William J. Novak’s The People’s Welfare and the New Historiography of the Early Federal State

Abstract

It is a true honor to be able to contribute to these proceedings, which seek to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of, and take stock of the impact of William Novak’s The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. In this short essay, I try to explain how Novak’s work identified a robust early American state at work through state and municipal courts and legislatures by purposefully turning his attention away from the activity of the federal government. Yet as I argue, The People’s Welfare has nonetheless fueled a historical and historiographical reassessment of the United States federal government. How and why this historiographic turn occurred suggests the great importance of The People’s Welfare as both a substantive study of statecraft and a how-to manual of legal and policy history. My sustained encounter with The People’s Welfare dates back to Novak’s seminar on the American state during my first year as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in 2001-02. One chief task of the seminar was to demolish the “myth of American statelessness,” which Novak describes as the belief that “the essence of nineteenth-century government was its absence.”1 Thus seminarians read The People’s Welfare alongside recent works that become a new canon of nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of statecraft: works by Richard John, Theda Skocpol, Richard Bensel, Stephen Skowronek, Thomas Sugrue, and Michael Katz.2 But a recurring theme of the seminar was that a quiet but significant critique of the “myth of American statelessness” had also taken shape in preceding decades: Willard Hurst’s opus shaped generations of legal historians study of legal institutions and the Commonwealth School produced vigorous examinations of political economy and the role of government in the marketplace. The American state had always been there, hiding in plain sight.3