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This chapter examines the advocacy efforts of members of Congress for policies designed to help poor people. It investigates whether the differences that exist between black, Latino, and white legislators in racial and ethnic hearings also occur in social welfare hearings. It examine legislators' interventions in committee deliberations during part of the Clinton era (1993–1997) and the first term of the George W. Bush presidency (2001–2003). It focuses on how actively legislators engaged in the deliberations in terms of questioning witnesses and interacting with fellow members of Congress. It also examines other legislative interventions, such as testifying at hearings in favor of social welfare policies that benefit the poor and requesting hearings designed to help poor people, who are disproportionately minorities.

This chapter analyzes data on political participation and testimony in congressional hearings on adversarial legal injury compensation policies as compared to bureaucratic legal policies. Overall, the hearings on adversarial legal policies feature more witnesses and a greater diversity of group types. This more varied lineup produces greater levels of conflict, as groups representing businesses, insurance companies, plaintiff and defense lawyers, victims, consumer groups, unions, the government, and experts all regularly participate. In hearings on bureaucratic legal injury compensation policies, by contrast, the hearings are dominated by federal officials, with regular input from groups representing beneficiaries, while businesses and consumer groups largely stay on the sidelines. The differences between the two sets of hearings resemble the distinction congressional scholars make between “fire alarm” and “police patrol oversight”.

Chapter 3 shows how ideologically diverse activists and legislators converged around a narrow, single-issue opposition to child sexual abuse and defined it as a politically neutral issue. The chapter shows how three challenges to this consensus emerged and were resolved: a 1981 Republican attempt to kill CAPTA; 1992‒1996 feminist organizing around child custody cases and False Memory Syndrome Foundation attempts to weaken CAPTA; 2000 forward, expansions of sex offender registration and notification requirements. Narrow neutrality facilitated the passage of legislation and pulled policy toward criminal justice and away from feminist challenges to the patriarchal family and conservatives’ emphasis on preserving the traditional family. Federal engagement shifted over time from a focus on violence within the family to a focus on child pornography and the control of sex offenders; although framed in terms of dangerous strangers, the new focus affected the larger number of familial offenders as well. Legislators and advocates downplayed race and gender while constructing an implicitly white victim, producing predominantly white offenders because of the prevalence of familial abuse. Experiential and expert knowledge and shared emotional rituals produced and maintained narrow neutrality in Congress, activist and professional groups, and media representations.

This introductory chapter discusses current political debates on the “torture issue,” as well as the constructionist approach that in this book are applied to select congressional hearings for the purposes of this study. Rather than conducting research on the prevalence of torture, its history, use, and sundry, a constructionist approach focuses on the “talk” of torture itself—the language U.S. politicians typically employ in discussions on the issue, i.e. the meanings, historical associations, and images that officials attach to the practice and the arguments regarding the issue. A constructionist approach to torture can clarify the reasons for how torture became a matter of public concern in the first place.

In Chapter 4, we examine the nuts and bolts of the Great Broadening using the congressional hearings dataset. We show how the step-by-step expansion happened and then how it stopped and even retreated under the pressure of a conservative counterrevolution.

The implications of the congressional hearings that took place in Washington in October 1947 and which were to usher in a period of fear, betrayal and a concerted attack on civil liberties cannot be fully grasped without a brief discussion of the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) during the period 1938–1944, when presided over by Martin Dies, a conservative Democrat from Texas. Dies is notorious for his denunciation of Hollywood in 1938 as a den of ‘premature anti-fascists’, meaning that he was not opposed to fascist regimes until they waged war on the United States. Research has shown that he maintained close relations with various organisations which supported fascism and anti-Semitism, and which were in favour of his singleminded attacks on subversives (read: Communists). The Ku Klux Klan, the pro-Nazi American Bund, a convicted Nazi agent and William Dudley Pelley, founder of the fascist Silvershirts, all expressed their agreement with Dies' anti-Communist agenda.

