Showing papers in "The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in 2011"

The Politics of Economic Crises: The Panic of 1873, the End of Reconstruction, and the Realignment of American Politics

Abstract: On September 18, 1873, the announcement of Jay Cooke and Company's bankruptcy sent Wall Street to a panic, and the country to a long, harsh depression. Americans interpreted this economic crisis in the light of the acrimonious financial debates born of the Civil War—the money question chief among them. The consequences transformed American politics. Ideologically ill-equipped to devise cohesive economic policies, political parties split dangerously along sectional lines (between the Northeast and the Midwest). Particularly divided over President U.S. Grant's veto of the 1874 Inflation Bill, the Republican Party decisively lost the 1874 congressional elections. As a Democratic majority in the House spelled the doom of Reconstruction, the ongoing divisions of both parties on economic issues triggered a political realignment. The dramatic 1876 elections epitomized a new political landscape that would last for twenty years: high instability in power at the national level and what has been described as the “politics of inertia.” Therefore, by closely following the ramifications of the 1873 panic, this article proposes an explanation of how an economic crisis transformed into a pivotal political event.

What the Progressives Had in Common

Abstract: When Professor Benjamin Parke De Witt of New York University sat down to write the first history of the progressive movement in 1915, he promised “to give form and definiteness to a movement which is, in the minds of many, confused and chaotic.” Apparently it was a fool's errand, because confusion and chaos continued to plague historians of early twentieth-century reform long after Professor De Witt laid his pen to rest. The maddening variety of reform and reformers in the early twentieth century has perpetually confounded historians' efforts to identify what, if anything, the progressives had in common. Back in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter charitably allowed that progressives were “of two minds on many issues,” whereas Arthur Link argued that “the progressive movement never really existed” because it pursued so many “contradictory objectives.” In the 1960s, Robert Wiebe concluded that the progressives, if they constituted a movement at all, showed “little regard for consistency.” In the 1970s, Peter Filene wrote an “obituary” for progressivism by reasserting Link's claim that the movement had “never existed” because it was so divided and diffuse. In the 1980s, Daniel Rodgers tried to recast the “ideologically fluid” progressive movement as a pastiche of vaguely related rhetorical styles. By the 1990s, so many competing characterizations of progressivism had emerged that Alan Dawley wondered if “they merely cancel each other out.” In 2002, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore declared emphatically that “historians cannot agree” on progressivism. In 2010, Walter Nugent admitted that “the movement's core theme has been hard to pin down” because progressivism had “many concerns” and “included a wide range of persons and groups.”

Writing African American Migrations

Abstract: Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson's A Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser's Sea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

Women's Reform Organizations and Wartime Mobilization in World War I-Era Los Angeles

Abstract: During World War I, the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense served as an intermediary between the federal government and women's voluntary associations. This study of white middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen in Los Angeles, California reveals ways in which local women pursued twin goals of aiding the war effort while pursuing their own, pre-existing agendas. Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women's suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.

From the “ornamental and evanescent” to “good, useful things”: Redesigning the Gift in Progressive America

Abstract: This article examines the transformation of American gift giving in the early twentieth century, using prescriptive and trade literature, as well as individual stories. This transformation occurred within the context of the transition from a Victorian to a modernist ethos and from a production to a consumption orientation. Changes in gift-giving practices were shaped by Progressive Era hygiene and home economics reformers and by aesthetic movements such as Arts and Crafts and interior decoration. Gift reformers divorced the gift from the Victorian ideal of ornamental and sentimental items, asserting that a gift's beauty lay in its functionality. This transformation fostered a second shift in the ideology of the gift. Rather than the giver's knowledge of and sentiment toward the recipient determining gift selection, the recipient's needs and desires increasingly dictated the choice. The gift thereby became more consumer-oriented. This change paved the way for the gift registry, which provided a commercial forum where prospective gift recipients could list their preferences.

