Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:03:24.749Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Managing the Periphery in the Gilded Age: Writing Constitutions for the Western States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2008

Amy Bridges
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego

Abstract

In this essay I argue that in the Gilded Age (the last quarter of the nineteenth century), delegates to constitutional conventions in the western territories designed state governments to manage, as best they could, the development of their economies. They were, and understood themselves to be, citizens of the periphery of the United States. Delegates to the conventions hoped to shield their states from the worst possible outcomes of that peripheral relationship, and foster the best ones. My arguments contribute to our understanding of state constitutions and, more broadly, to central concerns of American political development—regionalism, labor law, and state building.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. By “the West” I designate the eleven states west of Nebraska that were admitted to the Union by 1912. California's 1879 constitution replaced the state's first, written in 1849. Of the four remaining western states, two wrote their first constitutions earlier in the century (Oregon 1859, Nevada 1864) and two wrote their constitutions after 1900 (Arizona and New Mexico, both 1910). In this essay I rely on Glynn, George A., ed., Convention Manual of the Sixth New York State Constitutional Convention, 1894 (Albany, NY: The Argus Company, 1894)Google Scholar for the texts of constitutions written before it was printed.

2. Meyer, Elmer Herbert, “The Constitution of Colorado,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 2 (April 1904): 256–74, 256Google Scholar.

3. Brennan, William J. Jr., “State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights,” Harvard Law Review 90, no. 3 (January 1977): 489504Google Scholar; Linde, Hans, “First Things First: Rediscovering the States' Bills of Rights,” University of Baltimore Law Review 9 (1980): 379–94Google Scholar.

4. The most prominent critic of state constitutions today is James Gardner, who sees little originality or creativity among their authors, and little worthy of investigation—much less judicial consideration—in the constitutions as written. See “The Failed Discourse of Sate Constitutionalism,” Michigan Law Review 90 (1992): 761–837; and Interpreting State Constitutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Fritz cites Friedman, Lawrence, “State Constitutions and Criminal Justice in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Toward a Usable Past (1991)Google Scholar; Fehrenbacker, Don, Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Elazar, Daniel, “The American Constitutional Tradition (Lincoln: Universitiy of Nebraska Press, 1988)Google Scholar as authors of these critiques (Fritz, Christian, “The American Constitutional Tradition Revisited: Preliminary Observations on State Constitution-Making in the Nineteenth-Century West,” Rutgers Law Journal 25, no. 4 [1994]: notes 4244Google Scholar).

5. Fritz, Christian G., “More than ‘Shreds and Patches’: California's First Bill of Rights,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1989): 1334, 18Google Scholar.

6. Baum, Marsha L. and Fritz, Christian G., “American Constitution-Making: The Neglected State Constitutional Sources,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 27 (2000): 199223, 199Google Scholar

7. Fritz, Christian G., “The American Constitutional Tradition Revisited: Preliminary Observations on State Constitution-Making in the Nineteenth-Century West,” Rutgers Law Journal 25(1994): 982Google Scholar.

8. Fritz, “American Constitutional Tradition,” p. 964.

9. Fritz, Christian G., “Rethinking the American Constitutional Tradition: National Dimensions in the Formation of State Constitutions,” Rutgers Law Journal 26, no. 4 (1995): 969–92, 984Google Scholar.

10. Fritz, Christian G., “Fallacies of American Constitutionalism,” Rutgers Law Journal 35, no. 4 (2004): 1327–69, 1355Google Scholar.

11. Clayton, Cornell W., “Toward a Theory of the Washington Constitution,” Gonzaga Law Review 37 (2001): 4187, 66Google Scholar.

12. Fritz, “American Constitutional Tradition,” 970.

13. Fritz, “American Constitutional Tradition,” 966.

14. Fritz, “American Constitutional Tradition,” 951, 998.

15. Dinan, John, The American State Constitutional Tradition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 3, 275Google Scholar.

16. Alan Tarr, G., Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7Google Scholar.

17. Glynn, The Convention Manual, part 2, vol. 2, 236–42.

18. New York Evening Post, 21 Nov. 1834; Gillman, Constitutton Beseiged, Chap. 2.

19. Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions, 135.

20. Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions, 133.

21. Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions, 131.

22. Tarr has also been a mentor and an impresario of state constitutional studies. In addition to his own research and writing, Tarr has edited a series of guides to state constitutions, and promoted research on state constitutions by reserving, since 1988, the summer issue of the Rutgers Law Review for work on state constitutions.

