Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.

Edward A. Filene pioneered in introducing industrial democracy in his Boston department store in 1891. In the store's rapid expansion he lost control in 1928 and the experiment came to an end. Equally unsuccessful were his efforts to strengthen public control over the street railway, gas and subway monopolies in Boston after 1901 and to promote urban reform there from 1909 to 1912. He became a prophet of the New Capitalism and a promoter of the Neiv Deal but in both movements his integrity isolated him from his peers. His enduring contributions were the cooperative and credit union movements.

An era of space explorations and an era of expanded civil rights for racial minorities and women began simultaneously in the United States. But such important social changes are very rarely discussed in relation to each other. Four recent books on how the US astronaut program finally opened to women and minorities in 1978 address a key part of this connection, without discussing the struggles that compelled the ending of traditional race and gender exclusions. This essay examines the organizational and political dynamics of how civil rights in employment came to the US civilian space program in the decades after 1970.We know little about the social history of the US space programme. Narratives traditionally emphasize technological development, science, heroic individuals, and management teams. We are left, often, with anecdotal (or no) data about which portions of US society supported what types of space exploration. We know what Presidents and advocates in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) said and did. We know far less about how those thoughts or actions interacted with wider contemporary social changes including the women's movement, civil rights, and environmentalism. 1

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created in 1958 to develop America's non-military space effort. But the early leaders of a self-consciously elite science and technology agency rarely saw Earth as a part of 'space' or solar system exploration. This is clear when examining NASA's relations with earthly applications in the late 1950s and 1960s and with fast-emergent environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s. NASA consistently misread the importance of the most popular science-based political movement of the late twentieth century. NASA was advised from 1959 onwards that earthly concerns - and practical worldly benefits - were necessary to create broad and enduring support for space explorations. Despite this, NASA leaders consistently underestimated, ignored or spun-off Earth 'applications' in the formative period of America's civilian space programme. Power and prestige-focused human spaceflight, Moon and Mars missions, and human settlement of the solar system, became NASA's enduring 'human spaceflight culture'.

Between 1900 and 1940, organized industry and the federal government, acting in conjunction with the states, created an American social welfare system. The two major participants in this process evolved along similar lines during this period. Both began as simple organizations and developed into complex, functional bureaucracies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the federal government did not exist as a social welfare entity. Private corporations, the first to face the administrative and economic problems posed by the development of national markets, created social welfare systems for their employees long before the New Deal. Until the depression, these efforts enjoyed clear supremacy. By the end of the 1930s, however, a distinctly “public” social welfare bureaucracy and program had been developed on the federal level. Corporations and the state underwent similar changes but at different times, and the difference in timing influenced their relations. This essay describes the growth of these public and private bureaucracies and identifies their similarities and differences during the early twentieth century.