During the Gilded Age, constitutional issues pervaded the discussion of nearly all matters of public policy, including regulation of railroads, suppressing unsafe and fraudulent products, labor issues, and combating trusts and monopolies. The Democratic and Republican parties differed in their conceptions of federal power and state rights as well as on matters related to social order and personal liberty. They articulated these differences in political platforms and manifested them in their approach to public policy. The obsession with constitutional issues was not confined to the halls of Congress or the chambers of the Supreme Court. Constitutional discourse ran up from ordinary people and interest groups to public policy makers and down from policy makers seeking support based on fidelity to constitutional principles. Ordinary people influenced constitutional policymaking not only through voting but through various means of making their views known. Advocates used all types of media to make constitutional issues clear to the American people. These ranged from formal treatises aimed at the intellectual elite to cartoons, caricatures, songs, and screeds. Politicians articulated constitutional positions in political platforms, congressional addresses, pamphlets, political and commemorative addresses, and stump speeches. Justices of the Supreme Court eschewed technical and abstract language in constitutional opinions, addressing them to a more general public than they did in other areas of law. In the end, constitutional policy was not determined through legal determinations of the Supreme Court but by the political decisions of the American people.

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.

On September 6, 1901, at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, Leon Czolgosz, the son of immigrants and an avowed anarchist, shot President William McKinley. As McKinley clung to life for several days before succumbing, praise was heaped upon James B. “Big Jim” Parker, an African American Exposition employee who was credited with saving McKinley's life by subduing and disarming Czolgosz. By the time of Czolgosz's execution, government officials and the mainstream press were characterizing Parker as a glory-seeker who had played no role in capturing Czolgosz. African American spokespersons vigorously defended Parker, contrasting the brave, patriotic black hero with the treacherous foreign radical whose murderous act struck symbolically at the heart of the nation. These black commentators constructed a framework for understanding the assassination as a cultural critique of an American society that was paying the price for its acquiescence to extralegal violence against blacks. At the same time, black spokespersons used the assassination to create a narrative in support of African Americans’ claims to American citizenship and national belonging.