The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States [1 ed.] 9781138892071, 1138892076

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THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES

The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States is a comprehensive introduction to the most important trends and developments in the study of modern United States history. Driven by interdisciplinary scholarship, the thirty-four original chapters underscore the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that contributed to the growth and contested meanings of the United States in the twentieth century. The chronological and topical breadth of the collection highlights critical political and economic developments of the century while also drawing attention to relatively recent areas of research, including borderlands, technology and disability studies. Dynamic and flexible in its possible applications, The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States offers an exciting new resource for the study of modern American history. Jerald Podair is Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University. Darren Dochuk is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. The Routledge History of American Sport Edited by Linda J. Borish, David K. Wiggins, and Gerald R. Gems The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700 Edited by Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó The Routledge History of the Renaissance Edited by William Caferro The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health Edited by Greg Eghigian The Routledge History of Disability Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown and Nancy E. Hansen The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military Edited by Kara Dixon Vuic The Routledge History of the American South Edited by Maggi M. Morehouse The Routledge History of Italian Americans Edited by William J. Connell & Stanislao Pugliese The Routledge History of Latin American Culture Edited by Carlos Manuel Salomon The Routledge History of Global War and Society Edited by Matthew S. Muehlbauer and David J. Ulbrich The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States Edited by Jerald Podair and Darren Dochuk

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES

Edited by Jerald Podair and Darren Dochuk

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Jerald Podair and Darren Dochuk to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-89207-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-70934-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments

viii ix xiv

Introduction Darren Dochuk and Jerald Podair

1

  1 The Progressive Era—a Historiographical Survey Elaine Frantz

4

  2 The 1920s—a Historiographical Survey Jennifer Fronc

15

  3 The Great Depression and New Deal—a Historiographical Survey Mason B. Williams

25

  4 World War II—a Historiographical Survey John McCallum

37

  5 The Cold War Era—a Historiographical Survey Gene Zubovich

48

  6 The 1960s—a Historiographical Survey Doug Rossinow

60

  7 The 1970s—a Historiographical Survey Kirsten Swinth

71

  8 The 1980s—a Historiographical Survey Vincent J. Cannato

84

v

Contents

  9 The 1990s—a Historiographical Survey Mark Thomas Edwards

94

10 Economics and Capitalism—a Historiographical Survey Sean H.Vanatta

104

11 Intellectual—a Historiographical Survey Daniel Wickberg

116

12 Politics of Liberalism and Conservatism—a Historiographical Survey Jennifer Delton

127

13 Social and Cultural—a Historiographical Survey Stephen R. Duncan

138

14 Labor and Working Class—a Historiographical Survey Jon Shelton

149

15 Foreign Relations and U.S. in the World—a Historiographical Survey Kelly J. Shannon

161

16 Legal and Constitutional—a Historiographical Survey Mary Ziegler

172

17 Environmental—a Historiographical Survey Bartow J. Elmore

181

18 Women’s and Gender—a Historiographical Survey Abigail Trollinger

191

19 LGBT—a Historiographical Survey Cookie Woolner

203

20 African Americans and Civil Rights—a Historiographical Survey Clarence Taylor

213

21 Latino/a History—a Historiographical Survey Felipe Hinojosa

226

22 Native America—a Historiographical Survey Sherry L. Smith

238

23 Asian American History—a Historiographical Survey Cindy I-Fen Cheng

249

vi

Contents

24 Immigration and Ethnicity—a Historiographical Survey Stephanie Hinnershitz

258

25 Metropolitan—a Historiographical Survey Andrew R. Highsmith

267

26 American West—a Historiographical Survey John William Nelson

281

27 Border/Lands—a Historiographical Survey Sheila McManus

292

28 Agricultural and Rural—a Historiographical Survey Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

302

29 Consumerism and Popular Culture—a Historiographical Survey Emily A. Remus

315

30 Science, Medicine and Technology—a Historiographical Survey Myrna Perez Sheldon

325

31 Sport and Leisure—a Historiographical Survey Travis Vogan

337

32 Disability—a Historiographical Survey Daniel J. Wilson

349

33 Religious—a Historiographical Survey Sarah Ruble

359

34 Food and Health—a Historiographical Survey Benjamin E. Zeller

369

Index

381

vii

FIGURES

  3.1 Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest, August 1939   4.1 Japanese American internees reading a newspaper in Manzanar, 1943   5.1 Rows of newly finished frame houses in upstate New York   6.1 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at an antiwar demonstration in New York, 1967   7.1 Women office workers’ demonstration, 1976   9.1 Bill Clinton, standing between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, taking the presidential oath of office, 1993 10.1 WPA mural at the Cohen Building in Washington D.C. 12.1 Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan waving from their limousine at the Inauguration Day Parade in Washington D.C., 1981 13.1 Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, United Artists, 1936 14.1 Civil rights leaders at the 1963 March on Washington 17.1 Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, Founder of the Sierra Club, on Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park 18.1 Women’s suffrage headquarters at Upper Euclid Avenue, Cleveland 28.1 Grain elevator in Sisseton, South Dakota, 1939 30.1 Explosion from the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico, 1945 31.1 Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball 34.1 “Food Will Win the War”—poster urging Americans to ration and save food during World War II

viii

25 37 48 60 71 94 104 127 138 149 181 191 302 325 337 369

CONTRIBUTORS

Jerald Podair is Professor of History and Robert S. French Professor of American Studies at Lawrence University. He received a B.A. from New York University, a J.D. from Columbia University Law School and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill Brownsville Crisis (Yale University Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on the struggle for civil rights in the United States and an honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s Book Award in North American urban history. His other books include Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); The Struggle for Equality (co-editor) (University of Virginia Press, 2011); American Conversations (co-author) (Pearson, 2013); and, most recently, City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2017), which was awarded the 2018 Seymour Medal by the Society for American Baseball Research for best baseball history book and was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He received the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize for “literary distinction in the writing of history” and is a fellow of the New York Academy of History. Darren Dochuk is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He received a B.A. from Simon Fraser University, an M.A. from Queen’s University (Ontario) and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He has written widely on religion, politics, economics and culture in American life, and is the author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2011), winner of the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians (awarded for dissertation manuscript), John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association and Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He has also co-edited several volumes, including God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). **

Vincent J. Cannato is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he teaches twentieth-century U.S. history. He is the author of The Ungovernable City: John

ix

Contributors

Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (Basic Books, 2001) and American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009), and co-editor of Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book about Francis Cardinal Spellman and Cold War American Catholicism. Cindy I-Fen Cheng is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the award-winning author of Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (New York University Press, 2013) and editor of The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies (Routledge, 2016). Jennifer Delton is the Douglas Family Chair in American Culture, History and Literary and Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College in upstate New York. The author of three books, her work focuses on liberalism, civil rights and business in the twentieth-century United States. She is currently at work on a book about U.S. manufacturing and twentieth-century politics. Stephen R. Duncan is Assistant Professor of History at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Rebel Cafe: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground and other works that examine American culture and politics. Mark Thomas Edwards is Associate Professor of U.S. History at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He is the author of The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Writing the American Century: Francis and Helen Miller, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Public Diplomacy in a Protestant Secular Age, which is forthcoming from Lexington Books. Bartow J. Elmore is Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University and a fellow at New America. He is the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. Elaine Frantz is Professor of History at Kent State University. She is the author of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Manhood Lost: Drunken Men and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). She is the review editor for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her current book project traces the history of crime and policing in Pittsburgh. Jennifer Fronc is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (2009) and Monitoring the Movies: The Fight Over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America (2017). Fronc earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University and taught at Hunter College and Virginia Commonwealth University. She also serves as Consulting Scholar at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. Andrew R. Highsmith is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is a specialist in modern American history, U.S. metropolitan history and the history of public health. He is the author of Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stephanie Hinnershitz is Assistant Professor of History at Cleveland State University. She specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on immigration and ethnicity. Her first book, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2015, and her second book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South, was published by UNC Press in 2017. x

Contributors

Felipe Hinojosa is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His teaching and research interests include Latina/o and Mexican American studies, religion, gender and comparative race and ethnicity. Hinojosa’s first book, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) was awarded the 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award for the best book in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, given every year by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. John McCallum is the Earl S. Johnson Instructor in History at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 2017. His work has appeared in Humanity and Diplomatic History, and his current manuscript is an account of how international violence transformed American moral sentiments in the middle of the twentieth century. Sheila McManus is Professor of History at the University of Lethbridge. Her research focuses on the borderlands of the North American West, and she is one of the co-editors of H-Borderlands network. Her most recent book, Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West, is forthcoming from Texas A&M Press. John William Nelson is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he is completing a dissertation on the Chicago portage from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. His work broadly explores the environmental and Indigenous history of the Great Lakes as various Native peoples and European powers sought to harness the region’s distinct geography in their attempts to control the northern borderlands. Emily A. Remus is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on American consumer capitalism, urban space and gender. Her first book, Consumers’ Metropolis: How Monied Women Purchased Pleasure and Power in the New Downtown, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. She is the author of “Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Fin-de-Siècle Chicago” in the Journal of American History. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg is Professor of History at Iowa State University and a fellow of the Agricultural History Society. She is the author of Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas; Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest; and The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865. She is also the editor of the Routledge History of Rural America. Doug Rossinow is Professor of History at the University of Oslo. He is the author of works including The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Sarah Ruble is Associate Professor of Religion at Gustavus Adolphus College, where she teaches courses on the history of Christianity in the United States, the American missionary movement and religious skepticism in the United States. She is the author of The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture Since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Her next project is a study of religion in Minnesota during the Great Depression. Kelly J. Shannon is Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. She received her Ph.D. at Temple University and specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations, particularly xi

Contributors

U.S. relations with the Islamic world, U.S.–Iran relations, transnational history, women’s rights and human rights. She is the author of U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), as well as several book chapters and journal articles. Myrna Perez Sheldon is jointly appointed as Assistant Professor of Gender and American Religion in the Department of Classics and World Religions and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio University. She received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rice University. She is a historian of evolutionary theory. Jon Shelton is Assistant Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he teaches courses on American history, labor and working-class history and education. He is the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order. Sherry L. Smith is University Distinguished Professor of History (Emerita) at Southern Methodist University and former Co-Director and Associate Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. Her scholarship rests at the intersection of Native American, American West and American Cultural history. Smith’s books include Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2000). Kirsten Swinth is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Fordham University. Her book on second wave U.S. feminism, “Having it All”: A Real Feminist History, will appear in 2018. She has authored the document collection “How Did Settlement Workers at Greenwich House Promote the Arts as Integral to a Shared Social Life?” (Alexander Street Press, 2006) and Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Clarence Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Baruch College. His work focuses on the civil rights struggle in New York City. He has also written on African American religion and labor. Among his books are The Black Churches of Brooklyn (1994); Knocking on Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (1997); Black Religious Intellectuals From the Age of Jim Crow to the 21st Century (2002); and Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (2011). Abigail Trollinger is Assistant Professor of History at St. Norbert College. Her current project is titled “Becoming Entitled: Relief and Unemployment Insurance Before the New Deal,” which argues that beginning in the 1920s social workers and reformers defended the unemployed and aided in legitimizing unemployment insurance. Trollinger’s research has been supported by grants from the Social Welfare History Archives of the University of Minnesota and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. Sean H. Vanatta is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University. He is completing a dissertation on the history of the U.S. credit card industry, as well as a co-authored book on the history of federal bank supervision. His article, “Citibank, Credit Cards, and the Local Politics of National Consumer Finance, 1968–1991,” received the Business History Review’s 2016 Henrietta Larson Award for the best article in that year’s journal.

xii

Contributors

Travis Vogan is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media and ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire. Daniel Wickberg teaches history at the University of Texas at Dallas and is past President of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He is the author of The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America and numerous articles on intellectual historiography and methods. His current book project is titled The Idea of Tradition in a Culture of Progress: Thinking About the Past and Future in Post-World War II America. Mason B. Williams is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Political Science at Williams College. He is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (Norton, 2013). He is currently writing a history of the neoliberal state in late twentieth-century New York, focusing especially on policing, schools and housing. Daniel J. Wilson is Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. His scholarship has focused on the polio epidemics in the United States with an emphasis on the experience of the individuals who contracted the disease. His publications include Living With Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (2005) and Polio: Biography of a Disease (2009). Cookie Woolner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Memphis, focusing on race, gender and sexuality in modern American culture. She received her Ph.D. in history and women’s studies from the University of Michigan in 2014 and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Case Western Reserve University and Kalamazoo College. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “The Famous Lady Lovers:” African American Women and Same-Sex Desire Before Stonewall. Benjamin E. Zeller is Associate Professor and Chair of Religion at Lake Forest College. He is author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (NYU Press), Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (NYU Press) and co-editor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press) and The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury). He is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. Mary Ziegler is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University. Her first book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015 and won the 2014 Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first manuscript published in any discipline. Her second book, Rights to Privacy: The Forgotten Legacy of Roe v. Wade, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2018. Gene Zubovich is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Global Gospel, and “For Human Rights Abroad, Against Jim Crow at Home: The Political Mobilization of American Ecumenical Protestants in the Era of World War II,” forthcoming in the Journal of American History.

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Ted Meyer for guiding this volume to completion. They also thank the following for their help during the project’s various stages: Philip Byers, Sarah Golden, Suzanna Krivulskaya, Emily McLane, Emma Saiz and Jennifer Sdunzik.

xiv

INTRODUCTION Darren Dochuk and Jerald Podair

In February of 1941, leading publisher Henry Luce penned an editorial for Life magazine in which he famously announced the dawn of an American century. “Throughout the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century,” he wrote in his concluding line, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.1 Luce’s, of course, was an urgent plea for Americans to shed their isolationism, recognize their nation’s new standing as an economic, political and technological superpower and, amid the darkness of war, embrace its burden as beacon of progress and freedom on a global stage. In that regard his editorial can be (and has been) read as a buoyant one, full of idealistic promptings for America to wield (gently) its imperial might. Yet Luce’s think piece was hardly glib. In the five dense pages that preceded his parting charge he laid out a more somber and complex view of the century that he wanted Americans to claim as theirs. “So far, this century of ours has been a profound and tragic disappointment,” he rued. “No other century has been so big with promise for human progress and happiness. And in no one century have so many men and women and children suffered such pain and anguish and bitter death.”2 Americans were much to blame for the condition. While they rejected the opportunity to assume their global leadership at the conclusion of World War I, setting in motion two decades of political withdrawal and paralysis, they had also let fester within their society a “sickness” of apathy in the face of modernity’s multivalent problems. Social injustice and the search for answers in socialist ideology; economic tumult and a disregard for the poor; “troubles in the field of philosophy, in faith and morals”; “troubles of home and family, of personal life”; and “huge Government debt, a vast bureaucracy, and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the Government as the source of all life”— these were symptoms of a debilitated nation mired in a cultural and political “mess.”3 As a result, Luce explained, “We Americans are unhappy . . . nervous . . . gloomy.” “As we look toward the future— our own future and the future of other nations—we are filled with foreboding. The future doesn’t seem to hold anything for us except conflict, disruption, war.”4 As he pleaded with his fellow citizens

1

Darren Dochuk and Jerald Podair

to embrace their nation’s international leadership, then, Luce was not heralding America’s manifest destiny so much as he was offering it a last-gasp shot to right a desperate situation. Luce’s editorial reminds us that the twentieth century was a dizzying epoch for this nation, one that witnessed its economic emergence as a modern, global powerhouse, political maturation into an empire and war machine and cultural awakening as a vibrant epicenter of competing ideas, innovations and higher callings. It also illustrates the degree to which this epoch of America’s ascent was animated by mixed hopes and failed dreams, triumphalism and despair and a range of human and political ambitions that strengthened society’s resolve in some instances and fragmented it in others. As much as he set out to rally his fellow citizens behind a unifying vision of shared destiny, Luce did just as much to highlight the competing interests and sentiments that worked against such unity, and made America’s twentieth century of sovereignty a perpetually fragile undertaking. On a more basic level, Luce’s editorial underscores the difficulty of capturing America’s twentieth century in any one single historical portrait. Amid such dizzying progressions and tangled emotions and experiences, where does one find continuities and the whole? Rather than attempt to paint one picture, this volume offers multiple glimpses of the “American Century” in all its rich complexity. These glimpses aim to be both broad and deep. They are broad in the sense of chronological and topical coverage. As difficult as it is to portray twentieth-century America in one stroke, several contributors to this volume have charted the defining developments, trends and scholarship pertaining to the particular eras that comprised the century, in hopes that the cumulative effect is one of breadth and synthesis. Other contributors have surveyed specific topics, ranging from politics to religion, consumerism to the courts, immigration to sport, labor to leisure. If not exhaustive, this litany of fascinating subjects is meant to open up as much as possible the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that made modern America such a contested place and that kept leading lights such as Henry Luce simultaneously hopeful and disillusioned in his day. It is also intended to provide readers of all levels with considerable opportunity to pause on areas of particular interest and gain a clearer sense of emerging trends and insights in less familiar subfields, which they can in turn apply to their own developing research, writing and pedagogical ambitions. These glimpses are deep in the sense of focused examination of historiography and methodology. The past quarter-century has witnessed a transformation in the study, interpretation and writing of the recent American past. Driven by fresh emphases on interdisciplinary study, committed to the cross-fertilization of ideas across specializations and furnished by new technology, digital archives and social communication networks with unprecedented access to primary and secondary sources, U.S. historians and the broad field of twentieth-century U.S. history have flourished. Entirely new subfields have emerged, while the push for innovation has rejuvenated already-existing ones. Cultural historical methods and a refashioned interest in the study of capitalism, for instance, have enlivened once relatively dormant historiographies such as political history, labor history, diplomatic history and economic history. Where heavily bifurcated historiographies dealing with either urban or suburban, southern or western, U.S. or global once predominated and fragmented, we now see an exciting push for bridge-building subfields like metropolitan history, Sunbelt and borderlands studies, and the U.S. in the world. Once the defining era in the history of American popular culture, the 1960s has been superseded by the 1970s (and, to a degree, the 1980s) as the decade in need of investigation. Left behind for much-needed study of conservatism, the history of liberalism is now making a comeback, bringing historians full circle. Suffice to say, an American historian whose work last appeared in the 1970s or 1980s would hardly recognize the discipline today. This volume’s close attention to the state of recent scholarship on each era and in every category of analysis is designed to help those who may feel behind the times, but more importantly to challenge and equip anyone who wishes to test new ways of researching, writing and teaching history. This is a propitious time for such reevaluation and testing. With the twentieth century now fully in our rear view, historians are ready and able to assess it in fresh and full light, with all of the 2

Introduction

latest scholarly tools at their disposal. And as Americans contemplate their nation’s next steps in a new century, with a mingled sense of idealism and uncertainty and an unsettled global horizon that Henry Luce would have found familiar, there is no better time to revisit the 100-year path that brought them there.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, 65. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 61.

3

1 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Elaine Frantz

Progressive Era Americans were new people, conscious of their newness: The U.S. population expanded by more than a third from 1900 to 1920, and more than half of Americans in 1915 were younger than 25 years old. The use of the word “old-fashioned” peaked in these years as Americans marked what they were not, and use of the word “modern” dramatically increased as well. Americans had a striking confidence in their ability to transcend their own traditional practices, the limitations of nature and the competing plans of other nations to become the people they chose to be, if only they could agree on what that meant. New institutions dotted the landscape: YMCAs, a proliferation of new universities, massive mills, department stores. A class of intellectuals and policymakers set out to systematically describe, then to transform and impose order on, urban landscapes, school systems, farming and industrial practices, private homes and tenements, parks and wilderness areas, and the behavior and capacities of Americans themselves. These people—academics, writers for increasingly widely circulating newspapers and magazines, politicians, policymakers and reformers—are those to which historians are usually referring when we talk about the “progressives.” Progressive-era Americans would endeavor to create a unitary national culture from a people deeply divided by class, race, gender and cultural affiliation. Through a combination of deliberate reform, cultural innovation and violent suppression of internal dissent and external competition, Americans between 1900 and 1920 laid the groundwork for an increasingly cohesive national culture and identity and for the nation’s economic, political and military might in the century to come. The twin concepts of “segregation” and “Americanization” shaped the era. On the one hand, as cultural, economic and political structures national in scope grew, Americans increasingly identified with the nation rather than with their neighborhood, town, state or region. Progressives, whose plans often revolved around mobilizing end educating “the people,” set out to strengthen this identity. On the other hand, the labeling and sorting progressives themselves encouraged helped make Americans increasingly aware of racial or ethnic, class and other differences and identify themselves (and others) as members of a category. Because progressives differed among themselves and never cohered into a single movement, defining “progressivism” has long been a central problem of the period. The progressives shared a pragmatic belief that the scientific study of society could diagnose social ills and prescribe solutions. They were obsessed with organization: advances in bureaucratic structures and record-keeping, paired with a widespread belief in the positive power of organization to achieve social goods, made this an age of sorting, counting and naming. They believed that experts with social scientific knowledge had the

4

The Progressive Era

right and duty not only to convince less-educated people that certain social choices and structures would benefit the whole, but, if necessary, to impose their ideas against the will of the less enlightened. Progressivism had its equivalent in foreign policy, as Americans tried to export their ideas of proper governance to foreign nations and cause them to act in ways useful to the United States’ own plans; where foreign governments acted in ways offensive to U.S. sensibilities or against U.S. interests, the United States, in the Progressive Era, increasingly was willing and able to engage them directly. Recent historiography on the Progressive Era places particular emphasis on contingency, continuity and coercion. Historians emphasize contingency both in that they are skeptical of teleological approaches (neither the expansion of the franchise nor the police state was inevitable; gender roles might have been constructed differently than they were) and in that they doubt the ability of the powerful to effectively orchestrate the outcomes they intend. They eschew explanations that rely on top-down decision making, interesting themselves as much in what influenced and limited elites as in how elites shaped the nation. They focus on mechanics and process: Reforms fail, compromise or succeed due to the complex, unpredictable interplay of details like funding, geography and partisan alignment. And they emphasize the ability of non-elites to affect historical change. Institutions function as they do in part because of the preferences and prejudices of the bureaucrats lodged within. Laws and reforms cannot be implemented if their subjects persist in their resistance. Recent historians find continuities where earlier historians found difference. So, for instance, while historians have long depicted lynching as a southern phenomenon with some exceptional outbreaks elsewhere, many now understand it as a national phenomenon particularly virulent in the South. This same is true of treatments of the United States’ relationship to other nations: Historians reject exceptionalist accounts and emphasize the extent to which progressive-era Americans imported not only consumer goods but social movements, political ideas and cultural values from abroad. And the booming field of memory and commemoration studies explores how the Progressive Era was shaped by, and continued to reshape, nineteenth-century history. Finally, recent historiography acknowledges that violence was not simply a tragic side effect, but constitutive of the era.1 Progressivism began with set of values and pragmatic strategies, but often ended with the barrel of a gun. At home, progressives attempted to master the collective violence that emerged in the form of deadly conflicts between strikers and the armed representatives of industry, pervasive white-on-black violence in and beyond the South and crime and policing. In the international context, these years marked the beginning of the United States’ rise to global hegemony. The Spanish, American, Cuban and Filipino War ushered the Progressive Era in, and World War I ushered it out. In between, the United States suppressed a revolution in its new Filipino possession, sponsored another against Colombia in order to gain the Panama Canal and pursued the Punitive Expedition against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The U.S. economy grew substantially (if unevenly) during these years. Even at the bottom, rising wages outpaced rising prices.2 At the top was a small class of elites, largely involved in industry, railroads and finance. In the wake of these capitalists was a rapidly growing class of “white-collar workers,” independent or salaried professionals. Defined broadly, this group made up around a fifth of all workers by 1910. Their ranks included lawyers, doctors, ministers, dentists, clerical workers, teachers, journalists and managers. About a third of all Americans (a steadily decreasing percentage) worked in agriculture. Most farmers owned their own land (though often only with the help of hefty mortgages), but a large minority were tenants of other landowners.3 There were about as many wage workers as farmers. Employed in manufacturing, mining or construction, on railroads or as domestics, most worked more than fifty hours a week, though those hours could be cut without notice when economic times were tough. Wages varied substantially by age and gender, and work was dangerous at a time when industrial safety regulations were few, employers were rarely held legally responsible for workplace injuries and health insurance did not exist. Outside of these designations were craftspeople,

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small business owners and day laborers. And, of course, some Americans were unemployed: the worst year, 1915, saw a bit less than a tenth of the labor force without on-the-books work. Because progressives believed that social scientific knowledge could engineer a powerful and efficient America, they gathered mountains of information about the characteristics of Americans in order to map, summarize and categorize them. The urban poor were a favorite subject of investigation. Since the late nineteenth century, benevolent and reform groups in major cities had gathered into “charity organization movements” to share and organize the private information they had gathered on their clients and social conditions.4 In the Progressive Era, these were supplemented by investigations conducted by anti-vice groups, most famously New York’s Committee of Fourteen, which hired detectives to go undercover into areas usually inaccessible to white elites. Social workers and investigators took methodical notes on the people they served or observed and on the neighborhoods in which they lived, and aggregated them to describe their characteristics as a class. Public health workers represented another body of investigators. In the name of fighting transmittable diseases, they inoculated and quarantined residents, and forcibly entered private homes to observe and remedy, but also to document, whatever seemed unclean.5 Reform-oriented investigative journalists, famously including “newspaper women,” engaged in a similar business.6 Their style of reporting, called “yellow journalism” or “muckraking,” involved infiltrating spaces where marginal people congregated—tenements, saloons, prisons, mental asylums or opium dens—and describing them in sensational detail. Similar impulses led them to scrutinize the obscure doings of another group widely suspect of causing social problems: wealthy industrialists and financiers. Journalists disclosed the complex details of financial empires: interlocking directorates, rebates, trusts. As progressives aggregated, tabulated and circulated economic information, they made class difference increasingly visible and concrete even to Americans who would be unlikely to be exposed to the class-conscious rhetoric of international radical culture. Wealthy Americans, professionals, farmers and workers joined voluntary associations that reflected and developed their class identities. Americans’ racial and ethnic affiliations were, significantly, stronger than their class affiliation. Those who claimed Anglo-Saxon blood took pride in it. Most progressive intellectuals believed that the Anglo destiny to rule and shape those in lesser races was the driving force behind social progress. They considered it entirely appropriate to use their control of the most powerful institutions in the United States—most corporations, private clubs, universities, voluntary associations, newspapers and presses and the government itself—to advance and advocate for their racial interests. They had little need for purpose-built racial advocacy organizations. The major group that would most selfconsciously celebrate Anglo racial identity, the Ku Klux Klan, emerged in 1915, but would not reach its organizational peak until a few years after the Progressive Era. While historians have recently paid only limited attention to white ethnics, it is worth noting that Anglo-Saxon identity pointedly excluded even most Americans who were considered white, including southern and eastern Europeans, and other Jewish and Catholic Americans. This was particularly true of the recently immigrated. Around 15 percent of people living in the progressive-era United States in these years had been born abroad. Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, Slavic Americans and others formed new voluntary associations, organized public celebrations and founded newspapers and institutions, including schools and colleges, to create meaningful and nuanced identities and develop collective strategies. Black Americans continued to institutionalize their collective identity as well. In 1900, the great majority of black Americans lived in the South, mainly working in agriculture. Some black Southerners began to move north, trading rural labor and idiosyncratic and often unjust white control for the economic opportunity and self-determination that they hoped urban northern life would bring. Probably the most consequential black institution founded in the period was the Niagara Movement (1905), which in 1909 would evolve into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 6

The Progressive Era

People (NAACP). The force behind it, W.E.B. Du Bois, was foremost among a group of black intellectuals who had come to national prominence in the early twentieth century. The other most powerful black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, organized around his Tuskegee Institute, taking a more accommodationist approach to racial improvement, emphasizing cross-racial collaboration and building a strong, practically educated, black skilled class. Long spurned by historians, he has been taken more seriously in recent years as a pragmatic navigator of a deeply racist nation.7 Several important African American newspapers got their start in this period, most significantly the Chicago Defender (1910), Pittsburgh Courier (1911) and Philadelphia Tribune (1912).8 Recent scholarship has highlighted the international, transatlantic context of black leadership and organization.9 It has also shifted focus to the crucial leadership of black women, who supported their own organizations for racial advancement, most prominently the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, spearheaded by the influential Mary Church Terrell. Other groups of Americans were sorted by race. Chinese, Mexican and Native Americans struggled to make and preserve a cultural space for themselves. Chinese Americans in large western cities were subject to much the same regime as were black Americans: segregation laws and heightened state surveillance by whites who considered them particularly inclined to disease, drug use and sexual vice. Nevertheless, they set up mutual aid and political advocacy societies, organized around clan or home region and established businesses and newspapers.10 Mexican migration to the United States increased dramatically in these years, buoyed by a steady demand for labor in the Southwestern United States, and facilitated by new Mexican railroad lines that made it cost-effective to reach the border. With the border practically open until 1917, most migrants moved back and forth rather than remaining permanently in the United States. They increasingly faced discrimination. In Los Angeles, for instance, an informal system of segregated Mexican public schools emerged.11 Native Americans who moved to predominantly white areas similarly found themselves segregated. Many, however, remained on reservations. Progressives disagreed with one another about how to control life on the reservations, but usually focused on promoting individual agriculture and worked to impose “Americanization,” often under the auspices of education and public health work.12 Recent works have underlined the policy continuities between Native American control and foreign imperialism.13 Early twentieth-century Americans also sorted themselves by gender and sexuality. They marked the novelty of gender roles with terms like “new women.” This period offered unprecedented opportunities for women to become involved in public life, even before the most striking transformations occurred in the World War I home front. The wealthiest women attended colleges and universities at nearly the same rate as elite men. Some entered existing male-dominated professions, while others populated changing fields like nursing, public health and clerical work. Women of all classes, particularly with the social transformation accompanying World War I, had more freedom to move around public spaces without male escorts. Yet, while older scholarship represented this period as a watershed between the Victorian and the Modern, these new roles were hardly uncontested. Women were subject not only to public harassment meant to police their behavior and reinforce patriarchal control, but also to federal, state and local government officials paid to monitor and regulate their sexual behavior under the guise of the Comstock Act, Mann Act and other legislation.14 The meaning of being a man was also in transition. As men shifted to wage work, community identification lessened and women claimed more autonomy, nineteenth-century ideals yielded to a new “masculinity” that celebrated physical strength and the successful navigation of or escape from hierarchies.15 As women became a fixture in most public spaces, men increasingly spent discretionary time at fraternal associations and fostered the growth of masculine sports like football. They encouraged their sons to join groups like the Boy Scouts of America, which spread to the United States in 1910, to train them in manhood.16 Emerging racial identities, recent scholarship reminds us, profoundly shaped this transition in gender roles. White men used direct or vicarious violence to 7

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establish their dominance over non-white men, who they characterized as too sexually out of control to be patriarchs and insufficiently capable and disciplined to take non-menial roles in the modern economy. Non-white men constructed their own claims to masculinity both as informed by and in resistance to this white aggression, sometimes meeting or surpassing the terms set by white men for manly identity and sometimes setting their own terms.17 Sexual behavior and identities transformed in this era as well. Urban life, which allowed people to interact with one another while keeping their identities secret, enabled diverse sexual subcultures. In cities like New York, “fairies” and the “trade” who sought them established their own cultural spaces and common signals and language. And a thriving culture of “crushing” developed in women’s colleges as professional women paired off with one another as domestic partners. As these “homosexual” behaviors became increasingly subject to investigation and punishment, they came to be popularly understood as identities. An individual who had certain sexual desires became understood as a “homosexual” and those with other sexual desires came to be understood as a “heterosexual.”18 Progressives’ love of labeling and sorting made this the age of segregation. The term “segregation” came from scientific writing. Applying it to people underlined the reach of progressive ambitions. Progressives maintained late nineteenth-century vice districts like Storyville in New Orleans to contain prostitution and other illegal behaviors.19 Most notoriously, progressives set up a legal structure to formally separate people of distinct races. The Progressive Era saw the passage of many state and local laws, regulations and informal practices requiring separate white, black and (in the West) Chinese, Mexican and Native American schools, segregating public transportation and public spaces like parks and racially restricting sales of property. Driven by an understanding that African Americans were innately criminal, they enforced a formal regime of racial segregation and disparately policed black and white areas to force criminal enterprises into one and out of the other.20 Anti-miscegenation laws were already on the books in most states, but more adopted these laws preventing white people from intermarrying with non-white people.21 Yet as energetically as they marked and fostered distinctions among Americans, Progressives found insular communities dangerous, and believed that only a nation enjoying a common culture could ensure social improvement and political stability. Social influence, they believed, was a key means through which this common culture could be realized. Fear of negative social influence had justified segregation. Because people would unavoidably be shaped by the structures they inhabited and the people they encountered, contact with vicious, immoral, ignorant or ill people posed a danger to the whole. But segregation, by this logic, also kept good influences away from dangerous populations, allowing vice, sickness, corrupt traditions and ignorance to strengthen and organize. Progressives dedicated resources to encouraging (and, where necessary, coercing) everyone in the population to adopt certain common norms and behaviors and a respect and deference to governmental authority, a process they called “Americanization.”22 Public education was the most obvious location for Americanization.23 Reformers pushed for the introduction of kindergartens, mandatory attendance laws, the professionalization of teacher training and the consolidation of rural schools.24 Such schools, they hoped, would foster an able and likeminded citizenry. Popular culture could also potentially do the work of Americanization. Entertainment entrepreneurs built lavish theaters even in smaller towns, and customers flocked to vaudeville shows and other theatrical entertainment. Popular film also took off in these years. These performers and movies circulated nationally and had audiences that cut across class, ethnic and racial lines, and so were crucial in creating a system of common cultural referents and experiences. Progressives also hoped they could shape movies’ content through censorship. A private “National Board of Censorship” (later renamed the gentler “National Board of Review”), created in 1909, existed alongside state censorship boards. Movie companies found that it was in their economic interest to comply with them. 8

The Progressive Era

National culture could also divide Americans. White film became an important vector for the development of racial identity and justification of oppression of non-white others. Films that highlighted racial conflict, such as that of the 1910 boxing match between black champion Jack Johnson and white challenger Jim Jeffries; representations of (racially charged) executions; and the Birth of a Nation (1915), inspired responses by African American associations and leaders.25 These protests sometimes sparked race riots and violent police suppression. A segregated film culture seemed to become a possibility when a small black film industry emerged to counter the white supremacy inherent in many Hollywood films.26 Nationally circulating monthly magazines proliferated and increased their reach. Magazines lowered their prices, adopted modern advertising techniques, printed sensational exposes and watched their circulation and profits soar. Between 1890 and 1905, the circulation of monthly magazines rose from 18 million to 64 million. That growth would continue through the Progressive Era.27 Religion also had the potential to unify the nation. Almost two out of every three American considered themselves Protestant, so Protestant values and infrastructures were useful in building broad consensus. But more than a third of the population (mainly Roman Catholics, but also Jewish, Eastern Orthodox and Latter Day Saints) fell outside of Protestantism. And Protestants disagreed with one another over the proper relationship between the church and the emerging modern America. On one side stood “Social Gospelers,” who, influenced by the many Christian believers active in the struggle for labor rights, argued that church practices should evolve along with the secular society around it and engage actively in the problems of the day.28 “Fundamentalists,” in contrast, saw religion as a bulwark of truth and tradition in the midst of uncertainty and transformation. Fundamentalists like popular preacher Billy Sunday encouraged followers to focus on faith rather than public life. Other progressives placed their hope in the redeeming power of carefully planned domestic and public physical environments. In domestic architecture and furnishings, a simple aesthetic replaced more cluttered Victorianism. Progressive thinkers also worked to transform public spaces. Daniel Burnham, proponent of the “City Beautiful” movement, was one of many who believed that monumental architecture and rational design would encourage better citizenship and respect for government.29 Urban planners emphasized the importance of playgrounds and parks, so that city dwellers could experience the health and psychological benefits of nature. The national parks movement applied this idea on a much broader scale. The federal government strengthened its authority over undeveloped land in these years, and in 1916, it began the National Parks Service. Still others had faith that the capitalist economy could serve as a force of social cohesion. Capitalists endeavored to convince non-elite Americans that all people shared the benefits of progressive-era capitalism. For instance, corporate America led a series of campaigns during this period to encourage Americans to buy stocks and bonds. This was particularly successful during World War I: Buying war bonds became one of the premium symbols of patriotism, and a third of Americans did so.30 Progressive reformers also tried to ameliorate the conditions fostering social tensions. Believing that those who profited from vice and poverty often worked against their plans, they tried to root out financially lucrative vices, including alcohol, narcotics and prostitution. The campaign that came to be most closely associated with this period was that for the prohibition of alcohol. Prohibitionists won several statewide and local triumphs in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it was in 1919, at the end of World War I, that they finally prevailed through the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act.31 Similarly, Congress banned the importation of non-medical opium in 1909, and followed this ban with the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1914, which placed a tax on the non-medical purchase of opiates and required that they only be distributed by physicians.32 Progressives also tried to prevent people they considered likely to be vicious from becoming part of their community. The two major sources of population growth were immigration and natural reproduction. Progressives focused on screening those who attempted to cross our borders and those Americans who were giving birth to the next generation. The federal government standardized and 9

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centralized its naturalization process and created formal processes to “denaturalize” immigrants who failed to assimilate.33 As important was the impulse to control which babies would be born within the United States. There was widespread agreement that the physical and behavioral qualities of children were profoundly shaped by their genetic inheritance from their parents. Progressives accordingly adopted practices they labeled as “eugenics,” intending both to encourage people they deemed “fit” to reproduce and to prevent those they deemed “unfit.” They worked to convince healthy elite white women that they had a natural duty to bear many children. And they engaged in a loosely coordinated campaign to enable, convince and, failing that, coerce the “unfit”—particularly those who were impoverished, non-Anglo-Saxon, ill, disabled or had engaged in criminal behavior—to forego having children. Part of this effort was informing such individuals of the benefits of not reproducing and allowing them to access birth control. Zealous individuals, institutions and state and local governments across the nation also set up substantial sterilization programs, through which they sterilized reproductive-age women, often involuntarily or with deeply compromised consent.34 Where social control failed to achieve consensus, progressives faced two options: to give disaffected groups what they demanded or violently force them to accept a system under which they felt oppressed. They used different combinations of these in response to different groups. One of the social tensions that most worried progressives was class. While their investigations into the lives of the poor were not primarily intended to foster empathy or understand their perspectives, social reformers like Jane Addams came to believe that reform could only succeed by working in concert with their subjects’ beliefs, goals and understandings. Urban residents’ noncompliance with some progressives’ plans for the city shaped what they could implement. Progressives gave the nod to this bottom-up model of political power when they endorsed more direct democratic practices like initiatives, referendums and the direct election of senators.35 State and federal governments worked to improve relationships between labor and capital. After a successful labor mobilization of New York garment workers coincided with the catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911, for instance, New York transformed its investigative and regulatory systems.36 Many of these labor policies were also deeply informed by racialist and patriarchal views. Legislation that limited women’s access to employment, for instance, made them available for reproduction.37 But governments also prevented workers from using the organizational tactics they understood to be so crucial to exercising power. Legislators and courts weakened unionization by allowing employers to fire union radicals and failing to enforce closed shop contracts. The rise of the moderate, anti-socialist American Federation of Labor (AFL) as the mainstream labor group of the era and of progressive groups like the National Civic Federation, which claimed to be invested in an equitable labor/capital relationship, also tamped down more radical energies.38 Governments were often more than willing either to allow owners to use private violence to suppress strikes or to assist them in doing so. Not a year went by in which there were fewer than 1,000 strikes. As persistent as they were, labor unions’ effectiveness was limited not only by the tactics capitalists used against them, but also by their perpetual reluctance to incorporate black, southern and eastern European and female workers and unskilled workers generally. The International Workers of the World (IWW) emerged in 1905 as a radical alternative to the AFL. Popularly called the Wobblies, this group would come to be labeled as dangerous. It was widely feared and violently repressed. Antilabor sentiment increased as anarchists assassinated President McKinley and a former Idaho governor and bombed the Los Angeles Times, the home of an attorney general and Wall Street itself.39 Recent historians have endeavored to take violence seriously, not only as a pragmatic tool but as an ideological choice.40 Women’s demands were expressed and met with substantially less violence. Recent scholarship has focused on the pragmatic details of suffrage campaigns, asking, for instance, how their funding sources shaped what they could accomplish. This approach has also opened discussion on the class and racial 10

The Progressive Era

politics of the movement.41 Scholarship in the last few decades has also embraced the global nature of the suffrage campaign. U.S. suffragists were very much in conversation with, and their tactics often derivative of, European suffrage movements. Women demanded and gained more control over their bodies. Many states responded to pressure by white and black women’s groups to take steps to protect women from sexual violence. They lowered statutory ages, enforced seduction laws and reduced requirements for evidence of violence and resistance or the previous chastity of the victim.42 Women gained more access to birth control, despite Comstock Act regulations, as condoms, vaginal sponges and contraceptive douches came into wider usage. Margaret Sanger’s career was at its beginning, but it was in 1916 that she opened her first birth control clinics in New York City.43 It was non-white Americans who most consistently found their demands met with violence. Progressive-era whites shared a cultural nostalgia for the Ku Klux Klan’s postwar terrorism. High school history textbooks celebrated the Klan as the instrument through which the South had returned to its natural state of white supremacy. In 1905, Thomas Dixon wrote The Clansman, a novel celebrating the Klan that would be the basis for popular traveling stage shows and, in 1915, the epic racist film, The Birth of a Nation. Inspired by this, William J. Simmons began a new Klan in 1915. This “Second Klan” would not reach its peak until the 1920s, but its resurgence underlined the breadth of public approval of white-on-black private violence. Lynch mobs killed more than 1,500 people, about 90 percent of whom were black, between 1900 and 1920.44 Recent work has analyzed lynch mobs that killed Mexican American, Chinese American, Jewish American, Native American and white men and women as well.45 It has also placed the raw violence of lynching in an elaborate cultural context, exploring how representations of lynching were consumed and uncovering the powerful campaigns against lynching, largely by women of color.46 This period also saw several large race riots, from the 1906 Atlanta Riots, to riots in 1910 following Jack Johnson’s defeat of white challenger Jim Jeffries, to rioting upon the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, to a spate of riots during the war. It reached an apex during the “red summer” of 1919, when riots occurred in more than two dozen northern cities. These riots, many of which included substantial elements of police brutality, and which often lasted days and involved hundreds of white men and women, could include the killing of dozens of black men and women.47 But much white-on-black violence was perpetrated by the state. Black neighborhoods were inequitably policed, and black Americans treated quite differently than white Americans in the courtroom.48 African American prisoners were disproportionately forced to work, whether leased to private companies or on state-run prison farms. Recent scholarship has drawn out the economic utility of the prison system, emphasizing the crucial role played by male and female convicts alike in constructing the infrastructure for modernizing the southern economy. It has also explored how the spectra of the black prisoner produced and maintained whites’ self-understandings as law-abiding, controlled, appropriately gendered and culturally accepted.49 Where historians have focused on the federal level, they have often discussed the growth of the state, and particularly its new investigative and coercive powers. The Mann Act (1910), for instance, required a large infrastructure on the ground, foreshadowing the state’s increased policing capacity under Prohibition.50 Four presidents and eleven Congresses used the rapidly increasing capacity of the federal government to put their thumbs on the scale of many domestic reforms. Recent work, for instance, has highlighted Theodore Roosevelt’s support of the environment and of the national park systems.51 The federal government looms larger in the growing literature on foreign affairs, yet recent scholarship tends to approach even this from below, exploring how regular people embraced and constructed a cosmopolitan perspective or how non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross played a crucial role in the United States’ “soft imperialism.”52 The federal government applied many of the same principles to foreign affairs as progressives had applied in domestic life. These 11

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were the years in which the United States consolidated its empire. It had just taken several new territories as the century turned, including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, Guam, American Samoa and Wake Island. In the first years of the twentieth century it suppressed a Filipino revolution and developed governing structures for these new colonies. A few years later, Roosevelt’s strategies would lead to U.S. control of Panama.53 One insight of recent scholarship is that these new territories coexisted with territorial possessions on the mainland—Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona. The administration of territories abroad and at home profoundly shaped, and then quite consciously diverged from, one another.54 When Europe descended into war in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson intended to keep the United States out of it. Yet the United States was so entangled with Britain as to make isolation impractical. It would be actively involved in fighting from 1917 through 1918, at the cost of over 100,000 troops. World War I would both realize and end many of the hopes and struggles of the Progressive Era. With a progressive confidence in the effectiveness of central planning, Wilson created agencies like the War Industries Board (to coordinate industrial production), the Food and Fuel Administrations (to coordinate domestic consumption) and the Committee on Public Information (to coordinate public opinion). To bring citizens into line, he was willing to use the by-then much more muscular mechanisms of government, and also to substantially take control of private voluntary associations, in order to apply a remarkable amount of coercion on those who dissented from national policy.55 Meanwhile, a modern army, trained with a progressive commitment to bureaucratic efficiency and coordination, and sharing the progressives’ dangerous confidence in their racial supremacy, would set off to win the fight, establishing the United States’ leadership position in the world order.56 While, ultimately, the U.S. Congress would reject Wilson’s idea, enthusiastically embraced in his Fourteen Points, of shedding isolationism to engage in a project of civilizing the world, the United States’ power was established. It is darkly appropriate that the Progressive Era ended with an influenza epidemic whose death toll far surpassed that of World War I, and whose virulence not only underlined the robust integration of American communal life (it spread in part as Americans gathered to celebrate the armistice), but also the limitations of the public health regulation progressives had fought so hard to implement.57 In recent years, the term “progressive” has roared back into usage to describe the left. That, along with heightened attention to today’s rapidly increasing wealth gap between rich and poor, more visible white-on-black violence and the reemergence of radical politics, has caused many to turn to the study of the Progressive Era as an analogy to today’s social and political structure, creating an unusually robust and dynamic scholarly landscape.

Notes   1 T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern American, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Press, 2009).   2 Eric Rauchway, “High Price of Living in the Progressive’s Economy,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 898–924.   3 Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).   4 David Huyssen, Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).   5 Guenther B. Risse, Plague, Fear and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 127–133; Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).   6 Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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The Progressive Era   7 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up From Slavery, 100 Years Later (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).   8 Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).   9 Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 10 Risse, Plague, Fear and Politics, 31–32; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 11 George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Identity, Culture, and Ethnicity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12 Angela Firkus, “Agricultural Extension and the Plan to Assimilate the Native Americans of Wisconsin, 1914–1932,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 473–502. 13 Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 14 Catherine Cocks, “Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 2 (2006): 93–118; Mara Keire, “Swearing Allegiance: Street Language, U.S. War Propaganda, and the Declining Status of Women in Northeastern Nightlife, 1900–1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 2 (2016): 246–266; Fronc, New York Undercover; Jessica Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 15 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 16 Benjamin René Jordan, Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 17 Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 18 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 19 Mara Keire, For Business or Pleasure: Red Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 20 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 21 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 22 Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 64–84. 23 Tracy L. Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 24 Ibid., 35, 66. 25 Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 26 Cara Cadoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Black Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 27 Carl F. Kaestle and Janice Radway, A History of the Book in America,Volume 4: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 103. 28 Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 29 Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 30 Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 31 Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016). 32 Timothy Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days, Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870–1920 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 93–94. 33 Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Elaine Frantz 34 Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 35 Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive-Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 36 Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in Progressive-Era America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). 37 Thomas C. Leonard, “Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64, no. 3 (2005): 757–791. 38 Jennifer Luff, Common Sense Anti-Communism: Labor and Civil Liberties Between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 39 Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of American in the First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 40 Beverly Gage, “Why Violence Matters: Radicalism, Politics, and Class War in Gilded and Progressive Age America,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1, no. 1 (2007): 99–109. 41 Joan Marie Johnson, “Following the Money: Wealthy Women, Feminism, and the American Suffrage Movement,” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 4 (2015): 63–81. 42 Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Age of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 43 Catherine Cocks, “Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 2 (2006): 93–118. 44 Margaret Werner Cahalan with the assistance of Le Anne Parsons, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987), 9. 45 Michael J. Pfeiffer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Brent M. S. Campney, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 46 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African-American Testimonies of Racial Violence From Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 47 David Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 48 Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness. 49 Talitha LaFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here, Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 50 Pliley, Policing Sexuality. 51 Ian Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 52 Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 53 Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 54 Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 373–391. 55 Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You. 56 J. P. Clark, Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 57 Nancy K. Bristow, American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (New York: Oxford ­University Press, 2012).

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2 THE 1920s—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Jennifer Fronc

Americans’ fascination with the culture of the 1920s—speakeasies, flappers and jazz—persists in the early twenty-first century, evidenced by HBO’s period crime drama Boardwalk Empire (2010–14), Ken Burns’s three-part television documentary on Prohibition (2011), Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 interpretation of The Great Gatsby and a renewed interest in classic cocktails and home brewing operations. While captivating, this outsized focus on the decade’s excesses and drama overshadows the ongoing struggles for and challenges to America’s democratic institutions in the post-World War I period. Although the decade opened with the largest expansion of voting rights in United States history, Congress also passed federal legislation designed to reengineer the ethnic composition of the nation and significantly expanded federal policing mechanisms, which disproportionately targeted immigrants, African Americans and radicals. Fifty years ago, historian Burt Noggle noted in The Journal of American History that historians writing after 1950 treated the 1920s as “a distinct unit, sharply set off from (and usually in unfavorable contrast to) the history which preceded and followed it.”1 This “distinct unit” treatment of the 1920s endures, especially in undergraduate curricula, represented by course titles ranging from “The Roaring Twenties” to the more sober “Interwar Years.” In addition, the historiography of the 1920s has been a casualty of the ongoing debate surrounding the historiography of the Progressive Era, which, according to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ends in 1920. As historians continue to uncover evidence of the regressive and repressive policies affiliated with progressivism, it is time to reconsider the trajectory of those movements for social change, and their accompanying backlashes. In 2009, historian Rebecca Edwards proposed replacing the “standard Gilded Age/Progressive Era narrative” with a “long Progressive Era model,” one that begins in the 1870s during Reconstruction and ends “in the 1920s or quite possibly with the New Deal.” By continuing to separate the Gilded Age from the Progressive Era, Edwards argued, historians obscure the “stories of political possibilities that were open before 1900 but closed off afterward.” Likewise, by setting the 1920s off from the period that preceded it, as well as the larger currents in U.S. governance and statecraft, historians “marginalize several narratives of declension” that characterized the immigrant and African American experience, in particular.2 This chapter starts from the premise that a Progressive Era that ends in 1920 reifies the success of two national social movements (for Prohibition and women’s suffrage) and overshadows the backlash directed at, and experienced by, immigrants, African Americans and radicals in the post-World War I period. A periodization that considers the 1920s in conjunction with the preceding decades 15

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challenges triumphalist narratives of the twentieth-century United States, which portray American democracy as becoming ever more inclusive. Moreover, by employing intersectional analyses—using race, class, gender and sexuality as analytical categories—a reinterpretation of the 1920s and its place within a reimagined “long Progressive Era” emerges.

Beyond the Amendments: Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage In 1919, the temperance movement claimed victory when Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States. Early narratives of the history of Prohibition—especially those that focused on the work of women temperance reformers—end in 1920, with this legislative success. But Prohibition lasted until 1933, and had a disparate impact on Americans of working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2011) explored the broad coalition of activists (ranging from progressive reformers to elite Protestant moralists) who sought to discipline immigrant and working-class Americans and their preferred mode of entertainment. Marni Davis’s Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (2012) surveyed immigrant Jews’ engagement with Prohibition—from their religious exemption to the law, to their participation in the underground economy, to members of law enforcement—and its relationship to assimilation and success. Burton Peretti’s Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan (2007) explored the emergence of themed nightclubs in Manhattan, the professional opportunities they provided some women during Prohibition and the racial and class politics of performance and socializing that emerged as a result. Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (2015) approached the Eighteenth Amendment from the perspective of the history of policing and governmentality. Moving beyond New York City and Chicago to examine smaller cities like Richmond, Virginia, and their experiences policing alcohol, The War on Alcohol revealed “the highly differential impact” of Prohibition on various social groups, “many of whom face parallel challenges to this day,” especially with regard to the “emergence of the twentieth-century federal penal state.”3 McGirr’s work is representative of a renewed interest among American historians in placing the state at the center of analysis. In this case, “the war on alcohol” was central to the development of a politics of policing and surveillance.4 The nationally influential Women’s Christian Temperance Union—one of the guiding forces behind the maternalist crusade to enact federal prohibition of alcohol—may have lost power to the male-dominated Anti-Saloon League by the late 1910s, but the WCTU did not fade away. Its activists conducted a lesser-known “second noble experiment” for motion picture censorship during the 1910s and 1920s, as historian Alison M. Parker’s Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and ProCensorship Activism, 1873–1933 (1997) discussed. Maternalist rhetoric suffused the pro-censorship campaign, much as it had the early temperance campaign, becoming “both a tool for women’s political empowerment—inviting a concerted involvement in governmental affairs” and a way to fulfill their most traditional responsibilities to the nation’s children. As the pro-censorship movement matured, Parker explained, it “melded women’s increasing interest in participating in the political sphere with their strong identification of themselves as maternal/nurturing beings.”5 Whereas middle-class women found empowerment through policing and reform work, the black, immigrant and working-class women who came under that increased scrutiny suffered as a result. The moral panics over drinking and sexual activity that emerged in the late nineteenth century intensified during World War I, and legal and extralegal measures were taken to control those who indulged. Rhetoric about keeping the fighting forces fit for service justified the expansion of the surveillance state into people’s private lives. As I discussed in New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (2009), the Selective Service Act of 1917 criminalized the sale of alcohol to servicemen in uniform and limited their access to prostitutes and women of “low morals.”6 Several private 16

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organizations, as well as the Commission on Training Camp Activities, policed the terms of the Selective Service Act by apprehending women suspected to be prostitutes. Elizabeth Alice Clement’s Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (2006) also found that World War I’s extensive network of policing mechanisms had a disparate impact on sexually active women. By the 1920s, Clement explained, Prohibition served to “bifurcate the entertainment economy,” with one realm catering to “respectable” folks, and the other specializing in illicit pleasures. To appeal to families and courting couples, movie theaters and dance halls became alcohol-free. For those looking to consume sex and alcohol, the brothel system re-emerged. Clement found that this resulted in a loss of status for women sex workers and for any woman who did not abide by middle-class standards of sexual propriety, as they connected to pimps and organized crime to guard against incursions by the police or Prohibition agents.7 Even as some white women enjoyed sexual agency and liberation during the 1920s, typified by the “flapper” or the “New Woman,” federal policies actively sought to preserve traditional ideas about gender and sexuality. Passed in 1910 in response to anti-immigrant sentiment and an alleged international “traffic in women,” the Mann “White Slave Traffic” Act made it a federal crime for unmarried couples to travel across state lines together; it also significantly expanded the power and purview of the nascent (Federal) Bureau of Investigation. As David Langum established in Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (2007), the Mann Act had far-reaching consequences for black men and political radicals, especially after the Supreme Court ruling in Caminetti v. United States (1917) expanded the definition of the Act to include non-commercial sexual activity and not just prostitution. By the late 1910s, the Bureau of Investigation selectively employed the Mann Act to target radicals, dissidents and “dangerous” figures, such as film star Charlie Chaplin and sociologist W. I. Thomas. For years, the Bureau actively pursued black boxing champion Jack Johnson, who publicly consorted with white prostitutes and married a white woman; he surrendered in 1920 and was imprisoned for a Mann Act violation. During the 1920s, “although American women were voting, taking jobs, joining unions, driving cars and going to college in increasing numbers,” the Bureau of Investigation used the Mann Act in an attempt to maintain traditional gender roles. As Jessica R. Pliley’s Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (2014) argued, the BI’s policies upheld “parental authority over daughters” and “police(d) married women’s sexual choices.”8 White women’s sexual liberation came with “a renewed emphasis on liberated women as seducers themselves,” according to Estelle Freedman in Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation.9 The “equal rights rhetoric” that emerged within the women’s suffrage movement “challenged the older protective approach” toward white women who had been “seduced” or raped, and instead put the onus on the victim herself. “Activists who considered themselves ‘feminists,’” according to Freedman, supported the concept of “individual sexual choice,” which moved rape as a political issue off the docket for another forty years until the feminist movement of the 1960s.10 Crystal Feimster took a more granular approach in Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (2011), illuminating the conflict between black and white women activists over the issue and mythology of rape by juxtaposing the careers of anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells Barnett and anti-rape activist Rebecca Latimer Felton. With passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, and its ratification in time for the 1920 presidential election, many earlier historians of women used 1920 as a convenient place to end their narratives, with the suffrage campaign having achieved its goal. However, this periodization obscures several important historical developments after passage of the suffrage amendment and erases the ongoing work of women activists, many of whom were central to the development of New Deal programs. Women activists increasingly made the case that the state was in best position to protect American values, as historian Leigh Ann Wheeler outlined in Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (2007). Women engaged in the work of reform “employed a host of 17

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grassroots voluntary associations . . . to effect change by bringing the moral authority of American womanhood to bear on entrepreneurs and the state” in the period following enfranchisement.11 However, as Wheeler found in the anti-obscenity movement, women’s maternalist rhetoric also prevented coalition building. Race, class and region are deeply imbricated in the history of the women’s activism, as Lorraine Gates Schuyler’s The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (2006) revealed. Poor white and African American women in the South experienced disfranchisement in the wake of the federal suffrage amendment—from poll taxes to pressure from husbands. As Schuyler argued, “the same legal and extralegal tactics that prevented their male relatives from voting” were used against women.12 Furthermore, anti-suffrage women remained active in the post-1920 period, continuing to argue that their husband’s vote represented the entire household’s interests.13 As Kathleen Blee discovered in her landmark study of the second-era Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (2008), white women understood women’s suffrage as part of a larger effort to promote white supremacy, and played roles central to the organization’s political and social goals.14 Thus, historians of women have found that, rather than women coming together as a unified political force, conflicts over “equality” versus “difference” emerged. One animating conflict that divided activist women along class lines was protective labor legislation, which claimed to guard women’s safety and health (understood as ability to conceive) but also barred women from access to certain professions and lucrative night shift work. Nancy Woloch’s A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (2015) argued that women’s rights activists rejected protective labor legislation because it employed a language of gender differences to reinforce women’s inferior social and economic positions in the labor force and the home. Robyn Muncy’s Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (1994) established that women settlement house workers pushed for and won the creation of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1912. Julia Lathrop of Hull House became the head of the department and the first woman to head a federal agency. Through the Children’s Bureau and the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, women established a foothold within the federal government, from which they contributed to the development of New Deal programs. Similarly, Alice Kessler Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (2001) analyzed how gendered notions of family and wage work, forged in the Progressive Era, suffused the Social Security Act of 1935. As Kessler-Harris found, many women in New Deal agencies were not exempt from the racist, sexist and classist thinking that informed the American welfare state.

Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: African American History African American history has its own periodization debate, and its own version of the “stand alone decade” problem in the 1920s, with an outsized focus on the Harlem Renaissance. David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem was in Vogue (1981) and Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) celebrated the artistic, creative and cultural productions of the period, which was depicted as a positive outcome of the World War I-era migration to Northern industrial centers. This focus on New York City and the Harlem Renaissance’s artistic and literary output reifies the North as free of racism and obscures the radical political sentiment that defined the 1920s for many African Americans. Newer scholarship in African American history takes a “long Civil Rights era” approach, locating significant examples of movement building prior to the 1960s, such as Jay W. Driskell’s Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (2014) and Shannon King’s Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (2015). The long Progressive Era periodization may prove a useful framework for African American history, as it accommodates the end of Reconstruction, the multiple 18

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phases of the Great Migration, the rise of African American political movements and the legal and extralegal violence directed at restricting African Americans’ full citizenship. After World War I started in Europe in 1914, immigration to the United States declined precipitously. Northern industrial employers found themselves in need of a renewable, cheap and tractable labor force. African American migration had been going on for decades, but accelerated in this period as men and women in search of employment, educational opportunities and freedom from the repressive atmosphere of the South heeded the calls of labor agents and black newspapers. African Americans enjoyed higher wages in urban and industrial employment as a result of the Great Migration, but the higher cost of living often swallowed up the difference. Among the most notable studies of the Great Migration that attempted to understand the difficulties African Americans faced and that rejected the “making of the ghetto” model of scholarship was Joe William Trotter, Jr.’s Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Urban Industrial Proletariat (1985) and James Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1991). Darlene Clark Hine’s essays on black women in Michigan during the Great Migration, collected in Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (1997), remain invaluable models for understanding the pressure black women faced from family, children and the dominant culture. African American women were particularly vulnerable during the period of the Great Migration, and middle-class black and white women founded organizations to assist them in finding employment and housing and navigating social services. But these reformers also scrutinized their charges’ intimate lives and offered moral explanations for migrants’ difficulty finding employment. Middle-class black women often subscribed to the ideology of “racial uplift” and understood themselves as guarding the future of the race, as Kevin K. Gaines’s Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996) and Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (2004) explicated. New York City was both a popular and hostile destination for migrants, as Cheryl D. Hicks detailed in Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (2010). She discovered that established black residents often saw Southern migrants as dangerous and deviant, and feared their law-breaking behavior would “cast a negative ‘reflection on the whole race.’”15 Migrants had their own reasons for engaging in behavior that could result in arrest, but the politics of uplift attributed moral failing to those who ended up in the criminal justice system. LaShawn D. Harris moves historians of black women beyond respectability politics. In Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (2016), she explored the dynamic between black sex workers and the reformers and agents of the state with whom they were forced to interact after arrest. Black women relied on the underground economy to meet their material and social needs, and Harris illuminated the entrepreneurial and extralegal choices women made for survival and pleasure and their material and ideological contributions to the community. Although migration to urban centers certainly brought a modicum of freedom to African Americans, conflict with white, working-class Americans over jobs, union membership and preservation of the social hierarchy marred the experience. Dozens of race riots erupted in response to migration, as William Tuttle’s now classic Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1996) established. New appraisals of the riots foreground African American agency and institution building, and frame the violence instigated by white citizens in that light. For example, Charles Lumpkins’s American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (2008) provided an important retelling of the East St. Louis riot that emphasized the institutional power African Americans amassed in the city before the massacres. Lumpkins also found that white women (in addition to the usual suspects such as machine politicians and newspaper editors) played an important role in creating the volatile environment in East St. Louis. The mass lynching in East St. Louis came just months after President Woodrow Wilson claimed that the Great War would make the world safe for democracy, and African Americans pointed out 19

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the contradictions inherent in fighting for democracy abroad when it was widely denied at home. The “Red Summer” of 1919, with its dozens of race riots and extensive police surveillance of radicals, also transformed black political consciousness. For instance, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen came of age during World War I, and founded the first black socialist publication in the United States, The Messenger magazine, as Cornelius L. Bynum discussed in A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010). Randolph in particular was emblematic of the “New Crowd Negroes” forged in the political and cultural environment of World War I-era Harlem who emerged with a dedication to industrial democracy and a refined class and race consciousness. Beth Tompkins Bates’s Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (2001) analyzed Randolph and colleagues’ formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which coalesced into a nationwide, grassroots organizing effort for civil rights and jobs in the early 1940s—the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Winston James’s Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (1999) attributed some of the radicalism of the New Negro Movement to prominent Afro Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, including poet Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Black leaders as dissimilar as W.E.B. Du Bois (who famously implored African Americans in 1918 to set aside their “special grievances” and “close ranks” for the remainder of the war), A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey all earned the sobriquet “most dangerous Negro in America” during the 1920s. Black radicals like Garvey and Randolph were already targets of the expanding surveillance state, which employed increasingly sophisticated and diffuse tactics, as Theodore Kornweibel’s Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (1998) established. Dovetailing with the first Red Scare, the federal government’s Military Intelligence Division launched an extensive investigation into “Negro subversion” in the United States, and concluded that Germans and Bolsheviks had convinced African Americans to create disruptions in munitions plants during the war. Police officers, politicians and all manner of people in power failed to acknowledge that African Americans had legitimate grievances and consistently defaulted to this “outside agitator” thesis, which persisted into the 1960s and informed the FBI’s extensive counter-intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Private white women’s organizations supported the expanding investigative powers of the state and were instrumental in ushering in a militaristic and masculine state in the postwar period, according to Francesca Morgan’s Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (2005). The Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were particularly instrumental in bringing about the surveillance state during the period of the Great War. By the 1920s, organized white women actively supported policies that brought the state directly into the lives of black activists across the ideological spectrum, with Garvey and the UNIA a primary target. Morgan demonstrated that “the same security apparatus welcomed by many white women” disproportionately affected black Americans.16 Historians have also reassessed the artistic, cultural, intellectual and political movement known as the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement of the 1920s, emphasizing the different geographic sites of production and consumption. Davarian Baldwin’s Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (2007) asserted that black migrants remade Chicago through cultural and intellectual production such as motion pictures and beauty culture. Most significantly, Baldwin highlighted the existence of an energetic New Negro movement outside Harlem. Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani’s edited volume, Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem (2013), explored “the full subjectivity of black historical actors,” with essays examining black Americans abroad during World War I, the diasporic and pan-Africanist expressions of the Garveyite movement and analyses of the marriages and intimate lives of men and women who comprised the New Negro movement.17 Despite this proliferation of new and insightful studies, African American history is still often treated as an adjunct to the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Joe W. Trotter has observed that 20

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histories of internal migration and international immigration have been treated as separate entities, pursued by different groups of scholars. Bringing those two literatures into conversation with each other enriches our understanding of the African American and immigrant experience and highlights the work of whiteness in the 1920s.18

America’s Gates: Insights from Immigration History Immigration historians no longer prioritize a narrative centered on the Ellis Island experience or the “peak immigration years” of 1890 to 1914, and have largely rejected the metaphor of the “melting pot,” with its emphasis on seamless assimilation, in favor of “open” and “closed” gates. As such, the decade of the 1920s has emerged as central to understanding the United States’ transition from a welcoming nation to a gatekeeping one, dedicated to maintaining racial and cultural homogeneity. In 1921, after millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe settled in the United States, Congress responded by adopting the Emergency Quota Act. Three years later, the National Origins Act of 1924 was passed, reflecting a widespread belief that immigrants from certain areas of the world presented racial, political and cultural threats to the nation. The United States’ new national origins formula, initially calculated based on the 1890 census, favored Western and Northern European immigrants and banned Asian immigration entirely. This “closed door” policy remained in effect until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 as part of his Civil Rights platform. Race has been central to U.S. immigration and naturalization policy since 1870, when Congress passed the Naturalization Act clarifying the language of the Fourteenth Amendment related to who would be eligible to naturalize—“free white persons” and people of African nativity or descent. The Act was silent on other races and nationalities. A decade later, acting on pressure from nativists in California, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Initially adopted for a ten-year period, Congress renewed the Act for another ten years in 1892, and made it permanent in 1902. Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003) challenged the narrative of America as “the golden land” for immigrants, and instead argued that the Chinese Exclusion Act inaugurated a “completely new era in U.S. history” in which the United States developed into a “gatekeeping nation” that “exert[ed] federal control over immigrants at its gates and within its borders.”19 Lee richly documented the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the Americas in the wake of the Exclusion Act, revealing the survival strategies that “evolved among the Chinese in response to the restrictive parameters of the exclusion laws,” including the elaborate “paper son” system and human smuggling operations.20 Despite the hostile atmosphere in the United States, Chinese migrants still sought the economic opportunities life in the West promised. Lee found that during the Exclusion Era Chinese immigrants found Mexico to be a suitable alternative destination, often staying for short periods and then crossing the border into the United States.21 The border between Mexico and the United States was “largely unguarded and functioned more like an arbitrary line between the two nations” prior to 1924, according to Lee.22 Likewise, before Canada passed comprehensive anti-Chinese immigration laws in 1923, Chinese immigrants used Canada as their first stop before illegally crossing the border into the United States in search of agricultural work and moving on to Washington, Oregon and California. Lee noted that this served to exacerbate nativist sentiment in the Pacific Northwest, expanding the KKK’s membership in Oregon.23 Mexicans “enjoyed” special immigration status to the United States during the Exclusion Era (and the quota years) because their labor was so valuable to the agricultural economy in the American Southwest. In the wake of Chinese exclusion, “agribusinessmen” in California embraced Mexican immigrant workers, advocating for them as “quiet, diligent, docile, and therefore ideal farm workers.” This characterization, however, ignored the “robust activity of Mexican labor organizing in the United States,” as Kelly Lytle Hernandez explained in Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border 21

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Patrol (2010).24 She noted that “it was a comforting thought” for agribusinessmen, who realized that mounting “immigration restrictions had left them with few options” for a cheap and tractable labor force. By the mid-1920s, Mexicans “comprised the vast majority of agricultural workers” in California; the National Origins Act of 1924 exempted Latin American nations from the quota system and none were ever placed on Mexican immigrants.25 Within days of the passage of the National Origins Act in May 1924, Congress appropriated funds to establish a “land-border patrol” on the southern border between the American Southwest and Mexico.26 Hernandez placed the Border Patrol within the context of the expansion of the federal state’s police powers during the first decades of the twentieth century. Hernandez argued that the Border Patrol constructed Mexicans as the “iconic illegal alien,” and has “shaped the story of race in the United States.”27 Indeed, shifting conceptions of whiteness during the 1920s also played into the construction of “illegal” immigrants. Libby Garland’s After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (2014) found that Jews fleeing Europe, often without proper documentation, also took advantage of the loosely guarded borders of Mexico and Canada during this period. Garland uncovered evidence of extensive immigrant smuggling networks used by Jews, often taking migrants through Cuba, Mexico or Canada.28 Jewish organizations defended their “illegal” brethren, and capitalized on their proximity to whiteness to deflect attention and blame onto non-white illegal immigrants, helping to construct Mexican migrants as scapegoats in the process. Other nationalities proved harder for U.S. government and immigration officials to classify. Armenians, Syrians, Asian Indians and Filipinos did not fall into the neat categories employed by immigration officials. Several individuals from “liminal” nationalities petitioned for naturalization and when denied filed legal appeals. These lawsuits “forced the courts into a case-by-case struggle to define who was a ‘white person’” for the purposes of immigration and naturalization, thereby producing a “taxonomy of whiteness,” as legal scholar Ian Haney-Lopez argued in White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996).29 In the 1920s, the Supreme Court heard two cases related to race and citizenship that established the preferences encoded in immigration and naturalization policies—Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Thind (1923). Takao Ozawa was “an assimilated Japanese immigrant” from Hawai’i who applied for citizenship and was “rejected on the ground that he was of the ‘Japanese race’ and therefore not a ‘white person.’”30 Ozawa filed an appeal in which he construed the term “white person” quite literally, and suggested that the court implement a skin color test and offer an exception “‘for a Japanese who is ‘white’ in color.’”31 The Court rejected his argument, and refused to administer a “racial test based solely on skin color.”32 The Court maintained that “the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race,” according to Haney-Lopez.33 Three months later, the Court reaffirmed its “common knowledge” approach to the question of whiteness and its relationship to citizenship in United States v. Thind (1923). In 1913, Bhagat Singh Thind, an Asian Indian, applied for U.S. citizenship. In his application, he noted that anthropologists classified Asian Indians as Caucasian. Singh argued that since he was an Asian Indian, he was “‘Caucasian,’ therefore ‘white,’ and therefore eligible for citizenship.”34 The Court rejected Thind’s argument. Justice George Sutherland opined that while it may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity . . . the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.35 Proponents of immigration restrictions claimed they were necessary to preserve cultural homogeneity in the United States; the 1920s also saw the rise of a scientific and legal movement for eugenics in the United States, all part of the larger project of white supremacy. In addition to U.S. immigration policies, academics, politicians and reformers embraced eugenic policies for sterilization and against miscegenation, 22

The 1920s

resulting in a landmark Supreme Court case that allowed states to sterilize those deemed unfit for parenthood. Alexandra Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2005) focused on California and its decades of eugenic sterilization, while Paul Lombardo’s Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2010) analyzed Virginia. During the 1920s, white Virginians pushed for legislation that would enhance racial control, which they understood as integral to maintaining social and moral control. Pippa Holloway’s Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (2006) argued that “business Progressivism” motivated elite white Virginians to support increased state control of sexuality and race mixing. Historian J. Douglas Smith, in Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (2002), termed the decade of the 1920s in Virginia as one of “managed race relations.”36 The Mapp Motion Picture Censorship Act of 1922; the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, banning interracial marriages; and the Massenburg Public Assemblages Act of 1926, which prohibited integrated groups in any public place, “even when that integration was fully voluntary,”37 all reflected white Virginians’ perceptions of a massive upheaval in race relations, and a fear that tradition was no longer doing its job in enforcing Jim and Jane Crow. From this perspective, the decade of the 1920s seems inexorably linked to the confidence expressed in the state by Progressive Era reformers; the emerging conflict between conservative and liberal Americans; the political and cultural roles played by white women in the work of the state; the ongoing terrorism, dispossession and subjugation of African Americans through legal and extralegal means; and the emergence of the white supremacist state. Future historians might find that the 1920s provide ample evidence for understanding the “rise of the right” and conservative politics; the growing power of lobbyists, non-state actors and interest groups in politics; and the growth of the United States as an imperial and colonial power. And perhaps the millions of Americans sipping cocktails from teacups and dancing the fox-trot throughout the decade were seeking temporary escape from repressive state policies and a patriarchal, white supremacist culture.

Notes   1 Burt Noggle, “The Twenties: A New Historiographical Frontier,” Journal of American History 53, no. 2 (1966): 299, www.jstor.org/stable/1894201, accessed 3 January 2016.   2 Rebecca Edwards, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8, no. 4 (2009): 465–466, www.jstor.org/stable/40542874, accessed 3 January 2016.   3 Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), 17.   4 Ibid., 11.   5 Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 142–145, 224.   6 Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 149.   7 Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 178.   8 Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 157.   9 Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 229. 10 Ibid., 210. 11 Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 4. 12 Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 31. 13 Ibid., 56–57. 14 Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 7.

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Jennifer Fronc 15 Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 28. 16 Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 128. 17 Anastasia Curwood, “New Negro Marriages and the Everyday Challenges of Upward Mobility,” in Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem, ed. Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 291. 18 Joe W. Trotter, “The Great Migration, African Americans, and Immigrants in the Industrial City,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Nancy Foner and George Frederickson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 82–83. 19 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 6. 20 Ibid., 4. 21 Ibid., 158. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 154. 24 Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 24. 25 Ibid., 31–32. 26 Ibid., 32. 27 Ibid., 8. 28 Ibid., 5, 12; Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 91. 29 Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race, 10th anniv. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2. 30 Ibid., 57. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 59. 33 Ibid., 178. 34 Ibid., 61. 35 Ibid., 63. 36 J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 37 Pippa Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 40.

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3 THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND NEW DEAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Mason B. Williams

Figure 3.1  Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest, August 1939. Dorothea Lange, photographer. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8b15572.

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“The Depression froze small towns,” the American writer John Updike recalled. “Then the war came along and froze them additionally.” As the war drew to a close, Updike remembered, many Americans were living in “a world that hadn’t changed in fifteen years.” Or so it looked to a child growing up in the 1930s outside of Reading, Pennsylvania. To Americans who were older when the economic catastrophe hit, things looked decidedly different: The changes of the 1930s seemed little short of revolutionary. Updike’s own father had lost his job as a telephone lineman around the time of his son’s birth in 1932; he made it through the Depression working regular stints for the Works Progress Administration. Like many small-town Protestants, Wesley Updike had been raised a Republican. But in the mid-1930s he switched his allegiance to FDR’s Democratic Party. “His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him,” his son wrote. While John Updike was growing up in the apparently tranquil landscape of small-town Pennsylvania, the world was changing fundamentally for people like Wesley Updike.1 Americans in the 1930s knew themselves to be living through extraordinary times. “The certain landmarks are gone,” Walter Lippman declared. “The fixed points by which our fathers steered the ship of state have vanished.”2 Haltingly, Americans would steer themselves out of the economic abyss, and in the process establish new landmarks, new points of reference. In so doing, they would rebuild the American state, giving it new powers and responsibilities; reshape the American economy; and forever alter the relationship between the federal government and the American people. For many years, the Great Depression and the New Deal have appeared as watershed moments in American life. Little wonder, then, that historians have returned to the 1930s more often than to any other period in twentieth-century America. For students of the American economy, the Great Depression still represents (as Depression scholar and former Treasury Secretary Ben Bernanke has put it) the “holy grail” of macroeconomics.3 For historians, the New Deal is “the most painted political landscape of twentieth-century America,” a key to understanding “the origins of our time.”4 Despite its familiarity, scholars in the twenty-first century continue to look to the 1930s to understand key features of twentieth-century American history. With some important exceptions, our understanding of the economic history of the 1930s remains largely unchanged—though it is quite different from the version many students learn. New Deal scholarship, in the meantime, is changing dramatically, perhaps more so than in any previous moment. Though even most professional historians are not yet aware of it, recent scholarship has laid the groundwork for a fundamentally new approach to the New Deal.

The Great Depression Manias, panics and busts have been a feature of American life since the dawn of the republic. Deep and sometimes prolonged recessions wracked the United States at regular intervals from the War of 1812 on, growing increasingly severe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yet the Great Depression of the 1930s stands alone in its duration and the extent of human misery it left in its wake. It also stands apart for its consequences: it inspired a policy response that forever changed how the United States governs its economy. This spectacular economic collapse raises some fundamental questions. What caused it? Why was it so big? And why did it last so long? For many years, historians outside the field of economic history told a story similar to the one Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., related in his seminal trilogy, The Age of Roosevelt—a version of which still appears in some textbooks.5 In this story, the 1920s saw tremendous growth, but also great inequality. When the stock-market bubble burst, the era of prosperity came to an end; as workers lacked the purchasing power to buy the products of American industry and agriculture, a deflationary cycle set in. The U.S. government responded by raising tariff rates—the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930—which only further sunk the economy into depression. Countercyclical spending produced a mild recovery in Franklin 26

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Roosevelt’s first term, but then the federal government, unwisely judging itself out of the woods, cut back its expenditures in early 1937, leading to the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937–38. Only with World War II, and massive government spending required by the war effort, did the Great Depression finally come to a close. Today, economic historians and economists would contest practically every detail of this account. The upward redistribution of income and wealth in the 1920s, they note, was not large enough in scale to account for the gigantic drop in consumption of the Depression years. The stock market crash did not in itself cause the depression, they argue, though it did help to propagate it. The SmootHawley tariff did not help, but falling exports produced by retaliatory tariffs represented only a small part of overall GNP decline. The unintended federal stimulus supplied by New Deal relief programs and the payment of a veterans’ bonus in the mid-1930s was undercut by fiscal austerity at the state and local levels. And yet recovery occurred anyway—to the point where the American economy might well have achieved a complete recovery even without the boom in government spending occasioned by World War II. Most scholars now treat the Great Depression, not as a discrete event that begins in the United States in 1929, but rather as part of a broader crisis of global capitalism that began with World War I. The destruction wrought by that conflict destabilized the world economy, leaving an overhang of debt that depended upon continued American lending. Unwisely, the major nations chose to reestablish the prewar system of international monetary exchange, the gold standard, thereby locking in imbalances in the global economy that might have readjusted under a more flexible system.6 Most economists trace the onset of the American recession in 1929 to the Federal Reserve’s decision to stem a speculative bubble in securities by tightening monetary policy, which led to slumps in construction and the auto industry.7 The October 1929 stock market crash, notes the economist Christina Romer, not only wiped out paper wealth, but also generated extraordinary uncertainty on the part of consumers and investors; as the slide continued unabated, uncertainty turned to pessimism, making consumers even less likely to buy and businessmen even less likely to borrow.8 Ben Bernanke has noted that the bank failures of 1930–31 made it much more difficult for households, farmers and small businesses to find credit—further feeding the deflationary spiral.9 When it comes to the causes of the recovery, scholars are broadly in agreement: the Great Depression came to an end because the United States finally abandoned the gold standard, and because the Roosevelt administration consciously chose a policy of monetary reflation.10 Nearly all economists and historians agree with Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs’s seminal finding that the decision to abandon the gold standard (which the United States did in stages between 1933 and 1934) represented a vital step toward recovery.11 Thereafter, American recovery was spurred by a policy of devaluation and reflation; it was also aided by gold inflows from Europe, as investors skittish over political unrest sought more secure American investments. Recently, historians of economic growth have added another dimension to our understanding of the American economy in the 1930s, showing, remarkably, that the years 1929–1941 were among the most technologically progressive in American history. Alexander Field has demonstrated that, although labor and capital inputs remained basically stable, output rose by between 30 and 40 percent. The American economy had made huge gains in productivity, thanks in large measure to public infrastructure spending—especially road building—and a large increase in corporate spending on research and development. Depression-era advances, Field argues, laid the foundations for the remarkable period of prosperity that followed World War II.12 The historical literature on daily life in the Depression decade is extraordinarily diverse. One important body of literature, following in the footsteps of George Chauncey’s classic Gay New York, examines the intersecting politics of gender, sexuality and race in interwar cities. Chap Heap, for instance, has uncovered the role of “slumming”—voyeuristic visits by middle-class people to working-class and non-white commercial leisure spaces—in shaping popular conceptions of sexuality, race 27

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and urban space.13 Another rich body of literature examines African American community formation in the urban North in the era of the Great Migration and the New Negro movement. Victoria Wolcott has challenged the traditional focus on male industrial workers, bringing to light the “quotidian details” of African American women’s lives in interwar Detroit and tracing the gendered transformation of community discourse in the 1930s from one of “bourgeois respectability” to a “more masculine ideology of self-determination.”14 Davarian Baldwin has highlighted the role black cultural industries such as beauty culture, sports and cinema played in shaping a working-class “marketplace of intellectual life” in interwar Chicago.15 Perhaps especially influential has been the impact of the “long civil rights movement” framework, which has recast the 1930s as a key passage in the Black Freedom Struggle. Following in the footsteps of Robin Kelley, Patricia Sullivan and others, Glenda Gilmore has delineated the challenge posed to Jim Crow by a movement of radicals, workers, social-gospel preachers and newspaper editors that began to emerge during World War I and reached its high-water mark in the late 1930s and into World War II. This radical movement was suppressed during the Cold War, Gilmore argues, but not before it had helped recast Jim Crow as “fundamentally un-American,” thereby laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.16

The New Deal By producing one-party control of the national government, inducing an atmosphere of emergency and casting into doubt old ideas about the self-correcting capacity of the economy and the proper role of the federal government, the Great Depression created the opening for one of the most remarkable bursts of policymaking in American history. In the space of a few years, the Democratic Congress enacted, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration put into operation, a wide range of programs aimed, not only at the immediate goal of economic recovery, but also at reshaping American capitalism to make it more equitable and secure. These programs included new regulations of finance and industry, agricultural price supports, expanded rights to collective bargaining, emergency and categorical poor relief, unemployment and old-age insurance programs, conservation measures and large public works and economic development projects. For many years, historians framed the New Deal as the set of policies and programs created during the first six years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency—beginning with the burst of lawmaking that became known as the “Hundred Days” (March–June, 1933) and ending with the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Focusing heavily on Roosevelt’s White House and cabinet, they sought to characterize the New Deal and place it within the history of American politics. They sought to uncover its intellectual sources, particularly its connections to progressive reform and the experience of World War I. They plumbed its relationship to American capitalism, asking whether it ushered in a mixed economy or a form of “corporate liberalism.” They examined the limits of New Deal reform and identified the reasons why the New Dealers were not able to achieve more. Debating these topics from a variety of perspectives, historians and social scientists produced a greater volume of scholarship on the New Deal than on any other topic in twentieth-century U.S. history.17 The ascent of the Reagan coalition in the 1980s cast the New Deal in a new light. Rather than a short cycle of reform or an epochal watershed that set the terms for all subsequent American politics, historians now framed their subject as “the New Deal order”: a “dominant order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances,” as Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle put it in a seminal collection of essays, that “decidedly shaped American political life” from the 1930s into the late 1960s.18 Going beyond a narrow focus on the Roosevelt administration, scholars working in the 1980s developed a far more nuanced account of the coalition of interests and actors that came together to support the New Deal—and the “missed opportunities, unintended consequences, and dangerous but inescapable compromises” that ultimately led the New Deal order to disintegrate.19 Drawing questions and methods 28

The Great Depression and New Deal

from social history, they traced the “attitudinal changes” that led “white ethnic” and African American workers to support the New Deal and the Democratic Party, and to look to Washington and to labor unions as sources of well-being.20 They looked closely at how the ideas and interests of labor unions, intellectuals and key sectors of industry came to align in support of New Deal programs.21 They charted how New Deal liberalism changed in Roosevelt’s second and third terms, gradually shedding its interests in planning and antimonopolism to embrace a less interventionist blend of fiscal policy and social welfare.22 And they called greater attention to racial exclusion, though they did not yet place it at the center of their accounts—this would happen only with seminal research on postwar urban liberalism in the 1990s. Some scholars continue to revisit the perennial questions of New Deal scholarship, shedding new light on topics that have long been at or near the center of the literature. One body of literature focuses on the New Deal and the labor movement—long a vital area of research. Andrew Cohen has restored craft workers to a narrative that has tended to focus on mass production industry; longstanding practices within the least modernized sectors of the American industrial economy, he argued, formed the precedents of New Deal labor policy.23 Robert Korstad has documented the Wagner Act’s role in the development of labor-based civil rights politics among tobacco workers in urban North Carolina.24 Zaragosa Vargas has noted that the early New Deal inspired Mexican American farmworkers to organize—but that the exclusion of agricultural workers from key New Deal legislation represented “a death blow for the Mexican American working classes.” Indeed, while the national government was helping industrial unions win recognition, agencies such as the INS and the Border Patrol were actively repressing Mexican American worker militancy.25 Ahmed White has issued a revisionist account of the Little Steel strike of 1937, arguing that the Roosevelt administration’s lukewarm support for the National Labor Relations Board allowed employers to “redouble their resistance” to unionization, setting back the CIO’s organizing efforts.26 The political scientist Daniel Schlozman has explained why labor was able to become a major force within a major political party when other, comparable social movements have failed.27 Eric Schickler has documented the CIO’s role in leading the Democratic Party to embrace civil rights, which much of the party would do by the 1940s—setting in motion the partisan realignment that would come to full fruition in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.28 If historians continue to revisit some classic questions, the rise of new approaches within the field of twentieth-century U.S. history has allowed historians to take a fresh look at the New Deal—calling attention to some previously neglected areas and placing familiar ones in a new light. The resulting research has been eclectic, but some patterns emerge. First, it emphasizes the degree to which the New Deal built upon existing structures and patterns rather than breaking entirely from them. Second, it treats the American state as more capable than previous assumed: Rather than an underdeveloped state, scholars now see the New Deal state as competent yet segmented and divided, favoring some groups over others. Third (and related), it has moved race and racism, finally, to the center of the New Deal story. Fourth, it has treated the New Deal as a phenomenon that transcends “the national,” looking far more closely at transnational and regional/local developments than the traditionally Washingtoncentered story. Fifth, it has proposed a plural chronology. Rather than treat the New Deal as a six-year burst of reform or a decades-long order, scholars have depicted it as a phase in a longer epoch of transatlantic social politics, an episode in the remaking of Jim Crow, a “long New Deal” stretching from 1933 to 1952, a “great exception” in American culture and society running from the 1920s into the 1960s—and many more. In making peace with the multiplicity of political time, the literature has surrendered some of the coherence that used to mark the New Deal literature. But it has opened up a far broader understanding of the New Deal’s impact on American life. The concept of consumption figured heavily in the scholarship of the 1980s and early 1990s, underpinning the seminal work of Alan Brinkley and Lizabeth Cohen, among many others. Beginning in the early 2000s, scholars put consumer politics itself at the center of the New Deal 29

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story. Major studies by Landon Storrs,29 Cohen,30 Meg Jacobs31 and Lawrence Glickman32 have shown how a left-consumerist politics of consumers’ leagues, labor unions and grassroots activists shaped the New Deal policy agenda, providing support for higher labor standards as well as mass purchasing power. Historians’ search for the roots of modern conservatism, a major line of inquiry since the early 2000s, has led several scholars back into the 1930s, when opposition to the New Deal and the growth of the regulatory state catalyzed new conservative organizations and political styles. Kim Phillips-Fein has detailed the efforts of businessmen and their allies to organize in opposition to the New Deal and to promote free-market ideals.33 Kevin Kruse has argued that the marriage of Christianity, patriotism and conservative politics in postwar America, commonly ascribed to the influence of the Cold War, was actually the fruit of strategic efforts by leading businessmen to push back against liberal economic policy.34 Kathryn S. Olmsted has located the origins of conservative politics in California in agricultural businessmen’s response to labor mobilization in the mid-1930s.35 Jason Morgan Ward has charted the emergence in the 1930s of a pro-segregation political movement forged in opposition to measures such as the federal anti-lynching bill.36 Ironically, many of these conservative movements flourished in Sunbelt and suburban communities that New Deal spending helped to create. A rich vein of research within the fields of urban/metropolitan history, focused on the impact of the Federal Housing Administration upon American community formation and racial segregation, helps us to make sense of this apparent paradox. Following Kenneth T. Jackson’s classic work, scholars such as Craig Steven Wilder37 and David Freund38 have documented the history of redlining and the ways in which the FHA’s support of mortgage lending facilitated segregated metropolitan development. Becky Nicolaides’s history of the Los Angeles industrial suburb of South Gate has shown how FHA and Veterans Administration mortgage programs helped remake the culture and politics of suburbia.39 N.D.B. Connolly has examined how federal money helped local officials in Miami to “improve and modernize Jim Crow’s built environment.”40 Taken together, these studies have shown how many upwardly mobile white Americans understood the New Deal’s largesse as the earned rewards for hard work and property ownership, naturalizing racial privilege in a way that militated against integration and more generous social policy. Perhaps no turn in historiography has had as great an impact on New Deal scholarship as the rise of “the state” as a site of historical inquiry. As American political development and historical institutionalism have reshaped American political history, scholars have shifted their focus away from discrete programs and policies and toward the question of how the American state governed in particular areas: How the New Deal state was built, why authority came to be configured the way it was, and with what consequences. Much of this research has focused on the distinctive characteristics of the American welfare state. Whereas previous generations of scholars sought to uncover the origins of America’s “clumsy, jerry-built welfare state,” more recently scholars have viewed the American welfare state as surprisingly strong, but distinctive in the way it channels benefits through private intermediaries and favors some groups over others.41 Picking up on a hugely influential body of social-science research,42 historians have given us a far deeper understanding of the American welfare state. Jennifer Klein has revealed the role of insurance companies, corporate employers and labor unions in shaping the contours of American social provision.43 Karen Tani has documented the efforts of federal reformers to build a more modern, uniform and centralized public assistance system, and the resistance these efforts faced from state and local authorities.44 The sociologist Michele Landis Dauber has argued that the New Dealers sought to legitimize federal relief spending by grounding it in the tradition of emergency aid to victims of disaster, suggesting that a more robust rationale might have supported a more generous social welfare state.45 Much of the most vital historical research on the New Deal and the welfare state has focused on the racist and patriarchal dimensions of the New Deal social programs. Historians have long been aware that these programs excluded people on the basis of race and gender. But only recently have 30

The Great Depression and New Deal

they laid out, systematically, the way these exclusions reinforced and exacerbated racial and gender inequalities. Alice Kessler-Harris has shown how New Deal programs reflected a “gendered imagination” that envisioned a nation of patriarchal families headed by male breadwinners, denying women access to economic citizenship and, by extension, political power.46 Suzanne Mettler has charted the way New Deal programs institutionalized gender by dividing benefits between nationally administered programs, largely for white men, and more variable state-administered programs for women.47 Holly Allen has shown how the New Deal used gender narratives of “forgotten manhood” and “fallen womanhood” to build support for its programs.48 Ira Katznelson has catalogued the many forms of racial exclusion written into the key New Deal social and labor programs, ranging from the Social Security Act to the G. I. Bill.49 Mary Poole has done the same, though casting responsibility upon a larger range of actors—not only southern congressmen (who were at the center of Katznelson’s analysis), but also policy intellectuals, New Deal advisers and non-southern legislators.50 For many years, the New Deal’s economic development and public works programs received relatively little attention. But in recent years, scholars following in the footsteps of Jordan Schwarz have paid them greater due. Robert Leighninger has catalogued the vast range of New Deal infrastructure projects, making a compelling case for their long-term economic impact.51 Jason Scott Smith has gone further, arguing that the New Deal produced a “revolution” in state-driven economic development that in turn helped to solidify the New Deal coalition even as it exacerbated political fissures within the Democratic Party.52 Rising interest in the developmentalist state, together with the flourishing of environmental history, has helped lead to a renaissance of studies of the rural New Deal—a topic that received relatively little attention from the previous generation of scholars. In a pioneering study, Sarah Phillips has shown that the New Deal incorporated a concern with the economic well-being of rural Americans into an older conservationist focus on the use of natural resources.53 Neil Maher has situated the rise of the modern environmental movement in the history of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.54 And the sociologist Jess Carr Gilbert has produced a striking revisionist account of the New Deal agriculture programs, taking seriously the New Dealers’ commitment to decentralized programs that involved local citizens in meaningful ways.55 In the New Deal literature, “the American state” still primarily means the national state—and little wonder, since historians have traditionally seen the New Deal as a watershed moment in the development of the national government. Recently, though, a number of scholars have focused on the way the New Deal reshaped non-national politics—and, indeed, depended upon the capacities of local and state governments. Gail Radford has noted that the New Deal encouraged the development of local/regional public authorities to support its long-range investment efforts.56 Mason Williams has argued that the New Deal borrowed “auxiliary state capacity” from local governments in order to achieve its most ambitious projects—and, in turn, reorganized local politics in ways that allowed some of those projects to be sustained at the state and local level after the conservative turn in Congress curtailed the New Deal at the national level.57 Karen Tani has noted that the New Dealers had little choice but to partner with state governments in their efforts to modernize poor relief ­administration—but that newly strengthened state bureaucracies later came to challenge the “the New Deal’s more liberal substantive commitments.”58 Brent Cebul shows that local business elites, despite their anti-statist rhetoric, enthusiastically embraced New Deal developmental spending—which, ironically, underwrote a culture of “business producerism” that became associated with conservative opposition to Democratic liberalism.59 If historians have begun to rediscover the place of federalism and non-national polities within the New Deal story, they have gone much further in tracing that story’s transnational dimensions. Daniel Rodgers’s magisterial study of North Atlantic social politics helped historians to understand where the policy ideas that made up the New Deal came from—in turn, helping to clarify why such an extraordinary burst of policymaking was possible, and why its components were so eclectic.60 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, revisiting a line of comparative analysis first raised by John Garraty, has called attention 31

Mason B. Williams

to some cultural features shared by the New Deal, National Socialism and Italian Fascism, such as monumental architecture and public works and an ethos of “back to the land.”61 Synthesizing a vast body of scholarship (including his own), Kiran Klaus Patel has written the first “global history” of the New Deal, comparing America’s response to the economic crisis to those of nations in Europe, Latin America and Asia, and documenting the New Deal’s impact around the globe.62 Two of the most exciting areas of research in recent years have as yet had relatively little impact on our understanding of the New Deal—though this is beginning to change. The new history of capitalism has been slow to incorporate the New Deal, perhaps because the New Deal seems to fit uneasily with the emerging subfield’s interest in private investment, financialization and economization. Even so, several scholars have joined urban/metropolitan historians in looking closely at the New Deal’s impact upon private investment. Gabrielle Esperdy has charted how the Modernization Credit Plan, a relatively obscure New Deal program created under the 1934 Federal Housing Act, enabled small businesses to modernize their storefronts.63 Louis Hyman has shown that Federal Housing Administration lending programs encouraged banks to enter the field of personal finance—an important moment of transition in the history of personal consumer debt.64 Likewise, historians of the carceral state have, by and large, skipped straight from Prohibition to the postwar period. But this, too, may be changing. Recently, Jeffrey Adler has called our attention to the fact that punishment increased in the 1930s despite the dramatic drop in crime following the end of Prohibition.65 Khalil Gibran Muhammad has argued convincingly that a statistical discourse of black criminality forged in the decades before the New Deal circumscribed whatever potential for racial justice the New Deal might have held.66 In coming years, we may expect more attention to the New Deal’s role in the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and on the way logics of discipline and control were embedded in social welfare institutions, which historians of postwar America now understand as deeply integrated with the carceral state. Finally, a growing body of scholarship treats the New Deal as one phase of a longer process by which the American state has produced new categories, brought new technologies to bear upon governance and reshaped American culture. Wendy Wall has located the origins of wartime and postwar “consensus culture” in the efforts of a diverse array of groups (including New Deal officials) to forge a common national identity amidst the upheavals of the 1930s.67 Scholars such as Matthew Frye Jacobson, Thomas Guglielmo and David Roediger have documented the role of New Deal policies in helping southern and eastern European immigrants and their children claim “whiteness,” and thereby the New Deal’s place in forging the mid-century racial binary.68 Mae Ngai has shown how Depression-era administrators reconfigured the specter of the “illegal immigrant” by granting discretionary regularization to European illegal immigrants even as walking or swimming across the U.S.–Mexico border “emerged as the quintessential act of illegal immigration”—an important moment in the racialization of “illegal aliens.”69 Margot Canaday has found that the production of new categories of sex and gender non-conformity was bound up in the state’s efforts to govern in areas such as migration, poverty and crime.70 Dan Bouk concludes his account of how the rise of life insurance made Americans into “statistical subjects” with the advent of social security, a “risk-making system of unprecedented size” that transformed individuals into “statistical citizens,” in the process rendering them newly legible to the state and to private employers.71 Timothy Shenk has documented the emergence of “the economy” as a subject of knowledge and an object of policy intervention, beginning in the 1930s—and the role of presidential rhetoric (beginning with Roosevelt’s) in transforming this technical concept into a basic language of American politics.72 The opening of the historical imagination that has occurred in the past half century has greatly enlivened research on Depression-era American politics and society. The consequent diversity of the research has made it more difficult to fit the pieces together into a coherent narrative than in the past. Nevertheless, historians continue to write the history of the New Deal as a whole. Recent years have seen the publication of two especially ambitious synthetic accounts (in addition to Patel’s global 32

The Great Depression and New Deal

history). The historian Jefferson Cowie has built upon older scholarship to argue that the New Deal itself, and the longer “New Deal order,” should be seen as a “great exception” in American politics: the product of a conjuncture of structural variables—low immigration, a spell in “religious moralism” and a “very rare moment of racial politics when Democrats could have it both ways,” embracing segregation while winning the support of African American voters—that did not exist before the interwar years and are unlikely to exist again.73 The political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson has clarified what was at stake in 1930s America by situating the New Deal within the context of a global crisis of liberal democracy; in Katznelson’s hands, the New Deal becomes not only a watershed in American politics, but “the most important twentieth-century testing ground for representative democracy in the age of mass politics.” Putting Congress at the center of the story and extending the timeframe through Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration, Katznelson concludes that the New Deal’s greatest achievement lay in demonstrating the capacity of liberal democracy to govern in the face of danger and fear. Yet it did so, he makes clear, only by means of a “rotten compromise” with the white-supremacist South. Liberal democracy, Katznelson concludes, “prospered as a result of an accommodation with racial humiliation,” an alliance that circumscribed the New Deal’s transformative potential even as it laid the groundwork for the destruction of Jim Crow.74 If these syntheses show how much analytical value may be found in revisiting older ways of thinking about the New Deal, a survey of more recent work suggests that historians may be on the threshold of making a fundamental break from established categories, questions and periodizations. Much of the most interesting scholarship of recent years has examined, not the New Deal per se, but rather how the New Deal functioned as one important episode in a broader story: The age of “social politics” (globally and locally); the making of America’s public-private insurance and welfare system; the relation of state-building to gender category formation; the remaking of Jim Crow’s political economy and built environment; the structuring of American racial and gender inequality; the rise of “statistical citizens”; and the invention of “the American economy.” This scholarship has decentered “the New Deal.” But in doing so, it has given us a greater understanding of the many profound ways in which the New Deal shaped American life. Shifting away from categories and questions inherited from the old presidential synthesis and the related notion of “cycles of reform,” it has generated new ways of thinking about governance, subjectivity and citizenship. Twenty years ago, in a literature review similar to this one, the historian Alan Brinkley noted that Arthur Schlesinger’s classic interpretation of the New Deal remained fundamentally intact, though it had been subjected to evolutionary changes.75 Historians still treated the New Deal as a discrete episode, and they retained a primary interest in its internal logic, its successes and its failures. To them, the New Deal represented, above all, “the central event in the progress of the modern United States toward greater unity and democracy,” though they were increasingly aware of the constraints upon that progress.76 Today’s historians are more likely to note the ways in which the New Deal failed to afford greater unity and democracy—yet, when we speak of the New Deal as a whole, the classic interpretation continues to set the terms of discussion. In scholarship itself, though, the classic framework has become largely irrelevant. We have, it appears, finally managed to move past the old paradigm, though we have not yet forged a new one.

Notes   1 “Updike on Updike and Obama,” New York, 1 February 2009, http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/53794/, accessed 1 August 2016; John Updike, “Laissez-Faire Is More: A Revisionist History of the Great Depression,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/07/02/laissez-faire-is-more, accessed 1 August 2016.   2 Quoted in Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 30.

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Mason B. Williams   3 Ben Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5.   4 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 7.   5 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1957–1960).   6 Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).   7 Christina Romer, “The Nation in Depression,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 19–39.   8 Christina Romer, “The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 105, no. 3 (August 1990): 597–624.   9 Ben Bernanke, “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression,” American Economic Review 73, no. 3 (June 1983): 257–276. 10 The best historical account is Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 11 Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs, “Exchange Rates and Economic Recovery in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 4 (December 1985): 925–946. 12 Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward: The 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 13 Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 14 Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 15 Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 16 Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: Norton, 2008). 17 For a review of this literature, see Alan Brinkley, “Historians and the Interwar Years,” in Liberalism and Its Discontents, ed. Alan Brinkley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 111–131. 18 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 19 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, “Introduction,” in Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, x. 20 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21 See especially essays by Thomas Ferguson and Steve Fraser in Fraser and Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order; Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 22 Above all, Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 23 Andrew Wender Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 24 Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 25 Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 26 Ahmed White, The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 27 Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 28 Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 29 Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 30 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 31 Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 32 Lawrence Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 33 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2010).

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The Great Depression and New Deal 34 Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 35 Kathryn Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: New Press, 2015). 36 Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Making of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 37 Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant With Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 38 David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 39 Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Labor in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 40 N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 41 Brinkley, “Historians and the Interwar Years,” quoted at 124. 42 E.g., Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Edwin Amenda, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 43 Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 44 Karen Tani, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 45 Michele Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 46 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 47 Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 48 Holly Allen, Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 49 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005). 50 Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 51 Robert Leighninger, Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). 52 Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 53 Sarah Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural American, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 54 Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 55 Jess Carr Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 56 Gail Radford, The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 57 Mason Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York: Norton, 2013). 58 Tani, States of Dependency. 59 Brent Cebul, The American Way of Growth: Business, Poverty, and Development in the American Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, in progress). 60 Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). 61 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Picador, 2006). 62 Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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Mason B. Williams 63 Gabrielle Esperdy, Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 64 Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 65 Jeffrey Adler, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early TwentiethCentury America,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 34–46. 66 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 67 Wendy Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus From the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 68 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 69 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 70 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 71 Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 72 Timothy Shenk, “Inventing the American Economy, 1917–1981” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2016). 73 Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 74 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). 75 Brinkley, “Historians and the Interwar Years,” 122. 76 Ibid.

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4 WORLD WAR II—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY John McCallum

Figure 4.1 Japanese American internees reading a newspaper in Manzanar, 1943. Ansel Adams, photographer. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppprs-00006.

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John McCallum

On November 8, 1941, the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. center of population had crept a few miles west since 1930, to a point in Sullivan County just south of Terre Haute, Indiana.1 This imaginary “middle” of the nation fell almost exactly the same distance—a little over 4,200 miles—from Nazi-occupied Paris and from the U.S. Navy base that was bombed a month later in Hawai’i. From here the peculiar place of the nation in World War II is apparent. While U.S. entry gave the war its fundamentally global character, the American people remained far from the conflict’s other defining reality: the extreme violence that took 60 million lives. Trucks from Detroit turned Iran into a vast conveyor belt feeding boots, guns and raw materials to the Soviet Union; agricultural surpluses fed England; and U.S. soldiers occupied points from Iceland to India. But thousands of miles remained between American cities and the lethal crucibles of Kursk and the Ruhr, Imphal and Okinawa. The nation was simultaneously at the center of the storm and sheltered from the gale. War structured American life in paradoxical ways from 1941 to 1945, confronting historians with problems of productivity underwritten by destruction, rights claims amidst unprecedented coercion and national-state building in a moment of transnational solidarity and danger. While 400,000 Americans died and 12 million were under arms in 1945, the U.S. economy expanded over 50 percent from 1940 to 1944. As hunger wracked parts of Europe and Asia, domestic consumption actually increased between 1938 and the peak of wartime mobilization.2 Put simply, Americans grew wealthier even as they sacrificed nearly as much blood as had been spilled in the Civil War. Similar crosscurrents defined the wartime character of liberal citizenship. While tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were stripped of their homes, the president announced both the “four freedoms” (of speech and worship, and from want and fear) and an expansive “second bill of rights” promising economic security.3 Perhaps most disorientating, the war fostered an almost solipsistic patriotism and the rapid growth of the state—even as it was a “second chance” for Wilsonian internationalism, or as a recent account has it, a “war for international society.”4 The historiography of these years is marked by the effort to make sense of the internal reworking of American life by the violent recasting of global order.

Violent Internationalism The crisis of 1941 combined menacing Axis offensives with the achievement of an economically dominant alliance among the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire. Before the year was out there were important victories, most importantly outside Moscow. For the United States, however, Pearl Harbor began six months of reverses. Manila fell at Christmas, and 70,000 soldiers surrendered at Bataan. Some 16.7 million people lived in the Philippines; by the end of 1942, Japan governed as many former U.S. subjects as the populations of Hawai’i, Alaska and Puerto Rico—plus California, Texas and Oregon. Defeat was a palpable reality, whatever the material advantages of the Allies. A sense of crisis thus formed the backdrop of Washington’s first months at war, the imprint of which is legible in histories that viewed the war through the prism of top-down national security concerns. As Emily Rosenberg noted in a study of Pearl Harbor in American culture, Roosevelt’s address to Congress on December 8 downplayed internationalism to focus on a trope of “infamy,” a word the president substituted for “world history.”5 The violent reversal of infamy became a keynote not only of the war effort, but of historical writing that looked to explain how national leaders conducted such Olympian affairs. While Roosevelt moved tentatively before Pearl Harbor, shortly thereafter his commands sent soldiers to seize 800 miles of North African coastline as part of a global military strategy.6 For historians working in the aftermath, few tasks seemed as pressing as the reconstruction of the view from the top. This pattern was visible in the progressive historian Charles Beard’s 1948 argument that Roosevelt provoked Japan into war, a claim rejected by liberal historians in a debate freighted with political anxieties.7 But Beard’s dissent fell firmly within the main lines of postwar inquiry. An innovative 38

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scholar known for methodologically groundbreaking claims about the economic motivations behind the U.S. Constitution, his writing on the war was a conventional diplomatic history and part of the profession’s scramble for official sources.8 One culmination of these efforts was Gerhard Weinberg’s thousand-page A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, which appeared in 1994—and for all its international scope, leaned more heavily on German and Anglo American evidence than its title suggests.9 By then, however, the field looked quite different. While historians still examined turning points such as the halt of Japanese expansion at Midway in 1942, post-Cold War questions shifted attention to social and cultural processes beyond official archives.10 Roger Chickering, Stig Förster and Bernd Greiner’s A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (2005) paid almost no attention to the problems that transfixed Beard and instead gave a tour d’horizon of a conflict defined by economic and societal mobilization, criminality and postwar justice and the dynamics of escalating and de-escalating violence.11 A decade later, the longest volume of The Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015) was devoted to economic, cultural and social topics.12 While A World at Total War capped a collaborative investigation of the “total war” concept, the editors of the Cambridge History wrote of a “war of peoples.” The latter phrase was capacious enough to comprehend struggles among—and against—entire populations over fundamental questions of how global order should be structured and how human life should be lived.13 These shifts were long in coming. As early as 1968, Gabriel Kolko in the United States and Saburo Ienaga in Japan assailed earlier accounts for the elision of social and class politics.14 Akira Iriye’s Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941–1945 (1981) argued that Japanese and American policymakers overestimated their differences and saw regional economic development in such similar terms that a meeting of the minds might have terminated the war after the fall of the Tojo ministry in July 1944, if not earlier.15 The Pacific War was grounded in misperceptions and miscalculations, not irreconcilable interests or cultures. Iriye’s deep archival dive into the assumptions of postwar planning in Tokyo and Washington drew power from its capacity to tune out the roar of combat and racial invective and follow the fainter but more durable outlines of mutual interest. John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (1986), on the other hand, plumbed the depths of that theater’s near-genocidal intensity, where tiny parcels of land yielded thousands of dead. In a war often enveloping civilians, shocking cruelties took place on remote atolls between military forces with honor traditions. Why? Dower put race at the center of the war’s conduct. Both wartime cultures supported Manichean outlooks resting on contorted visions of the other side’s selfimage. Japanese propaganda turned American individualism into a world-threatening egoism, while Americans rendered Japanese solidarity—expressed in the slogan “100 million hearts beating as one”—as homicidal conformity.16 War welded specific histories to generic images of bestial enemies, accelerating the logic of racial hierarchy into talk of extermination. Ultimately the imagery of beasts and demons was unhinged from more persistent patterns of race-making—but not before elements on both sides imagined the extermination of the Japanese people at home.17 Of course, “both sides” is inadequate, and historians from Christopher Bayly to Rana Mitter traced the entanglements of the British Empire, Chinese nationalism and the war with Japan.18 Indeed, Jonathan Marshall examined colonial Southeast Asian resources as the basic casus belli.19 Nor were Americans quite the imperial neophytes they claimed to be, a point brought home by a recent interpretation of the 1941–45 war as one span of the “arc of empire” running from the Philippines to Vietnam.20 Meanwhile, Takashi Fujitani’s work on “inclusionary racism” further eroded the line between the United States and the other empires by comparing the place of Japanese Americans to Koreans in Tokyo’s imperium.21 The Pacific War fatally weakened the European empires and installed the United States as a dominant power along a crescent from Korea to the Indian Ocean. But the war revealed itself to individuals in the reworking of Marine Corps myths of violence and masculinity, in the racial and sexual tensions of military-ruled Hawai’i and even in the environmental devastation 39

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of a resource-hungry military that hopped from atoll to atoll blasting and crushing live coral reefs into runway surfacing.22 While few slight race or empire, the trend has been away from synthesis and towards the discovery of new facets of the collision of peoples across the Pacific basin. One result of this accumulation of perspectives, however, has been the impetus to moral reevaluation, which can lead back to a contemplation of the global war. While few historians justify the Japanese attack on the United States, the extreme response continues to raise doubts. As Bruce Cumings argued, Pearl Harbor was both an obvious act of aggression and a careful assault on a purely military target (killing 2,335 uniformed personnel and 68 civilians), providing dubious justification for unlimited retaliation.23 The final acts of the war, on the other hand, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in Tokyo and other cities. Arguments over the justice of the atomic bombings have raged since the initial suggestion that geopolitical calculations colored the decision, and historians continue to reveal new ways to think about the dawn of the nuclear age.24 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s study of Japanese and Russian archives suggested that the Soviet declaration of war was decisive, while Andrew Rotter’s Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (2008) de-emphasized nationality by focusing on the international “republic of science” that was a precondition for the Manhattan Project.25 Sean Malloy’s biographical study of Secretary of War Henry Stimson traced the moral education of the man who presided over the decision, adding a more textured picture of the deliberations over the bomb’s use.26 If the singular horror of nuclear weapons continues to lead historians to August 1945, the ethical problem of annihilating cities spans the entire war. Major studies of strategic bombing by Ronald Schaffer and Michael Sherry revealed an uneasy combination of shifting moral justifications and an amoral “technological fanaticism” (Sherry’s term) behind the decisions to target cities on both continents.27 The dynamics of conscience and technology have been explored in normative accounts of firebombing,28 and a compelling plunge into the technological development of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction is in Robert Neer’s Napalm: An American Biography (2013). Neer traced Harvard’s “Anonymous Research Project No. 4” from the 1942 development of a jellied gasoline that could be widely dispersed by TNT and ignited by white phosphorous to the apocalyptic March 1945 attack on Tokyo. Rooted in a technical story, Neer’s account found a moral ballast in linking first-person narratives to casualty estimates—between 87,793 and 124,711 died in Tokyo. Another metric: Research and development costs of each atomic bombing equaled $13.5 billion, while burning a city with napalm cost only $83,000.29 Recent works on the bombing of Germany accompanied a larger attention to civilian suffering in the destruction of the Third Reich. Jörg Friedrich’s eloquent The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940– 1945 (2006) deployed an unsettling vocabulary of “extermination” alongside discussions of chemistry and asphyxiation, before insisting that such language implied no comparison to the Holocaust, and that “death by gas will not create one.”30 He also described the bombing campaigns as the largest book burning in history. Even if intended to provoke, Friedrich’s narrative was often compelling, as in his account of doctors and priests giving morphine and last rites to conscious victims trapped in the rubble. More analytically salient, however, was his claim that the war had ended “a world in which it had been inconceivable that pilots from America would come to use explosives to hurl a woman into the tree in front of her home on Briloner Strasse and that she would be dead when they brought her down.”31 In 1945, many such things were conceivable, though it is difficult to capture exactly how far inhumanity had become thinkable. Peter Schrijvers, Mary Louise Roberts and William Hitchcock described the civilian experience of American power in Western Europe in harrowing terms, while stressing a moral economy that paired invasion with humanitarian aid. Hitchcock numbered the civilian dead on D-Day at 3,000, the same figure Schrijvers gave for the Battle of the Bulge late in 1944, during Hitler’s last offensive in the Ardennes.32 Schrijvers observed that the overlooked civilian toll of containing the “Bulge” rivaled the casualties of September 11, 2001—a comparison underscoring 40

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the routine character of violence in 1944–5.33 This certainly was one measure of what had become possible. Mary Louise Roberts adds to this picture an account of sexual violence and other wartime intimacies as a major component of the Franco-American relationship.34 Here, too, much was suddenly conceivable—figuratively and literally— that had not been before. Vital as it is to recover such experiences, these civilian histories do not add up to a fully satisfying picture of the rationalities of violence and humanitarian feeling in the U.S. war. Hitchcock emphasized the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s (UNRRA) efforts to provide aid in liberated areas as the flipside of collateral damage. But the more competent and effective UNRRA looks at the close of the war, so much stranger the limited response to the Holocaust, a topic that continues to stir controversy.35 Elizabeth Borgwardt’s history of the wartime development of international human rights, A New Deal for the World, argued that the shocks of depression and war, mitigated by the unprecedented deployment of federal authority, aligned American experiences with a concept of universal human rights as claims individuals might make on supranational authority. If the New Deal was dead after the 1938 midterm elections, its mentality survived long enough for postwar planning to take up the torch. But in her account the war itself becomes so overshadowed by planning and politics that the violence of victory is hard to discern. She contrasted the “heady multilateralist zeitgeist of 1945” to somber Fulton, Missouri in 1946, when Winston Churchill announced an “iron curtain” across Europe.36 But how much was the “zeitgeist of 1945” tempered by the sheer scale of destruction and human loss? Michael Burleigh began to provide answers in Moral Combat (2010), a volume investigating “the prevailing moral sentiments of entire societies and their leaderships, and how this changed under the impact of both ideology and total war.” But his interest in vindicating the Western allies against all critics verged on a rejection of his own project of reexamining ethical experience: he contrasted the practical evolution of wartime practices to “the desiccated deliberations of a philosophy seminar full of pursed-lipped old maids.”37 The point to make in response is not only to defend the seminar, but that in a war of peoples the “old maids” are part of the story as much as “practical” soldiers. Nonetheless, his effort to discuss the ethics of all the major combatants was a reminder (if one is needed) that the trend line of moral revisionism cannot be towards a normative declaration of equivalence. Where, then, are we? The long historiographical turn from geopolitics to a more capacious social and cultural history leaves a litany of moral complications with no obvious synthesis on the horizon.38 The rehabilitation of the Third Reich is unthinkable, but the more the conflict is understood as a global process the less tenable are clean divisions of good and evil. Gerhard Weinberg’s dismissal of the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose is hard to square with the fuller picture of a leader who grasped Nazi rule but still gambled on a vision of independence.39 More directly pertinent to the American role, Adam Tooze’s history of the German war economy identifies the ascendancy of the United States as “the pivot for our understanding of the Third Reich.”40 Hitler’s war was a desperate wager on concentrated force to preempt the emergence of an uncontested superpower across the Atlantic. While his threat perception was deranged by the concoction of a global Jewish conspiracy, the reality of American power was a constitutive element of Hitler’s worldview. This influenced the strategy of seizing an agrarian heartland in the East: when Hitler said that the war in the East amounted to a second “conquest of America” this was not just a genocidal flight of fancy, but an apt description of the war as a last act of colonialism.41 This does not directly implicate Americans, of course, but warns against moral complacency. Legends of isolationism to the contrary, America was already abroad in the world as both a looming hegemon and a seductive model of consumer prosperity grounded in the expropriation of a continental economic base. Hitler’s vision was never realized because it was violently resisted by a coalition of Europeans who found it abhorrent and by those who were scheduled for extinction. It also failed because in mounting 41

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a coup against London and Washington the Nazis managed only to precipitate the transformation of the American state into the dominant power in Western Europe. In this sense, the war was a decisive global intervention in American life.

Producing War at Home What defined the home front was not patriotic unity but the profusion of frantic social energies unleashed by global war. To arm its allies and propel soldiers against far-flung enemies, U.S. factories produced 300,000 military airplanes (compared to Germany’s 99,000) and shipyards launched 8,812 major naval vessels (compared to Japan’s 538).42 The physical movement required for production and combat was immense: at least 15 million people relocated from one county to another following the flow of war-work.43 The simplest logistics offer a glimpse of continental mobilization: a Marine recruit from Green Bay, Wisconsin traveled as far to boot camp as a German soldier did between Berlin and Moscow. Managing these energies guaranteed that political conflict not only persisted but intensified. The (almost) unanimous Congressional vote for war should be balanced with the bruising tax debates that followed. When the administration introduced payroll deductions (before 1942 taxes were paid in an annual lump sum), Congress forgave most of the still-unpaid income taxes from 1942 against the strenuous objections of Treasury and the White House, a windfall for the wealthiest after a year of rapid growth. When Congress reduced a subsequent request for $10 billion in new revenue by 80 percent, Roosevelt vetoed the bill with a sharp statement about tax relief “not for the needy but for the greedy.” Days later Congress overrode the veto—the first time it had ever done so with a revenue bill.44 It was far from the only White House loss. In 1942 the administration was battered by the frictions of mobilization—especially the rationing of gas, rubber and coffee—without the compensation of a visible change in the military situation. What the public knew was that American soldiers were dying in the Philippines while weapons were shipped to England and the Soviet Union. The successful North African invasion came on November 8, five days after midterm elections in which Republicans gained forty-four House seats.45 A revitalized GOP eliminated programs of the 1930s: The Civilian Conservation Corps, National Youth Administration and Works Progress Administration were all permanently shuttered.46 The alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats also deepened as they worked together to limit access to a federal ballot for soldiers, which simultaneously threatened Jim Crow in the South and GOP electoral prospects nationally.47 But the internal transformations of liberalism were as important as external setbacks. In 1944 the successful prosecution of the war—Paris was liberated in August and U.S. troops returned to the Philippines in October—gave a tailwind to Roosevelt’s fourth campaign, which was strongly supported by organized labor. Instead of a conservative restoration, the end of the war delivered an expansive GI bill and a protracted fight over full employment legislation.48 By the time the latter measure passed in 1946, the “full” had been dropped, and the employment act created the Council of Economic Advisors, but no public commitment to provide anyone (never mind everyone) with work.49 Alan Brinkley has argued that this was not only a testament to the strength of the conservative faction in Congress, but to a liberalism in the process of abandoning its old aspiration to extend democratic governance over markets. Drawing back from state power in the shadow of fascism, and attracted to the possibility that prosperity might overwhelm class confrontation, a rising bloc of wartime liberals looked to the promotion of consumption, social safety nets and Keynesian management of fiscal and monetary targets.50 These intellectual movements among policymakers were mirrored and reinforced by the orientation of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) towards wages and benefits rather than the old dream of “industrial democracy,” and the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) move away from apolitical bargaining and towards the support of pro-labor politicians.51 42

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While Brinkley depicted a diminished liberalism, James Sparrow’s account of the Warfare State (2011) was more impressed with the durability of a “big government” defined by mass fiscal powers. The prewar New Deal had barely drawn a tenth of the labor force into the federal income tax, but nearly 70 percent of workers made direct payments during the war. That figure never fell below half in the postwar.52 Drawing on a potent Hobbesian metaphor of the state, Sparrow’s work charted how wartime Americans “learned to live with the leviathan and accept its demands as legitimate.”53 Here, too, was a shift in the content of New Deal liberalism, as wartime rhetoric of freedom and consumer choice (citizens became consumers of the war, buying a piece of the fighting machinery through their bond purchases) transmuted public power into individual rights. But the larger point was that public power retained popular assent, instead of withering on a vine severed by postwar retrenchment. And even when consideration is limited to the short term of the war years, this public power reshaped the nation. Government investments developed the West overnight, leading to a tripling of personal income in California from 1940 to 1945.54 Federal investment may have produced a drastic rupture in earlier patterns of development, breaking the dependency of the West on eastern institutions and tying the West Coast permanently to far-flung military installations and trade networks in the Pacific.55 The cultural influence of the state was felt across multiple fields: writers and intellectuals were drawn into the Office of War Information in 1942, only to see the organization largely defunded by Congress the following year, while military and civil censorship exerted a subtle sway over what people saw of the war.56 Physicists were famously involved in the design of the atomic bomb, but few realms of intellectual labor remained apart from the war effort: Psychologists studied morale in the national service, and half the nation’s anthropologists were involved in war work.57 These growing disciplines borrowed prestige from government work, and in turn bolstered the authority and credibility of the agencies for which they worked, in ways that are still being disentangled. The augmentation of federal authority was a momentous event in race relations as well, triggering anxieties among conservatives and opening new avenues to contest Jim Crow. Responding to A. Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement, Roosevelt created a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) in June 1941 with the authority to investigate discrimination in defense industries, but little enforcement power.58 Despite its limits, Executive Order 8802 announced as national policy the principle of employment non-discrimination. More immediately consequential was the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Smith v. Allwright that the all-white Democratic primary in Texas was illegal.59 Multiple factors were at work in these gains, from the insistence of the black press on a “double victory” over fascism abroad and domestically, to the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to the genuine revulsion of many Americans at Nazi racism, to pragmatic political considerations: black voters provided increasingly vital urban votes in the north.60 More recent work has questioned the assumption of a wartime watershed, however, emphasizing powerful countermobilizations of white supremacy and the decline of 1930s militancy. As Kevin Kruse and Stephen Tuck pointed out in Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012), Randolph’s mass following faltered after Pearl Harbor, and by the end of the war “the movement’s headquarters in Harlem had become a bookshop.”61 At the same time that liberals yoked fascism to Jim Crow, conservatives construed the war as a contest between state tyranny and “white democracy,” conflating federal civil rights with Nazism.62 The disjuncture between these understandings of democracy and the character of Nazi rule was so severe that, as Jane Dailey noted, there seemed to be entirely separate wars.63 On the other hand, not all of the war-driven developments in the American racial order were organized movements. While Japanese Americans were forcibly excluded from political life, biographical works have sought to recover internment and its aftermath in a longer trajectory of interracial democracy.64 Matthew Briones’s Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America (2012) examined the “unprecedented level of interracial interactions” in the 1940s through the diary of Charles Kikuchi, a Nisei who recorded his efforts to cultivate human dialogue across the lines of 43

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racial subordination he found on his relocation to Chicago. The slender but precious prospects of interracial democracy were apparent in Kikuchi’s efforts to challenge residential exclusion that would let him move into neighborhoods that excluded blacks, his disputes with other Nisei who accept prevailing patterns of prejudice, and his argument with a black worker who expressed a desire to see Japan win the war and expected Kikuchi’s politics to follow his racial identity.65 Studies of sexuality and gender emphasize longer-run continuity while acknowledging sudden shifts in daily life. Elaine Tyler May argued influentially that the basic trajectory of the decade was towards “family values and female subordination.”66 D’Ann Campbell also described the influx of women into the labor force—growing to 36 percent of all workers in 1945, then plummeting—as a change in activities, but not in gender roles.67 More recently Marilyn Hegarty’s work on the regulation of female sexuality provided an illuminating account of sex as an obligation of citizenship severed from corresponding rights.68 When U.S. Public Health Service physician Otis Anderson coined the term “patriotute” he put his finger on a domain of American wartime life where answering the call to service ended in stigma. While the U.S. literature has no account of sexuality comparable to Dagmar Herzog’s treatment of the Third Reich and the postwar German states, Alan Petigny’s The Permissive Society: America 1941–1965 (2009) suggested that the dislocation of the war unleashed a “permissive turn” with long-run consequences.69 Certainly Alan Bérubé’s classic Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990) found evidence that the draft and military screening procedures intended to identify the psychologically “unfit” worked to break down barriers isolating gay people in the United States.70 Here too was a measure of the war’s social energies. Certainly, no one intended to produce an incipient revolution in attitudes towards homosexuality, but this was a result of mobilization.

Conclusion David Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear remains the best overview of World War II from a U.S. perspective, although the continuing pace of scholarship means the claim is unlikely to be a lasting one. But Kennedy’s closing vignette is worth revisiting in conclusion. It focused on the life experiences through the 1930s and 1940s of a “statistically typical 30 year old woman in 1950.”71 As historians continue to interpret the position of the United States at the center of a genocidal global conflict, the less typical provides an equally characteristic punctuation. Werner Sollors’s The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (2014) is concerned with immediate postwar Germany: a place full of Americans. He discusses at some length Hans Habe’s novel A Walk in Darkness (1948). The novel tells the story of an interracial affair from the perspective of a black GI from Harlem, whose involvement with a German women exposes him to German racial prejudices—and brings his own anti-Semitism to light when the woman gives up their child to a Holocaust survivor.72 It took a Budapest-born German author who had absorbed Richard Wright’s Native Son as a refugee in the United States and then returned to the ruins of Germany to narrate this collision between the legacies of white supremacy and the Holocaust. Such were the complexities of the American situation as war gave way to an uncertain future.

Notes   1 Special to the New York Times, “Center of Population Remains in Indiana,” New York Times, November 9, 1941, 43.   2 Hugh Rockoff, “The United States: From Ploughshares to Swords,” in The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, ed. Mark Harrison (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83, 90–94; John Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 7, 197.

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World War II   3 Peter Irons, Justice at War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jeffrey Engel, The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Evolution of an American Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).   4 Frank Ninkovich, The Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 144–170.   5 Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 11–12.   6 Thomas Mahnken, “U.S. Grand Strategy, 1939–1934,” in The Cambridge History of the Second World War,Volume 1: Fighting the War, ed. John Ferris and Even Mawdsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).   7 Charles Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).   8 Wesley Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1953); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1970).   9 Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 10 Craig Symonds, The Battle of Midway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11 Roger Chickering, Stig Förster and Bernd Greiner, A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12 Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, The Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume 3: Total War: Economy, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13 Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, “Introduction to Volume III,” The Cambridge History of the Second World War 3: 4–11. 14 Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 1968); SaburŌ Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 [1968]). 15 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 34–35, 147–148, 212–213. 16 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 28–30. 17 Ibid., 55, 233. 18 Christopher Bayly and Timothy Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004); Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Michael Schaller, The U.S. Crusade in China, 1938–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 19 Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), x, 4–11, 40. 20 Michael Hunt and Steven Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia From the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Theodore Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan Against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 21 Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 8, 31. 22 Craig Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Beth Bailey and Dave Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (New York: Free Press, 1992); Judith Bennett, Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 97–99. 23 Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 45–46. 24 Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 25 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Andrew Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 26 Sean Malloy, Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 27 Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1987), 252–255; Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940–1945

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John McCallum (New York: Viking Press, 2013); Conrad Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993). 28 A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker and Company, 2006). 29 Robert Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 34–35, 81, 86. 30 Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 8, 15, 168, 296, 477. 31 Ibid., 451, 144. 32 William Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3. 33 Peter Schrijvers, The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), xiv–xv. 34 Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 35 Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the American Jewish community, Hasia Diner, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 36 Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 250–251. 37 Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of World War II (London: Harper Press, 2010), vii, 164. 38 Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 39 Weinberg, A World at Arms, 231–232, 898; Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 40 Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin Press, 2007), xxiv. 41 Ibid., 469; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 42 Thompson, A Sense of Power, 195–196. 43 Bernd Grenier, “Mobilizing American Politics and Society, 1937–1945,” in Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War, 249. 44 John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1976), 242–243; Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 28–29. 45 Blum, V Was for Victory, 230–233. 46 Polenberg, War and Society, 79. 47 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013), 215–216. 48 Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens: The GI Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 49 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 260–264. 50 Ibid., 154–163, 268–271. 51 Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Andrew Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 52 James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 263. 53 Ibid., 243. 54 Bruce Cumings, Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 308–310; Earl Pomeroy, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Gerald Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 55 Cumings, Dominion From Sea to Sea, 333. 56 Allan Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); George Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 57 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); David Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 25.

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World War II 58 Merl Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). 59 Michael Klarman, “The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decisionmaking,” Florida State University Law Review 29 (October, 2001): 55–107. 60 Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000); Thomas Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006). 61 Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. 62 Jason Morgan Ward, “‘A War for States’ Rights’: The White Supremacist Vision of Double Victory,” in Kruse and Tuck, eds., Fog of War, 127. 63 Jane Dailey, “The Sexual Politics of Race in World War II America,” in Kruse and Tuck, eds., Fog of War, 151. 64 Lorraine K. Bannai, Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 65 Matthew M. Briones, Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 4, 174–182. 66 Elaine Tyler May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, ed. Lewis Erenberg and Susan Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 128–141. 67 D’Ann Campbell, Women at War With America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 236, 239. 68 Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality During World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 1–4. 69 Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4–6; Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 70 Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1990), 249–255. 71 David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 858. 72 Werner Sollors, The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 201–207.

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5 THE COLD WAR ERA—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Gene Zubovich

Figure 5.1 Rows of newly finished frame houses in upstate New York. Joseph Scherschel. The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

What was the Cold War? This question should be easy enough to answer in light of the hundreds of books with the term “Cold War” in their titles. One answer is that the Cold War was a decades-long geopolitical rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, beginning soon after World War II and ending in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet the phrase “the Cold War”—popularized by journalist Walter Lippmann to describe the simultaneous military escalation and state of peace between the two nations—has come to mean so much more. As Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell put 48

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it, “the term ‘Cold War’ has been transfigured from a noun into an adjective: we are today urged to examine ‘Cold War science,’ ‘Cold War civil rights,’ and, indeed, ‘Cold War America’ itself.”1 In the aftermath of WWII many Americans adopted a bipolar view of the world, dividing a wide array of nation-states with diverse histories, cultures and political systems into the capitalist-democratic “First World” and the socialist “Second World.” The conflict between the First and Second Worlds played out largely in the neutral “Third World,” in countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Korea, which had decolonized in the 1940s and 1950s only to find themselves in the throes of this new rivalry. America’s resources were mobilized to “contain” communism wherever it spread, especially in Eastern Europe and East Asia beginning in the 1940s. Fighting communism abroad also meant that Americans were becoming more vigilant about communist infiltration at home. Domestically, the phenomenon dubbed McCarthyism—a name given to the anti-communist hysteria promoted by Senator Joseph McCarthy—affected institutions as diverse as civil rights organizations, labor unions, religious bodies and Hollywood. Americans themselves discussed “the Cold War” from the late 1940s onward, making sense of their lives in relation to this new concept. Whether you were a communist hunter or a victim of McCarthyism, or one of the many millions of Americans watching events unfold in newspaper reports, radio broadcasts or over the new medium of television, the Cold War was something you could hardly ignore. Use of the term “Cold War” is ubiquitous in studies of the United States following World War II, yet its chronological boundaries are murky at best. Most historians agree that the starting point was somewhere between 1944 and 1947 but conclude that the Cold War’s hold over the American imagination diminished well before 1989.2 McCarthyism had run its course by the 1960s, by which point anti-communism met serious opposition.3 Foreign policy histories often see the 1970s as a transformative moment, when economic and political changes undermined the bipolarity of the early Cold War years.4 The reinforcing relationship between the Cold War and the civil rights movement waned in the 1960s and “Cold War America” ended by 1963. The difficulty in pinning down the boundaries of the Cold War has led some critics to question the analytic value of the term. Part of what makes the notion of a “Cold War” complicated is that it performs a double duty. “The Cold War” was both a popular phrase that Americans used in the postwar years and an analytic device used by historians to explain events from WWII to the 1960s and beyond. As Anders Stephanson argued, the “Cold War” was an invention that helped justify the projection of American power abroad and promoted the myth that that the USSR—with hundreds of cities in ruins, more than 20 million dead, and facing famine and disease in the years following WWII—was a superpower on par with the United States, and that the two were locked in an existential battle that could only end with the destruction of one of the powers. If used uncritically, “the Cold War” reinforces such myths. Stephanson helpfully reminds historians to treat the term as an ideological project and to pay attention to dissenting voices that sought to resist a bipolar worldview.5 While it is important not to treat the Cold War as a one-size-fits-all explanation for everything that occurred between WWII and 1960, this period can still be usefully described as the Cold War era. The twin threats of Soviet power abroad and communist subversion at home preoccupied American policymakers, religious leaders, civil rights activists and corporate executives. These threats also justified big political, economic and social changes to many Americans. Initially encouraging patriotism and conformity, the Cold War also fostered criticism and dissent, paving the way for the cultural transformation of the “the Sixties.”

Cold War America and the World When he assumed the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Harry Truman departed from his predecessor’s cooperative relationship with Josef Stalin. Truman was inspired partly by Moscow embassy staffer George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram,” which urged the president to 49

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engage in a “patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”6 Truman presided over anti-communist hysteria that included the creation of loyalty oaths for federal employees in 1947, and he stood firm in confronting the USSR in the Iranian crisis in 1946 and in what he wrongly believed was Soviet involvement in Turkey and Greece in 1947. In announcing what became known as the “Truman Doctrine”—that the United States would assist countries battling communist expansion anywhere in the world—Truman departed from longstanding practices in American foreign policy by involving the United States in permanent alliances like NATO, keeping a large peacetime standing army and implementing a peacetime draft. Older histories of the Cold War often focus on its origins, hoping to better understand who started the conflict. Since the Cold War ended, this question is no longer centrally featured in recent historical debates.7 John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler continue to explore the origins and duration of the Cold War, adding newly available Soviet sources to our understanding of Cold War diplomatic history. While Leffler suggested that the Cold War could have been de-escalated at key moments, as in the years immediately after Stalin’s death in 1953, Gaddis emphasized Soviet responsibility in the conflict due to Stalin’s desire to dominate Europe and the rigidity of socialist ideology.8 Yet even Gaddis concluded recently that a clash between the two superpowers was inevitable. In the case of the Soviet Union and the United States, “so many legacies of distrust now divided them. . . . It was too much to expect a few years of wartime cooperation to sweep all of this away.”9 In his careful study of Truman’s first years in office, Wilson Miscamble argued that the president operated in an atmosphere of confusion. According to Miscamble, “Harry Truman never self-consciously decided to transform the foreign policy content and approach he inherited from FDR. Instead, external circumstances drove the creation of the Truman administration’s foreign policy.”10 While Miscamble and Gaddis credited the collapse of the balance of power in Europe in launching the Cold War, a recent global history of the Cold War by Odd Arne Westad emphasized the longstanding ideological impulses of both powers to spread their systems across the world.11 In the newest literature, Truman’s role now appears as a footnote to broader historical, ideological and geopolitical patterns. Truman may have launched the Cold War, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was responsible for the peculiar character of the conflict in the 1950s. Once derided as an unintelligent and incapable president by critics and early biographers, he is now hailed for stabilizing the Cold War during his presidency, which lasted from 1953 until 1961. Eisenhower withdrew support for European colonialism and backed a moderate economic policy domestically. He also blocked factions in the Republican Party that demanded isolationism and those that called for an aggressive “rollback” of communism. Unlike his predecessor, Eisenhower placed limits on the use of the military abroad. Building on Truman’s efforts, he pursued a peace settlement in the Korean War, bringing the conflict to an end just months after assuming office. After the Korea armistice, no American soldiers died in combat for the rest of Eisenhower’s presidency.12 For these reasons, biographer Jean Edward Smith wrote that Eisenhower, “with the exception of Franklin Roosevelt,” was “the most successful president of the twentieth century.”13 The history of American diplomacy in the Cold War era has long focused on the Soviet-American rivalry and on key decision makers—presidents, Secretaries of State, foreign leaders, experts and political and business elites. But new work has moved away from the history of diplomacy and toward the recently coined framework of “America and the World.” This new field continues to address traditional American diplomacy, but it places policy elites in the context of a broader array of non-state actors, investigating encounters between nations beyond formal diplomatic channels.14 Historians are now pushing the field in two new directions. They have embraced the methodology of cultural and intellectual history, and they place greater emphasis on the experiences of decolonization and globalization. In the last fifteen years historians have produced a number of books on the “cultural Cold War.”15 New works have explored the role of mass media, tourism, food products and consumer 50

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goods in Europe and the Global South.16 The Eisenhower administration used troops and covert actions in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Lebanon (1958) and Panama (1958). But it also relied on subtler weapons in its fight against the Soviet Union. Policymakers understood that America’s cultural products were attractive to many foreigners, even while U.S. foreign policy was not. The State Department showed off the latest American kitchen wares in Moscow in 1959, sparking the spontaneous “Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.17 Famous jazz artists were sent on state-sponsored tours to the Middle East, India and Africa in hopes of counteracting the negative image created by America’s racial segregation and its meddling in the politics of other countries. Penny von Eschen provided vivid accounts of black artists Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and countless others being sent to African and Asian countries to repair America’s image and increase its “soft power” in the Global South.18 While American officials were happy to promote black artists abroad, they were far less eager to advance desegregation at home. McCarthyism devastated civil rights groups, forcing them to expel members, putting them on the defensive against redbaiting attacks and leading them to narrow their political visions. Several historians have shown that the broad anti-colonial and economic critiques made by civil rights groups in the 1940s gave way to a more narrowly legalistic attack against Jim Crow in the 1950s.19 And yet, the Cold War opened up new avenues for civil rights advocacy. In her now-classic account, Mary Dudziak argued that the concern for America’s image abroad created a new receptiveness by government officials to antiracist arguments: To win the Cold War, the United States would have to desegregate.20 The period from 1945 to 1960 was also the heyday of American developmental aid, which has been explored at the intersection of diplomatic and intellectual history.21 By the 1950s the United States built dams and rationalized farmland from the Philippines to Afghanistan, building on the precedents of the New Deal projects of the 1930s. These projects were grand in scale and universal in ambition, and were rooted in modernization theory. That theory, according to Nils Gilman’s pathbreaking work, assumed that “the manifold forms of traditional life were giving way to a unitary, interlocking and global modernity, the shape of which was already discernable in the contemporary United States.”22 According to David Ekbladh, development projects often failed to take the wishes of local inhabitants into consideration, and they routinely ignored cultural differences, often creating more resentment than good will.23 Observers in the 1950s came to similar conclusions. The 1958 novel The Ugly American depicted an American ambassador in a fictitious Southeast Asian nation, whose ignorance of the local language and culture leads the United States to disaster. The novel ended with an epilogue that urged for smaller-scale, culturally literate American involvement in developing nations, something that helped inspire the creation of the Peace Corps. But as Daniel Immerwahr pointed out in his highly acclaimed book, the United States was already pursuing village-based community development programs in places like India and the Philippines that encouraged local involvement.24 While critics present such programs as an attractive alternative to modernization theory, Immerwahr argued that they reinforced local hierarchies, coerced villagers and created a host of other problems. The emphasis on community development would come to the United States in the 1960s in the form of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs.

The Cold War at Home: The Great Exception? American economic life stabilized during the Cold War era. With foreign economies in ruins after WWII, the United States experienced rapid, sustained economic growth beginning in the late 1940s. Labor unions were accepted as a permanent part of the economy, a large, stable middle-class emerged, the power of the state grew and both left-wing and right-wing ideologies became suspect.25 Noting 51

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the moderation of both the Democratic and Republican parties during this period, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset insisted that the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship; the conservatives have accepted the welfare state; and the democratic left has recognized that an increase in over-all state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions to economic problems. Unaware of the deep divisions over racism, sexism, religion and war that would emerge in public debates years later, Lipset was one of many observers that proclaimed “the end of ideology” in the 1950s.26 What contemporary observers and some early historians of the era saw as a stable social arrangement now appears to have been, in the words of Jefferson Cowie, “the Great Exception.”27 Cowie argued provocatively that the political arrangements of the mid-twentieth century were an aberration rooted in unprecedented political realignments, unusual economic conditions and the cessation of perennial religious wars. Whether or not one agrees with Cowie’s interpretation of the era, his argument is in line with a growing body of literature that paints the politics of the Cold War era as more fragile, fractured and contested than previously thought. Earlier histories of the transition from the Great Depression to the Cold War focused on the narrowing ambitions of liberalism. As Alan Brinkley put it, the anti-capitalist criticism of the early New Deal gave way to a more limited reformist, rights-based liberalism that accepted capitalism as a fundamentally sound system that needed only minor restraints to make it work more efficiently.28 More recently, historians have highlighted the more conservative undercurrents of the 1930s that emerged in the Cold War era. Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself focused on conservative Southern Democrats in its explanation of the Cold War era’s origins. The New Deal coalition, a political alliance that governed the country from the 1930s to the 1960s, included African Americans, Jews and labor leaders, along with white racist Southerners. But it was the Southerners who held much more sway than previously acknowledged. While they had backed early relief and reform efforts in the 1930s, by the end of WWII they were suspicious of reform and eager to back a hawkish, anti-Soviet foreign policy. For Katznelson, the New Deal coalition placed Southerners at the heart of American politics, but it was an unstable arrangement that required many sacrifices, especially the rights of African Americans.29 Because of the Southern commitment to white supremacy, the growth of the welfare state during and after WWII coincided with increasing inequality for some minorities. African Americans experienced systematic discrimination when attempting to gain benefits from the GI Bill and other forms of welfare that were so important in creating the large postwar middle class.30 Similarly, Margot Canaday has shown in her award-winning book, The Straight State, that the growth of the state meant worsening conditions for homosexuals, who were increasingly singled out as a problem by the military and law enforcement.31 Attention to marginalized groups in recent scholarship on political development has created a richer understanding of the relationship between state and society in the Cold War era.32 The expansion of the state during the Cold War also helped forge a conservative movement opposed to the New Deal order.33 In 1946, voters brought Republicans back into control of Congress, which passed the restrictive labor legislation of the Taft-Hartley Act. But aside from this victory, conservatives were able to do little to roll back the growth of an interventionist government. Stalemated in national politics thanks to Eisenhower’s moderation, conservatism grew instead in local initiatives and as an intellectual project in the Cold War era. In Orange County, California, women and men organized coffee klatches to discuss communism, sex education, high taxes and other threats to suburban residents. They ran for school boards and local offices and elected anti-communists to national office, making Orange County the epicenter of political conservatism, helping elect Ronald Reagan to the governorship of California in the 1960s and to the presidency in 1980.34 As Darren Dochuk 52

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writes, in nearby Los Angeles County, fervently religious Southern transplants in evangelical and Pentecostal churches and colleges created a vibrant conservative political evangelicalism that would later join forces with the Republican party.35 The novelist-turned-philosopher Ayn Rand popularized the ideas of neoliberal economists into personal narratives that worked, according to Jennifer Burns, as a “gateway drug” for the conservative movement.36 The growth of conservative religion in the Cold War era has attracted attention in recent years. Baptized while in office, Eisenhower gave regular access to the White House for religious leaders, especially the evangelical star preacher Billy Graham.37 In the 1950s, Congress opened a prayer room, added the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance, added “In God We Trust” to currency and made the phrase into America’s official motto in what Jonathan Herzog argued “represented the deliberate and managed use of societal resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940s and 1950s.”38 The expression of religious sentiment was useful in the Cold War, as the United States fought the officially atheistic USSR. The Soviet Union’s totalitarian control of its civilian population made the country a formidable enemy. As Eisenhower argued, it would be through the reaffirmation of “the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future” that would ensure American victory in the Cold War. “In this way,” Eisenhower stated, “we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.”39 Cold War-era popular culture presented conservative religion in a harsh light. The 1955 play Inherit the Wind portrayed the 1925 fundamentalist crusade against Darwinism as an allegory for McCarthyism. Arthur Miller’s Broadway hit The Crucible likewise equated the religious extremism of the seventeenth-century Puritan witch hunts with redbaiting. Cultural critics of the era rightly perceived the link between the ardent religious belief among evangelicals and Catholics and anti-communism.40 Evangelical resistance to religious pluralism also elicited criticism. In 1947, and again in 1954, the National Association of Evangelicals worked with political allies to introduce the Christian amendment into Congress: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of all nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.” The amendment did not pass. Less appreciated by contemporary observers was the way that religion served as a conduit for liberalism, inspiring some religious activists to fight for a more pluralistic society, as David Hollinger has shown.41 Cold War America was brimming with ideological commitments, and, despite appearances, the era found little in the way of consensus in political and social life.

Demographic Changes and Social Movements Expressing faith in large-scale construction and expert planning, Americans enthusiastically rebuilt their country in ways that would have been utterly alien only a decade before the Cold War era. Politicians and business leaders joined forces to redesign cities, develop entirely new areas of the country and connect vast distances by freeways. From the United Nations building, which introduced the “international style” to the United States, to Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village, New York City led the way in urban redevelopment.42 Thirty miles east of New York, the suburb of Levittown, NY lent its name to hundreds of “Levittowns” constructed across the country after WWII. Buoyed by the availability of cheap mortgages guaranteed by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the G. I. Bill) and earlier New Deal reforms, Levitt and Sons used mass-production techniques to construct more than 17,000 affordable, single-family homes in this suburb between 1946 to 1961. Suburban living combined with economic prosperity spurred a consumer culture centered on the newly created suburban shopping mall, which sold cars, lawnmowers, air conditioners, furniture and other indemand goods far away from downtowns.43 The big story of suburbanization, however, was in the stretch of land running from Florida to California, which became known as the Sunbelt. In Lakewood, California, the 17,500 homes built between 1949 and 1953 were immortalized by photographer William A. Garnett in Life magazine as 53

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a feat of human ingenuity. In Arizona, the city of Phoenix experienced tremendous growth—from about 65,000 in 1940 to over 400,000 by 1960—thanks partly to the availability of residential air conditioning units after World War II. Sunbelt metropolises also grew because of federal subsidies, non-unionized cheap labor and low taxes, inspiring a conservative political movement that defended these arrangements. As Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk argue, a new transregional nexus of ideology and institution building did indeed transpire along the southern section of the country, thus uniting citizens from South Carolina and Southern California, Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, and San Diego, behind a shared economic, cultural, and political vision.44 Sunbelt cities and their suburbs grew at the expense of Northern cities in the manufacturing belt, which began experiencing depopulation and loss of jobs in the 1950s. City dwellers poured into the suburbs, a move enabled by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created an interstate highway system that largely bypassed city centers and made it easier to avoid urban areas entirely when traveling from suburb to suburb. Factories suburbanized too or relocated operations to the Sunbelt. As a result, the population of cities like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Chicago shrank, cities lost tax revenue and the region gained the moniker “Rust Belt” because of the many closed factories. Suburbs were sites that enacted the major American trends of the postwar years.45 Suburbs housed a generation of American families that got married younger, had more children and stayed married more often than any other generation in the twentieth century.46 Historians of gender have shown that as working life during the Cold War era became increasingly bureaucratized, especially in white-collar work, which made up a majority of non-agricultural jobs in the 1950s, men saw the home as a place to act out their desire for individualism.47 As Elizabeth Fraterrigo showed, Playboy magazine, which began publication in 1953, expressed male dissatisfaction with middle-class domesticity.48 Turning from the now well-documented phenomenon of suburbanization,49 historians have recently taken an interest in other developments, such as those at the border between suburb and wilderness,50 and in the secretive atomic cities. In her beautifully rendered portrait of Hanford, Washington and a remarkably similar Soviet nuclear city half way across the world, Kate Brown showed that “as the Cold War promises of affluence, upward mobility and the freedom to consume materialized in [both cities], anxious residents gradually came to trust their leaders, the safety of their plants and the rightness of their national cause.”51 The promise of a better domestic life as compensation for the hardships and anxieties of Cold War America was most acute in atomic cities but was present in towns from coast to coast. The civil rights movement has also received renewed attention from historians. Traditionally, the story of the civil rights movement made mention of the events of WWII but began in earnest with the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.52 The following year, Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was brutally murdered in Mississippi. His family’s decision to hold an open casket funeral that displayed the boy’s mutilated body set off a firestorm of protest against the inhumanity of Jim Crow. At the end of 1955, NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, which led to her arrest and to a long boycott of city transit. The events catapulted the young preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. into a leadership role in the civil rights struggle. The Brown decision and the activism of black clergy spurred massive resistance by southern whites. White Citizens Councils appeared across the South, led by politicians who pledged to defend segregation with all the means at their disposal, including the use of law enforcement and the political terrorism of the recently revived Ku Klux Klan. To them, the civil rights movement was communistinspired subversion. In 1957, Little Rock Central High School became a major symbol of white intransigence. The governor of Arkansas refused orders to integrate the school and went so far as to mobilize the National Guard to prevent black students from entering. Eisenhower reluctantly 54

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intervened on the side of federal courts and nationalized the Guard, allowing the first nine African American students—dubbed the “Little Rock Nine”—to attend the school. But continued resistance led to the closing of all public schools in Little Rock for the 1958–59 school year.53 Although the fight against Jim Crow had clearly begun, it would not be until the 1960s that an effective social movement and the passage of federal legislation would end legal segregation in the South. More recently, historians have embraced the notion of a “Long Civil Rights movement,” which looks at a longer chronology and is less triumphant than older civil rights narratives.54 These scholars argue that civil rights and the New Deal order rose and fell together between the 1930s and 1960s. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, for example, emphasized the role of the Communist Party in the 1930s and other radical actors that have been long ignored by historians. She argued that in this broader context, the struggle for civil rights looks “less like a product of the Cold War and more like a casualty.”55 Although widely accepted among historians, the “Long Civil Rights movement” has its critics, who call for great attention to differences and disagreements among antiracist groups. As Eric Arnesen put it, the framework involves “collapsing chronological boundaries, blurring the differences between very different organizations, approaches and strategies, and reducing the heterogeneity of black protest politics into a chronologically expansive phenomenon known as the ‘black freedom movement.’”56 While the outlines of the civil rights movement in the South are well-established, the story of the African American struggle for justice in the North has been explored only recently.57 Histories of black antiracist activism in northern cities, helpfully synthesized in Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty, paint a complicated picture, one less optimistic than the narrative of victory against Jim Crow further South.58 In places like Chicago, New York and Boston, African Americans could vote and had fewer legal restrictions than in the Jim Crow South. For these reasons Northern activists concentrated on economic rights, like access to better housing and decent jobs, rather than political rights. They succeeded in desegregating large swaths of urban areas, in forcing the passage of legislation requiring non-discrimination in housing and employment and in getting African Americans elected to office. Tragically, these important milestones were undermined by economic and demographic patterns that were well underway during the Cold War era. White flight and the movement of high-paying industrial jobs to the suburbs, where African Americans continued to be excluded, and to the Sunbelt ultimately left increasingly black urban centers poorer than they had been previously. While many new urban studies focus on the experiences of African Americans, historians of California have explored the relationship between a wide array of racial minorities in what Mark Brilliant called “the wide civil rights movement.”59 As Brilliant showed, once the legal restrictions on housing, jobs and marriage were nullified by courts (which happened soon after WWII in California, earlier than other parts of the country), activists clashed with one another over priorities. While the NAACP worked to desegregate schools in Los Angeles County and advocated busing, Mexican American groups opposed the policy because they advocated bilingual education, which required keeping Spanish-speaking students concentrated in a single school.

Toward the Sixties As important as the Cold War was from WWII until 1960, it is important not to treat it as a one-sizefits-all explanation for everything that occurred in those years. From the New Deal coalition to the growth of the Sunbelt, postwar developments had a multitude of causes, many reaching back to World War II and the Great Depression, if not even earlier. Looking ahead, historians have also observed that despite the conservatism encouraged by the Cold War, the 1945–60 era bred a variety of iconoclastic movements that would become important in later years. Religious liberalism paved the way for the secularization that took place in the 1960s. Civil rights groups of the 1960s built on the mobilization of the 1950s. The Ugly American and the novels of Ayn Rand criticized the complacency of the 1950s, 55

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albeit from very different perspectives. Sociologist C. Wright Mills publicly railed against what he saw as the ills of the era. In “A Letter to the New Left,” Mills attacked the wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted; the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bipartisan banality flourished. . . . But the most immediately important thing about the “end of ideology” is that it is merely a fashion, and fashions change. Already this one is on its way out.60 For a brief time, the Soviet Union and domestic communism had captivated the American imagination, reshaping American foreign policy, politics and social arrangements. At the same time, broad structural transformations, new ideas and social movements were fundamentally transforming American life. The Sixties would become famous for antiracist struggles, youth rebellions and antiwar protests, all of which competed for attention with the ongoing Soviet-American rivalry. By 1963, it was becoming clear that the Cold War as an all-engrossing phenomenon with a hold over the public imagination had come to an end.

Notes   1 Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, “Introduction,” Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.   2 For narratives of the Cold War that begin during WWII and end in 1989, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945– 2006 (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2006); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).   3 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).   4 Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).   5 “Cold War Degree Zero,” in Isaac and Bell, eds., Uncertain Empire, 19–50. For a rebuttal to Stephanson’s argument, see Odd Arne Westadt, “Exploring the Histories of the Cold War: A Pluralist Approach,” in Isaac and Bell, eds., Uncertain Empire, 51–60.   6 Telegram, George Kennan to George Marshall, February 22, 1946. Harry S. Truman Administration File, Elsey Papers, www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/6-6.pdf   7 On the earlier historiography that focused on who bore responsibility for starting the Cold War, see Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008).   8 Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind.   9 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997). See also Gaddis, The Cold War. 10 William D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 308. See also Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 11 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12 Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2012), xii. 13 Ibid., xiii. 14 “America and the World” has emerged as an aggregate term that encompasses several distinct focal points, including the desire to set the history of the United States in an international context and to diminish the importance of national borders. For earlier iterations of the trends, which often fell under the name “transnational history,” see Journal of American History, ed. David Thelen, special issue on “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 965–1307. The impetus for the transnational perspective on American history came from an earlier discussion in the same journal to understand American history from the perspective of other nations. See “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 432–542. See also Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review

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The Cold War Era 96 (October 1991): 1031–1055; Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: U.S. History in Global Perspective Since 1789 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience Into World History,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1692–1720. 15 For an introductory overview of the cultural Cold War, see “Here, There and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Culture, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine May (Hanover: University of New England Press, 2000). 16 On media, see Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On tourism, see David Churchill, “An Ambiguous Welcome: American Expatriates, National Needs and Cold War Containment,” Histoire Sociale 38, no. 73 (May 2004): 1–26; Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Rachel Snow, “Tourism and American Identity: Kodak’s Conspicuous Consumers Abroad,” Journal of American Culture 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 7–19. On food, see Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). On consumer goods, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). 17 Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism From World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 18 Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 19 Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anti-Communism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (June 2007): 75–96; Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Penny von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 20 Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 21 On an overview of social sciences in the Cold War era, see Nils Gilman, “The Cold War as Intellectual Force Field,” Modern Intellectual History 13, no. 2 (August 2016), 507–523. 22 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 6. 23 David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of anAmerican World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy From the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 24 Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 25 Charles W. Romney, Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 26 Quoted in Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 9. 27 Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). On early accounts of the era, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1949). 28 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). See also, Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, 2nd ed. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). 29 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2014). See also Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

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Gene Zubovich 30 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006); Kathleen J. Frydl, The GI Bill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 31 Alan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 32 Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government From the Founding to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Joanna L. Grisinger, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 33 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 34 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 35 Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). 36 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 37 Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 38 Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6. 39 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President Upon Signing Bill to Include the Words ‘under God’ in the Pledge to the Flag.,” June 14, 1954. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9920 40 Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 41 David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). See also Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 42 Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 43 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Daniel Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 44 Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 45 On Cold War culture, see Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 46 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Marilyn Irvin Holt,Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). 47 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 48 Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 49 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 50 Andrew Needham,Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 51 Kate Brown,Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. 52 Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 53 Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); John A. Kirk, Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007).

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The Cold War Era 54 On the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” see Kevin Boyle, “Labour, the Left, and the Long Civil Rights Movement,”Social History30, no. 3 (August 2005): 366–372; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009); Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,”Journal of American History75, no. 3 (December 1988): 786–811. 55 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. 56 Eric Arnesen, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement’,” Historically Speaking 20, no. 2 (April 2009): 32. 57 Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, With a New Preface by the Author Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 58 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009). 59 Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Phyllis Palmer, Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections Work During the Civil Rights Era (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of a Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 60 C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review 1, no. 5 (September–October 1960): 18–23.

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6 THE 1960s—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Doug Rossinow

Figure 6.1 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at an antiwar demonstration in New York, 1967. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–111165.

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President John F. Kennedy was murdered in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968. Nonviolent protesters moved the U.S. government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, destroying essential elements in America’s apartheid system of white supremacy. The federal government pursued a daring program of welfare state-­building unlike anything since the 1930s. A frustrated war effort in Southeast Asia brought uncounted masses into the streets to protest, sparked violent clashes between dissidents and police and tore apart a presidency and a political party. Millions of the nation’s youth pursued radical experiments in living, rejecting the cultural mainstream. This litany of dramatic developments shapes the public memory of that much-discussed era in American life, the 1960s—often simply “the Sixties.” It was the remarkable clustering of so many big events that made the era feel epochal to millions who lived through it. But so did the perception that genuine transformations, of society and of personal life—usually in an egalitarian or anti-establishment direction—were imminent. Some Americans resisted such prospects of transformation; the Sixties were an era of sharp conflict. But opponents of transformation shared in the belief that a host of jolting changes, upsetting to accustomed patterns of social relations, were upon them. To Americans who found the era exhilarating, it seemed that long-suppressed grievances and yearnings were bursting through the surface of their lives and demanding redress or fulfillment. Change came both from the top down and the bottom up. The two dominant developments in public life in the 1960s were the ascent of the African American freedom movement and the American war in Vietnam. These two phenomena framed, shaped and guided much else in the American experience of the time. Political liberals, at the helm of the nation and of a U.S.-centered international alliance for much of the decade, tried to quell the rising tide of revolutionary nationalism in the world’s poorer countries; this determination produced a massive international conflict. Anything but egalitarian, this drive for global control was the great authoritarian exception among the leading catalysts of change in the 1960s. Warfare abroad ensnared the liberals’ ambitious agenda of domestic reform and ultimately helped to destabilize America itself, feeding a tide of civic protest that had begun in the African American movement. Today, a true consensus exists among historians that the black movement was crucial for the whole development of American life in the 1960s—the hand that uncorked a vessel containing highly explosive content. That movement made enormous strides in the middle years of the decade. It also disclosed possibilities of mobilization against inequalities and abuses of power—in every walk of life— that previously had been unimaginable for most Americans. It entailed powerful assertions of group pride among African Americans, signified with the abandonment of the previously respectable term Negro and its replacement with black or Black, and other groups that long had suffered dispossession, exclusion and hatred. A somewhat distinct youth movement, largely white and middle-class in basis, often criticizing the entire cultural, social or political system, took many different forms in the 1960s: leftist politics, a quest for heightened consciousness and efforts at living more simply or ecstatically. For all rebel movements during the Sixties era, the black struggle remained the gold standard for asserting the efficacy of direct action, which meant disrupting business as usual by “putting your body on the line,” and the validity of criticizing America’s elites. Conservative Americans doggedly organized to push back against all of these protest movements and against the liberal toleration that conservatives thought had enabled them. They did so in ways that borrowed from the spirit of the 1960s, presenting themselves as insurgents against a liberal establishment. Libertarian conservatives rose up inside the Republican Party in the 1960–64 years, pressing toward the nomination of their man, Barry Goldwater, for the presidency. Goldwater’s calamitous run against Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 produced huge liberal victories—Democrats had enormous majorities in Congress in 1965–66, just at the time when liberals in the party were reaching the top rungs of leadership. Johnson used this moment masterfully to get his “Great Society” 61

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program of enhanced social insurance, civic inclusion and improvement of the quality of life in America enacted into law. But the liberal dominion did not last long. By 1967, after Republicans recovered ground in the 1966 congressional elections and African Americans in many northern cities rioted in protest against their continuing experience of oppression, liberals saw themselves besieged from both right and left, from the top and the bottom. But liberal elites helped to undo themselves, less through permissiveness or an unwillingness to share power and privilege than by their stubborn commitment to an excessive, worldwide counterrevolutionary militarism. The rise of the black challenge to white supremacy was also shattering for the Democratic coalition, which was led by liberals in the 1960s but which always had required the support of openly racist whites around the country. However, liberals could not have averted this challenge; it was thrust on them from below. The Vietnam disaster, in contrast, was theirs by choice (no matter how often they told themselves otherwise). By the late 1960s, conservatives were in position to wrest political power from the liberals. Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected president in 1968 in a close election over Hubert Humphrey, who epitomized the era’s Democratic Party liberalism in all its facets. Without the conflict over the war, Humphrey would have won.1 Instead, conservatives and moderates held the presidency for the following forty years.

Embracing Disruption: Efforts at Synthesis Historians who first sought to tell the story of the American Sixties as a whole related a tale of the political center’s disintegration. The most influential of these was The Unraveling of America, by Allen Matusow, which argued that liberals made enemies all around with half-measures aimed at alleviating poverty and a growth strategy that crowded out private investment.2 Later, Terry Anderson emphasized the moral wholesomeness of the social protest movements of the era and eschewed high political history.3 David Farber brought bottom-up and top-down history together, as did Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, in their widely used college text. These later syntheses underlined the progressive changes of the 1960s, stressing the democratic value of a new multiplicity of voices in American public life, rather than lamenting the disruption of a repressive and mythical unity. Nonetheless, these narratives—with their generally liberal viewpoint—regretted the rising fortunes of the political right at the end of the 1960s, as conservatives capitalized on a backlash against the militancy of the era and on disarray within the Democratic coalition.4 Few authors attempted syntheses of the era from either a conservative or a radical left viewpoint, although Kenneth Heineman made a start toward the first with a provocative survey of youth protest and Robert Buzzanco made a game effort at the second.5 A very different kind of synthesis, of intellectual history, came from Howard Brick’s Age of Contradiction, a work of stunning reach and depth.6 Two big ideas circulated in recent years among historians who sought to synthesize new narratives of Sixties America as a whole. These are the “long Sixties” and the “movement of movements.” Arthur Marwick’s large work of transnational history, The Sixties, which started its story in 1958 and ended in 1974, introduced the concept of the long Sixties.7 The social movements of the Sixties, and also the newfound affluence that Marwick saw as an essential condition for those insurgencies, clearly were not bounded by the 1960–70 years, so Marwick’s concept seemed sensible. Still, the hazard remains of stretching the Sixties so far as to make the concept meaningless. The Sixties were shaped by a sense of rare opportunities for social breakthrough. That sense—thrilling to some, frightening to others, sometimes exaggerated—had not always been present and did not last forever. Van Gosse, in a series of works including Rethinking the New Left, argued that the insurgencies of the era should be seen as components in a movement of movements, a broad push to democratize American life and open it to radical perspectives.8 There is value in this idea as well, although Gosse placed a fly in the ointment when he asserted that this mega-movement should be called the New Left. Activists of color in the 1960s surely would have rejected this notion, as everyone 62

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at that time understood the New Left to mean the young white left, and as the black and brown movements, as well as radical feminists, forcefully asserted their independence of the white left by the late 1960s. That independence was essential to their identities. Max Elbaum’s concept of “the Radical Internationalism of 1968” and Cynthia Young’s of “the U.S. Third World Left,” both of which stressed the ardent sympathy for social revolution in the Global South among young North American activists in the late Sixties, avoided this problem, since they did not equate these broad formations with the New Left.9

Challenges from Below: Recognition and Intersection The powerful flow of new scholarship on the African American movement shifted emphasis, in the early twenty-first century, in several ways: from a quest for social unity to demands for recognition of distinctive identities; from the special character of the 1960s to a longer chronological framing; and from historical and ethical idealism to a new materialism. An outpouring of work on the Black Power component of the African American movement, and a remarkable burst of works on the Black Panther Party (BPP) in particular, embodied these tendencies.10 All the elements associated with Black Power—closely linked, in earlier scholarship, to the post-1965 years and to the urban North—now appeared pervasive in the black movement. Scholars repeatedly rebutted conventional distinctions between the southern and northern movements, between segregation in law and white domination in practice and between the early and the late Sixties. Thomas Jackson’s From Civil Rights to Human Rights convincingly established Martin Luther King, Jr.’s twin commitment to democratic socialism and Christian radical nonviolence. But of these values, other 1960s historians appeared interested almost solely in the question of economic redistribution, not in what they deemed, perhaps, a sentimental doctrine of justice through aggressive love.11 Key works initiated these interpretive developments. Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams described a long history of black diaspora radicalism, both nationalist and leftist, in U.S. history. These were the primary intellectual sources of political inspiration that recent scholars treated seriously. Thomas Sugrue’s brilliantly influential study of post-1945 Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, implicitly located 1960s urban rebellions as responses to long-term capital abandonment and structural white racism. Robert Self, in American Babylon, made those implications explicit with his remarkably concrete geography of white disinvestment from Oakland, the city where the BPP started in 1966. Self narrated the Panthers’ rise as a kind of climax of African American self-defense in a political and economic sense. Timothy Tyson’s biography of Robert Williams, a champion of armed self-defense and leftist internationalism at the dawn of the 1960s, attacked the old narrative of a nonviolent, racetranscendent civil rights movement supplanted by disenchanted gun-toting Black Power radicals only in the late Sixties.12 The anchoring of 1960s militancy in long-term black mobilization for economic equity received support from other studies, including Matthew Countryman’s work on Philadelphia, Martha Biondi’s on New York and Patrick Jones’s on Milwaukee. Sugrue brought the emphasis on economic demands full circle with his narrative of the northern black struggle during the whole post-1945 era, Sweet Land of Liberty.13 These historians generally saw Black Power-themed organizing as part of the “long civil rights movement,” in which African American activists worked for economic opportunity and political rights together—the “jobs and freedom” that formed the explicit call of the famous 1963 March on Washington.14 They did not see Black Power as a radical departure from black tradition. Peniel Joseph, however, with a subtly different view, viewed Black Power as an independent political lineage in African American life.15 A smaller number of works scrutinized struggles over power so material as to be elemental. Danielle McGuire went far toward recasting the movement with her riveting account of persistent battles against the rape of black women by white men, At the Dark End of the Street. Jason Sokol’s history of 63

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white southerners amid the black struggle detailed, from a different vantage point, the recalibration of power relations, often of a highly personal nature, between white and black that comprised a crucial part of this epic story.16 The intense interest in the Panthers united the themes of armed self-defense and demands for recognition of identity. Some works on this topic were particularly important. Donna Murch, in her probing and theoretically knowing study, Living for the City, got the real story of the Panthers’ social origins, showing how they derived from the Great Migration out of the South and emerged from expanding institutions of higher learning in the metropolis.17 Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, in Black Against Empire, provided the first scholarly overview of the BPP’s history and argued the Panthers were armed revolutionaries. They provided a compelling explanation for the BPP’s decline after 1969, identifying the political system’s capacity to reform and to offer material concessions to African Americans (through affirmative action and public employment, for example) and the resulting loss of mass support for insurrection, rather than violent state repression, as the pivotal developments. Militant movements among other peoples of color in the Sixties received new analysis. Lorena Oropeza’s study of complex, ambivalent Chicano responses to the U.S. Vietnam War was joined by Making Aztlán, authored by Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Irene Vásquez, a fresh narrative of Chicanismo. Daryl Maeda’s work, Chains of Babylon, showed how Americans of Japanese, Chinese and Filipino heritage came together to form a highly politicized, anti-imperialist Asian American panethnicity in the cauldron of the Vietnam era. Earlier historians already had outlined the history of militant Native American activism in this period, mainly concerning the American Indian Movement (AIM). But new work moved the scholarly focus on Native activism away from AIM and toward less spectacular groups like the National Indian Youth Council, which struggled for full participation in American society on the basis of sovereignty.18 The scholarship on race-based organizing underlined the intersections and coalitions that these different movements created, for example among activists of color in the unmatched, nearly fivemonth student strike against a conservative administration at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in 1968–69. Recent scholarship placed SFSU, brimful of first-in-their-family college students, alongside elite schools like Columbia and the University of California-Berkeley in a reworked narrative of Sixties student radicalism.19 In Kelley’s vein, other scholars traced the international connections of activists of color, mainly African Americans.20 Further intersections came clear not only through coalitions but in the multiple identities of individuals and groups, particularly evident in the feminist organizing that rose within several race-based movements in the late 1960s. While an earlier generation of historians had narrated the emergence of women’s liberation among white women, more recent scholars like Kimberly Springer and Maylei Blackwell described African American women and Latinas asserting their own independent brands of feminism.21 Coalitions of the diverse strands of feminism took some time to form, as women of color demanded recognition of their distinctive social positions that was not immediately forthcoming from white feminists. But form they did.22 Wendy Kline detailed the involvement of feminists in issues of health care and reproductive rights, central concerns of the feminist movement that previous historians had neglected.23 Gay women and men—whose very existence was denied and who were openly made the objects of hate and ridicule in “polite” society—already had begun to demand recognition and respect when the 1960s began. But some in their number enacted a more militant and radical stance in the deeply rebellious environment of the late Sixties. Scholarship on this formative era in the gay liberation movement proceeded somewhat fitfully; Marc Stein’s superb study of Philadelphia remained a model. But Timothy Stewart-Winter’s work on Chicago added further layers of knowledge to this uprising and its multiple forms.24 The major emphasis of recent original scholarship on the white left of the 1960s was on that movement’s international connections, particularly with counterparts in the Federal Republic of Germany, 64

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who mirrored the anti-imperialism and occasional use of violence among U.S. radicals.25 Few works dove into the less expressly political counterculture of the era, although W. J. Rorabaugh treated a major piece of that picture seriously in American Hippies.26 Some of the outstanding Sixties scholarship of recent times focused on the right, not the left. Moving outside of party history, Lisa McGirr began a cycle of landmark social histories of postwar conservatism with her study of evangelical and libertarian activists in southern California.27 Like historians of black militancy, McGirr and others pointed toward the political collisions of the Sixties era as the culmination of longer-term processes. Kevin Kruse stressed the continuity of suburban residential segregation with preexisting traditions of white supremacy in and around Atlanta, according to local boosters “the city too busy to hate.” Matthew Lassiter, in a powerfully conceived work, argued that the most durable methods of maintaining segregation were suburban strategies resting on a pervasive ideology of middle-class merit and racial “innocence,” not the “massive resistance” to desegregation promoted by southern white firebrands. Joseph Crespino mapped the strategies of conservatives in Mississippi, the most extreme of segregationist states through the mid-Sixties, showing how whites there retooled their commitment to racial hierarchy to bring it into alliance with other, more viable forms of political conservatism, focused on foreign policy and the social role of Christianity.28 These books began to explain how the conservative political victories of the late 1960s proved the start of lasting conservative power.

Vietnam: Choice, Necessity and Dissent The strategic train-wreck of the American war in Vietnam has fascinated historians, who have found it impossible not to stare at the damage and ask how it might have been avoided. Earlier cohorts of scholars clarified the forces that moved U.S. leaders, from President Harry S. Truman through Nixon, to commit their country to a Cold War crusade against communist revolution in a remote land. Recent historians have reintroduced a sharp sense of choice or contingency to the fateful decisions to escalate under Presidents Kennedy, who made Vietnam a shooting war for American soldiers, and Johnson, who turned it into a full-blown conventional land and air war between late 1963 and early 1965. Kennedy was determined to find ways to beat back the socialist surge sweeping Third World countries in the early 1960s, from Cuba to Guyana to Vietnam. But he did not choose the same methods everywhere. Johnson was also violently intolerant of independent nationalism in the Global South. Yet we now know that he was unenthusiastic about enlarging the war in Vietnam. So questions linger about why Kennedy and Johnson opted for the dramatic widening of warfare there. Two works by leading historians of recent years stand out. Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War recovered a world of previously ignored skepticism about escalation, often publicly expressed, among American elites and the closest U.S. allies during the period of Johnson’s key decision making. Highly respected commentators and political leaders outlined sharp doubts about the strategic importance of Vietnam. The American public did not clamor for the war. Therefore Logevall held Johnson fully to account, refusing to view the president as a captive of circumstance.29 Andrew Preston, in The War Council, told the story of the National Security Council’s growing influence over U.S. foreign policy under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, elevated by Kennedy and retained by Johnson.30 Preston, too, attributed great power to the individuals at the top of the pyramid during America’s supposed Augustan age. He narrated a debacle resulting from a new concentration of unaccountable power, a process in which Kennedy was at least as culpable as Johnson. Neither of these historians saw Kennedy or Johnson as the dupe of cannier subordinates—a thesis that marred the otherwise arresting argument of Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance, another important recent work. Porter viewed the strategic supremacy of the United States in the 1960s as the key to understanding U.S. leaders’ foolhardiness in launching a huge imperial expedition in Vietnam.31 But the intellectual day was won, with lasting 65

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effect, by notions of the responsibility of the most high and powerful, not of the irresistible force of structures, intellectual or strategic. The U.S. effort’s poor battlefield results and the growing American death count stimulated great unrest in America. By the time Nixon became president and recommitted America to a war that many had thought he would de-escalate quickly, the antiwar movement far exceeded the size of any other protest movement of the Sixties era. Americans of all generations and races and of many political stripes took to the streets to oppose an ongoing war by their government, something unthinkable during the Korean War, and clearly a reflection of newly lightened inhibitions against defying authority. The intensifying militancy of a segment of the antiwar movement (which was simultaneously becoming more moderate as it grew) amped up the fierceness of all the other dissident political movements, which increasingly saw themselves at war with an empire run amok. The most important new work on the antiwar movement in recent years concerned connections between diverse mobilizations, sometimes across borders. Simon Hall explored the links between the black movement and the antiwar movement in new detail. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu brought a sophisticated consideration of racial and gender identities, with their inherent power dynamics, together with a sympathetic narrative of North Americans seeking to support Vietnamese revolutionaries.32

The Great Society: Liberal Achievement, Liberal Failure The broader historiography of federal policy and governance in the 1960s became more active after 2000, with historians, perhaps, looking wistfully at the vaulting ambition of an earlier era. Summations of the Johnson government came from Robert Dallek, who gave the Texan many high marks while noting his character defects; Julian Zelizer, who depicted the Great Society as an heroic legislative feat; and Randall Woods, who returned to a more mixed evaluation—akin to the earlier one of Matusow, emphasizing the unforeseen difficulties and contradictions of some liberal social-welfare measures.33 G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot argued that the impetus for social change in the Sixties came from the top down as much as from the bottom up. So did John Skrentny’s longerterm view of evolving civil rights law in The Minority Rights Revolution.34 Hugh Davis Graham’s earlier book The Civil Rights Era, which retained lasting authority, rendered affirmative action policies, as they emerged mainly under Johnson and Nixon, a departure from the simple anti-discrimination Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nancy MacLean’s Freedom Is Not Enough, taking a broader view of workplace anti-discrimination policies relating to gender as well as race, sharply disagreed, depicting affirmative action as a necessary method of enforcing the promises of 1964 against recalcitrant employers (and unions).35 The emphasis on grassroots pressure as the cause of the Voting Rights Act specifically was renewed in Gary May’s Bending Toward Justice.36 The “War on Poverty,” housed under Johnson within the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), was an area of keen interest. Here, top-down and bottom-up history began to converge. Most recent work on the conception and implementation of antipoverty policy was highly critical, mainly from the left. Jennifer Mittelstadt, Marisa Chappell and Daniel Geary laid bare policy biases against unmarried women of color in particular.37 A set of studies of the welfare rights movement that arose in the late 1960s—by Premilla Nadasen, Annelise Orleck and Felicia Kornbluh—embodied the progressive critique in the poor women who organized to demand fuller government assistance.38 All of this scholarship displaced the earlier work by Gareth Davies, a product of the 1990s, which had seen progressive reformers succeed in advancing the idea of a government-guaranteed income by the early 1970s, but had viewed that achievement rather critically.39 Ground-level studies of War on Poverty efforts yielded complex, ambivalent verdicts. They showed the Community Action Programs (CAPs) that were part of the OEO to be training grounds for a new generation of activists among the poor, even if these efforts lacked the resources needed to eliminate poverty. Noel Cazenave vindicated the CAPs in general, seeing them as part of a welcome surge in 66

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true civic participation in Sixties America. Absorbing stories emerged from the fine-grained, regional or local studies by Kent Germany (on New Orleans), Thomas Kiffmeyer (on Appalachia), Robert Bauman (on Los Angeles), William Clayson (on Texas) and Robert Korstad and James Leloudis (on North Carolina efforts separate from the OEO).40 Bauman’s and Clayson’s works were notable for their comparative treatments of poor black and Latina/o communities’ experiences. Bauman emphasized the mounting frustrations among the urban poor that fed the outbreak of rioting in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965. All of these works revealed the conservative political blockages to a true war against poverty—obstacles that came from Democrats and Republicans. And the OEO’s work was hobbled by the politically convenient illusion that job training would avert the need to redistribute either jobs or money if poverty were to be vanquished. Poverty in America was reduced impressively during the Johnson-Nixon years, but this was due to increased welfare spending and new job creation, not to the OEO’s efforts. Much of the American public—and many policymakers—during the 1960s and after saw poverty and welfare in highly racialized terms, conflating the War on Poverty with efforts to mollify restive urban black populations (despite the reality that most poor Americans, and most welfare recipients, were white). White Americans also associated social unrest with street crime, which increased sharply in the 1960s and which also was refracted, to many Americans, through the lenses of race and class. Michael Flamm regretted that Sixties liberals could not cope with the crime issue and that it undermined them politically. Elizabeth Hinton and Michael Javen Fortner, in different ways, tracked the policy movement away from ameliorative antipoverty efforts and toward more intensive policing and incarceration at the end of the long Sixties. Hinton showed that the roots of the later prison boom reach further back than many had thought. Fortner, controversially, argued that African Americans, especially victimized by crime, supported a “war on crime” in large numbers.41 Some recent works point to new ways of telling the story of the Sixties. Like the local studies of the War on Poverty, these scholarly models seek to overcome the divide between top-down and bottomup history. Robert Self offered a new master narrative of American politics from the 1960s through the 1980s, arguing that “culture wars” over permissible gender roles and proper family life reshaped partisan competition, galvanizing conservatives into a forceful ruling coalition hostile to gender equality and plurality. Jonathan Bell, in a pioneering study of California, for the first time told the story of idealistic, programmatically coherent liberal activists in the Democratic Party, counterparts to the movement/party figures now familiar from the historiography of conservatism and the GOP. Going beyond tired notions of Great Society liberals as Washington bureaucrats alienated from grassroots activists, Bell explored the middle ranges of political life on the near left.42 In a third work, Summer in the City, a group of historians examined the tumultuous tenure of liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay of New York City. With a focus on one city, they explored the interactions of bureaucracy, politics, economics and social forces. Future historians of Sixties America may, in one way or another, continue to map intersections and convergences.