23. Johnson, Donald A., Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 121–22Google Scholar.

24. Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of California, Convened at the City of Sacramento, Saturday, September 28, 1878, vols. I, II, and III (Sacramento, CA: State Printing Office, 1880), I: 377.

25. Scheiber, Harry N., “Race, Radicalism, and Reform: Historical Perspective on the 1879 California Constitution,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1989): 3580, 37Google Scholar.

26. Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions, 4.

27. Hall, Kermit, “Mostly Anchor and Little Sail, the Evolution of American State Constitutions,” in Toward a Usable Past, Liberty Under State Constitutions, ed. Finkelman, Paul and Gottlieb, Stephen E. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 388417, 406Google Scholar.

28. Hicks, John D., Constitutions of the Northwest States (Buffalo, NY: John S. Hein, 1990 [1924]), 31Google Scholar.

29. Brent Swisher, Carl, Motivation and Political Technique in the California Constitutional Convention 1878–79 (Claremont, CA: Pomona College, 1990 [1930]), 75Google Scholar.

30. Alfred Larson, Taft, History of Wyoming (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 247Google Scholar.

31. Henretta, James A., “Rethinking the State Constitutional Tradition,” Rutgers Law Journal 22 (1991): 819–39, 823Google Scholar.

32. Johnson, Founding the Far West.

33. Hicks, Constitutions of the Northwest States.

34. Dinan, John, “Framing a ‘People's Government’: State Constitution-Making in the Progressive Era,” Rutgers Law Journal 30 (1999): 933–84Google Scholar.

35. Most of the newspapers I read did not include every issue. Even the Colorado Historical Society does not have every issue of the Denver Daily Tribune. The Library of Congress, where I read the other papers, has only the weekly versions of the Idaho and Wyoming papers, but did have the Helena Daily Herald. Delegates' scrapbooks include an array of clippings.

36. Emily Zackin, “The Positive Rights Tradition in the United States,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association (9 Mar. 2007); “American Positive Rights Tradition: Constitutionalizing Labor Rights in the States,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (31 Aug. 2007).

37. Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions, 115–16.

38. Morriss, Andrew P., “Lessons from the Development of Western Water Law for Emerging Water Markets: Common Law vs. Central Planning,” Oregon Law Review 80 (2001): 861946Google Scholar.

39. Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System I, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 59 ffGoogle Scholar.

40. Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, is closest in substance to this essay. Bensel's account of the nineteenth century includes two earlier books, Yankee Leviathan, the Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

41. Bensel, Political Economy, 201–17.

42. Bensel, Political Economy, 217–22.

43. Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment, A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

44. Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform, Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1977–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

45. Bensel, Political Economy, map 4.1, 231. In this vast area of desert and farm, mountain, mine, and plain, California stood apart as, on one hand, investor and exploiter (e.g., owning the “big four” railroads, financing of Nevada's mining industry) and on the other hand, dependent and vulnerable, the very paradigm of the semiperiphery. See, for example, Blackford, Mansel G., The Politics of Business in California 1890–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

46. Bensel, Political Economy, 230.

47. United States, Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900. Volume VI. Agriculture, Part II Crops and Irrigation. Census of Agriculture (United States Census Office, 1902), plates 2, 3.

48. Clinch, Thomas A., Urban Populism and Free Silver in Montana (Bozeman: University of Montana Press, 1970), 36Google Scholar.

49. Clinch, Urban Populism, 2.

50. Edward Wright, James, The Politics of Populism, Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 227Google Scholar.

51. Clinch, Urban Populism, 66.

52. Amy Bridges and Jessica Trounstine, “Not in Kansas Anymore: Populists in Western States,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago (April 5, 2003). Labor and farmers alike used the opportunity presented by the Populists to increase the pressure on state politicians, with some success. In Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Utah the Populist Party was key to the passage of eight-hour workday legislation in the 1890s. And later, Populists were also critical to support for labor in state courts. These developments came about after the constitutional conventions had finished their work.

53. Donald Wayne Hensel, “A History of the Colorado Constitution in the Nineteenth Century,” unpublished dissertation Dept. of History, University of Colorado, 1957, 97.

54. Colson, Dennis, Idaho's Constitution, The Tie That Binds (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1991), 120, 233–34Google Scholar.

55. Larson, History of Wyoming, 238.

56. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 22–23.

