Charles Abrams (1902-1970) stood at the center of the policies, problems, and politics surrounding urban planning, housing reform, and the public and private interests involved in the expansion of the American state. He uniquely combined in one person the often divergent roles of "public" and "policy" intellectual. As a "public intellectual," Abrams's voice reached the American public through the pages of "The Nation, The New Leader, " and "The New York Times, " with accessible explanations of civil rights legislation, mortgage financing, government policies, and urban renewal. As a "policy intellectual," he helped to create the New York Housing Authority, lobbied President Kennedy to issue an executive order barring discrimination in federally subsidized housing projects, and combated the growing threat of a federally initiated "business welfare state."

"Housing and the Democratic Ideal" is the only comprehensive work on Charles Abrams to date. Though structured as a narrative biography, this book also uses Abrams's experiences as a lens through which we can better understand the development of American social policy and state expansion during the twentieth century. In his left-leaning critique of centrist liberalism, Abrams took aim at the use of fiscal and monetary policies to achieve social objectives -- a practice that allowed business interests to maximize private profits at the expense of public benefits. His growing concern over racial discrimination prefigured its emergence as a highly contested aspect of the American state.

A. Scott Henderson not only provides clear insight into Abrams's role in American policymaking and his individual achievements as a pioneering civil rights lawyer, scholar, and urban reformer, but also offers an in-depth analysis of modern state-building and the government-private sector relations ushered in by the New Deal.

Joseph Swidler (1907-1997) was one of the last New Dealers, part of a generation of talented professionals--including Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, and Morris Cohen--who devoted their energies to serving public, not private interests. In a career spanning six decades, he helped craft and administer the nation's energy policy while witnessing most of the signal events of the modern age: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and America's emergence as a superpower. Swidler's memoir is filled with insights on this transformative period of U.S. history and includes anecdotes about key historical figures, among them David E. Lilienthal, Harold Ickes, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Nelson Rockefeller.
In 1933, Swidler, a young Chicago attorney, signed onto the Roosevelt administration's efforts to implement New Deal economic reforms. As general counsel to the Tennessee Valley Authority, he did much to define the basic parameters of power regulation in the United States. His twenty-five years at the TVA were interrupted by World War II service in the Department of Justice, the War Production Board, and the Navy.
Asked by President Kennedy in 1961 to chair the Federal Power Commission (now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), Swidler, in just four years, transformed that moribund and inefficient agency into one of the best of the U.S. regulatory commissions. Later, he presided over a similar turnaround during his tenure as Chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission.
Between his lengthy stints in government service, Swidler practiced law privately in Nashville and Washington, D.C. But it was as a public servant that he had the most impact, using his sharp intellect and get-it-done style to construct a national energy and utility policy that considered the needs of the consumer as well as those of the producer--a balancing act that is especially relevant in the current climate of energy shortages.
The Editor: A. Scott Henderson, assistant professor of education at Furman University, is author of Housing and the Democratic Ideal: The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams.