Examines the forces that have deflected U.S. government publication from becoming the public enterprise conceived by Congress in the nineteenth century. Discusses concepts deeply embedded in the American political consciousness and their inhibitive effect on the production, distribution, preservation, and even the quality of U.S. government documents. Also examines the punitive congressional policies that drove executive agency publishing underground in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as how these policies forced agency publishers into the arms of the private sector in subsequent decades. This book further explains how advances in the graphic arts enabled executive departments to follow a publishing tack independent of the authorized channel of U.S. government publication--the U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Government Publication: Ideological Development and Institutional Politics from the Founding to 1970 describes the federal scientific establishment that emerged during and immediately after World War II and how the folkways of science constricted the sphere of government publication. A major theme is the historic absence of a controlling legal authority for U.S. government publishing, that is, the extraordinary degree to which competing and conflicting legal codes, administrative policy, and originating statutes have given government publication a conspicuous lawlessness.