The decades surrounding the opening of the twentieth century saw one of the most significant shifts in the character of American public life. A political order dominated by decentralized parties and a limited state gave way to one defined by interest group activism, weaker parties, and more vigorous government. Scholars argue over the degree and extent of these changes, but few quarrel with the claim that public life looked substantially different by the end of the Progressive Era. Americans accepted interest group pluralism in principle and in practice by the 1920s, and the ideal of a politics devoted to an undifferentiated common good lost much of its persuasive power.

This essay considers two land disputes that took place in the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines and that reached the U.S. Supreme Court: Cariño v. Insular Government (1909) and Reavis v. Fianza (1909). In arguing their cases, litigants were forced to reckon with the property rights regime of the former Spanish empire. In this regard, the cases affirm the import of inter-imperial frameworks for understanding colonial problems of land ownership and sovereignty. When arguing over the rightful owners of Philippine lands, parties to these cases also drew on the history and legal bases of land dispossession and settler colonialism in the American West. Further, in later decades, the arguments made in one of these cases would figure into legal conflicts over Native American lands. These cases thus suggest the value of also examining intra-imperial relationships, the emphasis of this essay. They demonstrate how histories and legal structures of settler-driven “expansion” and extra-continental colonialism informed, even constituted, each other.

In 1884, Congress created a new federal agency of unprecedented regulatory vision. Its officials soon acquired the capacity to summarily seize and destroy millions of dollars of property and thus to police the disposition of a stock of wealth worth more than the country's total capital invested in railroads. What was this federal colossus? It was the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), an agency that probably few historians know much about. Yet the hotly contested creation of the BAI—three years before the better-known Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—amounts to an epochal expansion of federal powers. Housed within the already powerful Department of Agriculture (USDA), the BAI was charged with investigating and containing potentially devastating livestock epizootics such as bovine pleuropneumonia and, later, Texas fever. Its success at doing so was little short of astounding. By 1892 it had conceived and carried out the world's first area eradication program of an epidemic disease, in the process establishing a model for future global eradication efforts. More immediately, it bolstered an economy that, for all its industrialization, remained crucially identified with agriculture.

Ancient Rome is a powerful metaphor in the western imagination. It is very much alive today. The Roman Republic inspires images of democracy and the empire is the very epitome of decadence. The collapse of this, the greatest of empires, is a parable. The Progressive Era opened with overt imperial ambitions and ended with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's plans for a Pax Americana. Throughout this period, the symbol of Rome was explicitly used to justify or condemn expansion, warn of the dangers of immigration and commercialization, attack America's enemies, and praise the nation's allies. To figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, Rome was both a model and a warning. Politicians, historians and other commentators saw America as heir to the Roman legacy. Race theorizers claimed that Americans were either the modern Romans or the descendants of the Barbarians—promoters of ordered modernity or champions of individual democracy.

In response to an enormous growth of trusts in the late nineteenth century, demands for reform among a wide spectrum of interest groups culminated in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1915. Playing an influential, though little-recognized role in framing this legislation was Wisconsin progressive Democrat Joseph E. Davies. As Commissioner of Corporations, Davies served in a unique, dual capacity as both politician and regulator, giving him access to President Woodrow Wilson and influence on the antitrust legislation. Davies used his position to promote a vision of administrative regulation based on the nationally recognized “Wisconsin Idea.” In so doing, he intensified conflicts among Wilson's policy advisers that, in turn, had a critical impact on the antitrust legislation and on the potential effectiveness of the first commission. In the long run, however, Davies' approach to regulatory policy, based on the Wisconsin Idea, would become standard operating procedure for successful regulatory commissions of the twentieth century.

During a brief period—1898 to 1907—the “American danger” proved a powerful slogan in Europe. Propaganda campaigns were launched that targeted the new ambitions of the emerging economic power. Historians have studied this episode but only as one among many examples of anti-Americanism embedded in European intellectual traditions. This paper insists on the distinctive character of this episode. It refutes the notion of anti-Americanism as the explanation most relevant to this episode and even questions the possibility of opposing Europe to the United States at a time of constant transnational circulation inside the “Atlantic world.” Disputing the idea that a common fear of American superiority united Europeans, the study reveals how people in England, France, and Germany used the “American danger” to put forward their own ideas of the national interest, which explains why the theme did not meet with the same success in each of these countries. Finally, the author offers the hypothesis that the “American danger” was less the expression of fear—as the Yellow Peril could be—and more a rallying cry for economic circles motivated by defense of their sectional interests and by a desire for national union in a time of deep political division.

