The War of 1812—Policy Changes and New Issue Regimes

The War of 1812 could serve as a model for the case that wars can have major effects. Two major policy changes emerged quickly after the armistice. Congress established the Second Bank of the United States—a reaction to the near-bankruptcy, currency disorder, and debt brought on by the war¹⁴

The War with Mexico—A Policy Change and a New Issue Regime

The war with Mexico of the 1840s brought one striking policy change—the acquisition of today's American Southwest, extending from Texas through California (in geographic terms, an area larger than today's Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain combined).²¹

The Civil War—Policy Changes and New Issue Regimes

The broad effects of the Civil War are well known. Beyond its changes in race policies, the war brought “a spirit of national economic activism unprecedented in the antebellum years,” engendering “what might be called the birth of the modern American state.”²⁵

• Extension of rights to African Americans. This was legislated through the Emancipation Proclamation; the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, nationalizing rights in general; and the Fifteenth Amendment, extending the suffrage.²⁶

  Foner 1988, 1–11, 66–67, 251-61, 444–48.

• A high protective tariff. Originating—at least in large part—as an emergency revenue source, “the so-called war tariff became permanent, both in the statute books and in the minds of the public and of the protected industries.”²⁷

  Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1963, 14–15. See also Sylla 2000, 527; Brownlee 1996, 44–45; Hansen 1990.

  This is a leading instance of a party—the Republicans—getting a chance to do what they would have wanted to do anyway. Suddenly in 1861, tariff revenue emerged as a solution to a problem—a desperate shortage of government revenue as war loomed. Once in place, through the usual operations of path dependence, revenue streams tend to stay in place. (Of course, it is quite possible that a ruling Republican Party would have generated a high protective tariff somehow at some point anyway without the stimulus of the war. But that is speculation. We do not know what a ruling Republican Party would have amounted to, or whether one could have existed in any stable sense, absent the Civil War and Reconstruction.)

• Taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and certain luxuries. As of the early twentieth century, over a third of federal revenue came from these sources.²⁸

  Brownlee 1996, 44–48. See also Sylla 2000, 527–29; Porter 1994a, 260.

• Nationwide banking. “The beginning of a nationwide banking system,” was enabled by passage of the National Banking Act of 1864.²⁹

  North 1966, 25. See also Sylla 2000, 531; Rockoff 2000, 651–52; Porter 1994a, 261.

  The war economy needed better organization.

• Congressional redesign. Creation of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees in 1865 and 1867, a major innovation in governmental structure, resulted from “pressures spawned by economic burdens produced by the long years of war.”³⁰

  Wander 1982, 25–28, quotation at 27.

• A transcontinental railroad. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and the following two initiatives, the kinds of policy moves once favored by Whigs and now by Republicans, were made possible by the absence from Capitol Hill of Southerners opposed to the policies—a coalitional distortion brought on by the war. The railroad also had a military rationale: “The Far West had to be defended.”³¹

  Sylla 2000, 533; Foner 1988, 21.

• Aid to higher education. The Land Grant College Act of 1862 benefited from coalitional distortions and may have also been helped by a war-related rationale: “The land-grant colleges would offer military training.”³²

  Sylla 2000, 533; Foner 1988, 21.

• Free Western homesteading. Through the Homestead Act of 1862.³³

  Sylla 2000, 533; Foner 1988, 21.

The Civil War also deposited a number of new long-lived issue regimes. Again, under scrutiny is the content of highly public issue controversy during the ensuing decades. It is not clear what to list, but the following four entries seem plausible. They did not exhaust the agenda of public controversy during the late 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s (other chronic issues of that era, such as civil service reform and regulation of the railroads, did not have Civil War origins), but they contributed to it. The relevant new regimes centered on:

• Civil rights and Reconstruction. These issues of the late 1860s and 1870s persisted, albeit sporadically, into the early 1890s.

• The Republican high-tariff system. The system stirred controversy for several ensuing generations.³⁴

  Previously, the tariff had not figured as a prominent issue between the mid-1840s and the Civil War.

• Currency. In the wake of the Legal Tender Act of 1862, currency issues remained prominent through the close of the nineteenth century.³⁵

  Porter 1994a, 260; Foner 1988, 23.

• Veterans' pensions. Amid chronic controversy, Civil War pensions started small, but grew into a major version of a welfare-state program during succeeding decades.³⁶

  Skocpol 1992, chap. 2; Holcombe 1999.

