Revisiting the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) created in 1887 and offering a fresh interpretation that the commission was conceived and operated as a highly court-like agency, this paper argues that its emergence triggered the judicialization of the U.S. administrative state. It has been argued that the blueprint of the ICC took after existing railroad commissions. Its proponents in Congress, however, redesigned it with judicial courts as a model after facing criticisms based on the common-law principle of the supremacy of law allowing adjudication only to judicial courts. In accordance with such an institutional scheme, both the president and judiciary promoted the commission's judicialization by appointing lawyers as its members and reviewing its decisions. By the early twentieth century, the ICC was a prototypical agency whose court-like features permeated the administrative state. This paper thus offers a corrective to the literature on the U.S. administrative state building that has come to trivialize the role of the rise of the ICC. It was, instead, a critical juncture in the emergence of the modern administrative state in which being “quasi-judicial” was the norm rather than the exception for an administrative agency.

“Disenchantment with democracy” is Sven Beckert's diagnosis for the United States around 1900. According to Beckert, the era's elites paid little regard to the ideals of democracy and worked to exclude the lower classes from the electoral process. But was acceptance of democracy really that low? Previously overlooked elite discourses and efforts—particularly discussions that dealt with the practice of elections—show that this explanation does not tell the whole story. By drawing on endeavors concerning election reform in New York City, I argue that at the turn of the century a new understanding of democracy became a kind of modern consensus. This was the case not only in New York, a city in a republic, but also in Berlin, in the Prussian constitutional monarchy. These findings support the interpretation that around 1900 the understanding and acceptance of democracy underwent a seminal change in the transatlantic world. The consensus held that state legitimacy required mass participation and, even more, that mass participation was connected to “everybody” and to a meaning of “universal”— though this ideal of “universal” was constructed and exclusive in important ways.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans celebrated the arrival of a circus. Circus Day had become a local holiday that brought together ethnicities, races, and classes (of both genders) that did not usually assemble at the same place and time. Within the circus itself, however, race and gender provided boundaries and fostered acrimony. The racism and segregation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be found aboard any circus train and throughout every show lot. African Americans were relegated to certain jobs, segregated within those jobs, and usually paid less than their white counterparts. The show's scheduled route often took them into areas in which they experienced the racial volatility typical of the era. Although the public perception of circus employment often produced thoughts of travel and fun adventures, African American circusfolk endured harsh treatment, low pay, and vile racism.

For African Americans, the work environment at a circus reflected the national social atmosphere, but female circus employees encountered conditions that most other women were not afforded. Indeed, female employees were confined to one or two train cars and lived under specific rules about when (or even if) they could entertain guests. Yet circus employment provided women with the ability to leave the restraints of the home during the height of Victorian domesticity, as well as the even rarer opportunity to outearn their male counterparts. Moreover, employment under the big top gave circuswomen a public platform to advocate for suffrage.

In the 1880s and ‘90s, Waco, Texas, served as a trading center for the cotton districts of central Texas whose farmers gave rise to the Farmers’ Alliance and turned the region into a Populist hotbed. Waco was also known as the “City of Churches,” as it was the site of Baylor University and other efforts of evangelical churches to build up their institutions. What is less well known is that Waco and its rural environs were also hotbeds of religious heterodoxy. Waco's Iconoclast magazine became a lightning rod of conflict between the Baptists and their skeptical and liberal critics, a conflict that played out to a murderous conclusion. Historians have taken due note of the evangelical environment in which the Populist movement emerged in late nineteenth-century rural America. But in the process the notion of evangelical belief has been too often rendered static and total. The Baptist-Iconoclast conflict in Waco provides an entry point for a better understanding of the dynamic and conflicted nature of the religious context, and the influence of liberal and heterodox ideas within the communities that sustained the Populist cause.