Goluboff's "Vagrant Nation"

Ria Goluboff (UVA)

Out from Oxford University Press next month, but already heralded by a press release from theUniversity of Virginia School of Law, is Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, by Risa Goluboff, UVA’s dean-in-waiting:

In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-served not only to maintain safety and order but also to enforce conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened?

In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff answers that question by showing how constitutional challenges to vagrancy laws shaped the multiple movements that made "the 1960s." Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities and civil rights activists; gays, single women, and prostitutes. As hundreds of these "vagrants" and their lawyers challenged vagrancy laws in court, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom.

Goluboff's compelling account of those challenges rewrites the history of the civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, sexual, and cultural revolutions. As Goluboff links the human stories of those arrested to the great controversies of the time, she makes coherent an era that often seems chaotic. She also powerfully demonstrates how ordinary people, with the help of lawyers and judges, can change the meaning of the Constitution.
       
The Supreme Court's 1972 decision declaring vagrancy laws unconstitutional continues to shape conflicts between police power and constitutional rights, including clashes over stop-and-frisk, homelessness, sexual freedom, and public protests. Since the downfall of vagrancy law, battles over what, if anything, should replace it, like battles over the legacy of the sixties transformations themselves, are far from over.

Mittelstadt, "The Rise of the Military Welfare State"

New from Harvard University Press: The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Oct. 2015), by Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers University). A description from the Press:

Since the end of the draft, the U.S. Army has prided itself on its patriotic volunteers who heed the call to “Be All That You Can Be.” But beneath the recruitment slogans, the army promised volunteers something more tangible: a social safety net including medical and dental care, education, child care, financial counseling, housing assistance, legal services, and other privileges that had long been reserved for career soldiers. The Rise of the Military Welfare State examines how the U.S. Army’s extension of benefits to enlisted men and women created a military welfare system of unprecedented size and scope.

America’s all-volunteer army took shape in the 1970s, in the wake of widespread opposition to the draft. Abandoning compulsory conscription, it wrestled with how to attract and retain soldiers—a task made more difficult by the military’s plummeting prestige after Vietnam. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care of its own—the more than ten million Americans who volunteered for active duty after 1973 and their families. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand.

Yet not everyone was pleased by programs that, in their view, encouraged dependency, infantilized soldiers, and feminized the institution. Fighting to outsource and privatize the army’s “socialist” system and to reinforce “self-reliance” among American soldiers, opponents rolled back some of the military welfare state’s signature achievements, even as a new era of war began.

A few blurbs:

“A truly important book. Mittelstadt shows how the military welfare state has contributed substantially to upward mobility for both soldiers and their families. Her excellent account is especially crucial today, when outsourcing and privatization threaten the standards of living of service members and civilians alike.”—Linda Gordon

“Mittelstadt describes the emergence of a khaki safety net extolled as tangible evidence of the nation’s commitment to its soldiers’ well-being, and she traces how this support system was undermined by a combination of military and civilian agendas. This is a provocative, informed, and disturbing book that provides an essential perspective on the modern U.S. armed forces.”—Brian M. Linn

More information, including the TOC, is available here.

RFP: A History of the US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims

[We have the following Request for Proposals for a "book on the history of the creation and the first 25 years of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims."]

Content.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (USCAVC) seeks proposals for a scholarly book on the history of the creation and the first 25 years of the Court. If the Court determines to publish such a book, the book will describe judicial review of veterans appeals and the effect of the Court upon veterans' benefits and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) claims and appeals process. Possible topics could include:

· Efforts of veterans and organizations to obtain judicial review of veterans benefits decisions
· Legislative history and the process involved in the creation of the Court
· The Early Phase of the Court's History, including
· Interviews with original judges
· Creating a new body of law
· Administrative challenges in establishing a new court
· Later Phases of Court history, including significant events since inception
· Gardner v. Brown-first USCAVC decision subject of Supreme Court review
· The effect of the Veterans Claims Assistance Act on the Court
· The second wave of new judges
· Establishment of USCAVC Bar Association
· Temporary expansion of Court to nine judges
· Unique features of the Court and their impact
· Single-judge decision authority
· Representation of veterans by non-attorney practitioners
· Appellate review by an intermediate appellate court
· Court's place in the veterans appellate structure
· Significant decisions of the Court

Sources will include published records of the Court, other published accounts (such as journal articles, Congressional legislative records, and VA records), statistics, and oral histories.

Format.  The book will be a hard cover illustrated history of approximately 100-200 pages in length not including the table of contents, index and appendices. The book size is expected to be 6.75" x 10".