World War I—Policy Changes and New Issue Regimes

At least eight major long-lasting policy changes can be credited to World War I:

• Progressive taxation. World War I brought “a shock to government finances that dramatically and permanently affected the internal revenue system”³⁷

  Witte 1985, 79–87, quotation at 87.

  as well as “a vast expansion of the Treasury's administrative capacity.”³⁸

  Brownlee 2000, 1030.

  Through the Revenue Act of 1916, a stiff preparedness measure enacted in uneasy awareness of the then two-year-old European war, the government “broke the dominion of the tariff over the federal revenue system, transformed the experimental income tax [enacted initially during peacetime in 1913] into the primary instrument of federal taxation, introduced federal estate taxation [now under siege in the twenty-first century],³⁹

  Graetz and Shapiro 2005.

  initiated the first significant taxation of corporate incomes, and contributed [along with the Revenue Acts of 1917 and 1918] to the nation's most dramatic departure toward progressive redistributional taxation.”⁴⁰

  Brownlee 1985, 173.

  As one indicator, the personal income-tax rate paid by the highest income bracket rose from 7 percent in 1913 to 77 percent in 1918 and has not fallen below 25 percent since. This overall progressive shift was not inevitable. A Progressive-oriented left wing ascendant on Capitol Hill during the Wilson administration insisted on it as a condition of funding preparedness and then the war. In the judgment of tax historian W. Elliot Brownlee, “Without the wartime crisis, the growth of the federal government almost certainly would have been slower and reliant on some combination of tariff revenues, sales taxes, and low-rate taxation of personal and corporate incomes or spending.”⁴¹

  Brownlee 1996, 60–72, quotation at 71. See also Higgs 1987, chap. 7.

• A record high protective tariff. As in 1815, an “intense nationalistic feeling” abetted a drive to shield industries nourished during the war, this time notably a new chemical industry.⁴²

  Kaplan and Ryley 1994, chap. 5, quotation at 100.

  Also, metals and ores were now seen to need protection for defense reasons. A new universe of war-kindled trade associations ready with proposals existed in the national capital. Farm interests signed on as postwar conditions ruined crop prices. These pressures ensured passage of the Emergency Tariff Act of 1921 and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. In general, despite spirited wrangling over particulars in the legislative process of the early 1920s, “the necessity of protection was hardly challenged.”⁴³

  Hicks 1960, 57. Eichengreen (1989) does not specifically connect the rise of the trade associations to the 1921 and 1922 enactments (his concern is the later Smoot-Hawley tariff) but he has the groups in place. There is a whiff of corporatism: “The sudden rise to prominence of trade associations was attributable to World War I. The war effort required closer ties between government and industry, but upon attempting to establish them the authorities found it difficult to deal with individual enterprises and requested that associations be formed. If the war occasioned the formation and growth of trade associations, the armistice by no means signaled their demise. Once formed into an association the process of marshalling a constituency was no longer so difficult.” A result was “to promote effective representation of industrial interests in Washington” (pp. 4–5).

• A national budgeting system. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and a centralization of congressional appropriations sought to accommodate officials who had found themselves “ill-equipped to address the budgetary problems that stemmed from the war.”⁴⁴

  Farrar-Myers, Renka, and Ponder 2000, 1; Wander 1982, 31–35.

• Prohibition. It is true that the dry cause was advancing on its own in the early to mid-1910s, but the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act might never have succeeded absent the war. New justifications arose. According to one account, “The entry of the United States into World War I, which was accompanied by a spirit of patriotic self-denial and the reviling of all things German, including beer and schnapps, swelled the dry ranks.”⁴⁵

  Kyvig 1996, 218–26, quotation at 224.

  “Most important,” according to another account, “[the war] brought into the movement such non-prohibitionists as Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, who advocated Prohibition to save grain.”⁴⁶

  Ferrell 1985, 188–90, quotation at 189.

  Another account maintains that “[w]hile the years of antidrink agitation had paved the way, it was the politics of wartime mobilization that provided the impetus for the speedy approval of the [Eighteenth] amendment by the states.”⁴⁷

  Kerr 1985, 185. See also Cooper 1990, 307.

• Women's suffrage. No doubt this reform, effected by the Nineteenth Amendment, would have succeeded sooner or later, but energetic contributions by women to wartime mobilization seem to have brought the proximate winning argument. Suffrage extension was “necessary to the successful prosecution of the war,”⁴⁸

  Kyvig 1996, 226–39, quotation at 234.