57. Bromwell authored, with Agipeto Vigil, a long and spirited minority report arguing for women's suffrage. See Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention held in Denver, December 20, 1875 to Frame a Constitution for the State of Colorado (Denver, CO: Smith-Brooks Press, 1907), 266–71.

58. Waldron, D. G., Biographical Sketches of the Delegates to the Convention to Frame a New Constitution for the State of California, 1878 (San Francisco: Francis and Valentine, 1878), 153–54Google Scholar.

59. Virginia Trenholm, ed., Wyoming Blue Book, vol. I (Reprint of Marie Erwin, Wyoming Historical Blue Book, Part One) (Cheyenne: Wyoming State Archives and Historical Department, 1974), 92–93; Larson, History of Wyoming, 255.

60. Toole saw direct democracy as a powerful aid in the fight against corruption. “It is the sure weapon,” he argued, “with which to put to flight the briber and the lobbyist, and drive them, like Hagar, to the wilderness.” Richard Brown Roeder, “Montana in the Early Years of the Progressive Period,” Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1971 p. 177.

61. Progressive Men of Montana (Chicago: A. W. Bowen & Co, 1902), 62; Smith, Robert Wayne, The Coeur d'Alene Mining War of 1892 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1961), 86Google Scholar.

62. Larson, History of Wyoming, 249.

63. Hensel, “History of the Colorado Constitution,” 214–15; Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention … Colorado, 730. See also Fernandez, Jose Emilio, Biography of Casimiro Barela, trans. and ed. Gabriel Melendez, A. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2003 [1911]), 4142Google Scholar.

64. In Colorado in 1859, before the enabling act, a convention was elected and offered a constitution for ratification. The proposed constitution was rejected, 2,007 votes to 1,649; six weeks later a very hastily written constitution won approval, 2,163 votes to 280. Absent an enabling act, the constitution could not become law. In 1864 another proposed constitution was rejected, 4,672 to 1,520. The next year a proposed constitution was approved by a closer vote, 3,025 to 2,870. None of those constitutions had the sanction of an enabling act. Finally, after an enabling act was passed, the constitution offered by the 1875–1876 convention was approved by a large margin, 15,443 to 4,039 (Hensel, “History of the Colorado Constitution,” 27, 68, 72, 228). Montana held a constitutional convention, also without the sanction of an enabling act, in 1884. The constitution produced was passed by a vote of 15,506 to 4.266. Not only was there no enabling act, however, but also the Republican Senate successfully opposed the admission of Democratic Montana. See Malone, Michael P., Roeder, Richard B., and Lang, William, Montana, A History of Two Centuries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 194–95Google Scholar.

65. Hicks, Northwest States, 27.

66. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 65.

67. Idaho Weekly Statesman, 3 Aug. 1889, 2.

68. Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention of Idaho 1889, vols. I and II (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1912), II, 1358.

69. Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention Held in the City of Helena, Montana, July 4 to August 17, 1889 (Helena, MT: State Publishing Company, 1921), 500.

70. Wright, Politics of Progressivism, 31–40.

71. Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention … Montana, 497.

72. Clinch, Urban Populism, 14.

73. Griffiths, David B., Populism in the Western United States, 1890–1900, vol. II (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 441–42Google Scholar.

74. Donald Pisani has shown that the claim that riparian rights were the exclusive water rights practice in the East is incorrect. Prior appropriation had precedents in eastern states. See Pisani, Donald J., Water, Land, and Law in the West, the Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, this was the argument presented at these conventions, for example, by Senator Stewart, speaking at Montana's convention. See Proceedings … Montana, 806.

75. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1021.

76. Bromwell, H. P. H., “The Constitutional Convention,” chap. XIV, in History of Colorado, vol. II, ed. Hall, Frank (Chicago: Blakely Printing Co., 1890), 288321, 311Google Scholar.

77. Denver Daily Tribune, 19 Jan. 1876, 4. Delegates to the convention refused to hire a stenographer, but allowed the press access to their deliberations, which were published by the Denver Daily Tribune. The proceedings were published in 1907.

78. Denver Daily Tribune, 19 Feb. 1876, 4.

79. Denver Daily Tribune, 2 Mar. 1876, 4.

80. Bromwell, “Constitutional Convention,” 313.

81. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1020.

82. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1021.

83. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1372.

84. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1021.

85. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1025.

86. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1373.

87. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1373.

88. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1021.

89. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 14.

90 Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1027.

91. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1374.

92. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1375.

93. Proceedings and Debates … Idaho, II: 1123.

94. Proceedings and Debates … Idaho, II: 1123.

95. Proceedings and Debates … Idaho, II: 1361.

96. Colson, Idaho's Constitution, 162–63.

97. Proceedings … Montana, 138–39.

98. Journal of the Constitutional Convention, State of Wyoming (Cheyenne, WO: Daily Sun, Book and Job Printing 1893), 193.

99. Journal … Wyoming, 293.

100. Journal … Wyoming, 498–500.

101. Journal … Wyoming, 500–501, 534–37.

102. Morriss, “Lessons from the Development of Western Water Law,” 905–37.

103. Turrentine Jackson, W., “The Wyoming Stock Growers' Association, Political Power in Wyoming Territory, 1873–1890,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 33, no. 4 (1947): 571–94Google Scholar.

104. Morriss, “Western Water Law,” 911.

105. Morriss, “Western Water Law,” 866.

106. Morriss, “Western Water Law,” 866.

107. Proceedings … Montana, 675.

108. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1021.

109. Proceedings … Montana, 472.

110. Proceedings … Montana, 500.

111. Helena Daily Herald, 2 Aug. 1889, 4.

112. Miller, George H., Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 4258Google Scholar.

113. This argument was offered in Miller's classic narrative (1971) and in Hensel's analysis of votes at the Colorado constitutional convention (“History of the Colorado Constitution”). Kanazawa and Noll found that at the Illinois convention “railroads had most success with delegates from areas without service, and less success with delegates from monopolized areas than from more competitive ones,” while “party affiliation appears to have been unimportant.” Kanazawa, Mark T. and Noll, Roger G., “The Origins of State Railroad Regulation: The Illinois Constitution of 1870,” in The Regulated Economy, A Historical Approach to Political Economy, ed. Goldin, Claudia and Libecap, Gary D. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1354, 46Google Scholar.

114. Hensel, “History of the Colorado Constitution,” 145.

115. Denver Daily Tribune, 29 Feb. 1876, 4.

116. Bromwell, “Constitutional Convention,” 305.

117. Denver Daily Tribune, 28 Feb. 1876, 4.

118. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 488.

119. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 488.

120. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 480.

121. Estee was a lawyer from San Francisco and had served in the state legislature, where he was chosen speaker of the assembly in 1874. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique, 28.

122. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 377, 382.

123. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 454.

124. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 600.

125. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 377.

126. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1228.

127. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1227.

128. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1227.

129. Debates and Proceedings … California, III: 1228.

130. Moffett, S. E., “The Railroad Commission of California, a Study in Irresponsible Government,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 6 (1895): 109–17, 477Google Scholar.

131. Proceedings … Idaho, I: 880, 882, 885, 884–85.

132. Journal … Wyoming, 581.

133. Hensel, “History of the Colorado Constitution,” 418, 152.

134. Art. XII, sec. 3, Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 383–88.

135. See Colo. Const. Art. XV, sec. 8; Idaho Const. Art. XI, sec. 8; Mont. Const. Art. XV, sec. 9; Utah Const. Art. XI, sec. 11; and Wash. Const. Art. XII, sec. 10. Wyoming's constitution declared the government's eminent domain prerogatives over corporations in general, and over railroads in particular (See art. X, sec 9, and art. X, sec. 4, “Railroads”).

136. Zackin, “American Rights Tradition,” 4.

137. Gillman, Howard, The Constitution Besieged, The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 71Google Scholar.

138. Urovsky, Melvin I., “State Courts and Protective Legislation in the Progressive Era: A Reevaluation,” Journal of American History 71, no. 1: 6391, 72Google Scholar.

139. Forbath, William, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 41Google Scholar.

140. Gillman, Constitution Besieged, 18.

141. Proceedings … Colorado, 609.

142. Journal … Wyoming, 443.

143. Journal … Wyoming, 447–48.

144. Journal … Wyoming, 450.

145. Journal … Wyoming, 452.

146. This claim contradicts many sources, which state that Montana and Wyoming also abrogated the fellow servant doctrine. The source cited for the claim is Hicks, who saw the provision as an effort to undermine fellow servants, which it failed to do. As related above, efforts to abrogate the fellow servant doctrine at the Wyoming convention met with effective resistance. Arizona was the first western state to declare in its constitution “the fellow servant doctrine is forever abrogated in the state of Arizona.” Section 193 of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 lists several protections for railroad workers. Ironclad contracts are abrogated; the negligence of fellow servants does not, in every circumstance, protect the employer from liability, nor does employee knowledge of dangerous conditions serve as a defense for the employer (Glynn, Convention Manual, 1086).

147. Journal … Wyoming, 450. In Wyoming, cattle ranchers and farmers had their own reasons to resent railroads, which may have increased general support for this resolution.

148. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1106–07.

149. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1373–75.

150. Proceedings … Montana, 239–40.

151. Judson Ferguson, commissioner of the Bureau of Agriculture, Labor, and Industry in Montana was an example of such an advocate. Ferguson is discussed in chapter 2 of Roeder, “Montana in the Early Years”; see, e.g., 27–34. See also Trachtenberg, Alexander, Laws for the Protection of Coal Miners in Pennsylvania, 1824–1915 (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 89Google Scholar.

152. Journal … Wyoming, 764.

153. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1378.

154. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1380.

155. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1380.

156. Journal … Wyoming, 765.

157. Journal … Wyoming, 765–76.

158. Proceedings … Montana, 202–209; Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1381–85.

159. Scheiber, “Race, Radicalism, and Reform,” 5.

160. Debates and Proceedings … California, I: 634.

161. See Connie Chiang, “Chinatown Will Cease to Exist: Race, Nature, and Fire at Monterey's Chinese Fishing Village, 1906,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western History Association, San Diego, CA, 2001; Crane, Paul and Larson, Alfred, “The Chinese Massacre, I,” Annals of Wyoming 12 (1940): 4755Google Scholar and “The Chinese Massacre II,” Annals of Wyoming 12 (1940): 153–61; Wortmann, Roy T., “Denver's Anti-Chinese Riot, 1880,” Colorado Magazine 42 (1965): 275–91Google Scholar.

162. Proceedings … Montana, 214–15.

163. Proceedings … Idaho, II: 1387–89.

164. Journal … Wyoming, 405.

165. Proceedings … Montana, 130.

166. Proceedings … Montana, 140.

167. Proceedings … Montana, 129–30.

168. Journal … Wyoming, 403.

169. Wyoming Constitution, Art. I, sec. 22.

170. Declarations of government's obligations to labor also appear in a few contemporary constitutions from other regions. In Arkansas, the General Assembly was asked “to require … means to be provided … to secure as far as possible the lives, health, and safety of persons employed in mining. And shall provide for enforcing such enactments by adequate pains and penalties” (Ark. Const., Art XIX, sec. 18). Even more expansively, Mississippi's constitution of 1890 mandated the legislature to “provide for the protection of employes [sic] of all corporations … from interference with their social, civil, or political rights” by their employers (Miss. Const., sec. 191).

171. Tripp, Joseph F., “Progressive Jurisprudence in the West: The Washington Supreme Court, Labor Law and the Problem of Industrial Accidents,” Labor History 24, no. 3 (1983): 342–65, 344Google Scholar. See also Douglas Hurt, R., “Populist-Endorsed Judges and the Protection of Western Labor,” Journal of the West 17, no. 1(January, 1978): 1926Google Scholar.

172. Chausovsky, Jonathan, “State Regulation of Corporations in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Critique of the New Jersey Thesis,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (Spring 2007): 3065Google Scholar. Chausovsky's central argument is that, rather than seeing New Jersey as a special case for its “untethering of the corporation from prior legislated restraints,” we should recognize that “many states actively adjusted many elements of their corporation law in the decades after the Civil War, often in the direction of greater liberalization” (30–31). Chausovsky looks at thirty-five states over thirty-five years, ending in 1900, providing a very broad view of changes in laws affecting corporations. However, in 1900 there were forty-five states in the union. Of the eleven-state West, Chausovsky's sample includes only California and Oregon. Nevertheless, he claims of his study, “when we look at all [my emphasis] the states … over a thirty-five year period …” (40). Generalizations made on the basis of the thirty-five-state sample may or may not be true of the eleven-state West.

173. Lilley III, William and Gould, Lewis L., “The Western Irrigation Movement, 1878–1902, A Reappraisal,” in The American West, A Reorientation, ed. Gressley, Gene M. (Laramie: University of Wyoming, 1966), 5774, 58–59Google Scholar.

174. Denver Daily Tribune, 1 Mar. 1876, p. 4.

175. Debates and Proceedings … California, II: 1020