Tani's "States of Dependency"

I’m delighted to announce that States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972, by my fellow LHB Blogger Karen M. Tani, University of California, Berkeley, Law, is out this month from the Cambridge University Press.  In appears in the book series Studies in Legal History, sponsored by the American Society for Legal History.

[UPDATE: The Introduction is now available for download here.]

Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amid the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on long-standing practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades, asking what happened as money, expertise and ideas travelled from a federal administrative epicenter in Washington, DC, through state and local bureaucracies, and into diverse and divided communities. Drawing on a wealth of previously un-mined legal and archival sources, Karen Tani reveals how reformers attempted to build a more bureaucratic, centralized and uniform public welfare system; how traditions of localism, federalism and hostility toward the 'undeserving poor' affected their efforts; and how, along the way, more and more Americans came to speak of public income support in the powerful but limiting language of law and rights. The resulting account moves beyond attacking or defending Americans' reliance on the welfare state to explore the complex network of dependencies undergirding modern American governance.

Here are some endorsements:

“States of Dependency inverts the story of New Deal social benefits to provide a fresh perspective on the story of state-building. Tani explains how federal authorities relied on the language of rights to legitimize new programs, only to run afoul of local communities. This powerful book suggests how providing relief led to a stronger central government with the authority to scrutinize individual lives. I’m persuaded!”
— Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America.

“The publication of Karen Tani’s States of Dependency marks a new beginning in the history of the American welfare state. Deftly weaving together the techniques of social welfare history, legal history, the history of the state, and the history of administration, Tani offers an entirely new perspective on the persistence of poverty and the progress of social reform from the New Deal to the 1970s, from social security to the welfare rights movement. She tells the grand story of the rise (and fall?) of the American welfare state with expert attention both to complex matters of law and administration as well as to the everyday social struggles over issues of localism, needs, rights, race, gender, and inequality that basically define this important field of inquiry. This is bold and revisionist history in the traditions of Willard Hurst, Theda Skocpol, Michael Katz, and Jerry Mashaw.”
—William Novak, University of Michigan

“In this brilliant administrative history, Karen Tani traces the remaking of poor relief from the passage of the Social Security Act to the failure of a federally guaranteed minimum income. Centering our attention on the assumptions, commitments, and everyday actions of what might be thought of as the worker bees of the modern administrative state (the midlevel interpreters of statutes – here, lawyers, social workers, and other professionals who staffed the Social Security Administration and state and local level welfare offices) and the fulcrum of modern state power (federal matching grants which bound national, state, and local governments together in an uneasy embrace, a new fiscally-driven federalism), States of Dependency beautifully and powerfully captures the intricate web of dependencies, the mode of governance at the heart of the modern American state in the ‘age of statutes.’”
—Barbara Young Welke, University of Minnesota

TOC after the jump
Introduction
Part I: Introduction
1. A new deal for poor relief? The modern American state and the endurance of the local
2. An 'appeal to attitude': rights as an administrative tool
3. Human needs and legal rights: competing visions of governance in 1940s welfare administration
4. Claiming welfare rights: fair hearings, state-court claims, and a forgotten federal case
Part II: Introduction
5. Dependency and its discontents: the fractious politics of federal grants
6. States' rights meet welfare rights: federal administrative enforcement in the age of rehabilitation and resistance
7. Unsuitable homes, undeserving fathers, and the administrative origins of poverty law
8. Subjects of the constitution, slaves to statutes: the judicial articulation of welfare rights
Conclusion
Appendix. Figures and tables