  President Wilson argued; “We have made partners of the women in this war.”⁴⁹

  Keyssar 2000, 214–18, quotation at 216. See also Cooper 1990, 307–8; Wynn 1986, 148–52; Behn 2005.

  The United States was not alone. Women won the vote in many other countries during World War I or its near aftermath, evidently through a logic of wartime contribution or various other democratizing impulses associated with war. The instances include Britain (for women over thirty), Canada, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Women in France, Italy, Hungary, and Japan had to wait until the close of World War II, when a comparable logic seems to have obtained.⁵⁰

  Lewis 2004, plus scattered sources on individual countries. The list for World War I includes neutrals, but there could be spillover effects. As of 1914, women had had the vote in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway, and certain American states.

• Immigration restriction. After failing for decades, this cause now triumphed through a literacy test and other barriers imposed in 1917. The war atmosphere brought a fear of radicals, pressure for Americanization, and a discrediting of powerful anti-restrictionist nationality groups—notably the German-American Alliance. After the war and its ensuing politicized strikes, Red Scare, and deportations of alleged radicals during 1919–20, a resort to national-origins quotas in 1921 and 1924 bolstered the move of 1917.⁵¹

  Tichenor 2002, 138–46; LeMay 1987, 70–72.

• Domestic intelligence. In the wake of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the Federal Bureau of Investigation created a General Intelligence Division that functioned during the Red Scare of 1919–20. J. Edgar Hoover started the compiling of files on individuals in 1919, a practice that he continued into the Nixon administration.⁵²

  Goldstein 1978, chaps. 4, 5; Ungar 1976, chap. 3.

• Cartelization of the railroads under tight government management. By way of direct government control during the war and the Transportation Act of 1920, a prominent issue regime centering on railroad regulation that dated to the 1880s ended. Henceforth, the rail corporations more or less dropped out of American public life as powerful or controversial entities.⁵³

  Klein 1990; Higgs 1987, 152–53; Skowronek 1982, 283.

Beyond these policy changes, World War I was a fertile source of new issue regimes. Five of them, in addition to the chronic tariff issue (which figured prominently both before and after the war), came close to exhausting the public agenda during the 1920s:

• Enforcement of Prohibition—a perennial subject of dispute until 1933.

• Cuts in the corporate and individual income taxes established during the war. Led by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the Republicans pursued this cause for most of a decade.⁵⁴

  Witte 1985, 88–96; Brownlee 1996, 67–72

• Hydroelectric power. The government had operated a power plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, during the war. The question of how to dispose of it stirred a chronic controversy that culminated in the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933.⁵⁵

  Leuchtenburg 1969, 66–67.

• Agricultural crop supports. The war had brought government support of crop prices, prosperity on the farms, and a crystallization of new agricultural interest groups. Once the postwar prices plummeted as they did in 1921, “the experience of price supports was there to be appealed to.” In short order, the so-called McNary-Haugen plan for crop supports came to preoccupy public attention and Capitol Hill and to incur vetoes by Coolidge and Hoover. The way was paved for a somewhat different crop-support plan, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Nothing like either of these government-centered plans had had any prominence before World War I.⁵⁶

  Karl 1983, quotation at 43; Hansen 1991, chap. 2; Olmstead and Rhode 2000, 730; Benedict 1953, chaps. 8–12; Eichengreen 1989, 5.

• Veterans' bonuses. Accompanied by chronic commotion, at least five veterans' bonus bills became law over Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt vetoes. Surprisingly, those of 1931 and 1936 are good candidates for the most effective countercyclical spending moves by the government during the Depression years.⁵⁷

  Key 1943; Brown 1956, 863–69; Lee and Passell 1979, 384–86.

World War II—Policy Changes and Issue Regimes

As in the locution “postwar era,” we still regard World War II as a dividing line, and that makes sense in domestic as well as in foreign affairs. At least nine substantial policy changes can plausibly be credited to the war:

• Mass-based progressive taxation. For lasting effects on the federal revenue structure, nothing has ever surpassed the financing of World War II. The personal income tax was “dramatically expanded” through widening its reach (the share of the workforce paying taxes rose from 7 percent before the war to 64 percent afterwards), raising marginal rates (the top-bracket rate peaked at 94 percent and stayed high), and pay-as-you-go withholding.⁵⁸

  Wallis 2000, quotation at 73; Murphy 1996; Brownlee 1996, 88–101; Witte 1985, chap. 6; Campbell and Allen 1994.

