In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

During the Gilded Age, constitutional issues pervaded the discussion of nearly all matters of public policy, including regulation of railroads, suppressing unsafe and fraudulent products, labor issues, and combating trusts and monopolies. The Democratic and Republican parties differed in their conceptions of federal power and state rights as well as on matters related to social order and personal liberty. They articulated these differences in political platforms and manifested them in their approach to public policy. The obsession with constitutional issues was not confined to the halls of Congress or the chambers of the Supreme Court. Constitutional discourse ran up from ordinary people and interest groups to public policy makers and down from policy makers seeking support based on fidelity to constitutional principles. Ordinary people influenced constitutional policymaking not only through voting but through various means of making their views known. Advocates used all types of media to make constitutional issues clear to the American people. These ranged from formal treatises aimed at the intellectual elite to cartoons, caricatures, songs, and screeds. Politicians articulated constitutional positions in political platforms, congressional addresses, pamphlets, political and commemorative addresses, and stump speeches. Justices of the Supreme Court eschewed technical and abstract language in constitutional opinions, addressing them to a more general public than they did in other areas of law. In the end, constitutional policy was not determined through legal determinations of the Supreme Court but by the political decisions of the American people.

The relationship between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in support of national prohibition has been a source of controversy since the 1920s. Both the ASL and the KKK acted to enforce prohibition, the ASL through legal and political means, the KKK through grassroots political pressure and extralegal vigilante methods. Wet observers and, more recently, historians of the Klan movement claimed that the ASL cooperated with the Invisible Empire in direct enforcement of dry laws. ASL activists and prohibition historians, in turn, denied league involvement with the intolerant, occasionally violent, dry vigilantism of the Klan and instead stressed the nonpartisan bureaucratic operations of the ASL. The actual ambivalent relationship reflected shortcomings in the dry regime and in the two organizations. Ineffective enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders. But extensive and persistent cooperation was not apparent.

On July 29, 1902 a massive funeral procession for Jacob Joseph, the esteemed Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community, wound its way through the streets of New York's Lower East Side. The solemn occasion was marred, however, when the procession was attacked by a group of factory workers. As the melee blossomed into a full-scale riot, a contingent of New York City policemen arrived and proceeded to pummel and arrest the mourners rather than the instigators. Historians have consistendy cited this ugly incident as a vivid example of Irish Catholic antisemitism, noting that both the workers and policemen were “predominantly Irish.” Indeed, it was a quest to learn more about the roots of Irish Catholic antisemitism that drew this historian to the subject. And yet, a thorough examination of the incident produced a startling result: a dearth of Irish defendants and a flawed historiography that ultimately call into question the validity of the Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot as an example of Irish Catholic antisemitism.

The state of Texas' determined effort to keep African-Americans performing plantation labor was at the heart of its prison farm system, from Reconstruction through the 1920s. State and penitentiary officials followed a practice of racialized labor control, demanding that African-American convicts perform plantation gang labor, not only to make the prison system profitable but also keep them involved in extractive agriculture. As the prison population grew, so did the abuse of convicts. The story of Texas’ penitentiary system shows the continuing tie between African-Americans, plantation labor, and racism in Texas, as well as other southern states. The sprawling farm system that developed in Texas made it unique in the South. When Progressive Era reformers confronted abuses in the Texas prison system, they had to contend with an overwhelming profit motive that made reform difficult, and warped reform measures they managed to push through the legislature. Among the initial goals of Texas prison reformers were an end to convict leasing and a ban on the use of the whip as punishment. The agenda of reformers collided with the goals of the Texas prison system, with unexpected results. Looking at reform measures after they passed the legislature illustrates how prison managers tried to circumvent regulations that hindered profitability.

The vogue for the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the popularity of vitalist ideas more generally, periodically claims the attention of historians of early twentieth-century American thought and culture. There is little appreciation, however, for either the broad epistemic significance of these ideas or for their profound ethical and political implications. This essay explores the activity of Bergsonian vitalism, particularly as applied by Bergson's radical compatriot, Georges Sorel, within the fractious conversation that attended the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a significant force in the pre-war 1910s. Understanding the ways in which this seemingly unprecedented menace to the status quo was understood facilitates a rethinking of the relationship between ideas and experience in the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, and illuminates the attraction of radically empiricist approaches to interpreting social phenomena in the Progressive Era. Here, as elsewhere, Bergsonism challenged dominant materialistic and mechanistic explanations in the name of “life,” a seductive alternative for those alienated by, or suffering under, the juggernaut of urban-industrial modernization.

Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics. The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas. A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question. In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

This study of the Baltimore anti-smoke movement illustrates how Americans altered their approach to environmental regulation during the Progressive Era. After citizen groups came to recognize the limits of common-law regulation, they became enamored with administrative regulation and the promise of rationalized, professional agencies. While Baltimore did mirror the national regulatory trends, the city's unique circumstances limited its capacity to reduce the sooty, black smoke that provoked episodes of public activism. Fearful about the city's economic future, regulators exempted manufacturing from the city's early anti-smoke measures. Furthermore, although railroads were major polluters, they balked at electrifying the bulk of their tracks. Finally, the anti-smoke movement was narrowly based in the northeastern, more affluent parts of the city and failed to expand its support to working-class whites and African Americans. Hence, while the ideas about what constituted appropriate regulation “modernized” in Baltimore, the city did not alter its regulatory practices until the 1930s, long after other cities had done so:

• • Susan Porter Benson, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

• • Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

• • Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2014).

• • Katherine Leonard Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, California Studies in Food and Culture 48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

• • Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

• • Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of the development of U.S. power in the Pacific, some American Protestants began to articulate a new approach to Catholicism and American national identity. In Southern California, Anglo-American boosters began to celebrate the region's history of Spanish Franciscan missions, preserving and restoring existing mission buildings while selling a romantic mission story to tourists and settlers. In the Philippines, U.S. imperial officials, journalists, and popular writers tempered widespread critiques of contemporary Spanish friars, celebrating the friars' early missionary precursors as civilizing heroes and arguing that Filipino Catholic faith and clerical authority could aid in the maintenance of imperial order. Against persistent currents of anti-Catholicism and in distinct and locally contingent ways, American Protestants joined Catholics in arguing that the United States needed to evolve beyond parochial religious bigotries. In both places, in popular events and nationally circulating publications, the celebration of particular constructions of Catholic histories and authority figures served to reinforce U.S. continental expansion and transoceanic empire.

This essay examines the influence of the social purity movement on the U.S. government's campaign to protect servicemen from the temptations of drink and illicit sex during World War I. This influence had been forged in the context of U.S. imperialism in the two decades prior to American entry into the war, as purity reformers linked the sexual morality and temperance of soldiers serving in occupied territories overseas to racial purity and national character at home. War Department policymakers who were allied with the purity movement likewise understood male moral restraint and sexual self-control to underpin democratic self-governance. This linkage between civic virtue and moral virtue was especially problematic at the outset of the war, as many native-born Americans (progressive policymakers included) questioned whether all members of the ethnically and racially diverse nation had the capacity for self-government. The goals of social purity and wartime policymakers were thus aligned as the War Department launched its crusade against liquor and sexual vice within the military. Government officials required moral sobriety of servicemen in order to remake the body politic. But even as they demanded virtuous conduct from the man in uniform, they simultaneously infantilized the “soldier lad” in their effort to safeguard him.

This paper reassesses American opinions and sentiments during the period of neutrality in light of the one endeavor that involved millions of Americans in the European conflict long before official U.S. belligerency: war relief. Tracing some of the “humanitarian narratives” employed in the relief campaigns for the Central Powers, the Allies, and neutral Belgium, humanitarian involvement, it will be argued, not only expressed prevalent ethnic, cultural, and political affinities, but shaped American attitudes toward the different belligerents. Contrary to contemporary claims, humanitarian pursuits were never even remotely impartial, but drew Americans onto the different sides of the war like few other endeavors. Indeed, relief work must be taken serious as a force of “cultural mobilization” (Horne), which affected American “visions of the war and its outcome.” By involving Americans actively on the different sides of the European war, it helped forge discrete moral and emotional alliances across the Atlantic. In trying to understand the complicated and acrimonious process by which Americans moved from peace to war, their relief work thus deserves attention.

