War toys: product history and public protest

IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been

Various themes in the scholarly literature have argued that an entrenched military is able to maintain its level of influence through the manipulation of perceptions of a hostile environment. While I argue that any alleged manipulation is generally not carried out under the guise of conscious `security policy', there is some evidence that the perception of an international threat can be and is maintained through the use of the media and entertainment outlets. Using the prevalence of war toys and war movies as indicators of societal symbols, I find that there is a consistent pattern between: (a) the trends of militarization in the USA, (b) public attitudes toward military spending and the expectation of a future war, (c) the popularity of war toys and movies, and (d) press reporting with pro-military themes. The correlation between war movies and societal militarization is 0.83; war toys and militarization 0.74; and press reporting with pro-military themes and militarization 0.44. These patterns appear to hold in the USA over the first 85 years of the 20th century, and not only lend credence to those arguments that suggest that a threat need not be existential for the military to remain `well prepared', but also point to areas that could help facilitate long-term demilitarization efforts.

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Capitalism, Protectionism, and Beer Wars in Rock Island, 1880–1900

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America combines essays from scholars based in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Germany to challenge the ossified ideas about migration that have emerged in national historiographies. Contributors draw upon recent migration scholarship to debunk the dominant image of the typical migrant as a male crossing an international border. This includes recognizing the movements of groups thought to be sedentary, such as indigenous people and women; it also entails analyzing internal migration and historicizing the formation of borders. The vast majority of contributions are well written, with a lucid introductory synthesis and historiographical chapter by Dirk Hoerder. When unmoored from a myopic focus on the transatlantic journeys of Europeans to the United States, the North American framework is quite useful because it unites subfields of migration scholarship that are often treated separately. The significance of creating scholarly dialogue between the ever-expanding fields of migration history in the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the United States, not to mention studies of the southwestern borderlands, should not be overlooked. For scholars already well versed in current migration theory, this comparative aspect represents the volume’s greatest strength.In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the borderlands between the United States and Canada in the north and Mexico in the southwest were crisscrossed by thriving networks of small-scale trade and seasonal migration. This created integrated communities of European-origin settlers and indigenous peoples that spanned international political borders, even as the latter shifted. Small groups of professionals and political exiles also moved between the Caribbean and the United States with significant effects in both. The existence of these transborder communities points to one of the volume’s recurring arguments: there are often more cultural commonalities across political borders than between subregions within them. This is not to say that political borders were meaningless. Trade policies enacted by the governments of the United States and Mexico created shifting economic inequalities on the border throughout the nineteenth century.Later in that century, the presence of railroads, commercial agriculture, and finance capital increased in the northern United States, the southwestern borderlands, and the Caribbean. Economic development and liberalization created new connections throughout the region at the same time that it displaced many people and destroyed local markets; some long-standing migratory practices became untenable, and new migrant streams were created. In Mexico, liberal economic policies enacted during the porfiriato broke up the communal holdings of church lands as well as those belonging to indigenous people, causing internal and international migration. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 increased migration to the United States. Despite linguistic and cultural similarities, Mexican immigrants were not initially welcomed by Spanish-speaking residents north of the border, again showing the need to historicize borders. Throughout Canada, the growth of railroads brought new competition in the form of distantly produced goods and people competing for agricultural lands. Small-scale farmers and indigenous people, themselves engaged in long-standing patterns of seasonal migration, were forced to migrate elsewhere. Emancipation in North America and the various parts of the Caribbean over the course of the nineteenth century allowed previously enslaved people to migrate. The rise of commercial agriculture played an important role in shaping their destinations.After a period of relative porosity, land and sea borders were militarized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on grounds of racial and economic concerns. In the late nineteenth century, the United States banned Asian immigration and con tract labor. Such restrictions influenced relations among states in North America and show the importance of a continental perspective. Fearing that Asians would enter the country from Canada or Mexico, the United States began guarding its land borders more stringently and pressuring neighboring countries to adopt similar restrictions. Canada acquiesced; Mexico did not. By the 1930s, racial and economic arguments were put forth throughout the region in an effort to halt immigration and deport foreigners. Although people continued to migrate, especially within nation-states, cross-border migration would not reach pre-Depression levels until the 1970s.The connections among different states and organizations within North America have become especially apparent during the past decades. During the 1980s, refugees from the wars in Central America began heading north to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Many spent time in multiple countries in search of legal recognition of their refugee status. However, a combination of unresponsive states and Cold War politics barred many from obtaining legal residence, forcing them to enter Mexico, the United States, or Canada illegally. Migrants received legal help, information about possible destinations, and material aid on their journeys from transnational networks of activists and organizations. More recently, Canadian guest worker programs have been lauded by the international community as a model of temporary migration that should be emulated elsewhere, a somewhat discouraging trend considering the abuses built into the system.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