Public Influence inside the College Walls: Progressive Era Universities, Social Scientists, and Intercollegiate Football Reform

Abstract: At the height of the Progressive Era a number of social scientists, educational leaders, and politicians called for the reform of intercollegiate football. Since the 1880s football had become a popular spectacle, and many were concerned that it was corrupting the country's universities and college men. This article considers the progressive movement to reform football in the context of programs to make the modern American university useful at the turn of the century—including the Wisconsin Idea of state government developed in Madison and the University of Chicago's sponsorship of settlement houses, social work, and university extension. Although many progressives wanted the university to affect society, most were less enthusiastic about the prospect that elements of that society (what Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner dubbed “public influence”) would affect the university. Social scientists theorized the relationship between the university and the public and constructed an intellectual basis for football reform. Reforms proposed and in some cases adopted demonstrated ambivalence regarding football's academic and public role. Reformers wanted to preserve the popular, profitable, and potentially educational enterprise of football, but they also hoped to curtail its influence over burgeoning universities. The Progressive Era effort to control college football and channel it into constructive directions in many ways demonstrates the paradoxical nature of Progressive Era reform and inadvertently contributed to the institutionalization of “big time” intercollegiate athletics.

A Storm of Cheap Goods: New American Commodities and the Panic of 1873

Abstract: Historiography of an International Crisis The Panic of 1873 is a perennial topic for American historians, in part because it serves as one of the boundary lines for what historians think of as modern America. It is the beginning of the end of Reconstruction; it is the explanation for the so-called Great Strike of 1877; it has stood as a convenient starting point for industrial histories of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cyrus McCormick. The trouble with this story is that it begins in September of 1873 and credits the entire thing to the failure of Jay Cooke and his speculative railroad venture, the Northern Pacific Railroad. How this worldwide panic could have started in the United States and somehow spread to Europe is seldom discussed. As an Americanist who has written about railways, I have always been uncomfortable with that argument and had a sense that there was a missing international dimension. After all, in the 1870s there was a lot of European capital— British, Prussian, and Dutch—in the U.S. bond market. This was in fact the distinction between stocks and bonds going back to the 1820s: Stocks were owned by Americans, bonds mostly by Europeans.

Just Poor Enough: Gilded Age Charity Applicants Respond to Charity Investigators

Abstract: This article examines the strategies used by charity applicants of the 1880s to present themselves in ways most likely to win relief from the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society (COS), while also preserving autonomy from an organization willing to use threats of starvation or institutionalization to force compliance from the poor. Investigators treated charity applicants as objects to be scientifically observed and categorized and then molded to conform to middle-class mores, but the applicants’ responses ranged from accommodation to complete defiance. Successful applications to the COS ultimately depended more on the vagaries of the investigator than on the strategies chosen by the applicant. Those applications often led to decisions that illustrate the draconian, punitive tendencies suggested by the leading theoretical treatises in the scientific charity movement. However, they also reveal instances where charity applicants guided investigators toward more generous decisions.

The 1903 Skinner Mission: Images of Ethiopia in the Progressive Era

Abstract: This essay examines the 1903 U.S. diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, which offers an unusual perspective on racial attitudes in the Progressive Era. Desirous of exploring new trade possibilities, the Theodore Roosevelt administration sent Robert P. Skinner to Addis Ababa to sign a reciprocity treaty with Emperor Menelik II. The timing of the mission had much to do with Roosevelt's global interests, but it happened to occur at a critical point for Ethiopia, which had recently thwarted an attempted Italian invasion. This victory delighted African Americans, especially those with a pan-Africanist perspective. Black Americans had long identified with the idea of Ethiopia, but they now identified with the actual nation and its leader. Black writers argued that the Ethiopians had triumphed over modern racism when they triumphed over the Italians. Those involved in Skinner's trip had a different view of the racial implications of Ethiopia's success. To them, the victory was that of a Semitic people whose triumphs were less startling. When talking about Ethiopia, black and white American observers revealed more about their own preconceptions and hopes than about the country to which the United States was making overtures.

