Turn-of-the-century socialists radicalized literacy. Unlike middle-class reformers, whose desire for mass literacy arose from the need for a hardworking, compliant workforce, socialists used it to undermine capitalism. Through their printed culture of dissent, they not only sought to transform individual lives, but an entire social system. They took up the task of using literacy to convert workers with a missionary zeal. Moral indignation fueled their crusade. In a nation of such wealth, they asked, why was it that so many industrious people did not have enough to provide themselves and their families with adequate food, clothing, and shelter? Their answer was that America's political and economic institutions had been corrupted by the nation's monied power. In their minds, only an enlightened, educated working-class could challenge the prerogatives of capital and make these institutions fully socially accountable to the people.

Peter Alexander Speek arrived in the United States in the fall of 1908 at the age of 35, “having in my pocket only 4c and knowing hardly more English words.” A leader of revolutionary activities against Russian rule in his native Estonia, Speek came to the U.S. a committed socialist intent on developing worker awareness and leading the class struggle. After two years in New York, Speek traveled to the West Coast, entered the graduate program i n economics at the University of Wisconsin, and worked two years as an investigator for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR). During his time with the CIR, Speek traveled widely across the United States, “visiting labor camps, cheap city lodging houses, gatherings of hoboes and tramps in so-called ‘jungles’, interviewing employers and various public agencies.” Speek wrote dozens of reports during these investigations that served as the foundation for official CIR policy recommendations and for a series of popular press articles on current migratory conditions. In doing this work, Speek became a recognized authority on migratory labor issues. Reference to Speek's reports can be found in studies of early-twentieth-century migratory labor conditions, but a specific evaluation of Speek and of his contributions has not been written. Speek's work for the CIR is of interest because of its subject matter and its comprehensive coverage. Speek's work is also of interest because it was during this period that Speek rejected his revolutionary socialism and became a structural reformer, accepting the basic U.S. economic and political system and working to improve the details of its institutions.

In his 1906 Annual Message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt urged support for a bill to mandate the government investigation of labor disputes before allowing workers to strike. In an “age of great corporate and labor combinations,” the president insisted “the public has itself an interest which can not wisely be disregarded; an interest not merely of general convenience, for the question of a just and proper public policy must also be considered.” Congress at the time was unmoved. Yet Roosevelt's proposal signaled a growing movement to compel the investigation and arbitration of major labor conflicts. This movement peaked in the years soon after World War I. Advocates for government mediation insisted that an impartial commission of experts could peacefully negotiate workplace disputes and spare the consuming public the contests of will and force associated with major strikes. The Progressive Era arbitration of railroad and mining conflicts established important precedents and have received significant attention from scholars. National mediation boards, however, rarely assumed the power to order participation. Such efforts were more prominent at die state level. In 1915 Colorado legislators largely implemented Roosevelt's proposal, creating the first government board with powers to ban strikes and lockouts pending an investigation in industries affected with a public interest. Soon after the war, Kansas expanded upon the Colorado precedent with a compulsory arbitration board to regulate a host of indus-tries deemed essential to the public. Programs for state mediation of labor conflicts in the postwar period were particularly bound up with questions of compulsion in the public interest.

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

Parole laws, passed by most state legislatures at the turn of the century, provide for the release of prisoners before the expiration of their maximum sentence and for their supervision during their transition to free society. This article explores the early years of the parole system in Illinois. While the Illinois parole law indicated that parole agents would watch over ex-prisoners and aid in their rehabilitation, the state instead relied on private individuals, businesses, and voluntary organizations to supervise parolees. Agreements forged between prison officials and these supervisors illustrate the extent to which the private sector took on the functions of the state during the Progressive Era. As a result, employers and voluntary organizations developed a range of surveillance practices to maintain control over former prisoners, using informal systems of assessment and notions of success to evaluate the parolees in their charge. Though the parole system represented innovation on the part of the Illinois state government—a nod to emergent rehabilitative frameworks in penology—the reliance on voluntary organizations and businesses wove older class and gender ideals into this newer, purportedly more scientific and objective institution. This essay illuminates the everyday challenges of life on parole, tracing the experiences of ex-prisoners during the process of reentry and exposing the constant negotiations between employers, voluntary organizations, prisons, and parolees.