This conclusion discusses the aftermath of the Congressional hearings. During the hearings, the owners' general prerogatives survived essentially intact, although free agency of some sort was imminent in all sports by 1976. Legislators did not repudiate the reserve clause, the reverse-order draft, or territorial rights, despite their qualms regarding these institutions. The legislators and their aides missed some opportunities to subject the team financial data from the 1950s to analysis, which could have shed light on such questions as the effects of revenue sharing. Some fans gained when their hometown landed an expansion or existing franchise, while other fans lost when legislators did not prevent franchise relocation. Congress has held several hearings in the intervening decades since 1989. The professional sports leagues have also evolved. Technology has altered the landscape.

During the summer of 1983, the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) responded to the possibility that nuclear winter might be a real phenomenon in a prompt and honest manner. Like other government agencies, the DNA could not avoid some political overtones. On behalf of the Department of Defense, it also had to reflect the administration’s view of the national interest at heart. Carl Sagan was criticized by those who disagreed with his liberal views on combating the nuclear arms race. While this was normal politics, the critics picked up and used the scientific issues under debate. The nuclear winter debate led to a flurry of congressional hearings before the Joint Economic Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Finance, and Security Economics. The hearings were conducted by Senator William Proxmire, vice chairman of the subcommittee.

The introduction lays out a model of social movement relationships that are neither coalitions nor oppositional, including their form and outcomes. It outlines three types of relationships between feminists and conservatives: collaborative adversarial relationships, narrow neutrality, and ambivalent alliances. It gives an overview of the three case studies (pornography, child sexual abuse, and the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA). It discusses feminist and conservative engagement with the intersections of gender and race in issues of violence and crime. It discusses mechanisms and paths of social movement outcomes for federal legislation and policy and cultural processes within the state, including emotion, frames, and discourse. It gives an overview of the book’s methodology and data, including analysis of transcripts of congressional hearings, conservative and feminist publications, amicus briefs, and governmental and archival material.

There was little cause for optimism in Hollywood in 1948, yet the events that came to pass within three years must have exceeded the worst fears. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb and the Communists seized power in China. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed the State Department was harbouring 205 Communists and four months later, the Korean War erupted when the Communist North invaded the pro-American South. Korea was the icing on the cake for Cold War warriors, yet it was simply the culminating point in their ideological war and its concomitant repression. The Internal Security Act was voted in 1950, during the Korean War. It was sponsored by three members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): Richard Nixon, Harold Velde (a former FBI agent) and Francis Walter. This chapter examines the HUAC hearings conducted during 1951–1953 and how the Hollywood blacklist of alleged Communists was conjured during that time.

Through 1983 and well into 1984, research on nuclear winter was primarily financed by “discretionary” funds from various government agencies such as the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As revealed by the private Natural Resources Defense Council, however, the government’s response to nuclear winter remained largely ad hoc. This prompted Congress to call for an organized response, which actually began in February 1984, when John Byrne and Alan Hecht, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and director of NOAA’s National Climate Project Office, respectively, received orders from George Keyworth, the presidential science advisor, to formulate a plan. The following year, the DoD released a report which emphasized the significant uncertainties in estimates of climatic responses to nuclear explosions. Congressional hearings were held to discuss the DoD report, first in the House in March 1985, then in the Senate in October 1985.

John Howard Lawson is constructed as the epitome of the humorless, rigid, dogmatic, unsmiling, doctrinaire Communist, mixing ruthlessness promiscuously with insensitivity. He may very well be the most notorious U.S. Communist; therefore, the inexorable gravity of anticommunism may help shed light on why this screenwriter's image has been so tarnished. Lawson had a complicated family life due to his difficult relationship with his son (Jeffrey), and perhaps his brother, and also Jeffrey's mother, Sue. Lawson's heavily criticized reluctance to acknowledge his party membership in congressional hearings and elsewhere has been subject to retrospective reevaluation. Lawson was convinced that the “blacklist” played a major role in Hollywood's manifold postwar problems. One cannot comprehend the ferocity unleashed against this man and his community unless one begins to understand how both came to be.

