Often viewed as an age of democracy vs. totalitarianism, the interwar years are more appropriately considered an era of dramatic reform. Following the unprecedented violence of the 1914 to 1920 years, statesmen across the globe looked to restrict political freedoms, exclude ethnic minorities, shore up welfare policies, promote industrial efficiencies, and increase state intervention in the national economy. While Germany, Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union leaned decisively toward corporatism by the early 1930s, Japanese reformers facilitated state intervention in the national economy only after total war mobilization in China in 1937.

The Constitution contains several protections for property rights. In the early republic, the US Supreme Court relied especially heavily on the provision prohibiting the states from impairing the obligation of contracts. Over time it has given greater scope to state police powers related to the health and welfare of its citizens, but it still insists that governments must honor the letter of their own contracts. As it relied less frequently on the Contracts Clause and as belief in laissez-faire economics grew, the Court subsequently read the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to provide substantive protections for property rights. It was especially concerned about regulations, such as those at issue in Lochner v. New York (1905), involving the regulation of the hours of bakers, that it considered to infringe on the liberty of contract. Although the Court became more deferential to governmental regulations during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, it still recognizes that the award of monetary damages can be so excessive as to constitute a violation of due process.

Chapter 5 returns to discussions of the law at the federal level. It reconstructs debates over defunding the law in Congress and in the federal agencies, arguing that the Children’s Bureau leadership learned from their trouble administering Sheppard-Towner programs through the states. Giving states ultimate authority over programming had meant that each state director documented their Sheppard-Towner work differently – if they did so at all. When it came time to renew federal appropriations in Congress, the Bureau staff found itself unable to create and present national statistics on the workings of state programs. Children’s Bureau leaders recognized that they would have to take more control over state-level accounting in subsequent legislation if they hoped to maintain their claim to expertise through accurate reporting. In the meantime, without reliable national data, the Bureau had little ability to defend its use of federal dollars when conservatives swept Washington in the 1926 election and the law came under attack. A few years later, in a political climate much more friendly to federal intervention, the Bureau staff was able to implement the oversight they learned they needed in their administration of Title V of the Social Security Act.

Euro-American intellectuals began by thinking of folklore as relics from a pre-modern era, showing our own nostalgic anti-modernism. Paradoxically, we then subjected folklore to the information control mechanisms of modernity: identification, observation, investigation, collection, classification, analysis, comparison, interpretation, and evaluation – all in service to science, expertise, universities, and the knowledge production industry. Today, we challenge the inscription of folklore studies into the epistemology of modernity and its institutional power structures, especially in terms of its consequences for minorities and people of color. In this chapter I construct a brief history of folksong observation and collecting chiefly in the United States, the region I know best. I attend to how and why the consensus among American folklorists changed over time concerning who are the folk (if not peasants, then who?), what constitutes folksong, and how folksong is to be studied and understood.

If anyone is worthy of the title of “Cold War liberal,” you think it would be the celebrity journalist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann. Lippmann coined the phrase “Cold War” in 1947 and had long been considered the guru of modern liberalism. Yet Lippmann was a harsh critic of containment and, by the time of the Vietnam War, considered himself a “neo-isolationist.” He was also self-identified as a conservative by the Cold War era and was an outspoken critic of New Deal “planning.” Lippmann’s career highlights the problem of talking about “Cold War liberalism” in the singular. At the same time, there were few greater champions than Lippmann of a large military establishment and an expansive welfare state that typified Cold War liberal orthodoxy.

The decline in US health due to increasing inequality and not supporting early life is alarming. Moving away from America is unlikely to improve your health much. We need to rethink society to benefit the least advantaged. Merge many policies so factors producing worse health are unlikely to exist. Use the media, in its various forms, to advantage. The plight of individuals is more likely to get attention than facts and statistics. Frame issues in ways that appeal to Americans. Focus on the world we want rather than oppose the one we have. Social media provides many opportunities. Be involved in a community and have social support

The term “self-made” was fully embedded in 1920s popular culture, intertwined with individualism. Master of positive thinking Dale Carnegie dominated armies of cultural entrepreneurs selling tales of success. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression turned many Americans against businessmen’s leadership, but business advocates militantly circulated the myth of self-made success to justify why the privileged still deserved esteem and power. They rejected efforts at systemic change. They used the myth of self-making to explain success and failure as individual matters, and explicitly upheld inequality as a valid outcome of merit alone. To resist the progressive state, conservatives invested enormous resources to attack reformers for threatening freedom and opportunities. Among their rhetorical tools were fantasies of self-made success that they often imagined came from Horatio Alger, distorting his legacy into an individualistic and often harsh “bootstraps” mythology. Into the 1950s, positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale and others magnified the faith that people could “make” their own lives regardless of what the world handed them.

