Supreme Inequality

Chapter  1

Protecting the Poor

In the spring of 1968, Sylvester Smith, of Selma, Alabama, asked the Supreme Court to restore her welfare benefits. The thirty-four-year-old Smith, a widow with four young children, worked from 3:30 a.m. until noon as a waitress and cook and picked cotton in her time off, but she earned only about $20 a week. She supplemented her wages with about $29 a month in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a federal cash assistance program for low-income families with children, jointly administered by the federal and state governments. When a tough new caseworker named Jacquelyn Stancil took over her case, Smith was told that she and her children were no longer eligible for benefits, because of information the state had received from an anonymous source. The problem, Stancil said, using the terminology of the day, was that there was a "man in the house."

Alabama was one of eighteen states with a "man in the house" rule, which denied welfare benefits to mothers who were having sex with a man on a regular basis. In Alabama, a man who visited frequently "for the purpose of cohabiting with" the mother, or met with her elsewhere for sex, was deemed a "substitute father" and obligated to support the family. The rule was meant to save the government money, but it also reflected the view that, as The New York Times put it, welfare was "an inducement to immoral behavior, especially among Negroes." Alabama's top welfare official defended the man-in-the-house rule by saying that a mother who lost her benefits could always choose "to give up her pleasure" and "act like a woman ought to" to get them back.

Stancil had received a tip that Smith had a boyfriend who visited her home-a shack on the outskirts of Selma-on weekends. Smith did have a boyfriend, a married man named William E. Williams, but, like many of the men who visited welfare mothers, he had little money, and he had a wife and nine children of his own. Williams gave

Adam Cohen, who served as a member of the New York Times editorial board and as a senior writer for Time magazine, is the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review.

Cohen s sweeping review is impressive and necessary. . . . Supreme Inequality makes an important contribution to our understanding of both the Supreme Court and the law of poverty. New York Times Book Review
 
Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Supreme Inequality is a howl of progressive rage against the past half-century of American jurisprudence. Cohen . . . builds a comprehensive indictment of the court s rulings in areas ranging from campaign finance and voting rights to poverty law and criminal justice. Financial Times

Cohen s ambitious, well-written book makes a convincing case that the court has contributed to growing inequality through its rulings on everything from election law and education to corporate law and crime. Christian Science Monitor

[A] tour guide such as Mr. Cohen is invaluable. He understands both the what and the why of the court s past 50 years. Whereas the average citizen might feel that the Supreme Court ensures fairness for all, Mr. Cohen s book demonstrates how it has become a court of the 1 percent, not the 99 percent. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Cohen persuasively argues that . . . [the] Supreme Court helped to create the income inequality that has become a defining (and grotesque) feature of contemporary America. His trenchant, gripping, and surprisingly accessible account guides readers through a slew of ruinous rulings that warped the Constitution. American Prospect

Cohen s lucid writing makes even the most difficult court cases understandable as he expertly details the evolution of the law in areas as diverse as the workplace, criminal law, campaign contributions and the corporate boardroom. Cohen s greatest strength, however, is his ability to explain clearly and urgently how the court, supposedly the least political of the three branches of the government, has relentlessly pursued a political agenda that has made Americans less equal and less secure.