ABSTRACT
President George W. Bush’s ‘‘war on terror’’ is only the latest effort to redefine the scope of the US federal government’s power (and especially the executive branch) by invoking the metaphor of war. In the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of a ‘‘war on cancer’’ quietly began to shape a powerful new form of law that came to be known after 1970 as ‘‘environmental law.’’1 The Johnson Administration launched a ‘‘war on poverty’’ that, combined with federal mandates for school desegregation and open housing, began to transform the governance of cities and states, facilitating the final breakdown of the urban party machines that dominated politics. Since the 1960s, a ‘‘war on crime’’ has seen enormous expansions in federal criminal law enforcement and the growth of mass imprisonment at the federal and state levels. Of course, Americans are not the only people to invoke the metaphor of
war; but I think a more careful comparative study of the use of the war metaphor to describe and encourage transformations in the nature and enterprise governance would support my sense that the US usage is rather distinctive. This usage may even have a very specific point of emergency. That moment is January 6, 1941, in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘‘State of the Union’’ speech to Congress. The setting is dramatic. Roosevelt has only just been re-elected to an unprecedented and controversial third term as President. He was very visibly rallying the nation to join escalating wars in Europe and the Pacific at a time when pacifism remained a very popular creed in the country following the unfulfilled promise of American entry into the Second World War. After summarizing the history of US autonomy from political events outside
the Western hemisphere, and the increasingly dire confrontation between what Roosevelt described as ‘‘the new order of tyranny’’ and the ‘‘democratic way of life,’’ Roosevelt baldly stated the need for a new singular reconstitution of government around the coming armed conflict with ‘‘the aggressor nations.’’