This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.

Long recognized as a case that left tenement cigar workers in New York City unprotected from hazards to their health, the New York State high court's In re Jacobs ruling in 1885 also raised anew disagreements regarding the extent of legislative powers known as “police” that were reserved to the states by the federal constitution. Upholding unfettered freedom of contract, the Jacobs ruling prevailed as a governing precedent through a string of related cases until its reversal in Holden v. Hardy, 1898, a working hours law for Utah miners and smelter workers. Between Jacobs and Holden, new thinking emerged on the meaning of class, the role of government, and the drivers of the wealth of nations. In Holden, drawing from Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court located a public interest in sustaining the health and strength of such workers on the grounds that the entire public depended on their productive capacity to ensure the public good of a strong and growing state economy. This precedent did not hold for New York State bakers in Lochner v. New York, but it became controlling again in West Coast Hotel v. Parish, which elevated the broadened conception of “police” from Holden to the national level. As labor union membership along with other vital structures of the New Deal order have declined during the New Gilded Age, employment regulation has tended to relapse toward the individualist, contractarian regime of the Old Gilded Age announced in In re Jacobs.

Samuel Gompers's address at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago is typically remembered for its invocation, “we want ‘more.’” This essay views Gompers's address in its broader context as a window into the Gilded Age labor movement and America's crisis of the 1890s. Gompers's thinking can be understood in terms of two sets of contradictory discourses or antinomies: labor republicanism as distinguished from socialism and apocalyptic change as distinguished from evolutionary development. Rather than someone who rationalized the interests of a narrow stratum of craft workers, Gompers emerges from this analysis as a serious and complex thinker who sought to bridge and contain divergent discourses and political tendencies within the broader labor movement for which he was the spokesperson.

Since its release in October 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 has generated considerable controversy. Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ highly popular video game set in a sprawling open world that resembles America’s southern and western states at the turn of the twentieth century, has attracted criticism from players who have disliked the perceived political messages the game presents. With numerous interactions with people of color, Native Americans, and feminist (suffragette) characters, the game prompts players to engage with the ongoing effects of colonialism, sexism, and racism, as well as the rising problems of an industrial and financial capitalist society. As such, the game’s depiction of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics has resulted in a large amount of online criticism from a group of traditionally white, male, right-wing players. This article argues that Redemption 2 utilizes the Progressive Era as a vehicle to capture and speak to the current political climate, and that it is the game’s dual relationship with the past and the present that has aroused animosity from part of the game’s audience. Ultimately, it demonstrates how contemporary mainstream progressive politics can be interpreted within and projected upon the politics of the Progressive Era.

This essay examines why Richard Henry Dana III and other Boston reformers supported the Massachusetts civil service law of 1884, an even stronger measure than the federal Pendleton Act of 1883. Historians have uncovered two purposes behind civil service reform. First, reform limited the “spoils system” and curtailed the power of political parties. Second, reform increased efficiency in government. This essay argues that restricting the suffrage of Irish laborers was another purpose. Therefore, the essay runs counter to prevailing historical opinion by demonstrating that support for suffrage restriction remained an undercurrent in the 1880s, even after the failure of the Tilden Commission to implement property qualifications in New York City in the late 1870s. This exploration of a neglected topic also reminds urban historians of the deep ethnic conflict that gripped Boston in the 1880s and of the crucial role of patronage and bossism in Boston and other cities, a reality that historians since the 1980s have tended to downplay.

The essays contained in this and the October 2003 special issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were originally delivered at a conference sponsored by Indiana State University, the repository of the Debs papers and site of his house, now a national landmark. Intended to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Debs' first run for the presidency, the conference themes of socialism and dissent attracted a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and activists. Their contributions help us gauge the state of the field. They also suggest new departures in the study of socialism.

When the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil in 1911, it marked the end of an unsuccessful campaign by the company to improve its public standing. Standard Oil's failure to mollify public opinion in the aftermath of Ida Tarbell's muckraking masterpiece, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” has resulted in a historiographical record that negatively assesses the company's response. This article reassesses the company response by placing it within the wider context of business history in the early twentieth century. It offers a detailed exploration of the public relations initiatives of Standard Oil from 1902 to 1908. Additionally, the article views the affair through the lens of standard corporate practices of the early Progressive Era, when large businesses had only begun to promote favorable public images. It argues that progressive reform inadvertently aided the rise of big business by teaching corporations the importance of promoting favorable public images. This wider context reveals that Standard Oil's public relations response, if unsuccessful, was not as aloof as others have argued. In fact, the company made a concerted effort to change public opinion about its business practices.

