Showing papers in "The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in 2015"

Imperial openings: civilization, exemption, and the geopolitics of mobility in the history of chinese exclusion, 1868–1910

Abstract: By most measures, Daniel Augustus Tompkins was a highly unlikely opponent of totalized Chinese exclusion. The owner of three cotton mills and a New South booster editor, Tompkins presided over a racially segregated labor force and had much to say about the necessity of white supremacy for the progress of the South, the nation, and the world. So why, on March 14, 1906, did he testify before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressing his opposition to immigration officials' overzealous enforcement of legal barriers against Chinese immigration? Existing approaches to the racial politics of migration to the United States, which have emphasized the interchangeability of anti-black and anti-Chinese racisms in the nineteenth century, make it difficult to account for Tompkins' actions: they would lead us to expect that he would defend both complete Chinese exclusion and black subordination on similar racial grounds. This essay presents a new framework for conceptualizing migration, empire, and the politics of social differentiation that, among other things, will make sense of this seemingly unlikely intervention by a New South industrialist and racial ideologue in U.S. immigration politics. This framework brings together two traditionally separated fields of inquiry: migration history and imperial history. By revisiting Chinese exclusion (and its seemingly odd critics) through an imperial lens, it hopes to demonstrate the value—indeed, the necessity—of connecting these two approaches in the larger effort to entangle U.S. and global histories.

Disorderly doctrines: religion, race, and the fountaingrove sex scandal of 1891–1892

Abstract: In 1891, a moral reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched an aggressive crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a spiritualist utopian colony in Northern California with white and Japanese members. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, Thomas Lake Harris, of promoting “disorderly doctrines” with sexual practices “worse than those of Mormonism.” This essay uses the little-known Fountaingrove scandal to examine the interrelationship of religion, race, and sexuality in California. As a mixed-race new religious movement accused of sexual immorality, Fountaingrove transgressed prevailing norms in multiple ways. The colony became Orientalized in the public imagination, showing how new religions and non-normative sexual practices were coded as racially other. Yet media representations of Fountaingrove reflected more than straightforward “yellow peril.” The Japanese members of Fountaingrove inhabited several unstable categories at once, viewed as neither “heathen” nor Christian, neither adults nor children, neither white nor Chinese, shedding light on the uncertain religio-racial status of early Japanese immigrants to the United States. The scandal also reveals the racist dimensions of white female reformers' attacks on male dominance. The wide range of public response to Chevaillier's campaign, from moral disgust to amusement to apathy, gives evidence of the cultural fissures beginning to break open in fin de siecle America.

“a deaf variety of the human race”: historical memory, alexander graham bell, and eugenics

Abstract: Alexander Graham Bell stood at the intersection of two late nineteenth-century American social developments. First, a nascent deaf community, threaded by residential schools and the use of a shared visual language, began to form by the 1850s, drawing deaf people into regular interaction and intermarriage. Second, the American eugenics movement, determined to eliminate perceived social problems through reproductive restrictions, came to prominence as the century neared its end. Bell's role in publicly connecting these two historical threads has earned him the approbation of the American deaf community and historians of disability.This article examines Bell's words and actions closely over thirty years to argue that a combination of Bell's own hubris and historians' tendency to conflate two aspects of his complex attitude toward disability has distorted historical memory. Bell feared that difference alone led to inequality, and he hoped that society could be improved through informed reproductive decisions. Ultimately, Bell found himself entangled in an alarming eugenic environment and sought to thwart eugenicists who would interfere with deaf reproductive rights.

American master narratives and the problem of indian citizenship in the gilded age and progressive era

Abstract: American Indian people fit poorly into the sweeping stories most commonly told about American history. Puritan-inspired stories of national origins and Turnerian frontier narratives cast Indians as outsiders whose role was to be dispossessed and then disappear. More recent counter-narratives of conquest and of redemptive struggles for citizenship allow Native actors important and autonomous roles, but are also premised on a teleology of assimilation and civil rights that flattens the complexity of Indian uses of U.S. citizenship rights. The history of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, shows how the paradox of Indian citizenship is central to stories about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.

