Showing papers in "The Journal of American History in 1984"

Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925

Abstract: "We dream, we work, we wake!" declared Artemas Ward, one of America's first great advertising geniuses, in 1892. "The world seems real only when it answers to our individual touch. Yet, beyond our touch, beyond our waking, beyond our working, and almost in the land of dreams, lie things beyond our present thought, greater, wider, stronger, than those we now lay hold on. To each a world opens; to everyone possibilities are present."' Ward captured here what I wish to develop at much greater length in this essay on the culture of consumption and women. America at the close of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the next was, indeed, a land of "possibilities" and "dreams" that flowered within the heart of a new culture and that had the power to change older patterns that had hitherto distinguished the behavior of many women. As recent historical study of women has so consistently shown, nineteenthcentury middle-class Americans viewed women as dependent, emotional, deeply religious, and sexually pure beings who were supposed to tend the domestic fires and to bear and rear children. Men, on the other hand, were thought of as stalwart citizen-producers, family providers, rational people who found personal fulfillment in public life and in the individual ownership of property. The public life was male, and individualism a male legacy that only a few women dared claim as their own. By 1915 that older paradigm had been deeply weakened by the transformation of work. Men now received wages and salaries in factories or in ever-expanding corporate and bureaucratic structures, while many women had entered the work force, some finding jobs in the new consumer, service-oriented industries.2 Alongside those changes in work emerged a vast culture of consumption. Forged by merchants in the company of enthusiastic politicians, reformers,

American Collegiate Populations: A Test of the Traditional View

Abstract: American Collegiate Populations is an exhaustive and definitive study of the membership of American colleges and universities in the nineteenth century. Colin B. Burke explores the questions of who went, who stayed and where they came from, presenting as answers to these questions a mass of new data put together in an original and interpretive manner. The author offers a devastating critique of the two reference works which until now have commanded scholars' attention. Burke examines Bailey Burritt's Professional Distribution of College and University Undergraduates (1912) noting that Burritt's categories oversimplify the data of the 37 institutions he studies. Donald G. Tewksbury's American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (1932), the author explains, presents a skewed interpretation of collegiate decline in the antebellum period. Using a far larger data base and capitalizing on the advances in quantitative history made in the last decade, Burke adopts appropriate analytic categories for college students and their subsequent careers. Amierican Collegiate Populations thus becomes the referent work to replace Burritt and Tewksbury and will likely have an equal longevity in print. American Collegiate Populations systematically compares denominational colleges, colleges by region, and student groups from a host of angles - age entering college, geographical origins, parental occupations. subsequent careers, and professional choices. Burke shows the reach of American colleges back into the socio-economic fabric of the culture. a reach that carries implications for many subjects - religious, economic, social, and intellectual - beyond the mere subject of college alone. Few works force the re-thinking of a whole field of historical inquiry - particularly one that has important bearings on current policy - as Burke's study does. The findings and implications presented in American Collegiate Populations will profoundly affect the scholarly community for decades to come.

Eisenhower, Dulles, and Dienbienphu: “The Day We Didn't Go to War” Revisited

Abstract: America's role in the Dienbienphu crisis of 1954 has been a source of persisting confusion and controversy. In a Washington Post story of June 7, 1954, subsequently expanded into a Reporter article provocatively entitled "The Day We Didn't Go to War," journalist Chalmers M. Roberts divulged that the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration had committed itself to a massive air strike to relieve the Vietminh siege of the French fortress at Dienbienphu. The United States would have intervened in the Indochina War, Roberts went on, had not the congressional leadership, after a secret meeting on April 3, made intervention conditional on British participation and had not the British refused. In their memoirs British and American officials confirmed some of Roberts's account. French memoirists went further, charging that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), had proposed an air strike to save Dienbienphu, had even proposed the loan of atomic weapons, and then had callously reneged, sealing France's defeat in the war. On the other hand, administration officials at the time and Eisenhower later insisted that they had never seriously contemplated military intervention in Indochina. Eisenhower conceded only that he had attempted to put together an allied coalition to resist Communist encroachments in Southeast Asia but had been thwarted by the British. 1

Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women's Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797–1840

Abstract: Historians have long recognized the importance of organizations in women's history. From a pioneering 1940 article by Mary Bosworth Treudley, through the work of Eleanor Flexner, to recent works by Nancy F. Cott, Keith E. Melder, and Barbara J. Berg, scholars have outlined the basic pattern of women's organizational beginnings. By 1800 the first permanent women's societies, such as the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in New York, the Boston Female Asylum (founded in 1800), and women's missionary groups had appeared on the urban scene. Members of those societies combined an interest in social meliorism with an emphasis on social deference while also exhibiting concern for the spiritual welfare of those whom they aided. During the 1810s and 1820s, under the influence of the Second Great Awakening, there formed new women's organizations whose members sought first to alleviate spiritual want, then to deal with temporal deprivation. Through Sunday school, tract, Bible, and missionary societies, women labored to convert the objects of their attention as well as to minister to their daily needs. During the late 1820s and 1830s, more actively reformist, even millennialist, women's organizations developed. The New-York and the Boston Female Moral Reform societies worked to reform prostitutes and to eradicate the sexual double standard; female abolitionist societies sought immediate emancipation of slaves; and groups such as the Seamen's Aid Society, Boston, became actively involved in the problems of working women. 1

From Activism to Apathy: The American People and Nuclear Weapons, 1963-1980

Abstract: Writing in 1981, George F. Kennan described Americans' response to the threat of nuclear war thus: "We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea. " 1 Eloquent as it is, Kennan's generalization is not wholly applicable. Americans have not always behaved like lemmings in confronting the nuclear danger; their engagement with that threat has gone through several distinct cycles of activism and apparent passivity. When directed to the years from 1963 to the late 1970s, however, Kennan's observations seem chillingly accurate. In those years public involvement with the nuclear weapons issue sank to a low level indeed. This article explores some of the sources of nuclear apathy during that protracted interval. Our starting point is September 24, 1963, when the Senate ratified with overwhelming approval the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty agreed on earlier in Moscow. The treaty also won enthusiastic public and journalistic support. David Lawrence, of the conservative United States News and World Report, wrote: "There's a new word in the vocabulary of the day-or at least a more noticeable use of an old word-euphoria." Even I. F. Stone, a skeptical, leftwing Washington journalist not easily given to flights of enthusiasm, observed: "Peace has broken out, and hope leaps up again." The treaty did not halt all tests; underground nuclear explosions were still permitted. Nevertheless, it was welcomed as the beginning of a process that would ultimately free the world of the nuclear menace. Expressing the prevailing view, the New York Times hailed the agreement in a front-page banner headline as a "Major Step toward Easing Tension. ' 2

On Seeing and Not Seeing: A Case of Historical Invisibility

Abstract: It is a truism, yet one easy to forget, that people see most easily things they are prepared to see and overlook those they do not expect to encounter. A sensitive artist will see things at the Louvre invisible to the casual visitor from the tour bus; one mark of a good novelist is the capacity to notice things most people overlook. Charles Darwin, voyaging as naturalist with HMS Beagle, began to see things his companions had not, and his friend Thomas H. Huxley remarked: "To a person uninstructed in natural history, [a] country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, ninetenths of which will have their faces turned to the wall. " Historians, looking at the past, do not see all that is there. "I sing of arms and the man," said Virgil, summing up not only the theme of the Aeneid but also the idea of history shared by many of his forebears and successors. The Anglo-Saxon chroniclers were attentive to heroes, wars, dynasties, genealogies, eclipses of the sun, and plagues but overlooked virtually everything else that was going on. For a long time the dictum "History is past politics" told historians what to look for-and what to ignore. In American history we are familiar with the phenomenon of the historian who calls attention to something hitherto overlooked and, by so doing, teaches others to have a broader vision of the past. Frederick Jackson Turner electrified a generation when he examined some of the consequences of the frontier experience, processes that had been going on in the Western Hemisphere for four centuries when he delivered his paper in 1893. Before Arthur Schlesinger,

Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800-1880

Abstract: A spate of recent scholarship confirms that Coxe's was indeed a hymn for the times. The images of the book of Revelation that inspired his song were virtually ubiquitous among nineteenth-century Americans. The Apocalypse prompted a few, such as the followers of William Miller, to expect the early end of the world and inspired many more in the mainstream denominations to promote revivals, missionary work, and other benevolent causes as a way of inaugurating the Kingdom of God on earth. Spilling into the secular realm, millennialism sometimes motivated social reforms (as well as opposition to them) and provided a major way in which Americans defined their country as a Redeemer Nation. In the 1860s the Civil War demonstrated how deeply millennial symbols had sunk into the collective psyche as writers and ministers seized the images of the Revelation to portray the struggle as an Armageddon of the Republic.2

Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Woman's Party

Abstract: ly and legalistically; her interest in international organization was spurred by Belmont's grandiose visions of an "International Parliament of Women." Belmont lived in France from 1920 until her death in 1933, and Paul constantly curried her favor to keep financial support flowing. Although the extent of Belmont's power over NWP decisions is not clear-some members regarded her as an old crank-she held the office of president for years and unquestionably had her greatest influence in fostering the party's international efforts. Here she not only goaded Paul but also kept Doris Stevens, a shrewd and effective activist, at her beck and call. At the Sixth Pan American Conference in Havana, Cuba, in January 1928, Stevens injected the NWP point of view into the discussions of the Inter-American Commission on Women and continued to serve vociferously on the commission for more than ten years.42 -Hooker's dispute with Jane Norman Smith in 1933-1934 and an intraparty schism that shortly resulted manifested a crisis that had been building since 1928 because of such factors as action at the top, disregard for inviting or involving membership participation, and more distant and more legalistic application of the concept of equal rights. Those practices dimmed the beacon of the NWP's feminist ideas, beset anyway by the depression economy. Hooker noted early in 1934 that the treasury for the previous year showed five or six hundred paid members. But Hooker's attempts at that point to build up the state organizations and to collaborate with other women's groups on aims they shared were flattened by "the most spectacular exhibition of autocracy, " Hooker herself said. "The steam roller plied back and forth. " Another member who saw galvanizing more women as a priority also had "practically no hope that it will be given any serious thought by any considerable group of the leaders; for these leaders are too largely made up of pioneers who are gripped by conservatism. They will not face facts.... One's having been 'jailed for the CAUSE' seems to make one an oracle. " In forming a vanguard party, Paul seems 42 For the NWP's international work, see Becker, Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment, 161-86. For the NWP's difficulties under Franklin D. Roosevelt's administrations, see Jane Norman Smith to Paul, Feb. 26, 1933, folder 115, Jane Norman Smith Collection. For the National Council's positive and ingratiating response to Alva Belmont's query whether she was the head of international as well as domestic work of the NWP, see National Council, National Woman's Party, minutes, Oct. 9, 1928, Jan. 15, 1929, reel 114, part C, series 2, "National Woman's Party

Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900

Abstract: In his provocative analysis of southern exceptionalism, The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash searched for the meaning behind the skyscrapers that Progress, New South style, had built among the stark and simple red clay hills of the Carolina Piedmont. In particular, the Charlotte-based journalist sought to explain how Babbittry and Rotarianism could thrive in a region where hundreds of rustic yeomen had rallied behind scores of proud planters to defend slavery and the southern way of life just over a half-century earlier. Unlike the filiopietistic school of Progressive historians who praised the rise of the New South as "the progress of a mighty people, " Cash was not deceived by the seductive and self-congratulatory rhetoric of New South propagandists. Cash, after all, wrote his epic during the crippling depression of the 1930s, or the "Great Blight," as he preferred to call it. He had only to look around his native Piedmont to see farmers battling both boll weevils and bankruptcy or to view part of the region's "cracker proletariat" walking out of the textile mills on strike. Moreover, just three years before his book was published, Cash heard the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration label the South the "nation's number one economic problem." With poverty and wrenching class tensions so visible all around him, Cash knew that the champions of the New South Creed had promised far more than they had delivered. Still, despite, or perhaps because of, the New South's failings, Cash remained intrigued by the rapidity with which a new business civilization had been grafted onto the remains of the Old South. ' Ultimately, after grappling with the issue through several hundred pages of eloquent and often emotional prose, Cash concluded that the emergence of the New South was a testimonial to the persistence and adaptability of the Old

Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s

Abstract: If, as most behavioral scientists maintain, the dynamics of minority group acculturation and assimilation are crucially influenced by the assimilationist aversions of majority groups, the fact remains that historically most AfroAmericans and Jews in the United States have themselves insisted that acculturation must not lead to assimilation. Indeed, both Jews and AfroAmericans have tended to cling to reinforcing ideologies to conceal or to deny the assimilative process whenever it begins to operate with great efficacy. As a fact of social life, acculturation invariably tends to lead to assimilation, but it is not inevitable that the former process end in the latter-in self-denial and the disappearance of ethnic group identity through dispersion and intermarriage.1 Most Afro-Americans and Jews have not wanted to disappear; this article is concerned with those who did. The argument, simply stated, is that there was a time when a small number of socially powerful and politically privileged Jews and Afro-Americans embraced an ideology of extreme cultural assimilationism; that, although this ideology was emphatically not without paradox and illogic, its ultimate consequence entailed the abandonment of identity; and that these two elites-one, wealthy and of primarily German-Jewish descent; the other, largely northern, college-trained Afro-American-reacting to threats to their hegemony both from within and from outside their ethnic universes, decided to concert many

An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms

Abstract: Military service should be the responsibility of every citizen, advised Niccolo Machiavelli in The Art of War, but soldiering should be the profession of none. Freedom and military might could coexist only when military service merged with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Machiavelli derived his insights from the past. While Rome thrived, "there was never any soldier who made war his only occupation." Citizens bore arms in defense of the state, motivated by a commitment to the common good and officered by the nation's most respected individuals. Roman liberties succumbed to tyranny only when citizens allowed professional soldiers, unmoved by a sense of the common good, to subvert the military power of the state to their own self-interest. Hence, Machiavelli concluded, "a good man [would] not make war his only profession"; nor would a "wise prince or governor ... allow any of his subjects or citizens to do it." A well-governed commonwealth "should take care that this art of war should be practiced in time of peace only as an exercise, and in the time of war, only out of necessity and for the acquisition of glory. " Most important, the military force of society should be used only in the service of the common good: "If any citizen has another end or design in following this profession [of war], he is not a good man; if any commonwealth acts otherwise, it is not well governed."' Some 250 years later, the people of the United States incorporated the essence of the great Florentine political theorist's ideas into the language of the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. " Despite the militia's poor showing during the revolutionary war, few Americans could imagine a republican government without citizens trained to arms. As the armed expression of civil authority, a militia deterred foreign aggressors while it eliminated the need for a potentially oppressive standing

The Great Debate: Roosevelt, the Media, and the Coming of the War, 1940–1941

Abstract: For almost eighteen months before the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the United States had been edging toward confrontation with the Axis powers. Diplomatic and economic pressures on the Japanese moved the nation inexorably toward a showdown in the Pacific, while aid to Britain and naval policy in the Atlantic ultimately brought confrontation and conflict with Germany. As administration policy unfolded, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought public approval for measures short of war while preparing the American people to accept and to support total involvement should it become necessary. His leadership produced a surfeit of information and images suggesting the threat of Nazi aggression and the success of America's mobilization effort. But the president tended to be uncommunicative or vague on many policy issues and deliberately sought, with the collaboration of the mass media, to avoid controversy and to stifle national debate. The result was that when war did come, a great many Americans remained uncertain of the circumstances (beyond the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) that led them into global conflict. ' Roosevelt's public information strategy reflected in large measure the ambiguous situation he confronted. Historians are uncertain to this day of Roosevelt's intentions. Did he intend all along to take the nation to war, or simply to contain Adolf Hitler and the Japanese warlords by interventionist measures short of hostilities? David Reynolds argues persuasively that Roosevelt may never have been certain of the role the United States would play in the world conflict.2 If that is true, as seems likely, Roosevelt was not in a position to argue forthrightly either the necessity of American involvement in the war or the certainty that supplying Hitler's enemies would make it unnecessary. In refusing to commit himself publicly, he was reflecting his fear