Terms of Service.  The Court will pay reasonable author's fees plus expenses.  The Court will not pay any fees incurred for the preparation of any bidder's response to this Request for Proposals.  There will be a series of deadlines for deliverables and drafts to the Court for review, with the ultimate time for the author(s) to complete the draft to be approximately one year from the signing of a contract.

Rights to the Work.  The Court will retain exclusive right to publish the materials. The author will be provided a specified number of copies for personal use and not for resale.

Selection Criteria. Selection is at the sole discretion of the Court but if a selection is made, it will be made based upon the Best Value.  Factors considered will include:
· author's proposed approach to the book, suggested deadlines, schedule, and budget
· author's overall experience
· quality of author's past publications
· author's familiarity with subject matter
· author's fee and estimated expenses

Selection and any resulting contract will be in compliance with the Court's procurement policy and all applicable federal laws. Award of a contract is contingent on the absence of, or the absence of appearance of, any conflicts of interest, as determined by the Court, between the bidder and the Court.

Proposals and Deadline.  All proposals should include the following:
 · a curriculum vitae for each author
· a 1,000-1,500 word description of the proposed approach to the book
· complete contact information for each author
· suggested deadlines and schedule for deliverables
· suggested budget to include fees and expenses
· two references

Deadline for the submission of proposals is November 30, 2015.  Proposals should be sent as email attachments to:

Gregory O. Block
Clerk of the Court
United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims
625 Indiana Avenue, NW, Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20004
Email: contracting@uscourts.cavc.gov

Questions.  Questions should be directed to the Clerk of the Court care of the email address noted above.  Answers to questions will be sent by reply email, and all questions and answers submitted will be published for review on our Court website under "Employment" via the link titled "Court History Book Request for Proposals Q&A Summary."

Lorenz Centrer Announces Website on Social Security Act

We missed the anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act on August 14, but belated here is news that the Pare Lorentz Center at the FDR Presidential Library has launched a “mobile-friendly Social Security web feature” that “ tells the story of how Social Security came to be through photographs, documents, posters and brief, informative narrative.

Sunday Book Roundup

Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information by Eva Hemmungs Wirten (Chicago University Press) is reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, without a pay-wall. 

"Intriguingly, the author suggests that the ineligibility of women to own property under French law might have shaped Curie’s perspective. “Because the law excluded her from the status of person upon which these intellectual property rights depend,” Ms. Wirtén writes, “the ‘property’ road was closed to Marie Curie. The persona road was not.”"

The Times Literary Supplement reviews The Making of the Modern Police, 1780-1914 edited by Paul Lawrence (Pickering & Chatto).

Last Sunday's The New York Times Sunday Book Review was a special issue on "The Secret Life of Money," and it included reviews of books such as The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: JM Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy by Ed Conway (Pegasus).

In The New York Review of Books reviewer Christopher Jencks asks, "The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?" when reviewing Legacies of the War on Poverty edited by Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger (Russell Sage).

Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos discuss their 2014 book, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (Oxford University Press) with the New Books series.

"What has gotten us to this point of high political polarization and high income inequality? McAdam and Kloos offer a novel answer to what divides us as a country that focuses on the role social movements have in pulling parties to the extremes or pushing parties to the middle. They argue that the post-World War II period was unusual for its low levels of social movement activities and the resulting political centrism of the 1950s. The Civil Rights movement that followed – and the related backlash politics of the Southern Democrats – pushed the parties away from the center and toward regional realignment. Along the way, activists re-wrote party voting procedures that reinforced the power of vocal minorities within each party, thereby entrenching political polarization for the decades to come."

The New Books series has other interviews to check out as well. Another is an interview with Michelle Nickerson, who discusses her book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press).

A third interview from New Books is with Linda Gordon about her recently co-written work (with Dorothy Sue Cobble and Astrid Henry), Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements (Liveright).

H-Net brings us several reviews as well. H-Net reviews Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution by James P. Byrd (Oxford University Press).

Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-1850 by John R. Van Atta (Johns Hopkins University Press) is also reviewed.

"In Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-1850, historian John R. Van Atta examines ideological and political debates surrounding land policy in the United States from the early Republic to the 1850s. The book is a fine discussion of the complexity and importance of policymaking at the federal level in these years. The book is well written and engagingly presented, but it overlooks some important pieces of the story."

A review of another land-use book, Sonia Hirt's Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Cornell University Press) is also up on H-Net.

"This is an excellent book and an impeccable introduction to American zoning for anyone interested in US city planning and urban geography. In one sense, it is a primer on US zoning theory and practice: it provides all the basic elements and history in a mercifully succinct manner in under two hundred pages. This would be an ideal book to give to a student or colleague just cutting his or her teeth in urban studies. Yet, at the same time, Sonia Hirt makes some original contributions to the field by clearly placing American practices in international and historical perspective. The book worked for me on both levels."