Chapter 2 explores how American policymakers built a government-sponsored housing finance model during and after the Great Depression. While the country entered the depression without major national housing programs, it emerged with an expansive toolkit of demand-side housing policies. The FDR administration discovered that subsidizing home mortgages would produce economic cascade effects by stimulating bank lending, construction, employment, wages, and consumer spending, reinforcing the country's emerging demand-led growth regime. The core idea behind New Deal housing programs was to transform mortgage markets to lower the cost for borrowers and minimize risk for creditors. These initiatives included the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program, which offered affordable mortgages to millions of homeowners - although excluding racialized minorities. These housing initiatives helped overcome the depression and permanently made housing finance a "national champion," albeit one heavily dependent on state support. Reinforcing housing-based growth became a routine response to address economic challenges well into the post-WWII period.

The rigid outlook of its supporters assured the KCIR’s emphatic defeat, which was broadly discrediting to labor courts. The positions taken against the KCIR also reveal the contours of the labor policy ultimately developed in the United States. The KCIR’s fascist premises were apparent by 1926, when the US made a decisive turn away from industrial compulsion. The evolutionary view of law was categorically rejected in the Wolff decision; Wolff’s decade of doctrinal ascendency ended an era of innovative state policy leadership in the United States. The procedural outlook of the KCIR’s liberal critics became the basis of New Deal labor policy, ushering in America’s unique model of labor law without labor rights. In rejecting these tenets of the KCIR, leading thinkers also turned away from international policy developments that shared those premises. Thus, America’s divergence from the labor policy of the rest of the world owed to the development of ideas, no less than institutions and structures, and it was liberals most engaged with global flows of ideas who did the most to turn the United States onto its distinctive path.

The United States, virtually alone in the capitalist world, never used labor courts during the Interwar period; existing accounts incompletely explain why US labor policy design diverged here. In the early 1920s, the weak labor policy and incoherent labor law of the United States was a widely recognized, urgent problem. The US government was newly strong and economically interventionist. There was ideological consensus on the basic features of an acceptable labor policy, but owing in part to political support for several plausible models, and unsettled partisan and intellectual alignments, the US did not make progress on labor policy in these first post-War years. Controversy over the KCIR, founded as a provocation in this debate, helps make sense of these patterns. The intellectual, legal, and political effects of the KCIR’s failure extinguished American interest in labor courts generally. Position-taking, especially reaction against the KCIR, reveals the emerging alignments that were to be crucial to the design and political realization of the unique labor policy of the New Deal.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the book, as well as its major argument. It argues that, while historians have traditionally treated war and military issues as temporary issues that affected American society only during wartime and had little impact on society during peacetime, the issues were, in fact, fundamental to political and cultural changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines how the remainder of the book will support this argument by focusing on how the relationship formed during this time between national security, education, and the cultural conception of “youth” strongly influenced young people’s educational experiences and had significant social consequences that still exist today.

Chapter Eleven takes up Rogers’ engagment with the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economic disaster that marked the culmination of his influence as a commentator on American political life. The Oklahoman castigated Wall Street for foolish financial practices and criticized Americans for buying on credit, two practices in the 1920s he believed underlay the economic collapse. With typical good-humored civility, he initially sympathized with Herbert Hoover as a victim of circumstances but soon denounced the president’s refusal to promote relief programs and job-creation initiatives. Rogers became an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The humorist became one of the biggest boosters of FDR’s programs as necessary to save the American system. While suspicious of federal government overreach and the encouragement of labor radicalism, he deemed the New Deal largely a success. Throughout the Depression, Rogers maintained his populist outlook, consistently criticizing economic and social elites while laboring to protect and uplife America’s common, working citizens. His acclaim for "the little fellow" further elevated his public stature in America.

After the Progressive Era of the late 19th century, the unregulated financial markets boomed, encouraging people to go into debt to buy stocks, and when an economic boom went bust, the Great Depression ensued. FDR’s New Deal was a response to the failure of markets to protect people that led to the government taking on the responsibility of preventing, or at least moderating, economic dislocations, regulating the financial and banking systems, providing jobs as an employee of last resort, and establishing a social security system to protect the elderly and disabled Americans. The missing link in these efforts was racial justice, which was largely overlooked for political reasons. While FDR’s critics accused him of betraying capitalism, he in fact saved the market system from destroying itself.