Substance abuse treatment has been a topic of ongoing debate in the United States since at least the 1960s, when the country witnessed the development of several promising new treatment approaches. Although costs to society in connection with substance abuse point to a continuing need for an effective treatment system, there is only a general understanding of the field. Several factors make it difficult to comprehend the treatment structure: the field is comprised of a sprawling combination of public and private facilities, it strives to treat many types of addicts, and it employs a variety of treatment approaches. While there are general studies that attempt to describe the system and its components, few inquiries probe the inside of specific treatment facilities to discern their evolution, mission, and effectiveness. This article, which examines the Antelope Valley Rehabilitation Centers (AVRCs), is one such analysis. Located in rural areas sixty miles from downtown Los Angeles, the AVRCs are Los Angeles County's only directly operated treatment centers. The two centers, at Acton and Warm Springs, are not only the first and fourth largest substance abuse hospitals in the country, but they serve a population larger than that of forty-two states, making them an excellent lens through which to view a portion of the substance abuse treatment system.

The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) has been sorely neglected in the history of the relationship of the political actors to the administrative state. There is no full account of the history of the APA, yet there is an increasing need for such a history. There is a growing literature paying renewed attention to the importance of administrative procedures in the politics of the administrative state (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984; McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987, 1989; Moe 1989; Hill and Brazier 1991; Farber 1992; Mashaw 1990; and Bawn 1995). With all this attention being given to the importance of administrative procedure, it is about time to examine the history of the act that established the minimum standards of administrative procedure. The act regulates the procedures for adjudication, access to, disclosure of, and publication of agency information, licensing, rule-making, investigations, tenure of administrative law judges, and judicial review of agency action. Standard accounts of the APA's legislative history such as Galloway's (1946) have conveyed the impression that the APA was a noncontroversial, consensual piece of legislation that provided much-needed reform of federal administrative procedures. The actual history of this act involved a prolonged battle among the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the presidency, the legislature, and interest groups for political advantage in the administrative state that had been created by the New Deal and World War II.

At one time, political science greatly influenced the writing of American history. Pioneers of “the new political history” brought critical elections theory, roll-call analysis, the idea of party systems, and a model of ethno-cultural voting to bear on the Jacksonian era, the problem of the coming of the Civil War, Gilded Age politics, and Progressivism in ways that permanently altered interpretation. The influence of political science is not very great now. Political history itself shriveled before the New Social History. Massive energies were applied to writing the history of people who could not vote during most or all of the nineteenth century. The old political models soon had a nonbehaviorist rival, born and bred within the discipline of history itself, the idea of a persistent and transforming “republican ideology,” first and most powerfully described by Bernard Bailyn in 1967. Even within political history, the old models of voting behavior borrowed from political science left an implausible and unsatisfying gulf between voting and platform, political behavior and belief, practice and ideology. The disciplines turned inward again.

As “Lincoln and the Politics of Union” is the only thing that Michael Holt has ever written with which Mark Neely entirely disagrees, I can understand his impatience with the arguments of The Politics Presidents Make. Each of us has a fish of this sort waiting to be fried, and the opportunity afforded by my reference to Holt's essay must have been hard to resist. At least Neely took enough care in seizing this opportunity to acknowledge his “reductionist rendering” of my thesis.

Although there is an enormous literature on presidential leadership, only a handful of books on the subject shape the terms of debate regarding the place of the presidency in the American political order. Edward Corwin's classic, The President: Office and Powers, written during the New Deal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Imperial Presidency, written during the Watergate era, are examples of such constitutive texts. Each reconceptualized the understanding of presidential leadership and connected that understanding to problems in the political order as a whole: they were synoptic, as well as constitutive texts.