Most scholars credit the New Deal for the rise of the American welfare state. And, indeed, many of the major policies intimately associated with the welfare state originated in the 1930s. More recently, these origins have been pushed back into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Citing the burgeoning system of Union military pensions in that period, Theda Skocpol has concluded that the United States created a somewhat precocious social welfare system (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). However, this system was both highly discriminatory and rife with administrative abuse and fraud. The latter, Skocpol contends, explains the reluctance of state agents to experiment with more modern welfare policies even as the steady demise of Union veterans contracted the size of the pension system. Thus, the late-nineteenth-century pension system was a false start in the development of the modern welfare state.

The book reviewed here pushes the origins of the welfare state even further back in time, to the founding of the republic. The key element in this interpretation is the notion of an entitlement policy: a statute conferring “public benefits to groups of ‘like’ individuals programmatically, on the basis of the statutory eligibility criteria of deliberately enacted legislation” (p. 8). For example, the Continental and Confederation Congresses both passed legislation entitling disabled veterans of the Revolutionary War to a pension. These programs were reenacted and thus continued by the First Congress of the United States. As Laura Jensen nicely describes, such policies were open-ended in their obligations (e.g., no one knew when a pensioner would die and thus cease to draw upon the Treasury). In addition, because the number of people who might fall within the categorical boundaries of eligibility was often poorly known, the size of the fiscal commitment was unpredictable. Even so, such entitlement policies frequently consumed large portions of the Federal budget, even in the antebellum period. For that reason, they were often intertwined with revenue policies; as Jensen notes, the protective tariff was the revenue twin to entitlement expenditures throughout the nineteenth century. Although, as she narrates the story, pensions tended to drive tariff policy, the tale could be told the other way around (with trade protection dictating the steps in the dance). Either way, the almost simultaneous adoption of expanded pension benefits and higher tariff schedules in 1828 (p. 113) and 1832 (p. 116) demonstrates their mutually intimate link before the Civil War.

Even more importantly, entitlement policies necessarily construct boundaries between those who are made eligible and those who are not. These boundaries, from Jensen's perspective, are essential to understanding the salient identities of the early republic's members. To be made eligible for a Revolutionary War pension, for example, was to be both identified and honored as a “patriot.” The importance of such boundaries and identities was reinforced by their contestation; those who were excluded from benefits struggled for a redefinition of categories which, at the same time, was a claim on identity. One of the very nice things about Jensen's book is the way she illustrates, time and again, the apparent inevitability of such contestation and the ever broadening definitions of eligibility that ensued. However, she does not sufficiently acknowledge the self-liquidating character of pensions based on service in a particular war. Over time, for example, the number of veterans of the Revolutionary War dwindled. Their decline in numbers meant that an expansion of eligibility did not necessarily mean an expansion in the size of the state. For example, when Congress increased Revolutionary War pensions to $500 per year in 1868, the increase in benefits went to only two men (p. 216).

This aspect of military pensions (and land distribution, which is also extensively discussed) is one reason Skocpol and others have downplayed the precedent-setting role of antebellum programs; they were both comparatively small even when most veterans were still alive and largely defunct by the time the post–Civil War system was constructed. Jensen is thus correct when she comments on the parallel politics of antebellum and contemporary entitlement policies and exaggerating when she assigns a path-breaking role to the former. This reviewer, for example, is confident that Civil War pensions would have been invented from whole cloth even if no previous system of benefits had been enacted. Jensen also takes to task scholars (this reviewer included) for under-estimating the state-building potential realized through antebellum pension and land distribution programs. From my perspective, her criticism appears to confuse state expansion (which was certainly abetted) with the development of strong state institutions. When the Civil War began, for example, former federal officials throughout the new Confederate States hauled down the Stars and Stripes and ran up the Stars and Bars with no apparent hesitation. Pensioners who had stridently paraded their patriotism in making demands for federal benefits were nowhere to be seen. In fact, as Jensen notes, the Union Congress assumed southern pensioners were all disloyal and thus stopped payment on their pensions. It is in that sense that “the early American state was a limited, underdeveloped, premodern shell at the center” (p. 227). In fact, central state institutions were probably strongest just around the time the Pension Act of 1818 was adopted, only to decline more or less steadily over the decades leading up to the Civil War.

But these are minor quibbles, far outweighed by the book's contributions. We now have a careful and convincing interpretation of entitlement policy during the early Republic, an interpretation set within the political discourse of social construction and the law as a communal language of identity and social standing. As Jensen amply demonstrates, the antebellum politics of pensions and homesteads—of patriots and settlers—was as modern as contemporary efforts to create a national health insurance system. For that reason alone, this book will find an enduring place in scholarship on the history of the American welfare state.