Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:21:25.293Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Serving the State: Constitutionalism and Social Spending, 1860s-1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Susan Sterett
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the 19th century, courts supervised states' social spending by limiting taxation to public purposes. The focus of this article is the courts' approach to pensions. Under a 19th-century doctrine, states could pay money to those who had served the state or, under the rubric of charity, to those who were the indigent helpless. States first paid pensions to people for military service and for serving as firemen; later in the century, the doctrine from these cases provided a framework for expanding civil service pensions as states expanded their civil service. Courts characterized the earlier pensions as earned because the service had been dangerous, requiring bravery from men and possibly leaving helpless women and children without protection. This characterization later shaped evaluations of civil service pensions. The doctrine persisted as states enacted pensions for widowed mothers; when these pensions were challenged in state courts, the courts approved of them as payments to helpless people, not as rewards to those who had served. This characterization counters recent scholarship that argues that mothers' pensions rewarded service as military pensions did.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 311 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1997 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abramovitz, Mimi. 1988. Regulating the Lives of Women. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Association, American Bar. 1924. Old Age Pension Legislation. American Bar Association Journal 10:109–11.Google Scholar
Reports, American Law. 1924. Annotation: Validity of Statute or ordinance providing for pensions for municipal employees. American Law Reports 37:1162–66.Google Scholar
Reports, American Law. 1917. Annotation: Constitutionality of Mothers' Pensions. American Law Reports 3:1233–37.Google Scholar
Baker, Paula. 1990. The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920. In Women, the State and Welfare, edited by Gordon, Linda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Berk, Gerald. 1990. Constituting Corporations and Markets: Railroads in Gilded Age Politics. Studies in American Political Development 4:130–68.Google Scholar
Bridges, Amy. 1987. A City in the Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Bruere, Robert W. 1924. Unconstitutional and Void. The Survey 53:69–70.Google Scholar
Cleland, Ethel. 1912. Pensions for Mothers. American Political Science Review 6:96–98.Google Scholar
Cooley, Thomas. 1868. A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Derthick, Martha. 1983. Policymaking for Social Security. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Devine, E. T. 1913. Central and Common Features of the Current Legislation. American Labor Legislation Review 3:191–201.Google Scholar
Dillon, John. 1872. Treatise on the Law of Municipal Corporations. New York: James Cockcroft.Google Scholar
Erie, Steven P. 1988. Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fligelman, B. 1923. If You Grow Old in Montana. The Survey 50:239–40.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy, and Gordon, Linda. 1994. A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State. Signs 19(2):309–36.Google Scholar
Goodnow, Frank. 1911. Social Reform and the Constitution. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Goodnow, Frank. 1912. The Constitutionality of Old Age Pensions. American Political Science Review 5:194–212.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda. 1994. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Linda. 1995. Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century. In U.S. History as Women's History, edited by Kerber, Linda K., Kesler-Harris, Alice, and Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert. 1983. Legal Thought and Legal Practice in the Age of American Enterprise, 1870–1920. In Professions and Professional Ideologies in America, edited by Gieson, Gerald L. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Grossberg, Michael. 1990. Institutionalizing Masculinity: The Law as a Masculine Profession. In Meanings for Manhood, edited by Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Guthrie, W. D. 1912. Constitutional Morality. North American Review 196:154–73.Google Scholar
