| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. By John Fabian Witt. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 311 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-674-01267-4.)

John Fabian Witt stakes his ground in his opening anecdote: a 1907 speech by President Theodore Roosevelt in Norfolk, Virginia, the centerpiece of which was the problem of industrial accidents. As Roosevelt's speech suggests, and as Witt's narrative makes clear, the rising tide of industrial accidents in the United States represented a national crisis. The ultimate solution to that crisis—workmen's compensation laws—was anything but a foregone conclusion and had ramifications for law and social policy far beyond the Progressive Era and workplace safety; thus the title The Accidental Republic.

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