Courage, Careers, and Comrades: Theodore Roosevelt and the United States Army Officer Corps

Abstract: Theodore Roosevelt made reform of the U.S. Army Officer Corps a priority during his presidency. He felt compelled to act because of the problems that the army experienced during the war with Spain. As a volunteer soldier, Roosevelt had witnessed the shortcomings of many of the top-ranking officers in meeting the physical and organizational demands of the fighting, but he also acted because he wanted high-minded, intelligent, and physically fit leaders who could inspire his fellow citizens to a greater sense of duty in post-frontier America. Roosevelt's efforts to promote promising army officers to top commands and mandate physical fitness standards would prove disruptive, as he elevated officers out of the normal line of promotion. These practices would, in turn, generate protests in Congress and from within the military. The resulting controversies would cause Roosevelt to fall short of his goals for improving army leadership, roil civil-military relations, and demonstrate his limits as a political leader.

The Ethnic and Racial Side of Robert M. La Follette Sr.

Abstract: The conundrum of Progressive Era reform flowering simultaneously with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the introduction of European immigration restriction fascinates historians, even as it agitates them. From a contemporary, post-civil-rights-era perspective there is something deeply disturbing—and disappointing—about progressivism and racial and ethnic bigotry apparently going hand in hand. Was progressivism inherently racist and ethnically chauvinistic, or are we dealing simply with a case of practically minded politicians bowing to bigotry to achieve political results? An investigation of the ethnic and racial side of Robert M. La Follette Sr. hardly promises to answer this question fully. The progressive movement remains well-nigh impossible to pin down in exact analytical terms. Still, it may be argued that La Follette was an unusually uncompromising politician who proved willing, at least during the latter part of his career, to sacrifice practical results for idealistic principles. If La Follette's progressivism was of a purer strain than that of many a result-oriented pragmatic politician, was it less bigoted?

The Eyes of Anna Held: Sex and Sight in the Progressive Era

Abstract: The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

Introduction: Reflecting on History when Markets Tumble

Abstract: The authors of the works-in-progress in this issue all began their research before the 2007–08 crisis. Like all historians, we struggle with imaginatively reconstructing the lived experience of the dead. As readers will see, we use the familiar objects of historians: dispatches, letters, published speeches, novels, voting counts, census returns, and cartoons. However, as the recent crisis hit its crescendo, our narrations about speculative bubbles, financial panic, business failure, depression, and tramping became sharper. These stories became more familiar. Our revisions of these works have rendered certain conflicts more apparent and unsettling.

Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa

Abstract: In the area that would become the German colony of Togo in West Africa, cotton booms and busts intersected with transatlantic struggles for economic freedom and political autonomy. In the period between the American Civil War and the First World War, this region of Africa began recovering from the Atlantic slave trade, established new forms of political and economic autonomy, and saw these new forms crushed with the growth of European colonial states. Like much of the world, this area had produced cotton for local textile production since antiquity. The forced integration of this local cotton production into a world market in raw cotton fiber dominated by industrialized core capitalist nations was part of a larger global struggle over the control of labor. This struggle led to a series of emancipations of bonded labor—serf and slave—and the imposition of new forms of control including sharecropping, factory supervision, and colonial rule.1

“Great Injustice”: Social Status and the Distribution of Military Pensions after the Civil War

Abstract: In recent years, historians have paid increased attention to the Civil War pension system created for Union army soldiers and their families. It has come to be seen as a milestone in the evolution of U.S. social policy. Despite the overall appearance of generosity and of unbiased treatment for applicants, however, individuals actually experienced the system very differently based on the social status of the soldier involved. Looking at pension legislation, its implementation, and nearly one thousand pension claim files, this article argues that three types of status discrimination appeared in the distribution of pensions: Pension laws paid larger amounts to officers and their families, the Pension Bureau used ability to perform manual labor to determine the level of disability regardless of the applicants' true ability to earn a living, and claims based on the service of officers generally were decided more quickly and more favorably than those of enlisted men. Because military ranks reflected the soldiers' civilian social position—most manual laborers served as enlisted men, for example—these biases meant that individuals of higher social status received significantly better treatment than those of lower civilian status.

La Follette’s Autobiography: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Glorious

Abstract: La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.