Last but not least, The Federal Lawyer has its April issue up online with a review by Henry Cohen of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life by Jonathan W. White (Cumberland House).

"Jonathan White, the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life, told me that he had wanted the title of this book to be Lincoln’s Advice for Lawyers, but that the publisher wished to secure a broader audience for it. Although this book is largely about Lincoln’s advice for lawyers, the broader title is legitimate, because much of Lincoln’s advice for law- yers can apply to life in general. As White writes, “Lincoln believed that the highest duty of a lawyer was to be a peacemaker in his community. Therefore, any read- er who deals with interpersonal conflict can learn from Lincoln’s insights. Indeed, Lincoln’s lessons for attorneys can apply to almost any walk of life.”"

Sunday Book Roundup

This weekend the internet is light on book reviews.

History Today's latest volume has two reviews of interest. The first is a review of Vivienne Richmond's Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press).

There's also a review of two women's suffrage books, Jad Adam's Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford University Press) and Jill Liddington's Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the Census (Manchester University Press).

The Los Angeles Review of Books has two separate takes on Marie Gottschalk's Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press). Reviewer Stephen Lurie offers his take here, and in his review, Michael Meranze writes,

"Marie Gottschalk’s commanding and disturbing Caught is our best guide to the political decisions and public policies that have created the carceral state and our present immobility on the issue of crime and its punishment. Gottschalk relentlessly tracks the different strands and effects of the carceral in the United States and in doing so offers a series of important insights and arguments. She moves through a remarkable range of issues: detailed critiques of penal policy and the limits of conventional reform; arguments over the place of the “new Jim Crow” both in the penal system and in our understanding of the penal system; the dismantling of rehabilitative programs, the increasing length of sentences, and the general debasement of prisoners and prison conditions; the endless surveillance faced by the formerly imprisoned or even charged; the dangerous effect of the growing importance of private prisons; the expansion of the immigration system; and the emergence of new “monsters” to justify the increased punitiveness of the last decades. This carceral archipelago (to borrow a term from Michel Foucault) is so deeply embedded in American law and society precisely because it is so disparate and diffuse."

There is an interview in The Nation with Eric Foner about "How Radical Change Occurs."

Holdren on Employment Risks under Workmen’s Compensation in the Early 20th-C. U.S.

The March 2014 issue of Enterprise and Society includes a new article by Nate Holdren (Indiana University Bloomington): "Incentivizing Safety and Discrimination: Employment Risks under Workmen’s Compensation in the Early Twentieth Century United States." Here's the abstract:

This article takes criticisms of employment discrimination in the aftermath of the creation of workmen’s compensation legislation as a point of entry for arguing that compensation laws created new incentives for employment discrimination. Compensation laws turned the costs of employees’ workplace accidents into a risk that many employers sought to manage by screening job applicants in a manner analogous to how insurance companies screened policy applicants. While numerous critics blamed insurers for discrimination, I argue that the problem was lack of insurance. The less that companies pooled their compensation risks via insurance, the greater the incentives for employers to stop employing people they would have previously been willing to hire.

Subscribers to Project Muse may access full content here.

Tani, "States' Rights, Welfare Rights, and the 'Indian Problem': Negotiating Citizenship and Sovereignty, 1935–1954"

I'm excited to announce that I have a new article out in the February 2015 issue of the Law & History Review: "States' Rights, Welfare Rights, and the 'Indian Problem': Negotiating Citizenship and Sovereignty, 1935–1954." The full issue is not yet available (we'll schedule another post when it is), but Cambridge University Press has published my article online. Here's the abstract:

Starting in the 1940s, American Indians living on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico used the Social Security Act of 1935 to assert unprecedented claims within the American federal system: as U.S. and state citizens, they claimed federally subsidized state welfare payments, but as members of sovereign nations, they denied states the jurisdiction that historically accompanied such beneficence. This article documents their campaign, and the fierce resistance it provoked, by tracing two legal episodes. In 1948, through savvy use of both agencies and courts, and with aid from former government lawyer Felix Cohen, reservation Indians won welfare benefits and avoided accompanying demands for state jurisdiction; the states, in turn, extracted a price--higher subsidies--from the federal government. Arizona officials re-opened the dispute in 1951, by crafting a new welfare program that excluded reservation Indians and suing the federal government for refusing to support it. The 1954 dismissal of the case was a victory for Indians, but also leant urgency to efforts to terminate their anomalous status. Together these episodes illustrate the disruptive citizenship claims that became possible in the wake of the New Deal and World War Two, as well as the increasingly tense federal-state negotiations that followed.