Explanations The rapidly growing work on Sixties America reflected great energies invested in detailed investigation of a wide array of topics. The most recent syntheses came before this latest generation of monographic studies. Not only is there no truly current synthesis of the era, but also very rare are efforts to explain the startling intersection of forces that produced such a turbulent phase of American life. At one time, sociologists in particular made repeated efforts to explain the Sixties, although usually they pursued the causes of either the African American movement or the (white) New Left alone, not of the era’s general upheaval.43 Two brave scholars in recent years have turned to the question of explaining the Sixties, offering very different answers. First, Jeremi Suri brought Sixties reform and radicalism together under the 67

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heading of an “international counterculture,” one that took by storm most of the wealthiest countries in the world in the 1960s. Suri saw the era’s initiatives for change resulting from the outsized promises of social betterment that the Cold War struggle with communism prompted leaders of “the West” to make to their peoples. Liberal capitalist elites pledged both material comfort and personal fulfillment as the rewards of life under their system. However, some in the liberal world turned to revolutionary creeds in the late Sixties. But Suri saw that radicalism as an expression of disappointment with the inflated promises, and the repressive violence in Vietnam and other places, of liberal capitalism, not as an invasion by foreign ideology dispatched from Communist states abroad.44 Next, Tor Egil Førland pronounced familiar descriptions of the Sixties as an era of historic uprisings unconvincing. He dismissed perceptions that the generation of the 1960s was more rebellious or radical than those before or after. It was simply a very big generation, he argued. Førland concluded, in a striking departure from conventional wisdom, that there is little special for historians to explain in the 1960s. The sheer scale of the young who crowded universities and job markets as they entered adulthood in the Sixties put pressure on systems of all kinds, and the “usual suspects” among this abnormally large generation, once they began to rebel, eventually reached a kind of tipping point that produced an avalanche of protest. To Førland, ideas, morals or ideologies had nothing to do with why the Sixties happened.45 The 1960s did mark the apogee of an America both imperial and liberal in its reigning ideology, and it also was a time when institutions raced to expand and keep up with soaring demands for meaningful participation and satisfaction. The pressures on the system were great—in part reflecting the inadequacy of liberal reform, in part expressing the dramatic achievements of the liberal capitalist system and the hopes for speedy change that these successes bred, in part embodying the clash between imperial power of unprecedented reach and struggles for freedom among the world’s dispossessed. All these pressures, and the amazing hopes for transformation that both caused and resulted from them, were parts of the Sixties.

Notes   1 See Walter LaFeber, The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).   2 Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).   3 Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).   4 David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).   5 Kenneth J. Heineman, Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999).   6 Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Boston: Twayne, 1998).   7 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958—c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).   8 Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).   9 Max Elbaum, “What Legacy the Radical Internationalism of 1968?” Radical History Review no. 82 (Winter 2002): 37–64; Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Power, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 10 Between 1998 and 2009, at least five anthologies of new scholarship on the BPP appeared. 11 Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), was an outstanding exception to the recent neglect of religion.

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The 1960s 12 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Radical Black Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 13 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Patrick D. Jones, The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). 14 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. 15 Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006). 16 Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 17 Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 18 Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Irene Vásquez, Making Aztlán: Ideology and Culture of the Chicano and Chicana Movement, 1966–1977 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014); Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Bradley G. Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). 19 Maeda, Chains of Babylon. On southern California see Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 20 Fanon Che Wilkins, “Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950–1965,” Radical History Review no. 95 (Spring 2006): 191–210; Anne-Marie Angelo, “The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic,” Radical History Review no. 103 (Winter 2009): 17–35; Stephen Tuck, The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 21 Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). The earlier narrative was described most fully in Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 22 See Stephanie Gilmore, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 23 Wendy Kline, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 24 Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Timothy Winter-Stewart, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 25 Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 26 W. J. Rorabaugh, American Hippies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 27 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 28 Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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Doug Rossinow 29 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 30 Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 31 Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 32 Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 33 Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin Press, 2015); Randall B. Woods, Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 34 G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). 35 Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 36 Gary May, Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 37 Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 38 Pamela Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 39 Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). 40 Noel Cazenave, Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Kent B. Germany, New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Thomas Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); William S. Clayson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 41 Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 42 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Jonathan Bell, California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Joseph P. Viteritti, ed., Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 43 On the black movement see Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), and on the white movement, George R. Vickers, The Formation of the New Left: The Early Years (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975). 44 Jeremi Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975,” American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 45–68; Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) offered a global analysis of the era’s youth revolt, and pointed specifically at expanding university education around the world as the seedbed for the rebellion against Cold War authorities. 45 Tor Egil Førland, “Cutting the Sixties Down to Size: Conceptualizing, Historicizing, Explaining,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 125–148.

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7 THE 1970s—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Kirsten Swinth

Figure 7.1 Women office workers’ demonstration, 1976. Photograph by Bettye Lane. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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From its opening weeks, 1973 seemed like an extraordinary year to Americans living through it. The “peace with honor” that President Nixon had promised to end the dozen years’ war in Vietnam reached a skeptical American public. Signed on January 27, the Paris Peace Accords concluded a war that 60 percent of Americans considered a mistake. By May 18, a deepening Watergate crisis held the country in its grip with Congressional hearings in which details of Nixon administration malfeasance in the 1972 election spilled out in 250 hours of hearings, aired gavel-to-gavel on public television. Early in the fall, in response to American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war, ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced an oil embargo of the United States. “An Energy Pearl Harbor” was how one top Nixon advisor characterized it.1 Vietnam. Watergate. Oil crisis. This trifecta of painful comeuppance for the United States hit hard then and still launches most histories of the 1970s. But 1973 represented a turning point for much more than these three familiar events. Historians now read the tea leaves of the decade through a wide-ranging set of that year’s events. The Supreme Court handed down its decision declaring a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade on January 22. The vibrant women’s movement of the decade seemed unstoppable in 1973. Late in the year, movements for gay and lesbian liberation similarly gained an important victory when the American Psychiatric Association struck homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. On February 27, activists in the American Indian Movement occupied the village of Wounded Knee on the Sioux Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota to protest federal Indian policy. Wounded Knee’s occupation was emblematic of what historians now call the long civil rights movement, and the 1970s witnessed a wide array of rights activism more often associated with the 1960s. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 as well, and liberalism appeared entrenched in American society and politics. Yet, just months earlier President Nixon had founded the Drug Enforcement Administration, a cornerstone of the emerging system of mass incarceration. Calls for “law and order” invigorated rising conservative activism. The Business Roundtable, a business lobbying group founded in 1973, represented another building block of an expanding conservative network. Christian social conservatives staked their claim to this coalition in 1973 too: Televangelist Jim Bakker incorporated Trinity Broadcasting, the root of his burgeoning Christian media empire. Crosscurrents of liberalism and conservatism roiled Americans’ 1973, just as they would throughout the decade. The earliest interpretations of the decade, however, would have likely pointed to a different happening of 1973: creation of The Foundation for the Realization of Man. The foundation was the pet project of Werner Erhard, impresario of est—Erhard Seminars Training—a highly popular, therapeutic self-realization workshop. For those first seeking to make sense of the 1970s, writer Tom Wolfe’s sardonic account of an est training gave the decade its earliest moniker: “Me Decade.” Writing for New York magazine in 1976, Wolfe characterized Americans in the decade turning inward, toward self-exploration and away from the political engagement and pursuit of social change that had been the hallmark of the 1960s.2 Historians have spent much of the last several decades seeking to dislodge Wolfe’s catchy characterization.3 They have proposed three alternative interpretations. The first resurrects the familiar trio of Vietnam, Watergate and oil crisis to characterize the 1970s as a decade of crisis. A second alternative reading of the decade sees it as the right’s decade. These scholars trace conservatism’s resurgence in politics, thought and culture, a triumph crowned by Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980. The most recent interpretation proposes the 1970s as the pivotal decade of the second half of the twentieth century. Proponents of this explanation emphasize underlying economic transformation. An unsettled economy fed the countervailing forces of liberalism and conservatism that vied for dominance across the decade. The results, according to this reading, have shaped our own time far more than the vaunted upheaval of the 1960s or conservative revolution of the 1980s. This account,

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however, has yet to grapple fully with two topics emerging in the scholarship—reorganization of the gender and family order and the rise of mass incarceration. As two of the most far-reaching social and cultural transformations of the last fifty years, they complicate the more narrowly political and economic focus of the pivotal decade thesis.

Me Decade In “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Tom Wolfe cited two phenomena in support of his characterization of the 1970s as the decade of “Me!” First, he said, Americans had embraced a “new alchemical dream.” Rather than change dross into gold, Americans now yearned to “remak[e], remode[l], elevat[e], and polis[h]” their very selves.4 Second, he observed that the adoration of Me! represented a religious seeking, but of a particularly solipsistic kind. More leisure and more money to spend in affluent postwar America had produced not an enlightened, liberated populace, but a navelgazing pursuit of self-fulfillment. Other analysts postulated even more pathological consequences of the focus on self-realization, giving the nation itself a diagnosis of narcissism. The 1978 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations exemplified this critique. Its author, social critic Christopher Lasch, argued that Americans’ self-absorption undermined the competitive individualism essential to the nation’s success.5 According to Lasch and other commentators, that downward spiral had a cause. They blamed the left, civil rights and feminist movements for the nation’s narcissism. As Beryl Satter has pointed out, Lasch directly attacked both the Black Power and feminist movements for “encourag[ing] narcissistic self-involvement and infantile rage against authority.”6 For Lasch, a family system built on strong paternal authority molded the necessary character to thrive in a bureaucratic capitalist society. The ideas of Wolfe, Lasch and other critics stuck, and did so in part because, however reductively, they encapsulated several trends in the decade. Among them were dynamic sexual liberalism, new religious enthusiasms and flourishing therapeutic services. Sex became both increasingly visible and increasingly commodified in the 1970s. New court rulings allowed for more open distribution and display of erotic materials, and the porn industry grew dramatically. Sexual innuendo and bedroom scenes flickered across television screens, while The Joy of Sex, an up-market sex manual, became a bestseller. Peter Braunstein has documented an “adults only” erotic New York that supported flourishing straight and gay sexual scenes.7 Alternative spiritualties thrived too. Some had roots in American Mind Cure traditions—est, Arica, bioenergetics, Silva mind control, among them. Others translated Asian spiritual traditions for Western consumption. Yoga, transcendental meditation, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching all became popular. Cults and gurus attracted followers: Baba Ram Dass; Maharaj Ji of the Divine Light Mission; and Jim Jones of the tragic Peoples Temple. The diverse practices of the New Age movement, as it came to be called, shared a goal of transforming consciousness, enabling self-realization and stimulating social change through new ways of being. At the same time, psychotherapies, which had been growing since the end of World War II, attracted ever more clients. “Therapeutic culture”—the origins of which historians still debate—broadened further in the 1970, and its tenets of self-transformation widened the stream of seeking that extended from sexual pleasure to spiritual awareness.8 Recent scholars are less sure than Wolfe or Lasch that the decade’s seeking represented regression. Historians of sexuality propose a more complex rendering of the decade’s sexual adventurism, while the authors in Rethinking Therapeutic Culture seek to offer a more nuanced portrait of therapeutic culture’s role. Most significantly, however, other interpretations of the decade have discarded the cultural temperature taking of the Me Decade thesis and turned directly to the decade’s political and economic upheavals.

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Decade of Crisis This interpretation always begins with 1973. Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis are its touchstones. America’s protracted withdrawal from Vietnam painfully signaled that the nation’s unparalleled postwar global dominance was coming to an end. The energy crisis was itself an example of America’s weakening power, as oil-producing nations held the country hostage—at least in the eyes of Americans—in retribution for the country’s actions in Israel. The knock-on effects of the energy crisis stimulated economic stresses across the decade. The revelations of President Nixon’s wrongdoing in getting himself re-elected to the presidency in 1972 were, said one senator, like “a national funeral that just goes on day after day.”9 Politics descended into dysfunction. President Nixon’s promise of “peace with honor” as he withdrew the country from the Vietnam War rang hollow as publication of the Pentagon Papers (1971) and other exposés of government bumbling in the war further discredited American officials. In 1974, a Senate investigation led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho revealed decades of CIA-led covert operations that had toppled elected leaders and interfered with governments in Chile, Guatemala, Ecuador, Cuba, Indonesia and Iran. The added shock of these disclosures reinforced doubts about the righteousness and effectiveness of American Cold War campaigns, particularly on the left. At the same time, belief that the U.S. had succumbed to a “Vietnam Syndrome” of defeatism and broken will enraged conservatives and made Ronald Reagan’s promise to restore American power highly appealing at the end of the decade. Additionally, reports of American atrocities, hostility toward returning soldiers and admissions of poor morale and drug use among soldiers prolonged the social divides triggered by the antiwar movement across the decade.10 Warming relations with China, along with the overtures to Russia known as détente, sent additional confusing signals about U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, over the course of the 1970s, use of regional surrogates to tangle with the communist world replaced direct engagement by American forces. Not surprisingly, Americans wondered if anti-communism still guided the country’s foreign relations. Less certainty about the Cold War endeavor as a whole arose. In the 1970s, as Daniel J. Sargent has recently argued compellingly, “the postwar order collapsed.” A system in which two global superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—managed competing blocs gave way to unsettled jockeying in international affairs.11 New pressures developed for policymakers. Among them were growing demands to secure and protect human rights.12 The Middle East, too, presented ongoing challenges for American diplomats. The 1973 oil crisis shifted the center of gravity of American interests away from Southeast Asia and toward the Middle East. Continued conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors ensured regional instability, amidst the dawning realization of American dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Despite successful efforts by President Carter to broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt in 1979, the same year’s revolution in Iran and invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union brought additional evidence of American inability to dominate the global stage. Virulent anti-Americanism in the Iranian revolution resulted in the storming of the American embassy in November. Revolutionaries detained fifty-two American hostages for more than a year.13 The Iranian revolution spawned a renewed energy crisis, and American pocketbooks felt the direct effects of U.S. energy dependence once again. It was not just oil shocks that provided evidence that the country was deeply entangled in an international trade and monetary system that it could no longer direct. In 1971, for the first time since the Panic of 1893, the country ran a trade deficit. Then President Nixon abandoned the fixed exchange rate for the dollar, and no longer pegged it to the price of gold in 1973. With that decision the intricate financial controls that had regulated global capitalism since World War II dissolved, and the U.S. lost its dominance of the international economic system. In the end, this crisis in international economic affairs left the United States in a diminished position. “What transpired,” explains Sargent, “was not the remaking of international economic governance but its rollback,” with American leaders struggling to find their footing in unsettled terrain.14

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The 1970s also saw growing awareness that environmental problems crossed national boundaries and had complex, interrelated causes. The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring on the planet-endangering effects of the pesticide DDT energized and reshaped an environmental movement that gained further ground in the 1970s. On April 22, 1970, 20 million people turned out for events across the country in schools, parks and legislative halls to celebrate the first-ever Earth Day. Burgeoning professional environmental organizations harnessed that grassroots momentum to win major victories in the decade. Congress banned DDT in 1972. The Clean Air Act (1970) and the Federal Water Pollution Act (1972) focused on ending pollution and environmental destruction. The first science documenting climate change developed in the 1970s. The dangers of toxic waste and nuclear energy stimulated grassroots and court challenges. A waste dumping scandal at Love Canal near Niagara Falls helped spark a national Superfund Law, signed in 1980, to clean up hazardous waste sites.15 Although the environment remained one site in the early 1970s where faith in governmentled solutions to problems remained strong, environmental regulations also stimulated counter-movements. Once the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act enabled citizens to use the power of the government to limit businesses’ impact on the environment, business opposition rose and pro-business conservatives found one of their signature causes. A populist “Sagebrush Rebellion” also turned antigovernment, protesting federal ownership of land in eleven western states.16 The crisis-themed interpretation of the 1970s extends to the domestic economy, typically starting with the oil embargo and subsequent energy crises. The price of a barrel of oil increased more than tenfold over the course of the decade. Americans felt the pinch of more expensive energy even more keenly as they also faced high inflation—averaging 6.6 percent annually for the decade—and declining real wages. Unemployment was a specter haunting the decade, with unemployment rates spiking at 8.3 percent in the 1974–1975 recession, and then staying relatively high across the decade. Adding inflation and unemployment rates produced an infamous “Misery Index” that rose above 17 percent in 1975, and hit 21 percent in 1980.17 What economists have termed the “Great Compression” ended in 1973, and a new “Age of Inequality” arose in its place. For more than twenty-five years after World War II, wealth and income gaps narrowed in the U.S., but inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory and production workers peaked in 1973. The average American earner has not since reached the same earning power.18 The crisis interpretation retains its hold in historians’ analyses. There is broad agreement that international, economic and political crises shook up America in the 1970s. But where to register the crises, how deep they were and the most relevant consequences of them remain up for debate. On the world stage, scholars of foreign relations debate where it is most relevant to look for the challenges to U.S. power: In the continued proxy wars of the Cold War? In the Persian Gulf and conflict over oil? Or in the emergent paradoxes of globalization? In thinking about the crisis of the economy, this interpretation of the decade stresses the challenges of energy and oil, but others, as we will see when we examine the pivotal decade thesis, point to deindustrialization and the solidification of a postindustrial economy. The tilt of government rightward as a reaction to the decade’s crises is fairly well entrenched as an interpretation, but recent histories see not a smooth road to Reagan’s ascent, but a much bumpier, and less certain, competition between the forces of liberalism and conservatism. How the process occurred and how the right came to power are central to the second alternative interpretation of the 1970s: as the right’s decade.

The Right’s Decade Looking backward from the end of the twentieth century, this interpretation starts from the conservative ascendancy that kept Republicans dominant in American politics after Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980. Telling the story of the 1970s from this standpoint becomes one of

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explaining the right’s political triumph and liberalism’s defeat. As the editors of an early book on the right’s rise stated starkly, “When Ronald Reagan assumed office in January of 1981, an epoch in the nation’s political history came to an end. The New Deal, as a dominant order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances, died.” More recent histories have questioned the aura of inevitability around the right’s victory that these early chroniclers embraced, but all share the view that the 1970s was a key decade of political realignment that ended the order in place since the 1930s.19 For evidence that the critical decade for explaining the right’s rise is the 1970s, historians turn to a number of developments. These include the expanding political power of the suburban Sunbelt; the growth of conservative political machinery and increased visibility of free-market economic thought; the rise of both the Christian right and a “Pro-Family” movement; and the shifting identity and political allegiance of the white ethnic working class. After World War II, both people and government dollars poured into the South and West, shifting the nation’s regional geographies and economic engines. The term “Sunbelt” captures both place—the states of the South, Southwest and Southern California—and space—communities built around massive suburban growth, exploding metropolises, car culture, extensive defense industries and technology and service-oriented business. Population in these areas grew at almost twice the rate of old Rust Belt industrial centers in the North and Midwest between 1950 and 1975. Sunbelt suburbia tended to be conservative politically, animated by issues ranging from Cold War anti-communism to antibusing. White Sunbelters often saw themselves as color-blind taxpayers, homeowners and school parents, and Republicans across the decade followed Richard Nixon’s pioneering appeal to this taxpayer-homeowner-schoolparent triad to build their base.20 Conservatives also expanded the reach of their ideas in the 1970s. An expanding network of foundations and think tanks spread conservative free-market beliefs. The Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973; the Cato Institute began four years later; and the American Enterprise Institute, with roots in the 1940s, grew significantly. These organizations embraced a coordinated strategy to support conservative intellectuals, many of them part of a new group of “neoconservatives,” former liberals who critiqued liberalism and promoted the free market. On the more directly political side, singleissue organizations like the National Rifle Association joined business lobbyists in groups like the Business Roundtable and political advocacy groups like the National Conservative Political Action Committee in invigorated activism. These groups, collectively called the New Right, took their message to the public in ever more effective forms, most notably targeted direct mailing campaigns.21 The centerpiece of New Right thought was the free market. The free market represented not just an economic system. Rather, a new set of economists, conservative thinkers and political activists argued it was the best way to embody democratic freedom. Conservatives successfully entrenched a far-reaching redefinition of the market in the 1970s. They insisted that the market, with its formally impersonal and decentralized processes in comparison to interest-influenced democratic politics, allowed for genuine freedom and liberty. These concepts, labeled free-market economics by supporters and neoliberalism by critics, helped rationalize new understandings of social difference as well. “Replacing the now clearly artificial hierarchies of race and sex in the 1970s,” contends Thomas Borstelmann, “was a new hierarchy considered more natural: the sorting out of people in what were seen as their natural socioeconomic levels by the operation of the free market.” Freedom of choice in the market, unconstrained by government regulation, thus embodied both liberty and the most efficient and productive organization of capitalism. Ronald Reagan was a fervent advocate of this new outlook.22 Conservatism grew additionally in the 1970s from awakened political activism of conservative Christians. Adherence to evangelical and fundamentalist churches grew dramatically in the 1970s, leading Newsweek magazine to declare 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical.” A new Christian media empire broadened conservative Christians’ influence. Televangelists, for example, pioneered a new “electronic church” and reached millions by taking advantage of new cable and communication 76

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technologies. Not only were conservative Christians’ numbers growing, but so, too, was their political engagement. In 1979 Reverend Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority to increase the influence of conservative Christians on American politics and policy. The group, Falwell claimed, was “prolife, pro-family, pro-moral, and pro-America.” Moral Majority members and other politically active evangelicals coalesced around a set of domestic issues: school prayer, the tax status of religious schools, sex education, pornography, feminism and women’s roles, abortion and homosexuality.23 One important component of the new religious right was what came to be called the “Pro-Family” movement. Pro-Family leader Phyllis Schlafly attacked feminism and led a charge against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Anti-homosexual rights and anti-abortion activism also drew thousands to the Pro-Family cause.24 Mobilized by these issues, millions of such voters placed their hopes—and their votes—in the hands of the Republican party by the end of the decade.25 A final building block for the right’s rise in the 1970s lay in transformations within the white ethnic working class, a stalwart of the Democratic coalition since the New Deal. Starting in the early 1970s, commentators and some white working-class leaders argued that the white working class was both struggling economically and getting the short end of the stick from the government, which they believed unfairly privileged African Americans and other minorities. At the same time, many white working-class Americans repudiated the assimilationist ethos that had been dominant since World War II. A white ethnic revival made The Godfather one of the top hits of the decade and spawned festivals and celebrations of newly rediscovered (and sometimes invented) Italian, Irish and Polish heritage, along with many other nationalities.26 As class resentment and the ethnic revival drew white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party’s “big tent,” a series of hot-button issues further stoked their disaffiliation. Affirmative action, busing, crime and the supposedly unequal benefits of the War on Poverty soon topped the list.27 Often labeled the “Silent Majority”—a forgotten middle America, alienated by the radicalism of the 1960s, civil rights and liberalism in general—conservatives deliberately fueled ethnic resentment to win over these white working-class votes. The so-called Reagan Democrats, who helped secure Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, signaled the ultimate triumph of this strategy. From the perspective of this series of changes and shifting allegiances, the right’s rise can appear a sudden, yet almost inevitable, outcome of the 1970s. Recent scholarship, however, has punctured some holes in this narrative. It roots conservatism’s triumph in the long durée of its development across the twentieth century, and in fortuitous opportunities to gain ground opened up by the economic—and governmental—failings of the decade. It may be more accurate to describe an “incomplete revolution,” as Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer did. They saw in the 1970s “persistent struggle between mounting conservative political power and liberal social change.”28 The newest scholarship is also drawing attention to the strength of liberalism throughout the decade. Studying welfare activism, for example, Marisa Chappell showed the deep influence of liberals into the late 1970s in putting forward antipoverty, welfare and full-employment legislation.29 Such critiques have shaped a final interpretation of the 1970s: as the pivotal decade.

Pivotal Decade At the heart of this interpretation of the 1970s are banks—not banks in the usual Gothic-columned, heavy-doored, stony-solidity that one might imagine, but in the women of the “pink-collar ghetto” who staffed them, in the holes newly carved into granite facades for shiny metal ATM machines, and in the hard-earned dollars pouring out of their vaults into spanking-new, but astonishingly popular, money market and stock funds. This understanding of the decade focuses on a set of structural changes in the economy that came to a head in the 1970s—from women’s labor in a newly christened “postindustrial society” to technological breakthroughs and financial deregulation.30 These changes upended the relatively stable political, social and economic order of the postwar period, and 77

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destabilized labor, gender and race relations. Vibrant forces of both left and right—of liberalism and conservatism—competed across the decade to respond to the upheaval. Two things thus make the decade “pivotal” in these recent interpretations: first, the structural changes in the economy and attendant crises and, second, the highly contingent and uncertain, but prolonged and vigorous, struggle over how to respond. This account addresses the complicated crosscurrents of the decade without reading the decade’s events teleologically from either the 1960s or the 1980s. Instead, historians step back, situating the decade within long-term transformations of the last half of the twentieth century. A constellation of changes—deindustrialization and outsourcing, labor force restructuring, technology and communications revolutions, the rise of finance and increasing globalization—characterize the long-term economic shifts that came to the fore in the 1970s. Deindustrialization—the erosion of the country’s manufacturing sector—replaces oil and the energy crisis as the central economic story in this assessment of the decade. Blue-collar manufacturing jobs appeared to dissolve into thin air in the 1970s, with 32 million or more jobs lost as a result of disinvestment or relocation, much of them in manufacturing. Outsourcing—moving production to other countries—became commonplace as well. In many cases, new jobs did appear after shutdowns. But lower wages, weakened job security and unfamiliar skillsets often went hand in hand with them.31 While manufacturing limped along, the service sector continued to expand. Jobs in clerical, retail and food service, the public sector and health care, among others, grew. Ten percent more of American workers had employment in the service sector at the end of the decade than at the beginning, rising from 60 to 70 percent. Women increasingly filled the ranks of these new jobs, with women’s participation in the labor force also increasing nearly ten percentage points. While women inaugurated a period of growth in service-sector unionization in the 1970s and public-sector unions expanded as well, overall, unionized workers fell from 25 percent of the workforce to 16 percent by 1981.32 By the end of the decade the “bargain” that had been struck after World War II between the “Big Three”—business, labor and the government—to create a stable world of production in exchange for expanding wages and union recognition had broken down. Advances in information and communications technologies in the 1970s helped further supplant manufacturing by services. Engineers developed microprocessors, the basic building block of personal computers, in the early 1970s, while the first email was sent in 1972. Microsoft and Apple were both founded at mid-decade. The earliest, clunky ATMs—automatic teller machines—appeared on bank walls, while computer technicians built the behind-the-scenes computer networks to connect them. The digital age was born in the 1970s. Communications technologies advanced along parallel lines. Commercial satellites proliferated. News and information could now circulate at lightning speed, making possible the launch of CNN in 1980 and the growth of the Christian Broadcasting Network, as well as easier integration of global businesses.33 Movies, television and music all could be experienced in new, more private forms after the invention of videocassette recorders in 1976 and the Sony Walkman’s portable tape recorder in 1979. Finance became an increasingly vital part of the economy. The share of corporate profits earned by the finance sector grew, while high inflation forced changes in financial markets and products. Policymakers shifted course and deregulated financial markets, opening the door to widely available credit and opportunities to make profit through financial transactions. Pioneering bankers launched money market mutual funds in 1972. Following the advice of increasingly influential business consultants, corporations also used the models of finance to manage their units. Historian Louis Hyman demonstrates, for example, that by the end of the decade General Electric had remade itself from a manufacturing powerhouse into a financial services company.34 Globalization represented the final element of long-term change for which the 1970s was a key moment. Deepening interdependence could be found in the United States’ first trade deficits, and the increasing trade that lay behind them, as well as in the country’s dependence on foreign oil. Multinational corporations slipped free of borders, dreaming of a corporation unbound by national 78

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character or obligations.35 On the flip side, inexpensive and appealing imports like Japanese cars and televisions found their way into American homes and driveways. Streamlined and speedier movement of goods escalated international trade. Federal Express delivered its first packages on April 17, 1973. Standardized shipping containers, lifted by huge cranes at gigantic new container facilities in ports from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey and stacked like so many Lego blocks, provided more efficient shipping. Economic globalization forced policymakers to manage a more open and volatile system. Yet, globalization was not alone among these changes in putting unprecedented pressures on political leaders in the United States. Conjoined with the decade’s economic jolts, America’s policymakers faced difficult dilemmas. Responses to business cycles of expansion and contraction in place since the 1930s, known as Keynesian economics, failed to work. That failure opened the door to new ideas, new approaches and new people in the economic and political sphere. By the end of the decade, it was the set of solutions proposed by conservative free-market thinkers and politicians that came to the fore. Their solutions featured deregulated credit markets, deregulated business and a money supply controlled by central bankers rather than elected officials. Republicans thus came into power at the end of the decade guided by this new neoliberal economics. The pivotal decade interpretation has focused principally on political economy, but to capture the full breadth of the turning point that the decade represents two major social transformations must be included as well. The first is gender relations. In gender relations the same long-term forces shaking up the American economy combined with robust women’s and gay and lesbian rights movements to destabilize the longstanding ideal of a family wage in which a single male breadwinner provided for a female homemaker and children. The women’s movement generated some of the most far-reaching changes of the 1970s. At high tide in 1972, for example, Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification and passed education acts that included Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in education at all levels; Ms. magazine published its first issue; and the Supreme Court ruled it a violation of the constitutional right to privacy to deny access to contraception to any individual, including those who were unmarried. Wide-ranging in its agenda, the movement drew in women across classes and races, with coalitions uniting diverse groups of women within distinctive strands of feminist activism. The movement taught Americans that “sexism”—a new coinage—existed and tore down the legal structures of inequality. Feminists fought for employment equity and educational access; for sexual and reproductive freedom; for taking rape and sexual harassment seriously; for nonsexist child rearing and nonstereotyped images of women in the media; and for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.36 The movement for gay, lesbian and bisexual rights became newly visible and gained ground in the 1970s. Coming out—openly acknowledging your homosexuality to yourself and community— became both a joyful and defiant declaration of gay and lesbian identity. Bisexual and transgender people—generally termed transsexuals in the 1970s—claimed recognition and rights as well. New organizations fought for legal and social rights and against discrimination. Communities grew: gay and lesbian neighborhoods in San Francisco and elsewhere, as well as communal living arrangements, consciousness-raising groups and youth support networks. Lesbians navigated pervasive sexism from gay men and homophobia in the women’s movement, with some joining separatist groups like The Furies in Washington D.C. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, and across the decade states repealed sodomy laws and localities passed non-discrimination ordinances. Lesbian mothers organized to secure legal recognition of their right to custody of their children.37 Ongoing campaigns for black, Chicano/a, Asian American and Native American civil rights added strength to the movements for gender and sexual liberation and proved a powerful, if fractious, political bloc through much of the decade.38 Both the women’s and gay and lesbian liberation movements provoked vigorous opposition. For large majorities of Americans from both the left and right, the fate of the family seemed to be at 79

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stake. The idea that the family was in crisis was a commonplace of popular news and television of the 1970s, as well as of more sober government reports and scientific studies. Dramatically rising rates of divorce, youth rebellion and gay and women’s rights movements all upended familiar roles of men and women and family patterns.39Although the 1970s appeared bright for women’s employment, male breadwinners’ weakening opportunities triggered considerable apprehension. The family wage system cracked at the seams. “The single-paycheck household is rapidly going the way of the dinosaur,” was how one commentator summed it up in October 1977.40 Conservatives found the changes deeply threatening. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly railed against the feminist “war on the family,” while Jerry Falwell considered homosexuality an “outright assault on the family.”41 Restoring a normative heterosexual male-breadwinner and female-homemaker family became the rallying cry of the Pro-Family movement. Feminists, in contrast, seized the opportunity to attack the family wage system’s core inequities and to provide an alternative vision of family and economic relations, with new roles for women, men and society.42 A second pivotal social transformation of the 1970s lay in America’s prisons. A complex system of mass incarceration, characterized by skyrocketing rates of imprisonment, an increasingly punitive criminal justice system and massive federal funding decisively took off in the 1970s. The history of this system—often termed the carceral state—is relatively recent, and historians are just beginning to define its contours. Starting in the early 1960s new federal programs targeted youth and urban crime, often in response to perceived threats to order from civil rights actions. The 1970s represented a pivotal decade, however. First, it was in this decade that prison populations exploded. Second, beginning with President Nixon, presidents and Congress alike abandoned the social welfare and rehabilitative elements that accompanied 1960s programs, and turned in far more punitive directions. Finally, that this war on crime would become the war on drugs of the 1980s, and that the nation would commit itself to mass incarceration, was far from certain. Alternative approaches and prison reform remained vital, particularly in the first half of the decade. The September 1971 rebellion of prisoners at New York’s Attica State Correctional Facility exemplifies these shifting sands. Over four days and nights nearly 1,300 prisoners took guards and civilian employees hostage before New York state troopers and corrections officers swarmed the prison, and killed thirty-nine, prisoners and hostages alike. Revolting prisoners demanded better treatment—decent food, health care, working conditions. In its aftermath, the Attica uprising fueled a correctional reform movement. Many in the early 1970s believed prisons would fade away, and historian Heather Ann Thompson has noted that the 1970s were a decade of “vital victories” for prison reform with prisoner needs for better nutrition, clothing, medical care and more employment opportunities addressed.43 Yet, Attica had other consequences as well. “Janus-like,” says Thompson, “it also reflected, and helped to fuel, a historically unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.” Harsher treatment of criminals and greater funding for law and justice programs gained vocal advocates, with real consequences.44 Fifty years of relative stability in the U.S. prison population ended in 1973. Thereafter, prison populations grew quickly and without stop, by 6 to 8 percent per year until 2000. Incarceration rates grew disproportionately, however, with widening disparities in black and white imprisonment across the 1970s and 1980s.45 In 1973, New York enacted dramatically harsher penalties for narcotics sale and possession, laws that came to be known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The lengthy imprisonments and mandatory sentences of these laws became models for other states, and Congress took up its own version of mandatory minimum sentences in 1976. Money directed to crime enforcement and prisons skyrocketed. The fastest growing federal agency in the 1970s was the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The 1970s also saw critical losses in rights for the incarcerated despite the improvements. In 1974 the Supreme Court ruled disfranchisement statutes constitutional; many states subsequently enacted laws denying felons the right to vote. And in 1979, business and conservative leaders helped persuade 80

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federal lawmakers to ease restrictions in place since the 1930s on prison labor. Prisoners became an increasingly available low-wage labor force.46 The problem of crime increasingly dominated American politics. Historian Elizabeth Hinton has recently shown that Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter all reinforced trends away from addressing the root causes of crime through progressive policies of community development, urban and housing supports and schools and jobs programs. Both parties embraced the “law and order” ethos. Yet, significant differences in emphasis existed. The Republican Party openly built its new coalition with tough on crime rhetoric, and there is not yet consensus among historians about how much the 1970s’ turn toward mass incarceration contributed to the rise of the right in the decade.47 Explaining the astronomical increase in incarceration in the United States through the lens of the 1970s provides a distinctive take on this system’s development. Historians have shown mass incarceration’s roots in the 1960s, but pointed out its shift in orientation in the 1970s. Similarly, they have increasingly demonstrated that the prison growth once thought to be a phenomenon of the 1980s “War on Drugs” actually had precursors in previous decades. The 1970s, then, remain a critical turning point. In this decade the country took decisive steps that set back the momentum toward racial equality of the civil rights era and reshaped the contours of race, labor, poverty and social relations. The pivotal decade thesis makes a twofold argument. First, it insists that these ten years represent a crucial moment of debate among liberals and conservatives in which the ultimate victor, and the future direction in politics, policy, labor, economy, race and gender, remained uncertain. Second, it says that answers that turned the country away from solutions dominant since the New Deal triumphed. A new order consolidated. It was not simply that Ronald Reagan’s victory solidified a rightward turn. Rather, a postindustrial economy was fully entrenched. A new working class took form, as men’s and women’s labor patterns transformed and the service economy demanded different types of workers. The information and digital revolutions built their basic infrastructure. Economic and political shifts intersected with social ones. The country stood on the brink of a prolonged debate about the correct gender and family order as the family wage system came to a crashing end. The development and hardening of a new racial control system in mass incarceration triumphed over rehabilitative possibilities. The shape of what the nation is today, this interpretation claims, came from these years.

Conclusion What all these interpretations share is the sense that on or about 1973 something fundamental shifted in the United States. Some point to politics; others to foreign affairs. Some highlight economics; others see social movements. Most note that pieties of manhood and womanhood went topsy-turvy. Newer studies trace the turn to mass incarceration, with painful consequences for civil rights gains. All debate the power of left and right to shape the nation’s direction. As the decade recedes in time, and as historians write more sweeping histories of America in the fifty years after World War II, understanding how these diverse forces were interrelated, how they were integral to long-term trends and what role the 1970s specifically played remains to be fully written.

Notes   1 Quoted in Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016), 4.   2 Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, August 23, 1976, 26–40.   3 Overviews of the 1970s include Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History From Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Boston: DaCapo Press, 2001); Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000 [1982]).   4 Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade,” 32.

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Kirsten Swinth   5 Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Elizabeth Lunbeck, “Narcissism,” in Rethinking Therapeutic Culture, ed. Tim Aubry and Trysh Travis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 108–118.   6 Beryl Satter, “The Left,” in Aubry and Travis, eds., Rethinking Therapeutic Culture, 121.   7 Carolyn Bronstein and Whitney Strub, eds., Porno Chic to the Sex Wars: American Sexual Representation in the 1970s (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016); Peter Braunstein, “‘Adults Only’: The Construction of an Erotic City in New York During the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 129–156.   8 Sarah M. Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Ellen Herman, Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).   9 Quoted in Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), xiii. 10 Mark A. Lawrence, The Vietnam Wars: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin Press, 2015); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 47–74. 11 Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2–3; Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Mandela and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jussi M. Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 12 Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 13 Salim Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); David Farber, Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter With Radical Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 14 Sargent, A Superpower Transformed, 6. 15 Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993). 16 Meg Jacobs, “The Politics of Environmental Regulation: Business-Government Relations in the 1970s and Beyond,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II, ed. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 212–232. 17 Borstelmann, The 1970s, 55–61. 18 Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012). 19 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix; Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History (December 2011): 723–743. 20 Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 21 Alice O’Connor, “Financing the Counterrevolution,” in Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound, 148– 168; Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday Press, 2016). 22 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 41–76; Borstelmann, The 1970s, 15. 23 Paul Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism,” in Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound, 44; Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988). 24 Donald Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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The 1970s 25 Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 26 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 27 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). 28 Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, “Epilogue,” in Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound, 292–293. 29 Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 30 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 31 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 32 Figures from Borstelmann, The 1970s. On unions, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, “A ‘Tiger by the Toenail’: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority,” Labor 2, no. 3 (2005): 103–114; Joseph A. McCartin, “‘A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970–1976,” Journal of American History (June 2008): 123–148. 33 Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Matthew H. Hersch, A Social History of American Technology, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 34 Louis Hyman, “Rethinking the Postwar Corporation: Management, Monopolies, and Markets,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II, ed. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 206; Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 35 Borstelmann, The 1970s, 137–142. 36 Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003). 37 Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Self, All in the Family. 38 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–1263; Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 39 Zaretsky, No Direction Home; Chappell, War on Welfare; Self, All in the Family. 40 Eliot Janeway, “Reviving the Economy: If Women Can’t Do It, No One Can,” Working Woman, October, 1977, 67. 41 Both quoted in Matthew D. Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” in Schulman and Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound, 22, 24. 42 Kirsten Swinth, Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2018). 43 Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), 560; Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 44 Thompson, Blood in the Water, 561–562. 45 Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), 33–34, 69. 46 Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 720, 732. 47 Elizabeth Kai Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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8 THE 1980s—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Vincent J. Cannato

American historians of the twentieth century have too often found themselves prisoners of the “decade.” The issue of periodization is a perennial challenge, but it seems especially true as historians grapple with public perceptions of individual decades representing important mileposts. The 1920s has long been defined with the “Roaring Twenties” of flappers and Prohibition; the 1950s a decade of prosperity and “conformity”; and the 1960s lives on as an era of social protests and counterculture. A recent television series by CNN, for instance, has reinforced this historical tyranny of the decades by running a series of documentaries focused on the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties (with another series on the Nineties in the works). Historians have both worked within the constraint of the decade, while also attempting to complicate these ten-year chunks of time. The 1980s is yet another one of those decades that has come to define an era and a set of historical themes. There are definitely some legitimate reasons for focusing on the 1980s as a distinct period. It begins with the election of Ronald Reagan, who epitomized a rightward shift in the Republican Party and the nation as a whole as he sought to reignite the Cold War with the Soviet Union and at home sought to rein in the Great Society and reanimate a free-market economy through tax and regulatory policies. And the decade roughly ends with fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. These events provide a bookend to the decade that one does not find with the Fifties or Sixties, for instance. Historians are constrained by the concept of the decade, but also forced to look for broader patterns and themes that liberate us from that constraint. This chapter will try to do both. First, it will take the 1980s as an important period itself for the rightward political shift represented by Reagan and the GOP, for the economic transformations that exploded during the decade and for the important global events that marked the end of the Cold War but at the same time displayed a rising concern with Middle East politics and the threats of terrorism. But it is also important to enlarge our understanding of the 1980s beyond just those events that fall within the decade. It is increasingly difficult to separate out the events of the 1980s from the previous two decades—as well as from the years that follow. The 1980s are an important era in American politics and society for what they tell us about larger economic and cultural trends that began in the years before 1980. For instance, Philip Jenkins argues that Ronald Reagan’s “opportunities to impose his particular vision were shaped by a wide variety of developments, social, economic, demographic and cultural, which were all under way well before the critical 1980 election.”1 Similarly, the impact of the 1980s can been seen in subsequent decades, with the 1990s in many ways a continuation of political and economic policies, as well as cultural debates, that dominated the 84

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earlier decade. Yet, viewing this period after 2008, that interpretation is in some doubt. On every front, the apparent political, economic and cultural realignment brought about by the election of Ronald Reagan looks less certain, less sturdy and more ephemeral. Writing in 2009, this author and Gil Troy concluded that “the Reagan Revolution may not have been the great victory that many of its supporters hope for and many of its critics feared.”2 That interpretation may too evolve as the years pass, but it reminds us that our understanding of American history post-1960s will likely be in flux for some time. *** The 1980s cannot be understood without seeing the decade as part of the changes the nation experienced in the late 1960s and 1970s. There are a number of good histories of the 1970s that see the decade as a kind of prelude to the 1980s. Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies actually spans the years 1969–1984. The economic troubles of the 1970s, the decline in U.S. influence abroad and weakening of the military after Vietnam and the residual cultural tensions from the late 1960s all laid the groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan. More Americans began to trust markets over government, entrepreneurship was on the rise and the growth of the Sunbelt and decline of northern cities meant a demographic shift in favor of individualistic, right-leaning Republicans.3 While there is a growing body of work on the 1970s, one obvious problem in discussing the historiography of the 1980s is that the period is still so recent that the literature is only beginning to develop, with Robert Collins, John Ehrman, Philip Jenkins and Gil Troy writing some of the most cogent histories of the decade so far.4 A disproportionate number of books on this period are devoted to the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose administration and legacy remain at the heart of any discussion of the 1980s. He dominates his era as no other modern president, with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 1930s. Whereas FDR had his New Deal, the 1980s are known for “Reaganomics” and the “Reagan Revolution,” which further personalize the politics of the era. Historians continue to debate the impact of the “Reagan Revolution” and whether it can even be a considered a revolution in any meaningful sense, but it will be very difficult for historians to disentangle Reagan from any study of this period. A sampling of recent books on the period reinforces this idea: The Age of Reagan, The Eighties: American in the Age of Reagan, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s.5 The earliest assessments of Reagan mirrored the political assessment of partisan Democrats such as Tip O’Neill, who called him “the most ignorant man who had ever occupied the White House,” and Clark Clifford, who referred to Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” In this reading, Reagan was an intellectually lazy ultraconservative whose only skill was his ability to communicate to the public, something related to his previous acting career. Early books by liberal journalists Haynes Johnson and Sidney Blumenthal represented this interpretation.6 Less polemical early interpretations of Reagan by Robert Dallek, Michael Schaller and Garry Wills were still dismissive of Reagan, painting a picture of a president who was able to sell a mythological portrait of America to a gullible American public. To Wills, Reagan was “Mr. Magoo,” bumbling through his presidency comforted by the myths he created and blind to the alleged troubles that surrounded him. Most famously, Reagan managed to elude his authorized biographer, Edmund Morris, who was so puzzled by the challenge of writing about Reagan that he bizarrely created a fictional alter ego to help narrate the book.7 That portrait of Reagan soon began to change. Former Washington Post journalist Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan as both governor of California and president, published President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime in 1991. Unlike earlier books on Reagan, Cannon’s biography considered Reagan not as an historical aberration or psychologically limited individual, but rather as a conventional politician who sought to reshape the nation’s political landscape. Cannon’s biography opened up the field for a more serious and measured appraisal of the Reagan years. 85

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Reagan was no longer “Mr. Magoo,” but rather a consequential president who helped transform American society, albeit in ways that were still being contested by historians. That fact was clear by the early decades of the twenty-first century as academic historians were publishing biographies that, while more critical of Reagan’s policies, also began to see Reagan in a different light. John Patrick Diggins compared Reagan to Abraham Lincoln, writing that “both exceptional presidents were politically wise, humane and magnanimous. Each had greatness of soul.” Sean Wilentz wrote paradoxically that even with Reagan’s “many failures, regressive policies and dangerous legacies . . . his achievement actually looks more substantial than the claims invented by the Reaganite mythmakers.”8 Conservative authors and right-leaning academics and authors have also set out to shape the Reagan legacy. While some merely serve as “court histories” of the conservative movement and the ­Reagan years, others have added important pieces to the historiography of this period.9 By far the most influential of these books was the 2001 edited collection by Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson titled Reagan in His Own Hand. Consisting of mostly Reagan’s radio commentaries from the 1970s and mostly written by Reagan, the entries in this book show Reagan’s own responses to a variety of political issues. This was not a portrait of politician who was merely good at reading the lines that others had written for him, but rather someone who had clearly spent a great deal of time thinking through his conservative ideas.10 In 2003, W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham put together a group of historians and political scientists to reevaluate Reagan’s presidency and found that while Reagan was not quite as successful as many of his conservative defenders argued, he could still claim “a potent political legacy” for his brand of “pragmatic conservatism.” Until the late 1990s, Reagan had generally appeared in the bottom half of American presidents in the periodic rankings by scholars, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s 1996 poll. Beginning around 2000, Reagan’s stock among scholars began to grow, and he would soon find himself regularly ranked in the top ten among presidents. With greater distance, historians began to rethink their earlier dismissal of Reagan’s presidency and understood the impact of his conservative politics on American society, even if they did not always agree with his politics.11 The area upon which Reagan’s reputation stands most firmly is foreign affairs, especially as it relates to the end of the Cold War. Reagan came to office with a clear set of principles in mind: He would revive the notion of containing communism, which had been partly discredited in the aftermath of Vietnam and the rise of détente, and challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet state. Reagan set out to rebuild the U.S. military and restart the arms race. Beth Fischer, Jeffrey Chidester and Paul Kengor made the case for the success of Reagan’s foreign policy in the Cold War. John Ehrman described the impact of the neoconservative ideology in pushing Republican foreign policy in a more hawkish direction. Paul Lettow detailed Reagan’s longtime interest in abolishing nuclear weapons and how those views impacted his presidency. Odd Arne Westad and James Scott outlined the impact of the Reagan Doctrine’s policy of intervention in the Third World.12 The Reagan administration also saw a shift in the leadership of the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gorbachev set about to reform the communist system in the hopes of reversing the Russian economy’s steady collapse. Despite negotiating historic arms control treaties with Reagan, Gorbachev could not hold the communist bloc together. Wisely, he refused to intervene in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, but could not keep the Soviet Union together. In 1991, the Cold War ended with whimper, not a bang. In the immediate years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientists Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein argued that We All Lost the Cold War, yet more recent studies have eschewed such pessimism. Another debate centered on the question of who should get credit for ending the Cold War. Some, like John Lewis Gaddis, have given Reagan a great deal of credit, while others like Melvyn Leffler have given more credit to Gorbachev. That debate may mostly be semantic as historians such as Jack Matlock, James Mann, James Graham Wilson and Robert Service increasingly see the final days of the Cold War as a product of both U.S. and Russian policies, as well as the personal leadership of both Reagan and Gorbachev.13 86

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From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Middle East appears to be an important subtext to the larger Cold War diplomacy of the 1980s. Steve Coll and Bruce Reidel outlined America’s role in the Soviet-Afghanistan war of the 1980s. David Crist’s The Twilight War described America’s continuing conflict with Iran since the 1979 revolution, while Kai Bird’s biography of CIA officer Robert Ames, who died in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, revealed important details about U.S. policy in the Middle East in the early 1980s. Malcolm Byrne’s history of the Iran-Contra scandal was the most recent attempt to untangle that murky episode in Reagan’s foreign policy. These books painted a more complicated picture than the histories of Reagan-era foreign policy focused solely on Russia and Eastern Europe.14 Unlike foreign policy, historians have not written as widely on the economy of the 1980s or the economic and fiscal policies of the Reagan administration. Judith Stein and Jefferson Cowie have written on the impact of deindustrialization on the working class in the 1970s, a trend that was deeply felt in the 1980s. Robert Collins’s history of economic growth in the postwar period perceptively put the Reagan years into a broader economic perspective. Mark Levinson used the history of the shipping container to chart the economic changes and globalization of the postwar period. Joseph McCartin and Nelson Lichtenstein examined the fate of organized labor during this time of conservative ascendancy. Kim Phillips-Fein and Angus Burgin traced the intellectual roots of the freemarket economics that blossomed in the 1980s.15 At the same, another branch of scholarly analysis has focused on the dominance of “neoliberalism,” which David Harvey defined as the idea “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Harvey, Manfred Steger and Daniel Stedman Jones saw the period beginning in the 1970s as a time of a revival in free-market economics that swept not just the United States, but also England, China, South Korea and Latin America.16 The focus on ideological conservatism has been one of the most fruitful areas of historical inquiry. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, published in the late 1980s, early on helped establish the centrality of Reagan’s election as a political and ideological rupture point for a new conservative movement. Written from the political left, the essays in the collection saw the Reagan years as a repudiation of the “New Deal Order,” with different political and economic priorities from the social democratic goals of the New Deal. “When Ronald Reagan assumed office in January of 1981, an epoch in the nation’s political history came to an end,” wrote Fraser and Gerstle. “The New Deal, as a dominant order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances, died, however much its ghost still hovers over a troubled polity.” To the authors, the Reagan years were most clearly a political and ideological “Counter-Reformation.”17 Still, in the years immediately after Reagan left office, academic historians did little to explore American conservatism. In his oft-cited 1994 essay “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Alan Brinkley wrote that “twentieth-century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” Brinkley probably underestimated the number of works on conservatism that existed by the early 1990s, but his overall point was still valid. Looking at America in the wake of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the seeming crisis of American liberalism, Brinkley suggested that historians needed to look beyond the central role played by New Deal liberalism and the challenges presented to that liberalism by the New Left and other social movements.18 A mere seventeen years later, the historiographical landscape looked decidedly different. Kim Phillips-Fein reassessed Brinkley’s earlier challenge and noted that in the subsequent years, the historical study of conservatism had become “one of the most dynamic subfields in American history.” In the forum that accompanied Phillips-Fein’s essay, Lisa McGirr asked: “Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?”19 But this emphasis on the impact and influence of conservatism—especially as it relates to the 1980s—can give the impression that there was little more to this period than right-wing politics. 87

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This is similar to the historiography of the 1960s, with many early studies heavily focused on liberal protest movements and the counterculture while ignoring the large swaths of American society that did not participate in these social movements. Bradford Martin’s The Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan was a reminder that the 1980s were more than just a decade of conservatism. Martin discussed left-wing opposition to the Reagan administration such as the nuclear freeze movement, anti-apartheid campaigns on college campuses, African American politics, AIDS activists and feminist politics. Michael Steward Foley, Van Gosse and Richard Moser also highlighted the varieties and potencies of liberal activism down through the 1980s, with Moser arguing that “the movements of the 1960s created a durable, if variegated, alternative American public . . . a halfway revolution that produced conflict and meaningful debate for the rest of the century.” Liberalism, though it struggled in the post-Sixties era, proved far more durable than conservatives or many liberals originally thought, leading to cultural battles becoming just as important during the 1980s as those fought over economics or foreign policy.20 The sense of cultural change and turmoil heightened in the later years of the 1980s, as the term “culture war” gained currency. Abortion, guns, gay rights and multiculturalism would become not just cultural flashpoints, but would also help shape the Republican and Democratic parties, as more religious and traditional Americans began to gravitate into the former and secular and more liberal Americans into the latter. James Davison Hunter first highlighted the importance of the “culture wars” in 1991, while Andrew Hartman recently took a more historical approach to the topic. Robert O. Self traced debates over the family and sexuality from the cultural changes of the 1960s to the response by “Pro-Family” conservatives in the 1980s.21 The focal points of many of these battles would be American colleges and universities. The unexpected bestseller of the decade—Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind—set the tone for conservative criticisms of higher education. Books by Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza also took aim at the intellectual life of American colleges, criticizing what they saw as the increasing dominance of left-wing ideology on campuses and foreshadowing what would soon be termed “political correctness.” From the other side of the spectrum, Susan Faludi’s bestseller Backlash saw the social and political conservatism of the 1980s as a direct threat to advances that women and the feminist movement had made since the 1960s.22 Central to many of the cultural debates of the decade was religion, most specifically the rise of evangelical Christianity, which not only played an important role in political conservatism and divisions over social issues such as abortion, but also marked an important turning point in how Americans worshipped and viewed the relationship between religion and politics. What makes the story of evangelical Christianity important to the 1980s is that it grew at the same time that mainstream Christian sects began to decline. At the same time, evangelicals had begun to become politically active after a long history of ambivalence to politics. In varying ways, historians such as Kenneth Heineman, Bethany Moreton, Steven Miller, Darren Dochuk, Daniel Williams and Matthew Avery Sutton have studied the recent history of evangelical conservatism and its intersection with politics.23 Religion helped to define the politics of the 1980s, and so did race. The 1980s are not seen as a high point in the history of civil rights, with affirmative action coming under criticism from conservatives and southern whites increasingly shifting their allegiance to the Republican party. Historians such as Dan Carter, Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse and Joseph Crespino all stressed the importance of race in accounting for the electoral success of Reagan and the rise of a more conservative politics, especially in the South and in the suburbs. Following the path of Thomas Byrne Edsall’s 1991 book Chain Reaction, they all placed race at the center of their narratives on the rise of modern conservatism. Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime represented a shift in analysis as more scholars looked at the racial dimensions of the “war on drugs” and tougher law enforcement overall, arguing that such policies have led to mass incarceration, which has significantly and negatively impacted black communities.24 88

The 1980s

Race became more complicated in the 1980s as the country witnessed a larger and more diverse influx of immigrants thanks to the reforms of the 1965 Immigration Act. In the 1980s, 6.24 million immigrants arrived, compared to 4.25 million during the previous decade. New immigrants were increasingly non-white, many coming from Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to the rise of legal immigrants, concern over the number of immigrants illegally in the country grew, leading to the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants, but also offered a legal pathway to citizenship for almost 3 million people in the country illegally. Much of the work dealing with immigration during the 1980s came from political scientists and sociologists, such as Aristide Zolberg, Daniel Tichenor and Nancy Foner, while Mary Waters, Reed Ueda, Leonard Dinnerstein, David Reimers and Marilynn Johnson all began the process of mapping out the histories of this post-1965 immigration.25 In hindsight, immigration during the 1980s appears an even more central development than it did during the decade itself. The same can be said of the politics of AIDS during the 1980s and the burgeoning gay rights movement, which would culminate nearly three decades later in the legalization of gay marriage. Christopher Capozzola probed the ways that the AIDS memorial quilt meshed identity politics with historical memory. Elizabeth Armstrong, Susan Chambre, Jennifer Brier and Deborah Gould wrote about the grassroots organizing that helped force a political response to the AIDS crisis, thereby creating a national gay rights movement that sought a broader acceptance of homosexuality in American society. The deeper historians delve into the social and cultural nuances of the 1980s, the more they are able to complicate the notion of the 1980s as simply representing the “Age of Reagan.”26 *** What can be said about the 1980s when the era’s historiography is still in its infancy? Much of the reappraisal of Reagan and his policies occurred before the Great Recession of 2008. In 2007, Robert Collins summed up the decade by writing that the American people got in the 1980s pretty much what they wanted—a country at once more competitive and efficient and more tolerant and inclusive; a country that worked hard and well and that allowed its citizens the freedom, within the broadest of boundaries, to be themselves. That combination was unusual, both in the contemporary world and, most certainly, in human history. After the economic disruptions of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama as president, this positive view of the 1980s is open for debate. Historians will continue to debate the legacy of the Reagan administration and probe how deep the roots of this conservative “reformation” actually went. They will broaden our view of this period, looking for continuities with 1960s and 1970s as well as discontinuities. Longer economic, social and cultural patterns will become apparent and transform how we view this period. Will the 1980s appear as a distinct period of American history that changed the trajectory of American politics and society, or will Reaganite conservatism seem more of an aberration within a much larger pattern of government expansion and social liberalism? Or will the patterns that governed America since World War II be completely upended in the twenty-first century and replaced by political, economic and cultural directions that scholars cannot yet make out? Nothing displays the evolution of this rapidly shifting terrain of interpretation more than the contrast between two influential works of the post-Cold War period. In 1989, Francis Fukayama published an essay, “The End of History?,” which pondered whether the end of the Cold War marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Fukayama’s essay has come to represent an ideological triumphalism 89

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for liberal democratic capitalism. Two decades later, historian Daniel Rodgers provided a different view of the same period, seeing the period since the 1970s as an “Age of Fracture” where “imagined collectivities shrank” and “notions of structure and power thinned out” among the public. Rodgers’s was a less triumphal vision, one that saw the underpinnings of liberal democracy as more fragile than Fukayama, who has since the publication of his essay backtracked a bit from his earlier views.27 In the early twenty-first century, Americans are grappling with the effects of deindustrialization, globalization, multiculturalism, declining faith in institutions and technological changes that will continue to transform dramatically how we live. Historians too must deal with how to describe these changes and what they mean to the country and the world. For many years, the 1980s appeared to have been a pivotal and unique period in American economic, political and cultural history. Writing more than a quarter century after Reagan left office, however, that judgment appears more fragile and less secure.

