The Georgetown U.S. History Workshop welcomes distinguished scholars from outside Georgetown to present cutting-edge research in U.S. history. This series is supported by the Department of History’s Georgetown Initiative for Global History. Students and scholars from the D.C. area are welcome to attend. For more information about this, or other GIGH events, please email GUHistory@georgetown.edu.

Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present

 A conversation with Gary Gerstle & Charles Lane

Monday, April 11, 2016 | 4:00-6:00 PM | ICC 701 

About Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present 

American governance is burdened by a paradox.  On the one hand, Americans don't want "big government" meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted governmental help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government's legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution. 

One theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another theory molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the "good and welfare of the commonwealth." The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gerstle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go - but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The states could be innovative too. More impressive was their staying power. Only in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government's proper dominion the defining issue of our time.

From the Revolution to the Tea Party, and the Bill of Rights to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America.

Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge. He arrived in Cambridge in 2014 after a three-decade career in the United States, most recently at Vanderbilt University where he was James G. Stahlman Professor of American History. He is a historian of twentieth-century America, with substantial interests in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In recent years, Gerstle has focused his writing on the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts. His new book, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), identifies the contradictory principles of governance that became part of the Constitution and that have shaped and confounded the deployment of public power ever since. Gerstle's other works in the field of political history include Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Princeton, 1989) and two books co-edited with Steve Fraser: The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989) and Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Harvard, 2005).

Charles Lane is an editorial writer for the Washington Post, specializing in economic policy, federal fiscal issues and business, and a contributor to the PostPartisan blog. In 2009 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing. He is the author of two books: The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Macmillian, 2008) and Stay of Execution: Saving the Death Penalty from Itself (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Lane joined The Post in 2000 as an editorial writer, did a stint as The Post's Supreme Court reporter and then rejoined the editorial board in 2007. Previously, he was editor and a senior editor of The New Republic from 1993 to 1999 and a foreign correspondent for Newsweek from 1987 to 1993. Lane studied at the Yale Law School and Harvard College. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.