Between the Civil War and World War I, the midwestern farm played an important role in the care of dependent children. Instead of paying families to take in children, welfare workers relied on farmers to take children in for free. However, the situation for dependent children and farmers changed during the Progressive Era. Movements to improve farming methods and standards of living in the hopes of keeping rural people on the land highlighted the difficulties of farm life. For the children placed in free homes with farmers, reformers sought to improve record keeping and supervision. Such reforms had unforeseen consequences. The bureaucracy needed to supervise children placed on farms increased costs, while farmers resented the intrusion. Children who labored for free on farms no longer learned skills useful in the modern, industrializing nation. As more systematic supervision became standard across the Midwest, farm placement lost its appeal. By examining the motivations for better supervision of placed-out children and how those plans became policy, this article reveals complexities, underestimated by previous scholars, in the commonly told story of the transition of child-welfare practices from an emphasis on free farm placement to paid foster care in suburban and urban settings.

This article demonstrates the value of a joint application of the theory and history of financial crises of 1873. It weaves together concepts of financial and banking panic theory with a narrative explanation of the causes and triggers of the Panic of 1873. Basic concepts of economic theory, it suggests, can act as both a framework and a starting point to the historical interpretation of a financial panic.

Employing such theory, however, ultimately reinforces the need for contextual cultural explanations of financial panics. A theoretically grounded view of the cultural history of capitalism—and its sudden crises—can help explain why and how some structures of exchange systematized and conditioned human confidence within specific historical contexts.

Drawing together theoretical models of banking panic and historical evidence, this article thus emphasizes the importance of Gilded Age money-making culture for understanding the impact of Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke upon the causes of the Panic of 1873. Cooke's sudden and unexpected bankruptcy caused the deconstruction of confidence on the stock exchange and throughout the country. The cultural idiosyncrasy of Cooke's outstanding position in all matters of American finance multiplied the asymmetry that occurred in the wake of a major information shock.

This article examines the origins of state-level regulations controlling the practice of pharmacy and the manufacture and consumption of dangerous drugs in the Gilded Age. The passage of laws regulating the market in pharmaceuticals grew out of both the precarious economic position of practicing pharmacists and widespread concern for the suffering of individual consumers. As a result, pharmacy laws and other regulations controlling the buying, selling, and use of dangerous drugs during this period should be understood as part of the effort by pharmacists to establish a professional identity for themselves. At the same time, these laws should also be understood as part of the process through which reformers sought to rationalize society toward the goal of protecting the individual consumer. Ironically, however, such efforts were intertwined with the bifurcation of consumer culture into legitimate and illegitimate realms, and with it the creation of the economic and social conditions in which new stories of individual suffering took place.

J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

At the height of the Progressive Era, a small circle of scholars and educators launched a zealous but failed effort to reform American spelling. Bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie, the Simplified Spelling movement epitomized the era's much-chronicled passion for “efficiency”: By replacing words like through and although with thru and altho, the simplifiers said, citizens would save both time and money. Yet the rapid demise of the campaign also highlights the limits of America's efficiency craze, even during its supposed heyday. Although some critics invoked the efficiency idiom against Simplified Spelling, questioning its utility and practicality, others denounced efficiency itself. Even if simplification made spelling more efficient, they said, Americans should retain their older forms in the name of higher values: beauty, habit, and tradition. Their rejection of Simplified Spelling stood as a standing rebuke to the gospel of efficiency, which never quite gained the full-throated worship that its high priests imagined.

The three essays in this forum examine the ways in which individuals have sought to reconcile sociocultural differences between those at the fringes of American society and those at the center. Two concepts embody this effort. One is the bridge concept—the idea that those with dual identities would serve as links between the two sociocultural worlds. The other concept, that of the cultural broker, refers to someone who actively seeks to mediate the differences between the two groups. The essays in this cluster use the two concepts to analyze the ways in which individuals in three disparate places—the American West (California), a U.S. colony across the Pacific (the Philippines), and the American Southwest (New Mexico)—served as bridges and brokers in their efforts to negotiate the imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups.