Perspectives on the Dick Thornburgh Archival Collection: State Perspective
Speech presented by Susan Hansen, Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science
University of Pittsburgh Founders Day, February 27, 1998
It’s a great pleasure to be involved on this auspicious occasion. State government and politics have been the focus of my research and teaching for many years and I welcome any event that fosters interest in state issues.
State governments are now more important than ever before. They were propelled into a central role in American government and politics by the election in 1994 of the first Republican-controlled congress in 40 years. The new Republican congress embraced a set of radical reforms that put more responsibility and pressure for performance on the shoulders of state government. Prior to the major shift in responsibility delivered to the states by congress and the President in 1995, state political institutions were already enjoying a heightened role in the federal system. Now state policy makers are in the limelight in a way that could not have been anticipated even a few years ago. The devolution/revolution of 1995 will touch every state political institution and political actor. The stakes will be higher than ever before; competition for the exercise of power, a prominent feature of politics, will grow more intense. The American states are ready for this challenge. Since the 1960's, state government and politics have been in a state of change. Reform has been most apparent in the governorship of the states. Individually, governors have been strengthened and have become the key political and governmental leaders in their states. As a group, they have worked to solidify their position within the federal system, and to work with the federal government on pressing domestic matters. This change in governorships has ramifications in many areas of the states’ political and governmental policy systems. Conflicts have grown between governors and other branches of state government, state supreme courts have become players, and a strengthened governorship facing greater challenges has made the position more attractive.
The type of politician that used to seek the office and the kind of person interested in running for it have changed. A political scientist named Larry Sabato has written a recent book on changing trends in governorships called, Goodbye to Good Time Charlie. And, of course, the theme is that the sort of good ol’ boy model that used to be the accepted criteria for electing governors has been replaced with a growing recognition that the governor is in fact the CEO of a very large enterprise and a very visible actor on the state as well as on the national scene. I should also note that several women have also been elected governors as well, further changing the image.
There has always been tension between popular representation, neutral competence and executive leadership and there have been shifts in policy actions within the federal system in a cycle of shifts from the state to the national government and back again. And these cycles provide the settings in which state and national governments function. We are currently entering an era of even more attention to the state role and to the contributions of governors. I think it’s important to note that the governors have also changed the presidential recruitment process. In each of the five presidential elections from 1976 to 1992, at least one of the major party candidates served as governor and three became president. Entrants in the 1996 presidential selection process included former governors and former gubernatorial candidates. So this collection is going to be a welcome addition to the archives at Pitt and they should prove invaluable to students of state politics and scholars charting shifts in the roles of governors and of the states.
One particular element, the Three Mile Island incident, has already found its way into numerous textbooks on public policy, decision science, and issues relating to the use of nuclear power. Dick Thornburgh himself has written a gripping account of his own management of the Three Mile Island crisis, which I regularly assign to my state politics students, and this provides them with an excellent inside view of the process of government and relations between the government and the media. It raises some very profound questions about technology, society, and the importance of maintaining some degree of political and social control over potentially lethal technologies. In the Three Mile Island incident, of course, a major nuclear leak threatened. No one knew whether the leak might ultimately lead to a core meltdown and consequent high radiation exposure in the surrounding areas. So, Governor Thornburgh faced an interesting decision tree, which has been modeled in a number of texts on process. He considered whether to evacuate, whether not to evacuate, and the risks of the various alternative plans. I’m sure many of you have seen a map of Harrisburg or have visited there, and as you know, a river runs through it and the problems related to evacuation could have been really considerable. Fortunately for all of us, I think Governor Thornburgh did indeed make the right decisions, panic was averted, and life was able to continue.
This is also a striking example of the way states are influencing the federal government, and there is a very fine exhibit in the hall with some of the materials from Three Mile Island including the dosimeter issued to Governor Thornburgh when he actually visited the site in his effort to reassure the public about the minimal danger. So one of the major contributions of this whole event was that after Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided that no future nuclear power plants would be licensed unless there was an evacuation plan on file. Because of Dick Thornburgh’s rather unsettling discovery that there was no such evacuation plan for the city of Harrisburg, they would have had to improvise one if that had become necessary. As a consequence, a nuclear power plant that was almost ready to go into operation on the north shore of Long Island was decommissioned: no one could figure out how to evacuate Long Island. So, I think this illustrates very graphically the contribution that state policy makers can make in our federal system. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described the states as laboratories of democracy. It is at the state level that issues relating to health care reform, economic development, comparable worth, all sorts of environmental issues, waste disposal, are being dealt with on a daily basis. So, this archive will provide a valuable resource for scholars interested not only in state politics and policy, but in using material from these laboratories of democracy to inform decision making at the national level. Thanks very much.