The movement to build a National Theatre in Britain took shape when, in the late 1840s, Effingham Wilson, an eminent London publisher, proposed a national playhouse concerned with popularising 'good drama' (particularly Shakespeare) and educating the public through 'the standardization of the best'.2 Wilson, like John Ruskin, believed in popular education and the moral function of theatre. Alfred Lyttelton, the great campaigner for a National Theatre in the late nineteenth century, was a friend and admirer of Ruskin and introduced by him to Thomas Carlyle.3 And Henry Irving, the leading Victorian actor under whose management the Lyceum became 'a national theatre […] without a subsidy',4 was not only an ardent supporter of the National Theatre idea but also influenced by Ruskin's work. Although Ruskin did not publish widely on the theatre he was clearly seen by his contemporaries as an important theatre critic. Regarding this influence William Archer puts Ruskin on a par with Matthew Arnold and Lord Lytton - both well known to Victorians for their support of a National Theatre.5 Today, however, Ruskin's crucial influence in this area is almost entirely overlooked.

TalkingSex: The Rhetoricsof Reproduction, Sex Education, and Sexual Expression in theModern United States Karen Weingarten Books Discussed in This Article Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938. By Laura Lovett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924. By Robin Jensen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Sex Expression and American Women Writers, 1860-1940. By Dale Bauer. Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2009. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. By Johanna Schoen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. "The time has come to think about sex," wrote Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."1 At the time, Rubin had to qualify her essay's open ing line with the admission that some might find sexuality a trivial topic amid the world's more seemingly pressing issues. She went on to make the case, all the same, that sex and sexuality were tied to poverty, hunger, violence, race, war, disease, and other problems that FeministStudies39, no. 1. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 235 236 Karen Weingarten ailed the world. Now, thirty years later, Rubin's plea has become com monplace in feminist scholarship, and it is almost unimaginable to dismiss sex as unimportant and not integrally tied to key concerns of feminism such as reproduction, pornography, race, family, labor, and of course, sexuality. Looking back, it becomes apparent that thinking about sex has been at the heart of several different manifestations of feminism, even when it was not explicitly stated as such. This review essay presents a slice of women's history in which sex occupied an ambiguous status in public discourse, when it was both named and not named as a central concern. The four recent books reviewed here help us arrive at a better understanding of how sex was expressed, taught, advocated, and restricted in the United States from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. The conventional narrative about sex in the United States holds that in the late nineteenth century, when social reformers such as the puritanical Anthony Comstock had influence, sex was only dis cussed in whispers and was considered taboo, if not illegal, in public conversation and publications. Then, during the firstfew decades of the twentieth century, the tide turned; the FirstWorld War liberalized the country and allowed for more progressive and open discussions about sex, including issues such as birth control, abortion, venereal disease, and prostitution. Women started viewing their own sexual ity in different terms, especially as suffrage granted them both citi zenship and personhood. The books I review focus on the same broad era of shifting rhetorical possibilities—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but none of them adhere to this simple prog ress narrative. Although they focus on different texts, characters, and movements, they each argue against a linear change from sex-as taboo to sex-as-free-flowing and instead demonstrate how sex in ear lier eras was discussed much more widely than previously imagined. Robin Jensen's DirtyWords explicitly examines the rhetoric of the sex education movement from 1870 to 1924. She argues that women played a much greater role in promoting sex education in the United States than previous historians have depicted. More significantly, she also demonstrates how sex educators found a way to discuss sex using ambiguous language that allowed them to address what were seen as unspeakable topics for public audiences, particularly those that Karen Weingarten 237 contained children and women. Similarly, Dale Bauer's Sex Expres sion shows how US women writers between 1860 and 1940 created a language of expressing sex in literature that reflected changing atti tudes about women's sexuality. Laura Lovett's historical study Con ceivingtheFuture,which spans 1890 to 1938, also argues that pronatal ism—rhetoric promoting sex for the sake of reproduction—was indirectly encouraged through federal and state programs that avoided all mention of sex and reproduction, even as procreation was implicit in the message. Finally, Johanna Schoen's Choiceand Coercion begins in the early twentieth century...

