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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
1. “Administrator’s Report, June 5, 1958,” as yet unfiled, New York Foundling Hospital Archives, New York City (hereafter NYF).
2. “Executive Director’s Report, March 13, 1959,” as yet unfiled, NYF.
3. This crossing of state lines is a key difference between the desertion discussed below and that examined by Willrich, Michael in “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 460–89.Google Scholar
4. Boswell, John, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago, 1988), quote from 429.Google Scholar
5. Important scholarly assessments of abandonment include: Thomas W. Gallant, “Agency, Structure, and Explanation in Social History: The Case of the Foundling Home in Kephallenia, Greece during the 1830s,” Social Science History 15, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 479–508 (the patronage politics of wet-nursing assignments, which included a small stipend); Jeffrey S. Richter, “Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Abortion in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 511–51 (which, interestingly, describes the legal situation where caregivers other than parents could be charged with abandonment); Rachel G. Fuchs and Leslie Page Moch, “Pregnant, Single, and Far from Home: Migrant Women in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1990): 1007–31 (a classic single and pregnant migration tale; for more, see Fuchs, Rachel G., Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992)Google Scholar); O’Donovan, Katherine, “‘Real’ Mothers for Abandoned Children,” Law and Society Review 36, no. 2 (2002): 347–78Google Scholar (a very innovative comparative review of abandonment and the discourses justifying its punishment—or lack of it—in England, Germany, and France); Kertzer, David I., Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston, 1994)Google Scholar, which highlights the exploitative and extensive role of the Catholic Church in the foundling home/wet-nurse system. With the exception of O’Donovan, these works all focus on the “era of institutionalization” and foundling homes in the nineteenth century.
6. A review of childhood historiography in the United States can be found in the introduction to Fass, Paula S., Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; for a survey of changing childhood “regimes” in the United States, see Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)Google Scholar; for a more focused consideration of the “value” of a child with more attention to custodial issues entailed therein, see Zelizer, Viviana A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, 1994).Google Scholar I follow the lead of other abandonment scholars (most notably, Boswell) by keeping my examination of it distinct from a discussion of infanticide. The study of homicide in Chicago by Jeffrey S. Adler—First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)—raises some interesting questions, however. Adler argues that infanticide was not really punished until the Progressive Era, and it is tempting to speculate that increased policing and punishment of that crime pushed some women to recalculate the methods of abandonment.
7. In his history of marriage in America, Hendrik Hartog addresses the widespread phenomenon of abandonment by the breadwinner as grounds for separation: see Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
8. See Nelson, Claudia, Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929 (Bloomington, 2003)Google Scholar, which includes a discussion on the depiction of foundlings.
9. See Miller, Julie, Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New York, 2008).Google Scholar Another historian who has worked with New York Foundling Hospital records has produced a lively and compelling examination of the ethnic presumptions inherent in custody: see Gordon, Linda, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).Google Scholar
10. Much more can be said about the labor of women religious in the United States, including especially this shift from a custodial culture to a professional response. In a historiographical review, Carol Coburn observes that women religious have too often been “rendered invisible”; see Coburn, “An Overview of the Historiography of Women Religious: A Twenty-Five-Year Retrospective,” U.S. Catholic Historian 22, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1–26. I argue below that the Catholic Church made significant investments in order to professionalize in areas of parochial schooling and nurses, a shift that corresponds to the changing fortunes of Catholics themselves, but evinced much less investment in professionalizing its workforce for care of the poor. For a discussion of these dynamics in secondary literature, see Oates, Mary J., C.S.J., The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington, 1995)Google Scholar; Kauffman, Christopher J., Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Healthcare in the United States (New York, 1995).Google Scholar For a discussion that includes or is focused on lay Catholic women, see Oates, Mary J., C.S.J., “Catholic Laywomen in the Labor Force, 1850–1950,” in American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Kennelly, Karen, C.S.J. (New York, 1989): 81–124Google Scholar; Debra Campbell, “Reformers and Activists,” in ibid., 152–81; and Brown, Dorothy M. and McKeown, Elizabeth, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar; and especially Moloney, Deirdre M., “Divisions of Labor: The Roles of American Catholic Lay Women, Lay Men, and Women Religious in Charity Provision,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 41–55.Google Scholar
11. Tanenhaus, David S., Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York, 2003).Google Scholar New York introduced a “child court” in 1922, but soon found that its operation conflicted with other courts and, after a time, federal aid to single mothers.
