The provision of welfare in the United States was transformed in the 1930s as county-based relief efforts collapsed under the burden of massive and sustained unemployment. The system of federal-state partnership that emerged in its place developed less through systematic and conscious planning than as the accidental result of a process of trial and error driven by the interaction between federal government officials and their counterparts in the states. In Kansas in the Great Depression Peter Fearon offers a careful examination of how efforts to address the pressing needs of the unemployed evolved in one state, Kansas, over the course of the 1930s.