Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal

6: The House That Julia (and Friends) Built: Networking Chicago's Juvenile Court

C h a p t e r 6 The House That Julia (and Friends) Built: Networking Chicago’s Juvenile Court Carol Nackenoff and Kathleen S. Sullivan At the turn of the twentieth century, reformers in Chicago, deeply concerned about social conditions and moral influences on children, created a juvenile court system. This innovation led to the extension of the juvenile court idea and other institutional efforts in child saving across the nation and gave rise to social programs at the city, state, and federal level. The origin and early development of the juvenile court system provides an important case study in Progressive Era statebuilding and the public-private collaborations that initiated and sustained it. Nonstate actors and organizations played a vital and dynamic role in pressing the idea of the Juvenile Court on policymakers.1 The networks they built included allies on the court, in elective office, in academia , and in newly professionalizing fields. As in the children’s rhyme, “The House That Jack Built,” Julia Lathrop (and friends) built an institution by building a network that generated, sustained, and expanded the juvenile court system. Our investigation leads us to be skeptical about some of the Weberian and linear assumptions in the literature on statebuilding in the Progressive Era. In the case of the Juvenile Court, statebuilding did not simply move from the state to the national level, nor were courts left out of the pattern of growth in bureaucratic organization and state capacity. Much of the American statebuilding literature focuses on the role of legislators, executives, and bureaucrats in the transition from a “state of courts and parties” to a new 172 Carol Nackenoff and Kathleen S. Sullivan administrative state, and the bulk of that literature addresses development at the federal level. Dan Carpenter’s work emphasizes the role of bureaucratic entrepreneurs, who, in the process of building bureaucratic legitimacy, engage in small, experimental programs that precede the building of coalitions and forging of public support. Carpenter’s administrative leaders create these “pockets of limited discretion” and “By nurturing local constituencies and by using their multiple network affiliations to build broad support coalitions among professionals, agrarians, women’s groups, moral crusaders, and congressional and partisan elites, they won for their young programs both political currency and administrative legitimacy.”2 Those networks had to develop somehow. In Chicago, we find that reformers actively generated and fostered those networks, which then provided financial resources, trained personnel, and experienced recordkeeping. The development of networks themselves was a precondition for formal institutional development. And the network of reformers pressured legislative and administrative elites into channels of reform that do not appear to have been on their agendas previously. The end of the nineteenth century ushered in a new era for the “intermingling of state and private means of extending public authority.”3 In this era, Brian Balogh finds the federal government parceling out state authority to a number of voluntary associations and professional societies to do state work. We discover here that these nonstate actors are not merely doing work already envisioned by the state or bureaucratic actors. Rather, they are often moving the state into new work, forging the warrants for, and helping to create , public authority. Drawing on firsthand experiences and experiments, Lathrop and her largely female reformer allies in Chicago pressed the idea of the Juvenile Court on the state of Illinois, and subsequently, pressed childsaving ideas upon the nation. Julia Lathrop, with many of her friends and associates, built an institution to deal with a newly defined public problem. Organized women activists loom large in the history of the juvenile court movement in the United States, and nowhere is this more evident than in Chicago, home of the first Juvenile Court.4 Hull House, founded in 1889, and the Chicago Woman’s Club (CWC), founded in 1876, provided many of the activists who would lead the battle for the Juvenile Court Bill in the Illinois legislature in 1899. Advancing their vision for coping with newly defined—or redefined—social problems, these reformers made use of opportunities and resources, both material and social, to make a “private” contribution to statebuilding. These reformers were not self-interested beneficiaries of the policies they advanced in the conventional 217.228] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:22 GMT) Networking Chicago’s Juvenile Court 173 sense; however, some parlayed the expertise they developed into new positions in the growing administrative state. The origins and early operation of the Juvenile Court places female reformers at...