States of Dependency

"Who bears responsibility for the poor, and who may exercise the power that comes with that responsibility? Amidst the Great Depression, American reformers answered this question in new ways, with profound effects on longstanding practices of governance and entrenched understandings of citizenship. States of Dependency traces New Deal welfare programs over the span of four decades and into communities around the nation, from American Indian reservations in the Southwest to agrarian stretches of Middle America, and to the metropolises of the industrial North. 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 towards 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"-- "As President John F. Kennedy declared the nation at a promising and perilous "New Frontier"-"a turning-point in history"--Newburgh, New York, seemed to belong in the proverbial dust heap with the rest of the detritus of the past. Once the headquarters for George Washington and the Continental Army, and later a hub for industry and transportation, Newburgh was falling into ruin. Its population was declining, its housing stock decaying, and its economy failing. City Manager Joseph McDowell Mitchell claimed to know exactly whom to blame: the city's hundreds of "chiselers and loafers," "freeload[ing]" migrants, "social parasites," and "illegitimate children." They burned through "taxpayer" dollars, he alleged, bringing in return only crime, blight, and immoral behavior. If Newburgh could simply reassert traditional, local controls over the poor, he insisted, the city would recover its former glory"--