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.

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.

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.

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.

The age of nationalities and nationalism associated with nineteenth-century Europe also found expression in North America in the same period: French Canadians developed a national consciousness charged with a religious and providential mission. As these Canadians crossed into the United States in ever-rising numbers and established permanent “colonies” during the Gilded Age, they carried with them a cultural ideology that kept them apart from mainstream American society—and apart from their Irish American coreligionists and coworkers. Claiming the freedoms promised to them by the Constitution, these immigrants from the North battled for accommodation not only in political conventions or state legislatures, but also in the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders seemed intent on doing away with foreign languages and customs. The religious battle came to a head as lay and clerical Catholics gathered in Baltimore, in 1889, to reassert the Church's unity as well as its patriotic credentials. By drawing attention to French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, this article refocuses the question of Americanization on the Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in late nineteenth-century America.

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.

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”

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Indian Territory and the State of Oklahoma experienced one of the world’s largest petroleum booms, with much of the oil extracted from the territory and state produced on land owned by Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race peoples. White settlers, backed by governing institutions and cultures rooted in settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and anti-monopolism, struggled to seize control of oil-rich land amid the allotment of Native-owned property. These latter elements insisted that non-whites could not grasp the value of petroleum nor be trusted with the control of such a vital resource, especially in the shadow of ever-looming oil monopolies. Settlers and wildcat prospectors built a white-supremacist oil-field politics that elevated the rights of small-scale, proprietary "independent" oilmen and worked to ensure that the latter controlled flows of crude vis-à-vis non-white property holders and “outside” corporations. For white settlers in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, oil rose to the top of collective imaginaries about race, property, and wealth, encouraging the creation of both legal and often violent extralegal strategies for dispossessing unworthy landowners of their hydrocarbon inheritance.

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.

U.S. opinion of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) was highly divided. The debate over the war served as a proxy for fights over domestic issues of immigration, inequality, and race. Anglo-American Republicans’ support for the British was undergirded by belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Caucasian but non-Anglo Democrats and Populists disputed the Anglo-Saxonist assumptions and explicitly equated the plight of the Boers to the racial and economic inequalities they faced in the United States. They utilized Anglophobia, republican ideology, and anti-modernist jeremiads to discredit their opponents and to elevate an alternative racial fiction: universal whiteness. Reports written by the celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis while covering the Boer War, along with a wide array of other sources, illustrate the discursive underpinning of the debate. They also suggest the effectiveness of the pro-Boer argument in reshaping the racial opinions of some Anglo-Saxon elites. Although Davis arrived in South Africa a staunch supporter of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism, he came to link the Boers with the republican values and frontier heritage associated with the U.S.’ own history. The equation of the South African Republic's resistance against the British Empire with that of the U.S.’ own war of independence highlighted contradictions between Anglo-Saxonism and American exceptionalism. As a result, Anglo-Saxonism was weakened. Davis and others increasingly embraced a notion of racial identity focused on color. Thus, public reaction to the Boer War contributed to the ongoing rise of a new wave of herrenvolk democratic beliefs centered on a vision of white racial hybridity across the social and political divisions separating Americans of European descent.

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.

This paper explores the role of race in the construction of tribal rolls for the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory under the Dawes Act. Examination of two examples, enrollment of Choctaws in Mississippi and arguments presented in the 1907 hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the status of Choctaws of Indian and African American heritage, demonstrates that policymakers' primary concern in deciding the fate of mixedrace individuals was not the determination of Indian blood, so as to enroll them, but of African American blood, so as to exclude them. With this approach, members of the Dawes Commission used Indian policy to uphold the color line. The Choctaw Nation also drew sharp racial lines. Their concern, however, was not racial purity, but citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Attorneys for the mixed-blood claimants proffered a definition which they believed to be biological—they focused on their clients' percentage of Indian blood—while the Choctaw Nation's lawyers held to a political and legal definition embedded in notions of children's legitimacy, as granted through marriages sanctioned by the Choctaw state. Thus the same racial enrollment policy—exclusion of blacks—served two different functions in the implementation of allotment.

With the current bountiful crops of outrages, provocations, and howlings, there is a temptation to evaluate everything in terms of our own Gilded Moment. The temptation needs to be resisted. Our Gilded Moment might be Trumpian, but it draws its fuel from a rebellion against a much lengthier and more complicated era that began in the late 1970s and runs into the present. Asking whether this era is a Second Gilded Age comparable to the First Gilded Age, which began at the end of the Civil War and extended into the early twentieth century, creates a blind man and the elephant problem. Examining different parts of the era can yield disparate conclusions. My task is to comprehend each era as a whole; I think that there are structural similarities stronger than particular differences.

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century), the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda), and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

Civilian societies advocating a bold defense program were arguably the most visible manifestation of the American preparedness campaign in World War I. Though historians have acknowledged the significance of the broader preparedness movement in a number of studies, they have often marginalized its civilian branch in general and defense societies in particular. This article examines the structures, activities, and objectives of two major organizations active in the movement in order to challenge historiography's traditional view on preparedness. Exploring the key role of the National Security League and the American Defense Society between 1914 and 1920, the article presents two main arguments: First, civilian societies were not merely the appendix to a centralized campaign dominated by military professionals and politicians associated with the defense cause but acted as principal agents of preparedness. Second, the historiographic time frame of preparedness cannot be limited chronologically to America's years of neutrality but must include the period after April 1917.

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Four days earlier, in his war message to Congress, he gave his rationale for declaring war against Imperial Germany and for creating a new world order. He now viewed German submarine attacks against neutral as well as belligerent shipping as a threat to the whole world, not just the United States. “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” he claimed. “It is a war against all nations.” He now believed that Germany had violated the moral standards that “citizens of civilized states” should uphold. The president explained: “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” He focused on protecting democracy against the German regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. “A steadfast concert for peace,” he said, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.” Wilson called on Congress to vote for war not just because Imperial Germany had sunk three American ships, but for the larger purpose of a new world order. He affirmed: “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.”

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.