Showing papers in "The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in 2014"

A Social Gospel for India

Abstract: This article discusses the ways that secretaries in the U.S. Young Women's Christian Association (USYWCA) used the Social Gospel to create a type of imagined community, which I call Y-space, in India. In the United States, USYWCA secretaries emphasized Social Gospel ideals such as the personal embodiment of Christ-like behavior, inclusivity, and working for the progress of society. In India, USYWCA secretaries used these same ideas to try to make Y-space an alternative to both the exclusive, traditional, British imperial “clubland” and the growing Hindu and Muslim nationalist movement. Instead, they promoted an idealized Americanized Anglo Indian/Christian woman who would engage in civic matters and embody Christian values, and serve as an alternative to the British memsahib, and the Hindu nationalist woman. Despite the USYWCA's efforts to distinguish itself from British imperialists, the secretaries' attempts to create these Americanized Indian women reveals that that the USYWCA supported transforming Indian society according to imposed Western models, in much the same way as the British.

Empowering the Physical and Political Self: Women and the Practice of Self-Defense, 1890–1920

Abstract: First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.

“Them's Fighting Words”: Violence, Masculinity, and the Texas Cowboy in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Violence inevitably plays a part in discussions of the cowboy, historical or mythical. Traditionalists celebrated his manly fighting as what tamed the West and saved American manhood; revisionists have castigated the brutality with which he dealt with Native Americans and the environment. It is important, however, to consider what purpose violence served for the cowboy himself. To the working-class cowboy, violence could preserve social harmony, both through defending personal honor and through regulating social behavior of women and minorities. Its use was a clear marker of masculinity, as it allowed him both to show his equal worth with the men around him and to maintain social hierarchies that gave him an advantage over other people. The middle- and upper-class townspeople and cattlemen around cowboys, however, increasingly saw violence as counterproductive. Although parents encouraged aggression in boyhood, they thought that in order to become a real man, one should learn proper restraint and channel that aggression into socially acceptable activities. More and more, respectable ideas of maintaining social order left no room for violence, and consequently cowboys faced increasing social regulation of their masculine self-identities.

Reflections on Conventional Portrayals of the African American Experience during the Progressive Era or “the Nadir”

Abstract: This essay, a slightly revised version of the distinguished historian address presented to SHGAPE in April 2013, suggests that millennial learners are oftentimes inadequately introduced to the African American experience during the Progressive Era, a period that historians of the black past, sampling from Rayford W. Logan's 1954 opus, customarily call “the Nadir” or “the lowest point” in the African American struggle for social justice. When discussing the Progressive Era, normative U.S. history textbooks at high school and college and university levels tend to relegate blacks to the margins of cultural and historical change, minimize lynching and other forms of anti-black violence that characterized the period, and endorse the archaic W. E. B. Du Bois–Booker T. Washington dichotomy of black leadership at the expense of oversimplifying and even denigrating Washington's accomplishments and legacy. On the other hand, specialized African American history textbooks and monographs equip their readers with critical interpretations that challenge what historian Manning Marable called the “master narrative of American history.” In this essay, I offer my thoughts on these subjects and propose some basic suggestions for more effectively teaching, problematizing, and thinking about the African American experience during the complex Progressive Era.

Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and in Ours

Abstract: A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.

Nature, the City, and the Family Circle: Domesticity and the Urban Home in Henry George's Thought

Abstract: This essay provides a reexamination of Henry George by focusing on how ideas about gender and nature informed one of the key objectives of the George movement: the transformation of the Gilded Age city into a metropolis of working-class suburbs tied together by single-tax funded public transportation. George was hardly a conservationist, and his understanding of nature was very different from those urban elites who sought to preserve nature. He simply did not accept the conservationist notion of depleted resources, which was inconsistent with his natural law belief in a boundless nature, a point that in turn grew out of the producerist emphasis of his political economy. Yet, George appreciated the need for a nonproductive relationship with nature, and he and his followers articulated this in terms of developing a healthier and more moral domestic environment. He applied such thinking to his political efforts in New York City during the mid-1880s, condemning the moral as well as the physical consequences of overcrowding that he blamed on land speculation. George enthusiastically embraced emerging transportation technologies as facilitators of mass residential decentralization. In so doing, he articulated a vision of a thoroughly reconfigured city that integrated nature into family life by enabling the development of a more spread-out metropolis.