When invited to write this retrospective review, I turned to my library shelves to pick up once more The Search for Order, 1877–1920. My faded paperback copy has a striking image of a railroad track, peeling off into the distance, past a mine site, and then disappearing over the horizon. The colors are shades of red, a black tinged in the glow of red, and a pale pink sky. The scene conveys both an unsettling alarm at the turmoil of society in the coloration, and a binding process through the railroad. I have just discovered that Saul Lambert (a noted illustrator) drew this evocative scene for Hill and Wang, and the job was exceedingly well done.

The initiative and referendum are commonly characterized as quintessentially Populist or Progressive reforms, but transatlantic socialism deserves pride of place in the intellectual history of direct legislation in the United States. A decade and a half before the People’s Party famously commended the idea of direct legislation at its 1892 nominating convention in Omaha, Nebraska, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) made the demand for direct legislation a plank in its first party platform. That demand was shaped by the 1875 Gotha Program formulated by the Socialist Workers Party of Germany and informed by socialist debates during the First International and the pioneering work of Moritz Rittinghausen. The diffusion of these ideas among Gilded Age labor radicals is a crucial and underappreciated part of the story of the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States. That socialists’ pioneering role in the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States has largely been slighted is particularly ironic since the individual arguably most responsible for securing the direct legislation resolution at Omaha was among the nation’s most successful radical labor organizers and a committed socialist, Joseph R. Buchanan.

From 1870 through 1900, the National Guard attracted tens of thousands of new members by offering men the opportunity to demonstrate that they were manly men who held dramatic civic roles that put them at the center of community social and patriotic life. Time, modernization, strike service, changes in technology, and warfare all worked to alter the environment in which Guardsmen made themselves men. Guardsmen of the early twentieth century no longer found their definition of manhood and citizenship in performances for the local community. By 1917, the elements of manhood National Guardsmen shared had evolved from the focus on style and sociability they celebrated the 1880s and 1890s into an individual focus on a concept of self-discipline, self-improvement, and national patriotism. The National Guard offers historians the opportunity to see how an organization that emphasized making men manly was able to shift what that meant as definitions of manhood evolved and as the Guard worked to keep its appeal current and fresh to each new batch of recruits.

La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.

In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novels The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.

Students of the life of Lillian D. Wald (1867–1940) know her best as a Progressive activist. A trained nurse and advocate for East European Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, she founded Henry Street Settlement House there in 1893 and worked for state intervention in public health issues concerning women and children. Though she lived until 1940, historians have focused almost exclusively on her achievements before 1920: her founding of Henry Street, her key role in the formation of the Children's Bureau, her anti-militarism during World War I. This is not surprising, given that Wald' s rhetoric is that of a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive. She consistently cited her actions as in line with her universalist philosophy of human interdependence, which she referred to as “mutuality” and defined as a vision in which “no one class of people can be independent of the other”. Wald's mutuality echoes the Protestant social gospel movement's call for a “brotherhood of man” which inspired so many – including so many middle-class women – to work for various currents of Progressive reform.

In 1884, a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate-at-large from New York. There, he and his new friend, Massachusetts delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, backed George Edmunds of Vermont against their party's overwhelming choice, the “Plumed Knight,” James G. Blaine. Despite their energetic efforts, which received national attention, Blaine easily secured the nomination, and both Lodge and Roosevelt eventually backed the party's choice. For Lodge biographers, the Chicago convention represented Lodge's “personal Rubicon,” the “turning point” of his career, leading to “the greatest crisis of Lodge's political life.” Roosevelt historians also see the convention as “one of the crucial events of Theodore's life,” “the great and deciding moment of TR's life,” leading to “the most agonizing dilemma of his political career.” The usual story of the convention is that by backing Blaine against the wishes of other Independent Republicans, both Lodge and Roosevelt did great damage to their immediate careers by alienating their natural allies. This led to Lodge losing his race for Congress that same fall and to Roosevelt fleeing west to his Dakota ranch with his political future uncertain. Moreover, Roosevelt's decision is often depicted as the moment he became a professional politician. David McCullough writes that the convention “marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician,” while John Morton Blum asserts that by campaigning for Blaine, “Roosevelt declared not only for Blaine but also for professionalism.”