During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Indian Territory and the State of Oklahoma experienced one of the world’s largest petroleum booms, with much of the oil extracted from the territory and state produced on land owned by Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race peoples. White settlers, backed by governing institutions and cultures rooted in settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, and anti-monopolism, struggled to seize control of oil-rich land amid the allotment of Native-owned property. These latter elements insisted that non-whites could not grasp the value of petroleum nor be trusted with the control of such a vital resource, especially in the shadow of ever-looming oil monopolies. Settlers and wildcat prospectors built a white-supremacist oil-field politics that elevated the rights of small-scale, proprietary "independent" oilmen and worked to ensure that the latter controlled flows of crude vis-à-vis non-white property holders and “outside” corporations. For white settlers in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, oil rose to the top of collective imaginaries about race, property, and wealth, encouraging the creation of both legal and often violent extralegal strategies for dispossessing unworthy landowners of their hydrocarbon inheritance.

The extent and intensity of electoral and voter fraud that took place during the U.S. Gilded Age is properly infamous. This paper explores a form of voter intimidation that has garnered comparatively little scholarly attention: economic coercion. Absent secrecy at the polls and security at work, bosses forced workingmen to choose between their job or their vote. Economic voter intimidation provoked both a real and rhetorical crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. In real terms, it disrupted hundreds of elections and damaged thousands of workers’ livelihoods. It became a nationwide crisis after 1873, however, because for the first time, employers were coercing white workingmen on a widespread basis. Reports of employers coercing their employees at the polls throughout the nation confirmed the worst fears of many labor leaders and politicians: white wage-workers were insecure possessors of the franchise whose precariousness might threaten democracy itself. Mining previously overlooked accounts of economic voter intimidation in contested congressional election case records, congressional investigations, corporate records, and newspapers, this article argues that employers’ politicized layoff threats and observation of workers at the polls undermined the political equality of even those men whose whiteness had seemingly secured their privilege.

The nature of American constitutional politics was forever changed during the Progressive Era. In the nineteenth century, the process of constitutional interpretation was a vague and decentralized enterprise balanced between the courts and the public square. The meaning of the Constitution was decided as much at the polls or on the battlefield as in court opinions. This balance started to give way at the turn of the century as federal courts began asserting greater authority in the definition of constitutional bounds. “Bench over Ballot” illustrates how the assertion of judicial supremacy in the Progressive Era precipitated a fight that upended the traditional dynamic of American politics. Populist-progressives championed the people's ultimate right to correct judicial decisions while traditionalist-conservatives stood for judicial supremacy to ensure a “government of laws.” The outcome of the political battle in 1912 was a consensus between Wilsonian progressives and Taftian conservatives in favor of judicial supremacy that banished the notion of popular supremacy and transformed the nature of constitutional politics from a popular, decentralized process to a vicious battle over the personal composition of the bench—a phenomenon deeply familiar over a century later.

From 1905–1920, American college and university students carried on active and understudied campaigns to gain legitimacy and support for women’s suffrage at institutions of higher education across the United States. The primary organization responsible for initiating and directing campus activism was the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), formed in 1900 by Massachusetts teachers Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Gillmore to recruit more upper- and middle-class, well-educated, students and alumni to the women’s rights movement. Exploring the records of state and national suffragists, women’s organizations, and academic institutions associated with the CESL shows that the league’s campaigns helped to reinvigorate the suffrage cause at an important moment in the early twentieth century by using educational tactics as powerful tools to cultivate a scholarly voice for the campaign, appeal to the upper classes, and fit within the contexts of higher education and larger movement for progressive reform. In addition to influencing the suffrage cause, campus organizing for equal voting rights changed the culture of female political activism and higher education by ushering a younger generation of articulate and well-trained activists into the women’s rights campaign and starting in a trend of organized youth mobilization for women’s rights at colleges and universities.

Progressive Era school officials transformed public education in American cities by teaching male students trades like foundry, carpentry, and mechanics in classrooms outfitted like factories. Historians have demonstrated how this “vocational education movement” was championed by male administrators and business leaders anxious to train the next generation of expert tradesmen. But women also hoped vocational education could prepare female students for industrial careers. In the early twentieth century, members of the National Women’s Trade Union League demanded that public schools open trade programs to female students and teach future working women the history of capitalism and the philosophy of collective bargaining. Their ambitious goals were tempered by some middle-class reformers and club women who argued vocational programs should also prepare female students for homemaking and motherhood. This article uses Chicago as a case study to explore how Progressive Era women competed and collaborated to reform vocational education for girls, and how female students responded to new school programs designed to prepare them for work both in and outside the home.

In the early twentieth century, many states turned to convict road labor in response to the clamor for good roads and the contemporaneous crisis of imprisonment. States, guided by the federal government that served as an information broker, developed two main types of convict labor program—the honor and guard systems. These systems differed by regional and local context. Colorado developed the honor form of convict labor based in Progressive principles. The Colorado system offers a case study in local conditions that took on national importance as Warden Thomas Tynan became enmeshed in a national network of Progressive penal reformers helping define state-run convict labor systems. This essay follows the reform ideology and financial incentives that drove Colorado's honor program, showing how capitalist labor motivations were balanced with ideals of reform. The honor system spread across the United States, and the story of this system complicates regional paradigms while highlighting national patterns. The story of honor guard convict labor and infrastructure development connects Progressive Era reform, penal reform, labor history, and regional and demographic patterns.