“A Perilous Venture for Democracy”: Soldiers, Sexual Purity, and American Citizenship in the First World War

Abstract: This essay examines the influence of the social purity movement on the U.S. government's campaign to protect servicemen from the temptations of drink and illicit sex during World War I. This influence had been forged in the context of U.S. imperialism in the two decades prior to American entry into the war, as purity reformers linked the sexual morality and temperance of soldiers serving in occupied territories overseas to racial purity and national character at home. War Department policymakers who were allied with the purity movement likewise understood male moral restraint and sexual self-control to underpin democratic self-governance. This linkage between civic virtue and moral virtue was especially problematic at the outset of the war, as many native-born Americans (progressive policymakers included) questioned whether all members of the ethnically and racially diverse nation had the capacity for self-government. The goals of social purity and wartime policymakers were thus aligned as the War Department launched its crusade against liquor and sexual vice within the military. Government officials required moral sobriety of servicemen in order to remake the body politic. But even as they demanded virtuous conduct from the man in uniform, they simultaneously infantilized the “soldier lad” in their effort to safeguard him.

The Disappearance of Emily G. Balch, Social Scientist

Abstract: Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the “objectivity” of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balch's case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.

Colonial Geographies, Imperial Romances: Travels in Japan with Ellen Churchill Semple and Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

Abstract: In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novels The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.

Long Live Teddy/Death to Woodrow: The Polarized Politics of the Progressive Era in the 2012 Election

Abstract: Two historic moments from the run-up to the 2012 presidential election might well stir the interest of readers of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era : December 6, 2011: President Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver what proved to be his signature speech about the economy. Indeed, former labor secretary Robert Reich called the address, “the most important economic speech of his or any modern presidency.” Obama castigated radical free marketeers, he vindicated communal bonds, and he upheld the great middle class. And the reason that the president traveled to the metropolis of Osawatomie? Because in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt had gone there to repudiate the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age and put forth his case for a progressive “New Nationalism” in an oration that White House press secretary Jay Carney characterized as “the speech that really set the course for the 20th century.”

“This Social Mother in Whose Household We All Live”: Berkeley Mayor J. Stitt Wilson's Early Twentieth-Century Socialist Feminism

Abstract: J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

If They Repeal the Progressive Era, Should We Care?

Abstract: These are extraordinary times for the study of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century United States. Commentators tell us that we are passing through a Second Gilded Age. Capitalism has produced levels of economic inequality unmatched since the first Gilded Age, while old battles from a century ago are being fought anew. Federal regulation of industry and finance, progressive taxation, corporate political influence, and union rights are once again flashpoints of a sharply polarized politics. During his reelection campaign, the president took to channeling Theodore Roosevelt as a progressive champion, while his conservative opposition make Presidents Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson special targets of vilification as they labor to repeal the reforms of the Progressive Era.

The Father of Modern Political Cartoons - Fiona Deans Halloran. Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xi + 384 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-6.

Abstract: imagination, but they do not present an altogether happy tale of American history. Instead, they employ new approaches and new archives to piece together a more accurate portrait of the story of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Factions vied for power, often bitterly. Racism and labor strife at times verged on class warfare, with capitalism and democracy seemingly tearing the nation apart. In the midst of this, however, people went about their daily lives, migrating to new places, attempting to take part in the political process, launching successful and failed business ventures, and working to create new cultural forms. In the midst of a seemingly chaotic era, Americans also came to appreciate certain kinds of poetry, art, and performance— sometimes for almost mystifying reasons—and on many other occasions with clear and overt symbolic meanings. People in this era also demonstrated an appreciation of certain aesthetic forms while a smaller number pointed to and questioned divisions that excluded non-whites from contributing to the active self-definition of the nation.