Subscribers may access the full article here.

I learned a lot from the process of writing and publishing this particular piece--about the value of workshopping, the difficulty of disentangling American federalism from race, and the challenges of bringing together disparate historical literatures--so expect a few more posts down the line. Until then, thanks to the many, many folks who made this article possible.

Sunday Book Roundup

The New York Review of Books reviews three books and a film in "He Remade Our World," including George W. Bush's Decision Points (Broadway), Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (Penguin), Dick and Liz Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (Threshold).

Ira Katznelson reviews Gavin Wright's Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Harvard University Press) in the NYRB.  Also reviewed is Camilo Jose Vergara's Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto (University of Chicago Press).

An older piece we missed in the NYRB from January is Robert Darton's review of Arlette Farge's The Allure of the Archives (Yale University Press) in a piece titled "The Good Way to Do History."

There are many reviews to highlight on H-Net this week, including a review of the edited volume Reaching a State of Hope: Refugees, Immigrants and the Swedish Welfare State, 1930-2000 (Nordic Academic Press). Another edited volume with a European focus is Thomas Maulucci and Detlef Junker's GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural and Political History of the American Military Presence (Cambridge University Press) (reviewed here). And speaking of military history, H-Net also adds a review of Susan Brewer's Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (Oxford University Press).

Still more reviews from H-Net include a three book review titled "Sammelrez: On the Uses of History in Contemporary American Foreign Policy Debates." Books include Zbigniew Brzezinski's Strategic Vision: American and the Crisis of Global Power (Basic), Robert Kagan's The World America Made (Knopf), and Charles Kupchan's No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford). There's also a review of Toyin Falola's The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization (Boydell & Brewer), here. Peo Hansen and Sandy Brian Hager's The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy (Berghahn Books) is also reviewed on H-Net.

Federal History 6 (January 2014)

H-Law sent around the call for submissions to the January 2015 issue of Federal History, the journal of the Society for History in the Federal Government.  According to the call, "FH examines all aspects of U.S. government history as well as innovative work done in federal public history. FH is a peer-reviewed academic journal published both in print and online. The journal is indexed by ebscohost, and the editors welcome articles from both federal historians and those in academia.”

A link directed us to the January 2014 issue, which has articles of interest to legal historians:

Roger R. Trask Lecture: A Search for Historical Understanding
Pete Daniel

The First Attempt at Federalizing Tort Law and Why It Failed
Ian J. Drake

From “Air Conditioning” Youth to STEM: The FAA and Aviation Education, 1935–2007
Theresa L. Kraus

Evil, Greed, Treachery, Deception, and Fraud: The World of Lobbying According to Senator Hugo Black
Jamie C. Euken

“This ‘Who Shot John Thing’”: Disaster Relief as an Entitlement in the 20th Century
Natalie Schuster

Serenading the President: John Adams, the XYZ Affair, and the 18th-Century American Presidency
Christopher J. Young

Interpretation and Technology: Going Mobile: Changing the Face of Interpretation in the National Park Service
Brett Oppegaard and Gregory P. Shine

Essays on American Statebuilding from Reconstruction to the New Deal

Out this month from the University of Pennsylvania Press is Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, edited by Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov.  It is a volume in the American Governance: Politics, Policy, and Public Law series.  Contributors are James Greer, Carol Nackenoff, Julie Novkov, Susan Pearson, Kimberly Smith, Marek D. Steedman, Patricia Strach, Kathleen Sullivan, Ann-Marie Szymanski.

The period between the Civil War and the New Deal was particularly rich and formative for political development. Beyond the sweeping changes and national reforms for which the era is known, Statebuilding from the Margins examines often-overlooked cases of political engagement that expanded the capacities and agendas of the developing American state. With particular attention to gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of civic action, the chapters explore points in history where the boundaries between public and private spheres shifted, including the legal formulation of black citizenship and monogamy in the postbellum years; the racial politics of Georgia's adoption of prohibition; the rise of public waste management; the incorporation of domestic animal and wildlife management into the welfare state; the creation of public juvenile courts; and the involvement of women's groups in the creation of U.S. housing policy. In many of these cases, private citizens or organizations initiated political action by framing their concerns as problems in which the state should take direct interest to benefit and improve society.

Statebuilding from the Margins depicts a republic in progress, accruing policy agendas and the institutional ability to carry them out in a nonlinear fashion, often prompted and powered by the creative techniques of policy entrepreneurs and organizations that worked alongside and outside formal boundaries to get results. These Progressive Era initiatives established models for the way states could create, intervene in, and regulate new policy areas—innovations that remain relevant for growth and change in contemporary American governance.

