David S. Tanenhaus

Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago

On December 23, 1912, a Hungarian father brought his three young daughters (ages three, five, and seven) to the Cook County Juvenile Court to file dependent petitions on their behalf. He alleged that their mother had deserted the family, stolen their savings, and disappeared. As a single father, he could have and probably did argue that it was unreasonable to expect him to work and to raise his young children simultaneously. On Christmas Eve, after a six-man jury found each girl to be a “dependent child,” Judge Merritt Pinckney ordered them committed to the Lisle Industrial School and arranged for their father to pay

Between Dependency and Liberty: The Conundrum of Children's Rights in the Gilded Age

15 a month for their support. Thus, the single father had used the juvenile court to arrange for a private institution to raise his now motherless children, who because they were the same gender were at least allowed to grow up together in the same industrial school.

Welfare, History, and the Framing of Twenty‐First‐Century Social Policy

Although legal scholars often assume that the history of childrens rights in the United States did not begin until the mid twentieth century, this essay argues that a sophisticated conception of childrens rights existed a century earlier, and analyzes how lawmakers articulated it through their attempts to define the rights of dependent children. How to handle their cases raised fundamental questions about whether children were autonomous beings or the property of either their parents and/or the state. And, if the latter, what were the limits of parental authority and/or the power of the state acting as a parent? By investigating how the Illinois Supreme Court confronted the conundrum of childrens rights in the Gilded Age, the essay reconstructs how lawmakers established a viable system for guaranteeing at-risk children due process protections as well as the positive rights of social citizenship. Significantly, this creative moment occurred at a transitional point in American legal history, when lawmakers began developing liberal constitutionalism. Given the subsequent difficulties that liberal constitutionalism has had in protecting childrens due process rights, providing for their basic needs, and giving them a voice in the legal process, the essay contends that it is worth engaging this earlier history.

Let's Change the Law: Arkansas and the Puzzle of Juvenile Justice Reform in the 1990s

Historians will have a difficult time making sense of twentieth-century American social policy. In the 1990s, for instance, Bill Clinton, a Democratic president who initially campaigned for universal health care during a recession, ended up working with a Republican Congress to abolish welfare as a federal entitlement while the economy soared. This dramatic reversal of fortune, which saw the welfare state contract during a time of national prosperity, raised difficult questions about how to explain the timing and significance of fundamental changes in American social policy, especially with respect to the nation’s dependent children and their families. In welfare’s wake, as part of the process of understanding its unexpected passing, scholars turned their attention to its origins, continuing an area of research that had developed in late 1980s and early 1990s out of a convergence of interest in gender analysis and state formation. Monumental studies, such as Theda Skocpol’s (1992) and Linda Gordon’s (1994), published before welfare reform, not only highlighted gender analysis but also reemphasized the importance of the Progressive Era

Juvenile Justice in the Making

[Governor Tucker] should also propose that juveniles be charged as adults more often. Such laws sound harsh. They are. Right now, they need to be. This is known as protecting the public safety. As deterrence. Until that improbable day when social scientists pinpoint the cause of crime, punishment is the best answer. Sure, swift punishment. Word will get around. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , August 10, 1994.