Reviewed by: Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy by Torrie Hester Kunal M. Parker (bio) Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy. By Torrie Hester. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. viii, 243. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) Torrie Hester's book is an important addition to the substantial literature on American deportation policy. The scale and significance of deportation are unquestionable. As Hester points out at the beginning of the book, between 1892 and 2015, the United States deported over 50 million people, close to 95 percent of them after 1970 (p. 1). That enormous number understates the terrible impact of deportation in both the United States and elsewhere: families torn apart, communities sundered, businesses disrupted, and American social problems such as crime willfully shifted to other countries less able to cope with them. Hester traces how the basic structure of deportation policy took shape. She begins in the late nineteenth century, showing how the U.S. Supreme Court exempted substantive deportation law from the purview of the U.S. Constitution. Because deportation was not seen for constitutional purposes as punishment for a crime, immigrants were unable to avail of the various protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution to criminal defendants. Hester then moves to explore how U.S. deportation policy developed two distinct tracks, one for Chinese immigrants that allowed for judicial challenges to deportation decisions and another for all other immigrants that vested administrative decisions with finality. Eventually, she shows how both tracks merged, so that it became increasingly difficult to challenge deportation decisions in court. This did not, of course, stop immigrants from seeking judicial review of deportation decisions, although they would increasingly do so on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds. Hester also shows in detail how deportation law shifted from the aim of removing excludable immigrants (those who should never have been admitted in the first place but who were let in erroneously) to punishing immigrants for post-admission activities that the state frowned upon. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, [End Page 563] deportation law increasingly became an instrument of domestic social policy. Invoking the fact of immigrants' non-citizenship, the state could remove immigrants from its territory when they engaged in behaviors ranging from crime to seeking public assistance to expressing politically undesirable views. This has been the focus of deportation law ever since. While deportation continues to function as an adjunct to exclusion, its main purpose is to punish immigrants for acts committed after (in many cases, long after) they have entered the United States. While citizens may be incarcerated, immigrants' incarceration is often followed by deportation to countries they might not even know. Much of Hester's story is familiar in its broad outlines to scholars of immigration and citizenship law, although the details she provides are compelling. Her major contribution is in highlighting the international dimension of deportation law. The United States might be eager to get rid of immigrants, but how did it decide where to send them? What if immigrants preferred to be sent elsewhere? Hester highlights state-to-state negotiations over the repatriation of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also shows how the old system of transporting immigrants to the border gradually ceded to the practice of sending immigrants back to their countries of origin. Her account of the "Red Scare" deportations around 1920 is a particularly detailed account of deporting immigrants from the Russian empire back to the Soviet Union at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations. Overall, Hester's book is a fine addition to the literature on American deportation policy. It historicizes one of the urgent problems of our time. [End Page 564] Kunal M. Parker KUNAL M. PARKER teaches law at the University of Miami. He is the author of Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (2015) and is currently working on a project on mid-twentieth century American legal thought. Copyright © 2018 Kentucky Historical Society

Ever since the emigration from the Nordic countries the Old world and the New world have maintained an exchange of ideas, customs, and material culture. This cultural heritage consists of more than remnants of the past. Drawing on theories of material culture and performance this article highlights the role of gifts in materializing relationships between individuals, families and organizations in the wake of migration. First, I build on a suggested coinage of the term heritage gifts as a way of materializing relationships. Thereafter, I map out the numerous roles which a Swedish bridal crown play in the United States: as museum object, object of display and loaned to families for wedding ceremonies in America. The transfers and transformations of the bridal crown enhances a drama of a migration heritage. This dynamic drama brings together kin in Sweden and America and maps specific locations into a flexible space via the trajectory of crown-clad female bodies.

