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PERHAPS as a final tribute to a nineteenth century individualism soon to be extinguished by the New Deal, Americans of the late twenties and early thirties frequently amused themselves in endless polls and competitions to find America's greatest men and women. The definitive order of greatness was never discovered, but in every poll Jane Addams did well. Included in Mark Howe's list of six outstanding Americans, she received Good Housekeeping's seal of approval as the greatest living American woman. But in 1933 the National Council of Women failed her. They declared her the second greatest American woman. First was Mary Baker Eddy. (1) Jane Addams, who treasured such symbols of fame, may well have felt considerable pique at being so linked with the founding mother of Christian Science. The two women certainly appear very different types. Where Mrs. Eddy achieved power through establishing a churchl, Jane Addams, except for one brief episode, was never involved in organised religion; where Mrs. Eddy exploited the world of the spirit, Jane Addams consciously entered the grubby world of the slum; where Mrs. Eddy sought to cure bodies through faith, Jane Addams' solution was better housing, higher wages, and better garbage disposal. Later historians have reinforced the contrast. Some have viewed Jane Addams as an energetic feminist, which Mrs. Eddy decidedly was not; Christopher Lasch, in the most widely accepted interpretation, has seen Jane Addams as the first of a new class, the intellectuals, whose animus was a revolt against middle class gentility and particularly against the constrictive atmosphere of the 19th century family. (2) MIrs. Eddy for all her interest in the mind, was no modern intellectual, nor did she reject the family. It is against such interpretations that this paper is leveled. In my view the National Council of Women may have spoken truer than they realized by joining Mrs. Eddy and Jane Addams. For Jane Addams' career was shaped by the same problem that impelled Mrs. Eddy: How did an ambitious egotistical woman in 19th century America break through the incredibly limited bounds which the domestic piety tradition had established for women. Woman's sphere was the home and family, but achievement could only be

MARC GALANTER is Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. M.A. 1954, J.D. 1956, University of Chicago. The author is indebted to Jerold Auerbach, Eve Galanter, Stewart Macaulay, Deborah Dash Moore, Dan Pekarsky, and Robert Post for the benefit of their reactions to an earlier draft. 1. No one knows just how many Jewish lawyers there are, but a sense of the Jewish presence in American law can be gathered from the following. Jews made up about 12% of all law students and 22% of law professors in 1975; in the "top twenty law schools" they were about 30% of both students and faculty. These figures are derived from surveys conducted by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, reported in Carl A. Auerbach, "Legal Education and Some of Its Discontents," 34 J. Legal Educ., 43, 50 (1984). Explanations of this abundant participation in legal life, ranging from Jewish legalism and textualism to more diffuse and general traits of Jewish life, have foundered on the difficulty of establishing such connections. For some recent attempts, see M. Price, "Text and Intellect," 33 Buffalo L. Rev. 562 (1984); J. Morris, "The American Jewish Judge: An Appraisal on the Occasion of the Bicentennial," 35 Jewish Soc. Stud. 195 (1976); D. Artz, "The People's Lawyers: The Predominance of Jews in Public Interest Law," 35(1) Judaism 47 (Winter 1986). 2. On participation in the legal side of the New Deal, see Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) ("Auerbach, Unequal Justice"); on community defense agencies, see Alexander Pekelis, "Full Equality in a Free Society: A Program for Jewish Action," in Law and Social Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950); Marshall Breger, "The Legal Tradition of Jewish Defense Agencies" (unpublished paper); on public interest law, see Artz, 35 Judaism (cited in note 1).

