Progressive Era Research Articles

BETWEEN SUMNER AND GALTON: A FURTHER LOOK AT ALBERT GALLOWAY KELLER’S SOCIOLOGY

Largely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main coordinates of Keller’s sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin’s mechanism of variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner’s general scheme. Although Keller gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements of the typically Progressive Era preoccupations with heredity and the biological quality of individuals. The aim of this paper is to examine in some detail Keller’s views on eugenics and related issues, and to assess whether and to what extent these biologically deterministic elements played a role in his Darwinian approach to institutional change.

“A Desirable Class of Homeseekers”: Colonization, Race, and Italian Migration in the Progressive Era US South

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century in Italy and the United States, a transnational media dialogue emerged that promoted facilitated emigration policies that their supporters called colonization. Designed to permanently transfer a highly mobile population to a region with a proportionally small foreign-born population, colonization's press coverage exhibited an elite class and race consciousness that sought to remake landless Italian migrants, undesirable in other areas of the United States, into good citizens working their own farms in the American South. A close reading of articles published in Progressive Era magazines in Italian and English, and direct appeals for settlement to the Italian ambassador in Washington, demonstrate how proposals to colonize Italians in the American South shaped the debate over desirability in a period grappling with policy solutions, both in Italy and the United States, to an emerging immigration problem. Race and the immigration problem intersected powerfully in the Progressive Era South in unusual ways as colonizationists adopted their own definitions of racial desirability that centered white southerners’ economic needs. When historians take distribution policy as seriously as Progressives did, the public debate over desirability that drove turn-of-the-century restrictionism becomes more complicated and the significance of the regional setting more pronounced.

Smoke from Factory Chimneys: The Applied Economics of Air Pollution in the Progressive Era

Smoke from Factory Chimneys: The Applied Economics of Air Pollution in the Progressive Era

Independent regulators and financial stability evidence from gubernatorial election campaigns in the Progressive Era

Regulatory independence forms a foundation for modern financial systems. The institutions’ value is illuminated by a Progressive Era policy experiment when independent state-bank regulators came under governors’ supervision. Afterwards, bank resolution rates declined during gubernatorial election campaigns for banks supervised by state but not national authorities. This gubernatorial-campaign effect diminished by two orders of magnitude, but did not disappear, after the FDIC became the independent resolver for all insured banks in 1935. In addition, during the Progressive Era, declines in bank resolutions led to declines in business bankruptcy rates, an effect that is not observed in the FDIC era. Our findings indicate regulatory independence can dramatically reduce but may not eliminate politics’ impact on banks and the economy.

American Progressivism: Supreme Court of the United States and the legitimization of eugenic practices

The purpose of the article is the presentation of the directions of reforms and development of eugenic ideas in the Progressive Era in the United States, and the evaluation of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the context of eugenic practices. Progressives reached their height in the early 20th century as a response to vast industrialization, the growth of large corporations, and the fears of corruption in American politics. The second half of the Progressive Era brought many statutory victories by the progressive economists and their proponents. Their reforms included state laws that regulated working conditions, fixed minimum wages, determined working hours, and banned child labour. Eugenic views justified exclusionary immigration legislation, and economists affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation advocating labour reforms were under the influence of ‘race-suicide’ theories. The jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court profoundly influenced the shape of the legal order in economic and labour law. Some decisions reflected the ideological attitudes of the justices rather than an aspiration for reform. The effect of the ruling in Buck v. Bell was the legitimization of eugenic practices in the United States. The case was also a classic example of an individual’s right versus state’s rights to control reproduction.

Gender and machine politics in Chicago, USA

This article investigates gender and political machines, specifically exploring women's activism and roles within Chicago's unique political tapestry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whereas extant literature investigates the racial, ethnic, and class dimensions of machine politics, a gap subsists regarding a direct exploration of gender dynamics – especially during and following the Richard J. Daley administration. The research unveils how women have navigated, contested, and shaped Chicago society and politics amid the tides of reform-minded ideals and an emergent, formidable machine. Despite achieving remarkable strides during the Progressive Era, the Cook County machine paradoxically shaped women's participation and activism while eroding progress. The insights garnered from this analysis do not remain an anachronism of history but resound with relevance for contemporary politics, revealing challenges and providing the groundwork for further explorations aimed at deconstructing gendered power within political structures.