Notes   1 Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23.   2 Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato, eds., Living in the Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8.   3 On the 1970s, see David Frum, How We Got Here: The 1970s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010); Dominic Sandbrook, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (New York: Anchor Books, 2011); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History From Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).   4 Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michael Schaller, Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era, 1980–1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).   5 Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2001); Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011); Ehrman, The Eighties.   6 Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York: Anchor Books, 1992); Sidney Blumenthal, Our Long National Nightmare: A Political Pageant of the Reagan Era (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).   7 Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), viii–ix; Michael Schaller, Reckoning With Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 181–182; Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Press, 1987); Garry Wills, “Mr Magoo Remembers,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990; Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999).   8 John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007); Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008); H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Doubleday Press, 2015). Another example comes from the “American Presidents Series.” Jacob Weisberg, Ronald Reagan (New York: Times Books, 2016). For a perceptive interpretation of Reagan’s rise to become governor of California, see Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (New York: Free Press, 2000).   9 A sample of some conservative histories of Reagan and his presidency are Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism (New York: Doubleday Press, 2002); Paul Kengor and Peter Schweizer, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (Lanham, MD:

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The 1980s Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989 (New York: Crown Forum, 2009); Craig Shirley, Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2009). 10 Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan, in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Touchstone, 2001); Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003). 11 W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003). 12 John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997); Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005); Jeffrey L. Chidester and Paul Kengor, eds., Reagan’s Legacy in a World Transformed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13 John Lewis Gaddis, The New Cold War: A History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004); James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Viking Press, 2009); James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Robert Service, The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). 14 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Bruce Riedel, What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979–1989 (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2014); David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014); Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). 15 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mark Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nicholas Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 16 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Manfred B. Steger, Neoliberalism: A Very Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 17 Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix. 18 Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994). Books on conservatism that existed pre-1994 include Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 19 Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011); Lisa McGirr, “Now That Historians Know So Much About the Right, How Should We Best Approach

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Vincent J. Cannato the Study of Conservatism?” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011). The body of scholarly appraisals of conservatism and its influence on Republican politics is vast. Some examples include: Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors the Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Kevin Mattson, Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 20 Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), xiv; Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 48; Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 21 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). 22 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Lawrence Levine provided a response to Bloom in The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Free Press, 1991); Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991). 23 Kenneth Heineman, God Is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 24 Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991); Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). For a broader discussion of the history of race and the Republican party before the 1980s, see Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship With African Americans, 1945–1974 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013). 25 Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America

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The 1980s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, The World Comes to America: Immigration to the United States Since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Marilynn S. Johnson, The New Bostonians: How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Area Since the 1960s (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Nancy Foner, ed., One Out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 26 Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Christopher Capozzola, “A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985–1993,” in Gosse and Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Susan Chambre, Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 27 Francis Fukayama originally published his essay “The End of History?” in the journal The National Interest no. 16 (Summer 1989). He extended the essay into book form with The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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9 THE 1990s—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Mark Thomas Edwards

Figure 9.1 Bill Clinton, standing between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, taking the presidential oath of office, 1993. Official White House Photograph. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4–3148.

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The 1990s

Writing and reading a chapter on the 1990s might feel more like an exercise in autobiography than history. Nevertheless, the 1990s were nearly thirty years ago, and several excellent historical surveys of the period already exist.1 This chapter will look at some of the leading personalities, events and trends of the post-Cold War era through the lens of current scholarship. The emphasis will be on illuminating current historiographical debates while pursuing three interrelated narrative arcs. Like other famous “nineties”—the 1890s, the 1790s—the 1990s were a time of remarkable conflict as well as emerging consensus. Ironically, the most important study to help scholars make sense of America’s post-Cold War years drew much of its evidence from the 1970s and 1980s: Daniel Rodgers’s Age of Fracture (2011). At its center, Age of Fracture was a communitarian critique of the Reagan Revolution embedded within an overview of America after the 1960s. Cold War liberalism, weakened by foreign policy failures, economic stagnation and attacks from the cultural left, by 1980 could no longer command sufficient public confidence. Yet no new social contract arose to take its place, Rodgers suggested. Rather, an anti-reality of “fracture” came to dominate American life and letters. The splintering effects of resurgent market logic were felt everywhere—from social science theory, to race and gender relations, even to the civil religion of politicians. Thanks to intertwined “imperializing ambitions” of Milton Friedman’s free-market enthusiasts and Michel Foucault’s poststructural theorists, power and thus oppression became faceless. There was no longer such a thing as “society” that could be understood, only individuals who could not. Culture warriors fought losing battles to defend traditional portraits of the white heterosexual patriarchal family. Even time itself, in terms of a shared and discussable past, ran out. “What changed,” Rodgers concluded, “were the ideas and metaphors capable of holding in focus the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual, ones.”2 Age of Fracture, however, was as much a story about coming together as it was about falling apart. After all, if most people have bought into the economization and related micro-sizing of American thought, politics and culture that Rodgers detested, does that not suggest the arrival of some common consent? While one sees fracture, more find freedom. Where loss of solidarity is witnessed, gains in human potential are projected. When it appears that history has come to an end, a new era of unrivalled prosperity and pleasure might just be in the making. Thus, it is important to read against as well as along the grain of Age of Fracture. With Rodgers’s invisible hand as an escort, the 1990s reveal patterns of irreconcilable difference, bipartisan agreement and lost opportunities.

The Culture Wars “There is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me,” wrote neoconservative columnist Irving Kristol in 1993. “So far from having ended, my cold war increased in intensity, as sector after sector has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos.”3 Kristol’s comment highlighted how few Americans stopped to celebrate the final collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War in 1991. Indeed, only 8 percent of voters in the 1992 elections considered foreign policy matters of importance.4 They were preoccupied with an ongoing series of domestic conflicts given the name “Culture Wars” by sociologist James Davidson Hunter that same year. To some extent, Hunter merely gave a name to then ongoing fights over education, the arts, race and gender and sexuality. Yet by positing an existential crisis between “orthodox” and “progressive” America, Hunter reaffirmed Cold War bipolarity as the normal state of postwar public life. His readers longed for the simpler times of the Red Scare, for the new enemies of God and country wore any color they wanted to.5 Since Hunter’s publication, a number of illuminating studies of the culture wars have appeared— most in the past few years. To be sure, the authors disagree on how to periodize the culture wars. Stephen Prothero’s Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (2016) and Adam Laats’s The Other School Reformers (2015) viewed them as a “cycle” running throughout much of American history.6 Conversely, Robert Self ’s All in the Family (2012), Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015) and Natalia 95

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Mehlman Petrzela’s Classroom Wars (2015), while not hostile to the long history of fights over national definition and redefinition, preferred to see the culture wars as unique to post-1960s America.7 The five writers all agreed on one point, however: Thomas Frank was wrong. In his wildly popular What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2004), Frank argued that the culture wars were a diversionary tactic led by conservatives to consolidate power. The American heartland was being duped into supporting the “market fundamentalism” of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. In other words, Frank did not think shouting matches over N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police” (1991), Madonna’s Sex (1992) and South Park (1997) were substantial. The culture wars’ chroniclers, though, believed Frank falsely dichotomized and privileged political economy over culture. What was most remarkable about America after 1980, they suggested, is how deeply and profoundly culture became politicized. Hartman and Self are the most interested in offering comprehensive histories of the culture wars. Though they covered much of the same ground, their narratives were quite dissimilar: Self ’s was primarily ironic, while Hartman’s was subtly tragic. For Self, a normative understanding of the white heterosexual male “breadwinner” family passed from Great Society liberals to New Right conservatives during the 1980s and 1990s. All that really changed was the enemy. Whereas liberals had targeted poverty and corporate greed as destructive to the breadwinner ideal, conservatives argued that ­government—in the hands of a Democratic party that had been hijacked by homosexuals and radical feminists—was the biggest threat. Hartman agreed with Self that evangelical conservatives (described so well in recent monographs by Dan Williams and Darren Dochuk, among others) formed the “demographic bedrock” of the contemporary culture wars.8 Nevertheless, Hartman found that Kristol and other neoconservative defectors from the new Democratic Party were the culture wars’ instigators and intellectual leaders. Hartman was also less comfortable than Self and Rodgers in dealing with abstractions. His treatment of the culture wars was the most deeply and thoroughly historical, even if he did at times leave it to readers to connect the narrative dots. As Hartman and others have shown, cultural conflict pervaded American thought and society during the 1990s. Public education became more politicized through fights over “political correctness,” sex education, and “secular humanism.”9 History became a common culture war site, as reflected in debates over the assumed anti-Americanism of the National History Standards project (1994) and the Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum (1995).10 The authors of The Bell Curve (1994), who suggested that African Americans remained oppressed by genetic disadvantages and not institutional racism, in fact made common cause with those Afrocentrists in Oakland who sought official recognition of Ebonics in 1996.11 Both factions stressed the uniqueness of black American experience over and against the normative “colorblindness” of the post-Reagan era. Those requiring evidence of the fictional qualities of colorblind ideology needed look no further than the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles or the acquittal of celebrity murder suspect O. J. Simpson in 1995, which many African Americans viewed as a heroic stand against a white supremacist legal and penal system. If liberals appeared to have no answers regarding America’s race problems, they seemed to be losing ground to anti-feminist and anti-gay activists. Conservatives dominated national conversations about AIDs and, consequently, sexuality, as Anthony Petro recently observed.12 The Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision (1992) sparked increasing regulation of abortion rights at the state level. Feminism and homosexuality were both primary targets of Robert Bork’s bestselling tale of moral apocalypse, Slouching Toward Gomorrah (1996). Nevertheless, feminists and the LGBTQ community met such challenges with new resolve thanks to the spread of post-structuralist analysis and deconstruction, as represented in the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Butler in particular completed the revolution begun by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) in positing that categories of gender and sex were linguistic—and thus imposed from without—rather than biological.13 Women furthermore had demographics on their side, as the country was becoming much less religious and traditional. Over 40 percent of marriages ended in divorce, only 60 percent 96

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of children lived with both biological parents, and women occupied more and more seats in Congress and graduate schools.14 On the issue of sex and gender, Prothero’s point that liberals hold the centers of cultural power even when conservatives win elections is well taken.15 Al Bundy and The Man Show were immensely popular but ultimately lost out to Will and Grace and the women of The View. Such a triumphalist conclusion is not to ignore the reality that, during the 1990s, the American political establishment became bounded and determined by cultural concerns. Washington was forced to play catch-up with the public culture that Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and other newly unencumbered “shock jocks” were then making. Hoping to capitalize upon Reagan’s courting of evangelical conservatives, George H. W. Bush and the Republican party highlighted cultural conflict during the 1992 presidential campaign. Former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan opened the Republican National Convention in Texas that year with a rallying cry to America’s emerging values voters. Bill Clinton and running mate Al Gore nevertheless toppled the incumbent Bush. Clinton made numerous concessions to social conservatives, including his moderation on abortion and gays in the military (the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy) as well as his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996). Still, the right portrayed him as the poster child of the radical liberal assault on traditional family values. The religious right, having been written off after the 1988 elections, surged behind Pat Robertson’s and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition to effect the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. That “Republican Revolution” was part of the fracturing force that Steven Miller has called the “Age of Evangelicalism.”16 House Speaker (and serial philanderer) Newt Gingrich and colleagues repaid their neoconservative and evangelical benefactors when they pressed ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. The immediate occasion was Clinton’s cover-up regarding his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When special prosecutor Kenneth Starr began leaking lurid details from his report on the Clintons’ financial and sexual dealings, however, it became for conservatives necessary proof of the disastrous effects of the sexual revolution. Effectively, Gingrich’s New Right was “impeaching the 1960s.”17 Clinton survived the stain upon his administration. Still, the fight over impeachment extended political polarization. The second Bush administration’s “ABC” policy—Anything But Clinton—showed the culture wars passing over into and determining both domestic and foreign policymaking. Scholars are divided as to whether or not the culture wars ended around the new millennium. Culture obviously remained politicized, but Hartman (and, to a lesser extent, Rodgers) suggested the “logic” or “metaphor” of the culture wars have run their course.18 Contemporary fights simply lack the earnestness and optimism for change that characterized the era that Hunter and Buchanan first named. To Prothero, however, the culture wars were not exhausted so much as they expanded into a “Culture War of Everything.”19 The 2000 presidential elections lend credence to such a view, as they exposed just how profoundly the nation had been split along liberal (blue) and conservative (red) lines. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, furthermore, seemed to validate Samuel Huntington’s earlier thesis (1993) that America’s culture wars had been subsumed by a “clash of civilizations” pitting the Christian and “enlightened” West against the Muslim and “backward” East. It seemed Americans had won the Cold War only to become the existentially divided heirs of a hopelessly fractured planet.

Neoliberalism Huntington had written in response to a former student, the neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, who had foretold a different way of thinking about the 1990s. In his article and book, The End of History (1989, 1992), Fukuyama had observed that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism were becoming normalized throughout the world. They certainly were in the United States, as the several opponents of “neoliberal” capitalism have since complained. Angis Burgin discovered that “neoliberalism” was first coined around World War II by critics of “planned economies” such as the 97

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New Deal. It quickly fell out of use. When “neoliberalism” resurfaced during the 1980s and 1990s, it was mainly deployed by the liberal left to describe the philosophy of economist Milton Friedman and policies of Reagan, Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and China’s Deng Xiaoping.20 “Neoliberalism” has since passed into general scholarly usage, although its critical tone still remains. Rodgers remained noncommittal toward any one term to describe his fractured age. Nevertheless, his book is the best thick description of the neoliberal accord that enjoyed its heyday in the decade immediately following the end of the Cold War. More explicit analyses of neoliberalism have already been written, including David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007) and David Kotz’s The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (2015). While not eliding Friedman’s free-market fetishism, Harvey and Kotz defined neoliberalism historically as the stage of capitalism that took off after 1980, thrived during the 1990s and imploded around 2008. They, among others, saw rival terms like “globalization” and “financialization”—as outlined in sunnier surveys like Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005) and Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American World (2008)—as dependent components of neoliberalism.21 In its predominant form as political economy, neoliberalism refers to the historical shift away from the “regulated capitalism” of the New Deal and Great Society eras in favor of deregulation and privatization of welfare; lowering deficits, taxes and inflation; and maximizing free trade, property rights and market transactions. Harvey, like Rodgers, recognized the coincidence between neoliberalism’s “commodification of everything” and the hegemonic qualities of post-structuralists’ radical contingency.22 Neoliberalism was made within and beyond the U.S.A. The so-called “Washington consensus” that anchored it was itself dependent upon earlier and broader structural adjustment policies of the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) enforced throughout the majority world.23 It was Clinton, the self-styled “New Democrat” and “Eisenhower Republican,” who brought the neoliberal project back home, hoping to complete the transformation of geopolitics into geoeconomics begun under Woodrow Wilson and the later FDR.24 “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement—enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies,” argued Anthony Lake, one of Clinton’s chief influences.25 Clinton effectively took over Bush’s support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and secured its passage against the protectionist arguments of Buchanan, Ross Perot and organized labor. Clinton’s free trade enthusiasm found obvious favor with the World Trade Organization (WTO), launched in 1995 to help complete the neoliberal turn of the WB and IMF. Building upon NAFTA and WTO momentum, Clinton aided the “opening up” of China begun by Presidents Carter and Xiaoping when he signed the China Trade Bill (2000) into law. Clinton had hoped that economic globalization could underwrite further Keynesian programs at home. He was nevertheless forced to make several concessions to Congressional Republicans’ “Contract with America” after 1994, most notably their drive for deficit reduction and passage of Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF), which placed term limits on direct assistance. Clinton’s support for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which deregulated many of the Wall Street banks that supported and advised him, more than anything redefined neoliberalism as the supremacy of the financial sector over the national and world economy. Americans enjoyed newfound prosperity and consumer opportunities during the 1990s—some more than others—and the number of families on welfare fell dramatically from 5 million families in 1994 to 2.1 million by 2000. Yet the net result of neoliberal reforms, moving forward, appeared to be anemic economic growth (2 percent average, down from 4 percent a decade earlier), record low taxes, soaring national debt, financial collapse relative to a bubble in housing and conditions for civil wars and terrorist growth throughout the Arab world.26 Given neoliberalism’s mixed results at best, Harvey and others rightly asked: How did it become so popular? Why have Americans across the political spectrum decided that smaller (exempting SUVs and fast food sandwiches) is better? If we understand neoliberalism, like Rodgers, as the macro-historical 98

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trend toward the micro-sizing of life, thought and policy formation, then here again Thomas Frank has served as historians’ favorite whipping boy. Frank’s argument assumed that the culture wars were happening within, and ultimately subservient to, the building of the neoliberal consensus. Rather, Self explicitly and Hartman implicitly argued that neoliberal advance was dependent upon the culture wars. The road to market-dom wound through conservative defense of family values against the supposed takeover of the state by radical, un-American groups. The result, both Self and Hartman note, “has been to subject more and more of national life to market forces.”27 Walmart is arguably the best example of the neoliberal-social conservative nexus at work. Sam Walton’s company had been a part of the “buy American” campaign of the early 1990s. Following his death in 1992, however, Walmart rapidly became the greatest beneficiary of the U.S.’s special relationship with China. It also joined McDonald’s as the leading employers of the country’s postmanufacturing work force, as Nelson Lichtenstein covered in his study, The Retail Revolution (2010).28 The irresistible Walmart empire cannot be understood in purely economic terms, though, as Bethany Moreton showed in To Serve God and Walmart (2009). Also against Frank, and like Lichtenstein, Moreton suggested that Walton’s army of conservative evangelical administrators, employees and shoppers must be taken seriously as the progenitors as well as rationalizers of America’s neoliberal service economy. “Walmart Country” has been dominated by women who have stressed the company’s contributions to “family stability.” A Christian ethic of “servant leadership” allowed Walmart’s resiliently male-dominated managerial staff still to feel good about themselves even when shuffling papers instead of smelting steel. Christian college graduates still count among Walmart’s largest leadership pool, preaching anti-unionism and regulatory downsizing as the approximation of the kingdom of God on earth. In the light of political economy, at least, it appears that evangelical conservatives sometimes do win the culture wars.29 Other instances of neoliberal reliance on the culture wars abound, but perhaps none will prove more consequential than those in the field of education. Libertarians had long been rendering attacks upon the federal Department of Education out of fear of Soviet-style bureaucracy, but their efforts really did not begin to pay off until the 1990s. As Hartman and Petrzela have shown, so much of the culture wars centered around the supposedly immoral, un-American or anti-Western—read “multicultural”—content of public school curriculum. Conservatives were not all of one mind about what was to be done, however. For instance, neoconservatives proposed their own sets of national standards to rival the more liberal National History Standards. They argued that American democracy depended upon a common core of knowledge. Their evangelical conservative readers disagreed. Instead, they supported the reestablishment of “local control” over schools through more state resources and protections for homeschooling, voucher programs and state “Schools of Choice” laws, such as Michigan’s in 1996. Evangelical conservative opposition to standards ran the gamut of the culture wars—from maintaining white flight neighborhoods, to fears of secular humanist infections and Heather’s two mommies, to wanting their kids to read Aristotle and Mark Twain. The net effect has been the increasing fracture of the very ideal of public education. Decentralization has benefited children here and there, notably those from minority families, who have been more likely to choose charter and private schools, or public schools in other districts. Decentralization has also tended to devastate urban districts, which have lost the most student populations. In this instance of education reform, the neoliberal privileging of individual over collective goods became interdependent with cultural conflict.30 The classroom fights of the 1990s have shown that analyses of neoliberalism cannot be abstracted from other interpretive lenses such as race and gender, and vice versa. Some African Americans did make significant gains over the decade, as median household incomes rose by more than $6,000 to $30,400 by 2000—still only 69 percent of that of white families—and black poverty rates fell.31 It was also an era of one step forward, one step back. A new Civil Rights Bill (1991) targeting workplace discrimination was met by several state rollbacks of affirmative action, beginning with California’s Proposition 209 (1996), and a 1996 welfare reform bill that denied benefits to legal immigrants for 99

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their first five years in the country. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings (1991) highlighted black women’s dual struggles against racism and sexism yet also heightened colorblind awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. The most consequential intersection between neoliberal reform and race and gender, however, was evident in the rise of what has been called the “carceral state.” Following Reagan, a new posture of “getting tough on crime” united Democrats and Republicans, neoconservatives and neoliberals, Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, culminating in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and, at the state level, “three-strikes” laws. Incarceration rates had been growing since the late 1970s, yet exploded during the 1990s. Given the disproportionate numbers of African Americans serving sentences, the penal system has been renamed The New Jim Crow (2012) by Michelle Alexander and other activists. Such a characterization is both true and misleading, argued Marie Gottschalk. In her remarkable recent study Caught (2015), Gottschalk showed that African American incarceration rates actually levelled off after peaking in 1995. In turn, the imprisonment of poor white males, women and Hispanics has grown considerably. Gottschalk blamed the neoliberal privatization of America’s prison system for much of the dehumanizing labor and facilities faced by inmates. More generally, she blamed neoliberalism’s furtherance of income inequality as the prime mover of mass incarceration.32 Bringing neoliberalism and the carceral state together, it is hard not to follow Harvey, Frank, celebrity economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and others in seeing the neoliberal endgame as a bid for financial class power and not rising prosperity for all. After all, CEO salaries skyrocketed during the 1990s, while the union movement collapsed and part-time “contingent” workers made up 33 percent of the labor force.33 By 1998, America’s 13,000 wealthiest families earned as much of the country’s 20 million poorest.34 What might have been a new Gilded Age of class warfare, though, was in fact a new era of moral reconciliation, as conservative columnist David Brooks detailed in his book, Bobos in Paradise (2000). The 1990s Bobo (the wedding of the Bo-urgeois to the Bo-hemian) ended the culture wars between the 1960s and 1980s and made it okay to be cool as well as consumptive, acquisitive and aesthetic. The central question of the age was not, “Who is to blame for my misfortune?” Rather, it was, “Can any society hold together on a neoliberal foundation?,” as sociologist Robert Putnam asked in his landmark lament for loss of social capital, Bowling Alone (2000). It is the same communitarian question that Rodgers asked of this time. And perhaps it was and is the wrong one. Thanks to IBM and other tech giants, Americans voluntarily left bowling alone for surfing alone. They traded in phone books for Facebooks and found Windows to be a way to master a universe of knowledge and experience from the safety of America’s burgeoning gated communities. Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph, the personal computer, “was anything but,” concluded Livingston, who scoffed at those still nostalgic for the prairie farm or Puritan village.35

Drift Yet even Livingston waxed wistful for the supposed certainties of former times when discussing foreign policy.36 A wonderfully thick description of the Bush-Clinton-Bush engagement in foreign affairs can be found in Derek Chollet’s and James Goldeier’s America Between the Wars (2008).37 Andrew Bacevich’s body of work, including American Empire (2002) and his most recent America’s Wars for the Greater Middle East (2016), were more critical but still helpful. Ultimately, Chollet and Goldeier concurred with Bacevich that Americans were ideologically unprepared for victory in the Cold War. Bush the realist refused to join Fukuyama in celebration of neoliberal capitalist victory. He instead was forced to turn to new sorts of foreign policy challenges in Yugoslavia and the Balkans, in Africa and particularly in the Middle East. Following a disastrous war with Iran—in which the United States had aided both sides—Saddam Hussain led Iraq in an invasion of Kuwait. Bush’s Operation Desert Shield placed over 500,000 troops in Saudi Arabia to protect Western access to oil, while 100

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Operation Desert Storm entailed a spectacular bombing campaign against Iraqi troops and infrastructure. The U.S.-led coalition quickly drove Iraq out of Kuwait, yet chose to abide by the U.N. mandate and leave Hussain in power. Desert Storm was celebrated as the inauguration of a new world order of American hegemony as well as U.S. and Russian cooperation. In fact, most of the frustrations and failures Americans have experienced abroad since that time can be traced back to that first war with Iraq. Desert Storm made the Bush and Clinton administrations overconfident that they could play nation-rebuilder as well as peacemaker in interstate and regional disputes. Wanting to exercise U.S. hegemony through the United Nations, Bush committed troops to protecting foreign aid workers in Somalia in 1992. He would bequeath that ill-defined mission and the Saddam quandary to Clinton, whose neoliberal faith that every problem had a market solution would be proven wrong. The new president was forced to withdraw troops from Somalia following the “Battle of Mogadishu” in 1993, while an effort to counter a military coup in Haiti, Operation Uphold Democracy (1994–1995), would literally be turned away by protestors fearing another American occupation. Genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia (1995) seemed to escape notice. When Clinton finally did intervene in Kosovo in 1999 against Serbian forces, unprecedented bombing campaigns undermined the moral legitimacy of America’s inaugural “humanitarian war.”38 Elsewhere, Clinton’s bids for better relations with Russia and China faded fast before failed market liberalization in the former and increased nationalism in the latter. American policymakers longed for the precarious certainties and stabilities of the Cold War in the face of global disintegration. Perhaps no lost opportunity was more important than that involving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Emboldened by his mission accomplished in Iraq, Bush threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Israel unless they entered into serious negotiations with the Palestinians. Meetings between multiple parties in Madrid (1991) and Oslo (1993) resurrected talk of a “two-state solution” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It would be hard to overestimate the hope for peace in the Middle East generated by the Oslo Accords. Beneath the surface, however, skepticism by American and Israeli leaders, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1995) and the splitting of the new Palestinian Authority (PA) into rival Fatah and Hamas parties quickly undermined all steps toward two coexisting states in Palestine. A desperate effort by Clinton to save Oslo at Camp David (2000) resulted in a famous handshake between the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak but no firm commitment. Within a year, a second Intifada in East Jerusalem bolstered militants on both sides and effectively ended the two-state solution. Minus a roadmap for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America watched helplessly as regional tensions between Arabs and Israelis threatened to return to Six Day War (1967) levels.39 Apparent U.S. complicity in Israeli occupation was one factor in the globalization of terrorist networks. Al-Qaeda, fronted by the wealthy yet austere Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, had initially cooperated with American agents in resistance to Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Operation Desert Shield promised to spread Western secularism throughout the region and so turned Bin Laden against his former fellow travelers. America followed Al-Qaeda actions throughout the 1990s, particularly after it orchestrated attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya (1998) and on the USS Cole (2000). A deteriorating and defunded American intelligence community, though, was little help in securing the level of proof Clinton demanded before he could approve an invasion of a sovereign nation where Al-Qaeda was based. America’s post-Cold War policy of “when in doubt, fire a missile” failed to stop Bin Laden’s coordination of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.40 Key members of Bush’s team took advantage of 9/11 to enact plans drafted during the first Iraq war. Renouncing Bush Senior’s faith in the UN, defense secretaries Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney had imagined a more pure exercise of American hegemony. Wolfowitz’s resulting 1992 report, Defense Planning Guidance, called upon the United States to realize “Globocop ambitions,” in the words of one detractor at the Wall Street Journal.41 Public opinion during the 1990s tended toward political isolationism and military divestment. That did not stop those neoconservatives who had first tasted 101

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power during the Reagan years from promoting a very different sort of new world order. Organizing in 1997 under new think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), neoconservatives dusted off Wolfowitz’s report and combined it with longstanding ambitions to weaken Iraq and Syria, isolate Iran and thereby prop up Israel as the major power broker in the region. The election of Bush Junior in 2000 propelled several PNAC members and allies back into high office, including Cheney, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. Those self-described “Vulcans” wanted to advance America’s international reputation through exceptional military might. Beginning on September 12, 2001, they plotted to destabilize the Middle East through removing Hussein from power. Nevertheless, Daniel Rodgers was skeptical that the Bush administration ever manufactured collective resolve in a new “War on Terror.” As Bacevich and the Vulcans’ chief chronicler, James Mann, concluded, the American warfare state is not a good means for exporting market democracies abroad.42 Rachel Maddow’s Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2013) joined Mann’s and Bacevich’s works as one of the most broad and insightful recent indictments of American statecraft since 1991. Like those men, Maddow criticized America’s overreliance on military solutions—notably those lacking Congressional approval and oversight. Perhaps the greatest value of her work, however, lies in its emphasis on the deleterious effects of neoliberal restructuring of America’s military establishment. Put simply, following the end of the Cold War, the United States began to decentralize its command structures—relying more heavily on private security contactors such as Blackwater began in 1997. Under Rumsfeld’s management, private contractors came to outnumber U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, only around 1 percent of the country’s adult population serves in the armed forces. Those situations, Maddow argued, make it all the more challenging for citizens to play an active role in foreign policymaking.43 Maddow’s image of “unmooring” military power coincides nicely with Rodgers’s forecast of a fractured age. As stated at the start of this chapter, “fracture” is in part a value judgment that may not be the best or only way of making sense of American life between 1991 and 2001. Certainly that other F-word, freedom, can go far in accounting for the emergence a more liberal and tolerant, more entrepreneurial and individualistic and more global and interventionist nation following the Cold War. Yet freedom, like fracture, can also be an illusion masking a more complicated story of historical change. Like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix (1999), perhaps we sit alone staring blankly at our computer screens, unable to articulate the ways we are caught within webs of power we cannot understand. But if the Bushes and Clintons were not Morpheus, then who else might guide us to the “desert of the real?”44

Notes   1 James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).   2 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 6, 41, 85, 107, 206, 225.   3 Irving Kristol, quoted in Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 276.   4 Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 52.   5 James Davidson Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).   6 Stephen Prothero, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars: Even When They Lose Elections (New York: HarperOne, 2016); Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).   7 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Hartman, A War for the Soul of America; Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).   8 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 101. See Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011);

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The 1990s Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).   9 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 222–252 10 Ibid., 271–284. 11 Ibid., 115–120, 126–133. 12 Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDs, Sexuality, and the Wrath of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 134–170. See also Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 144–179. 14 Patterson, Restless Giant, 270–272. 15 Prothero, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, 19–20. See also Livingston, World Turned Inside Out; David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 16 Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17 Prothero, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, 227–230. 18 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 285. 19 Prothero, Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, 247. 20 Angis Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 21 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 22 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 165–172. 23 John Williamson, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus,” in The Washington Consensus Reconsidered: Towards a New Global Governance, ed. Narcis Serra and Joseph E. Stiglitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14–30. 24 Bill Clinton, quoted in Freeman, American Empire, 420. 25 Anthony Lake, quoted in Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 69. 26 On the linkage of neoliberalism and the Arab Springs, see James L. Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 27 Self, All in the Family, 422–425. See also Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 285–290. 28 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Picador, 2010). 29 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 38, 71, 102, 174. 30 See Petrzela, Classroom Wars; Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 220–221. 31 Patterson, Restless Giant, 306–307. 32 Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 33 Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, 27–29. 34 Patterson, Restless Giant, 351–352. 35 Livingston, World Turned Inside Out, 100–104. 36 Ibid., 105–131. 37 Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars. 38 Ibid., 214. 39 See Daniel C. Kurtzer, Scott B. Lasensky, William B. Quandt, Steven L. Spiegel, and Shibley Z. Telhami, The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989–2011 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 40 See Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 41 Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, 46. 42 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 256–257; James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House, 2016). 43 Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012). 44 That phrase, uttered by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), was taken from French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard. Some scholars would say Baudrillard is a better student of the 1990s than Rodgers. See especially Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

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10 ECONOMICS AND CAPITALISM—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Sean H. Vanatta

Figure 10.1 WPA mural at the Cohen Building in Washington D.C. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm- 03795.

Economic history has long been concerned with, to paraphrase historian Harold F. Williamson, how the struggle for material existence has been carried on through time. Through the first half of the twentieth century, this question engaged historians and economists in ongoing and productive dialogue. But beginning in the 1960s, waves of methodological innovation and sub-disciplinary specialization split the fields apart. Economic historians have since charted a course well removed from the main currents of historical scholarship. The marginalization of economic history, however, has recently enabled scholars to address Williamson’s question from a range of novel perspectives. In history departments, a “new materialism” is flourishing. Many scholars in this vein self-identify as 104

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“historians of capitalism,” a catch-all category that encompasses a broad area of inquiry, rather than a defined methodological program. It also conveys excitement, from the pages of academic journals to those of the New York Times. Business, environmental, labor and technology history have all been swept up in its enthusiasms. A reintegration of historical and economic scholarship seems possible, but the terms of this reunion remain unresolved.1 One path toward conciliation should be historical political economy: how state action defined the struggle for material existence. The economic role of government in the twentieth century is common analytical ground where economic historians, historians of capitalism and practitioners of other historical approaches can profitably engage. To chart this path, I begin with a discussion of economic historiography, rooting historical political economy in a wave of scholarship from the 1940s, before showing how economic history diverged from it. I then narrate a brief political-economic history of the twentieth-century United States, providing readers an outline of how the state structured economic life in this period. I conclude by offering a few thoughts on how historians might move the new political-economy agenda forward.

Economic Historiography In the first half of the twentieth-century, economic history was characterized by steady intellectual exchange between its parent disciplines.2 The past was prime proving ground for the emergent social sciences, and for a time, there was little to distinguish these fields from history. However, economists and their peers soon shifted their analysis to the social circumstances of the present. Practitioners of the “new history,” who we now call progressive historians, followed.3 Scholars like Charles Beard adopted social-scientific argumentation to demonstrate how past social forces decisively shaped present social conditions, in contradistinction to the political narratives spun by history’s founding generation.4 The modes of economic explanation favored by Beard, reducible to ingrained conflict between virtuous “people” and corrupt “interests,” were initially praised by economists, but gradually lost favor among economists and historians working in economics departments during the interwar period. Instead, these scholars became concerned with using historical data to develop a quantitative foundation for economic theory, rather than mobilizing economic reasoning to make qualitative arguments about the past. For economic historians in history departments, quantification offered to bridge the progressives’ emphasis on the materialist motivations of historical actors and economists’ demand for the concrete economic facts of everyday life. In the early postwar years economic history was invigorated by new sources of institutional funding, new economic methods and, in the wake of the New Deal and in the midst of the Cold War, new interest in what the Social Science Research Council termed the “proper place of government in the whole economic process.”5 To this end, the SSRC sponsored major studies of the antebellum American economy by scholars like Louis Hartz, which demonstrated that individual states had actively fostered economic development.6 Other interdisciplinary projects, influenced by the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter, examined the social and historical conditions that supported growthgenerating entrepreneurship. At the same time, economists Simon Kuznetz, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow began to use historical data to measure and account for aggregate national income and growth, key concerns of postwar policymakers. Historical political economy, coupling economics and history, flourished. But the era of good feeling would not last. By 1960, research clusters at Harvard and Purdue had begun to rigorously apply positivist economic theory to historical data, projecting theory into the past rather than developing theory from past experience. Headed by scholars such as Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman and Douglas North, this cohort called their approach “cliometrics”—history and measurement. The cliometricians employed novel econometric methods, counterfactual hypothesis testing and computer-aided data processing to systematically challenge the economic assumptions 105

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and explanations developed by the progressive historians and adopted by their successors. Reflecting on their achievements in this endeavor, one member of this cohort recalled: “It has been childsplay to make such foolishness look foolish.”7 Such frank combativeness drove a deep wedge between cliometricians and their colleagues, who were hardly thrilled to be labeled fools, alienating mainstream historians and even likeminded scholars in fields like business history. For many historians, the cliometricians’ conclusions were as startling as their sources and methodologies were impenetrable. Confrontation was inevitable. It came with the publication of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (TOTC), which rejected the prevailing view that American slavery was a moribund economic institution on the eve of the Civil War. Fogel and Engerman went further still, arguing that slaves had internalized a bourgeoisie work ethic that aligned their economic interests with those of their masters.8 Historians of slavery, whose recent scholarship insisted that slaves had instead developed a vibrant culture beyond their degrading work lives and in opposition to their masters, were outraged. The divergence in interpretation was matched by methodological divergence. The TOTC debates demonstrated how quickly historians were moving away from materialism and embracing cultural approaches, which often came with their own dense vocabularies.9 In the wake of the controversy, economic historians largely migrated to economics departments, victims of their own cliometric revolution. Though sidelined from mainstream history, economic historians succeeded in using history to reshape economics through the “new institutional economics” movement. The cliometricians’ early scholarship, drawing on established theories of prices and markets, often elided the role of the state in economic development. Later scholarship, however, generated a new field of economic inquiry devoted to understanding how institutions, including state institutions, necessarily structured economic activity and were essential for markets to exist in the first place.10 Still, in the wake of the TOTC controversy, the shearing off of economic history from the main body of the historical discipline was so complete that, as historians have turned back to economic topics, some have mistakenly portrayed economic history as dead and buried.11 In recent years, historians have returned to examining how the struggle for material existence has been carried on, many under the aegis of the new history of capitalism. Scholars working in this vein, to borrow one prevailing metaphor, seek to “look under the hood” to understand how the economic engine turns in practice, not in theory. To do so many have adopted the tools of cultural history, emphasizing how diverse vectors of power, operating through non-economic categories like race, gender and ideology, bear heavily on economic relationships. At institutions like Harvard, Cornell and the University of Georgia, and through conferences such as the Business History Conference, historians of capitalism have built the foundation for a new field. Wary of the modes of reasoning undergirding studies like TOTC and skeptical of the political and institutional power of the economics discipline, so far these scholars have been reluctant to engage economic history directly. Nevertheless, the great controversy in the history of capitalism literature, as it was for the cliometricians a generation before, has been the relationship between slavery and economic development in the United States.12 Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, Seth Rockman and many others have directed renewed attention there. This is not surprising: Slavery and its legacy are the defining characteristic of American life and American exceptionalism across the nation’s history. But the focus on slavery has meant that the contours of the history of capitalism, a vague concept to begin with, are even less well-defined in the twentieth century. Yet if slavery was the defining institution of the antebellum economy, the state has assumed that role in the twentieth. Much work in the history of capitalism literature indirectly addresses the question that concerned postwar political economists—of the “place of government in the whole economic process”—while eschewing the normative modifier—“proper.” Whether historians of capitalism might want to venture normative claims is an issue I will consider at the end of the chapter. 106

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A Political-Economic History of the Twentieth Century Consolidation of Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1929 The nineteenth century ended in massive economic and social upheaval. Industrialization transformed the nature of American economic growth from largely extensive—physical expansion across space—to intensive—increased labor productivity through capital investment. Behind this dry phrasing lay the development of heavy urban industry, violent labor unrest, massive immigration and internal migration, populist revolt, the consolidation of the bourgeoisie and much else. It also meant the ascendance of the United States as the world’s leading industrial producer. But the business cycle, the unpredictable movements of which had been the bane of the nineteenth century, still spun in this new economy. The Panic of 1893 created new urgency to curtail the costs, both economic and social, of aggressively expansive market capitalism. Business moved first. Beginning in the 1870s and accelerating after the Panic, many American industries consolidated under the leadership of large, centrally organized, bureaucratic corporations. Some did so through vertical integration, as business historian Alfred Chandler has shown, through which firms sought to control production from raw material extraction through to the final distribution of finished goods. In capital-intensive industries like steel, firms also pursued horizontal integration, merging once-competing firms to gain control across an industry. Both strategies were intended to counter the disorder of markets. Vertical integration allowed firms to internalize market functions, like buying raw materials. Horizontal integration gave firms monopoly power to set market prices and avoid ruinous price competition. Consolidated firms also exercised tremendous power over labor and influence in government. The rise of big business did not portend the disappearance of small firms, which remained vibrant participants in the industrial economy. It did, however, mean that big business and monopoly power remained the critical political problem of the early twentieth century.13 The reformist responses to industrial consolidation and frenetic capitalism were many and varied, but as Ellis Hawley and other scholars have argued, they cohered around three principle strands of thought: centralized planning, where the state exerted direct control over the economy; restoration of competition, where the state curtailed the market power of large firms; and counter-organization, where the state accepted the market power of big business but helped other economic groups, like consumers and labor, exercise countervailing power. Progressive reformers also looked abroad for solutions to the problems of industrial society, Daniel Rodgers demonstrated, but entrenched American traditions of private property and laissez faire individualism meant that early reform efforts were always tentative and partial.14 In the decades before the New Deal, state economic oversight developed on a wide continuum. On one end, the managerial revolution in business propelled a like expansion of state bureaucracy, typified by the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887) and Federal Trade Commission (1914), which featured hierarchical organizations, expert managers and institutional autonomy. More often, reformers worked within what Brian Balogh calls the “associational state,” an enduring form of governance where state power integrated with and filtered through private, intermediary institutions, such as social service organizations and business trade associations. Governments also borrowed from the private sector. New workers’ compensation and deposit insurance schemes were forms of risk management developed in the private economy, which became tools for governance and welfare provision.15 Business and government became more integrated with the outbreak of World War I, stoking reformers’ hopes for increased state economic intervention in the postwar years. Instead, the end of the war brought significant retrenchment, while rapid demobilization produced a sharp postwar recession. In its wake, American political leaders turned to economic isolationism through strict new

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immigration quotas and high tariffs, closing the open global economy that had existed before the war. In this regard the United States was not alone. According to Harold James, the institutions that had promoted openness before the war—capital mobility, trade liberalization and immigration—became the conduits for autarkic movements afterward.16 Despite isolationism, the 1920s were a boom decade for the American economy, which expanded by 6 percent annually. At the center of this growth were new consumer industries. Manufacturers turned the technologies of mass-production toward consumer goods and developed new methods of distribution and merchandising to generate consistent consumer demand. Installment credit supplemented the steady paychecks of American workers, enabling them to purchase radios, refrigerators and automobiles, and to shop in the nation’s gleaming department stores. Yet while consumer-oriented industries grew rapidly, they were as unprepared for economic downturn as their industrial counterparts had been when Panic struck in 1893. The maturation of heavy industry in the 1920s and the weakness of consumption-oriented sectors, compounded by a decade-long crisis in agriculture, meant that the American economy was on unsteady ground when crisis came again in the late 1920s.17

Depression and the New Deal, 1929–1945 The outlines of the catastrophic events that rocked the United States’ and global economies from the late 1920s until World War II are well known. In the United States, the 1920s boom was gradually undercut by setbacks in the agricultural and construction sectors, while the stock market crash of October 1929 dramatically punctuated a period of rampant securities speculation. In three months, half the equity in the New York Stock Exchange disappeared. In three years, over 25 percent of Americans were unemployed. Widespread bank failures added to the sense and reality of economic instability. Across the Atlantic, Europe had never fully recovered from the ravages of World War I. The contagion of depression spread like Spanish influenza. The Great Depression has long been an important historical testing ground for economic theory. As the twentieth century has moved forward, trends within the field of economics and the fluctuations of the economy more broadly have refracted through the historiography of the Great Depression. Successive waves of economists have sought to retroactively diagnose the massive economic decline of the depression decade and use the past to legitimize their doctrines in the present. American Keynesians, like Alvin Hansen, arrived first, arguing that the basic problem was a lack of demand, and that state fiscal policy and economic management were necessary to avoid similar downturns. In the 1960s, monetarists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz challenged Keynesian doctrine, arguing that the contraction of the money supply, caused by Federal Reserve mismanagement and the era’s epidemic of bank failures, was the true culprit.18 As monetarism gained adherents within economics departments and public policy circles, the pitched battle spilled into historical interpretation, particularly Peter Temin’s 1976 Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (His answer then: Maybe. Later: Probably).19 Meanwhile, the decline of the Bretton Woods international financial system in the 1970s and the subsequent turn toward globalization were mirrored in a separate strand of analysis that put international monetary forces, specifically the gold standard, at the center of the global Great Depression.20 In the wake of the financial crisis, the Depression is now providing useful fodder for comparative work, like Atif Mian and Amir Sufi’s analysis of the housing market.21 At the heart of economists’ debates around the Depression are concerns about how to combat the next one. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, policymakers had their own ideas about how to solve the crisis: Namely, that the crisis must be allowed to solve itself. Herbert Hoover, president from 1929 until 1933, was the archetypal associationalist and believed government could guide the economy, not unilaterally direct it. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded Hoover, began his term with similar assumptions, but as the crisis dragged on, he and his administration gradually embraced a more robust role for the state in managing national economic affairs and promoting recovery.22 108

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The political response to the Depression—the Roosevelt administration’s development of a robust federal welfare and regulatory state—framed U.S. political economy for the next half century. Characterized by experiment and expediency, the early New Deal was a stable of ideas all given rein to pull at once, but lashed to the core notion that the federal government should actively alleviate economic hardship. New Deal policymakers tugged on the three strands of reformist thought, embracing at different times and for different sectors competition, control and counter-organization. The list of programs that were tried, tested, kept or discarded is less important than their legacy: The New Deal, David Kennedy argued, created a set of institutions that delivered security to the American people and the American economy. The New Deal provided more assurance to bank depositors (FDIC), more reliable information to investors (SEC), more safety to lenders (FHA), more stability to relations between capital and labor (NLRB), more predictable wages to the most vulnerable workers (FLSA) and a safety net for both the unemployed and the elderly (Social Security).23 Nevertheless, these benefits were grossly uneven. Many New Deal programs, Ira Katznelson has shown, were designed specifically to include African Americans and other people of color.24 Americans broadly supported New Deal experimentation as long as material conditions were improving. Thanks to a shored up financial system and modest federal spending, they were through the mid-1930s. But the crash of 1937, caused by Roosevelt’s premature return to a balanced federal budget, weakened support for liberal eclecticism and forced the administration to advance a more coherent agenda. According to Alan Brinkley, by 1938 New Dealers had embraced a dual vision for the economic role of the federal government that was fiscal—it would manage the economy, along Keynesian lines, through federal spending—and regulatory—it would make capitalist markets safe and orderly through the administrative state. While promoting economic security, this formulation largely abandoned the problem of corporate power that had animated economic politics since the turn of the century. It also left behind more dramatic efforts to redistribute wealth and fundamentally reorder corporate capitalism. Nevertheless, the New Deal sowed deep anxiety among economic elites, many of whom saw these non-outcomes as Roosevelt’s true legacy.25 Despite the expanded federal purview, the government’s economic footprint remained small until World War II. Then federal spending grew enormously. From 1940 to 1945, an average of 31.9 percent of economic output was committed to the military, fueling economic recovery. The reach of the state also expanded dramatically, James Sparrow argued, extending much further into Americans’ economic lives through wartime programs like rationing and wage-price controls. The warfare state also created bonds between the federal government and big business that would endure after the war. The defense industry in particular secured permanent state support, while maintaining and even strengthening private ownership. The federal government largely jettisoned its public militaryindustrial capacity in the 1940s and 1950s, while buttressing the economy through robust federal military spending in the private sector.26

The Postwar Consensus, 1945–1970 Federal withdrawal from direct command of the defense industry was typical of the contest for economic control waged between business, government and labor in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the war’s wake, Democratic policymakers planned to promote stability and growth through continued direct federal economic oversight. Organized labor, for its part, sought to improve its standing by waging a massive strike campaign and spreading mostly northern unionization south. But business elites and their conservative allies, reacting to a generation of federal intervention and renewed labor militancy, ultimately gained the political upper hand. By the early 1950s, a broad truce developed. 109

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The federal government provided a social safety net and managed the business cycle through fiscal and monetary policy. Unionized labor commanded high wages and firm-level bargaining power. Big business retained the right to manage their operations as they saw fit. In a reprise of 1920s associationalism, the testy partnership of big government, big business and big labor allowed Americans to enjoy the benefits of state-supported economic growth while professing allegiance to free enterprise.27 The new federal commitment to macroeconomic management, however, had profound and unexpected consequences. Economic policymakers were now central players in ideological conflicts over how postwar growth was understood, while their relative success managing growth shaped wider economic and social policy debates. Scholars in the field of economic performativity go further, demonstrating how new measures of the economy, statistics like the Gross Domestic Product, defined which categories of action counted as economically productive, and hence which activities state policy would promote. One striking example was the banking industry. There, American economists categorized financial activity as economically productive, while their counterparts in the United Kingdom and France did not. Consequently, Brett Christophers argued, the notional productivity of finance implicitly justified American banks’ expansion into international markets during the 1950s and 1960s, at the expense of their French and British counterparts.28 The international expansion of American banks was part of the larger movement of American business and economic governance abroad, begun in the 1910s and 1920s and continued after World War II. Under the Bretton Woods international financial system, the dollar was the world’s currency. Eager to claim new markets, leading U.S. firms adopted multidivisional corporate structures and established subsidiaries around the globe. According to Michael Hogan, the American business and foreign policy communities worked closely together to project American associationalism abroad and to rebuild Europe in the image of the New Deal. The strength and success of U.S. economic imperialism, however, should not be overstated. European scholars have cast doubt on whether, for instance, the Marshall Plan was necessary for European economic recovery.29 Still, economic power underwrote America’s postwar global leadership. Movement, which defined the postwar global economy, was equally salient at home, directed by a blend of market incentives and government intervention. Technological advances made industry less dependent on place. Firms moved out of central cities and migrated south and west toward cheaper labor, energy and taxes. Jefferson Cowie put it succinctly: “Capital Move[d].” Cold War defense spending financed “military Keynesianism,” and powerful Sunbelt congressmen directed defense industry contracts to their home states. People followed the flow of jobs and federal money. Federal highway construction and housing policies contributed to booming suburban growth in the North, South and West. These outcomes were still highly racialized and uneven. In the Sunbelt, growth typically came in metropolitan areas, where new industries courted new migrants. Rural areas, by contrast, remained stagnant and underdeveloped.30 Although unionized labor largely lost its bid to assert political control in the workplace, the early postwar decades were nevertheless materially rewarding for most Americans. Claudia Gordon and Robert Margo labeled the period from 1940 to 1960 “The Great Compression,” when wages became more equal than any time before or since.31 High demand for low-skill industrial labor drove wage compression, aided by labor productivity gains, high industrial profits and robust economic growth. Compression also meant age compression: Children and the elderly worked less. Continuing longterm trends, the labor pool also became more diverse, with women and minorities making up larger proportions of the paid workforce. As Alice Kessler-Harris has shown, for most women during the postwar decades, work was not a careerist pursuit, but a way to sustain the domestic ideal, whether from financial destitution or in consumer comfort.32 The consumer economy, which blossomed in the 1920s, came to full flower in the 1950s, and with it a new style of consumer politics that reshaped the postwar regulatory state. During the New Deal, consumer and labor groups advocated for a purchasing power agenda of high wages and fair prices 110

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(suitable to support high wages and ensure a “fair” profit for business owners). In the 1950s this coalition was sundered, largely by the aggressive political actions of business elites who linked rising wages to rising prices. In its place, Lizabeth Cohen demonstrates, consumer politics turned away from purchasing power and toward expanding the federal government’s role as a health, safety and environmental regulator. Old agencies like the FTC and FDA gained new regulatory powers, while a number of new agencies, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (1970) and the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) expanded the reach and visibility of federal economic oversight.33 The consumerist-state, like the New Deal before it, alarmed increasingly combative business elites.

Things Fall Apart, 1970–2000 As with the boom years of the 1920s, many of the forces driving American prosperity during the Great Compression were sources of future instability. The mostly hidden hand of the state hindered federal capacity to act robustly when the postwar model of industrial prosperity began to falter in the 1960s and seemed to tumble down in the 1970s. Historians like Judith Stein and Meg Jacobs point to the 1970s as a decade of crisis, centered on three interrelated economic problems. First, the everpresent inflation of the postwar era became rampant, as federal policymakers spent freely on expanding social programs and waging war in Vietnam. Second, rising energy prices added inflationary pressure and undercut consumer purchasing power. Finally, foreign industrial producers, particularly from Germany and Japan, undermined the domestic and global dominance of American manufacturing, and with it, the high-paying unionized jobs it supported. Stein and Jacobs capture how the failure of federal policymakers to craft effective strategies to counter foreign competition or resolve the successive energy crises diminished Americans’ belief in the ability of government to solve economic problems.34 Economic crisis, in turn, opened the door to a long-simmering conservative backlash against the New Deal and newly consumerist regulatory state. Although corporate elites had grudgingly accepted the terms of the postwar political economy by the 1950s, resistance took root at the margins and grew steadily. Angus Bergin, Kim Philips-Fein and Ben Waterhouse separately showed how a host of increasingly well-funded organizations—the Mont Pelerin Society, the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Manufacturers respectively—cultivated an alternate political-economic ideology where unencumbered markets, not the state, were best suited to maximize social welfare.35 Like reformers’ ideas during the New Deal, pro-market partisans mobilized quickly in the moment of economic crisis. The widespread changes in federal economic governance that began in the 1970s often cluster under the catchall terms “deregulation” and “neoliberalism.” Deregulation refers primarily to legislative and regulatory efforts to reintroduce competition into state-managed economic sectors. Deregulation also emerged from below, as innovative firms and individuals pried at regulatory gaps for their material benefit. Shane Hamilton demonstrates how, for example, unregulated truckers undercut their unionized, highly regulated peers on the way to reshaping American agriculture. Neoliberalism is broader and harder to pin down. The term might be most succinctly defined as the elevation of economic efficiency over social priorities, and a useful starting point is Mark Blyth’s work, in which he argued that capital mobilized ideas to succeed over labor in the 1970s. In any case, while pro-market partisans and maverick economic actors were successful at breaking down competitive barriers, the health, safety and environmental reforms of the 1960s and 1970s largely remained intact, though there too competition and efficiency entered the regulatory vocabulary.36 The drive for efficiency was one response to the broad problem of slowing economic growth, which introduced new distributional questions across the political-economic spectrum. The annual growth rate of 3.4 percent that prevailed through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s could not match the average of 4.5 percent achieved in the 1950s and 1960s. Foreign competition and shrinking productivity gains 111

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undercut industrial wages, while the transition toward the less-unionized service economy, which accounted for 67 percent of workers by 1970, further depressed wages for lower-income Americans. The retailer Walmart, examined by both Bethany Moreton and Nelson Lichtenstein, symbolizes the shift from the high-wage, fair-price economy to a low-wage, low-price economy.37 At the same time, changes in the tax code, which lowered tax rates for top earners and reduced levies on capital gains, ensured that the era’s economic rewards would accrue to the best-compensated Americans. The brightest lights in seemingly dark economic times were the computer and information technology industries. Beginning in the 1970s, computers dramatically changed the nature and pace of work (and leisure) for most Americans. The economic and symbolic heart of the industry is Silicon Valley, California, a region that demonstrates how the intertwined relationships between the state and private industry continued to structure markets into the late twentieth century. Technology entrepreneurs and workers are often among the most vocally committed to championing private initiative and minimizing public oversight. But as Bruce Cumings demonstrated, direct federal spending, especially through defense contracts, was a critical incubator of innovation in the region going back at least to the 1930s.38 The state and the market remained always intertwined.

Conclusion: Future History The financial crisis and Great Recession loom over the post-1970 period, if not all of postwar economic history. In recent years, economists, policymakers and journalists have given us shelves of accounts exploring the causes and consequences of the crisis.39 We know a great deal about long-term trends in mortgage markets and financial innovation, and have fine-grained studies of the crisis as it unfolded. The political aftermath, meanwhile, reveals how policymakers have continued to grapple with the “proper place of government in the whole economic process.” The achievements of Barack Obama’s administration—financial reform that adds new layers of regulation while leaving the financial structure largely intact and healthcare reform that relies on private firms and state-constructed markets—are emblematic of the complex and enmeshed relationships between state, society and economy in twentieth-century American history. Historians are rightly wary of working backward from the present. Teleology remains a dangerous word. But if we are interested in reintegrating the historical and the economic, a deeper historical accounting of the financial crisis, an area of mutual concern for historians and economists, would be a useful place to begin. Looking for the roots of the crisis, we might ask: How have the politics and structure of finance changed during the twentieth century? Were the New Deal financial reforms structurally sound? Would, to return to the question of normativity, a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall be a logical step in light of historical experience? What role has finance played in Americans’ individual and collective economic security? How have financial discourses shaped economic and political behavior? Scholars have begun to answer these questions, and the growing literature on financialization, led by Greta Krippner and Louis Hyman, promises to remain a vibrant, interdisciplinary field for the foreseeable future.40 Where else might the history of political economy go? First, we should think more critically about federalism. Much of our historiography, including this chapter, focuses on the aggregation and deployment of federal economic and regulatory power in the twentieth century. Individual states, though, remained critical economic protagonists; their role is dramatically understudied. A second area of focus, following the cliometricians, should be the historical study of institutions. Although organizational historians, institutional economists, economic sociologists and other social scientists have separately constructed theories of organizational development, these approaches have rarely been brought together. A new institutional history, examining the dynamics of change within state and private institutions, offers historians an opportunity to develop a productive interdisciplinary conversation. Third, historians should not shy away from addressing recent questions raised in 112

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historical-economic scholarship. Is inequality inherent to capitalism?41 Can we expect growth to continue?42 These questions go to the very heart of capitalism as a political-economic system; the decision to address them, or not, will likewise influence what the history of capitalism as a field becomes. Will it remain a discourse largely internal to the discipline of history? Will it engage with the ongoing work of economists and economic historians? Historians must grapple with the labels they make, even those they make for themselves. Finally, the eagerness to reduce opponents to fools, as the cliometricians did, remains a too-common reflex on both sides of the historical-economic divide. Historians and like-minded social scientists too often caricature economics as a discipline blindly committed to models of rational self-interest and infallible markets. Economists, likewise, at times reject history as non-rigorous story-telling. Taking arguments and methods seriously does not perforce require adopting theoretical vocabularies or deploying multivariate regressions. It does require sincere engagement. If historians pursue a new political economy, if they move to consider the “[proper] place of government in the whole economic process,” they will need that engagement. It will be a welcome substantive and methodological development.

