States of Dependency
Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972

This book recounts the transformation of American poor relief in the decades spanning the New Deal and the War on Poverty.

Karen M. Tani (Author)

9781107434080, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 April 2016

439 pages, 9 b/w illus. 4 tables
22.7 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

'If Karen Tani's States of Dependency were a movie, we would describe it as a 'prequel'. It provides the backstory to the well-known tale of the emergence of the welfare rights movement in the 1960s. This book is impressive in many ways. Tani's research is nothing less than extraordinary. … One of the greatest strengths of Karen Tani's book is that it shows us in great detail how rights and federalism were interwoven during the first three decades of the American welfare state.' R. Shep Melnick, Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]