This article considers how American food manufacturers used advertising and outreach to sway public opinion in the immediate years after the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Although this federal legislation has long been heralded as a landmark victory for consumer protection, the new law was not a watershed moment for progressivism. Food production and consumption in the United States remained deeply fraught. In the absence of a clearly defined apparatus to enforce the new law and much contestation among policy-makers, business interests, and reformers, the food industry's co-option of reform ideals and rhetoric exemplifies the increasing power of big business over both public policy and mainstream cultural discourse in the United States during the early twentieth century and beyond. While scholars have often framed the push to introduce federal food policy as a fairly linear institutional or political narrative, a cultural historical approach gives new insight into how unresolved questions about purity in food production and consumption have vexed Americans and stymied business interests and policy-makers in ways that have continued to reverberate into the present day.

New Mexicans pride themselves on their ability to bridge multicultural divides. Part of what we are urged to understand as “enchanting” about the Land of Enchantment is its diverse cultural background. Native American, Hispano, and Anglo have existed side by side, at times with remarkable harmony and good will, for nearly two centuries. The Land of Enchantment is not altogether a fantasy. Many New Mexicans have shown an uncanny ability to bridge ethnic divides and find common ground in the interstices between cultures. The soil of New Mexico seems to be fertile ground indeed for producing cultural brokers. Margaret Connell Szasz admits that living in New Mexico makes her particularly attuned to the role of the cultural broker.

In the late nineteenth century, cycling posed numerous problems for Protestant churches and other religious organizations that sought to reform the behavior of athletes and the tone of sporting events. A wide range of improper behavior, including desecration of the Sabbath, was attributed to the “cycling craze” of the 1890s, the danger of which was heightened by the privacy and anonymity that the bicycle offered as well as it popularity among women. While censuring it on the one hand, moral crusaders also adopted the bicycle for their own evangelistic purposes, recognizing its potential as a means of transport as well as its appeal to young audiences. Some argued that it would restore the health of church congregations. Others saw it as an agent of temperance reform. Missionary organizations, including the Salvation Army, used bicycles to distribute religious and social reform literature in rural areas. A symbol of the Good Roads movement, the bicycle also promised to create a mutually beneficial moral bond between town and country.

Progressivism has been notoriously hard to define, not least because progressives have been so diverse in their views and positions. They came in virtually all shapes, sizes, and opinions. One group, however, has seldom been included under the progressive umbrella, and that is American Catholics. But consider the credentials of Edward Osgood Brown, born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1847 to a long-established Yankee sea-faring family, who migrated to Chicago in 1872 and died there in 1923.

Images of Turkey in the United States during the Gilded Age were generally not flattering. For the most part, Turks appeared in Gilded Age serious journals and popular press as “blood-thirsty,” “savages,” and “the most brutal outcasts of the human race,” who were merely “camping in Europe” – albeit for five hundred years – but not a part of it. A “pitiable imbecility” was said to characterize the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks having shown an “utter incapacity for just, enlightened, progressive government.” Looking at Turkey in 1877, an American army officer concluded that in order “to reform Turkey” it would be necessary first “to abolish the Turks.” At the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, according to historians Gail Bederman and Robert Rydell, the location of the Turkish village on the Midway clearly placed Turkey among the “barbarous” nations of the world; at the Turkish village, as Bederman puts it, “unmanly, dark-skinned men cajoled customers to shed their manly restraint and savor their countrywomen's sensuous dancing.” Even Mark Twain quipped that “I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little – not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.”

As 2016 is the centennial of Dewey's most famous work, Democracy and Education (1916), it is imperative to consider Dewey's role as a public intellectual. In reflection of how he framed his most famous work—as an instrument for helping people think about democratic reform—the authors examined John Dewey's beliefs about the importance of peace as applied to the American view. This essay journals Dewey as an important contributor to the American peace movement in terms of both thought and activity, especially in the post-World War I period. Dewey argued that the responsibility of schools in a democratic society is to teach cooperation and understanding and not simply rely on notions of patriotism and allegiance as often presented in schools. His World War I experience alerted him to the need for transforming schools as seminaries of patriotism into instruments for global understanding. The authors also offered specific examples as to how his instrumentalist philosophy, including his involvement in the Outlawry of War campaign in the 1920s, has been a cornerstone of peace education efforts in the United States over the past one hundred years and what has been their effectiveness.

In September 1893, Catholic laypeople, clergy, and prelates met at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as the Columbian Catholic Congress to discuss their church's history and chart its course into the future. The leadership of Catholic laywomen in shaping the course of the Congress has been virtually absent in scholarship, much as it was hidden from contemporaries in the past. The act of a Catholic woman speaking among both men and women in a public space was significant, as it demonstrated an increasing assertiveness on the part of Catholic women, including those holding to a conception of gendered, separate spheres, that women had key roles to play in shaping public Catholicity and Catholics’ ideas about their own community of faith. A core group of Catholic women played a hitherto underappreciated part in bringing the Congress to life. This study therefore centers women in the history of, more narrowly, Catholicism's place at the World's Columbian Exposition and, more broadly, the Catholic public of the early Progressive Era, and demonstrates the often-invisible labor in which women engaged to develop their church's intellectual life in the early Progressive Era.

