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With some exceptions, the major project of civil rights litigators today is not forward movement but the work of preserving as much as possible the gains of the 1960s against legal and political battering.29 Meanwhile, and ironically, the rise of conservative progress metanarratives reflects the achievement of both liberal and radical scholars of forcing into mainstream discourse greater recognition of the evils of slavery and Jim Crow. Respectable conservatives now join in denouncing the most flagrant forms of racial terror running through the American past (pace certain allies of the Trump Administration). But doing so places them in a bind, for they also generally reject arguments that today's distribution of material blessings and life chances derives from past racial injustice in ways the law is bound or even permitted to worry about. To shimmy out of this bind, at least in the narrow realm of civil rights litigation, conservatives appeal not to their otherwise beloved past but instead to their own variation on twentieth century liberals' faith in the future.

Many accounts of Gideon v Wainwright s legacy focus on what Gideon did not do--its doctrinal and practical limits. For constitutional theorists, Gideon imposed a preexisting national consensus upon a few "outlier" states, and therefore did not represent a dramatic doctrinal shift. For criminal procedure scholars, advocates, and journalists, Gideon has failed, in practice, to guarantee meaningful legal help for poor people charged with crimes. Drawing on original historical research, this Article instead chronicles what Gideon did-the doctrinal and institutional changes it inspired between 1963 and the early 1970s. Gideon shifted the legal profession's policy consensus on indigent defense away from a charity model toward a public model. By 1973, this new consensus had transformed criminal practice nationwide through the establishment of hundreds of public defender offices and the expansion of lawyers' presence in low-level criminal proceedings. This Article describes these changes primarily through the example of Massachusetts, while contextualizing that example with national comparisons. The broad outlines of these post-Gideon changes are familiar to legal scholars. But situating these changes in a longer historical context and tracing them in detailfrom the perspective of lawyers on the ground in the 1960s yields two insights that help to explain the seemingly permanent post-Gideon crisis in indigent defense. First, the post- Gideon transformation was indeed limited in its practical effects, but its limits derived not only from politics but also from history-and from the legal profession itself Lawyers themselves, long before Gideon, framed indigent defense as low-status, low-pay, less-than-fullyprofessional legal work. That framing survived even as private charities became post-Gideon public defenders. Second, the post- Gideon transformation was also limited-or, perhaps, destined to be perceived as limited-by tensions inherent in the attempt to provide large-scale legal assistance through government ...