Early Twentieth-century America Research Articles

Credit Cars: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Auto Loans

Drawing on trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper stories, and other historical sources from the early twentieth-century United States, this article explains how installment plans overcame moral and business concerns to become the standard way people bought cars. Prominent figures in the automobile industry and financial institutions initially denounced the idea of selling cars on credit, and many banks declined to extend credit to would-be auto buyers. However, the relevant legal infrastructure heavily favored creditors, allowing them to circumvent usury laws and guaranteeing their right to repossess assets if borrowers missed payments. When the profit-making that these aspects of the law enabled became clear, moral objections to the idea of selling cars on credit yielded to a new moral consensus among powerful actors that valorized buying cars on credit and concentrated disapprobation on just those borrowers who defaulted on their payments. Thus, the characteristics of the legal infrastructure functionally presupposed the resolution of the erstwhile debate about the fundamental morality of selling cars on credit. Ultimately, lending practices building on the legal and moral foundation established in the early twentieth century led to the establishment of subprime auto lenders whose business model revolves around exorbitant interest rates, high fees, and aggressive repossession.

The First Folio and the transatlantic trade in early drama c.1900–1929

Abstract In early twentieth-century America, ownership of all four Shakespeare folios was a benchmark for rare-book collectors, showcasing a dedication to assembling an exceptional library. The First Folio (1623) typically commanded the highest prices. Dealers sought to capitalize on the popularity of Shakespeare’s works by labelling a wide range of material as ‘Shakespeareana’, and the 1920s saw a boom in the market for early English plays. For some American collectors, notably Henry Folger, one copy of an edition was not enough, but others, including Henry Huntington, released duplicates back into the market, helping to keep interest high and facilitating the use of books as investments in the 1920s. This article examines the transatlantic trade in early English drama from c.1900 to 1929, to situate sales of First Folios in their economic and cultural context and to explore why large numbers of sixteenth-century English plays are now held in a handful of American libraries.

The Textual Features and Narrative Strategies of Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Jazz Novel’: A Stylistic Interpretation of Coming through Slaughter

Abstract The novel Coming through Slaughter (1976), a story of a talented musician’s pursuit of real art and the true self, is based on Buddy Bolden, a jazz cornet player from New Orleans, Louisiana, in early twentieth-century America. Author Michael Ondaatje shows his originality in creating a ‘jazz novel’ that transcends the boundary between music and literature, in which three jazz-like features – collage, improvisation, and intersubjectivity – are embodied in characterization, theme presentation, and narration. By virtue of the unique free elements of jazz, Ondaatje maximizes the postmodern features of the novel and vividly depicts the complex subjectivity of the characters.

One Century After Thind

The 1923 naturalization case, United States v Bhagat Singh Thind (Thind), has become a flashpoint for multiple analyses of South Asian racialization in the United States, at times positioned as evidence of Asian exclusion and eventual triumph and, at others, an attempt to “claim whiteness” and inclusion through leveraging racist and casteist ideologies. The centenary of Thind offers an opportunity to revisit the case itself as well as take up broader questions regarding migration, citizenship, caste, racialization, and naturalization. We open our introduction by examining a public commemoration of Thind alongside the recent legal recognition of caste discrimination in the city of Seattle. Through this discussion, we aim to disrupt linear narratives of progress, move beyond methodological nationalism, question the workings of multiculturalism and concomitant erasures, and take account of uneven locations of legal and social citizenship that mark our understandings of the case. Finally, before introducing the issue contents, we situate Thind in the historical and legal context of the “Asiatic question” in early twentieth century United States.

Sacred Socialism

Sacred Socialism

Controlling Crowds: On the Technological Management of Entertainment Audiences.

The rise of large cultural performance venues in early 1900s America presented a problem: how to harness the energy and profit potential of the crowd without risking the political and property damage that large masses threatened? The solution lay in crowd control technologies, including turnstiles, stanchions, and seats. Manufacturers framed these products in terms of their ability to generate calm audiences by channeling bodies through venue spaces and seating them in neat rows. Designers and operators of theaters, music halls, and stadiums with crowd control equipment often used the same language of calmness and orderliness. Historicizing existing social science scholarship with trade literature and technical books, this article shows how large performance facilities used technological means to convert mass crowds into audiences, accommodating expanding urban populations and reinforcing the racial order of early twentieth-century America.