The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change

Abstract: In 1915, on hearing of the Rockefeller Foundation's desire to set up a medical school in Peking, Paul Reinsch, the United States minister to China, remarked approvingly that the foundation's plans were "in full accordance with the traditions of our past relations with China, where the activities of our people have been religious, cultural and educational in a far greater measure than they have been commercial." Reinsch's comment highlights two key elements of the relationship between the United States and China: the vital role that policymakers assigned to the cultural dimension of that relationship; and the conviction that the management of cultural contacts was properly a nongovernmental function. The Rockefeller Foundation's attempt over the course of forty years to channel China's modernization in a liberal direction epitomizes the marriage of national interest and private policymaking. At the same time, the Rockefeller experiment in the management of ideas also provides an example of how an important aspect of United States foreign relations can be understood "less from the study of diplomatic correspondence in government archives than from an examination of extragovernmental forces. " ' Despite the fact that the bulk of its expenditures would be made in medicine, the foundation always defined its purposes in sweeping civilizational terms that transcended its seemingly narrow focus on medical matters. That expansive outlook first became evident in the educational origins of its China program, which articulated the cultural objectives that would become the hallmark of its handling of Chinese affairs. In October 1906 Ernest DeWitt Burton

Research Note/Issues in Wilson Scholarship: References to Early “Strokes” in the Papers of Woodrow Wilson

Abstract: Any evaluation of Woodrow Wilson's neurological status prior to his severe stroke in the fall of 1919 is necessarily speculative. The patient is not available for examination, many of his medical records are missing, and some of the records most critical to diagnosis are known to have been destroyed. The published memoirs and the unpublished diary of Cary T. Grayson, Wilson's physician from the time he entered the White House until his death in 1924, are helpful, but the data are largely anecdotal and say little about Wilson's health prior to 1912. Surviving letters and other documents containing Wilson's own frequent references to his health and other people's observations about it are suggestive but not conclusive. ' Why, then, should three nonhistorians trouble historians with an article on

The CIO at Bay: Labor Militancy and Politics in Akron, 1936-1938

Abstract: CIO buttons "sprouted on overalls, shirtwaists, and workers' hats and caps ... badges of a new independence. Labor was on the march as it had never been before in the history of the Republic." Thus did Edward Levinson capture the excitement and potential of the union upsurge of the mid-1930s. Between 1936 and 1938 industrial unionism and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) became important innovative forces in American society. They transformed the labor movement and industrial relations, influenced the American political life, and raised hopes and fears of a unified working class. Yet Levinson emphasized only one side of the events of 1936-1938. At its height the industrial union movement revealed unexpected weaknesses. It lost organizing campaigns and strikes, suffered rebuffs, and failed to consolidate its power. By 1939-1940 Levinson's imagery was outdated if not inaccurate. Although the reasons for the reversal are as numerous and as imprecise as the membership of the CIO in the late 1930s, one conclusion seems inescapable: CIO men and women were neither so united nor so determined as Levinson's language suggested. The workers themselves bore much of the responsibility for the relative fall of the CIO.I The limits of labor power were nowhere more evident than in the 1937 CIO campaigns to extend the workers' influence from the union hall to city hall. In cities of all sizes, CIO leaders attempted to flex blue-collar muscles at the ballot box by electing local government officials. Their efforts, built on union