  Before the war, revenue from the personal income tax never exceeded 1.5 percent of GNP; since the war, it has dipped only once (around 1950) below 7 percent.⁵⁹

  Witte 1985, 124.

  Corporate taxes mushroomed also. “The country emerged from the war with a completely different revenue structure.”⁶⁰

  Wallis 2000, 73.

  In general, the government has lived off World War II's lucrative tax design for the six ensuing decades. For a while, at any rate, there seems to have been a progressive redistributive effect, as was argued by Douglass C. North in 1966: “It is not at all clear that New Deal measures provided any significant redistribution of income…. The really significant fall [in income inequality] is clearly related to the high progressive tax rates imposed during World War II.”⁶¹

  North 1966, 178.

• Fiscal policy to stabilize the economy and ensure full employment. These policy desiderata were expressed in the Employment Act of 1946 and the creation of the Council of Economic Advisors. According to Herbert Stein, “The great weight assigned to full employment as a postwar goal certainly resulted from the achievement of full employment during the war against the background of ten years of depression.”⁶²

  Stein 1969, chaps. 8, 9, quotation at 171.

  For one thing, the war showed that deficits could work; in the words of Brownlee, it “institutionalized structural Keynesianism.”⁶³

  Brownlee 2000, 1050. The experience of the war seems to have brought a similar result in Britain: “There must be some doubt if an administrative Keynesian revolution (that is, the adoption of Keynesian goals as well as Keynesian instruments) would have occurred had it not been for the Second World War…. The key to the institutionalization of the new paradigm was the shock of war—the decisive factor in forcing the Treasury radically to reappraise its ideas on economic policy.” Oliver and Pemberton 2004, 423–24.

• Curbs on labor unions. Repeated, crippling strikes during the war and its ensuing demobilization phase soured public opinion on unions. An “almost hysterical hostility toward unions” greeted a rail walkout in 1946, for example.⁶⁴

  Patterson 1972, 306.

  For many, John L. Lewis, of the United Mine Workers, became a national villain. Hence the promanagement revisions of labor law by way of the Smith-Connally Act of 1943 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The latter has remained largely in effect ever since.⁶⁵

  Lee 1966, chaps. 1–3; Amenta and Skocpol 1988, 114–15; Young 1956, 63–67; Sparrow 1996, chap. 3; Wynn 1996, 470. Spirited controversy over the Taft-Hartley Act carried into 1949 but then died down as the Democrats retreated. The question of whether it had been wise to curb the unions proved to be unpromising material for a long-lasting new issue regime, just as continuing opposition to the principles of the Employment Act of 1946 was unpromising terrain for the Republicans. These matters were largely settled.

• Progress in voting rights for southern African Americans. The Soldier Voting Act of 1942 and a Supreme Court ban of the white primary (a move that is said to have indexed the country's opinion change regarding race during the war) in 1944 made possible small but real progress in this area. According to Alexander Keyssar, “The equilibrium in voting laws was decisively disrupted by World War II.”⁶⁶

  Keyssar 2000, 244–55, quotation at 244. See also Klinkner and Smith 1999, chap. 6.

• Science policy. “The war provided the transforming event from which the modern research system emerged.”⁶⁷

  Smith 1990, 34.

  The idea of government support for basic research in universities through peer review was in place by 1945, as were corresponding practices and connections to industry, although it took until 1950 to establish the National Science Foundation (NSF).⁶⁸

  Ibid., 1–3, 34–52; Polsby 1984, 35–55.

• Atomic energy policy. Wartime development of the atomic bomb and the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 necessitated this new policy area.⁶⁹

  Green and Rosenthal 1963, chap. 1; Balogh 1991, chap. 2.

• Curbs on the executive branch. Policies limiting executive power were manifested in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, regulating bureaucratic practices; the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, strengthening the congressional committee system for, among other things, executive oversight; and the Twenty-Second Amendment, sent by Congress to the states in 1947, establishing a two-term limit for presidents. World War II, coming as it did on top of the New Deal, stirred considerable nervousness about executive power.⁷⁰

  Wander 1982, 35–38; Rosenbloom 2001; Brazier 1996; Davidson 1990. The term-limit restriction on presidents was the sixth constitutional amendment evidently stimulated by war conditions. A seventh came with the Twenty-Sixth Amendment providing for teenage voting as the Vietnam War wound down. Little has been written about the Twenty-Second Amendment. One safe conclusion seems to be the following: in the 1940s, President Roosevelt would very likely not have become a third- and fourth-term president absent the imminence of war in 1940 and its continuation in 1944. In that case, no term-limiting drive would have arisen. On the elections of 1940 and 1944, see Divine 1974, chaps. 1–4.

