In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not prescribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent workingmen. The decision quashed over two decades of efforts to end the “truck system.” Although legislators had agreed that wage payments redeemable only in company store goods appeared antithetical to the free labor wage system, two obstacles complicated legislative action. Any law meant to enhance laborers' rights could neither favor one class over another nor infringe any workingman's ability to make voluntary contracts. These distinctions, however, were not as rigid and laissez faire-oriented as depicted by conventional history. Labor reformers argued that principles of equity must supplement these categories of class legislation and contract freedom. This essay explores how legal doctrine helped both sides of the anti-truck debate articulate the contested meanings of liberty. Ultimately, the Godcharles ruling enshrined the specialness of workingmen's labor contracts and rejected the use of equity principles to justify contract regulations, but the controversy also informed future labor strategies, especially the turn to state police powers as the rubric under which workers' safety, morals, and health could be protected.

Between the Civil War and World War I, the midwestern farm played an important role in the care of dependent children. Instead of paying families to take in children, welfare workers relied on farmers to take children in for free. However, the situation for dependent children and farmers changed during the Progressive Era. Movements to improve farming methods and standards of living in the hopes of keeping rural people on the land highlighted the difficulties of farm life. For the children placed in free homes with farmers, reformers sought to improve record keeping and supervision. Such reforms had unforeseen consequences. The bureaucracy needed to supervise children placed on farms increased costs, while farmers resented the intrusion. Children who labored for free on farms no longer learned skills useful in the modern, industrializing nation. As more systematic supervision became standard across the Midwest, farm placement lost its appeal. By examining the motivations for better supervision of placed-out children and how those plans became policy, this article reveals complexities, underestimated by previous scholars, in the commonly told story of the transition of child-welfare practices from an emphasis on free farm placement to paid foster care in suburban and urban settings.

When studying the formation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, scholars have usually focused on interest groups and electoral politics. This essay, by contrast, suggests that the reputation and network influences of an existing federal agency, the Bureau of Corporations, also shaped the creation of its successor, the FTC. Building on the concept of bureaucratic autonomy, the essay examines the structure of the bureau, its connections, and its preferences. The bureau's leaders favored a clear separation from the Department of Justice and argued for a quasi-judicial process for antitrust, which they felt would be more effective than the courts. They advocated discretion in covering small firms and mandatory annual reports, while seeking to avoid being assigned authority to clear business agreements in advance. Well before the 1914 debates, leaders at the bureau directed substantial funds toward influencing trust legislation. They contacted academics and civic leaders, tracked existing legislative proposals, and analyzed key legal terms. Internal studies examined major questions, such as how to define and regulate unfair trade practices. Bureau officials came to argue Congress could never define these in legislation. Instead a bureaucracy with appropriate authority could adapt definitions of unfair practices to changes in business. When the bureau became the nucleus of the FTC, it received much of the discretionary power it sought.

Harry H. Laughlin's main claim to fame was as director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, from which position he exerted considerable influence upon early twentieth-century campaigns to restrict immigration and to institute compulsory sterilization of the socially inadequate. Laughlin also had an absorbing fascination for the idea of a single world government. Over the course of forty years, he produced a voluminous body of mostly unpublished work on the subject. In examining Laughlin's musings on internationalism, this article provides a glimpse into how a leading American eugenicist would have projected onto the world stage the policies he was zealously endeavoring to implement at the domestic level. Laughlin sent samples of his work to many of America's leading internationalists. Their responses to Laughlin's ideas reveal much about the character of internationalism in the United States during the era of World War I, especially the extent to which his racist and imperialist assumptions were shared by other members of the internationalist movement. Consequently, this article provides yet another example of how liberal and conservative impulses were neither easily distinguishable nor mutually exclusive during the Progressive Era.