the road. >> arthur brooks, head of aei, has endorsed your book on the back with a blurb. what's your relationship with aei or with arthur brooks? >> well, i don't have any formal relationship with aei. arthur has been a friend and a mentor of mine for many years. one of the nice things about this book is concerned with issues poverty in network and how we help poor people, and what i wanted to do was write a book that would not just connect to academic audiences, but to a broader array of individuals and organizations that work in this area. many of those are nonprofit, many of those are faith-based organizations, and arthur is an expert on the nonprofit sector and understands how critical that sector is to the work we do. and, you know, he provided invaluable insight and structure as i moved forward with the book. >> you're a professor here at the university of chicago, what department do you teach? >> just celebrated its 100th

year a year ago, it's a school of social work. we train thousands of students to be practitioners and counselors, go on to serve millions of americans over the course of all their careers. i teach courses on the history of the welfare state. i also teach courses on issues of place and poverty and this spring i'm teaching a new course on nonprofits and social innovation in which i'll try to connect student toss techniques for creating more effective programs in this current economic environment. >> what drew you to the social service sector? >> that's an interesting question. um, when i was in college, my dad lost his job, and he didn't have a college degree, and it was really hard for him to find work, and that was at a point when i was starting to think about what i wanted to do. i took a course on political science in minnesota, and the content connected with me, and i saw a way where i could take

what i was interested in academically and translate into it thicks that might help -- things that might help people like my dad. it's been really interesting. >> who designed the cover of the book, and why is it designed the way it is? >> it's an interesting design. i give all the credit to yale university press. their graphic designers came up with it. if you notice, the block title is a little bit off the page kind of symbolizing how out of reach social assistance has become for many working poor americans. >> professor scott allard is the author of "out of reach: place, poverty and the new american welfare state." he joins booktv at the university of chicago. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback. twitter.com/booktv. >> university of chicago professor james t. sparrow, what did world war ii do to the size

of the federal government? >> >> oh, it increased it by more than tenfold. >> how so? >> well, the economic mobilization required a drastic increase in the presence of the government within the economy. the armed forces grew drastically as well, over 16 million people served over the course of the war, and roughly half of the economy was absorbed by the mobilization. so it was an unprecedented expansion, the scope of the government. >> how did it compare to the 1930s during fdr's first terms? >> yeah. well, the '30s, of course, were a period of dramatic growth, but the government of the '30s even at its peak was just absolutely swamped by the warfare state that came out of the second world war. and years after the second world war was over and before the korean war had begun, the government was still dramatically larger than it had been at it height in the 1930s. so it created an immentionly

larger government and more intrusive government. >> could you give us an example of how the federal budget went from 1940 to 1945 or so? >> well, yeah. federal spending increased by a factor of ten from 1939 to 1945, from just under nine billion in 1939 to almost 100 by 1945. so, and a drastic increase in expenditures. >> how was that paid for? is. >> it was paid for by a combination of income taxes and debt, and, um, as a result of this radical new fiscal requirement, income taxes, personal income taxes surpassed corporate income taxes as the largest source of revenue coming into the federal government. >> and was that the first time in history, in our history that that happened? >> yes, it was. >> and it's remained that way, hasn't it? >> i believe it has. i haven't checked in the last

few years, but certainly in the 20th century. >> right. did the size of the federal government decrease dramatically after 1945? >> it decreased, but not to, as i have said, not to the size of the '30s. so after every war you have what's known as a ratchet effect when government spending goes down, but it somehow never seems to go down back to the status quo antia bell lumbar -- antebellum. it was quite substantial in large part because the cold war came along but if you look at the five years between the end of the war in '45 and the start of the korean war in 1950, you see by all measures state capacity was still much more elevated that be it had been even at the peak of the new deal. >> what were some of the programs that stuck around? i mean, the size of the military, presumably, went back down, but what stuck around? >> well, the office of price

administration remained in operation until late 1946. i should emphasize that many of the emergency programs that were inaugurated were eliminated as quickly as possible. so there was a dramatic demobilization. but the postwar military never fell below one and a half million people, so that required a fiscal state that remained extraordinarily robust. so you never had less than 60% of the labor force paying income tax after the second world war. so the biggest change is fiscal and military, and then also the precedents for economic mobilization that was then drawn upon during the korean war. >> professor sparrow, were economic promises made to help sell the war to the american public? >> economic promises?

um, certainly roosevelt's four freedoms suggested that the american standard of living would be extended to all americans as a consequence of the war. so these forfreedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. and roosevelt was very careful to emphasize over and over again as he spoke about the war aims. um, mostly during the war as something that the soldiers deserved to come home to. and they did, in fact, receive that with the servicemen's reea justment act of 1944. but it was also promised as a larger goal of the war and, in fact, was delivered in many ways although, you know, that story's more complicated than what i've just suggested. >> why do you say that? >> well, because the way in which the affluent society came about did not flow directly from

roosevelt's plans. muffin of the new deal -- much of the new deal had been dismantled by 1943, public works, work relief, planning. much of what survived was transformed by war. labor arbitration becames the heart which was not the case in the heydey of the late 1930s. so the state that underwrote that affluence and global power in the american century was a hybrid of what survived the new deal and what was forged in the second world war and then the agencies that were erected to carry on the cold war. >> james sparrow, you teach here at the university of chicago. what do you teach? >> modern u.s. history with an emphasis on politic, but politics broadly construed so as to include cultural and social aspects of politics as well as high diplomacy and state craft.

>> you're in the history department? >> i am. >> and you're working on a new book, leviathan. what is that about? >> i am. it follows the story in this book, so this book is part of a trilogy effect. on the legitimation of big government, its rise during world war ii, its reconfiguration during the high cold war from 1941 to '61 which is what the second book is on, the new leviathan, and then it's collapse inside the 1960s and the 1970s. so the second book is on that second period when the united states exerted unprecedented extraterritorial sovereignty through the reconstruction of germany and japan, through the reconstruction of the european economy with a marshall plan to the occupation of hundreds of bases around the world, the occupation of south korea. the united states found itself ruling other people for the first time on such an extraordinary scale. and it was a role to which americans were unaccusme