• A new national security structure. Reflecting a new “doctrine of national security” developed during the war, the National Security Act of 1947 integrated the military services (thus providing a suitable housing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff created in 1942) and established the Central Intelligence Agency (a successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services).⁷¹

  Yergin 1977, chap. 8, quotation at 193; Huntington 1964, 429–33.

• GI Bill of Rights. The program funded higher education for over two million returning veterans as well as home mortgages and other benefits. According to one assessment, “The transition toward a prosperous, middle-class society was accelerated by decades.”⁷²

  Perrett 1989, 439. See also Olson 1974, chaps. 1–3.

As in the cases of earlier wars, World War II brought about policy changes but also transformed the national policy agenda. Four major issue regimes lasting into the 1960s seem to have stemmed from the war:

• Civil rights. If the term “New Deal” is restricted to the 1930s, civil rights—entailing voting rights, fair employment, and access to public accommodations—was not a New Deal issue.⁷³

  Antilynching was a legislative cause of the 1930s, although the White House and the leadership of the Democratic Party took little interest, and the drive failed.

  It emerged in 1943 and 1944. On the home front, the war's crusade against Nazism is said to have “eroded the moral and intellectual respectability of the claim for racial supremacy.” In general, a pronounced spirit of democracy is said to have set in. For their part, African Americans aiding the war effort demanded better treatment, not least as assertive returning veterans. President Truman embraced the cause of civil rights in 1946, inaugurating a long-running controversy that bore fruit in the 1960s, yet has persisted since that time.⁷⁴

  Klinkner and Smith 1999, chaps. 6, 7, quotation at 200; Keyssar 2000, 244–53; Hart 2004; Collins 2002.

• General aid to education. Across-the-board subsidies to elementary and secondary schools was not a New Deal issue. It emerged in 1943 as word of failed draft exams circulated, and the implications of halted school construction hit home. A postwar teacher shortage loomed. Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft signed on to the cause in 1945. In general, “World War II proved to be the major force propelling education into the national political arena as a major issue.” It stayed there for two decades.⁷⁵

  Thomas 1975, 20–22, quotation at 20; Patterson 1972, 320–26. In 1943, “for the first time in over fifty years, a federal aid to education bill was debated and acted upon in the United States Senate” (Munger and Fenno 1962, 8; see also 7–10, 16). Bills had been introduced and won committee assent in previous Congresses, but 1943 brought an attention breakthrough.

• National health insurance. This was another non–New Deal issue that emerged in 1943. The poor health of the draft pool was noted. Britain's Beveridge Report of 1942, itself a product of the war, drew attention and praise. Senator Robert F. Wagner and others introduced an unprecedentedly ambitious bill. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman signed on to the cause (Roosevelt had not taken any such stand before the war). Thus was launched an issue regime that, with certain detours and discontinuities, emanated in Medicare in 1965.⁷⁶

  Starr 1982, 280–81; Hirshfield 1970, chap. 5; Derickson 1994, 1340–42; Hacker 2002, 217, 223; Derthick 1979, 317–19.

• Public housing and slum renewal. This (public housing, at least) had been briefly and secondarily a New Deal issue, but the cause came into its own in 1944 and 1945. “The war acted as a catalyst … and produced a widespread, conscious interest in postwar housing.” Construction had largely halted. An immense postwar housing shortage loomed. Taft and Truman signed on. Thus began a durable issue regime that would see the enactment of significant statutes in 1949, 1954, 1961, 1965, 1966, and 1968.⁷⁷

  Davies 1966, xi–xiv, quotation at xiii; Patterson 1972, 315–20; Keith 1973, 13–14, chap. 2.