Hanson, Russell. 1990. Federal State Building: The Case of ADC. In Changes in the State: Causes and Consequences, edited by Greenberg, Edward S. Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1983. Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Life, 1730–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1968. Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.Google Scholar
Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hurst, James Willard. 1950. The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Clyde. 1954. Law Writers and the Courts. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Katz, Sherry. 1994. Socialist Women and Progressive Reform. In California Progressivism Revisited, edited by Deverell, William and Sitton, Tom. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keller, Morton. 1977. Affairs of State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kerber, Linda. 1980. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Koven, Seth. 1994. Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers and the Great War in Great Britain. American Historical Review 99(4): 1167–1201.Google Scholar
Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 1994. Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Leff, Mark. 1973. Consensus for Reform: The Mothers'-Pension Movement in the Progressive Era. Social Service Review 47 (3):397–417.Google Scholar
Lindsey, Ben B. 1913. The Mothers' Compensation Law of Colorado. The Survey 29 (Feb. 15):714–16.Google Scholar
McBain, Howard Lee. 1914. Taxation for a Private Purpose. Political Science Quarterly 29:185–213.Google Scholar
McCurdy, Charles. 1978. Justice Field and the Limits of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism. In American Law and the Constitutional Order edited by Friedman, Lawrence and Scheiber, Harry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mink, Gwendolyn. 1990. The Lady and the Tramp: Gender and Race and the Origins of the Welfare State. In Women, the State and Welfare, edited by Gordon, Linda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, Barbara. 1990. The Origins of the Two Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Pensions. In Women, the State and Welfare, edited by Gordon, Linda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Orloff, Ann Shola. 1991. Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy. Journal of Policy History 3:249–81.Google Scholar
Orloff, Ann Shola. 1993. The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada and the United States, 1880–1940. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda. 1984. Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920. American Sociological Review 49:726–50.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Pennsylvania Commission on Old Age Pensions (COAP). 1919. Report. Harrisburg: J. L. L. Kuhn.Google Scholar
Reed, Adolph. 1992. DuBois's “Double Consciousness”: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American Thought. Studies in American Political Development 5(2):93–139.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, and Kearns, Thomas. 1993. Beyond the Great Divide: Forms of Legal Scholarship and Everyday Life. In Law in Everyday Life, edited by Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas R. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Scheiber, Harry. 1971. The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts. In Law in American History, edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. 5:329–404.Google Scholar
Review, School. 1914. Teachers' Pensions in New York City: Age of Retirement. School Review 1914:122–24.Google Scholar
Selvin, Molly. 1980. The Public Trust Doctrine in American Law and Economic Policy, 1789–1920. Wisconsin Law Review 1980:1403–42.Google Scholar
Shklar, Judith. 1991. American Citizenship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sklar, Kathryn Kish. 1990. Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers. In Unequal Sisters, edited by DuBois, Ellen Carol and Ruiz, Vicki L. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Skowronek, Stephen. 1981. Building a New American State. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Rogers. 1993. Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America. American Political Science Review 87(3):549–66.Google Scholar