From the German Schoolmaster's Psychology to the Psychology of the Child: Evolving Rationales for the Teaching of History in U.S. Schools in the 1890s

Abstract: The rationale for teaching history proposed by most professional historians in the 1890s was based on faculty psychology—the theory that the mind was composed of mental faculties such as memory and will that could be strengthened like muscles. However, over the course of the decade this approach was gradually replaced by a functional approach to mind and society, which had roots in the new psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. This development was accompanied by a pedagogical shift in learning theory from an emphasis on exertion of the students' will to engaging students' interest. John Dewey, William James, and the American followers of German pedagogical theorist, Johann Frederich Herbart, directly challenged the faculty psychology of the German-inspired professional historians but still placed history at the center of their pedagogical schemes. As a result, history gained a central place in U.S. elementary and secondary curriculum during these years, but paradoxically the new psychology gradually eroded the influence of professional historians on the curriculum, because they failed to acknowledge these emerging pedagogical and psychological theories.

Emancipation and Reconstruction on New Ground - Leslie A. Schwalm Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xii + 387 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-5950-6.

Abstract: It is the limited pool of characters that is both this work’s greatest strength and aggravating weakness. By concentrating on only a small group of Gilded Age movers and shakers, Spencer presents a simple argument that moves quickly and supports its assertions. At the same time, however, it feels maddeningly incomplete given the lack of opposing viewpoints. The other half of the story is missing. Ultimately, Banquet at Delmonico’s provides a streamlined narrative that serves well as a general introduction to the subject of Social Darwinism and its adherents, but anyone looking for more depth into the philosophy or its advocates and opponents will need to look elsewhere.

The New Negro and Social Democracy during the Harlem Renaissance, 1917–37

Abstract: This essay focuses on the conception of social justice devised by A. Philip Randolph, noted socialist, co-founder of The Messenger, and organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Frank R. Crosswaith, a general organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and one-time Messenger correspondent, in the aftermath of World War I. Weaving together a socialist critique of modern industrial society with a powerful vision of human freedom and equality, Randolph and Crosswaith articulated a distinctly egalitarian conception of social justice that asserted the equal right of all to benefit from society's advances. Arguing that genuine social justice was predicated on the open participation of all, they fashioned a program of reform that drew on black racial identity to frame their vision of class consciousness and, in so doing, planted the roots of an independent strain of black radicalism that was not intellectually beholden to whites. Although historical writing on the New Negro recognizes the importance of Randolph and to a lesser degree Crosswaith, this writing overlooks their innovative thought and its philosophical and political basis.

Contested Childhoods: Chinese American Children and the Politics of Immigration and Assimilation Wendy Rouse Jorae. The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiii + 295 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8078-3313-1; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5973-5.

Abstract: white supremacist and insists that once he was president, Wilson “put any ethnic and religious prejudices he ever felt far behind him” (410). Nevertheless, he also describes Wilson as easily accepting the “customary racial inequalities and indignities of the time” and as unable to recognize African Americans “as fellow children of God” (411). Cooper suggests this failure to see racism as a sin may have stemmed from Wilson’s Presbyterian aversion to “mixing religion in politics,” but this point seems a bit strained (411). In any case, Wilson embraced the racism of the period and actively reinforced it, marring not just his moral stature, as Cooper laments, but severely limiting his concept of democracy at home and abroad as well.

New Looks at Workers' Response to Industrialism Theresa A Case. The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor. College Station: Texas AM $27.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-15505-2.

Abstract: CASE, THERESA A. The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. xii + 279 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-60344-170-4. ENYEART, JOHN P. The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”: Rocky Mountain Workers and American Social Democracy, 1870–1924. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. xvi + 326 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-4986-2. SCHMIDT, JAMES D. Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiv + 279 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-19865-3; $27.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-15505-2. doi:10.1017/S1537781411000387

Women and the State, in Sickness and in Health - Jennifer Lisa Koslow. Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. vii + 204 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8135-4528-8.

