| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Fabian Witt. The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 311. $49.95.
In a 1938 address on the third anniversary of the Social Security Act, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: "There is still today a frontier that remains unconquered—an America unclaimed. This is the great, the nationwide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear. This is the frontier—the America—we have set ourselves to reclaim." FDR's words expressed a fundamental shift in American self-understanding, one that scholars and commentators usually date to the New Deal. A nation that had ascended on the wings of individualism now faced an untamed wilderness that called for solidarity as well as independence: the risks of an interdependent industrial society.	1
John Fabian Witt's groundbreaking book about this transformation begins not with FDR, but with another speech by another Roosevelt three decades earlier. The choice is deliberate. In Witt's telling, it was a crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century that was the first great step toward a new ideological paradigm centered on risk. In 1907, Witt recounts, President Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Virginia to speak about industrial accidents. It was not as odd a topic as it might seem. When TR spoke, one in fifty workers were killed or disabled each year. According to Witt, the restructuring of law and policy prompted by the accident crisis of the early twentieth century continues to exert a powerful pull in the early twenty-first.	. . .

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