Sterett, Susan. 1990. Constitutionalism and Old Age Spending: Pennsylvania in the 1920s. Studies in American Political Development 4:231–48.Google Scholar
Teaford, Jon. 1990. The Twentieth Century City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Twiss, Benjamin. 1942. Lawyers and the Constitution: How Laissez-Faire Came to the Supreme Court. New York: Russell and Russell.Google Scholar
Tyack, David. 1974. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tyler, Albert D., and Ludes, Francis J. 1924. Taxation, Corpus Juris 61: sections 21–23.Google Scholar
Tynes, Sheryl R. 1996. Turning Points in Social Security: From “Cruel Hoax” to “Sacred Entitlement.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilgus, H. L. 1913a. The Constitutionality of Teachers' Pensions (I). Michigan Law Review 11:451–77.Google Scholar
Wilgus, H. L. 1913b. The Constitutionality of Teachers' Pensions (II). Michigan Law Review 12:27–49.Google Scholar
Wilgus, H. L. 1913c. The Constitutionality of Teachers' Pensions (III). Michigan Law Review 12:105–23.Google Scholar

Cases

Baduro v. Multnomah Comity, 87 Or. 446 (1918).Google Scholar
Beach v. Bradstreet, 85 Conn. 344 (1912).Google Scholar
Beeland Wholesale Co. v. Kaufman, 174 So. 516 (1937).Google Scholar
Board of Educ. v. Bladen, 113 N.C. 379 (1893).Google Scholar
Board of Educ. v. Louisville, 288 Ky. 656 (1941).Google Scholar
Booth v. Town of Woodbury, 32 Conn. 118 (1864).Google Scholar
Bosworth v. Harp, 154 Ky. 559 (1913).Google Scholar
Bowler v. Nagel, 37 A.L.R. 1154 (1924).Google Scholar
Broadhead v. Milwaukee, 19 Wis. 624 (1865).Google Scholar
Bush v. County of Orange, 159 N.Y. 212 (1899).Google Scholar
Busser v. Snyder, 37 A.L.R. 1515 (1925).Google Scholar
Cass County v. Nixon, 161 N.W. 204 (1917).Google Scholar
Cobbs v. Home Ins. Co., 18 Ala. App. 206 (1921).Google Scholar
Denver and Rio Grande R.R. Co. v. Grand County, 170 Pac. 74 (1917).Google Scholar
Denver v. Lynch, 92 Colo. 102 (1932).Google Scholar
Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).Google Scholar
Elder v. Collier, 100 Ga. 342 (1897).Google Scholar
Firemen's Benevolent Ass'n v. Lounsbury, 21 Ill. 511 (1859).Google Scholar
Hilbish v. Catherman, 14 P.F. Smith 154 (1870).Google Scholar
In re Opinion of the Justices, 56 N.E. 675 (1900).Google Scholar
In re Rumsey, 167 N.W. 66 (1918).Google Scholar
In re Snyder, 93 Wash. 59 (1916).Google Scholar
Kelly v. Marshall, 69 Pa. 319 (1871).Google Scholar
Loan Ass'n v. Topeka, 20 Wall. 655 (1874).Google Scholar
Lucas Co. v. State, 75 Ohio St. 114 (1906).Google Scholar
Mahon v. Board of Educ. of New York, 171 N.Y. 263 (1902).Google Scholar
Mead v. Acton, 139 Mass. 341 (1885).Google Scholar
Mothers' Pensions, 28 Pa. Dist. 157 (1919).Google Scholar
Mountain Timber Co. v. Washington, 243 U.S. 219 (1917).Google Scholar
Opinion of Justices, 186 Mass. 603 (1905).Google Scholar
Opinion of Justices, 190 Mass. 611 (1906).Google Scholar
Opinion of Justices, 100 A. 50 (N.H. 1917).Google Scholar
Pennie v. Reis, 132 U.S. 464 (1889).Google Scholar
People ex rel. Kroner V. Abbott, 274 Ill. 380 (1916).Google Scholar
People ex rel. Stuckart v. Chicago, 270 Ill. 477 (1915).Google Scholar
Sharpless v. Mayor of Philadelphia, 21 Pa. St. Rep. 147 (1853).Google Scholar
State Board of Control v. Buckstegge 158 P. 837 (Ariz. 1916).Google Scholar
State ex rel. Bd. of Comm'rs v. District Court of Second Judicial Dist., 204 P. 600 (Mont. 1922).Google Scholar
State ex rel. Heaven v. Ziegenhein, 144 Mo. 283 (1898).Google Scholar
State ex rel. Stearns County v. Klasen, 143 N.W. 984 (1913).Google Scholar
State ex rel. Walker v. Derham, 61 S.C. 259 (1901).Google Scholar
State v. Osawkee Township, 14 Kan. 418 (1875).Google Scholar
State Supervisor, Mothers' Assistance Fund, 28 Pa. Dist. 244 (1918).Google Scholar
Taylor v. Mott, 123 Cal. 497 (1899).Google Scholar
Trustees of Exempt Firemen's Benevolent Fund v. Roome, 93 N.Y. 320 (1883).Google Scholar
Tyson v. School Directors of Halifax Township, 1 P.F. Smith 9 (1865).Google Scholar
United States v. Hall, 98 U.S. 343 (1878).Google Scholar
Weismer v. Village of Douglas, 64 N.Y. 91 (1876).Google Scholar
Woodall v. Darst, 71 W. Va. 350 (1912).Google Scholar