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

“People are People in a New Sense”: Race, Markets, Foundations, and Paul K. Edwards’s The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer

This article uncovers the story behind the first systematic study of the African-American consumer market, Paul K. Edwards’s The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer (1932). Apparently the work of single researcher working at a small African-American college, Fisk University, The Southern Urban Negro as a Consumer was in fact the product an unlikely intersection of larger developments in early twentieth century America: the growing industry producing market research and ambitious philanthropic foundations that aimed to reform the American South. The book’s purpose was not merely to map an untapped market but to demonstrate that African-Americans were viable consumers, in order to win them a new and improved status in American society.

A Different Land of Opportunity: The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Has the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States changed over time? Constructing a large historical linked sample, I show that upward mobility in the early twentieth century was greater for those who grew up in the coastal and industrial regions, in contrast to more recent times, where mobility is higher among persons who were raised in the middle of the country. The historical patterns are not driven by imperfections in record linkage or measurement error in economic status.

Heaven’s My Destination: Thornton Wilder, Artifice, and Camp

Abstract Recent applications of queer theory have led to innovative insights in Wilder studies. Currently underexplored in this area is Wilder’s 1934 novel Heaven’s My Destination, which is conducive to a queer reading, one that analyzes the Camp characteristics of flamboyance and exaggeration in the main character of George Brush. This article evaluates Wilder’s novel for qualities of the Camp aesthetic and utilizes various Camp and queer theories to produce a reading of Heaven’s My Destination that positions the work as a Camp text of novelistic farce. Based on this reading, the article demonstrates how one may interpret George Brush as a Camp character constructed to highlight the artifice and theatricality of heterosexuality and masculinity in early twentieth-century America.

“Good Business in Missouri”: Minstrelsy, Violence, and the Case of Louis Wright

This article contextualizes the professional life and traumatizing lynching death of African American blackface minstrel Louis Wright in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902. It unearths the physical dangers of “entertaining while Black” in early twentieth-century America. Wright’s life serves as a window into the racialized, gendered world of the American minstrel stage, which is gleaned from advertising information, entertainer biographies, and the early twentieth-century theatrical press. The essay highlights the mid-nineteenth-century origins of African American blackface minstrelsy, chronicles obstacles unique to Black traveling performers, and investigates contradictory reporting in African American and White newspaper media accounts of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the Wright case and the persistence of racial violence were among the motivating factors in the pursuit of autonomous Black traveling theater in American entertainment during the nadir.

Immigration Shocks and Marriage Market Sorting

Recent work shows a puzzle in the early twentieth century United States: as intergenerational mobility decreased, assortative mating increased. We argue that these two facts are causally related by using a shock to intergenerational mobility caused by falling immigration with the Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, which essentially closed the borders to European immigration. We find that lower immigration caused lower intergenerational mobility, causing assortative mating to increase. We also look at the choice of nativity of spouse, finding that socioeconomic status gradients increase for every outcome as immigration decreases.

Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace

In Herbs and Roots, Tamara Venit Shelton provides a sophisticated account of Chinese medicine in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing creatively from memoirs, interviews, archival documents, census information, newspaper articles, and advertisements, Venit Shelton compellingly analyzes how Chinese doctors navigated an increasingly hostile legal, medical, and political environment to promote their therapies, knowledge, and materia medica in the United States. Often assisted by patrons, politicians, and patients, Chinese herbalists tenaciously fought opposition to their presence. Many Chinese medical practitioners flourished, despite facing periodic imprisonment, fines, license revocation, and outright discrimination. Their dispensing of herbal medicine persisted until the end of World War II, when herbs from China became too difficult to obtain owing to Cold War restrictions. Chinese herbalists' experiences of challenging legal restrictions and promoting their medical therapies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America left critical legacies for the post-1970s period. In the early 1970s, white American visitors to China experienced medical treatment, and newly interested audiences back home reinterpreted the visitors' experiences for eager clients in the United States. Together with Chinese medical doctors, they elevated acupuncture to a viable therapy across the United States while maintaining long-standing tropes of “orientalism” in promoting classical Chinese medical practices.Chapters 1 and 2 trace how Chinese herbalist immigrants expanded their medical care beyond fellow immigrants to the broader population, who were already sensitized to herbal treatment prior to the arrival of Chinese medicine. Chapter 3 shows how Chinese American herbalists challenged opposition to their practices by promising noninvasive medical treatments and minimal interaction with female patients to promote their approaches as an alternative to mainstream medicine. Chapters 4 and 5 show how Chinese American herbalists worked with sympathetic advisors, patrons, politicians, and patients to subvert legal and cultural attempts to end their practice. Chapter 6 shows that, while opponents of Chinese medicine failed to diminish the herbalists' popularity, both the generational shift among Chinese Americans toward rejecting traditional medicine in favor of biomedicine and the paucity of imported herbal supplies from China during the Cold War led to the demise of the herbalists by the late 1940s. US-China rapprochement by the early 1970s, as chapter 7 shows, led white Americans to visit China; after experiencing acupuncture treatment firsthand on their travels, proponents touted its efficacy, and demand for the treatment back home increased.A key strength of Venit Shelton's account is how she demonstrates that the post-1970s struggles for legal, cultural, and political legitimacy in the United States drew from similar struggles in earlier periods. Like their predecessors, acupuncturists had to appeal to white America in their marketing and leverage sympathetic patrons and patients to evade enormous legal and biomedical scrutiny. Moreover, her rich account of many Chinese American doctors who were central to transforming and promoting Chinese medicine—including the transcultural Fong Wan, reformist Chang Gee Wo, and transpacific Ka-Kit Hui—provides biographies so needed in the global history of medicine as well as the history of medicine in the United States.Venit Shelton's focus on the nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth centuries raises important research questions for the more recent history of Chinese medicine in the United States. In addition to Venit Shelton's excellent account of how Americans' visits to China in the early 1970s popularized acupuncture therapy, additional consideration of immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong could also shed light on Chinese medicine in the United States from 1950 to the late 1970s. During this period, practitioners and their clients from Taiwan and Hong Kong (who made up the bulk of “ethnic Chinese” immigrants between 1960 and 1980) engaged with Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture in alternative spaces such as Asian grocery stores, bookstores, travel agencies, and trading companies. Their experiences suggest that the configuration of Chinese medicine during the Cold War became partly refracted through diasporic experiences in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in addition to long-standing medical practices in the United States and China. Similarly, the presence of some African American activists promoting acupuncture as an alternative to discriminatory mainstream biomedical systems in post-1970s New York also complicates the narrative of Chinese medicine as an encounter only between white and Chinese Americans.In sum, Venit Shelton provides a much-needed narrative on the history of Chinese medicine in the United States. Her deft weaving of stories of expertise, serendipity, courage, self-representation, and the tumultuous migrant experience of Chinese doctors and their collaborators should be reflected in future histories of medicine in the United States. Herbs and Roots deserves to be widely read by scholars interested in the globalization of Chinese medicine, Asian American experiences, and the intersection of knowledge and practice in transcultural contexts.

Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore (review).

