Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the “marrying parson”—a minister willing to perform on-demand marriages—became a well-known American cultural figure, caricatured and depicted in daily newspapers and popular magazines. To date, however, no scholar has analyzed this cultural phenomenon. This article explains and analyzes the rise of the marrying parson to cultural prominence in the early twentieth century. It discusses, first, the legal and cultural environment that gave marrying parsons a legal product—a state-sanctioned marriage—that they could sell; and second, the Progressive Era fears over changes in sexual behavior that made marrying parsons both prominent and controversial in popular discourse. Because marrying parsons were marked as religious figures, white Protestant leaders and reformers viewed them as traitors from within, traitors who commercialized the legal privileges of their sacred office as they undermined Protestants' attempts to combat divorce, protect the sexual innocence of young women, and limit youthful sexual autonomy. Although marrying parsons are no longer prominent in popular discourse, religiously ordained individuals continue the quick-marriage activities of early twentieth-century “marrying parsons,” thus revealing the limits of attempts by Protestant leaders to police the commercial use of religious privilege.

“‘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.

This paper reassesses American opinions and sentiments during the period of neutrality in light of the one endeavor that involved millions of Americans in the European conflict long before official U.S. belligerency: war relief. Tracing some of the “humanitarian narratives” employed in the relief campaigns for the Central Powers, the Allies, and neutral Belgium, humanitarian involvement, it will be argued, not only expressed prevalent ethnic, cultural, and political affinities, but shaped American attitudes toward the different belligerents. Contrary to contemporary claims, humanitarian pursuits were never even remotely impartial, but drew Americans onto the different sides of the war like few other endeavors. Indeed, relief work must be taken serious as a force of “cultural mobilization” (Horne), which affected American “visions of the war and its outcome.” By involving Americans actively on the different sides of the European war, it helped forge discrete moral and emotional alliances across the Atlantic. In trying to understand the complicated and acrimonious process by which Americans moved from peace to war, their relief work thus deserves attention.

This article examines contests over improving the municipal waterfront in New York during the Gilded Age, and it uncovers the hidden history of Thirteenth Avenue. To maintain its commercial prominence and competitive edge, New York established the Department of Docks in 1870, granting it the authority to manage maritime trade and oversee the redesign and modernization of the city's wharves and piers. Debates about how a modern industrial and commercial waterfront should look centered on new ideas about the aesthetic economy of cities. Business and civic leaders believed that the beauty of the built environment could be leveraged as an asset to attract commerce and industrial investment. But these debates about improving the industrial waterfront ultimately pitted business interests against maritime labor and local manufacturers. Thirteenth Avenue was a small-scale industrial district on the far edge of Greenwich Village that stood in the way of the lucrative transatlantic steamship trade. Siding with mercantile interests over those of small manufacturers, the city condemned Thirteenth Avenue in the 1890s and reclaimed it for the Hudson River to make way for the Chelsea Piers. These elaborate Beaux-Arts piers served as an aesthetic frame for New York City, but they also reflected the unequal dynamics of municipal planning and politics at the turn of the twentieth century.

This article situates Mark Twain's anti-imperialism within the wider atheist and freethought response to debates about the American turn to empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians have been alert to the ways in which religion influenced debates around empire at this time, there have yet to be any studies of the views of American atheists and freethinkers on this question. I examine Twain and Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker of the era, as well as some of the major freethought periodicals in the United States, the Truth Seeker, the Blue-Grass Blade, and the Free Thought Magazine, and argue that their irreligious views informed their responses to imperialism, from the initial support for a war against Catholic Spain, to opposition to the war against the Philippines motivated in large part by a hostility toward organized religion and its role in American expansion. More broadly, I argue for the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of anti-imperialism within an American religious landscape that was basically Protestant, to a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the diversity of religious and nonreligious perspectives.

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.

On July 12, 1871, the Colorado Springs Company and its largest shareholder, William Jackson Palmer, adopted a plan that divided the hundreds of acres they owned into the streets, blocks, and plots of Colorado Springs. To sell the city, the boosters of Colorado Springs marketed it as a refined resort for wealthy industrialists, health seekers, and tourists. Boosterism in Colorado Springs appealed to these audiences over the next four decades by using a changing mixture of politics, business, and religious morality. This boosterism successfully distinguished the resort of Colorado Springs from the mines, steel mills, and agriculture that defined nearby towns.

This essay investigates the motives by American volunteers during the neutrality period between 1914 and 1917 who decided to go to the war zone in Europe. Thousands of American men and women supported the Allies as nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, soldiers, or fighter pilots. Even though they had chosen to support one side in the war, however, even avid and well-connected supporters of the Allies rarely called for U.S. intervention. The absence of a political perspective was tied to peculiar personal motives. Calling for intervention in the war would have turned the fight into a national cause and public duty, reducing the value of a personal decision to go to war. When the United States entered the war in 1917, some volunteers joined the American war effort to support their flag, whereas others abandoned a war they no longer considered interesting. These responses were part of a significant shift in the role of American government.