Regulatory Transformations in a Changing City: The Anti-Smoke Movement in Baltimore, 1895–1931

Abstract: This study of the Baltimore anti-smoke movement illustrates how Americans altered their approach to environmental regulation during the Progressive Era. After citizen groups came to recognize the limits of common-law regulation, they became enamored with administrative regulation and the promise of rationalized, professional agencies. While Baltimore did mirror the national regulatory trends, the city's unique circumstances limited its capacity to reduce the sooty, black smoke that provoked episodes of public activism. Fearful about the city's economic future, regulators exempted manufacturing from the city's early anti-smoke measures. Furthermore, although railroads were major polluters, they balked at electrifying the bulk of their tracks. Finally, the anti-smoke movement was narrowly based in the northeastern, more affluent parts of the city and failed to expand its support to working-class whites and African Americans. Hence, while the ideas about what constituted appropriate regulation “modernized” in Baltimore, the city did not alter its regulatory practices until the 1930s, long after other cities had done so:In the heart of a beautiful residence section of our city, there rises a towering factory structure in the most gruesome ugliness, belching volumes upon volumes of black and angry smoke, flooding our very houses with showers of soot…. It is the sworn duty of our legislators to protect the citizens in all their rights, and it is to be hoped that the crying need of protection from this unbearable smoke nuisance will now be recognized.—PH. H., February 28, 19012

Finding “ pax plantation ” at Camp Gordon, Georgia: Historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and World War I

Abstract: This article examines the World War I service of the University of Michigan historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934). Phillips worked first with black recruits as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and later as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer in Washington, DC. In these years, Phillips ranked as America's foremost authority on the antebellum South generally and of African American slavery in particular. In 1918 he published his landmark American Negro Slavery. While on leave from Ann Arbor, Phillips taught English and French, planned educational and recreational programs, and supervised the management and construction of buildings at Camp Gordon's segregated facilities. Phillips's daily interactions with black troops in the cantonment reaffirmed—at least as he saw it—his conclusions that North American slavery had been a relatively benign institution, his belief in the virtues of plantation paternalism and in the management of subject peoples by educated whites, and his attitude that contemporary race relations were generally harmonious. Phillips's observations of African American recruits validated his conviction that blacks benefited most from white-run, regimented organizations and strengthened his belief in economic assimilation and social segregation. His military intelligence work confirmed Phillips's overall commitment to conservative change, whether in foreign or race relations.

David Montgomery: A Labor Historian's Legacies

Abstract: When David Montgomery sat down for an extended interview with editors of the Radical History Review, Mark Naison and Paul Buhle, it was the spring of 1981. His career as an academic historian was on the ascent. He had moved from the University of Pittsburgh to a named chair at Yale. He was editor of what was becoming the foremost journal in the field, International Labor and Working-Class History. His studies of workers and Reconstruction and his explorations of workers' shop floor world had catapulted him to the front rank of practitioners of the “new labor history.” And he was deeply into what would probably rank as his masterwork, The Fall of the House of Labor, published six years later. But much of the interview as published dwelt on his background in the Communist Party USA and on his own shop floor experience as a militant rank and file machinist during the 1950s. His observations on the internal life of the party, as someone who did not hold a leadership position, were perceptive. But perhaps more telling for his own future work as a historian were his comments on the growing gap in the 1950s between the party and lives of workers. Vital as the “connection to the everyday struggles of Americans” may have been, he also recognized the value of “styles of social analysis that were rooted in the hard and complex realities of experience and away from phrase-mongering and dogmatic abstractions.” As the party unraveled in the 1950s and the leadership grew more isolated, he noted, “at my level of activity we continued from day to day doing our thing”

Passionate for Music: A Fin-de-Siècle Quartet - Joseph Horowitz. Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America's Fin de Siècle . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. xv + 263 pp. $41.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-26744-2.

Abstract: the cultural and political ties that other historians have charted regarding champions of Indian landholding, political and religious rights, and culture between the Blands’ day and Collier’s.2 This minority view never disappeared. It maintained a life throughout the allotment era and even more importantly, the basic sensibilities at its core eventually prevailed—became the dominant view—not only in the 1930s but from the late twentieth century to the present. Nor does the author make connections with the national critics of the pre-Civil War removal policies. Genetin-Pilawa’s deep research into the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Dawes Act is splendid. But by staying so closely tied to that era, he misses an opportunity to make larger connections and a broader point about the long history of contestation regarding Indian policy in this nation.

