In the last two decades historians have begun to examine the political role and importance of religion. Many have concluded that religion provided a broad social perspective and served as the main basis for partisan identification and political activity (as summarized in Swierenga, 1971; McSeveney, 1973; VanderMeer, 1977; Silbey et al., 1978: 253-56). This position has by no means been universally accepted. Some of the criticism involves how the strength of that relationship has been evaluated and measured (Bogue et al., 1977; Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976). Other objections, focusing particularly on use of the pietist-liturgical (or ritualist) typology to analyze the late nineteenth century (notably Jensen, 1971; Kleppner, 1970), concern a prior and more significant problem: providing a consistent and coherent explanation of why religion was politically important (McCormick, 1974; Wright, 1973). It is argued that the pietist-liturgical typology cannot account for the opposition by some pietists to using government to enforce behavioral standards. The typology also fails to explain why the liturgical perspective was politically salient except when under pietist attack. Finally, there is the paradoxical situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which pietist churches were becoming less pietistic—adopting more elaborate worship services and deemphasizing revivalism—but at the same time were increasing and winning their demands for government regulation of morality. Taken as a whole, these criticisms suggest a fundamental weakness in the pietist-liturgical typology and indicate the need to reexamine the entire question of how religion has related to politics.

At eighteen, Marius Pouzergue was a student at the regional secondary school in the Southern French city of Nîmes. He lived near the lycée with his family in a solid bourgeois neighborhood. The small but prosperous Pouzergue household included Marius’s father, his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister Lucie, and a cook. Marius’s father was a court lawyer. Nineteen-year-old Adèle Lafont, like Marius, lived with her family. The Lafonts resided on the fashionable Boulevard Victor Hugo, where Monsieur Lafont owned a jewelry establishment. A domestic servant lived with Adèle, her parents, her brother aged 16, and her sister aged 26.

This essay will explore the relationship between the modernization of Congress and one of the main forces that is alleged to have produced it, the critical election of 1896. This is the election in which William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska ran for President on the Democratic ticket on a platform urging currency reform and bimetallic coinage. He was opposed on the Republican side by William McKinley of Ohio.

In recent years the social sciences have been asked to demonstrate that they are of some practical use. Knowledge for its own sake is a difficult policy to defend in a time of many crises, escalating costs, and shrinking resources for research. The result has been a tilt by the social sciences toward “relevance” and a growing emphasis on “applied” or “policy-oriented” or “action” research. Increasingly, the search for general, theoretical knowledge has become secondary to (or a fortuitous by-product of) more immediately “practical” endeavors.