This article demonstrates the value of a joint application of the theory and history of financial crises of 1873. It weaves together concepts of financial and banking panic theory with a narrative explanation of the causes and triggers of the Panic of 1873. Basic concepts of economic theory, it suggests, can act as both a framework and a starting point to the historical interpretation of a financial panic.

Employing such theory, however, ultimately reinforces the need for contextual cultural explanations of financial panics. A theoretically grounded view of the cultural history of capitalism—and its sudden crises—can help explain why and how some structures of exchange systematized and conditioned human confidence within specific historical contexts.

Drawing together theoretical models of banking panic and historical evidence, this article thus emphasizes the importance of Gilded Age money-making culture for understanding the impact of Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke upon the causes of the Panic of 1873. Cooke's sudden and unexpected bankruptcy caused the deconstruction of confidence on the stock exchange and throughout the country. The cultural idiosyncrasy of Cooke's outstanding position in all matters of American finance multiplied the asymmetry that occurred in the wake of a major information shock.

Long recognized as a case that left tenement cigar workers in New York City unprotected from hazards to their health, the New York State high court's In re Jacobs ruling in 1885 also raised anew disagreements regarding the extent of legislative powers known as “police” that were reserved to the states by the federal constitution. Upholding unfettered freedom of contract, the Jacobs ruling prevailed as a governing precedent through a string of related cases until its reversal in Holden v. Hardy, 1898, a working hours law for Utah miners and smelter workers. Between Jacobs and Holden, new thinking emerged on the meaning of class, the role of government, and the drivers of the wealth of nations. In Holden, drawing from Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court located a public interest in sustaining the health and strength of such workers on the grounds that the entire public depended on their productive capacity to ensure the public good of a strong and growing state economy. This precedent did not hold for New York State bakers in Lochner v. New York, but it became controlling again in West Coast Hotel v. Parish, which elevated the broadened conception of “police” from Holden to the national level. As labor union membership along with other vital structures of the New Deal order have declined during the New Gilded Age, employment regulation has tended to relapse toward the individualist, contractarian regime of the Old Gilded Age announced in In re Jacobs.

Emory Johnson served in a series of executive-branch appointments pertaining to the Panama Canal. Like many other executive experts, he used his professional skills and reputation as political tools, promoting the canal and bringing its toll-making under his control. His activities diverged from what scholars have described as other experts’ practice of gaining influence by insulating themselves from the preceding era's partisan politics, however. An avowed Republican, he worked in collaboration with appointed officials and lobbied members of the public and Congress alike. Although he presented economic data as objective fact, his persuasive efforts drew heavily on an often-forgotten strand of the party's ideological tradition. It paradoxically promoted transportation projects simultaneously in associative terms, as using the market to secure the Union, and as benefiting the divergent interests of competing individual localities. Johnson's work reveals a professional in the federal government as a more multidimensional historical figure than that which appears in accounts describing experts as symbols of an undemocratic administrative state, illustrating a complex set of ties between the preceding period's political beliefs and practices and the rise of an administrative state.

“‘A Grim Memorial of Its Thorough Work of Devastation and Desolation’: Race and Memory in the Aftermath of the 1893 Sea Island Storm” explores the political struggle that ensued in the aftermath of the August 1893 hurricane. The storm, which decimated the predominantly African American South Carolina Sea Islands, required a nine-month relief effort to assist the region's citizens in their time of need. Led by the American Red Cross, the relief effort became a new proxy for a long-standing debate over the legacy of Reconstruction and the meaning of black citizenship. This battle, waged by leaders in South Carolina's Democratic Party, Red Cross officials, writers in the national press, former abolitionists, and African Americans living in the South Carolina Sea Islands, exposed growing fissures in how Americans understood notions of charity and self-help. More than a battleground for still-nascent ideas of disaster relief, the political turmoil that followed the 1893 Sea Island Storm played a critical role in redefining the racial boundaries of the United States on the eve of the Jim Crow era.