Making War Their Business: The Short History of Populist Anti-Militarism

Abstract: Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics. The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas. A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question. In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

The Financial Turn: Historicizing American Capitalism after the Great Recession. Levy Jonathan.Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America.Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press,2012. 432 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN978-0674047488. Ott Julia C.When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investor's Democracy.Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press,2011. 352 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN978-0-674-05065-5.

Abstract: During the fall of 2008, as the economy crashed and the phrase “too-big-to fail” entered the national lexicon, it became clear how dependent the U.S. economy was upon nebulous financial instruments such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. The rise of the financial sector partly reflected systemic changes in the nation’s economy. No longer acting primarily in support of industry and manufacturing, finance had become an end in itself. Dubious accounting practices, high amounts of leverage, and even greater amounts of risk brought billions of dollars to those who adroitly captured markets, secured cheap labor, and ruthlessly streamlined business operations. Concurrently, these same forces brought ruin to millions of others. It is now clear how a deregulated Wall Street, peddling worthless mortgage securities, inflated a housing bubble and, at least in part, caused the Great Recession. Meanwhile, historians have produced many effective studies on the decline of the nation’s industrial base, as well as the impact of globalization.1 Whether it was the oil shocks, the abandonment

A Life in Limbo: Laura Langford and Brooklyn's Seidl Society

Abstract: Though virtually forgotten today, Laura Langford was a major Gilded Age impresario whose Seidl Society—a singular Brooklyn women’s club that she founded in 1889—presented world-class concerts twice a day in summertime on Coney Island. Langford was also many other things, including a pathbreaking journalist and a prominent theosophist. As a subject of study illuminating the status of American women in the late nineteenth century, she is protean. Her significance may be gleaned by observing:

Bridging the Gender Chasm of Progressive Era Conservation - Susan Rimby. Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Conservation Movement. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. xii + 208 pp. $64.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-05624-1.

Abstract: Ramey’s conclusion compellingly traces the implications of the entrenchment of gender, race, and class inequalities in and by orphanages at the turn of the twentieth century for the evolution of child care since 1929. She argues that despite a few moments of national crisis when it seemed that the vision of child care as “temporary, unfortunate, and charitable” might be subject to change, the United States has remained overwhelmingly wedded to a racially biased family wage ideal, as well as to the expectation that child care is a private problem to be solved by individual families, rather than a legitimate public responsibility worthy of support by the state (199). As a result, “poor families, in particular, find themselves not far from the conditions of the 1880s, with few choices, long waiting lists, sometimes frightening conditions for their children, largely segregated care, and little public funding” (203). The latest round of cultural conversations about work-family “balance,” with its focus on privileged white women’s “leaning in” and “having it all” would benefit from a reckoning with the history Ramey recounts, if economic opportunity and access to high-quality, affordable child care are ever to be available for all working families.2

Singing Wagner to Navajos: Natalie Curtis's Journey From Classical Music to Native and African American Folk Songs

Abstract: On the evening of New Year’s Day 1903, Natalie Curtis, one of a “few privileged palefaces” who had led a group of about thirty Navajos to Pasadena, California, for the Tournament of Roses festival, sat down around the fire with her friends. She approached the interpreter for the Navajo delegation and asked, “If I sing for them will they sing for me?” Curtis recalled, “Something within me said, the Valkyries’ call from Wagner’s drama. It seemed an inspiration, for I imagined that Brunhilde’s wild cry would be something like the Indians’ own music.” She asked the interpreter to explain the story of “the people across the seas” who “believed that there were warrior maidens, who rode swift horses, but not on the ground, as do the Navajos but through the sky.” The song, she explained, drew from the notion that “when the people saw the black stormcloud they thought it was the maiden in the sky, and when the lightning flashed they thought they saw her spear.”2

Not for Women. Goodier Susan. No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. ix + 272 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-03747-4; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07898-9.