Notes   1 Harold F. Williamson, The Growth of the American Economy, ed. Harold F. Williamson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1944), v; Kenneth Lipartito, “Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,” American Historical Review 121, no. 1 (January 2016): 101–139; Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (2014): 503–536; Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It’s Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, April 6, 2013; “The Future of Economic History,” Paul Rhode and Ann Carlos, eds., Journal of Economic History 75, no. 4 (December 2015): 1228–1257.   2 For thorough treatments of the economic historiography, which I draw on here, see: Naomi Lamoreaux, “Beyond the Old and the New: Economic History in the United States,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History, ed. Francesco Boldizzoni and Pat Hudson (New York: Routledge, 2016).   3 John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 104–116.   4 Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1913), v.   5 Arthur H. Cole, “A Report on Research in Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 4 (May 1944): 53.   6 Robert A. Lively, “The American System: A Review Article,” The Business History Review 29, no. 1 (1955): 81–96.   7 Donald N. McCloskey, “The Achievements of the Cliometric School,” The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1 (March 1978): 15.   8 Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 231–232.   9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 588–589. 10 Douglas C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11 Jeremy Adleman and Jonathan Levy, “The Fall and Rise of Economic History,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2014. 12 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 13 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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Sean H. Vanatta 14 Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979); Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15 Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 16 Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board; Business-Government Relations During World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 17 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michael A Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 18 Alvin Hansen, Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1941); Thomas Wilson, Fluctuations in Income & Employment, With Special Reference to Recent American Experience and Post-War Prospects (New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1949); Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 19 Peter Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976). 20 Charles Kindleberger, The World Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Barry J. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 21 Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 22 Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression & the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23 David M. Kennedy, “What the New Deal Did,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 254; David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005). 25 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 26 James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Edelstein, “War and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century,” Cambridge Economic History of the United States (hereafter: CEH) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 332; Mark Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 27 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 28 Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Philipp Lepenies, The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 02 (August 2005): 297–320; Brett Christophers, Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (Malden, MA: John Wiley and Sons, 2013). 29 Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945– 1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 30 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Carol E. Heim, “Structural Changes: Regional and Urban,” CEH, 96, 123. 31 Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (February 1992): 1–34; Claudia Goldin, “Labor Markets in the Twentieth Century,” CEH, 553, 577. 32 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 33 Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

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Economics and Capitalism 34 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016). 35 Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009); Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business From Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 36 Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985); Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Walmart Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Edward J. Balleisen, ed., Business Regulation, 3 vols. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015); Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 37 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 38 Bruce Cumings, Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendency and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 424–470. 39 Among the most useful for historians are: Alan S. Blinder, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (New York: Penguin Press, 2013); Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). 40 Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 41 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 42 Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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11 INTELLECTUAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Daniel Wickberg

In 1936, the sociologist Louis Wirth, in his preface to the American edition of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, wrote: It seems to be characteristic of our period that norms and truths which were once believed to be absolute, universal, and eternal, or which were accepted with blissful unawareness of their implications, are being questioned. In the light of modern thought and investigation much of what was once taken for granted is declared to be in need of demonstration and proof. The criteria of proof themselves have become subjects of dispute. We are witnessing not only a general distrust of the validity of ideas but of the motives of those who assert them. This situation is aggravated by a war of each against all in the intellectual arena where personal self-aggrandizement rather than truth has come to be the coveted prize. Increased secularization of life, sharpened social antagonisms and the accentuation of the spirit of personal competition have permeated regions which were once thought to be wholly under the reign of the disinterested and objective search for truth.1 This observation could have been made anytime from the late nineteenth century through the present. While presented as peculiar to its moment—the 1930s—it would seem to be equally at home in the Progressive Era thought of William James, Elsie Clews Parsons, Henry Adams and Walter Lippmann or the so-called “postmodern” era of Kuhnian paradigms, Foucauldian critique, critical race theory and feminist theories of knowledge. The rhetoric of a world in which timeless verities and absolute truths are called into question by epistemological uncertainty, rapid social change, cultural conflict and a rooting of knowledge and belief in personal experience and interested motive, is a rhetoric that is pervasive throughout the long twentieth century. Wirth wrote as if his moment was to be distinguished from that immediately preceding it, when the authority of established truths went unquestioned, as if Darwinism, statistical thinking, Freudian psychology and the scientific agnosticism of the late nineteenth century were not already unsettling received knowledge and calling into question the authority of rational thought and objective truth. Like Wirth looking back to a prelapsarian era, the critics of postmodern relativism of the 1980s and 1990s imagined an era—Wirth’s own— prior to the 1960s as one in which the authority of science was absolute, the fixed categories of male and female were given in nature, and moral truths were matters of broad consensus in the philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Kant.

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Given that our own historical sensibilities were in large part formed during, and shaped by, the intellectual history of the twentieth century, we should proceed with caution in evaluating the intellectual historiography of the era. In many ways, we are still within it, and scholarship on recent intellectual history is working within the idioms of modernism. The object/subject problem is particularly acute for historians of recent thought, since the “idea worlds” of the recent past that we study are so entwined with the ideas that we use to study that past. Twentieth-century thought, for the intellectual historian, is both the subject of our history, and the condition of our way of knowing.

The Problem of Periodization While historians are not in consensus on matters of periodization, and historians of social and political thought may, say, differ from historians of epistemology or aesthetic theory, it makes sense to think of the twentieth century as divided into three broad periods: a period of transition from late Victorian to modernist idioms, roughly 1890 to 1920; a mid-century era of high modernist thought, from 1920 or 1930 to the mid-1960s; and an era of what some have called postmodernist thought, but which might be more accurately typified as a more self-conscious form of modernism, emerging in the early to mid-1960s and continuing to the present. While there are longstanding continuities of thought and presumption that run through twentieth-century intellectual history, as well as enduring intellectual battles between opposed forms of thought, there are good reasons to break the history of thought into smaller units. I should add, of course, that there are alternatives to the structure of periodization that I am suggesting here, and that, given the historical issue that the historian chooses to study, such alternatives will seem more appropriate. Many historians of the intellectual history of foreign policy, for instance, will see the period from 1939 or 1947 to 1989 as of a piece. So, my tripartite conceptualization is offered as one that I see a great deal of recent work coalescing around, but not as a definitive or comprehensive periodization applicable in all instances. The first era, from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, is characterized by the dominance of Darwinian and biological notions and metaphors and the questioning of received notions of fixed hierarchy and order inherited from the Enlightenment. James Kloppenberg has argued—in what remains one of the most important works on modern thought—that this era saw the triumph of the principle of “uncertainty” in philosophy and social thought against prevailing forms of early and mid-nineteenth-century foundationalist thought.2 The intellectual consequences were numerous: the emergence of philosophical pragmatism, itself indebted deeply to Darwinism; the rise of the professional social sciences in the modern research university; both the accommodation of Darwinian and scientific thought, and the reaction against it, in the theological sphere; the new flexible and adaptive liberalism and progressivism of Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Jane Addams and John Dewey in the political sphere. Intellectuals of the era created, among other ideas, new understandings of social change in response to the rise of industrial corporate capitalism, and a new feminism that challenged Victorian notions of Woman. One of the central ways to think of the era is as one in which dominant modes of thought looked simultaneously both back—to an imagined fixed unitary and homogeneous moral order, rooted in nature, universal reason or biblical authority—and forward—to a society and culture characterized by constant accelerated change, innovation, pluralism and relativism. Whether intellectuals were responding to industrialism and the corporate merger movement, expanding scientific and naturalistic understandings to new realms of psychology and sociology or trying to preserve the authority of Christianity in an increasingly secular and pluralistic environment, they found a set of new idioms and critical tools to define a modern age. Theirs was, in George Cotkin’s terms, a “reluctant” modernism.3 The ambivalence of modernist forms of thought—committed to the liberating power of science and

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human reason, while hungry to retain the authority of the given and the sacred—lay behind many of the most characteristic intellectual conflicts of this era. The intellectual movement that Morton White long ago described as “the revolt against formalism” sought to replace older structures of inherent meaning with new evolutionary and concrete historical realities, but often found the new “reality” as evanescent and fragile as what it was intended to replace.4 Jackson Lears has identified a consciousness of “weightlessness” and an intensified search for “real life” underlying the intellectual and cultural movements of an era ostensibly committed to an unimpeded moral, material and social progress.5 Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, building on and synthesizing decades of scholarship on philosophical pragmatism, argued that the key innovation of the period was a new idea about ideas—that, following Darwin and the rise of statistical thinking, ideas came to be understood as man-made tools rather than reflections or registers of some independent reality.6 The conflicts and tensions that revolved around this new understanding of ideas—conflicts between absolutisms and relativisms, singularisms and pluralisms, universalisms and particularisms—are central to the intellectual history of the entire twentieth century, and can be found articulated in such notable texts as William James’s Pragmatism (1907), W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907), as well as dispersed throughout a wide swath of thinking at various levels of articulation. Daniel Borus has called the early twentieth century an age of “multiplicity,” effectively capturing the imagined breakup of a unitary and comprehensive world of moral and aesthetic absolutes and the embrace of the possibilities of relativistic and plural realities.7 The second era, from the 1920s through the early to mid-1960s, is characterized by the dominant rejection of biological and naturalistic models of human behavior and the triumph of cultural relativism in the liberal imagination. It includes as some of its central features the challenge to democratic theory of mass society and totalitarianism and the problem of scientific, moral and aesthetic authority once universalist standards were questioned or rejected. This era saw the rise and fall of Marx and Freud as intellectual systems for American thinkers and critics; the emergence of a “tragic sensibility” among mid-century thinkers, including the vogue of existentialism; the cordoning off of art from politics; and the emergence of formalist criticism in the aesthetic sphere. The characteristic conflicts of the mid-century were conflicts between universalisms and resurgent and resilient particularisms born of a modernist cast. The universalist ideas of the mid-twentieth century are best exemplified in the discourse of Man, examined with great critical acumen by Mark Greif.8 The commitment to an abstract image of Man, freed of all historical, ethnic, racial and national particulars, was an outgrowth of democratic theory with its roots in the Enlightenment, but also a response to the particular conditions of twentieth-century life and thought. The liberal response to the rise of racialist and nationalist ideologies exemplified by Fascism and National Socialism was not to double down on particularistic traditions as a means of fortifying against the seeming anxiety and uprootedness of what came to be called “mass society,” but to empty out the particularisms in favor of a common understanding of the psychology, sociology and political identity of human beings. But we find the mid-century commitment to universalist abstractions such as “the individual,” “the person,” or “the human condition” not just in the realm of liberal and cosmopolitan political ideals. It is also present in the mid-century elevation of “science” as a unified, singular and universal form of knowledge, exemplified in the logical positivism and analytical philosophy of the era; in the growing use of public opinion polling, statistical method applied to human populations, and other forms of social scientific “typing” so carefully examined by the historian Sarah Igo in The Averaged American; in the ecumenical religion that asserted a “Judeo-Christian tradition” as the basis for a way of life stripped of specific doctrinal commitments; in the nationalist idiom of an “American way of life” and what Gunnar Myrdal called “the American Creed,” both expressions of universalist principles; in the elevation of culture-free aesthetic criteria in the literary criticism of the so-called “New Critics”; and in the attempt to create a universal social theory in the work of Talcott Parsons and his followers.9 118

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Behind this bold universalism, however, a counterpoint of particularism was ever-present: The idea of modern cultures as plural, of modern history as a set of limiting conditions, of personalities and cultures as integrated particular wholes; an embrace of diversity of ethnicity and religion; the rise of theological neo-orthodoxy and a re-assertive evangelical Christianity; and new understandings of the diversity and range of sexual behavior given expression particularly in the Kinsey Report. The third era, whether we call it an era of “postmodernism” or an “age of fracture,” represents a challenge to hierarchies and received categories of meaning that had seemed to be articulated in a clear way in the mid-century years. Instead of science being envisioned as a realm apart from culture founded on the authority of reason and method, for instance, after Thomas Kuhn’s Structures of Scientific Revolution (1962), science was systematically represented as a form of cultural imagination deeply embedded within the terms of human desires and needs. If cultural modernists had held the realm of universal aesthetic experience as embodied in a canon of art distinct from the commercial products of an industrial society, after the Pop Art revolution of the 1960s such hierarchical distinctions seemed less clear. If the mid-century years represented the pinnacle of the productive forces of industrial capitalism, where labor had achieved a kind of triumph as a force in industrial unionism, the later decades of the century saw the emergence of a world of symbolic manipulations in a service economy and the decline of labor in a “post-industrial” world. The idea that all received categories of thought were arbitrary and “socially constructed,” that “reality” itself was a social construction—as the famous Berger and Luckmann volume of 1966 had it—undermined the hollow new realities constructed in the mid-century.10 New ideas of “identity,” of challenges to sex and race differences and of all “essentialisms,” provoked reactions and battles over a world of fixed meanings and hierarchies and a world of new visions of liberation as anti-categorical, and social categories as “performative” rather than intrinsic. The so-called “culture wars” of the late twentieth century were the site of these conflicts over religion, science, sexuality, education, freedom of expression and identity. According to the first comprehensive study of the late twentieth-century culture wars, Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America, the origins of these battles lie in the cultural transformation that occurred in the 1960s.11 While many historians have pointed to the rupture that they imagine occurred in that decade, there have been recent works that have stressed that the mid-century decades created a kind of moral, epistemological and aesthetic set of values that antedate the 1960s. Robert Genter’s Late Modernism, for instance, identified a group of mid-century social thinkers, critics, artists and theorists—including Kenneth Burke, James Baldwin, David Riesman and Erving Goffmann—who embraced a fully socialized, non-hierarchical and relativized vision of life, truth and art, in contrast to the hierarchical and rationalist, or romantic, commitments of other contemporaneous modernists. That “late modernist” orientation, for Genter, was a bridge to postmodernism. Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround showed how mid-century social scientists and artists dovetailed to create an image of democratic thought and culture based on multimedia experience—an idea that had previously been associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, but was fully present in such landmarks of mid-century display as the Museum of Modern Art’s Family of Man exhibit. Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion argues that the mode of political economy that has come to characterize the late twentieth century, often referred to as neoliberalism for its anti-Keynesian, anti-welfare-statist embrace of markets, had deep roots in the mid-century international organization the Mont Pelerin Society. And Jason Stevens in God-Fearing and Free argued, among other things, that the roots of the late twentieth-century culture wars, contra Hartman, lie in the language of early Cold War realism and concepts of sin and innocence.12 The most influential work that has sought to define the character of the thought of the last third of the twentieth century has been Daniel Rodgers’s Age of Fracture. While other works such as James Livingston’s The World Turned Inside Out, and James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama offered views of specialized aspects of American thought, only Rodgers created a comprehensive overview that seeks to bring political and economic thought into conversation with philosophy, critical theory, 119

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historiography and legal thought. Rodgers argued that the era of the final three decades of the twentieth century represents a “disaggregation” of the vision of social reality that was dominant during the mid-century years. The idea that thinkers in the middle years of the twentieth century saw society as a dense, interconnected, institutionally solid arena is the necessary backdrop for understanding Rodgers’s conception of late twentieth-century thought. The rise of market ideology, anti-essentialist and social constructionist theories of race and gender, post-structural critical theory and linguistic analysis: All point, for Rodgers, to a pervasive breakdown of a supposedly stable mid-century consensus. Rodgers presented us with an unraveling of—rather than a rupture with—mid-century thought, via the migration of language and metaphor across spheres of thought. It is probably too soon to say whether Rodgers’s picture of the age will come to be the dominant one, but it provided a powerful synthetic account that has been much discussed by intellectual historians.13

Intellectual History and the New History of Capitalism One of the major developments in American historiography in the last decade has been the appearance of a new history of capitalism as an organizing principle for understanding American life. The work of scholars such as Sven Beckert, Bethany Moreton, Michael Zakim and Kim Phillips-Fein created a new integrative focus for American history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of capitalism being seen as the subject for business history narrowly conceived, it is imagined as a full-blown social and cultural system that impacts every phase and domain of modern American life. Intellectual historians have had a large role to play in this new history; they have examined economic thought, political ideology and social theory as both representations of capitalism and as modes of thought that reveal and further the logic of economic life. Jeffrey Sklansky’s work on ideas of selfhood and economic life or Jonathan Levy’s analysis of the concept of risk in nineteenth-century thought are good examples of the role intellectual history is playing in this area.14 In some ways there is nothing “new” for intellectual historians in the history of capitalism; they have been engaged in dealing with many of these issues since the 1970s and 1980s. The focus on consumer culture and corporate capitalism and their intellectual history in the work of scholars such as Warren Susman, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Jackson Lears, Alan Trachtenberg and James Livingston was central to the work of modern American intellectual history of a previous generation.15 But in other ways, the current work in the field represents a departure, by relating intellectual history more closely to economic policy and politics, and by focusing more closely on ideas in relationship to institutions and markets. Recent intellectual histories of capitalism in the twentieth century tend to dovetail with work on the history of conservatism and a new concern with the political ideologies of free-market thought. Angus Burgin’s book on the Mont Pelerin Society and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market on Ayn Rand and libertarianism are good examples of this work, as is Mike O’Connor’s more temporally expansive study of “democratic capitalism.“ The essays collected in Nelson Lichtenstein’s American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth-Century showed a wider range of concerns—left, right and center—and pointed to the ways in which a variety of social, political and economic thinkers conceptualized capitalism and created ideologies to both critique and promote its various forms. Howard Brick’s study of post-capitalist thought offered a new model and way of understanding thinkers such as Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, David Riesman and other post-World War II thinkers. In it, he argued that the mid-century decades saw a form of social theory that imagined an end to capitalism as the result of technological and economic development rather than revolutionary conflict and that mid-century thought was not the old Cold War liberal consensus of an accommodation of the intellectual left to capitalist institutions and the welfare state, but represented a vision of a life beyond capitalism. So, the intellectual history of capitalism has shaped the understanding of a wide domain of political, economic, religious and social thought in recent years.16 120

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The question remains, however, whether the history of capitalism, as an integrative historiographical paradigm, is an adequate basis for the extent of intellectual history, and whether its historiographical dominance is sucking the air out of a wider range of possibilities. For an entire generation questions of the history of twentieth-century philosophy, of literary thought and theory, of aesthetic values, of ethics, have been somewhat marginalized by the eagerness to make political economy, policy intellectuals and public political and economic significance the center of intellectual history practice. The sense of crisis an older generation of intellectual historians experience has long passed, and intellectual history has been in resurgence in the discipline over the last decade. The formation of a new professional organization, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, is one indicator of the strength of the field. But many of its practitioners have maintained a concern, forged in the 1970s and 1980s, with demonstrating the relevance of intellectual history to matters of political, economic and social life, and have as a consequence narrowed the scope of intellectual history. The history of capitalism has produced genuinely innovative work, but seems too narrow to encompass intellectual history in the current moment of its “big tent” incarnation.

The Return of the Philosophical and the Aesthetic Works like those of Jason Stevens, Fred Turner, Robert Genter and Mark Greif, mentioned above, as well as those of other historians such as Lisa Szefel, George Cotkin and Joan Shelley Rubin pointed to a resurgence of concern with poetry, fiction, film, art and criticism as part of a broader intellectual history that often includes—but is not limited to—religious and political ideas. Like the field of intellectual history as a whole, the aesthetic turn displays a healthy methodological diversity. Stevens did close readings of prominent and not-so-prominent texts as registers of larger cultural values. Greif put four works of fiction in the center of a study of a widespread discourse, and balanced the discourse study with close attention to the concerns of particular novels. Rubin used a history of books and readers approach to understand the development and contradictions of middlebrow thought and aesthetic engagement. And these historians were, of course, trying to say very different things about the historical era they commonly depicted. But as historians they do share a concern with aesthetic representation as a field of ideas and thinking. This arena of study represents one of the richest possibilities for future study. Concern with the history of sensibilities and ways of seeing—particularly in the pluralistic intellectual world of the twentieth century—expands the current dominant concerns of intellectual historians.17 While philosophical thought, particularly the broad pragmatic tradition from Charles Sanders Peirce and William James through Richard Rorty and Richard Bernstein, has not lacked for analysts, the history of philosophy has not been central to twentieth-century intellectual history in recent years. However, that, too, is changing. While we are unlikely to see full-scale intellectual histories that integrate the analytical philosophical tradition of the mid-century into a broader pattern of thinking, recent work does point to a more concrete and specific integration of philosophical thought into the “human sciences.” Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge, for instance, situated the Harvard philosopher W.V.O. Quine in relationship to contemporaries, such as Thomas Kuhn, Talcott Parsons and B. F. Skinner, who developed a kind of local framework for epistemology in the human sciences at midcentury Harvard. Kerwin Klein demonstrated the way thinkers such as Quine and Suzanne Langer created a philosophy of language that came to shape what has been called the “linguistic turn” in the broader domain of historical and cultural studies.18 These works and others showed a new and more expansive concern with philosophy in relationship to broader intellectual movements and trends. This is most evident in the significant attention given to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s study of the reception of Nietzsche’s thought. Her book was part of a general wave of studies of German philosophy in America that included works on Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (who lived, wrote and published in the U.S., but has frequently been treated as a Continental thinker).19 As 121

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such, it was part of the transnational study that has long been a feature of some of the best work in the history of American thought. Ratner-Rosenhagen argued that Nietzsche was appropriated and used by a wide variety of American thinkers across diverse political and religious lines from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. The work is really a study of the pervasive nature of anti-foundational thinking in American culture. Not a study of Nietzsche’s influence so much as a study of what Americans found in Nietzsche—in his critique of religion, his perspectivalism, his aesthetic ideas, his romantic individualism, his vision of a rupture with the past and the possibilities of the future—what made Ratner-Rosenhagen’s study so powerful was its commitment to seeing a kind of vernacular philosophical consciousness that bridged high and low cultures. In a culture shaped by Protestant religious beliefs, overwhelmingly practical and pragmatic in its orientation, committed to democratic ideals (if not always practice), Nietzsche became a source to think through the contradictions of American life. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s work pointed to the way in which historians are re-conceptualizing philosophy as a fluid interdisciplinary and vernacular project—found in popular culture as well as rarified spheres, and in the broad conceptualization of knowledge throughout the arts and sciences.

The Transnational Turn The past two decades have seen the emergence of a push to rethink the nation state as a container of history, and to look at the transnational flow of goods, people and ideas as ways to explain modern developments. Historians continue to be trained in national fields, but they are increasingly attuned to the transnational dimensions of their fields. Intellectual historians, however, have long had a transnational dimension to their work, since the circulation of ideas has never been a respecter of borders. Daniel Rodgers on the transatlantic history of progressivism, Kwame Anthony Appiah on the German sources of W.E.B. Du Bois’s thought, Richard Pells’s Modernist America, on the global influence of American arts in the twentieth century, and Brooke Blower’s study of Americans in Paris between the World Wars exemplified both the longstanding tradition and the variety of work being done on European-American intellectual transfer.20 But only recently have American intellectual historians begun to look elsewhere than Europe for a transnational perspective. Two works in particular are indicative of this turn. Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism cast new light on movements for racial justice in the United States by showing the close connections between anti-colonial advocates for a democratic India and those who pushed against Jim Crow and white supremacy in the United States. Connecting Indian concepts of caste to American concepts of race, Slate showed how older ideas about the peculiarity of racial ideologies to American life are inadequate to understand the intellectual world of a developing cosmopolitan sensibility and politics. His work represented the entering wedge of a twentieth-century intellectual history interested in examining the relationship between Asian and American ideas and thinking. Ruben Flores’s Backwoods Pragmatists looked to the hemispheric transnational flow of ideas, particularly between the United States and Mexico. He argued that Mexican intellectuals who studied Deweyan pragmatism in the United States and adapted it to the concrete project of realizing democracy in the particular conditions of Mexican life, then shaped American reformers and intellectuals who sought to replicate the reforms in American communities in the mid-century. Deweyan pragmatism, long considered a kind of home grown American philosophy, is decentered in Flores’s account; transnational exchange moves both ways. Both Slate and Flores provide intellectual historians of the twentieth century with a broader canvas. But the ideas of cultural and racial cosmopolitanism and of fluid flow of ideas across borders should also be seen as modernist ideas, born in the twentieth century. In some ways, they attest to the creation of a modernist international cosmopolitan intellectual elite, whose modes of thinking have more in common with one another than with the specific cultural formations from which they come.21 122

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Academic Thought and the Intellectuals Ever since Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals (1987), intellectual historians have felt a kind of tension between the study of ideas and thinking that takes place within the modern institution of the university, and the world of so-called “public intellectuals.” Some of that tension is based on a romanticized notion of the intellectual as an independent critic, and a concomitant notion that academic thought is too detached, narrow and disciplinary to resonate in public life. Should intellectual historians concern themselves primarily with these public intellectuals, or should they focus on the site of the academy as the space in which ideas have been developed in communities of discourse and conversation?22 Much of the scholarship of the past decade has called Jacoby’s distinction into question. The history of the social sciences, in particular, is thriving precisely because what has happened in these disciplines has been the launch pad for social thought and theory more broadly. Many of the most important public intellectuals—from John Dewey to Lionel Trilling to C. Wright Mills to Judith Butler and Cornell West—have developed their voices in conversation with the academic milieu that produced them. Conversely, those New York intellectuals, like Dwight Macdonald, who maintained a space outside the academy were far from autonomous; they were deeply enmeshed in the commercial world of journalism, as Robert Vanderlan documented so effectively in his study of intellectuals in the Luce magazine empire.23 Andrew Jewett’s sweeping study of what he called “scientific democracy” illustrated the ways in which academic thought has been public thought. His argument was that, until the Cold War years, the development of science and particularly social science was not committed to value neutrality or positivistic method but to a common expression and understanding of democratic values. His account is in direct opposition to those who have always seen a commitment to technocratic expertise and specialized knowledge as characteristic of the modern university. Other scholars, such as Jamie Cohen-Cole and Joanne Meyerowitz, examined mid-century academic social thought to reconstruct its modeling of a version of a liberal or progressive society. In Cohen-Cole’s account, Cold War era social scientists come to see science itself as a model of liberal openness and rejection of dogma. For Meyerowitz, the interdisciplinary movement of Culture and Personality scholarship sought to rethink gender and sexual identities at mid-century in ways that are often associated with the postmodern anti-essentialism that flourished in feminist and queer thought at the end of the twentieth century.24

Gender and Race While we still lack comprehensive histories of twentieth-century ideas of race and gender, the pervasiveness of these categories in American historiography means that many histories deploy concepts of race and gender as part of their analysis, even when they are not the central subject matter. The operative assumption is anti-essentialist, with the notion that these categories are ideological rather than neutral descriptions of biological differences. The best studies of racial ideologies have tended to focus on African American intellectuals and various movements associated with them. There are many, many studies of race and its meaning in twentieth-century life, but surprisingly little recent work on the twentieth-century intellectual (as distinguished from social or political) history of white supremacy, notions of racial hierarchy and the various challenges to and affirmations of race thinking by whites after the Progressive Era, despite the ubiquity of racism as a mode of thought throughout the twentieth century. Daniel Geary’s recent study of the Moynihan Report and its various consequences for thinking about race and civil rights was one exception to this pattern. African American intellectuals, especially major figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, have received extensive treatment, as have African American social scientists, and ideologies such as Black Power and Black Nationalism. And recently a movement has arisen to provide the outlines and direction for an intellectual history of black women.25 The tendency to treat race and racial thought in

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this literature as a distinct and autonomous area of study—the idea, for instance, that there is a distinct African American intellectual tradition that should be understood primarily as an ongoing set of concerns and conceptions—has both provided a powerful impetus to the study of black intellectual life and sometimes made it difficult to see the intellectual relations and connections between black thinkers and the larger intellectual environment in which they moved. And the intellectual history of race, of course, despite the dominance of the black/white binary in the American past, is rapidly becoming pluralized. Henry Yu’s study of twentieth-century social thought, Thinking Orientals, is a good example of the ways in which a more expansive view of race is being incorporated into intellectual historiography.26 Surprisingly, we also still lack both a comprehensive history of the idea of gender in the twentieth century and a comprehensive account of the history of feminist thought. Rosalind Rosenberg’s study from a generation ago of early twentieth-century psychology and social science and ideas of sex difference and equality still provides a model for what an intellectual history of feminist thought might look like. The intellectual history of feminism, however, has tended to be subordinated to the political history of feminist movements. Still, there are very good specialized studies of aspects of feminist thought that suggest a pattern for understanding it in relationship to the broader intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Mari Jo Buhle’s excellent but sometimes overlooked study of feminist intellectual engagement with Freudian thought—its critique as well as its use—suggested that the ambivalence many feminists felt toward one of the most powerful forms of twentieth-century thought might be applied more broadly to the feminist engagement with other sources of radical thought, including Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche. Other scholars looked to the relationship between feminism and pragmatism. Jane Gerhard put American thought about sex and sexuality at the center of her study of second-wave feminism. The study of ideas of masculinity has been important to the study of gender ideology; John Pettegrew’s Brutes in Suits is one recent example. And historians of science such as Erika Milam studied ideas about gender difference as expressed in biological and anthropological studies and the continuing significance of evolutionary thought for popular understandings of sex difference, even as modernist and postmodernist intellectuals declared gender a matter of culture all the way down.27 The conflict between sex and gender, between the idea of a fixed biological nature and a fluid cultural sphere of distinctions defined by power, is perhaps the characteristic intellectual conflict of the long twentieth century. Biological science, with the mapping of the human genome and the popular resurgence of evolutionary psychology, has led many to think of a deep-rooted biological nature as the source of human identities and behaviors. But the idea of culture, as one of the key ideas of twentiethcentury thought, has pointed to learned behavior, a web of man-made symbols and mutable identities and conventions. Modernist thought created a set of conflicts between universalism and relativism, essentialism and socially constructed categories, objective truth and perspectivalism and unitary and pluralistic visions of reality. The battle between sex and gender—or the attempt to find a middle way between them—speaks to the most profound forms of modernist consciousness in twentieth-century life. Modernism has been, and continues to be, a battleground in which relentless critique and destabilizing fluidity are pitted against the authority of fixed and universal truths.

Notes   1 Louis Wirth, “Preface,” in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1936), x–xi.   2 James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).   3 George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (Twayne, 1992; reprint Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).   4 Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York: Viking Press, 1949).

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Intellectual   5 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Press, 2010).   6 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).   7 Daniel H. Borus, Twentieth Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).   8 Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).   9 Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 10 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Press, 1966). 11 Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 12 Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism From World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 13 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). 14 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014); Michael Zakim and Gary J. Cornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009); Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 15 Warren Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul Conkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 212–226; Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 19–39; Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 16 Burgin, The Great Persuasion; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Mike O’Connor, A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014); Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: V   isions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 17 See the citations for Genter, Stevens and Turner above. Lisa Szefel, The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); Joan Shelley Rubin, Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); George Cotkin, Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 18 Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences From Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 59–83. 19 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Richard H. King, Arendt and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Daniel Wickberg 20 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Brooke Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Culture and Politics Between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 21 Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Ruben Flores, Backwoods Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 22 Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 23 Robert Vanderlan, Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 24 Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University From the Civil War to the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Joanne Meyerowitz, “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” Journal of American History 96, no. 4 (2010): 1057–1084. 25 Daniel Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 26 Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 27 Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle With Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Sexual Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Erika L. Milam, Searching for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

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12 POLITICS OF LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Jennifer Delton

Figure 12.1 Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan waving from their limousine at the Inauguration Day Parade in Washington D.C., 1981. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, 198507.

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In the middle of the twentieth century, liberalism still referred to a philosophy focused on individual freedom, property rights and limited government. Otherwise known as the liberal tradition, it was a forward-looking philosophy, rooted in Locke and refined by Jefferson and Madison. It said progress occurred as individuals were freed from the restrictive social statuses of the past and allowed to compete with each other as equals. The primary role of government was to protect the rights and property of individuals so as to facilitate this free competition and progress. Conservatism at this time referred variously to nativism, antipathy to change or excessive commitment to “rugged individualism,” which progressives were beginning to see as a myth that upheld a capitalist elite. Unlike liberalism, conservatism was not seen as a coherent ideology, nor even part of the American tradition. In hindsight, we can see that by the 1950s, the meanings of both liberalism and conservatism had already been completely transformed.

Liberalism Like classical liberalism, twentieth-century liberalism would be forward-looking, protective of individual rights and progressive. But twentieth century liberals would discard “rugged individualism,” property rights and limited government and develop a governing philosophy based on the efficacious use of state power to correct social and economic ills. It took shape in the Progressive Era, as liberals like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly sought to enlarge the state’s capacity to regulate an increasingly complex society, while still protecting and expanding individual liberty. The founder of the New Republic, Croly argued that while the principles of individualism and small government may have been appropriate for an agrarian society, they were disastrous in a modern capitalist society where the problems faced were national in scope and required close study by experts, not horse-trading by political hacks. Croly urged Americans to think of the United States not as a disparate collection of local communities and unfettered individuals, but as a national political community whose various parts and interests could be coordinated. Theodore Roosevelt picked up on this theme, proclaiming that the betterment Americans sought must be accomplished through the “National Government.”1 Lippmann concurred, arguing in Drift and Mastery (1913) that the problems of a modern industrial society could be understood scientifically and thus controlled as long as it had the means to administer and regulate itself, that is, as long as it had strong national government. The Great Depression created an opportunity for liberals to deploy these ideas. The New Deal became the political embodiment of twentieth-century liberalism, uniting leftists, progressives, unionists, black leaders and internationalists around the idea that a democratic government could devise a social organization that enhanced freedom rather than stifled it. Although New Dealers saw their program as pragmatic and secular, distinct from the moralistic Progressive Era, they shared with the progressives a belief that the federal government had a responsibility to foster stability and security for its citizens. Its promises and achievements allowed liberals and their allies in the labor movement to gain control of the Democratic Party, at the time a minority party, thereby creating the New Deal Coalition of southern whites, urban machines, northern blacks, labor and liberals. World War II was another opportunity to showcase what could be accomplished when the private sector worked with the government.2 After the war, the federal state used the G. I. Bill, government-backed home loans and Keynesianism to build a prosperous middle class, develop the South and stabilize capitalism.3 Although centered in the Democratic Party, the main tenets of liberalism were endorsed by moderate Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower. By the 1950s, the idea that the national government had a positive role to play in maintaining economic growth and promoting public welfare was part of the mainstream, embraced by the media, unions, social elites, corporate leaders and Democrats and Republicans alike, a phenomenon known as the liberal consensus. There were still arguments about the scope of government power, but they were not about whether the government should intervene. 128

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This broad consensus among social elites produced an unprecedented era of economic equality, at least among whites.4 John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson expanded the prerogatives of liberalism, directing federal money into scientific research, higher education and the arts, declaring war on poverty and enacting legislation to integrate black Americans, women and other minorities into American political and economic life. Despite their limitations, the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) are among twentieth-century liberalism’s greatest achievements. Twentieth-century liberalism fostered U.S. internationalism, which revisionist historians would call imperialism. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, every liberal progressive twentieth-century president who expanded state power at home also expanded U.S. power abroad. Woodrow Wilson’s name is linked to an internationalist foreign policy that laid the groundwork for U.S. leadership in international cooperation and trade. Franklin Roosevelt took the United States into World War II and helped forge the postwar international economic system. Harry Truman led the United States into the Korean War and created a national security apparatus that included the Pentagon, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and a military draft. Kennedy promised to bear any burden in pursuit of freedom abroad, supporting nation-building operations in South America and Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson took the United States into the Vietnam War. All of this was underwritten by a bipartisan liberal ideology that imagined the United States as the harbinger of international freedom and progress, but also expanded U.S. markets and power.5 The Vietnam War and numerous grassroots social movements brought a whole new generation of diverse activists into the Democratic Party in the 1970s. The Vietnam War gave birth to the New Left, which challenged “the Liberal Establishment” and helped shift liberalism into an antiwar position. Responding to social movements for minority rights, liberals passed civil rights legislation and developed affirmative action, which encouraged and empowered African Americans, Chicanos, feminists and what would later become the LGBT community to become involved in the Democratic Party. Combined with antiwar activists and environmentalists, these new groups expanded the concerns of liberalism, which, in turn, clashed with the interests and sensibilities of the other parts of the New Deal Coalition, namely the labor movement and the white working class.6 Liberals might have been able to weather divisions within their shifting political coalition, but the economic crises of the 1970s (recession, inflation, trade deficit, deindustrialization), the decline of the labor movement and the rise of the right foreclosed that possibility and contributed to the decline of twentieth-century liberalism beginning in the 1980s. Conservatives rode to power by resurrecting the older classical liberalism forsaken by modern liberals.

Historians’ Perspectives Historians have long disagreed about the nature of liberalism and its legacies. Did it offer a genuine alternative to rapacious capitalism or merely ensure capitalism’s survival? Was it an expression of grassroots activism or the interests of a corporate elite?7 Are there fundamental differences between the Progressive Era, the New Deal, postwar liberalism, the Great Society and the “new Democratic politics” of the post-1960s era, or can we find continuities? The most consistent theme in the historical treatment of twentieth-century liberalism is that it is fundamentally conservative, that it never quite brought about the democratic change it promised. Historians have faulted twentieth-century liberalism for retaining elements of individualism and moralism, for acquiescing to corporate interests, for being too timid, too top-down, too elitist.8 The charge that liberalism was “conservative” was especially directed at postwar liberals, otherwise known as “Cold War liberals,” who, historians argued, scuttled their onetime allies on the left and embraced anti-communism, militarism and corporate capitalism.9 Such criticism continued during the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” as historians identified weaknesses and divisions within liberalism to explain this unexpected historical turn.10 As conservatism continued to gain ground in the 1990s, historians 129

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seeking to explain it finally shifted their attention to actual conservatives (as opposed to “conservative” liberals).11 Among those who continued to write about liberalism, two distinct narratives have developed. The first narrative focuses on the limits of twentieth-century liberalism in the context of its twentyfirst century constituents: people of color, gays, lesbians, feminists and others whose identity is at odds with the white, male heteronormative assumptions that undergirded the welfare/administrative state. Of note in this regard is Margot Canaday’s The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, which shows how the development of the liberal administrative state went hand in hand with the development of heteronormative policies and formation of gay identities.12 The AIDS crisis has likewise emerged as an important moment in the development of new coalitions and activist networks that have transformed liberalism into a more multicultural, intersectional twenty-first-century movement.13 While past histories acknowledged liberals’ political alliance with southern Dixiecrats and other racist whites, the emphasis was usually on how racism inhibited liberals’ civil rights agenda. Newer works such as Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005), Robert Self ’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2005) and David M. P. Freund’s Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (2010) showed the degree to which white supremacy was intrinsic to New Deal programs and postwar liberalism.14 These newer works detailed how liberal programs specifically excluded blacks from Social Security, FHA mortgages and other benefits that helped build a white middle class, suggesting that liberalism itself played a greater role than previously thought in creating the racial inequality that would explode in urban violence in the 1960s. Books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) faulted liberalism’s colorblind, “equal opportunity” approach to racism, which has exacerbated and hidden other forms of racial inequality.15 The effectiveness of liberal civil rights legislation continues to be debated as historians try to make sense of real progress (a black president twice elected) and severe setbacks (mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Donald Trump).16 The second narrative in the historical study of liberalism developed in the context of rising inequality and conservative success. These histories acknowledge the shortcomings of twentieth-century liberalism, but show a new appreciation for its complexities, endurance and unlikely successes in the twentieth century. While several books explicitly defend postwar liberalism (such as Kevin Mattson’s When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism), most of the recent histories take a more detached, nuanced view, emphasizing liberalism’s staying power and influence. Historians seem less bothered by the New Deal’s connections to capitalists and more willing to recognize its influence on Republicans.17 They challenge earlier declarations of the various “deaths” of New Deal liberalism, showing, for instance, that it survived the “right turn” of the late 1940s, flourished during the Cold War and was in some places perfectly able to accommodate the new political actors of the 1970s.18 Alan Petigny’s The Permissive Society similarly showed that the revolution in social mores began far earlier than the 1960s. And though recent histories emphasized the 1970s as a key moment in the conservative ascendancy, others showed that liberal policies—in the form of Keynesian economic policy, affirmative action, environmental legislation, the regulatory state—were alive and well under Nixon and Ford and continued into the twenty-first century.19 Over the past decade, various pundits have commented on the surprising degree of equality during the post-WWII years, especially compared to the high levels of inequality today. They point to high marginal tax rates, more equitable distribution of wealth and investment in infrastructure and jobs, attributing these to liberal economic policies and a strong labor movement, i.e. the New Deal Coalition.20 Historians, on the other hand, have been slow to explicitly acknowledge this extraordinary equality or to attribute it to liberal policies and political power, in part because they have been so focused on liberalism’s shortcomings and limitations, especially with regard to race. One historian who recognized liberalism’s connection to economic equality was Jefferson Cowie, whose recent 130

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book, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016), attempted to explain New Deal liberalism by way of its limitations. Cowie said explicitly that between the 1930s and 1980 the federal government used its resources on behalf of the economic interest of non-elite Americans in ways it had not done before or since. It was a period of equality bookended by two “Gilded Ages” of inequality.21 For Cowie, this was not the result of the inevitable rise of a welfare state, as twentieth-century liberals once believed, but rather specific historical circumstances that allowed liberals to put together a political coalition and structures that prioritized collective economic rights. The labor movement was central to this endeavor, but so too, it turns out, was immigration restriction, exclusionary racial and gender policies and the “Solid South” (the reliably Democratic votes of white southerners). In other words, liberalism’s political success depended on, and at times was complicit in, decidedly illiberal historical factors. As those factors declined—as immigration policies became more liberal, as anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action made politics and the workplace more diverse—so too did the viability of a political culture based on collective economic security. To be sure, those were not the only necessary preconditions for collective economic security, and Cowie thoroughly analyzed the political-economic conditions as well. But the question of how liberalism’s “new” concerns about diversity and inclusion relate to its “old” achievement of economic equality is a rich one that has thus far only been dealt with in terms of polemics against “identity politics” or a naïve faith that some kind of “intersectional” coalition of minorities can provide a coherent political unity.22 Cowie’s work bridged the divide between those who emphasized liberalism’s limitations with regard to race, sexuality and gender, and those who appreciated what liberals were able to accomplish in terms of economic equality, civil rights and strong government programs. But it also presented an interesting paradox for those seeking to understand twentieth-century liberalism today. On the one hand, liberals were able to change Americans’ attitudes toward the government in ways that allowed a greater redistribution of wealth, more equality and a greater effort to overcome racism, sexism and nativism than had ever before occurred in the United States. On the other hand, their power to do so was based on the relative homogeneity of U.S. political culture in the mid-twentieth century. As the political and economic arenas became more inclusive and the U.S. more diverse, society became more unequal economically. The diversity that marks today’s society is in part a product of twentieth-century liberalism, but the current scholarship compels us to consider the extent to which real diversity is also the result of the liberal state’s demise.

Conservatism Just as liberals united a disparate group of progressives, feminists, civil rights activists and unions behind a fundamental reinterpretation of America’s “liberal tradition,” so too would conservatives eventually unite a disparate group of traditionalists, libertarians, Christians, anti-communists and freemarket capitalists behind an effort to restore the original pre-New Deal liberal tradition, with its emphasis on a limited state, individual freedom and an allegedly laissez-faire economic system. Just as liberals took over a minority party in the 1930s, so too would conservatives eventually win control of the GOP. The conservative political ascendency was a response to the world twentieth-century liberals had succeeded in building. Although historians tend to emphasize the cranky eccentricity of the pre-WWII right, most conservatives before 1950 held to a staid ideology based on God, nation and business as usual. They were critical of changing social mores. They tended to be isolationist. They opposed unions and favored a protective tariff. They tended to vote Republican, a party that represented farmers, bankers, industrialists, small businessmen and small towns and cities in the Midwest and West. As Louis Hartz famously noted, conservatives in the U.S. were born “liberal,” that is, committed to the liberal tradition and its 131

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principles of individual freedom, limited state and progress, which were perfectly compatible with a conservative approach to politics and economics but not with socialism.23 The Great Depression was a blow to capitalism’s legitimacy and “business as usual.” In the face of the New Deal, which they regarded as socialism, conservative politicians and businessmen became ideologically defensive, attacking unionism, internationalism and the erosion of the “liberal tradition.” They would make up the Republican Party’s conservative wing, fighting the moderates who accepted the premises of the new liberal state. Allying with southern Democrats against the expansion of federal power and union rights, they helped create the vaunted “bipartisanship” of the twentieth century. Some found a home in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a business lobby infamous for its opposition to the New Deal and unionism.24 But they had no new ideas. Forced into a reactionary, defensive, minority position, they were regarded by ascendant liberals as on the wrong side of history. The movement that would change this began to develop in the post-WWII era and was composed of three elements: ideas, grassroots activism and networks. In 1955, William Buckley, Jr., founded the National Review, bringing together a diverse group of intellectuals who were looking for more solid grounding for their opposition to the new liberalism. These included traditionalists, who sought a genuinely conservative alternative to the liberal tradition; ex-Leftist anti-communists, who linked the new liberalism with totalitarianism; libertarian followers of Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek; and Catholic intellectuals critical of modern liberalism’s secularism.25 The horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism added a new element to conservatives’ intellectual arsenal. There were tensions, especially between libertarians and Cold War anti-communists, but there was also the shared mission of developing a coherent set of conservative ideas that could perhaps one day supplant liberalism’s “big government” statism. At the same time, a wave of grassroots anti-communism inspired by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy swept through U.S. towns and cities, planting in some minds the belief that New Deal liberalism was aligned with communism. These ideas gained traction in new suburbs, especially in the West and South (the Sunbelt). Populated by recent transplants, surrounded by business and real estate developers, bolstered by white flight, flush with defense contract monies and ripe for evangelical conversion, many of these suburbs became hotbeds of grassroots conservative activism.26 Conservative activism at the local level decried “godlessness,” government centralization and the proliferation of “liberal ideas” in schools, helping to nominate Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964. Originally organized around anti-communism, its focus adapted easily to the social issues of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. Galvanized by leaders like Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant, these grassroots networks organized opposition to gay rights, abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.27 The third component of the conservative movement was networks and organizations. Wealthy donors had begun funding organizations to combat New Dealism beginning in the late 1930s, but they grew in number in the 1950s, providing vital links between local activists, organized businessmen, intellectuals and party leaders. Intellectuals allied with executives from large corporations to form small organizations, such as the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which critiqued government policies from the perspective of “individual free enterprise.”28 Buckley founded Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, a campus group that produced leaders who would staff a new array of influential conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a well-funded research institution that collected data, crafted legislation and wrote editorials for major newspapers. Founded in 1973, the Heritage Foundation performed the same function for the social issues of the Christian Right. Other such organizations included Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and various television networks and direct-mailing companies. In the 1980s, new kinds of conservative organizations helped coordinate the legislative agendas of conservative politicians in Congress and at the state level. These included the Council for National Policy and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which would be responsible for state-level conservative legislation.29 132

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All of these factors—the ideas, the grassroots activism, the networks—created a movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the repudiation of the ideas that had once animated twentieth-century liberalism. But that movement might have stalled had not particular historical circumstances created political opportunities and whole new constituencies to move it forward. While the conservative movement began as an attempt to restore a liberal economic tradition, it picked up new adherents during the late 1960s, largely as a reaction to the antiwar movement, the counterculture, urban unrest and liberal programs that “went too far.” Many of the new adherents were part of a disparate group known as the neoconservatives. Neoconservatives were anti-communist liberals or ex-Leftists who were increasingly critical of urban riots, affirmative action, the New Left and the antiwar movement’s influence on the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was moving left in the late 1960s, especially in terms of foreign policy. The Vietnam War had soured Democrats on the idea of fighting communists abroad. Neoconservatives’ commitment to an anti-communist foreign policy would align them with the conservative movement and, particularly, Ronald Reagan, who after years of détente and “appeasement,” miraculously revived Cold War anti-communism. Although movement conservatives regarded them as outsiders, neoconservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Elliot Abrams and Norman Podhoretz were policy savvy, sophisticated and indispensable to Reagan’s victory in 1980, as well as to his interventionist, “make-America-great” foreign policy. Neoconservative influence made the conservative movement and the Republican Party more liberal with regard to diversity and more hawkish in terms of foreign policy, a hawkishness that continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.30 The conservatives who gained control of the Republican Party at the end of the twentieth century looked very different from pre-WWII isolationist conservatives such as Robert Taft, who were interested in restraining the state, not “starving” it.31 Modern conservatism purports to be a shared set of beliefs in American individualism and free markets, but it is actually a coalition of competing forms of conservatism. It is at once populist and elitist, neo-isolationist and hawkish, nationalistic and anti-statist, Christian and corporate, family oriented and individualistic. The pressure of governing has brought its many fissures and contradictions to the surface and it remains to be seen if the movement can survive them.

Historians’ Perspectives In a 2009 book called Debating the American Conservative Movement, historians Donald Critchlow and Nancy MacLean offered two very different interpretations of conservatism in the twentieth century. While both agreed that post-1945 conservatism was a social and political movement, Critchlow argued that it was successful due to specific historical circumstances and timely ideas. MacLean, on the other hand, argued that it was a movement that sought to “guard privilege” in a changing world.32 While Critchlow saw post-1945 conservatism as a new phenomenon, MacLean traced it back to all movements in U.S. history that sought to preserve racial, gender and class privilege. Allan Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation (2008) made a similar argument. Both MacLean and Lichtman echoed the old progressive Beardsian narrative that saw American history as a match between the forces of democracy (“the people”) and the forces of reaction (nativists, slaveholders, capitalists). Their point was that there is nothing new in twentieth-century conservatism; it continues a long tradition of opposition to the expansion of freedom for minorities and the underprivileged. In his essay, “The Conservative Ascendency” (and his 2007 book of the same title), Critchlow argued, in contrast, that conservatives’ success was due not to racism or privilege, but rather a changing economic context. The liberal ideas that undergirded the twentieth-century welfare/regulatory state were developed to meet the demands of an industrial, manufacturing-based economy. As the country transitioned into a global, postindustrial, service- and finance-based economy in the 1970s, 133

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liberal ideas lost their saliency and the liberal coalition fell apart. Conservatives’ revival of ideas rooted in America’s “liberal tradition”—individualism, economic and political freedom, distrust of the state, equal opportunity and free markets—attracted a new generation of voters wary of waste and government bloat. Conservatives’ support for traditional family values and a strong national defense tapped into the strong antipathy many people harbored toward liberal policies that weakened family bonds and national power.33 As liberal ideas faltered in the shadow of Vietnam, the stagflation of the 1970s and deindustrialization, a well-organized conservative movement was able to shift the political discourse rightward. Most of the newer histories of conservatism tend to line up with Critchlow’s argument that there were specific historical and economic circumstances that created opportunities for a highly organized movement to exploit. But they are less interested in conservatives’ ideas than they are in a changing demographics, shifting populations and white racial identity. Three works were typical of this approach: Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors (2001) about Orange County, California, Kevin Kruse’s White Flight (2005), about Atlanta, and Matthew Lassiter’s Silent Majority (2006), which examined several southern metropolitan areas. Like Critchlow, these authors saw the development of the Sunbelt as crucial to the conservative ascendency, denoting as it does the decline of the industrial Northeast and Midwest, the core region of liberalism’s political strength. But they focused on the politics of desegregation and thus saw race as a crucial factor in the creation of conservative voters in a way that Critchlow downplayed. Unlike MacLean, however, their understanding of white racial strategies is firmly tied to a specific time and place. In these works, there is something new about post-1945 conservatism that can be seen in the geographic reorganization of politics. At an intellectual level, the conservative movement is fraught with divisions. Christianity, for instance, with its emphasis on sharing and caring for one’s fellows, seems at odds with capitalism and its emphasis on property rights and profits. There is, however, a robust inquiry into the connections between Christianity and business that explains how this particular alliance actually worked in post-World War II society. Of note here is Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2010), which examined the evangelical Christian culture cultivated by Sam Walton in his rural Ozark-based stores, as well as the links between Christian colleges and conservative economic networks. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf ’s Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (2015) showed how anti-union employers allied with Christian organizations and appealed to southern working-class Christianity to impede this famous union drive. In One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Kevin Kruse argued that post-1945 corporations were central to the development of a conservative Christian identity.34 While earlier histories of conservatism focused on white backlash and gender politics—that is, social history—more recent histories turned to business history. In addition to Moreton’s book cited above, there were Benjamin Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business From Nixon to NAFTA (2013), Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (2009) and the essays in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II, edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian Zelizer. Like Critchlow, these books paid attention to the specific historical circumstances of post-WWII America and offered nuanced interpretations of business conservatism. But like MacLean, they also tended to be critical of the new conservatism and its inconsistencies. All the books discussed above saw the conservative movement, for better or worse, as a success in American politics. There are other histories, however, written from the perspective of disenchanted conservatives, which took a more critical stance of the movement’s “success.” Gregory Schneider’s The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (2009) emphasized the protean nature of twentiethcentury conservatism, arguing that the conservatism that emerged with Reagan and George W. Bush bore little resemblance to the conservative ideals and principles honed by the founding generation at 134

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the National Review. Despite their rhetoric, both Reagan and George W. Bush were “big government conservatives,” comfortable with military spending, war and other state-aggrandizing policies. Schneider focused on the neoconservatives as the element that steered conservatism away from its principles and gave a fairly sympathetic account of those who became known as “paleo-conservatives,” such as Pat Buchanan, who opposed the Iraq War. In Schneider’s interpretation, Reagan’s conservatism was in the vein of Theodore Roosevelt’s, which was about national power and greatness, not the prudent limits of government. Historian Paul Edward Gottfried pushed this critique even further in Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (2007), which exposed conservatives’ creation of their own past, beginning with Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in 1953 and the National Review in 1955. Both Kirk and Buckley sought to find a set of abstract universal conservative principles around which to build a movement, efforts that involved “presenting takeovers as the serene march of the past.”35 Gottfried was interested in who gets left out of the conservative movement. The most significant examples here are the exclusion of isolationists after conservatives embraced the Cold War and Reagan’s appointment of neoconservative William Bennett to the NEH over southern conservative M. E. Bradford. He abhors the Straussians, the neoconservative hawks and conservatives’ attempts to erase their racist past in light of their recent embrace of color-blind anti-racism. For Gottfried, there was a genuine American conservatism that existed before 1955 in the anti-New Deal Right of the Robert Taft variety that was destroyed by the imposter conservatisms of the late twentieth century. Unlike just about everyone else writing today, Gottfried believes the political landscape has been moving leftward since the 1950s, especially in terms of feminism, diversity and globalism. The conservative ascendency has done nothing to stem this. A Bronx-born Jewish American of Hungarian descent, Gottfried is disgusted by the rising tide of multiculturalism and “political correctness” and his ideas have inspired the so-called “alt-right,” whose energy helped propel Donald Trump into office in 2016.36 As distasteful as his ideas may be to many of us, Gottfried does identify a key rupture in political conservatism and the Republican party that other historians have either downplayed or missed completely.

Notes   1 Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (1910), as found at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/ document/new-nationalism-speech/, accessed 24 May 2016.   2 Historians debate the degree to which World War II curtailed the New Deal versus how it solidified it. On the former position, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession in War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); on the latter, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).   3 See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003); Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980, rev. ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).   4 See Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).   5 On the debate over the nature of American internationalism/imperialism, see Michael J. Hogan, The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the American Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).   6 On new divisions within the New Deal Coalition, see Jerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-BrownsvilleCrisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991).   7 On the latter see Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); on the former, Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Penguin Press, 2013); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social

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Jennifer Delton Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008).   8 See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); William Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). These themes were updated in Brinkley, The End of Reform, cited above.   9 George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 10 See Byron Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 11 Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review (April 1994): 409–429, was one of the first to note that historians should be redirecting their attention to conservatism. 12 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also Dan Geary, Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Kevin Mumford, Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men From the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 13 Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 14 On the racism embedded in liberal programs, see also Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 15 See also sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). 16 In addition to works cited above, see Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). For the positive side of civil rights legislation, see Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 17 See Jason Scott Smith, “The Liberal Invention of the Multinational Corporation,” in What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II, ed. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); David Stebenne, “IBM’s New Deal: Employee Policies of the IBM Corporation, 1933–1956,” The Journal of the Historical Society 5, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 47–77; David Stebenne, Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18 Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jennifer Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jonathan Bell, California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 19 See Judith Stein, The Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David Hamilton Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011); Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014); Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 20 See Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007); Eric Alterman, Why We’re Liberals (New York: Viking Press, 2008). 21 Cowie, The Great Exception, cited above. 22 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998). On intersectionality, see Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason, “Movement Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender, Disability, and Genetic Technologies,” Du Bois Review (Fall 2013): 313–328, and other articles in that issue. 23 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955). 24 On the NAM’s conservatism, see Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

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Politics of Liberalism and Conservatism 25 See George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 30th ann. ed. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2006). 26 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 27 On Goldwater, see McGirr, Suburban Warriors;  Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); on ERA see Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); on gay rights, see Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). 28 See Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009). 29 See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, ch. 8–10; Allan Lightman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Grove Press, 2008), ch. 6–9. 30 On the neoconservatives, see Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996), ch. 6; Paul Edward Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 31 A reference to conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist’s “Starve the Beast” campaigns of the 1990s. See Lichtman, ch. 9. 32 Donald Critchlow and Nancy MacLean, Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). 33 Donald Critchlow, “The Conservative Ascendancy,” in Critchlow and MacLean, Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1–7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 34 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 35 Gottfried, Conservatism in America, cited above, xi. 36 Gottfried himself has not embraced the white nationalist ideas of his one-time protégée, Richard Spencer. See Jacob Siegal, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet, November 29, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/jewishnews-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_ term=The+Alt-Right%E2%80%99s+Jewish+Godfather&utm_content=dec2016

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13 SOCIAL AND CULTURAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Stephen R. Duncan

Figure 13.1 Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, United Artists, 1936. cineclassico/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Social and Cultural If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now—when? —Talmudic saying

The question of how best to define the individual in relation to society is a thorny one, as ancient as civilization itself, yet still fresh enough to be found in the everyday life of American culture. Evoking the same sense of dilemma as the Talmudic saying in the epigraph above, in “Helplessness Blues” (2011) the indie-folk band Fleet Foxes sang: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique / Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see.” Yet, after more contemplation, the singer declared: “I’d say I’d rather be / a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.” The song thus renewed the Talmud’s fundamental question, expressing the singer’s “helplessness” as he faced a culture of individuation, despite the abiding human desire to be part of something greater. And the timing of Fleet Foxes’s millennial lament was apt. In many ways, 2011 saw a rebirth of the “new social history” as it was conceived in the 1960s: histories “from the ground up” that examined how the mass majority of Americans lived, worked and struggled alongside, and against, each other. That year, more or less, also marked the peak of cultural history’s influence on scholarly understanding of the twentieth-century United States. Since the 1990s, much like the “culture wars” that defined politics during the Clinton administration, historical scholarship on the lives of average people had paid more attention to issues of identity than socioeconomic structures. This ebb and flow of scholarly interest was not simple and straightforward, of course, yet there is evidence for such a generalization. Between 1970 and 2010 the number of monographs whose primary subject was “social history” (as opposed to studies of specific social groups) fell by half while cultural histories roughly doubled.1 This groundswell, known as the “cultural turn,” significantly altered the way historians examine the past. But the story of social and cultural history was not a simple rise-and-fall arc. Instead, the shape of this development was a spiral, as the study of history from the ground up came almost full circle, returning to the broad national field of American life, work and politics, even as it arrived at a new point in scholarly space by attending to the role of culture. Historians Daniel Rodgers and Eric Hobsbawm asserted that the period of the cultural turn was an “Age of Fracture” in which the “identity crisis” of the 1960s led to a diminishment of class-based senses of self. As global capitalism simultaneously expanded in size and individualized its marketing and rights-based politics trumped economically oriented movements, broad national identities gave way to more particular notions of community identification.2 The cultural turn’s attention to meaning-making certainly reflected an interest in identity formation. Yet to apply the metaphor of “fracture” to twentieth-century U.S. historiography misses the mark: The diffusion of social history into the minutiae of multiple mentalities was not the shattering of former unity. Instead, as the years since the cultural turn’s completion have made clear, a better model is that of a “fractal,” the complex geometry of branches and spirals (with examples in the natural world ranging from tree growth to sea shells) that allows for infinite change within definable patterns. Fracture implies disconnection, often on a horizontal plane. Fractals are defined by multidirectional metamorphosis that is simultaneously rooted in previous forms, a much better characterization of recent studies that interweave social and cultural methods. Perhaps because we live in an age of deep political division and environmental crisis, a move toward scholarship that recognizes interconnections—even amid diverging interests—might yet emerge from the previous paradigm of balkanization. Rather than an Age of Fracture, historians are potentially on the verge of a new era of synthesis, what could be termed an “Age of Fractals,” including a newly defined field of “sociocultural” history.