Note that another bundling pattern appears here. Civil rights, education, housing, and health insurance, along with a full-employment thrust, formed the core of what we remember as Truman's “Fair Deal” program.⁷⁸

In General—Policy Changes and New Issue Regimes

See table 1 for a summary of the foregoing material. At least four observations or reflections seem warranted. First, the Civil War and the two world wars obviously outpaced the two earlier wars in generating entries to the table. No doubt one reason is the scale of the three large wars—the cost in money, mobilization, and lives. In particular, the War with Mexico pales in comparison as a cheaper, easier, one-sided contest more akin to the Spanish-American War. Another likely reason is that the federal government in its early decades was functionally specialized: it was not designed to undertake programs of domestic policy initiatives in good times or bad, and on balance it did not.⁸⁰

Lasting policy changes and new issue regimes in the United States deriving from wars

Even so, it is well to realize that certain entries in table 1 are more important than others. In particular, an unweighted entry count underrates the War with Mexico. Few policy moves have ever exceeded the annexation of the American Southwest in importance. Possibly no American issue regime has ever exceeded the free-soil versus slavery-expansion controversy of the late 1840s and 1850s in intensity, public engagement, and eventual policy effects. Also, Americans have lost a sense of the War of 1812. The casualties may have been low, but even so—the British invasion of the Detroit area and Maine? The American invasion of Ontario? The battles of New Orleans and Baltimore? The American seizure of Indian territories? The burning of the White House? A secession move in New England? Near national bankruptcy? Perhaps we underrate both the war's amplitude and its effects—the latter being a blend of nation building (as seen in the postwar burst of nationalism) as well as state building that is perhaps thinly captured in table 1. Not considered here yet is the war's impact on the party system.

Second, on the evidence here, the country's hot, freestanding wars have left more of a mark in some policy areas than others. What is missing? In the familiar Progressive or New Deal–liberal interpretation of American history, attention centers on adversarial regulation of industry (as in taming the late-nineteenth-century railroads, busting trusts, setting a minimum wage, and policing such areas as occupational safety, securities fraud, consumer affairs, and environmental protection) and on establishing welfare-state entitlements. These topics make at best a faint appearance in the war-related lists of table 1. The only solid exception is veterans' benefits. In general, wartime governments may see fit to make use of industries rather than to confront them, and to allocate their expenditures otherwise. It is not surprising that Progressive and liberal accounts tend to skimp on the wars.

Amply represented in the checklists, by contrast, is a collection of concerns that Alexander Hamilton might feel at home with. The wars have nourished state building and economic management, that is, systems of revenue extraction, the crafting of government institutions, tariff duties for revenue and protection, the banking systems of the nineteenth century, as well as—this seems to fit the pattern—the Keynesian managerial thrust of the mid-1940s. Yet that is not all. Policy moves as diverse as immigration restriction, prohibition of alcohol, curbs on unions, and a transcontinental railroad have appeared at various times in the mixed bag of war legacies. There are some general patterns. Until the 1960s, the federal government's main efforts to shape higher education drew from wars—the land grant colleges of the 1860s as well as the GI Bill and science policy (including the NSF) deriving from World War II. Three of the hot wars—the War with Mexico, the Civil War, and World War II—revolutionized American race policy, either immediately or by spurring new issue regimes that proved consequential. The Civil War and World War I brought unsurpassed instances, and World War II a lesser but still notable one, of suffrage expansion—for, respectively, blacks, women, and blacks again. (Later, the Vietnam War also left a deposit of teenage voting.)⁸¹

Third, note the extraordinary power of these wars—all five of them—as agenda setters. The second column of table 1 has the relevant entries. In all five cases, new issue regimes that absent the wars might not have come into existence at all captured public attention for a generation or more. Why, it seems worthwhile to stand back and ask, did politically aware Americans of the 1850s come to dwell on free-soil versus slavery expansion, their descendants of the 1920s on Prohibition enforcement, tax cuts, and crop-support plans, their descendants of the late 1940s and 1950s on civil rights, federal housing programs, and federal aid to education? War legacies have provided a surprisingly prominent answer to the question, What is American politics about?

A fourth and related point is that one comes to appreciate the sheer noninevitability of much of American history by sifting through the materials in table 1. This raises the risky topic of counterfactuals, but serious historical explanation does not seem possible without doing that, at least implicitly.⁸²

Counterfactual speculation is relatively easy on topics such as veterans' benefits, where one can readily conclude that without a war, there would have been no benefits (although the shape of the various veterans' payouts of American history is a complicated matter). Heavier going occurs in areas where a preexisting policy impulse allows a claim that a result might have happened anyway, war or no war. One response here is philosophical: I do not see any reason why in principle a long-term allegedly “underlying” cause of a policy effect should be considered more real, basic, important, interesting, or successfully explanatory than a short-term, contingent cause. This is to step away from, among other things, a commitment that I believe is unwarranted to various social or economic determinisms.