Abstract: Jennifer Lisa Koslow’s exploration of municipal public health is set against the backdrop of Los Angeles during its boom years at the turn of the twentieth century, when the city lured new arrivals with the promise of health-uplifting sunshine. In this ostensibly health-infused locale, white middle-class women reformers’ actions underwrote the expansion of municipal responsibility for citizens’ health. First, these women established intellectual and bureaucratic frameworks ripe for government appropriation. They then deployed maternal and scientific arguments to compare the limitations of private endeavors to the advantages of governmental institutionalization. Patient-clients, a very different group of women who were impoverished, immigrant, or socially marginalized, negotiated for a version of public health that acknowledged some rights to privacy and private interests that might otherwise have been overwhelmed in the course of reformers’ enthusiastic cleansing of individuals’ bodies and homes. Although men—as officeholders, physicians, fellow reformers, and patients— are not without agency in Koslow’s narrative, it is women to whom she attributes the greatest share of responsibility for the domain and shape of municipal intervention in public health.

Not So Invisible Women: Catholicism and Female Power in the Progressive Era - Kathleen Sprows Cummings. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009

Abstract: in the form of memoirs and other personal accounts from Chinese Americans. One limitation of Jorae’s approach, and a limitation that plagues scholarship that tries to disaggregate experience from discourse in general, is that many of the accounts she uses to document the reality of Chinese childhood invariably conformed to prevailing notions of what was respectable. For example, Jorae does not address the experiences of children in boarding houses, where male Chinese adolescents lived with kin or on their own, working as laundrymen and servants. These domestic arrangements served as a primary object of scorn for reformers and anti-Chinese politicians alike, and one wishes that Jorae would raise the question of whether such living conditions were as corrupting of Chinese youth as respectable society made them out to be.3 Still, this book offers an excellent account of how children matter in the history of Chinese immigration.

The Politics and Desires of Wage-Earning Women Lara Vapnek. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. x + 216 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03471-8; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-525-07661-9.

Abstract: industrialists/financier merchant, the premium lobbyist, the middling lobbyist, the two-bit claims agent” (107). She notes two additional types who became influential only after the Civil War, women and reporters. She also makes a cautious defense of the lobby. In the years after the Civil War, she argues, the lobby had some corrupt members but “its emerging new style was more subtle, more focused on providing information than bribes, and more social” (5). It served an important function by helping the people influence what had become a far more powerful federal government. Its own reputation resulted from its being a handy “scapegoat” in explaining government corruption (130). In both her account of Ward’s life and the history of lobbying, Jacob’s observations are judicious, although some readers may think that, like Ward, Jacob has a generous spirit. Anyone interested in Washington and Congress during the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction or the history of lobbying will benefit from, and enjoy, King of the Lobby.

To Make This Beautiful Theory Practical Kevin C Armitage. The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America's Conservation Ethic . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. viii + 291 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1673-2.

Abstract: Near the end of his December 1899 lecture at the annual Farmers’ Convention in Connecticut, Cornell University professor of horticulture Liberty Hyde Bailey made reference to an emerging nature study movement. Nature study, Bailey told his audience, was a means to open a “man’s mind to the conditions in which he lives,” putting him into sympathy and harmony “with everything that is,” giving him a desire for knowledge instead of cramming his mind with facts, and giving him a new horizon and a wider and broader view on life. In the ensuing discussion, the president of the Connecticut Board of Agriculture asked Bailey “what kind of practical application he would make of this last principle to which he alluded relative to boys and girls starting in the world and making a living.” Noting the poverty that existed in rural communities, the president expanded his question: “If we are going to have these very fine theories of putting ourselves in harmony with nature and the world around us, we somehow must have clothes on our backs, and we must have shoes on our feet . . . I only ask this question to know how we are to go to work to make this beautiful theory practical?”1

Gilded Ages, Progressive Lives Cecelia Tichi. Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us) . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xviii + 382 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-3300-2.

Abstract: anti-modern, oppressed, or opposed to social change. Instead, she shows them in a far more nuanced light, stressing the importance of taking such women seriously rather than treating them as anti-feminist, antireform stock characters. In making this appeal, New Women of the Old Faith joins Maureen Fitzgerald’s Habits of Compassion (2006), a study of nineteenth-century Irish Catholic nuns working in New York’s welfare system, and Anne M. Boylan’s Origins of Women’s Activism (2002), which examines Catholic laywomen’s public activities in the antebellum United States. Like the subjects of these books, Cummings’s True Women may not fit comfortably into prevailing narratives of Progressive Era women’s activism, secularization, and feminism, but that does not mean that they do not belong.