Revisiting the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) created in 1887 and offering a fresh interpretation that the commission was conceived and operated as a highly court-like agency, this paper argues that its emergence triggered the judicialization of the U.S. administrative state. It has been argued that the blueprint of the ICC took after existing railroad commissions. Its proponents in Congress, however, redesigned it with judicial courts as a model after facing criticisms based on the common-law principle of the supremacy of law allowing adjudication only to judicial courts. In accordance with such an institutional scheme, both the president and judiciary promoted the commission's judicialization by appointing lawyers as its members and reviewing its decisions. By the early twentieth century, the ICC was a prototypical agency whose court-like features permeated the administrative state. This paper thus offers a corrective to the literature on the U.S. administrative state building that has come to trivialize the role of the rise of the ICC. It was, instead, a critical juncture in the emergence of the modern administrative state in which being “quasi-judicial” was the norm rather than the exception for an administrative agency.

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.

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires.

During the American woman suffrage movement, opponents described suffragists as abnormal, unsexed, non-mothers who desired to leave the home and family en masse, levying “war against the very foundation of society.” This charge ultimately compelled suffragists around the nation to respond by embracing expediency arguments, insisting the women's votes would bring morality, cleanliness, and order to the public sphere. This article charts how suffragists capitalized on movements for home economics, municipal housekeeping, and pure food to argue for the compatibility of politics and womanhood. In particular, this article examines suffrage cookbooks, recipes, and bazaars as key campaign tactics. More than a colorful historiographical side note, this cookery rhetoric was a purposeful political tactic meant to combat perennial images of suffragists as “unwomanly women.” And suffragists ultimately employed the practice and language of cookery to build a feminine persona that softened the image of their political participation and made women's suffrage more palatable to politicians, male voters, potential activists, and the general public.

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

In November 1915, popular Baltimore minister and anti-vice reformer Kenneth G. Murray became enmeshed in scandal after he allegedly attempted to engage in sex with another man at the Y.M.C.A. The revelation of Murray’s alleged queerness became a flashpoint in ongoing contestations over anti-vice reform and the legitimacy of using state power to enforce Christian morality. In the hands of his political opponents, most notably H.L. Mencken, Murray’s apparent homosexuality became a tool for vindicating long-standing assertions that men who campaigned for state-enforced morality were hypocritical and motivated in their activism by sexual and gendered pathologies. In tracing print reactions to Murray’s public exposure, this essay argues that homosexuality proved to be a powerful political weapon against progressive anti-vice campaigning like Murray’s because it was capable of reconciling competing stereotypes of religiously motivated anti-vice reformers as simultaneously overly sexual and impotent, feminized and pathologically masculine. The Murray scandal also opened the door for critiques of muscular Christianity, which made it an early example of how the sexual diagnosis of religious figures and reformers could be used to discredit social and religious activism.

The rambunctious world of Gilded Age politics, with its boisterous partisan rallies and three-hour long declamations on the finer points of tariff schedules and monetary policy, passed from the scene of American politics rather abruptly about a century ago. Despite its superficial similarities with politics today — sex scandals, corporate influence, and partisan gridlock in Washington — the spirit and substance of Gilded Age politics was quite different from political discourse today. Politics was a national obsession to nineteenth century Americans. Partisanship was open and vigorous because common people believed the issues were important and political parties represented divergent viewpoints. Men (and in a few places women) of every ethnic and racial background, and from every walk of life, overwhelmingly participated in America's democratic experiment. This made Gilded Age politicians some of the greatest heroes and villains of the era.

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.

During World War I, the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense served as an intermediary between the federal government and women's voluntary associations. This study of white middle- and upper-middle-class clubwomen in Los Angeles, California reveals ways in which local women pursued twin goals of aiding the war effort while pursuing their own, pre-existing agendas. Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women's suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.

This essay investigates how the repressive wartime political and social environment in World War I encouraged three key American social justice movements to devise new tactics and strategies to advance their respective causes. For the African American civil rights, female suffrage, and civil liberties movements, the First World War unintentionally provided fresh opportunities for movement building, a process that included recruiting members, refining ideological messaging, devising innovative media strategies, negotiating with the government, and participating in nonviolent street demonstrations. World War I thus represented an important moment in the histories of all three movements. The constructive, rather than destructive, impact of the war on social justice movements proved significant in the short term (for the suffragist movement) and the long term (for the civil rights and civil liberties movements). Ultimately, considering these three movements collectively offers new insights into American war culture and the history of social movements.