In November 1876, two Oneida Indians, Abram Elm and Lewis Doxtator, were arrested for voting illegally in the twenty-third congressional district election in New York. Their trial was held the next year in a federal court in the Northern District of New York, the same venue where Susan B. Anthony had been tried and convicted on a similar charge four years earlier. This essay focuses on the significance of the historically neglected United States v. Elm case, its origins, why the decision was rendered, and its short-term and long-term impact. Importantly, United States v. Elm has cast a long shadow over Supreme Court decisions—from the time of Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 right up to City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation in New York in 2005. In going to the polls, the two Native Americans were not trying to deny their Oneida identity; they saw themselves as dual citizens advocating a different course of resistance.

This study tracks the evolution of racist ideas pertaining to Black drug addiction and crime and the growth of a real interracial drug subculture, both of which had a part in forging New York’s drug policies in the early twentieth century. Well-worn racial tropes about drug use, cultivated in the imaginations of white commentators and pseudoscientists, railroaded African American suspects and contributed to the creation of the early apparatuses of the war on drugs. As observers increasingly connected the specter of cocaine “delirium” to common anxieties about Black crime and miscegenation, they in turn viewed white cocaine use as a solvable shortcoming in need of treatment rather than imprisonment. As such, New York City’s early civic responses to cocaine were shaped as Southern racial discourse collided with the developing panics of the Progressive Era that rallied around the increasing mobility of Black Americans in an effort to manage interracial contact through legislation.

Against the backdrop of the Great War a seemingly unlikely transatlantic romance blossomed between the deeply imperialist Round Table journal founded by “Milner’s Kindergarten,” a cadre of young former colonial administrators in Great Britain, and the American progressive standard-bearer The New Republic. The rhetoric of The New Republic in these years was deeply influenced by political Anglo-Saxon thought, as exemplified in The Round Table. Political Anglo-Saxonism was the belief that Anglo-Saxons were uniquely prepared for both self-governance and colonial governance. Adherents judged others’ capacity to self-govern against idealized Anglo norms. Both The Round Table (1910) and The New Republic (1914), from their inaugural issues on, sought national solutions for national problems utilizing a shared rhetoric of national efficiency. During the Great War this shared nationalist-progressivism drew the two groups together facilitating The New Republic’s founders’ early (1915) embrace of American intervention in the war. These connections are illuminated here through the interactions of The New Republic founders: Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl with key members of the British Round Table set, including Lionel Curtis, Philip Henry Kerr, Alfred Zimmern, and the prominent American “imperial school” historian George Louis Beer.

This essay examines the debate within the community of Black intellectuals and politicians about whether or not to abandon the Republican Party in 1916, and discusses both major parties’ attempts to cultivate Black voters. The objective of this article is to analyze 1916 through the lens of the rise of Black political independence and to elucidate the strains of thought that pushed an increasing number of Black thinkers—and, later, everyday Black voters—to operate outside of the political framework of the Republican Party. Though the momentous shift in the Black vote had not yet fully materialized, 1916 saw a pivotal and significant crystallization of discontent with the GOP that pushed Black voters to search for alternatives, including the radical option of a “Negro Party.” Ultimately, this new sense of political opportunity helped create the atmosphere that allowed Black voters to shift to the Democratic Party from 1928 to 1936.

This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

In September 1893, Catholic laypeople, clergy, and prelates met at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as the Columbian Catholic Congress to discuss their church's history and chart its course into the future. The leadership of Catholic laywomen in shaping the course of the Congress has been virtually absent in scholarship, much as it was hidden from contemporaries in the past. The act of a Catholic woman speaking among both men and women in a public space was significant, as it demonstrated an increasing assertiveness on the part of Catholic women, including those holding to a conception of gendered, separate spheres, that women had key roles to play in shaping public Catholicity and Catholics’ ideas about their own community of faith. A core group of Catholic women played a hitherto underappreciated part in bringing the Congress to life. This study therefore centers women in the history of, more narrowly, Catholicism's place at the World's Columbian Exposition and, more broadly, the Catholic public of the early Progressive Era, and demonstrates the often-invisible labor in which women engaged to develop their church's intellectual life in the early Progressive Era.

Millions of immigrants arrived in the United States during the Gilded Age, drastically altering the ethnic character of the American citizenry. This dramatic social change was met with mixed reactions from the native-born population that were vividly communicated in the popular press. Cartoonists for newspapers and magazines across the country developed a language of caricature to identify and distinguish among ethnic groups and mocked new arrivals in imagery that ranged from mild to malicious. One might assume that the masses of Eastern European Jews flooding into the country (poor, Yiddish-speaking, shtetl-bred) would have been singled out for anti-Semitic attack, just as they were in Europe at the time. However, Jews were not the primary victims of visual insults in America, nor were the Jewish caricatures wholly negative. Further, the broader scope of popular imagery, which, in addition to cartoons, includes a plethora of illustrations as well as photographs, presents a generally positive attitude toward Jewish immigrants. This attitude aligned with political rhetoric, literature, newspaper editorials, and financial opportunity. This article will propose a better alignment of the visual evidence with the scholarly understanding of the essentially providential experience of Jews in America during this period.

The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 (just twenty-two city blocks from where I write) sparked global demonstrations and renewed long-standing struggles for change. At the southern border, government agents separated migrant children from their families and confined detainees in cages. Politicization of the pandemic made Asian Americans targets of violent racist outbursts. Indigenous women continued to suffer disproportionate harm with little attention to their plight. Finally, the right-wing insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, in January 2021 marked the moment as especially volatile.