Abstract
ACCORDING TO THE conventional historical wisdom, America’s modern administrative and welfare state grew up in spite of the courts.The dominant narrative of law and political development in the Progressive Era (1890– 1919) portrays “the courts” as a monolith: a singularly conservative obstacle to progressive legislation enacted to bring industrial capitalism under the heel of a socially responsive interventionist state.This essay argues that to a large extent the modern administrative and welfare state arose within the courts— but not the high-level state and federal appellate courts that historians typically study.In the three decades before the New Deal, the criminal courts of America’s industrial cities were a fertile seedbed for progressive social policies and ambitious forms of administrative social intervention.The national model was the Municipal Chicago, a massive judicial bureaucracy founded in 1906 to handle the hundreds thousands of civil disputes and criminal cases that arose each year in the second city of the world’s leading industrial nation.The incipient welfare state that emerged within such local judicial bodies did much more than we expect a welfare state to do— regulate working conditions and provide material aid to the poor.City courts with their enormous caseloads served as local laboratories for a more far reaching effort to govern everyday life in a new urbanindustrial society.The court centered regime of urban social governance joined the ancient coercive power of the criminal law to modern administrative strategies of population management, expert social intervention, and therapeutic treatment of individuals.The result was a new relationship between law and administrative statecraft and an unprecedented, sometimes violent expansion of governmental power into the lives of city people.