Abstract: Susan Goodier begins her study of New York State anti-suffragist women in 1894, when they first organized in order to give the lie to Susan B. Anthony’s claim that New York women “do not oppose” the ballot. She follows them all the way through 1927, later than other scholars, who have ended similar studies in 1920. Goodier argues that the New York State “Antis” were “the most dynamic and influential” of all the organized anti-suffragists in the country, notably “more politicized” than their counterparts in other states (9). They also exercised more national influence, she argues. For example, New York women took the lead in forming the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage in 1911, an event that took place in a Park Avenue drawing room. Women who actively opposed their own enfranchisement have certainly been studied before. In fact, there is an extensive literature on the anti-suffragists, including five books and a number of articles.1 Goodier would have done a service to her readers if she had provided a comprehensive survey of that earlier work and positioned her book more clearly in relationship to it, especially since other scholars have used a state focus, and her work is implicitly and often explicitly comparative. As it is, historiography is relegated to the footnotes, yet only parts of this book make truly original

“The People's Prima Donna”: Emma Abbott and Opera for the People

Abstract: Editor’s Note: This forum began with a session jointly sponsored by SHGAPE at the 2012 Society for American Music conference in Charlotte. The session, which had the vague and winding title, “Women Cultural Activists at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” brought together historians and music scholars who had spent years researching and writing about three characters who illustrated different ways that women involved themselves with and become prominent in music between the Civil War and World War I: singer and entrepreneur Emma Abbott, clubwoman and impresario Laura Langford, and ethnographer Natalie Curtis Burlin. Each woman’s relation to music as an art, business, and set of institutions was clearly Victorian or Gilded Age in character and yet a precursor to routes into music or stances adopted by women in music across the twentieth century. Curtis, a scholar and professional, adored music as a transporting art with the ardor one associates with late nineteenth-century youth. Langford, an institution builder, publicist, and philanthropist, repeatedly reshaped her identity and life story in a manner commonplace in the nineteenth-century United States. Abbott’s carefully preserved image of Victorian respectability and evangelical piety was both sincerely felt and central to the public relations side of her enterprise, which depended on making opera accessible and acceptable to middle-class Americans.

The Great Sidetrack War: In Which Downtown Merchants and the Philadelphia North American Defeat the Pennsylvania Railroad, 1903–19041

Abstract: On November 21, 1903, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that its north-south through trains would no longer enter Broad Street Station in downtown Philadelphia and would stop instead at West Philadelphia. Nor would the company sell tickets from that station to downtown. These schedule changes, which seemed minor to the company and were intended to reduce congestion in the central city, threatened downtown merchants and manufacturers who worried that buyers would shift to more accessible cities. Philadelphia had been sidetracked, the North American reported. The result was an eruption of boycotts, protests, and petitions that pitted nearly every local trade association against the railroad. Encouraged by the North American's editorials, partisan reporting, and stinging cartoons, the protesters forced the Pennsylvania to back down, and in March 1904, through trains returned to Broad Street. The newspaper cloaked this local business dispute in the language of antimonopoly, linking the fears of small businessmen to national anti-railroad concerns. The sidetrack episode also helped launch modern corporate public relations, as the Pennsylvania—stung by this threat to corporate autonomy—soon hired Ivy Lee as its first publicity agent.

Serving the Nation's Racism - Eric S. Yellin Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xi + 320 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-0720-7.

Abstract: “Discrimination in Washington was never merely another example of southern Jim Crow: it was evidence of the white supremacy at the heart of the nation” (206). This statement, at the end of Eric S. Yellin’s Racism in the Nation’s Service, highlights a key portion of the book’s main argument—that the trajectory of racial discrimination in the capital was at once similar to and different from what one might find elsewhere in the early twentieth century. Yellin’s work operates at the intersection of political, economic, and social history, examining African American civil service workers’ attempts to navigate the shifting sands of racial segregation and patronage politics. In so doing, it complicates and clarifies historical understandings of the theory as well as the practice of Jim Crow, particularly in the nation’s capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival and manuscript collections, as well as government documents, Yellin makes the case that racial discrimination on the state and federal levels did not completely thwart employment opportunities for black Americans. Despite the arrival of Jim Crow in Washington after 1912, African Americans remained well represented in federal employment. Yellin’s work asserts and demonstrates that African Americans were never simply passive victims; they attempted to bend traditions of patronage to their benefit. Moreover, they exercised political agency in resisting white supremacist threats to their employment and acts of humiliation and intimidation in the workplace. In this sense, Yellin’s examination continues important revisionist work