Kim McQuaid

This is a reprint of a previously published doctoral dissertation. It describes and analyzes the reformist experimentations undertaken by Capitalists from 1886 to 1960.

"Businessmen are politicians in America," writes Kim McQuaid, "and politicians are businessmen." Today, in areas as diverse as home mortgages, high technology, and Smart Bombs, the private and public sectors are working together to perform tasks that each is unable to do alone. In Uneasy Partners McQuaid surveys the close ties that have formed between big business and government in the period from World War II to the present. Government needs business, McQuaid explains, to make and implement key economic and business-related decisions. Business needs government to gain advantages over labor and markets. The defining characteristics of this business-government relationship form the focal point for each of the book's chapters. McQuaid first examines the 1945-60 transition period, discussing Eisenhower's domestic policies, foreign aid, and the oil market. He explores the rapid expansion of government under the Democratic administrations of the 1960s. He discusses the Republican retrenchment and the Reagan administration's pro-business agenda in the 1980s. Finally he assesses the legacy of the Reagan policies and evaluates the current U. S. position in the world economy.

Creating the Welfare State investigates how private business and public bureaucracy worked together to create the structure of much of the modern welfare state in America. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, this important volume employs interdisciplinary techniques to demonstrate how politics, economics, law, and social theory merged over the course of a century of policy formulation and implementation. The authors also draw upon previously unconsulted sources from government warehouses and archives to analyze the operation of early federal social welfare programs such as vocational rehabilitation. Their discussions range from those early programs to modern ones such as cost of living pay adjustments and social security disability benefits. This emphasis on the notion of the continuing development of welfare programs is a significant factor in the welfare state controversies--a factor often ignored by other historians and writers.