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Spiraling Upward: Definition and Redefinition The appearance of unity in social and cultural history has waxed and waned over the last hundred years. The sweeping histories of Charles and Mary Beard and Carl Becker in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, blended social perspectives with economic and political aspects. Even the pioneering work of Frederick Jackson Turner as early as the 1890s included social elements as he sought to outline the shape of national development. Similarly, cultural history, which emerged as an identifiable field in the 1930s, most notably with Constance Rourke’s American Humor, examined tall tales, songs, poetry and prose to reveal the “character” of common people.3 And as social psychologist Erich Fromm declared in 1941, “Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.” Foreshadowing later methodologies, anthropologists such as Caroline Ware also called for more attention to culture in the discipline of history. Following the methods of Franz Boas, who insisted that culture meant more than either high art or racial traits, anthropologists attended to “the totality of ideas in a society” that grew from the ways that everyday people “think and feel about things.”4 If such a method were inherently centrifugal—an early move toward the constellations of multiculturalism—it was also out of step with the march of historical scholarship. “Consensus” historians in the Cold War 1950s, in the wake of economic depression and total war against fascism, kept notions of national character while jettisoning bottom-up perspectives. These histories often made arguments about an “American character” that largely ignored historical actors who were not elite white males. If workers, women, immigrants and African Americans made occasional appearances in consensusschool histories, rarely did they act as agents of change.5 The next generation of historians, however, coming of age during the Sixties, took a more radical turn and began burrowing into the grassroots. The model for this “new social history” was British historian E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Published in 1963, Thompson rejected strict sociological and Marxist structures and instead focused on the agency of workers—“class” not as a category, “but as something which in fact happens . . . in human relationships.” Thompson’s declaration that class was both a “social and cultural formation” was emblematic of left-leaning social historians of the 1970s, including Eugene Genovese, Sean Wilentz and Christopher Lasch. A diversity of topics was already evident by glancing at the work of these three scholars alone (on slavery, nineteenth-century workers and twentieth-century families, respectively). But through the late 1970s, attention to the working class remained a unifying theme, even as social historians noted the particularities of place or industrial sector as a way of managing their scope.6 But although the new social history arrived with an academic big tent, it was obvious to many scholars that important players were still being excluded from the center ring. This realization was a clear outgrowth of recent social movements: the Black Freedom Struggle highlighted the need for African American history; national immigration reform, feminism and the Chicano, gay rights and American Indian movements did the same for their respective groups. The further recognition of medical history, sports, science and religion added to the multiple fields that can be found in the table of contents of this collection. As Daniel Rodgers noted, historians seeking to tell a larger, inclusive story of American society found that bringing “hitherto invisible working people into history’s pages unveiled myriad stories of action and resistance, but consolidating those stories, as Thompson had, into a single narrative of class formation proved a daunting project.” This sense of apprehension was palpable in a 1980 overview of social history by Peter Stearns, which discussed the “explosion of sociohistorical topics” in recent years and the accompanying challenges for historical methods. Desperately seeking some path toward generalized principles, Stearns suggested that the concepts of modernization or hegemony might do the trick. But as Paula Fass recently argued, such an effort

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would have asserted its own hegemony of “dominant perceptions” over emerging fields trying to redefine social history on their own terms.7 Ramification of identity histories meant that labor history became the main locus of class analysis, as examinations of power otherwise focused on the social construction of race, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. The disjunction between class and identity was never tidy and many insightful U.S. histories brought them into conversation. But these exceptions tended to prove the rule. Recent scholarship on the 1970s shows that the very notion of an American working class lost traction as New Deal liberalism splintered into the identity politics of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Deindustrialization unmoored labor from its material base as an economy of production moved to one of retail and finance. Republican politicians, unable to tackle economic setbacks due to shrinking high-wage unionized jobs, instead turned to what historian Jefferson Cowie has called the “postmodern” project of wooing workers with “emotional pageantry.” Starting with Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign and culminating with Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” rhetoric in 1980, Republicans peeled away the white male working class from the Democratic New Deal coalition by appealing to their disaffection in the face of African American civil rights, student protests against the Vietnam War and feminism. In Cowie’s words, Nixon was the first politician to capitalize on “the postwar drift of the idea of ‘worker’ from a materially based to a culturally based concept.”8 This political realignment set the stage for the culture wars that only further mapped the ideological terrain of left and right according to the contours of identity rather than the economy. Considering these massive sociopolitical redefinitions, it is unsurprising that historians turned to culture in their pursuit of explanations. A milestone of the cultural turn was Warren Susman’s Culture as History, published in 1984. An odd bird in the profession during the 1960s and 1970s, Susman never completed a full-length monograph and published only occasional essays. Yet his ­audacity—captured in his famous declaration that “Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to an understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt”—gained him a core academic following and the collection of essays in Culture as History was met with some celebration. In it, Susman maintained his broad scope as he examined the twentieth-century “culture of abundance” in the United States and its shift from previous foundations on character, production and republicanism to personality, consumption and public relations. Culture as History charted a bold but strangely borderless path for the field, contending that cultural history is “the study of the forms men, women, and children develop and use in experiencing the world.” These forms “lie in the deep, buried invisible suppositions of every world view” and so close studies of everyday acts and entertainment were necessary to unearth the meaning within them. As one historian has noted, Susman’s characterization of the twentieth century as a clash between two cultures provided “a purchase on ideological conflicts right up to the Kulturkampf of the 1980s.”9 Susman’s approach was not entirely unique. Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), for instance, had already examined African American folk-tales, music and humor in impressively productive detail. And Levine’s work only highlighted Susman’s shortcomings, which were marked by shallow attention to race and gender, as well as a tendency to draw overly broad conclusions from narrow evidence. But his work provided a valuable target for criticism, as fellow cultural historians added nuance and empirical depth to his concepts. American Studies scholar T. J. Jackson Lears notably studied twentieth-century consumer culture and advertising, as well as Americans’ antimodern cultural responses, applying the concept of “cultural hegemony” to examine how received ideas and material interests intertwined. Other important monographs in the 1980s by historians such as Elaine Tyler May and James Gilbert magnified the commonplace cultural stuff of middle-class housework or comic books as ways of dissecting large social issues, from postwar gender roles to juvenile delinquency.10 Susman’s call to recognize the explanatory power of culture in social and political change echoed back from multiple directions by the end of the decade.

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This turn to histories that took the cultural lives of average people seriously coincided with a radical shift in epistemology. The disembodiment of deindustrialization had proceeded alongside the disillusionment many young academics felt with American politics as the Vietnam War dragged on and Watergate heightened distrust of government. The result was a general rejection of “authority”—from the sociocultural power of traditional elites to the very notion that an “author” holds a privileged position in relation to a text. Following the social and literary theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Frederic Jameson, “postmodernism” questioned the assumption of autonomous individual subjectivity as it was first established during the Enlightenment. Dismantling the idea of objectivity quickly followed, and in the gap left behind grew the notion that social relations are determined by the amorphous amalgam of “discourse,” locating power in language and ideology. New conceptions of culture also owed a clear debt to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who challenged notions of “authentic” developing world cultures by describing authenticity itself as a social construction. Historians coming of age in an era of identity politics found much use in Geertz’s definition of culture as the “webs of significance” spun by human societies—the analysis of which was “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”11 Such esoteric (if poetic) concepts did open new vistas of historical exploration. But they also risked becoming altogether unmoored from any solid realities of human existence. As Robert Darnton had written in 1980 about the previous generation of intellectual histories, a lack of temporally specific context often left postmodern methods “disembodied”—as disconnected from actual American lives as the “national mind” had been for the consensus school.12 Within the larger cultural turn, moreover, was a “linguistic turn” that posited language as the fundamental source of meaning, with societies composed of symbols to be decoded. These theories were certainly useful to literary and American Studies scholars, and they raised important questions about the nature of culture—the deep psychological sources, and limits, of what could be conceived in a specific place and time.13 But they often avoided the puzzles of historical causation and sometimes rhetorically detached culture from important moments of crisis or sociopolitical change. Early postmodernism’s sense of banishing materialism could be equally exhilarating and naive. Yet cultural criticisms of social history had a great deal of merit, pointing out the problems of assuming that statistics and categorization were self-evident. The roots of everyday politics and horrific atrocities alike can indeed be found in the realm of ideology.14 From the 1990s, productive work on arts and entertainment was influenced by, or at least in dialogue with, “Birmingham School” media scholars such as Stuart Hall, who combined Marxist theory with sociological studies of audience reception. Scrutinizing the cultural practices of audiences and media producers as sources of meaning—along with questions about the nature of modernity, American identity, business culture, consumerism, transnational exchange and, ultimately, politics itself—new ground was laid for a bountiful historical harvest.

The (In)Visible Spectrum: Cultural Historiography Cultural history looks for meaning hidden in plain sight: the “practice of everyday life,” as Michel de Certeau put it, the significance behind the symbols manufactured for mass media and the ways that internal human motivations are outwardly expressed. It is certainly impossible to tackle these subjects without attention to the analytical “holy trinity” of race, class and gender. Yet with each of these finally getting the individual attention that they deserved, social history largely dispersed into its component categories by the 1980s. Therefore, the cultural historiography of the last twenty years or so will be this chapter’s main focus. Even within that narrow field, a rich spectrum of works is visible, as scholars illuminated both the surfaces and deeper radiance of American life. As the twentieth century drew to a close and scholars grappled with the implications of postmodernity, they recognized the need to look back and reinterpret modernity, developing insightful theoretical frameworks and scanning the terrain of the last century. One early meditation on modernity was urban political 142

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scientist Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982). Berman used culture to illustrate modernity’s Faustian nature: “The Tragedy of Development,” in which societies continually unleashed forces beyond their control and the gains of the present are undermined by future innovation. Yet his explicitly New Left perspective unveiled a sense of hope, finding vitality in the modern imagination and the economy’s “infinite capacity for redevelopment and self-transformation.” Seeing this renewal in the street life and art of 1960s New York, Berman declared (with a winking hippy pun) that “the meaning for which modern men and women were desperately searching in fact lay surprisingly close to home, close to the surface and immediacy of their lives: it was all right there, if only we could learn to dig.”15 By contrast, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) used its own earthy metaphor of “rhizomorphic” cultural tangles to question modernity’s universalist positivism. Noting the origins of racism in the “rationality” of Enlightenment categorization, Gilroy sought to dismantle specious binaries by tracing the complex “roots and routes” of African diaspora culture. Viewed through the lens of race, modernity could seem anything but dynamic. Instead, it was locked into a struggle of opposites. Yet hybridity was the engine of Gilroy’s critique. African American art forms are inherently modern, he argued, because their power “derives from a doubleness, their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outside conventions.” This “counterculture of modernity” reintroduced a potent model of modern history.16 Such theoretical approaches informed many studies of twentieth-century modernism, from avantgarde artists’ individualist expressions to the sociopolitical role of jazz. W.E.B. Du Bois declared in 1903 that racism was the central problem of the modern world and, indeed, historians have fruitfully disentangled racial construction from the making of culture. Building on Jackson Lears’s work on turnof-the-century antimodernism as a reaction against the materialist foundations of “progress,” with its ethic of autonomous achievement and science—the Weberian “disenchantment of the world”—John Kasson added that ideas about manliness and whiteness were also at stake. Amid the rise of celebrity and exotic culture, Kasson argued, Harry Houdini’s escapes represented release from rationalized social discipline that brought romanticism and authority to modern (diminished) “magic.” Further, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series pitted white “heredity” against primal forces (“lord of the jungle”), rejecting the “iron cage” of modernity, even as it emphasized the superiority of Eurocentric imperialism. As Gilroy rightly noted, African American culture was also fundamental to modernism, although fraught with tensions. Eric Porter and other music historians have shown that jazz was part of a debate over black culture in America, present in national discussions over the definitions of “the folk,” notions of authenticity and hybridity, race, nation and modernity in art and commerce.17 Most recently, Richard Pells has discussed American modernism in the context of transnational flows of art and cinema, detailing how bleeding-edge artists adapted international styles and reinterpreted them for global commercial export.18 Whatever the strength of Pells’s work on cultural exchange between the U.S. and Europe, other historians have nonetheless emphasized the role of commercial and state power that he often sidesteps. While not always espousing the term “cultural imperialism,” scholars such as Victoria de Grazia and Penny Von Eschen effectively demonstrated how American culture’s global reach is entangled with national interests and power dynamics. De Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (2006) characterized America’s “Market Empire” as the “rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium,” in which commodities and consumption underpinned U.S. hegemony in postwar Europe. Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World (2004), meanwhile, examined the State Department’s “jazz ambassador” tours from 1956 to the 1970s, showing the relationship between culture and imperialism. The tours were used as cultural combat in Africa, the USSR and the Middle East against the Cold War image of American racism. While the State Department sought to use blackness to legitimize hegemony, its meaning was often contested by black performers who strayed from the “scripted power of empire.” The tours therefore belied a bipolar notion of the Cold War and revealed a more “tangled” conflict. Similarly, works such as Micol Seigel’s Uneven Encounters (2009) demonstrated the multiple layers of culture, race and commerce that made up American empire and transnationalism.19 143

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At the heart of this body of scholarship, of course, is cultural production itself, especially the arts and media that have guided and reflected American tastes, identity and politics. Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Lawrence Levine, who argued that the legacy of nineteenth-century bourgeois society was a “highbrow/lowbrow” cultural hierarchy, historians such as Victoria Grieve and Michael Kammen traced the emergence of popular and mass culture. Kammen’s work largely encapsulated this school of thought, noting the growth of cultural pluralism in tandem with electronic media through the 1960s. This view suggested that democratization and broadening of cultural authority simultaneously lessened the influence of elite critics. Kammen argued that the 1950s rise of non-regional mass media and leisure culminated with TV’s ubiquity as its most transformative force, elevating leisure to a right, rather than a privilege. The 1960s then saw the final collapse of the high/low taste divide, as epitomized in the work of Andy Warhol, an initial move into postmodernism.20 The core of cultural history is found in such studies of changing media. Histories of print media abound, with detailed accounts of journalists and authors, the book industry and various periodicals from Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire to Playboy and the Sixties’ underground press.21 Scholars have likewise examined radio, from its amateur origins, through the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, into the FM era of the 1970s and the rise of Talk and Shock in the 1980s. Communications professor Susan J. Douglas’s Listening In (1999) constructively tracked this arc, arguing that radio, due to its “invisibility” and thus creative possibilities, developed both imagined communities and individual American identities. And historians of television such as Thomas Doherty and Aniko Bodroghkozy demonstrated the relation between this “cool medium” and politics, from the Cold War to the civil rights movement.22 Yet studies of film and cinema have far outshined those of television and radio. This does betray a subtle undercurrent of snobbery among academics, who have been as susceptible as any in creating a cultural hierarchy that privileges more “artistic” media over popular ones. But this also reflects the much longer history of film, and film criticism, which goes hand in hand with the more richly layered textual analysis film often allows. Film historians such as Robert Sklar, Miriam Hansen, Lary May, Janet Staiger and Peter Lev have offered nuanced views of cinema’s role in the public sphere, identity formation, popular and class politics and the ideological aspects of spectatorship. In J. Hoberman’s felicitous phrase, film is America’s “dream life,” with movies ultimately projecting dominant social views. “If one movie is a manufactured fantasy,” Hoberman wrote, “a year’s worth of movies—or a decade’s—becomes an instrumentalized stream of consciousness that insinuates itself into a shared national narrative.”23 The most insightful film studies reveal the ensnarled relationships between Hollywood as a dream factory and a hardnosed international industry. Tensions between theoretical and empirical methods are at the heart of important debates among cultural historians. Monographs that balance the two offer insightful cultural histories, utilizing critical theory—such as Theodor Adorno’s notion of the mass “culture industry”—alongside examinations of key individuals and business practices.24 Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters (2001) is a prime example. McAlister historicized Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism”—the image of a “feminized,” exotic West Asia that functioned as a discursive companion to imperialism—pointing out that U.S. discourse surrounding the Middle East was never as unified or gendered as Orientalism would suggest. For McAlister, the juncture of popular culture and foreign policy “interests” was a space in which the state’s military, religious and economic concerns (oil) met with the “logics that helped make that expansion seem meaningful and even necessary to many Americans.” This was seen, for instance, in Hollywood’s biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments, which subtly blended with U.S. support for Israel.25 David Suisman’s Selling Sounds (2009) paralleled this cultural-historical nexus, but reversed McAlister’s lens, focusing solely on the music industry domestically. Suisman argued that the industry’s rise between 1896 and the 1930s guided American culture in important ways, soaking the very “air” with music that was increasingly directed by capitalist imperatives. He skillfully addressed business methods and Adornian theory, while avoiding the latter’s insistence on the culture industry as totalizing, analyzing the roles of labor, race and gender in the production of music as a commodity.26 144

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By prying back the surface of the everyday—from McAlister’s sand and sandal epics to Suisman’s subjects, ranging from Enrico Caruso to copyright law—such studies reveal culture’s significance within broader socioeconomic and political structures. Such scholarly dexterity and rigor is seen in a variety of cultural subfields that have evolved over the last two decades. Perhaps the most conceptually capacious is the study of social memory, the idea of history as a “usable past.” George Lipsitz’s Time Passages (1990) was a foundational study of collective memory since 1945 that delved into the crisis of history created by electronic mass media and how collective memory shapes cultural production and modern identity. More recently, following the lead of David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001), historians such as John Bodnar and Kirk Savage have revealed how memorials, public monuments and museums simultaneously produce nationalist narratives and act as empty vessels to be filled with competing meanings of American democracy. The history of education similarly explores questions of knowledge and identity—an important companion to debates about the role of public history in collective memory.27 Paralleling Lipsitz’s influence, Robin D. G. Kelley’s work since the 1990s has detected the political potential pulsing through American cultural subjects ranging from factory workers and southern sharecroppers to Malcolm X and jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Kelley combined detailed research with deft deployment of critical theory, such as James Scott’s concept of “infrapolitics”: the “hidden transcripts” of daily African American life and cultural tactics that infused political struggles, seen in production control (such as slowdowns), clothing choices, pleasure culture, family and religious belief. The blooming of politically aware cultural histories embodies much of this list. Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (1999), for instance, connected working women’s desire for fashionable hats to union organizing in early twentieth-century New York. And building on the work of Lewis Erenberg, Chad Heap’s Slumming (2010) traced the threads of racial and gendered power running through mid-century urban nightlife. Works on the sociopolitical elements of postwar comedy or folk music, by Stephen Kercher and Robert Wells, also combined attention to media and commerce. And Natasha Zaretsky’s scholarship on the 1970s American family uncovered the roots of that decade’s politics planted firmly in concerns about the loss of male-dominated households amid the disruptions of Vietnam and rising divorce rates. Such studies illustrate the fractal nature of the field, as offshoots of cultural scholarship branched into new and generative ways of seeing American society, opening a space for a renaissance of Thompsonian social history.28

The Future of the Field: “Re-Membering” Social and Cultural History In the 1950s, the poet and gay rights activist Robert Duncan wrote about the concept of “re-membering the Mother,” which proposed rejecting biological families in favor of a communal “body” of likeminded artists.29 In respect to social and cultural history, I similarly see a healthy trend away from “disembodied” histories. The privileging of ideologies, identity and language in recent decades was a necessary break from materialist analysis that often maintained traditional hierarchies. But the most promising recent scholarship has begun to “re-member” the life of the mind as an intrinsic part of material human existence. A key example of this is Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive (2010), which is a recent echo of Thompson’s pioneering social history. Recognizing the significance of Nixon’s ideological strategy to woo workers amid deindustrialization, Cowie’s expansive labor history was simultaneously political and cultural. Alongside discussions of internal 1970s union intrigue and the failure of Hubert Humphrey’s full-employment bill are chapters delving deeply into the “narratives of popular culture” that encapsulated the demise of the idea of the working class. From the songs of Bruce Springsteen to films like Dog Day Afternoon, Cowie took seriously the notion that culture and sociopolitical change go hand in hand.30 Stayin’ Alive reminds us that the history of American politics can’t simply be found in the voting booth, party headquarters, at the protest march or the picket line. It begins with the questions of why people show up in the first place and what they find meaningful when they get there. 145

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As James Cook argued, the recognition that meaning and material existence are mutually constructed was not lost even amid the occasional excesses of the linguistic turn. But as Julia Thompson also noted, historians have lost touch with the most compelling aspects of empirical inquiry in the hard sciences. She called for attention to a “new materialism” that is continually mindful of systems of production and for an “environmental turn” to face the crisis of climate change—even as she warned against any revival of the nineteenth-century ambition to make history into a science. Thompson maintained critically that “science has nothing to say about the desirability of social justice or even human survival.”31 The tools of history can indeed pick up sociocultural questions where science leaves off. We are only on the cusp of a substantive biological understanding of human consciousness. But recent studies by neuroscientists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and cognitive psychologists reveal one important common finding: that language, as structured in the human brain, is less about signifying physical things than it is a social and creative act to make meaning. Communication is cooperative creativity and our species’ evolutionary success relied on our capacity for empathy, rule-following, imagination and a sense of fairness, which is reflected in sacred rituals, for instance.32 Moreover, it seems significant that in the history of human development, art predated religion: our need to communicate with each other is deeper than our desire to commune with the divine. Robert Duncan was right: the “family” we choose is just as authentic (maybe more so) than the one we are born with. And this is due to our biology, not despite it. This means that the study of society and culture remains vital, but should be integrated into a renewed form of structuralism. This premise is reflected in what some millennial thinkers are calling a “re-modern” consciousness, a reaction against the formlessness of postmodernity that seeks some basic authority, not as domination but as structure and rootedness. Some of this justifiable authority can and should draw on the hard sciences, as well as the humanities. Life is composed of infinite change within definable patterns and inherent limits—like the immeasurable music that can be conjured from the mere twelve tones of the Western scale. But if historians want to best understand how societies work, we have to address the central dialectic of meaning and materiality. To see that each of us is both as unique as a snowflake and a cog in a great machine is not a contradiction; it is the recognition that the machine itself is biomechanical, of mind and matter, and capable of previously unimaginable complexity. In a word: fractal.

Notes   1 Based on the search terms “social history” AND “United States” in the JSTOR database, there were 4,200 articles published 1970–1979, making up 4 percent of all works on American history; from 1990–1999, there were 10,900 articles, or 6 percent of the total. Social history monographs, based on searches in WorldCat, were 0.22 percent of the total 1970–1980, but only 0.11 percent 1990–1999. In those same time spans, U.S. cultural history articles increased from 2 percent to 4 percent of the total, while monographs grew from 0.21 percent to 0.52 percent of all published American histories.   2 David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), xi–xvii.   3 Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, History of the United States (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1921); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235, 240, 253–255; Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1931).   4 Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1941; reprint 1969), 27; James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman and Michael O’Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5–9.   5 Novick, That Noble Dream, 178–180; Robert Darnton, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in Michael Kammen, edited for the American Historical Association, The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 327–354; Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 149–162; a notable exception to this was the work of Oscar Handlin. See Peter N. Stearns, “Trends in Social History,” in Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us, 212.

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Social and Cultural   6 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 9; Novick, That Noble Dream, 440–444; Stearns, “Trends in Social History,” 208–218. For a thorough and self-reflective discussion of Thompson and the evolution of cultural history, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).   7 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 92–94; Stearns, “Trends in Social History,” 217–224; Paula S. Fass, “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue,” Journal of Social History (Fall 2003): 39–46.   8 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 128, 165, 194–195; Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Politics Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 401.   9 Robert B. Westbrook, “Abundant Cultural History: The Legacy of Warren Susman,” Reviews in American History 13, no. 4 (December 1985): 481–486; Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), xx–xxx, 288. 10 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1994); “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567–593; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Cultural history has long straddled the line between social history on one side and American Studies on the other. And the more historically minded American Studies scholars have used methods of evidence and analysis that were virtually indistinguishable from cultural history. 11 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (United States of America: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 12 Darnton, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” 329. 13 Cook, Glickman and O’Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History, 12–13. 14 As UNESCO’s founding constitution insisted in 1945: “That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” 15 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 40, 314–315, 321, 348. For a similar yet less sanguine look at postmodernity, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 63, 182–183, 355–359. 16 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity, Race, and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2–6, 50, 54–58, 71. 17 Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ruth Feldstein, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013). 18 Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 19 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Hiroshi Kitamura, Screening Enlightenment: Hollywood and the Cultural Reconstruction of Defeated Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 20 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Howard Brick, The Age of Contradiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Juan A. Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 21 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Catherine Keyser, Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Jinx Coleman Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Stephanie J. Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois and the Souls of Black Folk (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the

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Stephen R. Duncan Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); John McMillan, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). Also noteworthy are Volumes 4 and 5 of Karl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway’s edited series, The History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill: Published in association with the American Antiquarian Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009, 2014). 22 Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 23 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975; rev. and expanded ed., 1994); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); J. Hoberman, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: New Press, 2011), xviii. 24 For a thorough discussion of theoretical debates in the field, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); “AHR Forum: Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American History Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 698–813. 25 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 2005), 65–66, 192–197. 26 David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); George Lipsitz, “Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History” and Nan Enstad, “Popular Culture,” in A Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 268–271, 364–369; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Robin E. Jensen, Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 28 Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Stephen E. Kercher, Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Robert Wells, Life Flows on in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 29 Anne Dewey, “Poetic Authority and the Public Sphere of Politics in the Activist 1960s: The DuncanLevertov Debate,” in Albert Gelpi and Robert J. Bertholf, eds., Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 112. 30 Cowie, Stayin Alive, 17, 216–217, 317–333, 278, 364. 31 AHR Forum: James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History” and Julia Adeney Thomas, “Comment: Not Yet Far Enough,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012): 746– 771, 794–803. 32 F. B. M. de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: The Search for Humanism Among the Primates (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013); Barbara J. King, Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion (New York: Doubleday Press, 2007), esp. 82–87.

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14 LABOR AND WORKING CLASS—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Jon Shelton

Figure 14.1 Civil rights leaders at the 1963 March on Washington. Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, 542010.

Labor and working-class history, like most historical fields, has been intimately entwined with contemporary political developments. Indeed, the questions American labor and working-class historians ask have emanated from political economic concerns extending beyond the academy as much as epistemological advances within it. During the era of its academic origins in the early twentieth century, for example, scholars inquired about the historical trajectory of the “labor question,” while, in our own time, a profound increase in global inequality, the enhanced power of capital and a precipitous 149

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decline in workers’ rights in much of the developed world has led to a revived academic interest in the position of working people in the new global economic order. The first academic research to view working people as actors of historical importance emerged from social science. To the extent that professional history existed in the nineteenth century, it focused on broad American political narratives and glorifying the origins of the United States.1 As the field advanced toward more analytical approaches to understanding the past, historians treated working people, if at all, as tropes to signify larger American political developments: the Western pioneer, for example, in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.2 For much of the twentieth century, professional historians largely failed to differentiate classes within an amorphous “American” people, as in Louis Hartz’s account of a Lockean “liberal tradition” flowing from the Puritans through the post-World War II United States.3 In the American academy, in fact, economists, most notably the University of Wisconsin’s John Commons and his students, developed the first systematic treatments of the history of working people and labor organization in the U.S. Commons led the charge in the academy to address the most pressing political problem from the end of Reconstruction to the onset of World War II: The U.S. became a world economic powerhouse in the late nineteenth century at the expense of millions of Americans and immigrants who became little more than fodder for the industrial machine. Capital accumulation derived from the rampant exploitation of working men and women, and the non-existent social welfare state left them with nothing but their communities to cushion them from unemployment or workplace injury. The result was labor organization, strikes and, often, spontaneous violence on the part of both workers and the private guns hired by rabidly anti-union employers. The Commons school sought to develop non-revolutionary policy solutions capable of quelling the violence brought on by the “labor question.” As a consequence of its focus on “institutions,” the work today is often treated as pre-historical: The time before worker “agency” was uncovered by the new labor historians in the 1960s and 1970s. The most important work of Commons and his students, especially the four-volume History of Labour in the United States (published from 1918–1935), nonetheless offers insights of use for contemporary historians. Laying out the importance of contingency, Commons emphasized what made the U.S. working class unique, arguing that an idiosyncratic ethic of individualism, the difficulty of assimilating a diversity of immigrants and a legal apparatus privileging private property rights more than in other nations distinguished American labor organization.4 The work was clearly limited, however. First, stemming from its perspective rooted in the field of economics, History of Labour in the United States overlaid an awkward schematic formula on American history in which boom times renewed worker activism and downturns limited it. Commons and associates also disapproved of radicalism, preferred craft unionism over the more inclusive industrial models of the Knights of Labor or International Workers of the World (IWW) and argued, problematically, that American labor politics flowed inexorably toward “a more constructive period slowly developing before us.”5 In the 1960s, a new generation of historians began to focus on working people in a broader context, considering wider-scale power dynamics and the myriad ways workers had influenced politics and economic conditions—within unions and without. Three historians in particular—David Brody, Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery—are largely credited as the first generation of historians to center workers in their studies, in the words of Roy Rosenzweig, transforming “labor history into working-class history.”6 Indeed, the research of all three was based on the premise that understanding the American past necessitated the rigorous study of class relations, which, in turn, necessitated understanding working-class experience and worker agency. David Brody’s Steelworkers in America (1960) represented a pioneering study. The book examined the work of steel production, how mill operators defeated unions in the early twentieth century 150

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and how workers resisted, often—since many were European immigrants—through their ethnic traditions. Brody’s introduction to the work highlighted the novelty of his departure from the Commons school: The steelworkers themselves have been the focus [of the study], not one or another of the institutions or events of which they were a part. My aim has been to study the process by which their working lives in America’s steel mills were shaped in the non-union era of the industry.7 A radical political project motivated Gutman and Montgomery, two important intellectual lights in the transatlantic left. Indeed, Gutman’s and Montgomery’s respective careers began around the time E. P. Thompson published his landmark The Making of the English Working Class (1963), which charted the emergence of class consciousness in Great Britain in the nineteenth century.8 For Thompson, the class experience did not result automatically from working men’s and women’s alienation from the production process but was always made historically, and largely through culture. British documentation of the working-class experience advanced more rapidly than in the United States, and it influenced both Gutman and Montgomery. Gutman’s seminal article, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” for instance, documented how the constant addition of preindustrial people—mostly through immigration—into American factories over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to continuous but distinct waves of resistance to the discipline of wage labor.9 Following the publication of his first book, Beyond Equality, in 1967, Montgomery spent several years working with Thompson to develop the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick; though certainly not derivative, Montgomery’s later work showed Thompson’s influence.10 In 1979, Montgomery published an influential series of essays entitled Workers’ Control in America, which charted the variegated ways capital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used managerial techniques to curtail worker power over production, described the landscape of worker resistance and explained how ethnicity and race divided the workforce.11 The “New Labor History” of Brody, Gutman and Montgomery represented the most disruptive aspect of the “New Social History.” The latter scholarship, as Brody remembered it, was “triggered” by “a crisis that had overtaken the profession . . . when New Left historians, many of them graduate students, challenged the establishment and won.” By the end of the 1970s, “the New Labor History was the liveliest branch of American history, and [Montgomery] (along with Gutman) its towering figure.”12 Historians most remember Montgomery, however, for his magnum opus The Fall of the House of Labor, which brought to fruition many of the inchoate ideas in Workers’ Control. The former powerfully documented the contingency of class experience in the United States from the 1870s to the 1920s, showing how the resistance of workers—white, black, immigrant, male, female, skilled and unskilled—shaped both capitalism and the arc of American politics. The single volume of American labor history that comes closest to sustaining the depth, richness and scale of The Making of the English Working Class, The Fall of the House of Labor argued that in these formative years, “class consciousness” derived from “a project” in which “working-class activists” and sympathizers “persistently sought to foster a sense of unity and purposiveness among their fellow workers through the spoken and the printed word, strikes, meetings, reading circles, military drill, dances, athletic and singing clubs, and co-operative stores.”13 Among its many important arguments, The Fall of the House of Labor asserted that, even though they failed to foment revolution, American workers envisioned and strove for dramatic new forms of organizing and communities built around deep solidarity. Further, the book extensively examined the interaction between economic structure and the cultural values of “newcomers from capitalism’s periphery”: Central, Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia.14 Though a more ideologically and culturally “homogenized” working-class had emerged in the United States by the 151

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end of World War I, Montgomery concluded that a complicated series of developments, including a “hostile” state, the postwar depression, unemployment and, finally, a massive open-shop drive, thwarted their aspirations.15 Brody, Gutman and Montgomery trained or influenced much of the next generation of labor and working-class historians along with Alice Kessler-Harris, whose groundbreaking 1982 study of how women’s move into the waged labor force interacted with new economic and cultural pressures in the twentieth century to challenge the shape of American society, and Melvyn Dubofsky, who wrote the signal history of the IWW.16 This second generation of scholars, publishing their first books in the late 1980s and 1990s, chronicled a wider variety of worker agency over the course of American history by expanding our conception of political action and offering a broader examination of how race and gender impacted working people. These scholars, writing histories after the black freedom struggle and resurgent feminism ignited the new social history, brought closer to fulfillment the vision of the New Labor history’s founders by unearthing the experience of all workers—women, African Americans, Latino/as and Asian Americans—in order to fully appreciate the salience of class in American history.17 This second generation also served as an important bridge for later developments as many of them engaged with new theoretical work in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and other fields. Indeed, many of the labor scholars published during this era embraced the “cultural turn” in American historiography then underway in the 1980s and understood cultural practice as a key arena of class identity, struggle and resistance.18 The second generation of labor historians, for example, highlighted the ways working-class women pushed for more equitable wages and working conditions. Nancy Gabin charted the history of women in automobile production, an especially significant industry to study since the United Auto Workers (UAW) represented both the exemplar of industrial unionism in the 1930s and the most progressive of the powerful industrial unions in the years after World War II. Gabin concluded that while falling short of attaining gender equality, women activists in the UAW were able to mobilize the ideals of industrial unionism to challenge gender discrimination and force the union to take their concerns seriously.19 Indeed, combined with Dorothy Sue Cobble’s The Other Women’s Movement, which spotlighted a “missing wave” of labor feminism in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, it is clear that labor historians challenged the narrative that 1960s feminism emerged exclusively from the discontent of middle-class housewives chronicled by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963).20 Other scholarship on gender and labor during this time expanded the terrain of what counted as work and documented women’s activism to push for economic equality beyond the shop floor. Eileen Boris’s Home to Work, for example, drew scholars’ attention to the connection between gender ideology, the role of the state and household work in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.21 Alice Kessler-Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity showed how feminists challenged the gendered ideal of “economic citizenship” that had dominated major social welfare policies in the twentieth-century United States.22 Recent work testifies to the influence of this generation. Premilla Nadasen’s study of domestic workers and their organizing efforts in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, for instance, built on this earlier scholarship to rectify the historiographical invisibility of the disproportionately black female domestic workers in the postwar era.23 Other second-generation scholarship highlighted the history of African Americans and labor organization in the United States. Joe Trotter’s groundbreaking study of Milwaukee chronicled the development of a black industrial working class in that city during the Great Migration era.24 Kimberley Phillips’s history of Cleveland charted “the ascendancy of a militant working-class organization of migrants from the Deep South and the dominance of unemployed migrants and women within with the organization.”25 Eric Arnesen’s Brotherhoods of Color showed how the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and other black railroad workers pushed for both civil and union rights in one of the nation’s most discriminatory industries.26 152

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Other scholars turned the gaze of labor history south. Daniel Letwin’s The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, a study of Alabama, analyzed interracial organizing amongst white and black coal miners, who simultaneously upheld the social color line while working together for their common interests.27 Tera Hunter dramatically expanded our understanding of the scope of black working women’s agency by showing the different ways Southern domestic workers challenged white supremacy from Reconstruction through the early twentieth century.28 Chronicling developments in the Depression and New Deal era, William Jones’s study of lumber workers and Robin D. G. Kelley’s work on sharecroppers showed how black workers proved central to local economies and had very different strategies for combating the stiflingly rigid Jim Crow system.29 The second generation of new labor historians also documented the experiences of Mexican and Mexican American workers. George Sánchez, in Becoming Mexican-American, emphasized the significance of labor organizing during the 1930s in the emergence of Mexican American identity in California, while Vicki Ruiz’s Cannery Workers, Cannery Lives charted the history of activist Mexican and Mexican American women workers in the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).30 Building on the foundation of this early work, more recent scholarship has examined Mexican American workers through the prism of the successes and failures of the United Farm Workers (UFW), a post-World War II movement which capitalized on agricultural workers’ exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to engage in tactics, like the secondary boycott, forbidden to other unions.31 Building on Zaragosa Vargas’s pioneering research on Mexican workers in the Midwest, more recent studies by Lilia Fernández and Michael Innes-Jiménez have examined the creation of working-class Mexican American communities outside the southwest.32 A number of second-generation labor and working-class histories expanded our awareness of workers’ political action beyond the shop floor. Leon Fink’s Workingmen’s Democracy, for instance, showed how Knights of Labor locals in the late nineteenth century used electoral politics to push for change.33 Julie Greene’s Pure and Simple Politics, a study of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), caused scholars to rethink the conventional wisdom that the AFL, its members and its locals eschewed electoral politics in adherence to its president Samuel Gompers’s legendary “pure and simple unionism.” On the contrary, Greene argued that in the early twentieth century, the AFL decisively entered into electoral politics in order to combat viciously anti-union campaigns by employers.34 Joseph McCartin’s dissection of labor during the World War I period highlighted the emergence of “industrial democracy” and the AFL’s effort to use the U.S. government’s wartime apparatus to push for meaningful collective bargaining.35 Other research during this period advanced accounts of working-class politics that encompassed the politicized terrain of culture: saloons, films and consumer products. The resurgence of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s thought in the 1970s and 1980s, in addition to the British cultural studies of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others, influenced much of this new American work.36 Roy Rosenzweig’s study of Worcester, Massachusetts, demonstrated that workers in the late nineteenth century forged an “autonomous sphere of existence” in saloons and holiday celebrations, and despite efforts from above to control them, continued to shape burgeoning mass cultural forms such as film into the twentieth century.37 Steven Ross’s Working-Class Hollywood showed how labor activists and filmmakers in early twentieth-century cinema offered a robust challenge to industrial capitalism.38 Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal argued that working people’s interaction with movie houses and other cultural institutions like the radio and chain stores in the 1920s and 1930s did as much as the Wagner Act to bring them into the fold of the New Deal coalition.39 Michael Denning made the case that the Popular Front coalition between communist and other working-class cultural producers in music, film and literature “proletarianized” American culture over the course of the 1930s.40 Other research zeroed in on working people’s conscious use of consumer politics. Chronicling one of the most radical moments in the twentieth century U.S., the AFL-led Seattle general strike of 1919, 153

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Dana Frank’s study of the labor movement in that city underscored the significance of housewives in forging the collective power of working-class consumers. Indeed, Frank showed how boycotts were just as significant as strikes in developing a solidarity that would be lost after businesses’ open-shop drives in the 1920s.41 Similarly, Lawrence Glickman’s A Living Wage highlighted the relationship between consumption, working-class agency and culture in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Glickman’s study of the consumer movement argued that American workers—who had previously rejected “wage slavery”—increasingly accepted wage labor and reoriented the labor movement around the notion of a “living wage.”42 Many of the studies of this second generation of labor history that went into the 1940s and 1950s emphasized paths not taken. Rosemary Feurer’s work on activism among electrical workers in the Midwest helped to reassess the value of communists and socialists as more than just good organizers, and charted the diminished political possibilities following their marginalization in the repressively anti-communist postwar era.43 Studies of Southern workers in the CIO era, like those of Michael Honey and Robert Korstad, highlighted the potential for interracial cooperation along class lines, but argued that these efforts failed because of white workers’ racism and employer opposition legitimized by anti-communism. As a consequence, the nation maintained a large unorganized industrial labor force in the South, limiting labor’s influence on American politics in the postwar era.44 More recent work has documented the efforts by black union activists during the Civil Rights era to connect labor and civil rights, taking on an establishment invested to varying degrees in white supremacy. William Jones’s account of the long history of the March on Washington, for instance, showed how the event in 1963 headlined by Martin Luther King, Jr. represented the culmination of a thirty-year effort by labor activists like A. Philip Randolph to convince the labor movement to take racial equality seriously.45 Michael Honey’s work on the sanitation workers campaign in Memphis in 1968, where King was assassinated, showed black workers in the city linking calls for both civil rights and economic equality.46 The ascendance of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the series of losses throughout the decade by private sector unions caused labor historians to ask questions about the decline of the New Deal labor-liberal coalition that had been forged in the 1930s. These questions became more urgent when Democrats regained control of the presidency and Congress in 1993, but labor’s agenda items went nowhere, as well as after the 1995 insurgency that brought John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to the head of the AFL-CIO failed to halt the decline of union membership in the United States. Beginning in the 1990s, labor historians increasingly asked what had gone wrong. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle’s 1989 edited volume, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, was crucial in setting the terms of this debate. Essays by leading scholars critically assessed the successes and limits of the New Deal, especially the failure of labor’s social democratic project to move beyond the disproportionately white and male workers in heavy industries like auto, steel and rubber. Other pieces documented the failure of the Great Society to rectify those limits and the rise of a new right that included many working-class whites.47 Nelson Lichtenstein, building on his essay in the Fraser and Gerstle volume, believed the constraints of labor-liberalism ran deep. In State of the Union, he argued that the Taft-Hartley Act’s revision of the Wagner Act in 1947 hamstrung organized labor in ways that tamed the most meaningful challenges to corporate power and sowed the seeds of the New Deal order’s demise. Civil rights legislation in the 1960s located employment action in the individual’s challenge to discriminatory practices, and although this apparatus largely ended outright discrimination, Lichtenstein pointed out, it did nothing to guarantee meaningful employment or labor rights.48 Recent work has contributed to our understanding of labor’s decline by zeroing in more closely on the 1970s. Jefferson Cowie’s sweeping account of the decade, Stayin’ Alive, charted the disappearance of the working class as a political actor, and he argued that cultural concerns allowed figures on 154

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the right like Richard Nixon to court white workers by appealing to patriotism, race and gender.49 Robert Self showed how a white working class invested in “breadwinner conservatism” and its defense of gendered and heteronormative assumptions came under fire in the late 1960s and 1970s from the feminist and homosexual rights movement and shifted even further to the right.50 Joseph McCartin’s deep case study of the disastrous Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981, in which President Reagan fired and replaced the federal employees, argued that the strike represented the logical consequence of labor’s decline in the 1970s and emboldened further assaults on labor in the 1980s.51 Other approaches to the decline of the New Deal coalition have put the onus more squarely on the failures of the Democratic Party. Kevin Boyle’s The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, a study of the Reutherite wing of labor—the most progressive mainstream force in the labor movement in the 1940s—took issue with Lichtenstein’s account of the UAW’s shift away from social democracy after the so-called “Treaty of Detroit” in 1950. Boyle argued that the UAW maintained a social democratic agenda into the postwar era, but foundered when its attempt at wider coalition building moved beyond the working-class roots of labor. The crucial moment came when Reuther could not guide Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty into a movement capable of attracting both white workers and the African American working-class who had been largely denied the gains of the postwar order.52 Eschewing explanations that stressed either the “excesses” of the civil rights movement or the white working-class backlash to it, Judith Stein blamed the failure of the Democratic Party’s macroeconomic policy for the decline of New Deal liberalism. In Running Steel, Running America, she argued that the Reagan revolution was possible only after Democrats failed to “modernize” and revitalize American industry.53 Stein elsewhere highlighted trade policy, arguing that during the “pivotal decade” of the 1970s Democrats sold out American workers to maintain U.S. global political hegemony.54 Other recent contributions to this literature focused on the long arc of anti-union activism. Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands powerfully connected the rise of market fundamentalist intellectuals, anti-communist groups like the John Birch Society and revanchist politicians like Ronald Reagan. These forces all came together, she argued, to forge a powerful new business consciousness in the 1970s.55 Other work delved more deeply into the activism of specific right groups like the National Right to Work Committee, a shadowy, single-issue organization that emerged in the 1950s to agitate against union security clauses.56 Increased awareness of activism on the right, combined with revelations about capital’s renewed influence on economic and social policy, also led labor historians to recalibrate working-class agency within the broader trajectory of capitalism. Labor scholars devoted more attention over the last two decades to understanding the relationship between workers and the structural forces that have limited and shaped their agency, particularly in the wake of free trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, the deregulation of finance capital in the 1990s and 2000s and the global economic catastrophe of 2008. Jefferson Cowie’s 1999 study of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the twentieth century represented an important intervention into this history of capitalism and labor. Indeed, RCA’s unquenched thirst for ever cheaper non-union labor began in Camden, New Jersey and was only slaked after landing in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico via Bloomington, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee.57 Important work to emerge after Cowie’s includes Nelson Lichtenstein’s study of Walmart’s global business and labor practices, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s account of “developmental neoliberalism” in postwar Phoenix and Bethany Moreton’s treatment of the rise of a virulently anti-union strain of retail employment in the evangelical Sunbelt.58 Understanding the story of labor in the postwar era has also necessitated greater attention to the shifting role of the state. Since the 1970s, federal, local and state governments have increasingly listed toward a political economic system distinguished by what many scholars now call neoliberalism. 155

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Neoliberal politicians, often backed by corporate interests and wealthy market-fundamentalist philanthropists, seek in various ways to repurpose public money for private capital accumulation and to use public services for corporate ends.59 As labor historians have reckoned with this development, they have engaged in a long overdue examination of the history of public sector labor. An influential essay published by Joseph McCartin in 2006 challenged historians to put their energies into this scholarship.60 Though some important work existed before McCartin’s essay, labor historians have clearly taken up his call in the years since.61 In the past decade, exciting work has highlighted how public-sector labor both differs from and intersects with private sector labor. Studies include work on the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); teacher unionism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; and home-care unionism.62 A final major trend in recent labor and working-class history is the profoundly increased attention to developments beyond American borders. Though much previous American labor history had compared the experience of American workers to those in other nations, this new work is distinguished by a specific “transnational” focus: a recognition that economic, social and political developments in the United States cannot be adequately understood without considering the imbrication of American workers in a world economy and the movement of peoples into and out of the United States. The Organization of American Historian’s 2000 La Pietra report summarized the moves toward the transnational in the historical profession already underfoot while also galvanizing further attention to it.63 Labor historians have been among the most eager to embrace the “transnational turn.” Aviva Chomsky’s work, for instance, seriously enriched our understanding of globalization through an examination of the interlinked forces impacting working people in New England and Colombia. She argued that the trajectory of economic integration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across national lines involved an inherently “unequal exchange” of capital exploited either by exporting factories or by importing immigrant labor willing to work for less.64 Similarly, Julie Greene’s study of the Panama Canal in the early 1900s reframed the narrative of this American engineering achievement by highlighting the fundamental necessity of labor migration, including white workers from the United States and Afro-Caribbean labor from the region around Panama. The success of the effort to construct the canal, in her groundbreaking study, hinged on the dialectic between American efforts to discipline labor and workers’ efforts to resist it.65 Recent scholarship also asks us to think broadly about the very foundations of the nation-state by linking labor to Native American sovereignty. Chantal Norrgard’s Seasons of Change showed how European-American colonialism challenged traditional forms of Ojibwe labor even as they attempted to “retain their autonomy under the increasingly difficult conditions presented by containment on reservations, the dispossession of their lands, federal Indian policy focused on eliminating their traditional ways of life, and state encroachment on treaty rights.” She argues that Ojibwes “enacted their sovereignty around the axis of labor.”66 Indeed, Norrgard’s work is representative of the best new history in the academy. As Stephen Duncan’s chapter in this volume puts it, the “new age of synthesis” is reviving a focus on the connections between economic structure and, to borrow from the classic Marxist/Gramscian formulation, the “superstructural”: the social and cultural workings of society that produce and reinforce power dynamics rooted in relationships to the productive process. Norrgard’s work powerfully shows how social constructions like sovereignty and “legitimate” labor are fundamental to understanding the larger forces that impact the history of working people. A survey of the newest work in labor and working-class history further highlighted this “new synthesis.” Very recent scholarship has moved into several exciting new terrains, enriching our understanding of the connections structuring the power relationships in American and global society. Cutting edge scholarship, such as Miriam Frank’s examination of labor organizing and Queer America and Melinda Chateauvert’s history of sex work, brought together capitalism, labor organization and sexuality.67 Other work, like Thomas Andrews’s account of the dramatic struggles in the coal industry 156

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during the Ludlow era in Colorado, highlighted the connections between capitalism, labor and the environment. Indeed, Andrews argued that moving “beyond the merely human” is vital if we are to reach a “more holistic interpretation . . . of the coalfield wars.”68 Perhaps the best recent effort to weave together such an extensive array of connections is Sven Beckert’s history of how cotton production remade global capitalism. The book showed how labor regimes in the U.S.—notably, chattel slavery—shaped and were shaped by the fiber’s large-scale commodification in the nineteenth century, and then how cotton production in the twentieth century shifted toward the Global South.69 Few labor histories can match the grandness of Beckert’s, nor should we expect them to. Nonetheless, our world grows more complex by the day. Information travels ever faster; financial corporations find ever more complicated ways to package and repackage investments, debt and other financial instruments, obfuscating their origins and cloaking the identities of the people who profit from them; and productive capital ever more ruthlessly seeks cheaper sources of labor, or to eliminate it entirely. For those with an interest in the place of working people, an understanding of the origins of these developments is vital. Labor and working-class historians must connect more and more dots to make sense of this past. If recent work like that of Norrgard, Andrews and Beckert is any indication, they are up to the task.

Notes   1 Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) charts the rise of the profession and early historians’ primary concerns.   2 See “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” where Turner argues that “to study th[e] advance of the frontier, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.”   3 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955). An important exception is the work of Charles Beard and his students, who understood key developments in American history through the prism of class interests. See Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1915).   4 John Commons, David Saposs, Helen Sumner, E. B. Mittelman, H. E. Hoagland, John Andrews, and Selig Perlman, History of Labour in the United States (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1918–1935).   5 Ibid., Vol 1, quotation on p. 13.   6 Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.   7 David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), ix.   8 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Thompson defines class as what “happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs,” 1. For an insightful examination of Thompson’s oeuvre, see Harvey Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1990).   9 Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, & Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1–78. Essay originally published in 1973. For an introduction to Gutman’s work see Ira Berlin, “Herbert G. Gutman and the American Working Class,” in Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Herbert Gutman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 10 David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). 11 David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 12 David Brody, “David Montgomery: Field Builder,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas no. 10 (Spring 2013): 53–56, quotations on pp. 54–55. 13 David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2. 14 Ibid., quotation on p. 100. 15 Ibid., 453.

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Jon Shelton 16 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York: Quadrangle, 1969). 17 This generation’s work is best exemplified by a volume that stemmed from a conference held in 1993 to celebrate the legacy of Montgomery: Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene and Bruce Laurie, eds., Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 18 On the “cultural turn,” see, James Cook, Lawrence Glickman and Michael O’Malley, eds., The Cultural Turn in US History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3–57. 19 Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). For other work on the UAW, see Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Jobs Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 20 Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963). 21 Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 22 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 23 Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015). 24 Joe Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 25 Kimberley Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 26 Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 27 Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 28 Tera Hunter, To “Joy My Freedom”: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 29 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 30 Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 31 Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of V   ictory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 32 Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Michael Innes-Jimenéz, Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 33 Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). 34 Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 35 Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 36 On the renewed interest in Gramsci, see Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567–593. Useful introductory reading on British Cultural Studies includes Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, Culture, Media, Language (London: Unwin Hyman, 1980).

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Labor and Working Class 37 Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, quotation on p. 5. 38 Steven Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 39 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 40 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso Press, 1997). 41 Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 42 Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 43 Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). On the role of communists as organizers, see Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). 44 Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 45 William Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013). 46 Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007). 47 Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 48 Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 49 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). 50 Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 51 Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 52 Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). For Lichtenstein’s account of the postwar UAW, see Walter Reuther. 53 Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 54 Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 55 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009). 56 See Sophia Lee, The Workplace Constitution: From the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jon Shelton, “‘Compulsory Unionism’ and Its Critics: The National Right to Work Committee, Teacher Unions, and the Defeat of Labor Law Reform in 1978,” Journal of Policy History 29 (Summer 2017). 57 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 58 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Walmart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), quotation on p. 3; Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 59 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 60 Joseph McCartin, “Bringing the State’s Workers in: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced US Labor Historiography,” Labor History 47 (2006): 73–94. 61 Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199SEIU and the Politics of Health Care Unionism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Joshua Freeman, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in NYC, 1933–1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 62 Francis Ryan, AFSCME’s Philadelphia Story Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 23; Joseph Hower, “Jerry Wurf, the Rise of AFSCME, and the Fate

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Jon Shelton of Labor Liberalism, 1947–1981” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2013); Jon Shelton, Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); John Lyons, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Adam Mertz, “The 1974 Hortonville Teacher Strike and the Public Sector Labor Dilemma,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 98 (Spring 2015): 2–13; Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 63 Thomas Bender, “The La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession,” www.oah.org/about/reports/ reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/ 64 Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), quotation on p. 3. 65 Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 66 Chantal Norrgard, Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 67 Miriam Frank, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement From Stonewall to SlutWalk (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013). 68 Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), quotation on p. 17. 69 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

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15 FOREIGN RELATIONS AND U.S. IN THE WORLD—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Kelly J. Shannon

The field of U.S. foreign relations history is a vibrant one that has evolved and expanded dramatically in recent decades. In fact, the very name of the field has been in flux, which has reflected the field’s upheaval and innovation. Historians of U.S. engagement with the world used to write “diplomatic history,” which typically focused on state-to-state diplomacy and policymaking elites. By 2000, the field became the history of “American foreign relations” broadly defined, which included traditional diplomatic and policy history but was more expansive to encompass any interaction between Americans and people from other countries. Today, many historians—and an increasing number of job ads—dub the field “America and/in the world” or “the U.S. and/in the world,” an umbrella term which embraces diplomatic and foreign relations history, as well as scholarship that situates U.S. history in an international or transnational context. Along with its shifting name, the field has undergone a methodological revolution. The three editions of Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations illustrate this, as each edition’s contents changed considerably to reflect shifting concerns and approaches in the field.1 Since the beginning, scholars concerned with U.S. engagement with the world have asked important questions about the nature and exercise of power in the international realm, but their approaches to answering those questions have shifted from a traditional focus on political leaders and other elites to examining the roles played by culture, gender and non-state actors to recent studies of transnational phenomena and internationalized U.S. history. The field’s history is one of constant evolution and vitality, and it continues to provide important perspectives on the development of the international system, the United States’ global role and the world’s impact on the U.S.