Enduring legacy: u.s.-indigenous violence and the making of american innocence in the gilded age

Abstract: On Sunday, May 1, 2011, in a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, President Barak Obama informed the American people and the world that Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born founder of Al Qaeda, had been killed in a firefight with United States Special Forces. The announcement came nearly a decade after the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent and often frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in framing the moment, President Obama evoked the enduring notion of American innocence in its wars of aggression. “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and it started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens,” he said. “Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved one to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.”2 And that evening, in the midnight darkness of a moonless night, crowds gathered outside the White House, in Time Square, at Ground Zero, and on street corners and in pubs across the country, and they celebrated. They waved flags. They lit candles. They sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” And they chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A!”3 With its celebratory assertion of justice making, discourses of American innocence permeated news of the death of Osama bin Laden. But as details of the daring raid began to emerge, notions of redemptive violence toward foreign terrorists began to mingle in uncomfortable ways with the legacy of U.S.-Indigenous violence in America. Americans soon learned that the twenty-three Navy SEALs, their interpreter, and their Belgian Malinois named Cairo had traveled from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to Abbottabad, Pakistan, in two modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, named after the famous Sauk warrior. They also learned that three school bus-sized Chinook heavy-lift helicopters supported the operation. But perhaps most tellingly, Americans learned that the code name used for Osama bin Laden himself was “Geronimo,” after the Bedonkohe Apache leader who confounded American military capture for decades in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. “For God and Country—Geronimo,

Double-voiced: music, gender, and nature in performance

Abstract: Double-voiced singing was a popular form of variety show entertainment from the 1860s through to the 1920s. Double-voiced performers were able, through intonation and tone, to sound as though they had at least two separate and distinct “voices,” generally one soprano and one baritone. But as Claire Rochester, a double-voiced singer of the early twentieth century made clear, their act was more than just a matter of a woman singing low notes or a man singing high ones; it was all about a performer adopting the “voice” of the other sex. The unusual practice of these singers was to sing duets (and sometimes as much as quartets) to themselves and by themselves, flipping back and forth between their male to female “voices.” I place this strange form of entertainment in the context of changing attitudes to gender and sexuality and suggests that conventional interpretations of “freak” performances as “transgressive” fail to account for these vocal wonders. Double-voiced singers shunned the “transgressive” billing, especially when their own sexual identity was called into question. In making this argument, I suggest that we need to widen our understanding of “freakery,” imposture and the meaning of “nature” and “truth,” as they were revealed both on stage and off.

A church divided: roman catholicism, americanization, and the spanish-american war

Abstract: Standard accounts of American Catholic history generally note in passing that American Catholics supported the Spanish-American War but do not examine what reasons provoked them to do so. At the same time, recent literature on the war itself has described various factors that motivated American support, but few of these studies have noted the central role that religion played in Americans' interpretations of the conflict. This article brings these two historiographies together by showing the importance of the war for the Catholic Church in America as well as the significance of religious belief for how many Americans understood the conflict. In particular, providentialist interpretations of the war held by a large number of Catholics reveal a crucial moment in the church's process of Americanization. Yet more importantly, this article focuses on the significant number of Catholics who steadfastly opposed the war, demonstrating the contested nature of the Americanization process. Ultimately, this article maintains that skepticism concerning the righteousness of the American nation motivated antiwar Catholics' resistance to prevalent American attitudes. By integrating American Catholics into our understanding of the Spanish-American War, this article sheds new light on the development of fin de siecle American Catholicism and on the war itself.

Anti-corruption in american history

Abstract: What will it take to get Americans to do something about political corruption? I mean the deep corruption of politics and policy now caused by massive campaign contributions, by lobbyists who bundle those contributions for political candidates and then influence the policy decisions of elected officials, by the revolving door between public office and lucrative private employment, and—through all these instruments and more—by the influence of wealthy individuals and interests over the agencies and institutions of government. Some people say this is just American politics as usual: money is inevitable in public life, and anyway it's all perfectly legal. Sadly, those who say this are, at this moment, winning the argument. Writing for the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), Justice Anthony Kennedy opined, “It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.” Cementing the case, says the Court, is the First Amendment, which protects political speech and political dollars.

