States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972 // Karen M. Tani

Studies in Legal History
The Book Series of the American Society for Legal History

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 traveled from the federal administrative epicenter in Washington, DC, through state and local bureaucracies, and into diverse and divided communities. Drawing on a wealth of previously unmined 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.