The Political Economy of Social Change and Nation-Building During the Progressive Era

The Political Economy of Social Change and Nation-Building During the Progressive Era

The problem and probability of marriage for alumnae in Progressive Era United States

When Bryn Mawr College opened in 1885, then-president James Rhoads highlighted the precautions taken to ensure that the young women students would remain healthy, in reaction to the publicized warnings of Scottish physician Thomas S. Clouston, M.D. Dr. Clouston’s concern that girls’ higher education would damage their health epitomized a growing anxiety around the status of wives and mothers at a time of increased educational opportunities for the so-called ‘fairer sex’. To counter these opinions, college alumnae and administrators turned to statistics. Through a combination of published statistics and informal anecdotes, this article provides an in-depth study of how marriage data were solicited, tabulated, and framed at Bryn Mawr College during the Progressive Era, contributing a detailed case-study to the historiography on the period’s debates over educated women. The tension between marriage and a career in research was acutely apparent to the women in academia who were at once responsible for the statistical analysis and among the subjects under investigation. While the survey design and published results emphasized the desired outcome of marriage after graduation, these same documents also offered space for emerging professional trajectories.

The Essential Worker: A History from the Progressive Era to COVID-19

The Essential Worker: A History from the Progressive Era to COVID-19

From Rate Regulation to Financial Control: Accounting and Public Policy at the Interstate Commerce Commission, 1887–1933

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the Interstate Commerce Commission’s (ICC’s) application of accounting to achieve public policy goals for the U.S. railroad industry. The ICC began in 1887 with a mandate to ensure competition in the transportation industry, with rate oversight as one tool. During the Progressive Era, from 1901 to 1921, the ICC used accounting to ensure rate equity; a second implicit goal was to reduce the rail industry’s informational asymmetries to investors, morphing over time to ensuring a reasonable return to investors. In the 1920s, the ICC used accounting to reduce securities speculation, facilitate regional rail consolidation, and govern industry finance. This accounting-based model of regulation continued until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when new economic circumstances called into question the ICC’s ability to serve the most pressing public policy concerns. The technologies used by the ICC, however, continued to be exploited by other regulatory bodies.

Exclusion from Within: Noncitizens and the Rise of Discriminatory Licensing Laws

In the United States in the early twentieth century, state and local laws discriminating on the basis of alienage proliferated. Progressive reformers, nativist groups, state legislatures, and city councils sought new methods for restricting noncitizen access to the workplace and the marketplace. As this article demonstrates, the primary vehicle they utilized was state and local licensing laws. Licensing proved to be a powerful tool of exclusion; by 1930, citizenship-based licensing restrictions were present in every state and most major cities. Noncitizens challenged some of these laws, pushing for greater protection of their constitutional rights. The resulting court contests over exclusionary licensing laws led to the creation of a new branch of legal doctrine, one that redefined the relationship between noncitizens and state power. This article highlights the significant and underappreciated role played by state and local laws in shaping the immigrant experience in the Progressive Era. It furthers our understanding of the licensing power and illuminates a pivotal moment in the development of immigrant rights. Today, noncitizens are still excluded from a range of economic activities due to licensing restrictions. This article explores the roots and the spread of this little understood – and still consequential – technique of exclusion.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics, the humanities, and the human sciences in the 20th century. Rather than figuring cybernetics as emerging from Second World War military technologies and post-war digital computing, Code argues that liberal technocrats’ inter-war visions of social welfare delivered via ‘neutral’ communication techniques shaped the informatic interventions of both the Second World War and the Cold War. Tracing how an organizing concept of code linked the work of diverse structurally-minded thinkers, such as Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs the cybernetic apparatus that spawned new fields, including structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology – and grapples with the unfolding implications of such socio-technical dynamics for 21st-century critical theory, digital media, and data analytics.

The Efficiency of Occupational Licensing during the Gilded and Progressive Eras: Evidence from Judicial Review

This paper proposes a novel approach to assessing the efficiency and distributional consequences of occupational licensing statutes during the Gilded and Progressive eras, based on the practice of judicial review. At the time, state judges ruling on the constitutionality of police powers regulation operated under powerful legal norms that militated against redistribution and class legislation. Evidence presented in the paper strongly suggests that judges were significantly more likely to uphold, on constitutional grounds, occupational licensing legislation for occupations with important information asymmetries, suggesting that constitutional review promoted efficiency in occupational markets. These findings have implications for current policies regarding occupational licensing.

The Relationship Between Scientism and Curriculum Modernization in America

This paper examines the impact of scientism on the modernization of curriculum during the progressive era in America. Based on primary sources and secondary literature, this paper analyzes the performance of scientism as the core of curriculum modernization from five aspects: science and technology as the concern of reform, nationalism as the cloak of scientism, scientists as the initiator and host of education reform, subject structure as the core of reform, and scientific curriculum preparation. It argues that scientism played a significant role in establishing progressive education. It further influenced Americans understanding of progress, democracy, and social reform and contributed to the emergence of a modern, scientific approach to politics and governance.