RHETORIC OF THE STANDARDS: THE DEBATE OVER GOLD AND SILVER IN THE 1890 s

Abstract: In the 1890s, questions about whether to base the American currency upon gold or silver dominated public discourse and eventually forced a realignment of the political parties. The matter often confuses modern observers, who have trouble understanding how such a technically complex—even arcane—issue could arouse such passions. The fact that no major nation currently backs its currency with precious metal creates the suspicion that the issue was a “red herring” that distracted from matters of far greater importance. Yet the rhetoric surrounding the “Battle of the Standards” indicates that the more sophisticated advocates of both sides understood that, in the financial context of the 1890s, the contest between gold and silver not only had important economic implications but would substantially affect the future development of the United States.

Transformation in the tabernacle: billy sunday's converts and emotional experience in the progressive era

Abstract: Millions of Americans watched the evangelist Billy Sunday preach during the years 1905–1935, and many were profoundly affected by the experience. Using letters, published and unpublished reminiscences, and other primary source documents, this article reconstructs the emotional experience of Sunday's converts and offers insights into the meaning of conversion and followership in Sunday's and other similar social movements. Through their emotional responses to the evangelist, followers recast socioeconomic problems and community pressures as personal, internal crises that could be resolved through adherence to Sunday's principles. The process of conversion was considered and volitional; it was also a long-lasting act of self-fashioning. Americans who converted in Sunday's tabernacles thoroughly reinvented themselves as followers of Sunday and then set out to remake society according to the evangelist's goals. Generalizing from these insights, the article argues that followership of inspirational leaders was a site of significant agency for Progressive Era Americans. It also identifies emotional experience as a way for historical figures to translate cultural trends into concrete social action. The article concludes by calling for additional research into how emotions shape and condition historical change.

The battlefields of personal and public memory: Commemorating the Battle of Saratoga (1777) in the late nineteenth century

Abstract: The commemoration of the Battle of Saratoga (1777) a century after the pivotal Revolutionary victory illuminates the imbrication of public and personal memory in the politics of late nineteenth-century patriotic commemoration. The fiscal challenges faced by the white elites who stewarded the project and the compromises they were forced to make expose the uncertainties of public commemorative projects, a theme overlooked in foundational scholarship on patriotic public memory. Given the frequent failure of monument projects in an era before governments led heritage planning, the significance of individuals to the fulfillment of ambitions warrants greater consideration. Using a microhistorical approach, this paper analyzes the Saratoga Monument Board members’ ambitions, promotional strategies, and improvisations, prompted in part by an issue unique to this Battle: how to deal with Benedict Arnold's significant role in the Americans’ victory over the English? The Board's sole female trustee, Ellen Hardin Walworth, confronted a similar challenge: how to remake her life after surviving a scandalous domestic tragedy? The interweaving of their stories and strategies highlights the ways in which the cultivation of Revolutionary memory served both political and personal attempts at reconstruction without fully managing to resolve the conflicted past. Thus, scholars must factor individuals’ unique connections to the past into the broader structural characteristics of patriotic commemoration in histories of public memory and its orchestration.

Working Out Their Economic Problems Together: World War I, Working Women, and Civil Rights in the YWCA

Abstract: This article examines how a group of Black and White YWCA staff members seized the opportunities of World War I to advance a racial justice agenda through Young Women's Christian Association programs for working women. First, they created YWCA program work for thousands of Black working women that paralleled the YWCA's Industrial Program, which followed YWCA segregation policies. Second, they made claims for social justice based on Black women's labor contributions, in contrast to both earlier reformers' focus on elite Black women and other wartime activists' focus on soldiers' service. Finally, in a period best known for White people's violent resistance to Black advances, they fostered a program culture and structures that encouraged White working-class women to view African American coworkers as colleagues and to understand racial justice as part of a broader social justice agenda. Arguing that interracial cooperation among working people was crucial to social progress, they made African American laboring women and White working-class allies both symbolically and literally crucial to wartime and postwar civil rights efforts. Their efforts contribute to our understanding of the changing discourse of “respectability” and the impact of World War I on the Black Freedom Struggle.

