Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy.

By Laura Jensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 256p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This book starts with the author's concern that in the Clinton era, “the end of welfare as we know it” had happened, particularly that the poor and the needy had lost an inclusive “entitlement” to assistance from the federal government. Laura Jensen's experience as a municipal official in Connecticut and in teaching a graduate seminar in American welfare policy gave her in-depth, current understanding of the welfare debates of the 1990s. As a historian, she studied earlier practices in United States history that provided benefits and even entitlements to certain groups of Americans.

Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy is thus a study of two important episodes in American history that provided what the author sees as examples of early entitlement programs: the provision of pensions for veterans of the Revolutionary War (and later the War of 1812 and the Civil War), and public land policy from the 1780s to the Homestead Act of 1862 and its application in the defeated South after the Civil War. Jensen provides thorough, well-researched accounts of the passage of the dozens of pension and land bills, and detailed accounts of their provisions and implementation, especially between about 1815 and 1855. She shows that nearly all the laws were discriminatory, that is, were not “universal” in that they provided benefits to some and explicitly excluded others. Thus, they in effect took money (or lands) from some citizens (in the form of taxes or disposal of public lands) and provided it to others as a matter of right or entitlement. They were distributive, or redistributive, in ways that usually reflected biases of class, race, or gender—thus, officers were benefited over enlisted men in grants of pensions, women were excluded from some land grant laws, and defeated Confederate soldiers were denied Homestead Act grants, while men of color in the South were explicitly included in the grants. Jensen's account of these events, like good history, is accurate, and her telling of the whys and wherefores of the passage of the various acts is insightful. For this, students of American history and American public policy can be grateful.

The problem with the book, though, is the distracting and dubious explaining of the pension and land-law episodes as if they were illustrative of current welfare and entitlement debates—and the consequent discussion of them in the jargon of those contemporary issues. In an opening chapter, “Entitlements in Law and History,” with subsections on “Rethinking the American State and American Governance,” “The E-Word in Contemporary American Politics: What's in a Name,” and “Entitlements as a Policy Device,” the author surveys the debates of the last 20 years or so, leaving quite clear her displeasure with the welfare and entitlement revisions of the 1990s. She concludes that the pension and land grant laws were “selective entitlements [that] fostered the concentration and purposeful application of central state capacity to privilege particular interests at the expense of more collective concerns” (p. 233)—a pattern that has persisted in American history to the detriment of fairness. Furthermore, this pattern has in the United States obstructed “the development of the kind of citizen-based system of social provision that other democracies came to envision in the late nineteenth century,” and represents an “historic failure to embrace the most basic guarantees for all its citizens” (pp. 235–36). Her point is to argue that this unfortunate pattern started way back and, since it has become a standard part of American politics, still afflicts the country today.

In the use of policy studies and political development terminology, and the incessant “presenting” of her study, the author often misses the important historical context of both the pension and land grant legislation. The pension bills had to do principally with deserved recompense for patriotic service (and very little to do with alleviating poverty or the needs of the citizenry in general), while the land grant bills had to do at first principally with the public use of the money from the sales of the lands, and then with the final fulfillment of the Jeffersonian aspiration of a freehold farm for every American who wanted one—perhaps an entitlement, but more fundamentally an encouragement of good citizenship. Altogether, the book would have been much more useful had it simply sought to understand and tell the story of the pension and land grant episodes in the broad context of history (the author knows a great deal about that) and left out the encumbrance of current entitlement controversies.