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Book Review
| Susan M. Sterett, Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850–1937, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 222. $39.95 (ISBN 0-8014-3984-1).
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| In recent years, a new body of scholarship has emerged to trace the operational realities of pre-twentieth-century governance in the United States. Susan Sterett's study of the legal logic undergirding early social welfare policy is a valuable addition to this literature. Dealing yet another blow to the conventional historiography situating the origins of the American welfare state in the national-level developments of the New Deal era, Sterett deftly shows how state and municipal governments recognized the activities of citizens who served civic ends from the mid-nineteenth century forward, creating pension benefits for firefighters, police, and other workers that were the precursors of Federal social insurance programs. Illuminating both a little-known body of social policy and the litigation that gave shape to it, Public Pensions documents the historic vitality of state law and state courts in forging meaning within the national constitution and framing American governance. |
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The creation of public welfare benefits for individuals was a tricky matter in the constitutional culture of the 1850s. Although the communities of the American polity relied heavily upon the efforts of citizens willing to serve the common good, tangible recognition of their endeavors had to comport with state statutes and constitutional provisions restricting government spending to "public purposes." As legislators began to enact pension programs and administrators implemented them, arguments erupted over distinctions between public service, ordinary labor, and charitable relief, and over the separation of powers and bureaucratic accountability. Suits brought by reluctant taxpayers, state and local officials contending over authority and responsibility, and citizens seeking benefits caused state courts to play major roles in defining and defending legal categories of desert and reward. Comparing cases from across the country to reveal the judiciary's centrality in the process of establishing early social benefits, Sterett asserts that the analysis of social welfare "must include law not only as a structure but [also] as a site of contest" (10, emphasis in original). |
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Just as the enactment and implementation of public benefit programs varied across city and state lines and over time, so, too, did the outcomes of court cases challenging the legality of those programs. Generally, however, the validity of state and municipal pension schemes hinged upon a finding of service: the provision of a civic benefit or convenience through an exchange involving independent actors (as opposed to persons who were intrinsically dependent, unable to care for themselves, and therefore eligible only for aid under the poor laws). State courts ruled that taxes could legitimately be imposed for the purpose of paying pensions to aged and disabled firefighters, regardless of the legal status of firefighting organizations (originally private, volunteer organizations), because firefighters performed a public function involving the same kinds of risk and heroism as military service. Policemen likewise deserved pensions that would preserve their independence in old age or disability because of the hazardous service they performed. Municipal taxes could even be used by cities and towns to fund the purchase of substitute soldiers, sparing men from being conscripted into Union service during the Civil War, because protecting men from the hazards of combat protected their local communities' well-being, a vital public purpose. |
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Sterett importantly emphasizes that early benefits for firefighters, police, and soldiers did not accrue as entitlements or rights of citizenship (national or state-level), nor as charity, nor even as matters of contract between equals. Instead, they were privileges or "bounties of sovereignty" (87–90), a legal status both rooted in feudal notions of sovereign responsibility and ingrained by gender and racial hierarchies ascribing dependence (essentially, a form of disability) to women and persons of color. This status—identical to that of Federal military pensions, land grants, and disaster relief measures dating back to the late 1800s—was consequential in the developmental trajectory of social policy in the United States, for it constituted the legal and ideational basis upon which the modern American welfare state was formed. Legislators, judges, academics, and social reformers would advocate benefits for other categories of citizens arguably serving the common good, but, as Sterett shows, analogies to extant understandings of desert and public purpose could only be pushed so far in political debate or litigation. |
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Granting pensions to the survivors of soldiers, firefighters, and police did not require much of a logical leap, either by legislators or by judges. Death, it was reasoned, did not extinguish the claims upon the public purse of heroes who had served and sacrificed; using tax revenues to save their widows and orphans from poverty served a legitimate public purpose. Yet, protecting other single women from the vicissitudes of raising children alone without financial means could not be framed successfully as a civic task worthy of reward, analogous to men's service in the military. While state after state enacted mothers' pensions in the 1910s and 1920s, Sterett explains, legal authorities continued to insist that public payments to women outside the structure of the patriarchal family be based upon indigence and considered a form of poor relief, "consistent with the state's traditional obligation to support the destitute and dependent" (108). Mothers' pensions "recognized a natural relationship among family members, not a political tie between the state and the mother" (126). |
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The courts were often more open-minded about other social benefits. State and local pensions created for Civil War veterans after Reconstruction, for example, were at first widely considered to be invalid expenditures serving a private purpose (individual gain), but by the 1910s, courts came to see a public purpose in state recognition of national military service. As both wage work and civil service employment expanded and private industry began offering pensions to ordinary workers, courts began approving pension benefits for teachers and then other public employees, along with workmen's compensation programs. Sterett demonstrates that although efforts to establish state pensions for all elderly citizens met with resistance, and multiple meanings of public purpose continued to coexist for decades, the bounty of sovereignty was gradually if unevenly transformed into something more akin to an earned right, paving the way for the national social programs and Federal "constitutional revolution" of the 1930s. |
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The gender analysis in Public Pensions might have been more explicit at times. Similarly, the book would have been richer had stronger connections been drawn between state-level decisions about social policy and the raging contemporary debates over Federal social benefits (particularly the expansions of the pension system for Union veterans of the Civil War enacted in 1879 and 1890 and their consequences). But these are minor criticisms of what is otherwise a carefully researched, persuasively argued volume that contains many insights about federalism, constitutionalism, the evolution of the public/private distinction, citizenship, gender inequity, state law, and American political development. Scholars interested in the relationship between the evolution of American social policy and the legal and political consolidation of a federally organized nation will find much of interest in Sterett's book. |
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| Laura S. Jensen
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| University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
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