With only 64 shopping days to Christmas, ‘Toys for 1988: the Gamleys Christmas Catalogue’ landed unsolicited on my doormat. It was a reminder that the toy industry trades in wishes and desires. The front cover photograph features a Christmas morning scene with tree and presents, bathed in golden light, that is gazed at from the shadows in the doorway by a boy and a girl with their backs to the camera. The presents themselves are not wrapped up as gifts, but displayed as they would be in the shop, in attractive packages with brand names facing the viewer: ‘Kongman’, a ‘Tiny Tears’ doll, ‘Le Mans Scalextric’ — and an ‘Action Force’ helicopter. Within the catalogue, these toys are sorted into sections. At the front, you immediately discover ‘Action Figures, Cars, Trucks, Robots, Trains and Science’, featuring on the first page the ‘Action Force’ series of ‘fully poseable modern army figures’ and their range of military vehicles. At the back, after some hunting, you will find ‘Soft Toys, Around the House, Dolls and Accessories’. Predict- ably, all six illustrative photos in the ‘around the house’ section featurerls, and all four in the ‘action’ section feature boys. The organisation of desire here is gendered, and a classic dichotomy reproduced, whereby girlhood is associated with domesticity and the private world, and boyhood with adventure and the public world.KeywordsFictional WorldDiscursive ContextCharacter MerchandisingExtraordinary TalentAttractive PackageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940 by Robert Chao Romero, and: Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusions in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Grace Peña Delgado, and: Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960 by Julia María Schiavone Camacho Ignacio López-Calvo (bio) Robert Chao Romero. The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 255 pp. Paperback $26.95, isbn 978-0-8165-1460-1. Grace Peña Delgado. Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusions in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 226 pp. Paperback $24.95, isbn 978-0-8047-8862-5. Julia María Schiavone Camacho. Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 304 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3540-1. Following Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s pioneering essays and the publication in 2010 of Robert Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940, two more studies on this topic were published in 2012: Grace Peña Delgado’s Making the Chinese Mexican and María Schiavone Camacho’s Chinese Mexicans. While the three books share common findings and a hemispheric approach (at times producing a sort of déjà vu feeling, if one reads them in sequence), they also complement one another nicely to propose collectively a much-needed revised social history of Chinese community in Mexico. In a time span of only three years, the publication of these three books has covered a major lacuna in the history of Mexico and the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, and is proof of the vitality of this relatively new subfield, which studies the history of Asians in the Americas. Fortunately, Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Lok Siu, Jeffrey Lesser, Juan Pérez de la Riva, Kathleen López, Daniel Masterson, Tsugio Shindo, and others have published important historical studies on the Asian presence in other Latin American and Caribbean countries. The cultural production of these Asian communities in the region has also been increasingly studied in recent years. Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico, the first English-language monograph on the Chinese presence and heritage in Mexico, opened the dialogue to a revision of the official notion of mestizaje in Mexico. Like the other two books considered in this review, it moves from the public to the private, often citing case studies of Chinese immigrants, such as Pablo Chee, Ricardo Cuan, and Alejandro Chan, whose stories offer a microcosm of their community. They were part of the more than sixty thousand Chinese who migrated to almost every state in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Chinese immigrants were recruited to serve mostly as agricultural contract laborers, they soon moved to commerce, and by the 1920s, they had a monopoly on the grocery and dry goods trade in northern Mexico. In part, this economic success engendered anti-Chinese protests that culminated in racist legislation, boycotts, lootings, and even [End Page 180] massacres, such as the one in Torreón on May 15, 1911, where 303 Chinese immigrants were murdered by revolutionary soldiers. As Chao Romero explains, the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States coincided with the efforts of Mexican businessmen and their government to attract Chinese labor. As a result, Chinese immigrants chose Mexico either to find business opportunities in its developing economy or to get smuggled into the United States. As the author points out, “the Chinese were the first ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Mexico, and they created the first organized system of human smuggling from Mexico to the United States” (Romero, p. 3). This sophisticated smuggling business that, during the late nineteenth century had its headquarters in Havana, Cuba, also had international ramifications and collaborators in China, Mexico, and several cities in the United States, including San Francisco, Tucson, San Diego, El Paso, New York, Boston, and New Orleans. The San Francisco fraternal organization Chinese Six Companies was reportedly the chief sponsor of the human trafficking that brought approximately two thousand unauthorized Chinese to the United States...

