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Fate, Responsibility, and “Natural” Disaster Relief: Narrating the American Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Michele L. Landis
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Abstract

This essay argues that the history of the American welfare state is inextricably bound up with disaster relief. It focuses on the New Deal, which was justified using numerous precedents drawn from the previous 150 years of federal disaster relief. After sketching this early history, including the development of a compelling moral narrative of fault and blame, I examine congressional speeches, briefs filed in the central legal cases of the New Deal by the Roosevelt administration and its opponents, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and photographs taken by New Deal employees to trace how the Depression was narrated as a “disaster” whose victims were entitled to federal relief.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 257 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Arthur Stinchcombe for his invaluable criticism, guidance, and patience. Many thanks also for the insightful comments of Pegeen Bassett, Cynthia Bowman, Ken Dauber, James Heckman, Carol Heimer, Martha Fineman, Jane Larson, Estelle Lau, Saul Levmore, Tom Merrill, Elizabeth Mertz, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Nelson, William Novak, Austin Sarat, Rayman Solomon, three anonymous reviewers, and the participants at the 1997 and 1999 Annual Meetings of the Law & Society Association, where earlier versions were presented. Finally, I am especially grateful to United States Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt for giving me the privilege of spending a year in his service. His brilliant and compassionate use of the law to aid today's “dispossessed” carries on the work of the New Dealers discussed in this essay.

References

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