I T IS OUR THESIS that every social problem has a natural history and that the natural history approach is a promising conceptual framework within which to study specific social problems. Let us first clarify our usage of the terms "social problem" and "natural history." The concept "social problem" as used in this paper can be stated in a series of propositions. I. A social problem is a condition which is defined by a considerable number of persons as a deviation from some social norm which they cherish. Every social problem thus consists of an objective condition and a subjective definition. The objective condition is a verifiable situation which can be checked as to existence and magnitude (proportions) by impartial and trained observers, e.g., the state of our national defense, trends in the birth rate, unemployment, etc. The subjective definition is the awareness of certain individuals that the condition is a threat to certain cherished values. 2. The objective condition is necessary but not in itself sufficient to constitute a social problem. Although the objective condition may be the same in two different localities, it may be a social problem in only one of these areas, e.g., discrimination against Negroes in the south as contrasted with discrimination in the north; divorce in Reno as contrasted with divorce in a Catholic community. Social problems are what people think they are and if conditions are not defined as social problems by the people involved in them, they are not problems to those people, although they may be problems to outsiders or to scientists, e.g., the condition of poor southern sharecroppers is a social problem to the braintrusters of the New Deal but not to many southern landowners. 3. Cultural values play an important causal role in the objective condition which is defined as a problem, e.g., the objective conditions of unemployment, race prejudice, illegitimacy, crime, divorce, and war come into being, in part at least, because people cherish certain beliefs and maintain certain social institutions which give rise to these conditions. 4. Cultural values obstruct solutions to conditions defined as social problems because people are unwilling to endorse programs of amelioration which prejudice or require abandonment of their cherished beliefs and institutions, e.g., one possible "solution" to illegitimacy would be social acceptance of contraception and abortion, practices which in themselves are now defined as violations of the mores.

IN A SENSE, merchants in ideas of agricultural policy have come full circle. When farmers were in financial difficulties after World War I agricultural leaders decided the government should do something to make the competitive price system work better. Under Henry C. Wallace, father of the recent Secretary of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture began preparation of economic outlook reports to guide farmers in their production plans. When the supply of some product was large, the department would recommend that farmers reduce that line and expand another. Now, after thirteen years of more direct efforts to control farm production and prices, leading farm economists and planners are turning back to the old idea of making the free-price system work better. The new scheme calls for government outlook planning, but this time backed up by guaranteed prices. Dr. Theodore W. Schultz, of the University of Chicago, has called it "forward pricing." Schultz was first among agricultural economists to propose this government pricing system flexible enough to adjust supply and demand but rigid enough to take some of the risk out of farming operations. Many economists and several farm leaders have taken up with the idea. Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson has expressed himself in sympathy with it. In a contest on postwar agricultural price-policy conducted by the American Farm Economics Association last year, threefourths of the winning papers presented plans for forward price guarantees. A survey of current writng on agricultural economics reveals a high degree of unanimity on what changes are needed in farm programs. The lessons of the last thirteen years of national farm programs have been so pointed, so clear that nearly every expert comes up with the same interpretation. This unanimity reminds one of the agreement which existed among agricultural leaders at the start of the New Deal in I933 and suggests that it may bring results. In the early '30's most farm leaders favored some kind of farm production control by the government. The