The tolerant populists and the legacy of walter nugent

Abstract: Published in 1963 and with a second edition in 2013, Walter Nugent's The Tolerant Populists challenged and overturned an interpretation of the American Populist movement, largely associated with Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, which portrayed the People's Party as backward looking, reactionary, irrational, antisemitic, and nativist. The Tolerant Populists demonstrated the Populist movement to be forward looking in its advocacy of statist economic reforms later adopted by progressives. In addition to this particular intervention in the literature, The Tolerant Populists, as it marked a turn in the 1960s to writing history from the bottom up, also more generally shaped the historiography of Populism by emphasizing the local social, cultural, and political roots of the movement; the movement's appeal to marginalized Americans in the 1890s; and the reasonableness of its policy measures to ease economic suffering. Moreover, the new edition critiques the continued use in popular media of lower-case “populism” to describe modern anti-statist movements that bear no resemblance to the movement of the 1890s. Finally, Walter Nugent forwarded the historiographical emphases in The Tolerant Populists to influence, in his later scholarship, the wider history of monetary policy, American demographic and social history, immigration, the American West, and American empire building.

The mini-beast—george h. butler (1838–1886)

Abstract: George H. Butler was a Gilded Age writer, diplomat, and soldier, who was also a poster boy for what Richard Stott identifies as the “jolly fellow.” Butler parlayed a witty writing style to enter journalism, and with the help of his influencial uncle, Benjamin Butler, he obtained a diplomatic posting as consul general to Egypt. Overly fond of alcohol, George Butler participated in several newsworthy fights, often involving deadly force. His life serves as an archetype for out-of-control manliness, which was contrary to gender expectations of polite society in 1870s America.

Eric foner's “reconstruction” at twenty-five

Abstract: What follows is a written reproduction of a forum held at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in San Francisco in April 2013. The forum commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Kate Masur (Northwestern University) organized and introduced the discussion, and the commentators in order of speaking were the following: • Heather Andrea Williams, The University of Pennsylvania• Gregory P. Downs, City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York• Thavolia Glymph, Duke University• Steven Hahn, The University of Pennsylvania• Eric Foner, Columbia University The written version on the following pages largely preserves the feel and tone of the original oral presentations by the contributors. However, given the opportunity for reflection inherent in the published word, the authors and editors have made some small changes to enhance readability.

Reflections on aileen kraditor's legacy: fifty years of woman suffrage historiography, 1965–2014

Abstract: This article assesses the impact that Aileen Kraditor's classic monograph, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965) has had on fifty years of suffrage historiography. Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the nineteenth century and the latter with the Progressive Era. Although specialists no longer believe in a firm divide between the two periods, many continue to differentiate between principled (egalitarian) arguments that called for suffrage as a universal right of citizenship and instrumental (expedient) claims that often contained racist assumptions about white women's superiority. The majority of scholars now accept Kraditor's fundamental insight that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic and racist elements, but they have challenged other key aspects of Kraditor's work, including her characterization of white southern women's advocacy of suffrage and her Turnerian assumptions about why statewide suffrage referenda succeeded first (and primarily) in the West. In addition, scholars have expanded the terrain of women's political activism to include analyses of black women's suffrage activities and understandings of citizenship; in so doing they have connected the regional histories of the South and the Midwest, displacing Kraditor's national narrative. Collectively the field has moved far beyond Kraditor's focus on the National American Woman Suffrage Association to emphasize the enormous range of suffrage activities that took place before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, demonstrating how woman suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the histories of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.