Here are the blurbs:

"An engaging and original contribution to our understanding of a critical period in American political development. By surveying a range of different policy domains within a single historical era, these essays effectively catalogue the multiple ways in which private citizens and associations leveraged and augmented the scope of state intervention."—Elizabeth Clemens, University of Chicago

"The Progressive Era remains as controversial as it is vital for understanding the contemporary United States. Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov have orchestrated a set of rich, detailed and evocative studies on themes ranging from prohibition, urban government, environmentalism, housing and juvenile justice that together make for a highly original contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century America."—Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University

Berkowitz on SSI at the Washington History Seminar

Washington History Seminar’s Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs series continues with "The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy" by Edward Berkowitz, George Washington University:

Supplemental Security Income, passed in 1972 during an innovative and expansive phase of the American welfare state, marked an effort to do welfare right. But economic and political circumstances, as well as the contingencies of the moment, all combined to turn the program into a source of controversy over such things as whether parents coached their children to act "crazy" in an effort to secure benefits or whether immigrants deserved benefits. As a result, instead of marking a new departure in social policy, the program replicated many of the features of the welfare system it was designed to replace.

Edward Berkowitz, who received his doctorate in history from Northwestern University, is a professor of history, public policy, and public administration at George Washington University. He is the co-author, along with former chief Social Security historian Larry DeWitt, of The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security Income and U.S. Social Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013). Other recent books include a history of the nineteen seventies (Something Happened, 2006) and a history of mass culture in modern America (Mass Appeal, 2010).

The seminar will take place on Monday, November 4, 2013, at 4:00 p.m. at the Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom, Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop. 
Reservations requested because of limited seating: mbarber@historians.org or 202-450-3209
Photo ID required for admittance to the building.

Aaronson on Welfare Rights Lawyering in Reagan's California

Mark N. Aaronson, University of California Hastings College of the Law, has posted Representing the Poor: Legal Advocacy and Welfare Reform During Reagan's Gubernatorial Years, which appears in the Hastings Law Journal 64 (2013): 933-1119.  Here is the abstract:    

The empirical focus of this book-length work is the contentious political and legal battle over California welfare reform in the early 1970s. It is an extended, multifaceted case study of a kind not much found in the literature on social cause lawyering. The narrative highlights the forceful presence of Ronald Reagan and the pivotal role in representing the welfare poor carried out by Ralph Santiago Abascal, a government-funded legal aid attorney. To counter Reagan’s welfare policy ambitions, Abascal with other legal services lawyers, and in joint cause with recipient-led welfare rights organizations, relied on court litigation not in isolation but as part of an overall strategy that also involved legislative and administrative actions. Within the context of American pluralism and constitutionalism and from an analytical perspective, this study examines the professional and institutional character of group legal representation for the poor as a strategy for political empowerment and social change. While grounded in political and legal history, the study’s conceptual approaches primarily draw on ideas from political science and political theory about representation and from writings in legal ethics and legal education on professional role responsibilities. The principal thematic points are: (1) Social cause lawyering is a systemic necessity for the democratic and equitable functioning of our governing institutions; (2) the client constraints on the role of lawyers for groups or causes have more to do conceptually with understandings about the nature of representation than the applicability of ethical or procedural rules; and (3) the political consequences of such legal advocacy are variable and potentially contradictory.

Symposium on The History and Future of the Economic Equity Act

"Congressional Power to Effect Sex Equity: The History and Future of the Economic Equity Act" is the topic of a symposium this Thursday, February 21, at Harvard Law School. Here's the announcement:

Patricia Seith (credit)

This symposium, hosted by the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, explores the efforts of the Congressional Women’s Caucus and, more specifically, the Economic Equity Act, an omnibus piece of legislation active in Congress throughout the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. A bipartisan effort, the Economic Equity Act sought to improve the lives of women by tackling the economic challenges they faced as homemakers and caregivers, workers, consumers, and business owners. Focusing on practical reforms in areas such as tax, insurance, employee and retirement benefits, and credit and lending, the Act’s many successful provisions aimed to achieve sex equality not in theory, but in fact.

The event is tied to an article that we are publishing this winter, entitled Congressional Power to Effect Sex Equality and written by Patricia Seith. The article will provide a springboard for a discussion of efforts to legislate toward gender and class equity in the past and implications for the present and future. Confirmed speakers include Congresswomen Elizabeth Holtzman and Pat Schroeder, and scholars Alice Kessler-Harris (Columbia), Stephen Ansolabehere (Harvard University), Serena Mayeri (Penn Law), Patricia Seith (Stanford Law), and Suzanne Kahn (Columbia). A wine and cheese reception will follow. All are welcome!