Chicana/o history has witnessed a number of historiographical debates that date back to its emergence in the 1960s. Paradigms and periodization once again emerge as important themes in González and Fernández’s A Century of Chicano History. The authors challenge current historiographical trends concerning the formation of the Chicana/o community, structure and agency, the importance of gender as a category to analyze labor and Bracero programs, and the ideological forms of colonialism—both past and present—deployed in Mexico as part and parcel of U.S. empire building. They especially believe that scholars need to reconsider the role of early U.S. imperialist activities in Mexico during the nineteenth century. The origins of U.S. domination in Mexico can be traced to the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a period that signaled the economic subordination of that country to U.S. capitalism (p. 29). Consequently, “the rise of the Chicano national minority was not an event marginal to U.S. history; quite the opposite, it was central to the construction of a U.S. neocolonial empire” (p. 59). The cozy relationship between Porfirio Díaz and U.S. capitalists spurred Mexican migration. The coming of the railroads, the exploitation of minerals, and the sprouting of an agricultural economy in the Southwest further facilitated this trend. The formation of the Chicano community in the United States, therefore, “reflects Mexico’s economic subordination in the face of U.S. hegemony and the limitations placed on its national sovereignty by that domination” (p. 29).This monograph challenges current Chicana/o historiography in focusing on Mexican migration to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that the bulk of the Chicano community in the U.S. is descended from these migrations. That is, the nonmigrant community residing primarily in the American Southwest is a small percentage of the overall Chicano community, one composed predominantly of more recent migrations beginning in the late nineteenth century. Thus, with the exception of New Mexico, “the small number of Mexicans annexed by the conquest are inconsequential compared to the much larger number of late nineteenth-century Mexican migrants to the region” (p. 13). Most scholars argue for a continuity of Chicano history from 1848 to the present and overlook the impact of later Mexican migrations on the formation of Chicano/a communities. In the words of González and Fernández, most Chicana/o historians “nearly unanimously emphasize a continuity of Chicano history from that point to the present” (p. 11). But by comparing the periods of increased Mexican migration with those of increased American investment in Mexico, it is easy to see how the creation of the Chicano community is due to immigration. As such, “Rather than the commonly held belief that the Mexican American War of 1848 led to the construction of the Chicano minority, this study proposes that the origins of the Chicano population evolved from economic empire led by corporate capitalist interests with the backing of the U.S. State Department”(p. 59).González and Fernández also incorporate some important ideological and cultural components in their economic interpretation. Two chapters are worth noting: “The Ideology and Practice of Empire: The United States, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants” and “Denying Empire: The Journal of American History on the Ideological Warpath.” In the American imaginary of Mexico and Mexicans, as viewed through the extensive production of travel literature in the nineteenth century, the authors see something similar to the “Orientalism” that Edward Said described in his pathbreaking postcolonial study of the East in the European imaginary. This knowledge was employed alongside U.S. economic policy and later combined with Americanization programs imposed upon the Chicano community. As a result, the “interconnections of the Chicano historical experience with the economic and political hegemony exerted by the United States over Mexico and of the ideology that that domination inspired need to be placed on the research agenda” (p. 93)A few experts in Latin American history will probably see the residual elements of an earlier dependency theory model, while postcolonial critics will perhaps read this interpretation as another effort to impose European categories of analysis à la Marx. These points aside, however, A Century of Chicano History will more than likely stimulate a healthy level of discussion within Chicana/o studies itself and should be required reading for scholars of U.S., Latin American, and borderlands history.

Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America

Whereas much attention is devoted to negotiating norms and formal agreements for the peaceful use of outer space, domestic factors that push for the development of space-based weapons receive minimal attention. Despite serious doubt about the effectiveness of missile defense and the technical feasibility of space-based weapons, the United States has spent well over $130 billion on research and development of them, including at least $10 billion currently. This article examines four domestic drivers that may explain why such investment persists: the defense perspective and ideology of the Republican Party; the belief that US satellites may require space-based protective weapons; the huge investment of the military contractor corporations, including their efforts to influence legislation and cultivate contacts; and the private advocacy groups that support US military domination of space. A number of countervailing drivers exist to mitigate against development of these weapons, with perhaps the most powerful factor restraining space-based weapons development being their wildly high costs.