World War I significantly impacted U.S. society and politics long before the United States officially entered into the war's frontlines in 1917. Even as historians have begun to pay closer attention to this process, they have until now largely failed to notice a particular group of colorful and highly emblematic public elite actors: charitable foundation philanthropists. With the soon-to-be globally active Rockefeller Foundation a cohort of ambitious U.S. progressives and social engineers—later ardent supporters of global science funding during the interwar years and beyond—utilized their war experiences to shape the wartime philanthropic agenda. This article focuses on the Foundation officers’ profiles and the beginnings of their more concerted engagements during World War I in order to show how, in their mindsets and tactics, Rockefeller philanthropists disregarded American neutrality. From the outbreak of the war in 1914, they mobilized themselves to the point of pleading for and entering into direct commitments at home and abroad, especially in the European war zone. With the official entry of the United States into war in early April 1917, Rockefeller officials and collaborators became openly “combat” philanthropists, resolutely assisting the moral stabilization efforts of the U.S. military and conducting support campaigns to bolster, most notably, the American alliance with France. The incubation and infancy period of Rockefeller philanthropy as a subsequently ubiquitous phenomenon of the American twentieth century is inseparable from the impact of the Great War.

This essay examines Theda Skocpol's landmark 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and discusses its influence historians of the U.S. welfare state. The first section summarizes the book's “state-centered” approach and its central arguments and discusses its reception. It pays particular attention to critiques from women's and gender historians, who challenged Skocpol's characterization of Progressive Era “maternalist reform” particularly for its failure to account for racial politics or the limitations of rooting women's claims to social citizenship in mothering. The second section explores Skocpol's influence on historians of the U.S. welfare state in the past twenty-five years. Scholars of women and gender followed Skocpol's call to “bring the state back in,” bringing the insights of two decades of social and cultural history to the arena of state-building. In the process, they illuminated the centrality of race and racial politics to American social policy and citizenship in ways that Skocpol largely elided. Skocpol's discovery of the peculiar forms of American social provision also profoundly influenced welfare state scholars, who uncovered the vast reach of the “hidden” or “submerged state” in shaping unequal citizenship and political identities around race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. Finally, the essay discusses historians’ attention to an aspect largely absent from Protecting Soldiers and Mothers—the voices, perspectives, and actions of participants in welfare state programs and policies—which has deepened and expanded understanding of the processes and effects of welfare state-building in the past twenty-five years.

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.

In late 1902, exhaustion, financial distress, and the desire for a political appointment—combined with aspirations to serve as a broker for the export of African American labor abroad—led famed African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune to secure a temporary appointment with the Roosevelt administration to investigate trade and labor in Hawaii and the Philippines. In Hawaii, Fortune was fêted by the planter class, and allied himself publicly with the educational and political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. His hopes for black emigration and land ownership, however, were vigorously opposed by most newspapers connected to the oligarchy. Hawaii's robust in-language indigenous and ethnic newspapers, meanwhile, voiced their own position on black labor. In Manila, a fiercely entrepreneurial and militaristic American press attacked Fortune. Recent scholarship ties Washington's Tuskegee Institute to a kind of “Jim Crow colonialism” abroad. An in-depth look at Fortune's journey both supports and troubles such a view. Both men hoped U.S. “expansion,” and African American participation in it, might expose not only the power of race, but also its instability and vulnerability; Fortune, in particular, saw newspapers as vital to this task.

Civilian societies advocating a bold defense program were arguably the most visible manifestation of the American preparedness campaign in World War I. Though historians have acknowledged the significance of the broader preparedness movement in a number of studies, they have often marginalized its civilian branch in general and defense societies in particular. This article examines the structures, activities, and objectives of two major organizations active in the movement in order to challenge historiography's traditional view on preparedness. Exploring the key role of the National Security League and the American Defense Society between 1914 and 1920, the article presents two main arguments: First, civilian societies were not merely the appendix to a centralized campaign dominated by military professionals and politicians associated with the defense cause but acted as principal agents of preparedness. Second, the historiographic time frame of preparedness cannot be limited chronologically to America's years of neutrality but must include the period after April 1917.

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.

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.

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

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.

This article examines late nineteenth-century preadmission records taken at the Pennsylvania Training School in order to better understand the biographical and medical characteristics of persons seeking admission to this prominent school for the “feeble-minded.” It draws on those records to then explore how guardians and the superintendent assessed the likelihood and nature of educational improvement. A pioneering institution for the education of people with intellectual disability, the Training School, generally known as “Elwyn,” kept extensive biographical and etiological records that contain a previously untapped wealth of data. These records offer valuable insight into parents’ understanding of their children's disability, their hopes for improvement, and opinions of what would constitute a successful, productive life. The authors use the records to develop a statistical profile of the characteristics of applicants that superintendent Dr. Martin Barr would deem most likely to improve from instruction, and a similar profile for those deemed incapable of improvement. We situate our analysis of the records within the Gilded Age context of anxieties surrounding the state of public education and worker productivity in an industrial economy. In the field of disability studies, the article adds to our understanding of how superintendents constructed and applied the “medical model” of disability and its tension with the lived social experience of disability.