Creating community in the confines of “fine barbaric thrill”: joseph kekuku, a hawaiian manhattan, and the indigenous sounds of modernity

Abstract: “Toots Paka’s Hawaiians came into New York a little less than a year ago unknown and almost unannounced,” reported Variety in May of 1909; their first engagement at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the newspaper continued, “made the trio a recognized standard vaudeville number ... As a musical feature alone it is a striking entertainment. Two Native Hawaiian musicians coax amazing harmonic effects from their guitars, a style of melody that has a curious resemblance to that of the violin in its sweetness.”1 Although other Hawaiian steel guitar acts likely made it to New York before them, “Toots Paka’s Hawaiians” was the first to garner enough attention to warrant extensive reviews by vaudeville critics. Critics struggled to comprehend the sounds of troupe member Joseph Kekuku’s instrument. Developed and refined by Kekuku on O’ahu during the 1880s and 1890s, his innovation required the guitarist to lay the instrument across his or her lap, tune steel (as opposed to gut) strings to open chord voicings, physically alter the nut on the instrument’s neck in order to further distance the strings from the fretboard, and fabricate metal finger picks and a metal bar to generate tones from the strings.2 No one had seen nor heard anything like it before, and along with their spectacular mele repertoire and Toots Paka’s hula dancing, they generated extraordinary publicity. After wrapping up a stunning forty-week run with the biggest booking agency in town, they carried New York City in the palm of their hands.3 By 1916, Ka ̄naka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) guitar music, first entrenched in U.S. popular culture by the Paka troupe’s extensive U.S. tours and commanding New York performances, was outselling every other genre of recorded music in the United States.4 By the 1930s, tens of thousands of American boys and girls had enrolled in Hawaiian guitar schools across the country.5 In fact, the first electric guitar ever mass-produced was a Hawaiian steel guitar; and the most recognizable promoters of this new technology, with their faces plastered on promotional literature in music stores and trade shows, were Ka ̄naka Maoli.6 Presenting the guitar as a lead melodic rather than simply a rhythmic instrument in string band and other forms of popular music, Kekuku’s Hawaiian steel guitar quickly populated and reshaped the sounds of nearly

George herbert mead on terrorism, immigrants, and social settlements: a 1908 letter to the chicago record herald

Abstract: George Herbert Mead's advocacy of innovative social reform was not a distinct endeavor unrelated to his pragmatist social philosophy. In fact, the convergence of social philosophy and social reform is discernable in Mead's analysis of social settlements: an analysis that led him to conclude that settlements were indispensable social organizations for promoting cooperative living and civic progress within America's emerging industrial municipalities. For Mead, the settlement was the only social organization capable of understanding the immigrant's world and explaining that world to the nonimmigrant. In 1908, Mead wrote a letter to the Chicago Record Herald endorsing the work of social settlements. He composed the letter during an era when the violent actions of some political extremists (i.e., anarchists) seemed to encourage many native-born citizens to regard all immigrants as nascent terrorists and to treat organizations created to assist immigrants, such as settlements, with distrust and hostility.Most unfortunately, the Chicago Record Herald refused to publish Mead's letter. This article describes the historical circumstances that prompted Mead to write a letter in defense of settlements; it then reprints the original letter in its entirety, with annotations; and, it concludes by briefly noting the letter's significance in relation to Mead's other writings about social settlements.

Revisiting the birth of a nation at 100 years

Abstract: D. W. Griffith's seminal 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often approached as a paradox in that it embodies both an extreme commitment to white supremacy, on the one hand, and technical innovation and artistic vision, on the other. While its technique and aesthetics reached to the modern, revealing the promise of the still-new media of film, its celebration of racial oppression reached to the past, justifying and expressing nostalgia for a world in which white people wielded complete control over black people through a tight combination of natural superiority and unapologetic violence. As the essays in this forum underline, the film's modernism and its celebration of white supremacy not only happily cohabited, but reinforced one another. The film revived elements of nineteenth-century racism, and dressed them in the clothes of the modern.

From greenwich village to hollywood: the literary apprenticeship of sonya levien

Abstract: Sonya Levien (1888–1960) achieved a modicum of fame and fortune by writing stories and screenplays for Hollywood studios beginning in 1922 and ending only with her death. Her remarkable story began as the daughter of the immigrant working class and represents a narrative that took her from Greenwich Village to Hollywood. This essay explores her coming of age during the 1910s and, consequently, the process through which America invited those at the fringes to join in defining its national and civic creed. Herein lays the significance of Sonya Levien to an understanding of progressivism. By bridging the divides that separated Americans into groups defined by gender, class, ethnicity, and even politics, Levien engaged a number of the major issues of her day.