12. See Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction; and especially Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us, passim.
13. See especially Coburn, Carol K. and Smith, Martha, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1999).Google Scholar
14. For more on the world of Jewish social services and their interactions with the state, see Ingra, Anna R., Wives Without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900–1935 (Chapel Hill, 2007)Google Scholar; rotation and subsequent addition of Jewish charities comes from Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York, 2001); cf. Miriam Ahern, “A Study of the Children Abandoned in NYC in 1942” (dissertation presented to the School of Social Work, Catholic University of America, 1944), 8.
15. Arthur Dunham, National Association of Social Workers Oral History Interviews, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 1, p. 178.
16. See Oates, Mary J., The Catholic Philanthropic Tradition in America (Bloomington, 1995), 76–96.Google Scholar
17. For more on community chests and funds, see Sedlak, Michael W., “Young Women and the City: Adolescent Deviance and the Transformation of Educational Policy, 1870–1960,” History of Education Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 1–28.Google Scholar
18. Arlien Johnson, National Association of Social Workers Oral History Interviews, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 1, p. 70.
19. Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us, 95.
20. Numerous historians of childhood have chronicled the origins and eventual acceptance of this philosophy; an excellent summary can be found in Mason, Mary Ann, From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; observation mentioned on 78–79.
21. For more on this transition, see Crenson, Matthew A., Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar; and Miller, Abandoned.
22. Importantly, foster care has been singled out in recent times for many of the same charges of cruelty once levied against institutionalization. Most recent is the concise examination found in Berrick, Jill Duerr, Take Me Home: Protecting America’s Vulnerable Children and Families (Oxford, 2009).Google Scholar For a still broader indictment, see Sealander, Judith, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2003).Google Scholar
23. Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition, 87.
24. But see ibid., 87; and Stewart, George C. Jr., Marvels of Charity: History of American Sisters and Nuns (Huntington, Ind., 1994).Google Scholar
25. “‘Boxed Baby Abandoned in Church,” Daily Mirror, 3 January 1944, as found in Newspaper Clippings, NYF, New York City, box 1.
26. Ahern, “A Study of the Children Abandoned in NYC in 1942.”
27. Special Dispatch, “Abandonment of Infants Shows Wartime Increase; Booming Birthrate a Cause,” Syracuse Herald American, 22 January 1944, as found in Newspaper Clippings, NYF, New York City, box 1.
28. For more on the sexual dynamics during the war, see Jane Mersky Leder, Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II (Westport, Conn., 2006); on the simultaneous wartime policing of female sexuality and exaltation of male sexuality, see Hegarty, Marilyn, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II (New York, 2007).Google Scholar
29. “War Leads to Boom in Adoptions,” Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1945, A1. For more of “Victory Girls,” see Brandt, Allan, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York, 1985).Google Scholar
30. See Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001).Google Scholar
31. See Francis Cardinal Spellman, The Foundling (New York, 1951).
32. For more on Reilly, see the homage paid to him after his death printed in Executive Director’s Report, undated, 1957, As yet unfiled, NYF, New York City.
33. “The New York Foundling Hospital Report, 1953,” As yet unfiled, NYF, New York City.
34. “Executive Director’s Report, March 13, 1959,” As yet unfiled, NYF, New York City.
35. The amendments to the Social Security Act passed throughout the 1950s are generally remembered for expanding the ranks of those who could benefit from Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI), if they are remembered at all. Less noted are the many licensing requirements of institutions and, as we shall see, the added policing of beneficiaries of ADC. All told, these amendments shaped the character and political logic of the modern U.S. welfare state as much as the original Act, and they deserve much more attention than they have thus far received. Though focused on a later time period, more administrative attention to AFDC is paid in Steven M. Teles, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (Lawrence, Kans., 1996).
