The year 2003 marks the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978, a late chapter in the development of the American administrative state and the most significant reform of the civil service system since its creation through the Pendleton Act of 1883. The Act made a number of enduring contributions to the personnel system of the federal government. Given the recursive nature of public management debate, there is considerable policy importance in trying to understand the original basis of decisions on legislation that have shaped the federal government over the last twenty-five years, and the CSRA has recently been the subject of renewed interest. More important, the CSRA was a rare and relatively important shift in the beliefs and attitudes—the administrative doctrine—that shape the evolution of the administrative state. Significantly, the debate during the CSRA saw the emergence of deep divisions within administrative doctrine, divisions that continue to shape public management policymaking.

Since the late nineteenth century, American employers have relied on a program of welfare capitalism to deflect incursions into the workplace from the regulatory state or organized workers. Welfare capitalism encompasses social welfare benefits and health, safety, or leisure programs offered through the workplace—programs established and directed by the employer. In periods of labor upheaval and political social reform, American firms have relied on workplace social welfare as a private, managerial response to political pressure from the state and workers—particularly when workers sought to use the state to improve working conditions and guarantee economic security. Where or when employers no longer faced these threats, managers reasserted their control over the terms of work, compensation, and security. Out of this conflict emerged a public-private welfare regime, heavily tilted toward private sources and based on the exclusion of those who most needed economic assistance. Any narrative of the American welfare state, therefore, belongs within the century-long story of welfare capitalism.

In an obscure footnote to his groundbreaking study of deindustrialization in Detroit, Thomas J. Sugrue notes that “the history of industrial renewal in postwar American cities is still largely unwritten.” A review of the historiography of the postwar city confirms this statement. Historians have carefully explored the problems of low-income housing provision, red lining, and urban racial conflict, as well as the destructive consequences of federally subsidized highway construction, urban renewal, and suburbanization. With only limited exceptions, however, few scholars have examined the history of local policy strategies that addressed the disappearance of urban manufacturing jobs.