This essay defends the Populists against charges that they espoused an irrationally conspiratorial view of American history. Focusing on monetary policy, and the free silver issue in particular, I argue that the Populists correctly suspected that bankers conspired to demonetize silver and demonstrate that William Ralston, president of The Bank of California, secretly bribed Treasury Department bureaucrats and used Western congressmen to pass the Coinage Act of 1873. Ralston's involvement in silver's demonetization has important ramifications for our understanding of the free silver movement. Some of the congressmen who helped Ralston demonetize silver paradoxically went on to lead the free silver movement, blaming Eastern financiers for the measure they helped pass, and created organizations such as the American Bimetallic League and the American Bimetallic Party, organizations that popularized the ideas subsequently adopted by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan. As some leaders of the free silver movement were deeply involved in silver's demonetization, this period exhibited levels of duplicity that have been unrecognized until now.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the United States transformed itself from a commercial republic into a major international actor and acquired its first overseas colonies and dependencies. This article investigates the role of public-private partnerships between American state officials and American financiers in the management and expansion of American empire. Confronted with tepid support from Congress for further imperial expansion and development, colonial bureaucrats looked to investment bankers to accomplish goals for which they lacked the financial capacity and political support to achieve independently. These partnerships were soon formalized as “Dollar Diplomacy,” an arrangement that would govern America's imperial strategy in the Caribbean. This article highlights two theoretical processes: (1) the downstream effects of congressional delegation decisions and their role in motivating institutional adaptations, and (2) the formation of public-private partnerships as an alternative means of state development, and the unique pitfalls of this approach. To illustrate these mechanisms, this article presents historical narratives, based largely on archival research, on the emergence of this Dollar Diplomacy partnership in the formal American colonies, the spread of this system of imperialism to the Caribbean, and its partial collapse during the early Wilson administration.

The Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry Code was one of the only successful codes in the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Compliance was high. It increased production, wages, employment, and product diversity. NRA administrators marveled at its success. Why? And why have historical and rational-choice institutionalists, studying the NRA, overlooked the container code? This paper provides two answers: one microbehavioral, the other macrohistorical. At a micro level, it is impossible to understand the container code with rational-choice theory. It was successful not because it coordinated and enforced collective action, but because it organized “collaborative learning.” The code showed manufacturers how to compete over productivity and product diversity instead of volume. At a macro level, historical institutionalists miss the movement that spawned the container code, because they search in vain for liberal corporatism and state autonomy. Instead, this paper shows how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) led a movement of cost accountants, trade associations, and peak business associations in an effort to channel competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes through “developmental trade associations.” The container code drew its personnel and practices from this project. In order to make sense of the container code, I introduce a novel theory of institutions, called “creative syncretism.”

Contemporary conservatism places an affinity for, fidelity to, and defense of the U.S. Constitution at the center of its electoral, institutional, and movement politics. Through a survey of popular constitutional discourse in postwar conservatism's premiere magazine, National Review between 1955 and 1980—presented in the context of the development of (conservative) political thought and the institutional infrastructure for idea generation and propagation—I argue that that defense began to assume an ecumenically populist, antielitist, and antijudicial form only beginning in the mid-1950s, and a shared commitment to “originalism” only in the late 1970s. From the 1950s through the late 1970s, conservative constitutional argument was centered not on the judiciary, but rather on the (often divisive) constitutionalism of Congress and the executive, and on divergent views concerning structuralist versus moralist constitutional understandings. Over time, however, through dialogic engagement taking place over and through unfolding political events, the movement's diverse intellectual strands reframed and reinforced their relationship by focusing less on their differences and more on an ecumenically shared populist critique of judicial power emphasizing a virtuous demos arrayed against an ideologically driven, antidemocratic, law-wielding elite. During this formative period, besides advocating a particular approach to textual interpretation, constitutional discourse played a critical role in fashioning movement symbols and signifiers, forming hopes and apprehensions, defining threats and reassurances, marking friends and enemies, stimulating feelings of belonging and alienation, fidelity and betrayal, and evoking both rational logics and intense emotions—all of which motivate and inform the heavily constitutionalized politics of American conservatism today.