A second response is ad hoc and empirical: There does not seem to be any escape from assessing the causal backgrounds of past phenomena one by one with counterfactual ideas in mind. In general, in apprehending the American past, I would guess that we impute far too much inevitability to what has in fact happened. Our explanations tend to overfit. Of the entries in table 1, which were inevitable, war or no war, sooner or later? (This relaxes for the moment any requirement of temporal immediacy—although note that when something happens is not necessarily a minor concern; consider the Thirteenth Amendment.) Suffrage for American women was extremely likely, although that judgment does not settle the question of when. Slavery would have come to end, but, absent the Civil War, at what cumulative human cost and when? A transcontinental railroad would almost certainly have been built, although possibly by the states, on private resources, or later or differently. But the near certainties run out quickly. For a century, Whigs, Republicans, and their industrial backers supplied powerful support for high tariffs, but we do not know what would have happened on that policy front absent the wars. After all, it had proven possible for a stable American low-tariff regime of nearly constitutional standing to persist for a full generation leading up to the Civil War.⁸⁶

The American past is a cemetery of failed impulses and movements. It is news when events assist one to succeed. In general, it is probably a mistake to invest in grand schematic explanations of American history that underplay contingency, and wars are hard to beat as bearers of contingency.

Shakeups of Electoral Coalitions

Policy changes can be popular or unpopular, in a general sense, and they can beget both winners and losers. New issue regimes can crystallize electorates in new ways. Disagreement can mount and last about whether a war should have been fought in the first place. By way of these various routes, all in the realm of “position issues,” it is easy to see how wars and their near aftermaths might spur significant, possibly long-lasting, shakeups in electoral coalitions. There is also the route of “valence issues.”⁹⁰

This is a jumble of possible causal paths that cannot be sorted out through available historical data. But clues can be sought on the general question of whether wars have been associated with significant and long-lasting electoral change. For this purpose, an apt dataset was provided by Jerome Clubb, William Flanigan, and Nancy Zingale in 1980 (although the authors did not emphasize the question of wars in their own analysis).⁹¹

For all thirty-three presidential elections from 1836 through 1964, table 2 documents the realignment changes of various kinds that the authors considered ample enough to report.⁹²

Surge and interactive realignment in U.S. presidential elections, 1836–1964

This is complicated material, but it yields some simple results. After the 1830s, the seven elections associated with the highest change values in table 2 all occurred during or after major crises. Three of them were the first presidential elections to take place after the country's three worst depressions struck—in 1876, after the crash of 1873 (those years also brought a crisis centering on Reconstruction); in 1896, after the crash of 1893; and in 1932, after that of 1929. The other four were the first elections to take place after hot wars ended—and in all four cases volatile war aftermaths had had time to occur and war-induced issue regimes had had time to take hold. Those were the elections of 1848, after the War with Mexico; 1868, after the Civil War; 1920, after World War I; and 1948, after World War II. All four occasions seem to have brought sizable lasting penalties in the 5 to 8 percent range to the incumbent presidential parties (or, more or less the same thing, durable bonuses of that size to the opposition parties). This is in the neighborhood of a recent 4 percent penalty estimated through a different methodology for the Korean War in 1952 and the Vietnam War in 1968.⁹⁴

Lest an ironclad law be spotted here, let it be said that measurement of this sort is not easy and that different techniques can yield different results. One similar analysis has not found such results for 1868 and 1948.⁹⁵

In one way a striking violation, yet in another way a striking confirmation of the pattern in table 2 is the election of 1816, held in the wake of the War of 1812. Although that election occurred too early to earn a place in mass voting studies, it seems to showcase the idea that wars can bring lasting coalitional change, yet the then-incumbent Democratic-Republican Party reaped a bonus in 1816 rather than a penalty. Here is the story. Earlier in 1812, a few months into the war, the Federalist candidate had fallen only one state short of winning that year's presidential election through an able blend of position and valence appeals (the war shouldn't have been fought in the first place; why are the British occupying Detroit?). The Federalists were doing well.⁹⁶

World War I, looked at more generally, seems to have affected American voting behavior a good deal.¹⁰⁰

Overall, whatever the precise causal paths may have been, there is a suggestive case on the statistical evidence for the War with Mexico and World War II as electoral levers, a suggestive as well as commonsense case for the Civil War—how could it not have made a difference?¹⁰⁷