Law, Liberty, and Anarchism in the Progressive Era - Michael Willrich. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023. 480 pp. $32.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1541697379.

Law, Liberty, and Anarchism in the Progressive Era - Michael Willrich. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023. 480 pp. $32.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1541697379.

Histories with Sound: Using Noise and Music to Teach (and Research) the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

AbstractIn recent years, the history of sound has developed into a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship. This article explores the benefits of considering sonic evidence alongside a host of other material; teaching and writing histories with—rather than of—sound. In the classroom, this kind of “history with sound” is particularly useful for its ability to cut across lines of scholarly inquiry. This makes sound an especially potent resource when teaching the history of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. During these years, American society underwent a many-sided process of development difficult to adequately narrativize. The study of sound, with its ability to link numerous trends and dynamics within densely layered events, can help address this issue. Providing insight into the practices and problems of everyday life, such sonic history can reveal the interplay of change and continuity that defined the social experience of the turn-of-the-century United States. Focused on sound in New York, this article provides an overview of the topic’s historiography before examining a series of distinct case studies for classroom use.

Introduction: New Approaches to Music and Sound

AbstractThis introduction to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s special issue, “New Approaches to Music and Sound,” provides a historical sketch of American music and the American soundscape at the turn of the twentieth century. It also offers a discussion of relevant historiography, taking stock of recent work in sound studies and its influence on research on music and sound of the period. Finally, it introduces the four research articles featured in this special issue and marks their contributions to our understandings of listening practices, normative understandings of audition and speech, and the sonic dimensions of politics and capitalism, race and national identity, imaginings of the past and visions for the future in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“More Hawaiian Than Hawaii Itself”

This article investigates the phenomenon of “Hawaiian Fevers” in US popular culture during the Progressive Era. Examining the careers of “hula” celebrities Toots Paka and Doraldina, I examine how both dancers sought to legitimize their appropriations of Hawaiian culture through performances of timelessness and wildness that established iconography of Hawai‘i as an otherworldly territory. The racial masquerade of this performed Hawaiianness eased white identification with embodiments of “going native” while also promising transformational access to a leisure-class paradise. Examining the press rhetoric surrounding both dancers, I consider how cross-race performances of hula instructed American women on how to be adeptly modern postindustrial imperial subjects. In fantasizing Hawai‘i as the restorative otherworld foil of the United States, these celebrities and the hula craze in which they participated reveal how the United States authenticates its own imagination of itself as a modernizing missionary of industrial imperialism.

“The Best Songs Came from the Gutters”: Tin Pan Alley and the Birth of Manhattan Mass Culture

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the publishers of Tin Pan Alley revolutionized American music. Focused on the dissemination of a constantly changing set of attention-grabbing songs, leading companies dramatically expanded the market for popular compositions, generating hits that sold millions of copies of sheet music to customers across the country. While publishers aimed at this continental audience, their output was shaped by the urban context in which their businesses first emerged. During these years, local popularity was crucial to national success. As a result, firms sought to engage with new audiences throughout Manhattan, incorporating a host of social and ethnic groups into the structures of commercial entertainment. Over time, Tin Pan Alley’s relationship to these groups—and the distinctive leisure spaces in which they gathered—would define its musical production. It was not simply that publishers molded songs to fit public taste. Rather, the industry and the broader world of commercial entertainment developed together. By exploring this business-influenced process of cultural change, it is possible to gain new perspective on the emergence of American popular song, as well as the consumption-driven dynamics remaking society in the Progressive Era in the United States.

"written with the heart's blood": An Unpublished Novel by Black Activist James Samuel Stemons, 1900

Abstract: This article traces the efforts of Philadelphia Black activist James Samuel Stemons to publish his 1900 autobiographical novel, "Jay Ess." The novel depicts the challenges faced by its protagonist to leave his subsistence-level farming life in Nicodemus, Kansas—founded during the Exoduster movement of the 1880s—to seek industrial employment in a major city. Stemons's copious correspondences with his sister, Mary Stemons Johnson; editors; publishers; and Progressive Era luminaries trace his attempt to position his arguments about industrial labor as a corrective to both Booker T. Washington's emphasis on vocational training and W. E. B. Du Bois's insistence on higher education for the talented tenth. However, the novel's lack of an Horatio Alger-like "rags to riches" trajectory—typified in Washington's Up From Slavery narrative—and its lack of the empirical evidence characteristic of Du Bois's published work led to repeated rejections by would-be publishers.