In examining the mathematical models, theories of value, and price statistics wielded by leading economist and social reformer Irving Fisher, this article explores the overlooked impact that Neoclassical Economics had on Progressive Era reform and thought. By offering a neoclassical theory of marginal utility that claimed that market prices reflected subjective value, Fisher formalized, legitimized, and popularized the use of price statistics in progressive political discourse, teaching the American people that if they wanted to argue over the nature of progress or the worthiness of a certain reform, they would have to price it first. The article argues that such a “pricing of progressivism” served as an important foundational precursor to the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1980s. In light of such a significant intellectual legacy, it seems imperative that intellectual historians of the Progressive Era turn their attention away from the usual suspects of this period, such as Pragmatists William James and John Dewey, and shift their analytical focus away from the “Metaphysical Club” and toward a neoclassical one.

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.

This article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

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.”

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.

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.

For all its typically Progressive Era characteristics and national scope, the “honest weight movement” has long been hidden in plain sight. Seemingly ubiquitous and mundane, the common grocery scale was the intersecting borderland of industry, government, marketplace, and consumer. On the one hand, the regulation of weights and measures, being one of the first forms of governmental regulation of the marketplace dating back to the ancient world, seems so unobjectionable and commonplace that the Progressive Era movement for its more rigorous and efficient administration does not seem like it could have been a very controversial proposal. Who, after all, could object to clear and consistent standards of measurement and their universal application? Thus, the appearance of a movement to reform the ubiquitous and the mundane has not elicited the same historical attention that novel forms of government regulation have.

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.

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 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.

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.

• • 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).

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:

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.

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.

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.

When a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan first arrived in Butte, Montana, in the summer of 1921, he placed an ad in the Butte Miner depicting a white-robed man astride a bucking horse. Borrowed from the publicity materials for D W. Griffith's groundbreaking film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), this image of a uniformed figure was a fixture of Klan propaganda. The advertisement faced two directions: it connected the newly formed Klan with its Reconstruction Era predecessor, while also demonstrating that the Klan imagined itself through the revisionist lens of Griffith's film and its textual inspiration, Thomas Dixon Jr.'s play and novel The Clansman (1905). The image of a white-robed Klansmen in the Butte Miner was thus a symbol of what Klan leaders and the popular media alike called the Klan's “revival,” the process through which the historical organization was brought to life in a new form.

Racial mapping during the Progressive Era played into the political narratives of eugenic intervention and immigration restriction. This article argues that the racial cartographic work of the Yale geographer and prolific eugenicist Ellsworth Huntington was both developed within and contributed to this racist milieu. Huntington’s middle-class and educated upbringing, his familial history, and his expertise as a well-travelled geographer all conspired to shape his views on eugenics, race, and immigration. By applying the critical cartographic theories of John Brian Harley, Denis Wood, Heather Winlow, and others, I show that Huntington’s racial maps were a product of his cultural and political environment. The success of a map’s impact was often due to maps being seen as objective depictions of spatial variation. Indeed, for Huntington they performed an essential role in communicating and portraying racial information. But, as I argue, they were susceptible to bias, misunderstanding, and intentional manipulation. I show that Huntington’s maps are not accurate snapshots of reality, but rather cultural texts or rhetorical images intended to create a narrative and convince the reader of a particular subjective point of view.