TU TNDERSTANDING OF THE successful way in which profit-makers moved into control of social organization during the hundred years preceding 1929 centered necessarily in variations on a technological theme. That theme needed its setting: its history, its geography. But important as these were, they were not the drama itself. That-or, more properly, its third act-took on a power and velocity which, as we looked back, was breath-stopping but which, as it went on, was (as historical changes are apt to be) relatively unnoticed and without effect on accommodative social institutions. This contemporary obliviousness to basic technical change was why the tragic events which began in 1929 took so many people by surprise and why terror descended on a whole people like the mid-day darkness of a hurricane. The clouds would blow away in time and the deus ex machina would become visible; but for the moment the moving causes were effectually hid behind the vague myths and the surviving folkways of an earlier way of life. There was a vast conspiracy to conceal reality, a tacit agreement, in which each conspirator would be seen later to have done his bit, and effectively, but without knowing why: the preacher prescribing an ethical system which stressed disproportionately the parable of the talents; the teacher showing his pupils ways to get the better of one another, unconscious of the paradox in a society of determined individualists; the lawyer and the jurist treating the corporation as a person; the economist supplying the "laws" of competitive capitalism. Thus all had worked together. The exploitable techniques had begun as far back as the history of human intelligence could be traced. Their development had represented a carrying over of the scientific tradition into a new and fruitful field. Scientific management had been inextricably mixed with and dependent upon other evolutions, such as slide rules, paper work, new metals, and universal literacy. Each of these idea-chains and their fitting together had followed a pattern impossible to trace in detail. That was equally true of the social changes which had gone on at the same time; and it was not profitable to go beyond obvious utility in trying to account for them. In 1929 we were plunged into what seemed like chaos by forces which would sometime be given a rational accountability, but which as they occurred seemed to arrive out of the blue. Frederick W. Taylor's name is prominently associated with the late nineteenth-century culmination of these techniques. He, no doubt, had felt vaguely that his discoveries would have social effects; so

TH TOW can the agricultural economists help to shape the nation's farm policy? Perhaps a historical analysis of the experiences of the economists of an earlier day who had some influence upon national policy may hold something of significance for the policy-oriented economists of today.' Many economists contributed to the development of New Deal farm policy. This paper will look at but four of the most prominent who were both professors and economists: Rexford G. Tugwell, M. L. Wilson, George F. Warren and William I. Myers. Their role was large-too large to survey in these pages. But the basic significance of their experiences can be discussed. That significance lay in the relationships between ideas and power. When these economists became interested in shaping policy, they found that they had entered a world in which power was the fundamental reality. They found that they had to think in power terms as well as economic terms. Economists had to explore the location, function, and nature of power and the ways in which changes in elements in the political situation influenced power relationships. The economists' ideas helped them to gain access to power for men of power needed economic ideas. But the ideas alone, no matter what their quality may have been, did not enable the economists to control policy. They first had to establish working relationships with men who had the capacity to control policy. Thus the ideas of the economists had to appear to harmonize with the interests of such men. In short, Tugwell, Wilson, Warren and Myers found, often from bitter experience, that men of ideas needed to learn to work with men of power. Economists needed to learn to work with officeholders, representatives of organized interest groups, men of wealth, and men with political skills. The pragmatic orientation of much of the American academic world provided an underlying explanation of the ability of these economists to work with some men of power. By the 1930's, as one well-informed observer of the "Brain Trust" noted, American universities had for "nearly forty years" been insisting that their "business" was "not only to preserve, to increase and to interpret knowledge, but to cariy scholarship and

The gravest problem which confronts the nation today is that of relief. It is the nightmare of the New Deal; the skeleton in the closet of our present economic system; the morning-afterthe-night-before for our harrassed taxpayers and the bete noir of the Brain Trust. In spite of a period of bold experimentation, there still remain in the United States approximately 22,000,000 who must drink at the public trough and listen to siren songs-"Happy Days Are Here Again," "Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner"-which corner ?-and "no man, woman or child must go hungry in this the richest country on the face of the globe." A study of the attitudes of key citizens, in the communities we represent, towards the unfortunate souls who, through no fault of their own, must accept charity, would, make an amazing document. The distinguished Senator from Maryland, Millard Tydings, recently commented before an investigating committee that he could not understand why so many Negroes are on relief. One of the major topics for private conversations at luncheon clubs throughout the country is, why is there such a disproportionate number of Negroes on relief? "Off-therecord" conclusions most frequently reached and disseminated are that Negroes are shiftless, lazy, indolent, and irresponsible. The basic factors behind this crucial problem are seldom considered and never studied. For the purpose of providing a basis for discussion on this complex and comprehensive subject I shall limit my paper to: (1) The extent of the problem; (2) Discriminatory practices; (3) Apparent pauperization of Negroes and lowering of morale; and (4) Work relief projects.