Reviewed by: Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture ed. by Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore Ian Miller (bio) Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore, eds. Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2018. xi + 276 pp. Hardcover, $159.99. These are exciting times for humanities scholars interested in the abdomen. Perhaps some scholars would consider the gut to be a curious, even niche, object of historical inquiry. I would disagree. Eating. Digesting. Defecating. All these bodily processes are intimately tied to our physical and emotional well-being. Understanding them can take us to the core of human experience, emotions, and existence—physical and mental. And taking the gut as a starting point can raise unexpected, but important, questions. Why, since the nineteenth century, has digestive health been discussed in relation to broader ideas of nationhood and national identity? For what reasons have ideas about gut health intersected with broader issues such as class, gender, and race? How did the rise of capitalist modernity change (western) humans' experiences of their gut? In recent decades, scientists have identified the gut as a bodily region swarming with communities of bacteria. Each of us has a unique microbiome that forms early in life. Enter the new medical sub-discipline of nutritional psychiatry, which seeks to comprehend how our gut health affects our moods, positively or negatively. These psychiatrists believe that a fuller grasp of the gut-brain axis will shed light on how our eating affects our feelings and elucidate links between gut health and disorders including depression and anxiety. A growing number of scholars beyond the sciences are illuminating the gut's modern history, including Elizabeth Williams, who has succinctly examined the history and science of appetite;1 James Whorton, who emphasizes the importance attached to the bowels in early twentieth-century America;2 and Christopher Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne, who have explored topics such as the history of fat.3 My own research approaches the stomach from a historical perspective, revealing its fundamental importance to past experiences of health and well-being.4 In recent years, emerging scholars such as Evelien Lemmens and Elsa Richardson have also taken a historical approach to the gut. Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore's essay collection, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture, is situated in this growing body of engaging interdisciplinary research, linking the science of gut health to the aforementioned issues of identity, nationhood, modernity, class, gender, and race. [End Page 187] The phrase "gut feeling" perfectly encapsulates the volume's thematic approach. Using diverse methodologies rooted primarily in literature and medical history, Gut Feeling and Digestive Health establishes decisively that the nineteenth century was a time of heightened concern about gut health and its implications for emotional well-being. As the editors explain, this was a period when a critical mass of doctors, psychiatrists, novelists, artists, ethnographers, politicians, and religious leaders all wrote extensively on the relation between digestive function (or, more often than not, "dysfunction") and the human emotions (1–2). This insight justifies an interdisciplinary approach that, despite its diversity, underpins a remarkably cohesive volume—the result of careful editing and an artful weaving together of key topics and themes. Many of this volume's contributors examine dietary science's burgeoning influence on literary works. In his opening chapter, Tripp Rebrovick investigates the impact of esteemed nutritional chemist Justus von Liebig on Walt Whitman's mid-century writings. Like many physicians and scientists, Whitman was enthralled by the workings of the digestive system and shared with them the view that indigestion was a "great American evil" that threatened the body politic (15). This coupling of digestive health with national identity provides a thread that runs throughout Gut Feeling and Digestion. In France, as with Britain and other countries, the abdomen became known as the "second brain"; its disorders constituted a national threat. These interwoven concerns also featured in the writing of Émile Zola, as explored in chapters by Bertrand Marquer, Anne Vila, and Manon Mathias. Joris-Karl Huysmans's handling of digestion is discussed in contributions by Mathias and...

The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-century America by Elizabeth A. Clark

The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-century America by Elizabeth A. Clark

Maximilian P. E. Groszmann’s alternative approach to the classification of “atypical” children in the early twentieth-century United States

ABSTRACTThe identification, diagnosis, and categorisation of students who qualified for special education have created long-standing controversy. This article explores Maximilian P.E. Groszmann’s measurement practices, which were intended to facilitate instruction in the early twentieth-century United States. In 1900, Groszmann established a private residential school for “atypical” children and developed his own method of measuring these children’s capabilities, an alternative to the Binet scale. “Atypical” children were defined as those who deviated from the average human type but had the potential of a “normal” child. Thus, they were children who were classified between normal and abnormal. Groszmann’s methods were based on his conviction that “atypical” children’s development was closely and intricately related to their social environment. His holistic perception of “atypical” children’s development led Groszmann to try to take a wider view of their difficulties, reactions, and experiences. Groszmann’s answers to the questions of what, where, and why to measure children differed from those of advocates of intelligence testing. In short, his methods were intended to help children adapt to their social environment, not to label and sort them as “atypical” or socially incapable.

The Influence of Kin Proximity on the Reproductive Success of American Couples, 1900-1910.

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples' reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household-including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother-that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law.

How Widespread Are Social Network Effects? Evidence from the Early Twentieth-Century United States

How widespread are social network effects? To answer this, I introduce a page-based approach for identifying individuals living in close proximity and compare how the propensity to work in the same...

Infrastructure killed the electric car

When prices are adjusted for quality, electric vehicles stood their ground to petrol cars in the early twentieth century United States. If the electricity grid had developed twenty years earlier, they might have reached a 68–79% market share and CO2 emissions per car could have declined by 60%, a new study finds.

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920