One of the chief promises of the emerging history of capitalism is its capacity to problematize and historicize relationships between economic inequality and capital's social, political, and ecological domain. At their best, the new works creatively integrate multiple historiographic approaches. Scholars are bringing the insights of social and cultural history to business history's traditional actors and topics, providing thick descriptions of the complex social worlds of firms, investors, and bankers, while resisting rationalist, functionalist, and economistic analyses. They are also proceeding from the assumption that capitalism is not reducible to the people that historians have typically designated as capitalists. As they've shown, the fact that slaves, women, sharecroppers, clerks, and industrial laborers were, to different degrees, denied power in the building of American capitalism did not mean that they were absent from its web, or that their actions did not decisively shape its particular contours.

When historians fight about Progressivism — and fight they do — they are not just arguing about events of a century ago. They are also struggling over the basic meanings of American democracy. If we could face this fact more directly, and begin to come to grips with the stakes involved, we would not only advance the study of the past but, even in some small and indirect ways, we might improve the practice of our current politics as well.

Politicians standing at the center of our nation's democratic dramas recognize, even if often without nuance, the value of reclaiming the Progressive Era. Cheerfully blurring historical distinctions, Bill Clinton announced as he left office, “I always felt that the work we did the last eight years made us the heir of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” In turn, Al Gore's communications director saw his candidate's “message more in the tradition of progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt, who confronted powerful trusts, rather than the populists who railed broadly against elites of all stripes.” Several years earlier the vice-president's main Democratic opponent, Bill Bradley, wrote, “I've always admired the progressives, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who enabled the private sector to flourish but in a way more responsive to national purpose.”

Roughly 2,000 American fugitives fled to Canada in the 1880s—mostly clerks, cashiers, and bank tellers charged with embezzlement. This article argues that these “boodlers,” as they were popularly called, were symptomatic of a late-nineteenth-century crisis of mobility. Embezzlement was a function of new kinds of mobility: migration to cities, the rise of an upwardly mobile middle class, the fungibility of greenbacks, and the growth of international transportation networks. The boodlers were some of the earliest white-collar criminals. By focusing on their unexplored story, this article contributes to the growing literature that presents the clerk as an important figure in nineteenth-century labor history. Still, the boodlers also had a more unexpected impact on the evolution of the United States' international borders, both in the popular imagination and in actual surveillance and law enforcement techniques. Through the figure of the boodler, this article examines the links between the growth of capitalism and the development of the United States–Canada border in the late nineteenth century.

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.

In February 1915, upon viewing The Birth of a Nation at a special White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked, “It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” This line has appeared in numerous books and articles over the past seventy years. This article examines the history of this alleged quotation and the sources where it has appeared. The article weighs the evidence that Wilson effusively praised in these words one of the most racist major movies in American history.

Something was menacing the South during the Progressive Era. Southern physicians located the threat in the “germ plasm,” the genes, of the region's inhabitants. Writing in a now-infamous 1893 “open letter” published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for “some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the negro of the present day.” McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of “[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes.” Lydston's solution to this problem was not lynching, but surgical castration which “prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind.” Eight years later in Alabama, Dr. John E. Purdon opined, “It is a proved fact of experience that the inveterate criminal tends to propagates a race of criminals, and that the undeveloped or degraded nerve-tissue will duplicate itself in the next generation.” Dr. Purdon then declared, “Emasculation is the simplest and most perfect plan that can be adopted to secure the perfection of the race.” Twenty-three years later, in 1924, Harry Hamilton Laughlin testified in support of a Virginia law providing for the eugenic sterilization of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South,” who allegedly created social problems for “normal” people. The multiplication of these “defective delinquents,” Laughlin and Virginia officials claimed, could only be controlled by restricting their procreation.

There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.

My purpose here, apart from convincing you that John Dewey was quite possibly right about American entry into World War I, is to address the repression and mutilation of pragmatism by left-wing intellectuals in the twentieth century. These would seem to be very different purposes, but in fact they are the same. If we are to understand how pragmatism acquired its unsavory reputation among leftists everywhere, we must go back to 1917, when Randolph Bourne denounced not only Dewey's decision in favor of American entry but also pragmatism itself as the source of that decision. These almost ancient denunciations would not matter very much, except that they are repeated in every subsequent account of the American Left in World War I, and are recalled if not reiterated in every subsequent critique of pragmatism – they still determine our thinking about Dewey, about pragmatism, and about the war. Revisiting this primal scene allows us to ask why. It allows us to convert the following statement, which still serves as a left-wing credential, into a question: Dewey's support for American entry into the Great War demonstrates that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to “the existing fact,” a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism.