36. Reactions quoted in memo from Lennon to O’Grady, 26 February 1953, in Catholic Charities USA [formerly National Conference of Catholic Charities], History of American Catholic Life at the Catholic University of America (hereafter: Catholic Charities USA, CUA), box 16.
37. Ibid.
38. See Scheller, A. H., S.J., “Catholic Social Service and Professional Training,” American Catholic Sociological Review 4, no. 4 (December 1943): 205–9.Google Scholar
39. See Sister M. Arcadius Bigosinska, F.S.S.J., “Some Factors Associated with the Selection and Admission of Members of Religious Orders of Women in a Catholic School of Social Work” (M.A. thesis, Catholic University School of Social Work, 1949); quotes from 36, 37, and 47. More signs of discord between traditional Catholics and the profession of social work can be detected in Scheller, Catholic Social Service and Professional Training, who urges more investment in Catholic schools of social work “if we [Catholics] do not wish to be outdone by radical groups whose good intentions are unwisely detected” (209). Finally, the focus of women religious on institutions, including the budget savings that accrued as a result, is discussed in Moloney, “Divisions of Labor,” 49.
40. It is important to note that, for some women and for many centuries, the appeal of the religious life lay precisely in its special access to careers, power, and status that would not be available to them in secular pursuits. See, among others, Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago, 1994); Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, 2009). Moreover, as Brown and McKeown note, many Catholic lay women entered into professional social work in order to nurture the affiliation between Catholic charities and the expanding social welfare state (Brown and McKeown, The Poor Belong to Us); as they also note, however, these women ultimately urged the adoption of social provision, convinced of its superior reach and possibility of affecting the lives of ordinary Catholics. It is also mportant to note here that the efforts described above can be viewed as analogous to recent efforts by conservatives in various states to regulate abortion providers more heavily; that is to say, one can view them as attempts to regulate a social provider out of business. For more on the recent developments, see Rachel Weiner, “Challenge to Virginia Abortion Regulations Moves Forward,” Washington Post, 9 October 2013, which describes, among other things, the state’s consideration of requirements regarding the width of doors and hallways in abortion clinics, which would necessarily entail extensive renovations that would put some providers “out of business.”
41. “Executive Director’s Report, March 13, 1959,” As yet unfiled, NYF, New York City.
42. The reverse dilemma, a Protestant orphanage coping with an increasingly Catholic charge, is richly detailed in Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago, 1995).
43. Roi Ottley, “Tells Problem of Negro Orphans,” Chicago Tribune, 27 June 1954, SW-A16. Significantly, although the Foundling’s reluctance and refusal to board as many minority babies as New York State needed would become a major bone of contention in the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Suellen Hoy cautions us to remember that women religious, especially those active in parochial schooling, could function as quiet but powerful agents of racial equity. See especially Hoy, “Lives on the Color Line: Catholic Sisters and African Americans in Chicago, 1890s–1960s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 22, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 67–91.
44. Joan Beck, “Children Behind Bars Because Nobody Wants Them,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 August 1954, B7.
