Public Pensions

In Public Pensions, Susan M. Sterett traces the legal and constitutional structures underlying early social welfare programs in the United States. Sterett explains the status of state and local government payments for public servants and the poor from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression. The most visible public payments for service in the United States were directed to soldiers, who risked death for the nation. However, firemen, not soldiers, first captured local governments' attention; social welfare programs for soldiers were modeled on firemen's pensions. The dangerous work of firefighting and of combat provided the fundamental legal analogy for courts as governments expanded pensions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing about the state court doctrine approving payments for dangerous, local service would allow pensions for indigent mothers and for the elderly, which states began to consider after 1910. Counties and railroads that objected to the new taxes could fight programs based on the old doctrine, established for firefighters, soldiers, and finally civil servants. State litigation provided one of the many grounds for contesting expanded welfare states in the early twentieth-century United States. Sterett demonstrates that state courts maintained a gendered division between the service that marked citizenship and the dependence that marked indigence, even during the promising ferment of the early twentieth century.

Susan M. Sterett has added an important perspective to recent social welfare scholarship. Her insight is that state court litigation after the Civil War played a major role in shaping state public pension legislation, especially as new groups were added to the eligibility list., The strength of Public Pensions is Sterett's treatment of some of the early, and relatively obscure, court battles over payments to firemen and soldiers., Public Pensions illustrates how substantially state constitutions shaped the evolution of American social welfare.... This excellent book adds immensely to our understanding of pensions, work, dependency, and American constitutional culture. It constitutes an extraordinary contribution to the scholarship on this very important topic., Sterett... urges scholars studying the welfare state's history to pay closer attention to state courts and the public purpose doctrine, which held that state funds could be spent only on charity to the intrinsically dependent, on businesses providing general public benefits, or in rewarding people who had served the state.... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections., Sterett applies gender analysis in an interesting way to the legal arguments that distinguished entitlements for 'manly' and heroic work from care of the dependent and weak.

Susan M. Sterett is Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver. She is the author of Creating Constitutionalism? Professional Politics and Administrative Law in England and Wales.