[bold emphasis added]

We will update* the post when an electronic version of Seith's paper comes online. A few of the responses are already available:

Suzanne Kahn, Valuing Women’s Work in the 1970s Home and the Boundaries of the Gendered Imagination

Serena Mayeri, Filling in the (Gender) Gaps

For additional details, follow the link.

*UPDATE: Page proofs for Seith's article are available here, at SSRN.

New Release: Dauber, "The Sympathetic State"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (2012). Readers may have caught glimpses of this project in Dauber's previous articles in the Law and History Review. For those unfamiliar with Dauber's work, here's the Press's description of the book:

Even as unemployment rates soared during the Great Depression, FDR’s relief and social security programs faced attacks in Congress and the courts on the legitimacy of federal aid to the growing population of poor. In response, New Dealers pointed to a long tradition—dating back to 1790 and now largely forgotten—of federal aid to victims of disaster. In The Sympathetic State, Michele Landis Dauber recovers this crucial aspect of American history, tracing the roots of the modern American welfare state beyond the New Deal and the Progressive Era back to the earliest days of the republic when relief was forthcoming for the victims of wars, fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

Drawing on a variety of materials, including newspapers, legal briefs, political speeches, the art and literature of the time, and letters from thousands of ordinary Americans, Dauber shows that while this long history of government disaster relief has faded from our memory today, it was extremely well known to advocates for an expanded role for the national government in the 1930s, including the Social Security Act. Making this connection required framing the Great Depression as a disaster afflicting citizens though no fault of their own. Dauber argues that the disaster paradigm, though successful in defending the New Deal, would ultimately come back to haunt advocates for social welfare. By not making a more radical case for relief, proponents of the New Deal helped create the weak, uniquely American welfare state we have today—one torn between the desire to come to the aid of those suffering and the deeply rooted suspicion that those in need are responsible for their own deprivation.

Contrary to conventional thought, the history of federal disaster relief is one of remarkable consistency, despite significant political and ideological change. Dauber’s pathbreaking and highly readable book uncovers the historical origins of the modern American welfare state.

Michele Landis Dauber (credit)

And a few blurbs:

“A marvelous, deeply researched history of the largely forgotten role of federal disaster relief in the historical development of the American welfare state. Michele Landis Dauber shows very creatively how the Great Depression came to be understood as a single, monolithic event—as a disaster—that justified new and expansive forms of relief. Political scientists and historians will have to contend with her central argument: that the New Deal was less the product of a ‘constitutional revolution’ than ordinary lawyering from long-settled precedents.” -- Michael Willrich (Brandeis University)

“The Sympathetic State is a revisionist history for our contested present. As Dauber masterfully shows, the more than two-hundred-year history of federal disaster relief indicates that national social policies fit comfortably with longstanding American constitutional traditions. You cannot fully understand current debates—or where they might yet go—until you read this book.” -- Jacob Hacker (Yale University)

Follow the link for more blurbs and the TOC. For reviews, check out Dauber's Stanford Law website, which provides links to coverage in the Washington Monthly, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the book has received lots of (well-deserved) attention.

Tani reviews Michelmore, "Tax and Spend"

Last December, guest blogger Felicia Kornbluh spotlighted (here) new research by historian Molly Michelmore (Washington and Lee University). That research has now been published, as Tax and Spend: Taxes and the Limits of American Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I liked the book a lot - so much that I made it the focus of my first JOTWELL review.

Here's the Press's description of the book:

Taxes dominate contemporary American politics. Yet while many rail against big government, few Americans are prepared to give up the benefits they receive from the state. In Tax and Spend, historian Molly C. Michelmore examines an unexpected source of this contradiction and shows why many Americans have come to hate government but continue to demand the security it provides.

Tracing the development of taxing and spending policy over the course of the twentieth century, Michelmore uncovers the origins of today's antitax and antigovernment politics in choices made by liberal state builders in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. By focusing on two key instruments of twentieth-century economic and social policy, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and the federal income tax, Tax and Spend explains the antitax logic that has guided liberal policy makers since the earliest days of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Grounded in careful archival research, this book reveals that the liberal social compact forged during the New Deal, World War II, and the postwar years included not only generous social benefits for the middle class—including Social Security, Medicare, and a host of expensive but hidden state subsidies—but also a commitment to preserve low taxes for the majority of American taxpayers.

