| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. By Terry H. Anderson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi, 320 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-515764-8.)
Terry H. Anderson has written an excellent one-volume history of the political, legal, normative, and economic factors that led to the establishment—and, in the 1990s, the disestablishment—of the controversial public policy we call affirmative action. The book is a very well-written, very scholarly, and very fair examination of the public policy from its genesis during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to its demise in the two decades before and after the onset of the twenty-first century.	1
Anderson focuses on all aspects of the notion of affirmative action: From national as well as state and local governmental programs to diversify work forces (for example, police, state troopers, firemen, postal workers, and sanitation workers) to private sector efforts to hire more minorities and women in areas of work that had been filled by white males in the past. He examines policies developed and implemented in federal and state contracting offices that enabled minorities and women to receive—for the very first time—contracts for government public works projects. And he does an excellent job of differentiating these governmental, business, and industry affirmative action programs from those created in the late 1960s by institutions of higher education to diversity their student, faculty, and staff populations.	. . .

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