelson, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), 413–35. argue that these two programs established the major fault lines of social provision – between social insurance and public assistance, between employed male workers and unpaid mothers – for the rest of the century.

Race, in particular the peculiarly American embrace of political race-consciousness, is often portrayed as an important source of limitations on American political development. Although the color line has undergirded some of the most notorious instances of state repression in American history—the pre-civil rights South most notably, but also race-based immigration and citizenship restrictions and the FBI's COINTELPRO operations of the cold war era, to name a few—race is most commonly associated with state weakness through its effects on such processes as regional differentiation, class formation, and welfare state building.V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). These accounts fit nicely into conventional approaches to American political development, which similarly emphasize the peculiar weakness and fragmentation of the American state.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

The American Cancer Society puts it bluntly: “We're fat and it's killing us.” Obesity is rising at epidemic rates and, according to a first-ever Surgeon General's report on obesity (issued in 2001), it may soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death in the United States. Obesity has been directly linked to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, infertility, and cancer. Each year, obesity costs the nation an estimated $120 billion in medical care and takes some 280,000 lives. Body weight is rising fastest among young Americans—the most dramatic stories feature heart attacks among obese six year-olds.David Satcher, “Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity” (Rockville, MD: Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), xiii, 8; Kelly Brownell, “Public Policy and the Prevention of Obesity,” in Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook, ed. Christopher G. Fairburn and Kelly D. Brownell (New York: Guilford, 2002); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 241–43.

Comparison of Canadian and American state security legislation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals striking similarities. This is somewhat surprising, given the political and constitutional gulf between the loyalist British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the revolutionary U.S. republic. Indeed, Murray Greenwood's study of treason laws and their administration in the United States, Lower Canada, and Great Britain during the period of the French Revolution highlights the contrasts between the liberal American approach and the repressive alarmism of Pitt's government which was taken even further by British colonial administrators in Lower Canada.F.M. Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800,” in Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837, ed. F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241. Differences extended to other matters related traditionally to state security, such as the availability of habeas corpus and formal protections of judicial independence from executive and partisan influence.

Scholars have accorded the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a uniquely important place in the annals of American political development. During this period, the nation underwent transformations from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial society. Underlying these transformations was a revolution in the nature of the country's political economy, which shifted rapidly from a longstanding proprietary-competitive order to an unwonted corporate-administrative one.Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. Specifically Sklar defines “proprietary-competitive” as capitalist property and market relations in which the dominant type of enterprise was headed by an owner-manager (or owner-managers), or a direct agent thereof, and in which such enterprise was a price-taker, rather than a price-maker, price being determined by conditions of supply and demand beyond the control of the enterprise short of anticompetitive inter-firm collusion. By the new “corporate-administrative” order, he means a political economy characterized by the capitalization of . . . property in the form of negotiable securities relatively widely dispersed in ownership, a corresponding separation of ownership title and management function, and management of the enterprise by bureaucratic-administrative methods involving a division, or a specialization of managerial function, and an integration, or at least a centralization, of financial control. It is meant to designate “a process occurring not merely in a few notable firms, or in a sector of the economy . . . but pervasively, and hence involving the change in the broader economy from price-competitive to administered, or ‘oligopolistic,' markets” (Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 4 n.1). This transformation fundamentally altered traditional forms of work and management in the private sector, leading to the preeminence of a wage-labor system, the separation of corporate ownership from control, and the rise of bureaucratized and professionalized business management.See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977). At the same time, a “new American state” was formed with its own analogous cadres of governing professionals, professionals who in the new administrative agencies asserted increasingly centralized control over the nation's economy and civil society.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Upon his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest threat to the survival of the nation that has confronted any incoming president. His victory had been made possible by the splintering of the opposition in a four-way race; the total popular vote for his foes substantially exceeded his own.James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232 As he assumed office, he was confronted with the secession of several states and the possibility that others would soon follow, and southern forces had seized U.S. arsenals and laid siege to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Within weeks, his decision to send relief to the fort had provoked the first shots of the war and additional states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln and his fellow Republican leaders now confronted the daunting task of restoring the Union.

A recognized strength of modern constitutional democracies is their ability to insure legitimate political succession through the use of elections.For a review of the contribution of democratic theory to the succession problem, see: Peter Calvert, “The Theory of Political Succession” in The Process of Political Succession, ed. Peter Calvert (London: Macmillan, 1987), 245–66. We do not challenge this assessment; rather, we suggest that the process of producing a legitimate leader is a complex social construction with numerous variations. The pathway to political legitimacy can be conceived thus as a passage through a series of “gateways” and “rituals” that, when successfully confronted, confer political authority. The public, the press, and political elites participate in the process of conferring legitimacy on the “winner.” The 2000 presidential election is a prime illustration of this process because its contested nature clarifies and highlights gateways that have been less visible in other elections. We present an analysis of the social construction of legitimacy in the post-election and early weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, including examples of strategies designed to negotiate successful passage through these rituals. Finally, we note the capacity of these rituals to produce legitimate successions even when irregular events pose a challenge to democratic theory.

The twentieth century was the century in which African-Americans fought their way into American democracy. But it did not begin that way. From 1895 until 1915, Booker T. Washington advised African-Americans, with considerable success, to adopt a different course. He believed that blacks were unlikely to attain equal rights through political protest. Hence, they should stop fighting racial segregation and political exclusion. Equality would come only after blacks had attained a substantial level of economic success. In order to achieve this, African-Americans would have to build their own institutions – schools, businesses, and the like. Thus, Washington advised accommodation, economic initiative, and racial self-help. And his was not idle advice, for Washington became the most influential black leader of his day – possibly of any day.