In a surprising twist on conventional political history, Michelmore's analysis links postwar liberalism directly to the rise of the Republican right in the last decades of the twentieth century. Liberals' decision to reconcile public demand for low taxes and generous social benefits by relying on hidden sources of revenues and invisible kinds of public subsidy, combined with their persistent defense of taxpayer rights and suspicion of "tax eaters" on the welfare rolls, not only fueled but helped create the contours of antistate politics at the core of the Reagan Revolution.

And here's the start of my JOTWELL review, titled "Not My Welfare State, or the Taxpayer's Lament":

Molly Michelmore’s new book could not be more timely. This summer the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act’s controversial individual mandate provision, through a majority opinion that links healthcare directly to the federal government’s tax power. Meanwhile, the lead-up to the presidential election has been riddled with references to tax burdens (and evasions), social welfare spending, and government “dependency.”

Historians and social scientists have much to add to this conversation, but little faith that they will be heard. A recurring theme in post-World War Two U.S. political history is how greatly the government has assisted working- and middle-class Americans (especially white men and their families) and how rarely those Americans have acknowledged that fact. This paradox persists today. Most Americans will rely at some point on a means-tested government support program, such as food stamps or Temporary Aid to Needy Families. Many more will accept Social Security benefits, tax credits, and other government subsidies. Yet these same Americans often resent the “welfare state.” In Michelmore’s words, “Americans hate government, but demand and expect, almost as a matter of right, the privileges, security, and mobility that government offers.” (p. 2-3) [Footnotes omitted]

Read on here.

Tani on the New Deal's "Portias"

Sue Shelton White (Credit)

Karen M. Tani, University of California, Berkeley, Law, has posted Portia's Deal, a paper she originally delivered at this symposium and appears in Chicago-Kent Law Review, 74 (2012): 549.  Here is the abstract:

The New Deal, one of the greatest expansions of government in U.S. history, was a “lawyers’ deal”: it relied heavily on lawyers’ skills and reflected lawyers’ values. Was it exclusively a “male lawyers’ deal”? This Essay argues that the New Deal offered important opportunities to women lawyers at a time when they were just beginning to graduate from law school in significant numbers. Agencies associated with social welfare policy, a traditionally “maternalist” enterprise, seem to have been particularly hospitable. Through these agencies, women lawyers helped to administer, interpret, and create the law of a new era.

Using government records and archived personal papers, this Essay examines three under-studied women lawyers of the New Deal. Sue Shelton White, an outspoken feminist from Tennessee, came to the New Deal after a long career as a court reporter, political organizer, and senate staffer. Records of her time in government suggest the difference that gender, and specifically gendered opportunity structures, made to the work of a New Deal lawyer. Marie Remington Wing, a prominent politician and lawyer in her native Cleveland, joined the New Deal as the lead attorney in a regional office. Her biography encourages scholars to remember that just as the New Deal was national in scale, so too was its legal work. Regional outposts of the New Deal provided some women lawyers with a taste of the power that the men in Washington enjoyed. Bernice Lotwin Bernstein was in age, brains, and social networks the equivalent of one of Felix Frankfurter’s “Happy Hotdogs.” She joined the New Deal in 1933 and stayed for forty-five years, narrowly surviving a Cold War loyalty-security investigation. Her life offers a case study in the appeal, and the dangers, that government work held for women lawyers. Taken together, these three biographies suggest the need for sustained scholarly attention to the “Portias” of the New Deal.

All in the Family by Robert O. Self

Farrar, Straus and Giroux announces the publication of All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s by Robert Self (Brown--history).  The publisher's description of the book, which may be of interest to legal historians who study postwar law, politics and social relations, follows.

In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty promised an array of federal programs to assist working-class families. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP the party of “family values” and promised to keep government out of Americans’ lives. Again and again, historians have sought to explain the nation’s profound political realignment from the 1960s to the 2000s, five decades that witnessed the fracturing of liberalism and the rise of the conservative right. The award-winning historian Robert O. Self is the first to argue that the separate threads of that realignment—from civil rights to women’s rights, from the antiwar movement to Nixon’s “silent majority,” from the abortion wars to gay marriage, from the welfare state to neoliberal economic policies—all ran through the politicized American  family.
Based on an astonishing range of sources, All in the Family rethinks an entire era. Self opens his narrative with the Great Society and its assumption of a white, patriotic, heterosexual man at the head of each family. Soon enough, civil rights activists, feminists, and gay rights activists, animated by broader visions of citizenship, began to fight for equal rights, protections, and opportunities. Led by Pauli Murray, Gloria Steinem, Harvey Milk, and Shirley Chisholm, among many others, they achieved lasting successes, including Roe v. Wade, antidiscrimination protections in the workplace, and a more inclusive idea of the American family.
Yet the establishment of new rights and the visibility of alternative families provoked, beginning in the 1970s, a furious conservative backlash. Politicians and activists on the right, most notably George Wallace, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and Jerry Falwell, built a political movement based on the perceived moral threat to the traditional family. Self writes that “family values” conservatives in fact “paved the way” for fiscal conservatives, who shared a belief in liberalism’s invasiveness but lacked a populist message. Reagan’s presidency united the two constituencies, which remain, even in these tumultuous times, the base of the Republican Party. All in the Family, an erudite, passionate, and persuasive explanation of our current political situation and how we arrived in it, will allow us to think anew about the last fifty years of American politics.

