The Moral Economy of Work

The United States's unique history of tying social benefits to work has shaped American social citizenship in peculiar ways. Recently, the history of American citizenship has gained attention from scholars in specialties as diverse as women's history, suffrage, labor, and the burgeoning field of disability history.¹ Two provocative new books by John Fabian Witt and Ruth O'Brien—the latter of which draws explicitly on disability history—offer compelling arguments about the lasting impact of free labor ideology on social policy and the meaning of citizenship. Witt investigates industrial accident policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while O'Brien explores the impact of rehabilitation programs and rights legislation on disabled people's access to employment since the 1940s. Both scholars draw primarily on neo-institutionalism and legal history, broadly defined, focusing on institutions such as workingmen's cooperative benefit societies and rehabilitation centers.

Witt and O'Brien agree that free labor ideology has been central to American social policy, but they assess its long-term impact quite differently. Witt's The Accidental Republic contends that the inevitability of industrial accidents in mechanized workplaces forced policymakers, employers, and workers to rethink the nature of the work process. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he contends, these groups rejected contract law and their previously shared faith in free labor ideology and autonomous work in favor of tort law, scientific management, and the concepts of risk, statistics, and insurance central to the modern administrative state. In Crippled Justice, O'Brien argues that free labor notions of independence, autonomy, and employers' free right to contract—which she terms "rehabilitation ideology"—remained powerful throughout the twentieth century. Rehabilitation ideology, in her view, repeatedly undermined disability rights legislation, including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, thereby helping to exclude disabled people from the workplace.

Witt begins with a discussion of the fundamental clash of an "industrial-accident crisis of world-historical proportions" (22) with free labor ideology in the late nineteenth century. He defines free labor ideology as an amalgam of liberalism, individual autonomy, self-ownership, and the male breadwinner (or family wage) system. The rapidly increasing rate of industrial accidents destabilized this ideology in numerous ways. As Progressive reformer Crystal Eastman so compellingly depicted, accidents threatened both workers' economic independence and the ability of male breadwinners to support their families. Moreover, workers' "independence and discretionary authority" and their "persistent and usually irrational optimism" about risks actually seemed to increase accident rates (31, 32).

These dual crises—of accidents and free labor ideology—led to widespread policy experimentation, which The Accidental Republic covers in four excellent discussions integrating labor, business, policy, gender, and legal history. Witt begins with the late nineteenth-century collapse of classical tort law, which was previously the major legal remedy for harm. Under classical tort law, individuals could act freely within a certain zone of autonomy and could not be held liable for harm to others. For jurists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, industrial accidents created a puzzling legal category—"the nonnegligent victim of nonfaulty harm" (44). Neither classical tort law nor the common-law solutions of wrongful death statutes or employers liability laws satisfactorily addressed these accident victims.

Stymied by the legal system, workers eventually found a potential solution in cooperative insurance and benefit societies, which were organized by workers on the basis of ethnic, union, religious, and many other affiliations. In theory, these societies offered workers a means of controlling risk while maintaining the free labor ideals of manliness, independence, and fraternity. For a brief time, as Witt documents, they were remarkably successful, providing almost one-third of American workingmen with life and/or disability insurance during the 1880s and 1890s. The disproportionate participation of older and high-risk workers, malingering, and the absence of mandatory participation requirements, however, eventually...