This chapter tests alternative explanations for the growth of lobbying. It analyzes three possible explanations: Government is getting “bigger”; government is devoting more attention to issues of concern to the lobbying growth industries; and companies are getting bigger; and there is a herd effect in certain industries. Government has gotten bigger, and the growing size of government may exert a diffuse pull on corporate lobbying expenditures. Government has also shifted its attention. However, in some of the key growth industries, changes in government attention (as measured by congressional hearings and bill introductions) do very little to explain the growth patterns. None of these explanations can offer a theory of why corporate lobbying has expanded and grown as it has. Rather, industry-level lobbying seems to have an internal logic of growth.

This chapter provides an overview of the hearings conducted by Congress in the wake of player unrest after World War II and growing demand for new baseball franchises. The Congressional hearings began in 1951, when Emanuel Celler (N.Y.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Anti-trust and Monopoly, initiated an inquiry into Major League Baseball (MLB). For the first hearings, Celler told reporters that the committee's purpose was to “help baseball against itself.” During the hearings, few of the legislators impressed with their savvy. Some did not appear to understand the testimony. On occasion a few made dubious comments. The hearings occasionally lapsed into farce. The chapter considers sports owners' reluctance to release their financial records as well as professional sports leagues' search for antitrust exemptions.

This book examines the economics of the antitrust aspects of the three professional sports leagues—Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA)—based on the information presented at the hearings conducted by Congress during the 1950s. In the late 1800s, Americans worried about the growing concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations and big trusts such as oil, railroads, steel, meat packing, and tobacco. In response, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. While owners of professional sports teams may not have resembled industrialists, they labored under the same antitrust statutes. This book explores some of the major issues tackled in the Congressional hearings, including mergers between rival football and basketball leagues, player rights, general antitrust exemptions, territorial rights, franchise relocation and sales, franchise expansion, and television policies.

Chapter 4 provides snapshots of what issues cause marketing addresses and how it addresses them, what issues the policy process addresses and how it addresses them, and how they differ. These snapshots lay the groundwork for understanding key features of both cause marketing and the policy process, and therefore for understanding how policymaking around breast cancer incorporates both. The analysis in this chapter uses a database of cause-marketing issues and data from congressional hearings (using the Policy Agendas Project) to show that cause marketing emphasizes different issues than the policy process does—social welfare over government regulation—and addresses those issues in fundamentally different ways, as simple, positive, and easily solved. Cause marketing removes the conflict at the center of American politics, essentially depoliticizing the subjects it addresses. The chapter illustrates how the process works in the case of breast cancer.

This essay reprints the Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America (1954), otherwise known as the “Comics Code,” because it directly impacts the characterization of villains in comics for generations. Fredric Wertham and his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocentvilified comics as being the cause of juvenile delinquency. As a result of outcry from parents and other civic groups, congressional hearings were held to talk about the content in horror and crime comics. Rather than wait for government intervention, the comics’ industry created the Comics Code to make sure that comics were published with non-offensive content.

This chapter examines one of the most contentious issues in professional sports leagues that were tackled at the Congressional hearings in 1951 and 1957: player rights. The reserve clause and the player draft allowed owners to minimize competition for players and therefore to have salary-setting power over their players, giving them discretion in how much they paid them. Owners and their commissioners employed novel arguments supporting the necessity of having the reserve clause. This chapter first provides an overview of the sorry state of player salaries in professional team sports before considering the owners' explicit use of the reserve clause and how players began challenging it. It concludes with a discussion of Congress's inquiry into player rights, the challenges to the player draft, the formation of players' associations, the outcome of the hearings, and the inquiry's impact on owner-player relations.