45. Holtzman, Anonymous v. New York Foundling and Anonymous, 61 Misc.2d 137, 304 NY 2d 837 (1969).
46. See “Child Placement Shifted by Court,” New York Times, 29 June 1970, 37.
47. Interview by the author of Sister Carol Barnes, New York Foundling Hospital staff, on 12 January 2009.
48. See Bernstein, Nina, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York, 2001).Google Scholar
49. For more on the tremendous expansion of parochial schooling and Catholic hospitals, see Kauffman, Ministry and Meaning; Oates, Catholic Philanthropic Tradition. Although lay Catholic women provide an important source of labor for social work and foster care today, evidence from the immediate postwar period indicates that lay women had not yet entered into professional social work in the numbers that would allow for lay staffing of institutions like the Foundling. Chilman finds in 1948 that the “general tendency” in New York for the management of dependent children is “toward a custodial type” of care rather than “the modern child welfare standards demand.” See C. William Chilman, “New York State Reviews Its Foster Care System,” Social Service Review 22, no. 2 (June 1948): 189. It is also suggestive that Bigosinska’s study of women religious in Catholic University’s School of Social Work noted the faculty’s surprise at the advanced age of many of the sisters sent to study at the school, indicative perhaps of a tendency of mothers superior to save their most vital resources for other institutions of Catholic life. The time lag between lay women’s activism in social work, as well as persistent Catholic suspicions of it, is discussed in Moloney, “Divisions of Labor”; as she observes, social work was “widely viewed as a Protestant field” (53). The routing of women religious to professional schools in order to serve “especially . . . teaching,” and later expanded to nursing, is discussed in Mary L. Schneider, O.S.F., “American Sisters and the Roots of Change: The 1950s,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 55–72.
50. As Regina Kunzel rightly notes, “The unwed mother was one of the most visible affronts to postwar notions of proper family, gender, and sexual behavior.” See Kunzel, “Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 1474.
51. “Where’s My Mommy?: Dragnet Out for Mother Who Abandoned Baby,” Cleveland Call and Post, 14 August 1954, 1.
52. See relevant sections in Mass. Criminal Code, chap. 119, Protection and Care of Children, recompiled 1949. This diverse and well-defined statute is identified by Michael Willrich, City of Courts, as typical of Progressive Era reform.
53. Ahern, “A Study of the Children Abandoned in NYC in 1942.”
54. Conn. Crim Code, 424, §8591.
55. See Reagan, Leslie, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998).Google Scholar
56. This “female dominion” has received much attention from scholars of the Progressive Era (see, for example, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935, New York, 1994), but I agree with Regina Kunzel that it merits still more beyond those chronological boundaries: see Kunzel, Regina G., Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945, (New Haven, 1993).Google Scholar
57. The tension between private charity and social workers is described and perceptively treated in Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls.
58. Kunzel, Regina G., “The Professionalization of Benevolence: Evangelicals and Social Workers in the Florence Crittendon Homes, 1915 to 1945,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 21–43.Google Scholar
59. Mary Alexander, Secretary, Committee on Unmarried Parenthood, Social Planning Council of St. Louis, to Freda Ring Lyman, Legal Research Unit, 12 April 1946, Central File, RG102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, NARA, box 189.
60. Lyman to Alexander, 29 April 1946, Central File, RG102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, NARA, box 189. For more on social workers pressuring especially white women to surrender their babies for adoption, see Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls.
61. Marguerite Windhauser, Consultant on Child Welfare Legislation, Children’s Bureau, to John W. Frommer Jr., 5 June 1951, Central File, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, box 446.
62. Ibid., 1242.
63. Hazard, Geoffrey C. Jr., “May v. Anderson: Preamble to Family Law Chaos,” Virginia Law Review 45 (1959): 379–406.Google Scholar
64. Simpson, Helen, “The Unfit Parent: Conditions Under Which a Child May be Adopted Without the Consent of His Parent,” University of Detroit Law Journal 39 (1962): 347–92.Google Scholar
65. Ibid., 347.
66. Ibid., 352.
67. See Simpson, “The Unfit Parent,” note 96, for a thorough review of abandonment statutes.
68. Ibid., 367.
69. Martin Gula, Specialist on Group Care, Children’s Bureau, to Susanna Blanco, 20 August 1958, Central File, RG 102, Records of the Children’s Bureau, box 885.
70. For more on ADC during this time period, see Mittelstadt, Jennifer, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill, 2005).Google Scholar
71. See Hearings Before the Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate, 81st Congress, HR 6000: Social Security Revision (Washington, D.C., 1950), 136–39, passim.
72. These provocative debates suggest a need to relate the arguments made by Linda Gordon about the original Social Security Act through the 1950s, as crucial amendments to ADC shaped the scope and nature of the program: see Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York, 1994); they also suggest more historical attention needs to be paid to the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, whose arguments regarding the social control of the poor and the expansion of welfare in response to disorder need more historical attention: see Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1993); cf. Felicia Kornbluh, who argues that the agency and activism of especially black women expanded AFDC rolls: see Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2007).
