Samuel Gompers's address at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago is typically remembered for its invocation, “we want ‘more.’” This essay views Gompers's address in its broader context as a window into the Gilded Age labor movement and America's crisis of the 1890s. Gompers's thinking can be understood in terms of two sets of contradictory discourses or antinomies: labor republicanism as distinguished from socialism and apocalyptic change as distinguished from evolutionary development. Rather than someone who rationalized the interests of a narrow stratum of craft workers, Gompers emerges from this analysis as a serious and complex thinker who sought to bridge and contain divergent discourses and political tendencies within the broader labor movement for which he was the spokesperson.

Ancient Rome is a powerful metaphor in the western imagination. It is very much alive today. The Roman Republic inspires images of democracy and the empire is the very epitome of decadence. The collapse of this, the greatest of empires, is a parable. The Progressive Era opened with overt imperial ambitions and ended with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's plans for a Pax Americana. Throughout this period, the symbol of Rome was explicitly used to justify or condemn expansion, warn of the dangers of immigration and commercialization, attack America's enemies, and praise the nation's allies. To figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, Rome was both a model and a warning. Politicians, historians and other commentators saw America as heir to the Roman legacy. Race theorizers claimed that Americans were either the modern Romans or the descendants of the Barbarians—promoters of ordered modernity or champions of individual democracy.

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.

This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.

Since its release in October 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 has generated considerable controversy. Redemption 2, Rockstar Games’ highly popular video game set in a sprawling open world that resembles America’s southern and western states at the turn of the twentieth century, has attracted criticism from players who have disliked the perceived political messages the game presents. With numerous interactions with people of color, Native Americans, and feminist (suffragette) characters, the game prompts players to engage with the ongoing effects of colonialism, sexism, and racism, as well as the rising problems of an industrial and financial capitalist society. As such, the game’s depiction of Gilded Age and Progressive Era politics has resulted in a large amount of online criticism from a group of traditionally white, male, right-wing players. This article argues that Redemption 2 utilizes the Progressive Era as a vehicle to capture and speak to the current political climate, and that it is the game’s dual relationship with the past and the present that has aroused animosity from part of the game’s audience. Ultimately, it demonstrates how contemporary mainstream progressive politics can be interpreted within and projected upon the politics of the Progressive Era.

The essays contained in this and the October 2003 special issues of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were originally delivered at a conference sponsored by Indiana State University, the repository of the Debs papers and site of his house, now a national landmark. Intended to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Debs' first run for the presidency, the conference themes of socialism and dissent attracted a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and activists. Their contributions help us gauge the state of the field. They also suggest new departures in the study of socialism.

In response to an enormous growth of trusts in the late nineteenth century, demands for reform among a wide spectrum of interest groups culminated in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1915. Playing an influential, though little-recognized role in framing this legislation was Wisconsin progressive Democrat Joseph E. Davies. As Commissioner of Corporations, Davies served in a unique, dual capacity as both politician and regulator, giving him access to President Woodrow Wilson and influence on the antitrust legislation. Davies used his position to promote a vision of administrative regulation based on the nationally recognized “Wisconsin Idea.” In so doing, he intensified conflicts among Wilson's policy advisers that, in turn, had a critical impact on the antitrust legislation and on the potential effectiveness of the first commission. In the long run, however, Davies' approach to regulatory policy, based on the Wisconsin Idea, would become standard operating procedure for successful regulatory commissions of the twentieth century.

The three essays in this forum examine the ways in which individuals have sought to reconcile sociocultural differences between those at the fringes of American society and those at the center. Two concepts embody this effort. One is the bridge concept—the idea that those with dual identities would serve as links between the two sociocultural worlds. The other concept, that of the cultural broker, refers to someone who actively seeks to mediate the differences between the two groups. The essays in this cluster use the two concepts to analyze the ways in which individuals in three disparate places—the American West (California), a U.S. colony across the Pacific (the Philippines), and the American Southwest (New Mexico)—served as bridges and brokers in their efforts to negotiate the imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups.

In examining the mathematical models, theories of value, and price statistics wielded by leading economist and social reformer Irving Fisher, this article explores the overlooked impact that Neoclassical Economics had on Progressive Era reform and thought. By offering a neoclassical theory of marginal utility that claimed that market prices reflected subjective value, Fisher formalized, legitimized, and popularized the use of price statistics in progressive political discourse, teaching the American people that if they wanted to argue over the nature of progress or the worthiness of a certain reform, they would have to price it first. The article argues that such a “pricing of progressivism” served as an important foundational precursor to the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1980s. In light of such a significant intellectual legacy, it seems imperative that intellectual historians of the Progressive Era turn their attention away from the usual suspects of this period, such as Pragmatists William James and John Dewey, and shift their analytical focus away from the “Metaphysical Club” and toward a neoclassical one.