For thirty years after Franklin Pierce's death, the ex-president's reputation remained low in the estimation of historians and the public. Most saw Pierce and his successor James Buchanan as primary culprits in the sectional discord leading to the Civil War. Between 1900 and 1915, however, Pierce's reputation improved, with the sectional healing represented by Blue-Gray reunions on former battlefields like Gettysburg and the election of only the second Democratic president since the war, Woodrow Wilson. This process of healing was particularly difficult in Pierce's home state of New Hampshire. In a classic case of contested memory, the Grand Army of the Republic repeatedly stymied Democratic attempts to raise a statue to the state's only president and criticized Pierce as a traitor and Confederate sympathizer. The Democrats, however, took over the New Hampshire governor's chair in 1913, and the legislature voted to honor Pierce with a statue. In that small early twentieth-century window, Franklin Pierce became a beneficiary of hard-earned sectional reconciliation.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s reactions to the Colorado Coal Wars resulted in the creation of the Employee Representation Plan, better known as the Rockefeller Plan. While labor historians identify the Rockefeller Plan as a dynamic shift in labor-management relations, this article focuses on the lesser studied portion of Rockefeller's reconstruction plan, his program of soft reform and its effect on the construction of masculinity in the industrial West. For Junior, restructuring the work environment and the relationship between management and labor left reconstruction incomplete, and thus vulnerable to future crises. Beginning in 1914, Rockefeller provided support for local and national social organizations to work throughout southern Colorado in order to impart middle-class values to his workers. He believed that reconstructing their social and cultural values—from language to sexual behavior—would remove any socialist influences, and create a better workforce. By applying this type of pressure, Junior helped create an environment that supported local anti-vice movements, and validated a growing belief that law enforcement and legislation could be used to curb vice. Following the deadly strike, Rockefeller's attempts to transform his public image and industrial workers not only have implications for labor history, but also social and gender histories, in particular the construction of masculinity in the American West.

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

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”

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American mining engineers fanned out around the globe to potential or existing mines in China, Mexico, Siberia, South Africa, and beyond. This article examines the rise and work of mining engineer John Hays Hammond and the mining engineers, geologists, and capitalists with whom he worked. The paper reveals ways that a segment of the investor class depended upon members of the emerging professional middle class of university-trained mining experts for collaboration—and even inspiration—regarding possible sources of remunerative investment. The search for raw materials abroad opens up a chapter in the history of U.S. capitalism in which mining engineers like Hammond encouraged and facilitated a new phase of export of redundant U.S. capital and manufactured goods in a direction where investment would be secure, labor recruitable, and profits attractive and subject to repatriation. Filling in this vital narrative makes an essential contribution to the ongoing recovery of the history of the U.S. and world capitalism in the era of rapid industrialization.

He had only seen Debs three times, met him twice, and really talked to him once, but when Debs died in 1926, John Haynes Holmes, pastor of New York City's Community Church (Unitarian), himself a distinguished civil libertarian and social reformer, announced that he loved Debs deeply and “honored him above all other men now alive in America.” Why did many people share that love of Debs, and others hate him, Holmes asked. In both cases the answer was Debs' own outflowing love, which common folks cherished but the rich and powerful saw as a threat to the established order. Exactly the same answer explained reactions to Jesus. Holmes spoke at a mass meeting in Debs' memory at the Madison Square Garden and converted a Sunday service at the Community Church into “a public memorial” to Debs: “I shall take his life as my text,” he wrote Theodore Debs, “use his writings for Scripture reading, and place in the pulpit a full-sized copy of Louis Mayer's bust, draped with the Red flag.” Waxing poetic, Holmes had Christ receive Debs into heaven with these words:

During the 1909 New York mayoral campaign, the Socialist newspaper, the New York Call, published a series of seven political cartoons signed by Josh Nolan. Analysis of the subject and style of these cartoons suggest that the signature on them was an anagrammatic pseudonym for painter John Sloan, a leading figure of the Ash Can School and later art director for the Masses. Sloan confirms this in his diary, which provides the reader with evidence of the painter's inclination to use anagrams and fictitious names. The cartoons document a forgotten aspect of the artist's career and reveal many of his political and aesthetic influences. The images also explicate Sloan's personal political commitments and the origins of his later unique imagery. This essay examines Sloan's early cartoons, while questioning why Sloan would choose to hide his identity when creating images for the New York Call.

Millions of immigrants arrived in the United States during the Gilded Age, drastically altering the ethnic character of the American citizenry. This dramatic social change was met with mixed reactions from the native-born population that were vividly communicated in the popular press. Cartoonists for newspapers and magazines across the country developed a language of caricature to identify and distinguish among ethnic groups and mocked new arrivals in imagery that ranged from mild to malicious. One might assume that the masses of Eastern European Jews flooding into the country (poor, Yiddish-speaking, shtetl-bred) would have been singled out for anti-Semitic attack, just as they were in Europe at the time. However, Jews were not the primary victims of visual insults in America, nor were the Jewish caricatures wholly negative. Further, the broader scope of popular imagery, which, in addition to cartoons, includes a plethora of illustrations as well as photographs, presents a generally positive attitude toward Jewish immigrants. This attitude aligned with political rhetoric, literature, newspaper editorials, and financial opportunity. This article will propose a better alignment of the visual evidence with the scholarly understanding of the essentially providential experience of Jews in America during this period.

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.