This revisionist history seeks to complicate the common view of the modern American welfare system as largely continuous with the Elizabethan Poor Law. Although recognizing a variety of ways in which long-standing cultural attitudes toward (and programmatic features of) public provision for the poor persisted even through the welfare rights movement of the 1960s, the author demonstrates the manner in which administration of welfare programs established by the Social Security Act curtailed the authority of local officials and transferred power that they had traditionally exercised to state and federal levels of government. Rather than attempting a federal assumption of all responsibility for relief, that act authorized substantial federal grants-in-aid to programs of assistance that met specified federal standards. This program of conditional expenditure resulted in federal supervision of state and local welfare administration, the gradual creation of professionalized state welfare bureaucracies, the imposition within states of uniform rules governing procedures and benefit levels, and the limitation or elimination of traditional but now disfavored eligibility criteria. Although assistance would continue to be administered by local bureaucrats, they would now operate under a new set of constraints.

A principal means through which federal administrators sought to cabin the exercise of local discretion was by re-characterizing benefit payments as “rights” rather than “gratuities,” and relief claimants as rights-holders rather than supplicants. Although welfare rights claims often are thought to have emerged in the 1960s, the author finds their origins in the late 1930s, and documents their persistence throughout the period under study. Through a variety of media, federal welfare authorities exhorted frontline relief agents to view their clients' relationships to the state in an entirely new way. Now they were to be seen not as dependent members of a local community, but instead as citizens making just claims on their national government. Their standing in the polity therefore demanded that they be treated with dignity, equality, administrative regularity, and according to the rule of law, rather than as subjects of unconstrained (even if well-intentioned) administrative discretion. From an early date poor Americans—particularly the elderly, with considerable success in the state courts—similarly invoked their status as national rights-bearers in contests with local welfare officials. The result was to recast the traditional localized, discretionary system of governance into one in which state and federal authorities enforced national rights against local officials who threatened to infringe them.

The language of rights also was appropriated by critics of the system, as they decried its various pathologies and insisted both upon the rights of communities to preserve their local customs through self-rule and the rights of taxpayers not to be burdened with the support of those who flouted conventional behavioral expectations. Maintaining that welfare was not properly understood as a right, several states imposed eligibility restrictions that brought them into conflict with claimants or federal administrators. These disputes, which typically centered on questions of personal conduct, also often implicated issues of race or ethnicity. In a political climate increasingly characterized by resistance to exercises of federal authority, anxiety over leftist ideologies, and concerns about the future of the family, federal administrators of the 1950s and early 1960s struggled to contain such assertions of state autonomy.

The campaign for welfare rights achieved its greatest successes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Earlier reformers had invoked “rights” grounded in the language of the Social Security Act or in general notions of governmental obligation. Later, welfare rights lawyers turned to the federal courts with assertions of both statutory and constitutional rights to public support. Here they won a trio of important victories before the Supreme Court: in King v. Smith (1969), which held that an unmarried mother was not disqualified from benefits because of the occasional presence in her household of a man who had no legal obligation to support her children; in Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), which recognized a fundamental constitutional right to travel and accordingly invalidated a Connecticut law conditioning eligibility for benefits on residence in the state for one year or more; and in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), which famously adopted the theory of Charles Reich's article on The New Property (1964) and held that the Due Process Clause required a fair hearing prior to government termination of benefits.

Hopes that these decisions augured the Court's recognition of a constitutional right to a minimum standard of living were soon dashed. Dandridge v. Williams (1970) upheld a state law subjecting benefit levels to a uniform cap that was not sensitive to family size or need. Wyman v. James (1971) upheld New York's termination of benefits for a recipient who would not allow a caseworker into her home for a routine visit. President Richard Nixon's Family Assistance Plan foundered in Congress, which instead tightened federal “workfare” requirements for recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and consolidated previously separate programs for the blind, the elderly poor, and the disabled into a single, federally funded and administered program of Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Recipients of SSI, now liberated from the labyrinth of state eligibility requirements, henceforth would receive a guaranteed minimum income. AFDC thus became the sole federal welfare program still administered by state and local authorities, and remained subject to lingering local efforts to incentivize work, hold benefit levels down, monitor and discipline individual behavior, and distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor.

This thoroughly researched monograph deploys a variety of previously unexplored primary sources to admirable effect. Although it is richly informed by the relevant literatures in history, political science, and sociology, the narrative wears its theoretical apparatus lightly. Gracefully written, highly interesting, and rewardingly informative, this is a strong first book from a promising scholar.