Here is commentary on All in the Family from early reviews.

[A] powerful, well-researched account of how the efforts of marginalized groups to assert their rights as citizens ran up against the resistance of entrenched privilege, setting the stage for the polarization that grips US politics today . . . [Self] reminds us that our democracy is an imperfect thing, only as noble as the people who constitute it.”
—The Boston Globe

“All in the Family is meticulous, convincing, and engaging . . . Self has written a book that should become the authoritative social history of the U.S. since the 1960s.”
—Library Journal

“Most of the stories we have told about American politics in recent decades have tended to divide the world between social issues and economic issues . . . In his new book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self . . . rewrites this story from its most basic assumptions . . . brilliant.”
—Mark Schmitt, The Washington Monthly

Self also is the author of the prize-winning book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2005). 

Tani on Welfare Rights as a Language of the State

I’m very pleased to note that my fellow Legal History Blogger Karen M. Tani, University of California-Berkeley Law, has posted Welfare and Rights Before the Movement: Rights as a Language of the State, which is forthcoming later this year in volume 122 of the Yale Law Journal.  Here is the abstract:

Jane Hoey (credit)

In conversations about government assistance, rights language often emerges as a danger: when benefits become “rights,” policymakers lose flexibility, taxpayers suffer, and the poor lose incentive to work. Absent from the discussion is an understanding of how, when, and why Americans began to talk about public benefits in rights terms. This Article addresses that lacuna by examining the rise of a vibrant language of rights within the federal social welfare bureaucracy during the 1930s and 1940s. This language is barely visible in judicial and legislative records, the traditional source base for legal-historical inquiry, but amply evidenced by previously un-mined administrative records. Using these documents, this Article shows how concepts of “welfare rights” filtered through federal, state, and local administrative channels and into communities around the nation.

This finding contradicts conventional wisdom, which dates the birth of “welfare rights” language to the 1960s. This Article reveals that as early as 1935, some Americans—government officials, no less—deliberately and persistently employed rights language in communications about welfare benefits. In addition to challenging dominant interpretations, this Article identifies an under-studied aspect of rights language. An abundant “rights talk” literature chronicles and critiques claimants’ use of rights language. This Article, by contrast, identifies rights language emanating from government and being used for government purposes. Specifically, this Article argues that federal administrators used rights language as an administrative tool, a way to solve tricky problems of federalism and administrative capacity at a time in which poor relief was shifting from a local to a state and federal responsibility. Thus this Article not only enriches debates about the role of rights in contemporary social welfare reforms, but it also brings fresh insights to scholarship on the techniques of administrators and the limits of federal power.

Rao, "Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Health Care, and the Early American State"

Here's a timely and important piece, just out in Law and Social Inquiry: Gautham Rao (American University), "Administering Entitlement: Governance, Public Health Care, and the Early American State," Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 37, issue 3 (Summer, 2012), 627-56.

Here's the abstract:

This article explores the federal marine hospitals of the early republic, the first public health care system in US history. Beginning in 1798, the federal government collected twenty cents per month from mariners' wages and used this revenue to subsidize medical care for sick and disabled merchant mariners. Previous studies have traced links between marine hospitals and modern public policy. By studying governance from the bottom up, this article takes a different approach. I argue that jurists, physicians, and officials' regulation of sailors' entitlement to public health care facilitated and reflected a transformation of national authority. Between 1798 and 1816, sailors' entitlement was a local matter, based on the traditional paternalist understandings of maritime laborers as social dependents. By 1836, though, the federal Treasury redefined entitlement around a newly calculus of productivity: only the productive were entitled to care at the marine hospitals. This story about governance, federal law, and political economy in the early United States suggests that the early American state was a more vibrant participant in the market and society than has been previously understood.

I saw a version of this when it had the clever title "Pitied but Entitled." I'm looking forward to reading the final version, available here.