Dewey's “new education” and an alternative: reacting to the past

Abstract: Perhaps no aspect of the progressive movement has proven more consequential than its program for the transformation of education. Lawrence Cremin observed that by the midtwentieth century, progressive educational precepts had become “the conventional wisdom of American education.”1 Nowadays it is hard to find an elementary classroom that does not exhibit at least some of the techniques outlined in Dewey’s The School and Society (1899), his first of many manifestos for educational transformation.2 But why has higher education seemingly been unaffected by the progressive pedagogical revolution? Why do most professors—historians especially—adhere to the predominant pedagogical modes of the late nineteenth century—lectures and seminar discussions?3 The answer is twofold. First, Dewey’s conception of educational play for children was never all that successful: the counterrevolution against progressive techniques is partly predicated on the fact that the results have been disappointing.4 Second, Dewey insisted that education progressed according to a rigid developmental sequence. Dewey himself, and most of his critics, have focused on the education of young children; but Dewey’s developmental trajectory had profound implications for the education of teenagers and college students. And these ideas have done much to impoverish higher education.

Gatsby, the jazz age, and luhrmann land

Abstract: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is an unusual combination of realism and romance. Its realism is rooted both in its devotion to a historical moment and to the way in which the story is told, while its romance is located in the character of Jay Gatsby. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the novel, while presenting a superficially realistic picture of the “Jazz Age,” diminishes the narrative’s historical validity through its treatment of narrator Nick Carraway. Ironically, Luhrmann might have been able to make a much better picture had he not tried so hard to be faithful to the novel. Fitzgerald named the 1920s “the Jazz Age.” He was, of course, in part referring to the new popularity of the African American music, but “jazz” for him had a wider meaning. His 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” begins, “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war.”1 Fitzgerald dates the period from the repression of May Day demonstrations in 1919 to the October 1929 stock market crash, when “the most expensive orgy in history” came to an end. For Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age is characterized by changes in manners and morals, by the emergence of youth as a distinct category, and by excess. Fitzgerald himself was so powerfully identified with each of these and the Jazz Age, in general, that when it ended, critics and readers actively rejected him. He was never a simple celebrant of the period, but rather something like a participant observer who made and spent enormous sums of money and drank himself sick but who was able to write about the era with detachment. The Great Gatsby may be the best illustration of this dual role, since in it Fitzgerald seems to have divided himself into observer and participant. The observer is Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator who is characterized by moderation in his behavior as well as in his judgment of what he witnesses.2 Fitzgerald the participant in excess is represented by Jay Gatsby, though it is important to observe that Gatsby’s excesses are romantic rather than self-destructive. The genius of the novel is this division, which allows two very different visions to be represented and two different genres to be combined in the same novel. Nick’s observations give us a realistic vision and a novel of manners; Gatsby’s vision is romantic and his story is a romance both in the sense that it is about romantic love and in the sense that it is about a character who is larger than life and events that are far from ordinary. This combination was recognized by Richard Chase in his enormously influential The American Novel and Its Tradition, where he located The Great

