"That's Not What We Meant to Do": Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

Someone once remarked that Prohibition failed because no one realized how innately American it was to drink. A similar disjunction of expectations and results pervades this fascinating study of five key areas of modern public policy—welfare, civil rights, mental health, immigration, and campaign finance reform. In a series of short essays, Steven M. Gillon demonstrates how institutions, politics, and events transform laws in unintended ways. Circumstances change. A key component of welfare, designed to keep a mother at home with her children, became anachronistic and dysfunctional in a later era when mothers were expected to enter the labor force. Ideologies change. The faith in integration that propelled the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was tested in a later era when the mentally ill morphed into the homeless. Other branches of government alter congressional intent, as in the vigorous bureaucratic enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that led to affirmative action. Furthermore, sometimes things simply do not work out as planned. The 1965 immigration law contained a section that allowed family members of foreigners legally settled in this country to live in this country. That section brought far more people of Asian origins to America than the authors of the legislation anticipated. In a similar manner, campaign finance reform unfolded in ways that would have surprised its original congressional proponents in the Watergate era.