PATRIOTS, SETTLERS, AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY

Vol. 14 No. 2 (February 2004)

PATRIOTS, SETTLERS, AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY, by Laura Jensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 256pp. Hardback. $60.00. ISBN: 0-521-81883-4. Paperback. $20.00. ISBN 0-521-52426-1

Reviewed by Clifford Angell Bates, Jr., Department of Political Science and American Studies, Warsaw University. Email: batesc@rocketmail.com

G.F.W. Hegel, one of the main theoretical architects of the modern state, once commented that America lacked a state. But from the 20th Century such a comment could not be seriously believed for, by then, the United States clearly had a strong and long-rooted state structure at the national level. Given Hegel's authority as one of the creators of the modern state, his comment was taken as true, and this fueled the question - "When did the U.S. obtain a central state?"

The dominant view was that such a state arose in the U.S. in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression; it was embodied in FDR's New Deal, although precursors of it could be seen in the Progressive movement of the early 20th Century and the agendas defining that movement. In the late 1980s, advocates of the "new institutionalism" and state theory sought to verify the validity of such an approach via the historical record. Two such scholars, Richard Bensel (1990) and Theda Skocpol (1992), published groundbreaking works in the early 1990s, making the case that the origin of the centralized National state was the Civil War and its aftermath. Their scholarship was impressive and convincing, and their argument that the modern state in the U.S. originates around the late 1860s seems to be accepted as the strongest case. Now, however, comes Laura Jensen and her PATRIOTS, SETTLERS, AND THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SOCIAL POLICY. Jensen, using Skocpol's own criteria of state policy (i.e. assistance to veteran soldiers), shows that one can point to the origins of a centralized National social policy as early as 1818, in the Pension Act aimed at aiding poor and destitute Revolutionary War veterans of the Continental Army.

Following the line of argument made by Richard John, Jensen asserts that the approach used by Bensel and Skocpol, causes a scholarly myopia, in that such an approach is rather anachronistic, especially when you measure "the national origins of administrative apparatus […] to comparisons with the post-Civil War or even the twentieth-century" (p.7). Jensen makes a very strong case for the argument that the 1818 Pension Act can be seen, using Skocpol's own set of policy criteria (see Skocpol 1992), although differing in terms of scale and amounts spent, as the originating point of National social policy. Social policy, as currently understood, exists in the realm of "entitlements." It could be argued that Jensen does not show that either Bensel or Skocpol are wrong simply because they seem to be focusing on the existence of comparable state structures, when Jensen, following John (see John 1995, 1997), admits that such similar state structures cannot be evidenced. She shows, however, that actions by Congress at the time had in their intent and outcomes, actions or processes that we would clearly and accurately understand to be social policy. Seeing what one can recognize as a national social policy, she attempts to show how such policy emerged and evolved, and what processes, structures and institutions emerged to execute it. In so doing, Jensen's work is a very useful contribution to scholarship about the scope and character of the American National government at its early stages

Although Jensen starts her book with how the Pension Act of 1818 originated, she frames the interest in that Act in terms of the debate over the contemporary understanding of benefits as entitlements, by looking at the debates over welfare reform in the mid-1990s. Taking how "entitlements" are understood in contemporary politics as a starting point, she turns to the history of the early Republic to examine how the Pension Act of 1818 sets the stage for the understanding of benefits in the ensuing periods. Using the documentary evidence-some of which is reproduced in her book-she shows the origin of the concept of "entitlement" firmly as a statutory creature and as a policy device as it remains to this very day. She also demonstrates how the Pension Act "created the need for an administrative branch of government and invested it with significant powers over citizen's lives. At the same time, the American state gained the power to construct abstract categories of dessert and reward, signaling what kinds of people and behaviors would be deemed virtuous and meritorious by the nation. America's original entitlements bound citizens and their loyalties to the government of the United States, but not in such a way as to engender passivity. Rather, Federal entitlements urged positive actions in the service of Government goals, by members of the military and civilians alike. Mobilizing the energies and imaginations of thousands of American citizens, entitlement programs allowed multiple thorny problems of national governance to be addressed simultaneously, be they conquest, territorial expansion, or the elimination of native peoples" (p.4). She makes a strong case that the policy precedents of the 1818 Pension Act frames future policy, such as the Removal Act and Preemption Act of 1830, Preemption Act of 1841, Armed Occupation Act of 1842, Ten Regiments Act of 1847, Assignment Act of 1852, and the homestead provisions in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, to the Homestead Act of 1862, Pension Act of 1862, "Southern" Homestead Act of 1866, and other major pieces of legislation following the Civil War.

Jensen's book is a useful reminder that social policy always played role in American national politics. Yet, when looking at her argument, with its focus on the policies and not the state structures, her case seems to point to the difference between the version of National social policy she describes and the type of social policy that emerges following the New Deal and the Great Society. Clearly current social policy does seek to do what she says the Pension Act of 1818 [quoted above] did. Currently, benefit policies seem not to create active citizens but passive ones who act as consumers of such benefits and deserve them without any requirement of either loyalty or service on their part. So, perhaps, her portrait of the model of National social policy, embodied in the Pension Act of 1818, is not so much the origins of current National social policy, but a different type of National social policy-a type of social policy that is much more consistent with the principles of Republican government as understood by the Framers of the Constitution and their generation, and one that is wholly at odds with the current state of affairs. Yet, I am not sure if this was her intent.

REFERENCES:

Bensel, Richard. 1990. YANKEE LEVIATHAN: THE ORIGINS OF CENTRAL STATE AUTHORITY IN AMERICA, 1859-1877. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

John, Richard R. 1997. "Governmental Institutions As Agents Of Change: Rethinking American Political Development Of The Early Republic, 1787-1835." 11 STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 347-80.

John, Richard R. 1995. SPREADING THE NEWS: THE AMERICAN POSTAL SYSTEM FROM FRANKLIN TO MORSE. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Skocpol, Theda. 1992. PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF SOCIAL POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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