“you look like a pied man”: murder in montgomery county, georgia, 1893

Abstract: In July 1893, three Croatan Indians from North Carolina (now known as Lumbee Indians) murdered a white man in the small town of Ailey, in Montgomery County, Georgia. The man, Alex Peterson, belonged to a prominent local family—locals named the town after his mother, and his assailants worked on his brother’s turpentine plantation. The murderers—their names were Hite Brewington, Lucian Manuel, and Hiram Jacobs—never denied their involvement with the crime and did not try to run far after committing it. Manuel and Brewington went back to work for William Peterson. Jacobs was found fifteen miles away, clean shaven; he bragged to a barber that he needed to shave his mustache because he “had got into trouble at Ailey and wished to disguise himself.” The barber took his money and told the police. The men probably did not even premeditate murder; young and impulsive, they simply panicked when they failed to intimidate Peterson and then mortally wounded him accidentally. At trial they confessed that they hoped to steal enough money to get home and open a saloon. To commit the robbery, the men disguised their faces by blacking them with burned cork, causing Peterson to remark “you look like a pied man,” when Lucian Manuel stepped across the threshold of his office, pistol in hand. “Pied” is a description of an animal, such as a cow or a dog, which is dappled, spotted, or multicolored. Because the robbers had blacked their faces imperfectly, leaving large areas of lighter skin showing around their eyes, undoubtedly they looked multicolored. When Peterson, apparently unruffled by the pistol, attempted to grab it, the robbers panicked and shot him four times. The newspapers reported that he died four days later, in the belief that his assailants were “white men blacked.” That notion sifted through the attitudes of elites in Montgomery County and beyond, as they caught, tried, and executed Manuel, Brewington, and Jacobs. After turning up no white men who could be linked to the crime, authorities figured out that the perpetrators were not in fact white, but were “Crowatanians, better known in this county as Scuffletonians.”1 I uncovered this incident in local newspapers as I was researching Croatan Indian migration to Bulloch County, Georgia, for the turpentine industry. There, Croatans formed a distinct community and sustained their identity as Indians around turpentine labor, farming, and their own separate school and church. Bulloch County whites recognized this community as Indian, and the “Crowatanian” label appeared to be a straightforward

Welfare state, settler state: ojibwes, social citizenship, and disaster relief in the great fire of 1918

Abstract: In October of 1918, a series of forest fires swept through northeastern Minnesota, destroying 38 communities. The fires, collectively known as the Fire of 1918 or the “Great Holocaust of 1918,” was among one of the worst forest fires in American history.1 It killed 453 people, injured 52,371 more, and destroyed $65–$73 million worth of property.2 The Fond du Lac Ojibwe Reservation was one of the communities decimated by the fire. Though no one from the reservation was killed, Fond du Lac Ojibwe suffered thousands of dollars worth of destroyed property. Like their white settler neighbors, they brought claims against the United States Railroad Administration (USRA) for compensation. But the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) paternalistically determined Fond du Lac people’s claims based upon whether they were legally citizens or determined to be noncitizen wards of the federal government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), moreover, insisted on suing on behalf of some Ojibwes. The fire took place during a critical period of transition—the Progressive Era—when some Americans pushed to expand the boundaries of American citizenship and personhood, or what historian Barbara Welke has termed “the borders of belonging.” In so doing, they formed the foundation of what later became the modern welfare state.3 These individuals argued that citizens had the rights to belong in a national community and to enjoy security and economic welfare through the state, or social citizenship. Advocates of social citizenship hardly got all that they wanted: citizenship in practice conferred formal political equality but little in the way of the security of such provisions as unemployment and health insurance, workplace safety, or economic security. Nevertheless, social citizenship advocates did manage to secure some economic and social protections for many classes of widows and orphans as well as expand the protections guaranteed by the state to some in organizing the workplace.4 A number of historians have explored how inequities based on race and gender shaped the meaning and boundaries of social citizenship for many Americans in the early twentieth century.5 Most notably, Alice Kessler Harris has asserted that the United States formulated welfare policy based on the assumption that breadwinners were white and male and that women were subsumed within the family.6 Such studies illustrate how the

Comments on wyatt wells, "rhetoric of the standards: the debate over gold and silver in the 1890s"

Abstract: Wyatt Wells redirects our attention to the“battle of the standards,”the central issue of the 1896 Bryan-McKinley campaign but with roots going back to the Civil War and Reconstruction. He contrasts opposing sides, labeled “goldbugs” and “silverites.” Often these labels identify Republicans on one side, Democrats and Populists on the other. Goldbugs concentrated in the Northeast, silverites in the South and West. Goldbugs included many bankers, merchants (especially in international trade), and bondholders, while silverites were often agrarians—not only farmers but rural businesspeople who shared the farmers’ ups and downs. And agrarians, both in where they lived and what they did, were still the majority of the American people during the decades in question. There were exceptions to all of these categorizations, but in general they identify the groups for which “goldbugs” and “silverites” are surrogate terms. The consistent policies and laws affecting money—from the Public Credit Act of 1869 to the 1893 repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act—effected “persistent deflation”

