Legal scholars draw distinctions between government regulation and adjudication in the courts. Regulation is the more direct way to mandate safe behavior. A regulatory commission requires what it considers safe, and forbids everything else, leaving individuals, corporations, and governments the choice of complying or facing punishment. The rules regulators establish determine how thick a retaining wall must be, how many parts per billion of a substance will be tolerated, or how far a car window may roll down. Failure to meet a safety standard is a violation, whether or not an accident results. Regulators and courts can force compliance with standards and procedures even if no harm has occurred.

In the politically turbulent post–World War II period, proposed federal legislation to expand the welfare state pitted conservative Republicans against liberal Democrats in Congress. The conflict over national health insurance introduced between 1943 and 1947 in the Wagner-Murray- Dingell bill ended in a conservative victory with the bill stalled in committee. The primary constituents of the two sides were American Medical Association (AMA) spokesmen and corporate interests on the political right and labor leaders and public health advocates on the left. By 1946 the conservatives controlled Congress; thereafter liberal congressional reformers defaulted on the national health issue, as they had throughout the twentieth century, to corporate progressives and the tenets of “welfare capitalism.” Government continued as a regulator of “minimum standards” for business and industry. Provision of voluntary health insurance and direct medical services was left to the private sector. The Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program emerged out of the political stalemate over health care in the middle 1940s as a highly efficient and popular prepaid group health plan, innovative in its large scale and total integration of service and facilities. Its survival and growth was due to its acceptability to both liberals and conservatives as a model private-sector alternative to national health insurance or any other form of state medicine.

There is widespread agreement among scholars that Franklin D. Roosevelt created the modern presidency, and he serves as their paradigm of successful presidential leadership. James MacGregor Burns, Richard Neustadt, Clinton Rossiter, and others who took their cues from them found in FDR the ideal heroic president. He combined extensive and sustained popularity, partisan support, skillful power-sensitive bargaining and persuasion, adept use of the prerogatives of the office, and consummate performance of the multiple roles of the president to make the American constitutional system work.

Twenty-five years ago H. Stuart Hughes observed that “the study of history is entering a period of rapid change and advance such as characterized the science of physics in the first three decades of the twentieth century.” Amid such ferment, he believed, professional historians could become more “scientific” in stating their assumptions and executing their analysis without sacrificing an “aesthetic” style of discourse. Professor Hughes correctly predicted the professional excitement and intellectual controversy unleashed since the mid-1960s, but he underestimated the extent to which historians’ relative standing in the academy would be adversely affected by external and internal developments. Other social sciences attracted more students, tenure lines, and grant support; they had more success in formalizing their investigations. Many humanistic endeavors (including historical inquiries), critics charge, have concurrently become inscrutable. Historians themselves have expressed serious concern about the future of their discipline. With the Balkanization of knowledge, with a growing number of subfields and specialized journals, historical synthesis seems more and more to be an elusive goal. The current debate over how to “(re)present the past” goes far beyond disputes over approach, style, or ideology.