73. O’Grady to Guilfoyle, 20 July 1956, Catholic Charities USA, CUA, box 16.
74. “Abandonment Case Jury Deadlocked,” Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1968, OC9.
75. “Court Continues Cases in Baby Abandonment,” Hartford Courant, 3 February 1959, 4; “Couple Who Abandoned Baby at Church Jailed,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March 1963, B15.
76. “Mother of Five Held in Relief ‘Horror,’” New York Times, 23 June 1956, 16; “Mom Jailed for Leaving Kids Is Freed,” Chicago Daily Defender, 1 March 1966, 4.
77. See, for example, Jose Cardenas, “Compton Woman Held in Abandonment of Daughter,” Los Angeles Times, 24 February 1998, 3, for a report of a mother who left a child in a restroom with a note, and was later arrested while seeking medical treatment for herself; or Greg Hernandez and Bonnie Hayes, “Mother Who Abandoned Baby Charged,” Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1997, 8, for a story on the seventeen-year-old Orange County mother, charged and tried as an adult, who hid a pregnancy from her family, gave birth in the bathroom of the family home, and then attempted get rid of the baby by dropping him out of the bathroom window in a bag.
78. There is, however, a very recent reexamination of this approach as the result of reporting on Nebraska (and its formerly late age for legal abandonment); see Erik Eckholm, “Nebraska Revises Child Safe Haven Law,” New York Times, 21 November 2008.
79. See Joel Blau, The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States (New York, 1992), for more on how advocates for the homeless themselves turned to the courts by filing suits to expand shelter capacity; see also Ella Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (Philadelphia, 2013), on the rise of the “new homeless” and deinstitutionalization without support. As Howard notes, in 1984 the American Psychological Association characterized deinstitutionalization “a major societal tragedy” (207).
80. Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, 423.
81. Other frameworks include those with a social and cultural set of priorities, set out clearly by philosopher and historian Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish; namely, the evolution of punishment from less corporal to more penal and, coincident with that, as more central to the social apparatus.
82. See Novak, William J., The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996)Google Scholar, and for an important synthetic treatment, see Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–72.
83. See the opening in Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982).Google Scholar
84. See Hartog, Hendrik, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Ithaca, 1989)Google Scholar; Einhorn, Robin L., Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago, 2001).Google Scholar
85. Quote from Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law (New York, 2009), 14.
86. Daniel Richman, “The Demand Side of Overcriminalization,” Columbia Law School Working Paper, Paper No. 10-234, 4.
87. Whitman, James Q., Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe (New York, 2003), quote from 4.Google Scholar
88. Ibid., 11.
89. See Freedman, Estelle B., The Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1984).Google Scholar
90. For a similar account focused on political culture, see Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 2004).Google Scholar
91. See Novak, William, ”The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” and response by Gary Gerstle, “A State Both Weak and Strong,” American Historical Review (June 2010): 779–85Google Scholar; and Frydl, Kathleen J., The GI Bill (New York, 2009).Google Scholar
92. Much more can be said about liability and the expansion in twentieth-century tort law; for a concise and informed summary, see Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2002), chap. 11. The “federalization” of certain safety issues and the removal of legal obstacles to standing and filing injury claims all need to be placed in conversation with still broader political trends of the recent past, including the expansion of the state, its regulations, and the backlash against it. For an interesting review of the conditions that induce Congress to legislate favorably toward private enforcement regimes, namely, tort claims, see Sean Farhang, “Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the American Separation of Powers System,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 4 (October 2008): 821–39.
93. An important article along these lines is Karen Orren, “Standing to Sue: Interest Group Conflict in the Federal Courts,” American Political Science Review 70 (September 1976): 723–41; Farhang, “Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits; MacLean, Nancy, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Silverstein, Gordon, Law’s Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (New York, 2009).Google Scholar
94. A similarly complex story could be told about the criminalization of homelessness, a topic that has received systematic critical attention from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, but one that needs much more historical attention from students of the recent past. See also Howard, Homeless.
95. The phrase comes from Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940) and can be found at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (accessed 10 January 2014.)