“Disenchantment with democracy” is Sven Beckert's diagnosis for the United States around 1900. According to Beckert, the era's elites paid little regard to the ideals of democracy and worked to exclude the lower classes from the electoral process. But was acceptance of democracy really that low? Previously overlooked elite discourses and efforts—particularly discussions that dealt with the practice of elections—show that this explanation does not tell the whole story. By drawing on endeavors concerning election reform in New York City, I argue that at the turn of the century a new understanding of democracy became a kind of modern consensus. This was the case not only in New York, a city in a republic, but also in Berlin, in the Prussian constitutional monarchy. These findings support the interpretation that around 1900 the understanding and acceptance of democracy underwent a seminal change in the transatlantic world. The consensus held that state legitimacy required mass participation and, even more, that mass participation was connected to “everybody” and to a meaning of “universal”— though this ideal of “universal” was constructed and exclusive in important ways.

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.

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.

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.

This study tracks the evolution of racist ideas pertaining to Black drug addiction and crime and the growth of a real interracial drug subculture, both of which had a part in forging New York’s drug policies in the early twentieth century. Well-worn racial tropes about drug use, cultivated in the imaginations of white commentators and pseudoscientists, railroaded African American suspects and contributed to the creation of the early apparatuses of the war on drugs. As observers increasingly connected the specter of cocaine “delirium” to common anxieties about Black crime and miscegenation, they in turn viewed white cocaine use as a solvable shortcoming in need of treatment rather than imprisonment. As such, New York City’s early civic responses to cocaine were shaped as Southern racial discourse collided with the developing panics of the Progressive Era that rallied around the increasing mobility of Black Americans in an effort to manage interracial contact through legislation.

The period after 1870 through the middle of the 1920s, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, coincided with the mass migration of Jews to the United States. Nearly three million Jews, primarily from eastern Europe, overwhelmed the numerically small Jewish community already resident in America. Of the Jews who left Europe in those years, approximately 85 percent opted for the United States, a society that took some of its basic characteristics from the particular developments of this transitional historical period. This essay focuses on five aspects of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America and their impact on the Jews. These features of American society both stimulated the mass migration and made possible a relatively harmonious, although complicated, integration. Those forces included the broader contours of immigration, the nation's obsession with race, its vast industrial and economic expansion, its valorization of religion, and its two-party system in which neither the Democrats or the Republicans had any stake in demonizing the growing number of Jewish voters.

This is an expanded version of the presidential address I gave to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) at their meeting in 2000. In Part I, I use the catchphrase “Men are from the Gilded Age, Women are from the Progressive Era” as a way of making a critique of Progressive-era historiography from the perspective of women's history. In Part II, I suggest four specific ways in which Progressive-era historians might respond to that critique.

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.

Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, statistician and insurance executive, was a formidable opponent of the emerging welfare state during the Progressive Era. As a vice president of the Prudential Insurance Company of Newark, New Jersey, Hoffman led a relentless campaign against proposals for government-ran compulsory health insurance between 1915 and 1920. While he acted in the interests of his insurance company employer, Hoffman's opposition also arose from his ardent beliefs about the nature of welfare states. Social insurance and other forms of state-organized assistance, Hoffman claimed, represented “alien governmental theories” based on “paternalism and coercion,” especially since they originated in autocratic Germany, where in 1885 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had created the world's first sickness insurance system. “In so far as our right to oppose compulsory health insurance is concerned,” explained Hoffman, “it [is] the duty of every American to oppose German ideas of government control and state socialism.” In the anti-German atmosphere engendered by the First World War, his arguments had particular resonance.

In 1902, Clemencia López journeyed to the United States to work for the liberation of her imprisoned brothers and for Filipino independence. She granted interviews, circulated her photograph, and spoke in public under the sponsorship of American anti-imperialists and suffragists. López argued that Filipinos like herself were already a civilized people and thus did not need Americans' “benevolent assimilation.” Her gender and her elite family background helped her make this case. Instead of presenting her as racially inferior, published accounts expressed appreciation of her feminine refinement and perceptions of her beauty as exotic. Americans simultaneously perceived her as apolitical because of her sex. López was thus able to take advantage of American gender politics to discuss the “delicate subject” of autonomy for the Philippines in ways that anti-imperialist Filipino men could not.