Drawing on Chicago immigrant communities’ archives, memoirs, and native-language newspapers, this article advances our understanding of Progressive Era environmental politics by delving into cross-class immigrant communities’ views on and activism concerning health. Everyday ethnic Chicagoans—medical and journalistic professionals alongside working-class immigrants—displayed a sophisticated understanding of health. Well versed in medical and scientific germ theories, they embraced a mixture of germ and environmental theories that made them, in effect, “disease ecologists,” revealing a widespread health ecology orientation not limited to the educated white professionals and reformers about whom scholarship has revealed much more. Such perspectives contribute to reinterpretations of earlier scholarly assumptions that germ theory largely displaced environmental analyses. Moreover, ethnic communities’ interpretations of health as ecological underpinned some of their political activism in pursuit of greater environmental parity. Many ethnic activists from across Chicago's class spectrum fought alongside white reformers to rectify environmental health inequities. They sometimes even initiated efforts, displaying an early version of environmental justice activism. At the same time, other cross-class ethnics at least partly blamed individual or ethnic communities’ habits and failures, mirroring to a degree the condescension visible among many Anglo reformers and professionals.

The vogue for the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the popularity of vitalist ideas more generally, periodically claims the attention of historians of early twentieth-century American thought and culture. There is little appreciation, however, for either the broad epistemic significance of these ideas or for their profound ethical and political implications. This essay explores the activity of Bergsonian vitalism, particularly as applied by Bergson's radical compatriot, Georges Sorel, within the fractious conversation that attended the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a significant force in the pre-war 1910s. Understanding the ways in which this seemingly unprecedented menace to the status quo was understood facilitates a rethinking of the relationship between ideas and experience in the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, and illuminates the attraction of radically empiricist approaches to interpreting social phenomena in the Progressive Era. Here, as elsewhere, Bergsonism challenged dominant materialistic and mechanistic explanations in the name of “life,” a seductive alternative for those alienated by, or suffering under, the juggernaut of urban-industrial modernization.

Historians usually consider the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s to have been consistently opposed to labor unions and the aspirations of working-class people. The official outlook of the national Klan organization fits this characterization, but the interaction between grassroots Klan groups and pockets of white Protestant working-class Americans was more complex. Some left-wing critics of capitalism singled out the Klan as a legitimate if flawed platform on which to build white working-class unity at a time when unions were weak and other institutions demonstrated indifference to working-class interests. In industrial communities scattered across the Midwest, South, and West, white Protestant workers joined the Klan. In Akron, Ohio, the Klan helped to sustain white working-class community cohesion among alienated rubber workers. In Birmingham, Alabama, the Klan violently repressed mixed-race unions but joined with white Protestant workers in a political movement that enacted reforms beneficial to the white working class. But Klan attention to working-class interests was circumstantial and rigidly restricted by race, religion, and ethnicity. Ku Klux definitions of whiteness excluded from fellowship many immigrant and Catholic workers. Local Klans supported striking white Protestant workers when Catholic, immigrant, or black rivals were present, but acted, sometimes violently, against strikes that destabilized white Protestant communities. Ku Klux sympathies complicated urban socialist politics in the Midwest and disrupted the effectiveness and unity of the United Mine Workers. Lingering Klan sympathies among union workers document the power of reactionary popular movements to undermine working-class identity in favor of restrictive loyalties based on race, religion, and ethnicity.

When invited to write this retrospective review, I turned to my library shelves to pick up once more The Search for Order, 1877–1920. My faded paperback copy has a striking image of a railroad track, peeling off into the distance, past a mine site, and then disappearing over the horizon. The colors are shades of red, a black tinged in the glow of red, and a pale pink sky. The scene conveys both an unsettling alarm at the turmoil of society in the coloration, and a binding process through the railroad. I have just discovered that Saul Lambert (a noted illustrator) drew this evocative scene for Hill and Wang, and the job was exceedingly well done.