Major Changes in Party Ideologies

A fourth probe into the consequences of wars is made possible by John Gerring's recent work on party ideologies, which is based on a coding of campaign speeches and party platforms of the major American parties from 1828 through 1996.¹⁰⁸

Gerring's most interesting and surprising ideological hinge points came in the twentieth century. There were only two. In the mid-1920s, the Republican Party abandoned its century-long stance (in ideological terms, the party is taken to be a continuation of its predecessor, the Whigs) as a party of state building, government activism, reverence for public institutions, and, in general, authoritative order as a guard against the menaces of disorder, insurrection, and anarchy. The Republicans had been the party of state. Now, in swept a new emphasis, still abundantly prominent in our own day, on free-market and anti-statist themes that often flare into populist-style assaults against Washington, DC.¹¹⁰

The Democrats' twentieth-century hinge point came around 1950. Then, that party shook off its longstanding antimonopoly, anticapitalist, anti–Wall Street rhetoric well captured in the phrase “the people versus the interests” that had infused the campaigns of Bryan around 1900 through Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and in a last hurrah in 1948, Truman. Out the window went assaults against capitalism. In swept a new configuration of emphases on civil rights, social welfare, redistribution, and inclusion. The party “discarded its abrasive, class-tinged ethos in favor of a Universalist perspective—the extension of rights to all aggrieved claimants and a general rhetoric of inclusion.” In general for the Democrats after 1950 or so: “Oppression and injustice were out; peace, harmony, and community were in…. It was a far cry from the Populist blame game.”¹¹³

The following is speculation. It is not clear why these twentieth-century hinge points occurred,¹¹⁵

The Democrats' shift around 1950 had a complicated background, but World War II and its aftermath seem to have supplied both a moral jolt and a cognitive jolt. In highlighting the shame of American race relations, the war spurred the Democrats into a new ethic of “rights-based liberalism” that would cascade into multiculturalism in succeeding decades.¹²⁰

Events as Causes

We tend to assume that interests or preferences are the basic building blocks of an analytic political science. That is sensible, yet it risks analysis that is either unhelpfully truistic or unhelpfully abstract. Where do interests or preferences—or the agendas, programs, ideologies, movements and parties that ordinarily accompany them in the real world of politics—come from? One answer is events, of which wars and their aftermaths supply spectacular, although of course not the only, kinds of instances.¹²³

With both interests and preferences, it is difficult to proceed further without noting that wars can generate new, widely accepted causal stories. Such stories supply roadmaps to the achievement of old or new interests or preferences, or else new reasons to adopt new preferences. The new stories derive from the experience of the wars. Consider, for example, a story from the mid-1810s: The best way to shake free of the alarming national vulnerability just experienced is to build a stronger U.S. political economy, and the best route to that is the “American System.” From the late 1910s: Immigrants cause destabilizing political trouble. Among farmers after World War I: Government crop supports can cause prosperity. During and after World War II: Expensive scientific research is a key to national strength; racial discrimination at home causes trouble for the United States abroad;¹²⁴

Another route to war effects is the engendering of new organizations—which often champion new interests or preferences or implement the lessons of new causal stories. Such new units can be directly governmental institutions such as the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, the FBI's General Intelligence Division, the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisors, or the Central Intelligence Agency. They can be units chartered by the government, such as the Second Bank of the United States, or fostered by the government, such as the new universe of trade associations during World War I. New organizations, which, like new statutes, tend toward stickiness, are particularly good at rendering the effects of wars long-lasting. Yet path dependency can apply in the cases of interests, preferences, and causal stories also.¹²⁵

In the realm of primitive building blocks, there is a case for ranking events as the equals of interests and preferences in a seriously explanatory political science.¹²⁶

To take events seriously is to aim for longitudinal analysis, but also for comparative analysis. Any specialist of American politics might realize, for example, that most of the country's wars and all of its depressions have been transnational, not just national, events. As a result, cross-national, not just United States–specific, evidence can help to illuminate their causes, characteristics, and effects. Possibly this point is obvious to non-American scholars, but research by Americans about American politics can be insular. In writing this paper, I found the transnational patterns of women winning the vote and certain Allied ruling parties incurring electoral devastation in connection with World War I especially illuminating. I did not come across well-developed comparative literatures on subjects like these. There may be an opening.

Since 2001 the United States has been engaged in a war—or at least warlike circumstances—that could have long-lasting effects. Those might include a durable policy change regarding civil liberties, a new issue regime centering on terrorism, and the Republicans' reversion to their nineteenth-century stance as a state-centered party of order.