The birth of a nation, police brutality, and black protest

Abstract: On September 21, 1915, shortly before 10 p.m., a brick crashed through the glass window above the entrance of Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre. Instantly, the streets erupted into a “bloody scene” of the “wildest disorder.” Police charged with batons and revolvers. The crowd, which consisted mostly of black demonstrators, scattered. A few dashed for the building's main entrance. Hundreds more fled up Broad and Walnut Streets, the police at their heels. “Those who could not run fast enough to dodge clubs received them upon their heads.” Two protesters threw milk bottles at the patrolmen pursing them. At the corner of Walnut and Broad, someone hurled a brick at Officer Wallace Striker. On Juniper Street, either a rioter or a police officer fired shots into the air. By night's end, more than a score were injured, several arrested, and the theater defaced. Nineteen-year old Arthur Lunn, a farmer from Worcester County, Maryland, was charged with inciting the riot. Dr. Wesley F. Graham, pastor of Trinity Baptist, sustained “severe injuries.” Lillian Howard, a caterer; William A. Sinclair, the financial secretary of Douglass Hospital; and a thirty-three-year-old laborer named Lee Banks received severe lacerations.

Old purpose, “new body”:the birth of a nation and the revival of the ku klux klan

Abstract: When a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan first arrived in Butte, Montana, in the summer of 1921, he placed an ad in the Butte Miner depicting a white-robed man astride a bucking horse. Borrowed from the publicity materials for D W. Griffith's groundbreaking film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), this image of a uniformed figure was a fixture of Klan propaganda. The advertisement faced two directions: it connected the newly formed Klan with its Reconstruction Era predecessor, while also demonstrating that the Klan imagined itself through the revisionist lens of Griffith's film and its textual inspiration, Thomas Dixon Jr.'s play and novel The Clansman (1905). The image of a white-robed Klansmen in the Butte Miner was thus a symbol of what Klan leaders and the popular media alike called the Klan's “revival,” the process through which the historical organization was brought to life in a new form.

“friends” and fistfights: federal indian policy debates and late nineteenth-century state development

Abstract: On a hot, late-June day in 1884, Red Cloud rode out from his home on Pine Ridge Reservation, with an entourage of fifty to eighty people, to meet Dr. Thomas A. Bland, the soon-to-be founder of the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA). Bland and Red Cloud had become friends during the latter’s many visits to Washington, DC, in the 1870s, and he now appealed to his ally for help in removing the federal agent at Pine Ridge, Valentine McGillycuddy. Bland, a protégé of former peace commissioner Alfred Meacham, was a populist agitator and critic of forced assimilation and Indigenous dispossession. Herbert Welsh, founder of the Indian Rights Association (IRA), supported Agent McGillycuddy, once calling him “a man of remarkable ability.” The agent employed all possible techniques in his efforts to confine and limit the Oglala Lakota and to undermine Red Cloud and other customary leaders, including reducing treaty stipulated rations; pitting community leaders against one another; and pressuring them to abandon Lakota social, cultural, and political practices such as the Sun Dance. After Red Cloud welcomed Bland and stopped for lunch, Indian police officers sent by McGillycuddy arrested the doctor. At the agency office, the two men screamed at one another and—on the verge of a fistfight—had to be separated physically. McGillycuddy threatened to remove him from the reservation, and Bland shouted, “I’m a citizen of the United States with a letter from the Secretary of the Interior giving me permission to come here.” McGillycuddy yelled back that they were not in the United States; they were, he said, “on an Indian reservation” where he was in “supreme command.” The agent disregarded Bland’s letter of permission, instead issuing ammunition to the Indian police officers. He ordered them to escort Bland away from the reservation, adding that they could use force if necessary. They reportedly dragged him from the office as he screamed, “My wife said I was a fool for visiting your agency.” It’s no small wonder then that Bland concluded Pine Ridge had become “the little monarchy over which McGillycuddy reigns.” This conflict, far from being an obscure and exceptional event, illustrated the intensity with which opposing Indian policy reformers brought to their debates in the Gilded Age.2