This article examines the origins of state-level regulations controlling the practice of pharmacy and the manufacture and consumption of dangerous drugs in the Gilded Age. The passage of laws regulating the market in pharmaceuticals grew out of both the precarious economic position of practicing pharmacists and widespread concern for the suffering of individual consumers. As a result, pharmacy laws and other regulations controlling the buying, selling, and use of dangerous drugs during this period should be understood as part of the effort by pharmacists to establish a professional identity for themselves. At the same time, these laws should also be understood as part of the process through which reformers sought to rationalize society toward the goal of protecting the individual consumer. Ironically, however, such efforts were intertwined with the bifurcation of consumer culture into legitimate and illegitimate realms, and with it the creation of the economic and social conditions in which new stories of individual suffering took place.

At the height of the Progressive Era, a small circle of scholars and educators launched a zealous but failed effort to reform American spelling. Bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie, the Simplified Spelling movement epitomized the era's much-chronicled passion for “efficiency”: By replacing words like through and although with thru and altho, the simplifiers said, citizens would save both time and money. Yet the rapid demise of the campaign also highlights the limits of America's efficiency craze, even during its supposed heyday. Although some critics invoked the efficiency idiom against Simplified Spelling, questioning its utility and practicality, others denounced efficiency itself. Even if simplification made spelling more efficient, they said, Americans should retain their older forms in the name of higher values: beauty, habit, and tradition. Their rejection of Simplified Spelling stood as a standing rebuke to the gospel of efficiency, which never quite gained the full-throated worship that its high priests imagined.

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.

This article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

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.

The relationship between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in support of national prohibition has been a source of controversy since the 1920s. Both the ASL and the KKK acted to enforce prohibition, the ASL through legal and political means, the KKK through grassroots political pressure and extralegal vigilante methods. Wet observers and, more recently, historians of the Klan movement claimed that the ASL cooperated with the Invisible Empire in direct enforcement of dry laws. ASL activists and prohibition historians, in turn, denied league involvement with the intolerant, occasionally violent, dry vigilantism of the Klan and instead stressed the nonpartisan bureaucratic operations of the ASL. The actual ambivalent relationship reflected shortcomings in the dry regime and in the two organizations. Ineffective enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders. But extensive and persistent cooperation was not apparent.

On July 29, 1902 a massive funeral procession for Jacob Joseph, the esteemed Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community, wound its way through the streets of New York's Lower East Side. The solemn occasion was marred, however, when the procession was attacked by a group of factory workers. As the melee blossomed into a full-scale riot, a contingent of New York City policemen arrived and proceeded to pummel and arrest the mourners rather than the instigators. Historians have consistendy cited this ugly incident as a vivid example of Irish Catholic antisemitism, noting that both the workers and policemen were “predominantly Irish.” Indeed, it was a quest to learn more about the roots of Irish Catholic antisemitism that drew this historian to the subject. And yet, a thorough examination of the incident produced a startling result: a dearth of Irish defendants and a flawed historiography that ultimately call into question the validity of the Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot as an example of Irish Catholic antisemitism.

For all its typically Progressive Era characteristics and national scope, the “honest weight movement” has long been hidden in plain sight. Seemingly ubiquitous and mundane, the common grocery scale was the intersecting borderland of industry, government, marketplace, and consumer. On the one hand, the regulation of weights and measures, being one of the first forms of governmental regulation of the marketplace dating back to the ancient world, seems so unobjectionable and commonplace that the Progressive Era movement for its more rigorous and efficient administration does not seem like it could have been a very controversial proposal. Who, after all, could object to clear and consistent standards of measurement and their universal application? Thus, the appearance of a movement to reform the ubiquitous and the mundane has not elicited the same historical attention that novel forms of government regulation have.

The state of Texas' determined effort to keep African-Americans performing plantation labor was at the heart of its prison farm system, from Reconstruction through the 1920s. State and penitentiary officials followed a practice of racialized labor control, demanding that African-American convicts perform plantation gang labor, not only to make the prison system profitable but also keep them involved in extractive agriculture. As the prison population grew, so did the abuse of convicts. The story of Texas’ penitentiary system shows the continuing tie between African-Americans, plantation labor, and racism in Texas, as well as other southern states. The sprawling farm system that developed in Texas made it unique in the South. When Progressive Era reformers confronted abuses in the Texas prison system, they had to contend with an overwhelming profit motive that made reform difficult, and warped reform measures they managed to push through the legislature. Among the initial goals of Texas prison reformers were an end to convict leasing and a ban on the use of the whip as punishment. The agenda of reformers collided with the goals of the Texas prison system, with unexpected results. Looking at reform measures after they passed the legislature illustrates how prison managers tried to circumvent regulations that hindered profitability.