To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

America's foremost historians analyze the history of the most pressing current issues revolving around the federal government
Forcefully makes the case for the active role of government in American life
Well-balanced and serious consideration of the federal government's place in health care, security, finance, and infrastructure

To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

Description

Americans love to hate their government, and a long tradition of anti-government suspicion reaches back to debates among the founders of the nation. But the election of Barack Obama has created a backlash rivaled only by the anti-government hysteria that preceded the Civil War.

Lost in all the Tea Party rage and rhetoric is this simple fact: the federal government plays a central role in making our society function, and it always has. Edited by Steven Conn and written by some of America's leading scholars, the essays in To Promote the General Welfare explore the many ways government programs have improved the quality of life in America. The essays cover everything from education, communication, and transportation to arts and culture, housing, finance, and public health. They explore how and why government programs originated, how they have worked and changed--and been challenged--since their inception, and why many of them are important to preserve.

The book shows how the WPA provided vital, in some cases career-saving, assistance to artists and writers like Jackson Pollock, Dorothea Lange, Richard Wright, John Cheever, and scores of others; how millions of students from diverse backgrounds have benefited and continue to benefit from the G.I. Bill, Fulbright scholarships, and federally insured student loans; and how the federal government created an Interstate highway system unparalleled in the world, linking the entire nation. These are just a few examples of highly successful programs the book celebrates--and that anti-government critics typically ignore.

For anyone wishing to explore the flip side of today's vehement attacks on American government, To Promote the General Welfare is the best place to start.

To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

Editor's Preface
1. Looking for Government in All the Wrong Places, Brian Balogh
2. Transportation and the Uniting of the Nation, Zachary M. Schrag
3. Uncle Sam at the Blackboard: The Federal Government and American Education, Jonathan Zimmerman
4. Banking on Government, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
5. Twenty-Nine Helmets: Government Power and the Promise for Security, Kevin Boyle
6. The Right to a Decent Home, Thomas J. Sugrue
7. Solving the Nation's Number One Health Problem(s), Karen Kruse Thomas
8. Culture for the People: How Government Has Fostered the Arts and Culture, Steven Conn
9. From Franklin to Facebook: The Civic Mandate for American Communications, Richard R. John
10. From Endeavor to Achievement and Back Again: Government's Greatest Hits in Peril, Paul C. Light
Notes
Contibutors
Index

To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

Author Information

Steven Conn is Professor and Director of Public History at Ohio State University. His books include Do Museums Still Need Objects?, Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, and History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. He is the founding editor of the online magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.

Contributors:

Brian Balogh is a professor in the University of Virginia's Department of History and Chair of the National Fellowship Program at the Miller Center. He is also co-host of the public radio show "Backstory with the American History Guys." Balogh's latest book is A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (2009).

Kevin Boyle teaches history at Ohio State University. He's the author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995) and Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), co-author of Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930 (1997), and editor of Organized Labor and American Politics: The Labor-Liberal Alliance, 1894-1994 (1998).

Steven Conn is Professor of History at Ohio State University where he also directs Public History initiatives. To Promote the General Welfare is his sixth book project. He has written regularly for newspapers around the country and is the founding editor of the on-line magazine "Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective."

Paul Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at NYU's Robert Wagner School of Public Service. He has previously been the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the Director of the Public Policy Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is the author of numerous books including, Government's Greatest Achievements: From Civil Rights to Homeland Defense (2002) and A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It (2008).

Richard R. John is a professor in the Ph. D. program in communications at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he teaches courses on business, technology, communications, and political development. His publications include Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010) and Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995).

Zachary Schrag is associate professor of history at George Mason University. He is the author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (2006) and Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009 (2010).

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has published widely on the intersecting histories of labor, business, capitalism, policy, and politics, topics covered in her first book Creating the Sunbelt: Phoenix and the Political-Economy of Metropolitan Growth. She is the Paul Mellon Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge and an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago.

Thomas J. Sugrue is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology and Director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His books include The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996); The New Suburban History, with Kevin M. Kruse (2005); Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008), and Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (2010). He is writing a history of the real estate industry in modern America.

Karen Kruse Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She published Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954 (2011) and is currently completing a history of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of Education and History at New York University. A former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher, Zimmerman is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009) and three other books. He is also a frequent op-ed contributor to the New York Time, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and other popular newspapers and magazines.

To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

Reviews and Awards

"An impressive collection."--The Historian

"So effectively do these essays make 'the case for big government' that one is left wondering why the animus against government should be so strong in the United States today, if it has been so beneficial a force, and so generally respectful of popular antistatism...Conn and his colleagues reveal that contemporary advocates of smaller government are far less in tune with the reality of American political development than they imagine."--Journal of American History

"One of the greatest secrets of American history is that Americans have from the very beginning relied on government to improve their nation, help it grow, and make it more just. An energetic government is not simply consistent with keeping our country free, but actually essential to expanding our liberties and our personal possibilities. The authors make their arguments so clearly and so well that Tea Party members willing to grapple with To Promote the General Welfare might find themselves changing their minds. This is an excellent book that is also perfectly matched with our political moment."--E.J. Dionne, author of Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent

"To Promote the General Welfare injects a welcome note of realism into our hyperbolic public discourse. Because government in the United States has usually functioned out of sight, Americans have constructed a mythology of private enterprise and individualism and forgotten that the free market depends on the rule of law, state-funded infrastructure, and state-sponsored support of citizens' initiatives. From the earliest provision of security and infrastructure through social security and the GI Bill to medicare and middle-class housing, health, and education subsidies, these first-rate historians demonstrate that public-private partnerships have always been the American Way."--James Kloppenberg, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard University

"The scholars brought together by Ohio State historian Conn persuasively demonstrate how the growth of 'big government' throughout the 20th century has benefited ordinary Americans so comprehensively and unobtrusively that they have often taken it for granted."--Publishers Weekly

To Promote the General Welfare

The Case for Big Government

Edited by Steven Conn

From Our Blog

Did the government invent the Internet?

By Richard R. John Did the government invent the Internet? In a 23 June 2012 Wall Street Journal article, journalist L. Gordon Crovitz answered 'no.' 'It's important to understand the history of the Internet,' Crovitz contended, 'because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government.' Crovitz gave the credit instead to researchers at Xerox PARC who in the 1970s developed the Ethernet to link different computer networks.

Posted on August 23, 2012

Read the blog post