The History of Diplomatic History U.S. diplomatic history broke away from political history after World War I to become a distinct field. Early diplomatic historians debated the nature of U.S. power and the drivers of American foreign policy, and they differed in their judgments of American behavior, which remained central debates for decades to come. Following World War II, a school of thought known as realism emerged that dominated the field through the late 1950s. Having witnessed the rise of fascism, the destruction of World War II and rising Soviet power, realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan were more critical of U.S. policies than many prewar historians had been. Nevertheless, they promoted American exceptionalism and advocated the exercise of U.S. power. According to realists, American policy should maximize U.S. power and be driven by a clear and rational calculation of what was best for 161

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the national interest. Realists were especially critical of policies that they perceived as having been driven by domestic concerns, like public opinion or electoral politics. They wrote diplomatic history to guide American policymakers in the Cold War, and many had close contacts with government. Thus, they focused on policy elites and state-to-state diplomacy, and their analyses upheld the Cold War consensus.2 Realism dominated through the late 1950s, but a new school directly challenged realist orthodoxy by the 1960s. Known alternately as the New Left, the revisionists and the Wisconsin School, these historians both reflected and influenced the fracturing of the Cold War consensus. Neither Marxist (“Old Left”) nor orthodox, these leftist scholars were highly critical of U.S. expansionism, ideology and the Cold War. The opening salvo in revisionists’ assault on realism was William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy in 1959. Although Tragedy was “a manifesto, not a monograph,” it soon became one of the most influential books ever published in the field.3 Williams argued that the U.S. was an empire that, like other empires, was driven by selfish economic interests. Williams asserted that, by the nineteenth century, Americans clung to “the firm conviction, even dogmatic belief ” that overseas expansion was necessary for U.S. prosperity and security.4 This mindset caused the United States to make foreign policy blunders, which included (in later editions) the Vietnam War. The great tragedy, according to Williams, was that Americans did have worthy, enlightened ideals but had failed to live up to them by imposing coercive, exploitative policies on foreign peoples and thwarting democratic revolutions abroad. Tragedy touched off a revisionist revolution. The deepening crisis of Vietnam lent credence to Williams’s critique of American empire. A host of scholars soon applied Williams’s ideas to archives-based studies of U.S. policy. Walter LaFeber’s award-winning The New Empire demonstrated how the United States sought new markets to absorb its industrial surplus in the late nineteenth century through physical and economic expansion, while Lloyd Gardner and others applied a materialist lens to U.S. policy in the 1930s and 1940s.5 Williams’s influence was “most profound” in the area of Cold War historiography. Whereas realists asserted that an aggressive, expansionist Soviet Union caused the Cold War, revisionists argued that a weakened USSR sought security rather than revolution in the immediate postwar period. The United States, on the other hand, was propelled by an aggressive anti-communist worldview to assert its power. Cold War revisionism was not monolithic, however. Hard revisionists like Gabriel Kolko argued that expansionist imperatives of American capitalism inexorably drove U.S. Cold War policies, whereas “softer” revisionists, such as Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber and Thomas Paterson, rejected economic determinism in favor of complex, multi-causal analyses of U.S. Cold War policy that included economic motives.6 While many historians continued to produce orthodox diplomatic histories, revisionists were the most dynamic interpretive force through the 1970s. However, the reaction against revisionism was swift and often openly hostile. Many critics accused revisionists of being pro-Soviet, but debates over revisionism “also brought to the surface status anxieties about the place of foreign relations history within the historical profession.” The rise of social and cultural history by the 1970s that emphasized race, class and gender, as well as the emergence of postmodernism, made diplomatic historians uneasy. As the historical discipline changed dramatically, diplomatic historians remained wedded to their focus on elite, white males and U.S. hard power. It would be years before the field took questions of culture, race and gender seriously, and most remained suspicious of postmodernism. Thus, as Mark Philip Bradley observed, “A continuing concentration on structures of power and economics . . . put the field at odds with the prevailing zeitgeist of the discipline.”7 While shying away from social and cultural history, new groups challenged the dominance of revisionism in the 1970s–1980s. Post-revisionists like John Lewis Gaddis focused primarily on the Cold War and generally accepted the New Left’s assertion that the USSR adopted a defensive position in the immediate postwar period. However, post-revisionists tended to argue that the United 162

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States and Soviet Union bore equal responsibility for the Cold War, although Gaddis insisted that the Soviets were primarily to blame.8 Post-revisionists also generally accepted revisionists’ assertion that the United States was an empire. However, they argued that American imperialism was a benevolent “empire by invitation.”9 Despite their nods to revisionism, post-revisionists downplayed economic factors and expansionism in their explanations; instead, they argued that other structural factors, like geopolitics and military concerns, drove U.S. policy. While post-revisionists focused on the Cold War, other historians developed the “corporatist” approach. Like revisionists, corporatists saw economics as important, but they advanced a less politically charged interpretation and included other structural factors. Drawing on the work of Ellis Hawley, Alfred Chandler and Robert Wiebe, corporatist Michael Hogan explained, corporatism refers to a system that is founded on officially recognized functional groups, such as labor, business, agriculture, and the professions. In such as system, institutional regulating and coordinating mechanisms seek to integrate the groups into an organic whole; elites in the public and private sectors collaborate to guarantee order, stability, and progress; and this collaboration creates a pattern of interpenetration and power sharing that makes it difficult to determine where one sector leaves off and the other begins.10 Corporatist works by Hogan, Melvyn Leffler, Frank Costigliola, Emily Rosenberg and others largely examined the ways in which elites in the U.S. and Europe cooperated to promote economic recovery after World War I, effectively dismantling the myth that the U.S. was isolationist in the interwar period.11 International history was also revitalized in the 1970s and 1980s. Important studies grounded in multinational, multi-lingual archival research remedied revisionists’ reliance on U.S. sources and the American perspective. Ernest May’s sweeping international studies of the War of 1898 and World War I set high standards for international history, while Michael Hunt, Akira Iriye and Marilyn Young produced the first serious studies of U.S.–East Asian relations that drew upon Asian documents.12 Despite this dynamism, however, diplomatic historians entered the final decades of the twentieth century believing that their field was in crisis.

The Cultural Turn In his now legendary 1980 essay, Charles Maier lamented the decline of diplomatic history: “The history of international relations .  .  . cannot, alas, be counted among the pioneering fields of the discipline.” While social and cultural history offered excitement and innovation—and drew the best graduate students and new tenure-track lines—diplomatic historians stubbornly insisted on studying elites, were too focused on the U.S. perspective and rejected the “methodological democratization” occurring in the rest of the discipline.13 His pronouncement both reflected and influenced the field’s existential crisis throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In many ways, Maier was right. In light of the entrance of previously marginalized groups into the academy, along with accelerated globalization, diplomatic historians continued to ignore race, gender and culture only at their peril. It became increasingly clear that traditional interpretations provided incomplete explanations of the history of U.S. foreign relations. Nevertheless, it took until the late 1990s before the field truly adapted to the “cultural turn.” Throughout the 1980s, despite the publication of many topnotch traditional studies, diplomatic historians continued to concentrate primarily on the Cold War and Western concerns, characterized power as flowing outward from the U.S. and remained suspicious of gender, cultural and postcolonial analyses. To be sure, excellent scholarship appeared that prefigured the transformation of diplomatic history into the history of U.S. foreign relations. Taking up Williams’s concept of an American Weltanschauung, 163

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for instance, scholars like Michael Hunt asked how ideology influenced U.S. policy.14 Others such as John Dower, Susan Jeffords and Emily Rosenberg began to adopt analytical lenses that included gender, culture and race in their assessments of U.S. behavior.15 Amy Kaplan considered U.S. behavior in the context of global imperialism and postcolonial theory, while Akira Iriye called for scholars to view international relations as intercultural relations.16 Perhaps most striking, historians in this period began to examine the Vietnam War from multiple angles, shifting the field’s focus away from the Soviet Union and Europe and creating perhaps the most robust diplomatic literature at the time. While many studies centered on the U.S. perspective, Marilyn Young and Robert Brigham soon produced international histories of the war that drew upon Vietnamese-language sources.17 As Andrew Rotter later observed, “the futile exercise of so much military power raised serious questions about the ability of the United States to work its will in a world which it was assumed to predominate,” and Vietnam “was no mere aberration, but instead a strong indication that the pattern of American foreign policy was not as guiltless as it had looked to a previous generation of historians.”18 Scholars who drew upon cultural, gender, postmodern and postcolonial theories remained on the margins of the field until the late 1990s, when the cultural turn hit diplomatic history in earnest. Thereafter, there was an outpouring of scholarship that adopted theories and methodologies previously shunned by diplomatic historians. At the same time, scholars began to reorient the field to examine American relations with Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East more systematically. They also increasingly put non-state actors at the center of their analyses by asking how non-elites and groups outside of government affected international relations, from missionaries, tourists and soldiers to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The result was a dynamic field that expanded and became increasingly diverse, both methodologically and in its membership. Borrowing theories of culture from anthropology and other disciplines, foreign relations historians examined how culture influenced U.S. relations with foreign peoples. Culture can influence how Americans and non-Americans perceive and understand—or misunderstand—one another, determine which issues they identify as core values and national interests and condition their stereotypes and fears. Gender is culturally constructed, as is race; therefore, cultural analysis included attention to gender and racial ideology in explaining international relations. Diplomatic historians also borrowed from postcolonial theorists, especially Edward Said’s work on Orientalism. Based on these ideas, Andrew Rotter demonstrated how cultural differences, American racial and religious stereotypes of Indians and Hindus and gender ideology influenced the ambivalent U.S. relationship with India during after 1947.19 Similarly, Frank Costigliola argued that Americans’ tendency to feminize and pathologize the French caused tensions in the U.S.–French alliance during the Cold War, while Naoko Shibusawa, Maria Höhn and Petra Goedde demonstrated how gender and culture intersected to influence the ways Americans came to see Germany and Japan as allies after World War II.20 Melanie McAlister explored U.S. cultural representations of the Middle East to identify the construction of American political and cultural interests in the region, which demonstrated how popular culture, public debates, the news media, and various social and religious movements forged a web of meanings that have often facilitated—and sometimes challenged—the expansion of U.S. power in the Middle East, even as they worked to construct a self-image for Americans of themselves as citizens of a benevolent world power.21 Frank Costigliola’s 1997 article, “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration,” perhaps best represented the innovative potential of the cultural turn, as well as the passionate backlash by traditionalists during this period. Costigliola employed language analysis to reexamine George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” the foundational document of U.S. containment policy, which diplomatic historians long considered the 164

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epitome of Cold War realism. Historians often pointed to the Long Telegram’s “gripping” language, but none explained why it was so compelling. Through close attention to the Long Telegram’s prose, Costigliola demonstrated how Kennan’s metaphors cast the Soviet Union as a hyper-masculine rapist bent on “penetrating” Europe and as a disease that only understood power, which persuaded the Truman Administration that further cooperation with the USSR was unwise. Costigliola also returned a sense of human authorship to the Long Telegram by demonstrating how Kennan’s “intense feelings” about Russia and experiences in Moscow influenced what he wrote.22 Costigliola’s article demonstrated how cultural approaches assisted historians in developing new interpretations of even such thoroughly studied topics as the start of the Cold War. At the same time, it exposed traditionalists’ deep status anxieties and sparked a furor on the H-Diplo listserv and in other forums. While many scholars praised his article as groundbreaking, others leveled strong—and sometimes nasty—criticisms. The article destabilized scholarly assumptions about realism and the early Cold War—central topics in traditional diplomatic history—and struck at the very core of the field in ways traditionalists could not ignore. Suddenly, the foundations of the field had become unsteady. Of course, not all traditionalists responded emotionally to the cultural turn. Some simply concluded that cultural approaches, while interesting, did not offer a satisfactory explanation of the field’s central preoccupation: power. Melvyn Leffler commented: “Although such works vividly illustrate the interlocking ties of foreign policy and national security with culture and society, they are much better at demonstrating parallel developments than at elucidating causal relationships.”23 Meanwhile, Robert Buzzanco explained his objections: Applying theories from sociology, anthropology or literary criticism, examining languages, cultures or, in this case, religions, can be interesting, even illuminating, but how, in the final analysis, does it explain state action, which presumably is the basis of the study of foreign relations?24 Despite these objections, the cultural turn was here to stay. Kristin Hoganson, Mary Renda, Amy Greenberg, Emily Rosenberg, Robert Dean and others placed gender at the center of their interpretations of the causes of the War of 1898, the U.S. occupation of Haiti, antebellum U.S. expansion, dollar diplomacy and the Kennedy Administration, while Allison Sneider, Molly Wood, Carol Chin and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones highlighted women’s influence on foreign relations—actors long omitted from diplomatic history.25 Others like Paul Kramer, Penny von Eschen, Carol Anderson, Thomas Borstelmann and Mary Dudziak asked how race influenced foreign relations, from the ways in which American racial ideology drove U.S. imperialism to the Cold War’s impact on the civil rights movement.26 Others turned their attention to Cold War cultural diplomacy, cultural transmission, borderlands and foreign peoples’ reception of—and resistance to—U.S. cultural influence. While scholars like McAlister and Rotter examined Americans’ perceptions of foreign peoples’ religions, Andrew Preston, Ussama Makdisi and others began to investigate how Americans’ own religious ideologies shaped their behavior.27 Diplomatic historians also borrowed methods from fields beyond the humanities and social sciences. Richard Immerman reinvigorated examinations of U.S. intelligence, personality and decision making by incorporating methodologies borrowed from psychology. Eschewing psychoanalysis, which had led earlier historians astray, Immerman drew upon studies of cognition to examine how people process information that contradicts deeply held values in order to investigate how intelligence information and policymakers’ perceptions and beliefs influenced their decisions.28 While much of cultural turn scholarship focused on the U.S. perspective, the “new international history” enhanced understanding of global developments and non-American viewpoints, and it drew upon impressive multinational, multi-lingual archival research. Based on sources from North Africa, Europe and the United States, Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution characterized the Algerian 165

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War for independence as an international conflict not only to demonstrate how “the United States and other states influenced the Algerian War but also how these countries were themselves influenced by it.” Connelly contended that “U.S. policy and public opinion” were parts of a complex network of relations linking American society to the rest of the world— an evolving international and even transnational system that also includes the media, multinational corporations and diasporas. Would-be international historians must therefore examine “structures,” the non-governmental phenomena that have changed the basis of interstate relations.29 Many scholars did precisely that in the years to come. The cultural turn so transformed and energized the study of U.S. foreign relations that Tom Zeiler, editor of Diplomatic History, declared confidently in 2009 that the field had exorcized the ghost of Charlie Maier; “historians of U.S. foreign relations are, in many ways, an advance guard driving the bandwagon of internationalization,” he enthused. Zeiler celebrated the field’s increasing interconnectedness with other areas of history: the domain once occupied primarily by historians of U.S. foreign relations is now also populated by other practitioners of American history . . . This is a two-way process, with the mainstream’s embrace of diplomatic history increasingly evident as well.30 Without a doubt, U.S. foreign relations history was a field resurgent in the twenty-first century.

The Transnational Turn Over the past decade, the field has continued to evolve and expand, with many now calling it “the U.S. and/in the World.” However, as Erez Manela explained, “the rapid evolution of the field has also left historians both within and outside the field unsure about its precise contours and content.” Any attempt to evaluate current trends must necessarily be impressionistic, but the cultural turn appears to have ended, not because its methodologies are no longer in vogue, but because such approaches have become so widely accepted. New trends have emerged at the cutting-edge, such as “the increasing dissatisfaction with the national and regional enclosures that have long defined historical fields and the growing willingness of scholars of all stripes to push against and transcend these boundaries.” This has led Manela and others to declare that the “transnational turn” is now upon us.31 The transnational turn encompasses a multitude of methodologies, interpretations and subjects that internationalize U.S. history. In many ways, this is a return to the multi-lingual, multinational archival research that was common before the rise of revisionism, although earlier international history focused almost exclusively on elites and the West. Today’s scholarship builds upon new international history by combining the methodical innovations of recent decades with international perspectives that can include but also go beyond a focus on states. The transnational turn thus includes attempts to decenter the nation-state in analyses of international relations and to illuminate the significance of non-state actors, such as NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, activist networks and cultural agents. Transnational scholarship also examines the multiple directions in which power flows, including how U.S. culture and actions are shaped by foreign peoples and global structures. It investigates truly global phenomena that transcend national borders, such as immigration/migration, the environment, population growth, disease, international law and technological advances. Finally, the transnational turn includes scholarship that reexamines domestic U.S. history in international context. 166

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Transnational phenomena and structures have particularly captured scholars’ attention; historians like David Zierler, Barbara Keys and Carol Anderson have investigated how these developed, how Americans participated in or were impacted by them and how some groups attempted to forge transnational communities that provided alternatives to the prevailing international system.32 Recent studies also examined the rise of an elite class of global experts in the twentieth century that promoted development and modernization programs, as Bradley Simpson, David Ekbladh, Michael Latham and Nick Cullather demonstrated, or worked to control global population, often coercively, as Matthew Connelly uncovered.33 Others focused on globalization and have argued that, far from being a process of Americanization, globalization transformed the U.S. just as much as other countries. Kristin Hoganson traced globalization’s impact on the U.S. through middle-class white women’s patterns of consumption between the Civil War and World War I, while Andrew McKevitt demonstrated “the globalizing of America” as Americans embraced Japanese products and culture in the 1970s and 1980s.34 Meanwhile, Manela argued that the international resonance of Wilsonian principles in the wake of World War I represented a global “Wilsonian moment,” while Michele Louro traced interwar attempts by leftists and anti-colonial nationalists to create a transnational League Against Imperialism as an alternative to the League of Nations.35 The history of humanitarianism and human rights has been particularly popular and has developed its own historiography. While not all human rights historians consider themselves part of the “U.S. and/in the world” field, many foreign relations scholars have contributed to the growing human rights literature, including The Human Rights Revolution, which explored Americans’ relationships with human rights from multiple angles.36 Historians writing about human rights have illuminated the origins of modern human rights, international human rights law, the ways in which Americans participated in the global human rights movement and how that movement affected U.S. foreign policy. Elizabeth Borgwardt and Mary Ann Glendon illustrated the important role played by the United States and American actors, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, in the creation of the UN and Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s.37 Julia Irwin traced Americans’ humanitarianism through the American Red Cross’s relief assistance to foreign peoples in World War I, while Stephen Porter examined the connections between the U.S. rise to world power status and American refugee aid initiatives from World War I through the Cold War.38 Bradley Simpson, Barbara Keys, Sarah Snyder, Daniel Sargent and others demonstrated the influence of the transnational human rights movement on U.S. foreign policy after the 1960s, often arguing, as Keys did, that human rights advocacy became an important part of Americans’ global identity as they sought to recover moral authority after the Vietnam War.39 Another developing literature centers on the Third World in the Cold War and often decenters the superpowers to examine the perspectives of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Such studies demonstrate that countries on the periphery of the Cold War exercised significant influence over the superpower standoff and other global processes. Undemocratic leaders could often ensure U.S. assistance by characterizing their political adversaries or popular protest movements as communist, while other Third World peoples sought to develop a third way in the Cold War, whether it was by joining the Nonaligned Movement or developing models like Pan-Arabism. Paul Chamberlain’s international history of the Palestine liberation struggle argued that the PLO’s cultivation of transnational connections with other anti-colonial revolutionaries after 1967 profoundly influenced U.S. policy, not only toward the Arab-Israeli conflict but also toward revolutionary movements worldwide.40 Similarly, Jeffrey Byrne’s Mecca of Revolution traced the FLN’s attempts to promote themselves as a revolutionary model for other decolonizing nations that competed with both the U.S. and Soviet models and other Third World models like Nasserism. Ultimately, the Algerians’ vision for Third World solidarity did not come to fruition, but Byrne demonstrated how Third World peoples actively sought to control their own destinies.41 Even such thoroughly studied subjects as the Vietnam 167

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War have benefited from the transnational turn, as Lien-Hang Nyugen’s Hanoi’s War examined the international context of North Vietnam’s decision making, ranging from their internal considerations to their dealings with Beijing, Moscow and the United States. Based on unprecedented research in North Vietnamese and other international archives, Nyugen’s work provided a deeper understanding of North Vietnam’s motives and considerations.42 While these works examined the Cold War from the Third World perspective, Robert Rakove argued that Third World nationalists and neutralists deeply affected Washington’s Cold War policies as Americans sought to win the Third World’s allegiance. Meanwhile, Odd Arne Westad’s Bancroftwinning The Global Cold War examined the U.S. and USSR’s repeated interventions in the Third World, which, he argued, ultimately weakened both superpowers and “fuelled [sic.] many of the states, movements, and ideologies that increasingly dominate international affairs,” such as Islamic fundamentalism.43 While much work remains to be done, the transnational turn illuminates Americans’ global connections and international influences on U.S. history. It also provides a fuller picture of international affairs by providing the multiplicity of global perspectives and actors who influenced the Cold War and other international processes. Finally, transnational work can explain the rise of international and transnational institutions, legal systems and norms, as well as non-state networks, which influenced the international system.

Conclusion Of course, not all historians of the U.S. and/in the world have adopted transnational approaches. For this reason, it is best to think of the field as a big umbrella that brings together traditional, cultural turn, transnational and eclectic methodologies to provide a broad picture of American engagement with the world. Scholars in the field continue to produce excellent works that examine the role of culture, gender, women, sexuality, traditional policy concerns, hard power and other factors in relation to U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Recent works like Richard Immerman’s The Hidden Hand, which demythologized the history of the CIA, James Wilson’s The Triumph of Improvisation, which traced American and Soviet leaders’ choices as they navigated the changing international system after 1979, and David Milne’s Worldmaking, a sweeping intellectual history that understood American policy through the perspectives of those who saw diplomacy as an art and those who saw it as a science, all demonstrate the ongoing necessity and value of traditional subjects and methodologies.44 At the same time, there remain new vistas for scholarly exploration. Most work on America and/in the world has focused on the twentieth century. While Brian Delay and others have pushed historians to view Native American history as foreign relations history, and Bancroft-winner Sven Beckert and others have produced excellent international and foreign relations studies of the nineteenth century, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remain largely underexplored in the field and are ripe for the application of transnational and other recent approaches.45 Geographically, too, much remains to be done on the non-Western world, particularly Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Scholars in the field continue to chart new directions, and recent work by Andrew Rotter and Frank Costigliola on the physical senses and on emotion may lead to a physical or cognitive turn in the field (for lack of better descriptors).46 Finally, recent work by Matthew Connolly that embraces digital methodologies also suggests that there may be a digital turn coming.47 While this chapter provided a somewhat simplified overview of the field of U.S. and/in the world, it offers a glimpse into the history of the field and current methodologies. The takeaway is that the grand narrative of U.S. foreign relations has long since disappeared, and historians have dramatically expanded the field’s geographic and topical areas of concern, borrowed innovative methodologies from other disciplines and developed their own and have moved beyond a traditional focus on policy elites and hard power to provide a multiplicity of viewpoints and approaches to the study of U.S. 168

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engagement with the world. At this point, scholars are free to take any approach and ask any question, whether traditional or cutting-edge, but the field remains at least tangentially a subfield of U.S. history and wedded to questions about the nature and exercise of power in the international realm. Given the ongoing globalization of the twentieth century and the rise of global concerns about issues like climate change, transnational terrorist networks and rapid technological change, studies that put Americans in conversation with the global will continue to offer us relevant and important insights.

Notes   1 Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).   2 “Introduction,” Explaining, 2nd ed., 1–3.   3 Dexter Perkins, “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy: Twenty-Five Years After,” Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984): 3.   4 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th anniv. ed. (1959, 1962, 1972; reprint New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1959), 15.   5 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).   6 Mark Philip Bradley, “The Charlie Maier Scare and the Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980,” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12–13.   7 Ibid., 15–16.   8 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972; reprint New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).   9 Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23 (September 1986): 263–277. 10 Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism,” in Explaining, 3rd ed., 42. 11 Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1977); Melvyn Leffler, The Elusive Quest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 12 Ernest May, World War I and American Isolationism, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Imperial Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1961); Michael H. Hunt, Frontier Defense and the Open Door (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Marilyn Young, Rhetoric of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 13 Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in The Past Before Us, ed. Michael G. Kammen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 355–356. 14 Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 15 John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1989); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Gender,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 116–124. 16 Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Akira Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations,” Diplomatic History 3 (April 1979): 115–128. 17 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991); Robert K. Brigham, Guerilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 18 Andrew J. Rotter, “Chaps Having Flaps: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign Relations, 1980–1995,” in Costigliola and Hogan, eds., America in the World, 46–47. 19 Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 20 Frank Costigliola, France and the United States (New York: Twayne, 1992); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

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Kelly J. Shannon 21 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 22 Frank Costigliola, “‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,” Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309–1310. 23 Melvyn Leffler, “New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations,” in America in the World, ed. Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 69. 24 Robert Buzzanco, “Where’s the Beef? Culture without Power in the Study of U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000): 623. 25 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); Molly M. Wood, “Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the ‘Social Game’ in the U.S. Foreign Service, 1905–1941,” Journal of Women’s History 17 (Summer 2005): 142– 165; Carol C. Chin, “Beneficent Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Century,” Diplomatic History 27 (June 2003): 327–352; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–1994 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 26 Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Penny von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 27 Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of the Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2012); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 28 Richard Immerman, “Psychology,” in Explaining, 2nd ed., 103–122; “Intelligence and Strategy: Historicizing Psychology, Policy, and Politics,” Diplomatic History 32 (2008): 1–23; Empire for Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 29 Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), viii–ix. 30 Thomas W. Zeiler, “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 1053–1054. 31 Erez Manela, “The United States in the World,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 201, 203. 32 David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Barbara J. Keys, Globalizing Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 33 Bradley Simpson, Economists With Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Matthew Connolly, Fatal Misconception (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 34 Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Andrew McKevitt, “You Are Not Alone! Anime and the Globalizing of America,” Diplomatic History 34 (November 2010): 893–921. 35 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michele Louro, “Rethinking Nehru’s Internationalism: The League against Imperialism and Anti-Imperial Networks, 1927–1936,” Third Frame: Literature, Culture and Society 2 (September 2009): 79–94. 36 Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 37 Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). 38 Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Stephen R. Porter, Benevolent Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 39 Bradley Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” International History Review 31 (December 2009): 798–826;

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Foreign Relations and U.S. in the World Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 40 Paul Thomas Chamberlain, The Global Offensive (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012). 41 Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016). 42 Lien-Hang Nyugen, Hanoi’s War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 43 Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 44 Richard Immerman, The Hidden Hand (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); James Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); David Milne, Worldmaking (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 45 Brian Delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Vintage Books, 2015). 46 Andrew Rotter, “Empire of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters,” Diplomatic History 35 (January 2011): 3–19; Frank Costigliola, “‘I React Intensely to Everything’: Russia and the Frustrated Emotions of George F. Kennan, 1933–1958,” Journal of American History 102 (2016): 1075–1101. 47 History Lab, www.history-lab.org/, accessed 22 October 2016.

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16 LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Mary Ziegler

What defines American legal history in the twentieth century? This question may bring to mind blockbuster Supreme Court cases. At a time when familiarity with Supreme Court decisions is vanishingly rare, many know about Brown v. Board of Education’s desegregation of American schools and Roe v. Wade’s recognition of abortion rights. Others may point to the legal revolutions celebrated in many textbooks, from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.1 These moments form part of a conventional history about American law in the twentieth century. This narrative showcases the expansion of federal power, the influence of the courts and the dramatic turns that helped to create a more inclusive society. Given the subjects that historians once preferred to study, this story followed naturally. Scholars detailed the contributions of prominent lawyers and discussed the inner workings of the Supreme Court. However, this focus left open important questions about the evolution of American law. “What we have never adequately had in this country,” wrote Alfred Konefsky in 1976, “is a legal history from the bottom up.”2 In recent years, historians have taken up Konefsky’s challenge. Scholars have looked for law in unusual places—not just in courts but also in state and local legislatures, administrative agencies, school boards, medical clinics, social-work offices and social-movement debates. We now have a clearer sense of how lay citizens understood and even changed the law. While defining the practice of law more capaciously, historians tell the stories of many more individuals, including minorities, conservatives, bureaucrats, grassroots activists and legal educators. Scholars have also moved beyond retracing the origins of key legal developments. Some question whether the triumphs of the past were as complete as we once thought. Others have shone a light on alternative legal paths that once seemed both persuasive and politically possible. The momentum for social change, as Konefsky might have expected, has come from the bottom up as well as the top down.

Lochnerism, Jim Crow and Progressivism before the New Deal The Progressive movement often opens histories of law in the first decades of the twentieth century. Deciding who or what defined the Progressive movement has been notoriously hard. The movement included militarists like Theodore Roosevelt and pacifists like Jane Addams, Republicans and Democrats, Southerners and Northerners, feminists and anti-feminists, businessmen and activists deeply skeptical of unfettered capitalism.3 While the meaning of progressivism has remained elusive, the legal changes sponsored by the movement are harder to miss. Progressives supported suffrage for women and campaigned vigorously 172

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for the Nineteenth Amendment. As researchers like Kenneth Miller have demonstrated, the movement also called for a more direct form of democracy, amending the Constitution to require the election of Senators by popular vote and sponsoring the use of initiatives, referenda and recall elections.4 However, progressives’ impact on the law went much further. Progressive statutes like the Sherman Antitrust Act reined in business monopolies. The movement worked to regulate both impure food and drugs and the wages and hours of exploited workers. Seeking to shift the balance of power between labor and management, progressives tried to stop the use of anti-union court injunctions as a strike-breaking tool. The movement looked for new sources of income to fund their expansion of government. In 1913, following the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress enacted the first income and estate taxes.5 Conventionally, we think that progressives failed to achieve many of their goals. In decisions like the infamous Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court struck down many of the labor laws progressives had championed. Laws against labor injunctions and other pro-union measures fared equally poorly in the courts. As a result, beyond the state and local level, government had relatively limited power.6 Recent histories add important nuance to this picture. The decision for which historians named the era, Lochner v. New York (1905), began when Joseph Lochner, a bakery owner, was fined $25 for allowing one of his employees to work more than sixty hours in one week. Lochner argued that the fine violated his right to contract under the Fourteenth Amendment, and by a vote of 5–4, the Supreme Court agreed. Between the decision of Lochner and the mid-1930s, the Court struck down several major progressive initiatives, including minimum-wage laws and statutes that stopped employers from firing unionized workers. In later decades, Lochnerism became shorthand for the worst of American constitutionalism. The Court seemed to have invented a right out of whole cloth. Critics argued that the Lochner’s freedom of contract theory thinly veiled the Court’s pro-business bias.7 Recently, revisionist historians have described the Lochner era in radically different terms. Some refute accusations that the justices of the Supreme Court simply enacted their policy preferences. Tracing the ideas of limited governmental authority and market-centered autonomy much further back, commentators like Robert Post argue that Lochner had deeper roots in American jurisprudence. Historians no longer accept at face value a narrative pitting a reactionary Supreme Court against liberal opposition. Scholars like David Bernstein have highlighted the unexplored egalitarian potential of Lochner and its progeny. In Bernstein’s view, the free-market ideology developed by the Supreme Court in the Lochner era held out more promise for racial minorities and women than did the reforms progressives so eagerly endorsed.8 With reappraisal of the Lochner Court has come fresh insight about progressives’ impact on the law. The progressive experiment, once seen as a regrettable missed chance, now seems to have had a further-reaching and more ambiguous impact. Historians have long recognized progressives’ cultural achievements. The movement helped to create the model of the modern American university, legitimized economics and social science and offered a lasting blueprint for the administrative state. The movement’s legal victories now seem equally impressive. Progressives backed workmen’s compensation laws and introduced statutes mandating public education for children. The movement made local courts effective laboratories for new policy, creating lasting models for family and juvenile courts we still see in operation today. State and federal courts often proved friendly to progressives, and even the Supreme Court upheld more laws than it invalidated.9 In recent years, however, the story of the Progressive Era has stressed social control as well as social reform. Michael Willrich and Thomas Leonard have documented how progressives set aside questions of moral agency to address the impact of heredity and environment. This new emphasis helped to inspire the eugenic legal reform movement that successfully pushed compulsory sterilization in over thirty states. Like sterilization, the burdens of many progressive legal changes fell the most heavily on poor, immigrant populations, particularly women. The state most often forcibly sterilized those already in government hospitals and criminal institutions. Moreover, the movement successfully 173

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promoted wage and hour laws partly to exclude certain “unemployable” groups, including the disabled, racial minorities, women and immigrants.10 The work of historians like Erica Lee and Natalia Molina establishes that progressives also had a lasting impact on immigration law. Prior to 1917, Americans barred entry into the country of only a handful of groups, including prostitutes and convicts. That year, however, the categories of inadmissible immigrants expanded to include people of Chinese or Japanese origin, as well as those alleged to be sick, poor, mentally incompetent or morally corrupt. Seven years later, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act created an enduring quota system based on national origin.11 In the Progressive Era, American imperialism also became entangled with immigration law. After the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States assumed power over a sizable chunk of territory that once belonged to Mexico. Fifty years later, the government gained control over other former Spanish possessions, including Guam and the Philippines. In the Insular Cases, a series of 1901 decisions, the Supreme Court concluded that Congress had plenary power to decide the fate of those living in the territories. In the aftermath of Insular Cases, as Sam Erman showed, the law set these and other immigrant groups on very different paths. While East Asians faced complete bars on immigration, Mexicans recognized as citizens of the federal government struggled to secure state citizenship for decades. Limits on Mexican and Filipino migration, often imposing a ten-year wait, can be traced back to progressive debates, as can the idea of quotas still dominant in immigration law. Mae Ngai has even traced the idea of an illegal immigrant to progressive-era legal battles. For the first time, American law, deeply marked by racial thinking, criminalized certain immigration violations.12 The exclusionary policies animating progressive immigration law reflected a broader embrace of social Darwinism and scientific racism. As historian Michael Klarman writes, in the Progressive Era, “race relations continued to deteriorate, seemingly caught in an endless downward spiral.” At the height of the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, many northern schools segregated for the first time in decades. Because of intensifying animosity toward Asian immigrants on the West Coast, many states banned interracial marriage. The law also defined whiteness in ever more restrictive terms, culminating in statutes passed in the 1920s that excluded anyone with even “one drop” of nonwhite blood. Legislatures formalized the segregation of every public space and worked to formally disenfranchise black voters. Chain gangs, convict leasing and all-white juries in the South became the norm. According to an NAACP study completed in 1919, an average of one hundred people per year were lynched, and almost no member of a lynch mob ever faced punishment.13 Recently, however, the triumph of the Jim Crow regime has come to seem far more tenuous. In studying the segregation of American railroads, Barbara Welke showed how black women seeking access to single-sex cars won or lost depending on how well they wielded contemporary ideas about class, gender and respectability. Ariela Gross studied how the racial categories of the time fell apart when judges, juries and lawyers tried cases about racial identity. As scholars like Daniel Sharfstein and Allyson Hobbs showed, many Americans crossed the color line, either permanently or temporarily.14 Jim Crow litigation offers a valuable case study of how the legal profession changed in the Progressive Era. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the legal profession was small and homogenous, but new groups fought for a place of their own. James Moliterno studied how immigrant lawyers pioneered some forms of accident-injury law, triggering a backlash from elite lawyers. Felice Batlan showcased the work of women, many of them social workers, who offered advice and mediated claims, all the while challenging prevailing ideas about what it meant to practice law. Kenneth Mack illuminated how African American lawyers like Sadie Alexander navigated stereotypes about race and sex to achieve surprising professional success.15 The economic collapse of 1929 put the legal profession to an unprecedented test. In the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt promised America a New Deal that would cut unemployment and help Americans get on their feet. In the next several decades, American law evolved in ways that still provoke debate. 174

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The New Deal Revolution If the Progressive Era was dominated by a conservative Supreme Court and limited government power, the nation’s next chapter was quite different. Traditionally, historians have identified 1937 as the year when everything changed. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed legislation to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, the Supreme Court continuously thwarted him. Roosevelt responded by threatening to “pack” the Court with justices who would sustain New Deal reforms. A chastened Court backed down, abandoning constitutional limits on economic and social regulations.16 As researchers like Jefferson Cowie and Ira Katznelson have shown, the New Deal marked the legal landscape in other ways. Liberal attorneys flocked to the nation’s capital to help shape new policies. The 1934 Securities and Exchange Act created an agency to regulate financial markets, discourage insider trading and curb market speculation. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 reversed decades of labor law, stopping employers from interfering with certain efforts to unionize, strike or engage in collective bargaining. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established a federal minimum wage and required extra pay for overtime work. The labor movement no longer stood at the margins of American law, and union membership exploded, reaching 15 million by 1951.17 Scholars like Michelle Landis Dauber, Daniel Ernst and Karen Tani have explored how the New Deal also helped to launch the modern legal welfare state. In early decades, state and local governments controlled “poor relief,” devising a patchwork system that favored the “worthy” poor, including veterans, wives, mothers, widows and the disabled. The Social Security Act of 1935 brought the federal government to the center of social welfare policy. New Dealers marketed the program as a form of social insurance, a pension available to Americans who paid in before leaving the workplace. To navigate hard questions about administrative capacity and states’ rights, government lawyers described social welfare as a right, suggesting that the Constitution sometimes did more than protect people from the government.18 Nevertheless, the New Deal does not appear to have been as complete a break from what came before as early histories have suggested. Recent studies have captured how much the government expanded in the years prior to 1929. During World War I, as Chris Cappozola contended, the federal government assumed new powers. Bureaucrats created a more muscular surveillance state, and, as Ajay Mehrotra documented, lawmakers formulated a modern fiscal policy that introduced new financial obligations for citizens.19 Prohibition, one of the most controversial dimensions of progressive reform, also pushed the boundaries of federal authority. Prohibition gained lasting fame for its spectacular failure to curb alcohol consumption, but as Lisa McGirr argued, the war on alcohol left a lasting imprint on criminal law. Prohibition formed part of a larger attack on vice some associated with urbanization, immigration and changing sexual mores. The 1910 Mann Act prohibited the act of crossing state lines with the intention of engaging in sexual activity. Although the Mann Act was theoretically designed to stamp out prostitution, courts applied the law far more broadly, targeting a variety of non-marital relationships.20 By setting a lasting precedent for the criminalization of nonviolent vices, Prohibition radically expanded federal regulation of crime. As criminal dockets grew, plea bargaining—deals between prosecutors and defendants—took on prominence, radically increasing the power of prosecutors. Discretion permeated the criminal system in other ways, as state and federal law introduced indeterminate sentences and probation and parole. While a ban on alcohol came to seem a laughable mistake, federal intervention in criminal law only intensified in the decades to come.21 If the government expanded before the New Deal, the civil liberties traditions some associate with it also had deeper roots. Scholars like Laura Weinrib and David Rabban recently reminded us of earlier ideas of civil liberties centered on expressive freedom, sexual autonomy and economic justice. During

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World War I, progressive administrators crafted a new approach to conscientious objection that would resonate in the succeeding decades. Earlier labor activism set the stage for the Democratic coalition responsible for many New Deal victories. Indeed, as William Forbath reasoned, the success of the labor movement in the 1930s may have led activists to temper their agenda, setting aside demands for class-based reform to achieve rights for individual workers.22 Others have brought to the surface unexplored limitations on the New Deal. Emphasizing the tit-fortat debates between liberals and conservatives, Alan Brinkley highlighted the extent to which key reforms came as the result of compromise. The business community opposed key parts of the New Deal agenda, as did Southern defenders of Jim Crow. Meg Jacobs partly blamed the ideology woven into New Deal reforms for its shortcomings. Because it relied on participation in a mass consumer society, the New Deal created lasting tensions between people who wanted different things. While unorganized middle-class consumers hoped for lower prices, farmers and labor unions sometimes fought price cutting that would lower wages. The clashing goals of different beneficiaries of the New Deal limited its reach.23 In addition, by privileging reforms that primarily helped industrial workers, the New Deal’s social safety net did less for women and minorities. The National Labor Relations Act helped industrial workers at a time when many unions remained segregated. Nor did the Social Security Act or Fair Labor Standards Act reach many women or people of color. In excluding farm workers, domestic laborers and contract and part-time workers, much of the New Deal left out the jobs women and minorities most often occupied.24 Even the Supreme Court’s 1937 “shift in time that saves nine” has come under the microscope. Recent studies emphasize that at least one justice changed his position prior to Roosevelt’s courtpacking threat. Others, like Barry Cushman, have chronicled the internal doctrinal evolution within the Court that made a jurisprudential shift seem expected. Without underestimating the impact of the Court’s new constitutional approach, many agree with G. Edward White that the Court’s new doctrine had a “revolutionary doctrine . . . far deeper and wider than any ‘shift in time.’”25

The Postwar Rights Revolution World War II seemed to have put an end to the Great Depression, and unions began a gradual period of decline. New work by scholars like Sophia Lee showed how much labor and employment law changed in the postwar period. Although major unions slowly opened membership to women and people of color, Republicans argued that the pendulum had swung too far in workers’ favor. In 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, banning most forms of mass picketing and giving employers more latitude in checking unionization. Business groups and populists rallied around a right to work supposedly violated by pro-union laws. In the 1940s and 1950s, right-to-work lawyers failed to convince the court that prounion laws violated the Constitution, particularly since courts reaffirmed that rights could be enforced only against government actors, not private employers or unions. These decisions essentially ensured that the private sector workplace would be a constitution-free zone for all employees. Nevertheless, the right-to-work movement was far from finished. Union power never recovered after Taft-­Hartley, and by 1970, nineteen states had introduced right-to-work legislation, with more to come later.26 If labor rights shrunk in the postwar period, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the further expansion of the federal welfare state. Scholars like Julian Zelizer have considered how government expanded dramatically in the period—and not just in the area of support for the poor. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty established the food stamp program and provided health care to older and poorer Americans through Medicare and Medicaid. The federal government took fresh interest in workplace safety and environmental protection, forming the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1971. Concern about consumer safety helped to explain an explosion in accident-injury suits in the later twentieth century, and the number of lawyers grew sharply. The legal profession also became more diverse: minority 176

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participation increased meaningfully, and the proportion of women students grew from 4 percent in 1965 to over 47 percent in 2013.27 The postwar period became better known for a rights revolution that fundamentally changed the protections enjoyed by criminal defendants, women and minorities. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education held that public school segregation violated the Constitution. Initial resistance to Brown was intense. In short order, Brown became the most widely celebrated judicial decision in American law. After Brown, the Supreme Court applied an ever-expanding number of federal constitutional protections to defendants in state criminal proceedings. In the first half of the twentieth century, trials of African Americans in the South were fantastically unfair, particularly when crime victims were white. By injecting the federal courts into more criminal proceedings, the Court appeared to have shifted the balance decisively in favor of minority rights. These developments convinced historians of how much the civil rights movement had achieved through litigation.28 As Kunal Parker and others demonstrated, the civil rights era further reached into immigration law. As recently as 1954, Eisenhower’s Justice Department launched Operation Wetback, an effort to round up and depart undocumented Mexican workers. A little more than a decade later, the Immigration Act of 1965 took a dramatically different direction. Responding to the concerns of civil rights activists and anxieties about the image of the United States in other countries during the Cold War, Congress’s Hart-Celler Act eliminated explicit racial criteria for admission. The law retained quotas by nation and category but made family reunification and employment opportunity, rather than racial purity, the objective of immigration policy.29 The expansion of civil rights in the federal courts inspired other social movements, including those led by feminists, gay-rights activists, Native Americans, Latinos, welfare-rights activists, the elderly and the disabled. The courts interpreted the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause to require formal equality, the identical treatment of people regardless of race, sex or national origin. Feminists also helped to remake the right to privacy. At a time when Watergate and computerization created panic about information leaks, the courts began describing privacy rights that covered individual autonomy and bodily integrity. Starting with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a case striking down a ban on married couples’ right to use contraceptives, the Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy. In 1973, applying this right, the Court in Roe v. Wade struck down the majority of the nation’s abortion laws.30 Recently, scholars have shown how different the history of the rights revolution looks when we no longer focus on the courts. Many suggested that the Supreme Court reflected popular attitudes rather than revolutionizing them. World War II and the Cold War made it more politically costly for the federal government to ignore civil rights, pushing judges to back the claims of civil rights attorneys. On the rare occasions that the courts did move faster than popular opinion, the judiciary may have actually hurt the cause it embraced. Gerald Rosenberg suggested that court victories like Brown made no real practical difference. Michael Klarman further argued that Brown and Roe triggered a damaging backlash. Other scholars suggested that even backlash histories exaggerate the power of the judiciary, demonstrating that even widely controversial decisions like Roe made less of a difference than did larger-scale political, social and economic changes.31 While social change in the courts has lost some of its luster, histories have explored the untapped potential of extrajudicial rights claims. Novel ideas of rights took hold in state employment commissions, federal administrative agencies, city welfare offices and grassroots street protests. Americans working in these venues developed unfamiliar but influential constitutional visions. Before the 1960s, as Felice Batlan and others have contended, civil rights attorneys connected race discrimination to income inequality. Activists clashed with attorneys charged with representing them, and some lawyers preferred other strategies to litigation. Others insisted that constitutional rights should apply with as much force against private actors as against the government. During the civil rights era, as Mark Brilliant argued, Latinos, Asian Americans and other ethnic groups borrowed from the civil-rights 177

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paradigm and infused it with new meaning. Serena Mayeri, Nancy MacLean and Katherine Turk explained how those rejecting the idea of formally equal treatment recognized potential connections between sex discrimination, race, class and reproduction. Others challenged discrimination on the basis of marital status, sexual orientation or social class in ways that would later resonate.32 The rights revolution also inspired those who rejected many of the ideas articulated by the Warren and Burger Courts. Segregationists effectively limited Brown and advanced colorblindness as a limiting principle. In the aftermath of Roe, pro-life lawyers developed a potent incremental strategy in state legislatures and higher courts that quickly changed the scope of abortion rights. A conservative legal movement created programs of study, public interest organizations and networks of influence.33 By looking beyond constitutional law, scholars have also pinpointed key changes in American law and culture. Notwithstanding the new protections for criminal defendants created by the courts, states extended the reach of criminal law, setting the stage for mass incarceration. Lawmakers reinstated the death penalty after a Supreme Court challenge, imposed mandatory minimum sentences, launched a war on drugs and thereby dramatically increased the nation’s prison population. In family law, lawsuits for seduction and breach of promise to marry became obsolete. Once a shameful rarity, divorce became widespread after the introduction of no-fault statute in the 1970s, and non-marital cohabitation became both common and legal.34 Now twentieth-century legal history looks little like the narrative of progress familiar to many of us. There are fewer obvious inflection points. The paths not taken by the law sometimes matter as much as the legal strategies that were ultimately victorious. Social change seems to have come in fits and starts, driven by many outside the legal profession. The study of legal and social history is more closely related than ever before. Twentieth-century legal history may be less reassuring to some and harder to understand for everyone. But whether we look from the top down or from the bottom up, twentieth-century American legal history now is becoming far richer and more complex.

Notes   1 As several studies have demonstrated, Brown and Roe are by far the most widely known Supreme Court decisions. See Paul Bedard, “Roe v. Wade Most Well-Known Case, Only 34% Know Bush v. Gore,” Washington Examiner, October 1, 2015, www.washingtonexaminer.com/poll-roe-v.-wade-most-well-known-case-only34-know-bush-vs.-gore/article/2573195, accessed 29 February 2016. Polls on the Civil Rights Act also demonstrate some familiarity with the statute. See “Public Opinion on Civil Rights: Reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” The Roper Center, 2014, http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-on-civilrights-reflections-on-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964/, accessed 2 March 2016.   2 Alfred Konefsky, “Lawyers’ Papers as a Source of Legal History: The Nineteenth Century,” Law Library Journal 69 (1976): 307–309. Some earlier histories followed Richard Hofstadter in viewing the twentieth century as an “age of reform” defined by gradual progress. See The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955); see also Paul L. Murphy, The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).   3 On the diversity of the progressive movement, see Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 3.   4 On progressives’ campaign for direct democracy, see Kenneth P. Miller, Direct Democracy and the Courts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30–36; Thomas Cronin,Direct Democracy: The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 50–59. On progressives’ involvement in the Nineteenth Amendment campaign, see William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 34–50; see also Reva Siegel, “She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,” Harvard Law Review 115 (2002): 948–1045.   5 On the progressive agenda, see Lewis L. Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1914, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 40–69; Michael Willrich, “The Case for the Courts: Law and Political Development in the Progressive Era,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novak and Julian Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 198–222.   6 For a sample of earlier histories of the Lochner era, see Robert McCloskey, The American Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Benjamin Twiss, The Lawyers and the Constitution: How Laissez Faire Came to the Supreme Court (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942).

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Legal and Constitutional   7 Until the 1990s, as Jack Balkin writes, “[a] surefire way to attack someone’s views on constitutional theory was to say they led to Lochner.” Jack M. Balkin, “Wrong the Day It Was Decided: Lochner and Constitutional Historicism,” Boston University Law Review 85 (2005): 689. For an overview of jurisprudence in the Lochner era, see Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).   8 See David Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For reevaluations of the theory underlying Lochner era jurisprudence, see Robert Post, “Defending the Lifeworld: Substantive Due Process in the Taft Court Era,” Boston University Law Review 78 (1998): 1489–1545; William Wiecek, The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886–1937 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).   9 For an overview of progressive achievements, see Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), x. On the support for progressivism in the courts, see William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–772; Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10 See Leonard, Illiberal Reformers, 17–27; Michael Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 63–111; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11 See Erica Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 12 See Sam Erman, “Citizens of Empire: Puerto Rico, Status, and Constitutional Change,” California Law Review 102 (2014): 1181–1242; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 13 Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 63. 14 See Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Daniel Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 15 See James Moliterno, The American Legal Profession in Crisis: Resistance and Responses to Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Felice Batlan, Women and Justice for the Poor: A History of Legal Aid, 1865–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kenneth Mack, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 16 See Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 17 See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013); Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 18 On the expansion of the welfare state during the New Deal, see Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Daniel Ernst, Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Karen Tani, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Government, 1935–1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 19 See Chris Cappozola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Ajay Mehrotra, “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys: The U.S. Treasury, World War I, and the Administration of the Modern Fiscal State,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 178–225. 20 See Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016); Richard Chused, “Courts and Temperance ‘Ladies’,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and the Law, ed. Tracy Thomas and Tracy Jean Boisseau (New York: New York University Press, 2011); David Langum, Crossing the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Jessica Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 21 See George Fisher, Plea Bargaining’s Triumph: A History of Plea Bargaining in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); William J. Stuntz, “Plea Bargaining and Criminal Law’s Disappearing Shadow,” Harvard Law Review 117 (2004): 2548–2569.

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Mary Ziegler 22 See Laura Weinrib, “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 325–386; David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 23 See Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 24 See Ira Katzelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); see also Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 25 G. Edward White, The Constitution and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). For more on the switch in time, see Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 26 See Sophia Z. Lee, The Workplace Constitution From the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27 See Julian Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (New York: Penguin Press, 2015); Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 28 See, for example, Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and the Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). 29 See Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 185–221; Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 30 See Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Leigh Ann Wheeler, How Sex became a Civil Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 31 See Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michael Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same Sex Marriage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 32 See Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Serena Mayeri, Reasoning From Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Katherine Turk, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 33 See Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Christopher Schmidt, “Litigating against the Civil Rights Movement,” University of Colorado Law Review 86 (2015): 1173–1190; Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010); Daniel Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 34 See Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lawrence Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman, Inside the Castle: Law and Family in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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17 ENVIRONMENTAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Bartow J. Elmore

Figure 17.1 Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, Founder of the Sierra Club, on Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-36413.

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The Roots of Environmental History “I was sick of Puritan sermons and intellectual history.” So said University of Kansas Professor Emeritus Donald Worster, a founding pioneer in environmental history, reflecting on his time as a graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Puritanism was then a huge topic—deciphering the ‘Mind of the Puritan World,’” Worster reminisced, “And I wondered, ‘what have I gotten myself into? The planet is in crisis and we’re talking about this kind of stuff.’”1 Raised on the Great Plains in heartland America, Worster made frequent trips to the Rocky Mountains as a child and grew up with a close connection to nature. Like many environmental history trailblazers, Worster’s penchant for outdoor exploration naturally led him to become interested in the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s. While teaching at the University of Maine, Worster reflected on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published just two years prior to his college appointment, and digested the writings of environmental luminaries, such as Henry Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. Out of this intense immersion, Worster began to develop a new approach to teaching history that considered how nature shaped the course of human events and vice versa. And Worster did not mince words with folks that challenged his new intellectual pursuits. When confronted by a colleague who asked, “What is this environmental history? Is this history for the bears?” Worster responded, “You’re damn right it’s for the bears—the bears and all the rest of us.” As Worster’s fiery reply demonstrated, in the early years, trailblazing environmental historians spoke with conviction about the importance of the work they were doing, work they believed would help to save a world facing serious environmental problems.2 Worster was not alone. In the 1970s, Worster would find common cause with other historians who shared a similar love of the natural world, among them Samuel Hays, Donald Hughes, Carolyn Merchant, Roderick Nash and John Opie, and in 1977 these scholars helped launch the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), which still serves as the leading organization of the field today. ASEH quickly attracted young graduate students, such as Yale’s William Cronon, who began using new scientific technologies of the day to paint detailed historical portraits of past environmental landscapes. In his classic Changes in the Land (1983), Cronon drew on palynology and carbon dating tools to show how both Native Americans and European settlers transformed the ecology of colonial New England.3 This interest in cross-disciplinary work became a signature of the field, and so too did environmental historians’ open embrace of scholars from diverse historiographical backgrounds. Historians of the American West, such as Richard White (who first became an important contributor to the field in the 1980s), were accepted on equal terms with scholars of the American South, such as Jack Temple Kirby, whose 1987 Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 became a pioneering work in the now blossoming area of southern environmental history. In sum, environmental history was a big tent that welcomed all scholars interested in the historical relationship between man and the environment.4 By the end of the 1990s, environmental history had clearly become a powerful force in the historical profession, evidenced by the fact that top presses began commissioning useful American environmental history survey texts, the first of which was John Opie’s Nature’s Nation (1998). Perhaps the most popular undergraduate text is Ted Steinberg’s excellent Down to Earth (2002), which is now in its third edition. Other synthetic works include Mark Fiege’s The Republic of Nature (2012) and Jeff Crane’s The Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States (2015).5 It would be impossible to trek through all the trails and streams environmental historians have journeyed down over the years. Precisely because environmental history is so inclusive, it has inspired numerous lines of inquiry. Unlike Reconstruction historiography, which follows a much clearer path from the Dunning School to the revisionists of the 1960s to the post-revisionists that followed, there is no clear historiographical trajectory in environmental history. As such, what follows is a choice

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selection of some of the transformative texts in the field. While I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive review of all of the works in environmental history, the books cited here represent scholarly contributions that have made historians working outside the subfield question the basics of what they know about America in the twentieth century.

Branches of a Field: How Environmental History Changed What We Know about American History Let us start at a time before there was an American nation. After all, though environmental history had its origins in the late twentieth century, many pioneer environmental historians were interested in America’s early pioneers. Only by studying the distant past, they argued, could Americans begin to solve the pesky pollution problems of the Cold War era. Scholars have long sought to explain how a few adventurous Europeans came to colonize territories controlled by powerful Native American communities on the North American continent. Over the years, many historians pointed to Europeans’ superior ships, weaponry and technology to explain why settlements at Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts, expanded into colonial empires, but by the 1970s, environmental historians explained that focusing on guns and boats was really missing the boat. The real story, according to environmental historian Alfred Crosby, was the ecological biota—germs, seeds and animals—that European settlers accidentally brought with them to the New World. In Ecological Imperialism (1986), Crosby explained how disease ravaged Native populations (killing over 90 percent of Indigenous people in the immediate decades after colonization) while animals native to the Eurasian landmass, such as pigs and cattle, acted as primitive bulldozers, paving the way for Mediterranean grasses (wheat and barley) that grew well in disturbed soils. Today, most people know some of this story because of anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel, but long before Diamond, environmental historians, such as Crosby, had laid the foundation for a new understanding of colonial conquest in North America.6 Crosby was careful to point out that colonists were not masters of their own ecological arsenal. In fact, as other environmental historians have shown, early colonial settlers were quite ignorant of ecological relationships and often tried to dominate nature rather than work symbiotically within their adopted ecosystem. As historian Carolyn Merchant explained in the Death of Nature (1980), many American colonists were disciples of the Scientific Revolution—a movement that imbued them with a profound faith in their ability to master the natural order. For Merchant, this desire for ecological conquest was bound up in gendered notions of nature. Prior to the Scientific Revolution, Merchant argued, Europeans often viewed the natural environment as a “nurturing mother” or a “kindly beneficent female who provided for the needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe.” But after the 1500s, this environmental ethos began to fade, “replaced by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated or used female principles in an exploitative manner.” Rather than a powerful force owed maternal loyalty, nature became something colonists hoped to “subdue” with new manmade technologies.7 Merchant’s message came at a time when Americans’ fascination with new digital technologies had reached a fevered pitch. The personal computer revolution and the emergence of companies such as Apple and Microsoft beckoned the nation towards a world of liberation through machines. Merchant’s work served as a cautionary tale for those who believed that scientific advancement automatically portended emancipation and new freedoms for the American populace. In the case of women in the Enlightenment, Merchant showed, science often served to suppress rather than liberate.8 Adding to Merchant’s argument, William Cronon showed how colonists’ exploitative logic wrought profound environmental changes in America’s northern climes. For Cronon, New England had never been a tabula rasa, a land untouched by human hands. He carefully noted that Native Americans—long considered ecological saints in American lore—dramatically transformed natural 183

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environments in North America prior to Europeans’ arrival in an effort to create favorable hunting grounds and transportation networks. But the changes brought about by Native American communities prior to European colonization in the New World paled in comparison to those enacted by white settlers who sought to impose their will on the land. As Cronon explained, Europeans brought with them a uniquely Old World view of private property that largely precluded the kind of common-use land practices favored by Native American communities. “More than anything else,” Cronon wrote, “it was the treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that distinguished English conceptions of ownership from Indian ones.” Ultimately, this capitalist conception of the land proved “ecologically self-destructive,” in that it “assumed the limitless availability of more land to exploit, and in the long run that was impossible.”9 For Cronon, colonial history was more than just a story of the construction of America’s hollowed political institutions and foundational federalist principles. Rather, it was a pivotal moment when American colonists enshrined a private property regime that set the nation on an environmentally unsustainable trajectory of economic growth that shaped American life well into the twentieth century. In the end, Cronon concluded, “We live with their legacy.”10 Thus, many of the early canonical works in environmental history showed that the environmental problems facing twentieth- and twenty-first-century America had roots that extended to the founding of the nation. Others, however, turned to the Gilded Age to understand the origins of some of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. Take the story of the development of railroads. Environmental historians have recently questioned the prudence of expanding the country’s railroad networks so fast and so far in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In Railroaded (2010), historian Richard White showed how the cutthroat expansion of America’s transcontinental railroads took white settlers into regions of the country’s arid West poorly suited for farming and ranching enterprises pioneered in the rain-soaked lands east of the Mississippi River. In White’s telling, Native Americans found that the railroads brought dozens of white buffalo hunters to the West that hastily brought about the extermination of buffalo herds, perhaps the most important source of sustenance for Indigenous people on the Great Plains. White came down hard on the transcontinentals. “In terms of their politics, finances, labor relations, and environmental consequences,” White concluded, “the transcontinental railroads were not only failures but near-disasters, and in this they encapsulate the paradox of the arrival of the modern world in western North America.”11 Beyond hastening the near extinction of American buffalo and disturbing the fragile grasslands of the Great Plain states, railroads also fueled another major environmental problem: a growing national dependence on fossil fuels. Throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S. economy became increasingly tethered to coal veins. Just as the United States was getting rid of an economy that brutally exploited millions of enslaved black Americans, it was also becoming addicted to a fossil-fuel economy that placed millions of lives in jeopardy. Thus, the railroad rush of the late nineteenth century wrecked not only physical environments but also human bodies. In an excellent work that models the fusion of labor and environmental history, Thomas G. Andrews’s Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest War chronicled the mining of fossil fuels in Colorado in the final decades of the nineteenth century and showed how this extraction opened up new opportunities for railroad expansion and industrial development in the West. As Andrews explained, timber and organic fuel, which had propelled U.S. railroad growth earlier in the century, were in short supply in arid sections of western states like Colorado, and thus the discovery of coalfields in the Centennial State allowed the region to overcome a clear “energy crisis.” But as Andrews illustrated, companies literally killed for coal, forcing miners to dig dangerously deep into mining shafts that collapsed and buried those who had built their walls. Out of these mining disasters—disasters that could have been prevented had companies not pushed laborers to dig into unstable underground environments—a labor movement emerged that would go on to initiate the “most 184

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violent American labor rebellion of the postemancipation era,” the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Thus, in Andrews’s story, the boundaries between nature, the human body and the body politic became blurred. Killing for Coal revealed how natural forces in America’s subterranean labor camps forged political coalitions that shaped national politics above ground.12 Considering the recent warming of our planet due to greenhouse gases, the harnessing of coal in the nineteenth century still haunts us today, as does another fuel source discovered in the Gilded Age: oil. Global environmental historian John McNeill argued that the 1870s tapping of Pennsylvania oil fields and the subsequent exploitation of the Texas Spindletop oil reserves in 1901 allowed America’s industrial growth to shift into hyper-drive. After all, as energy historian Christopher Jones beautifully explained in Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America, the laying of petroleum pipelines allowed oil companies to funnel fossil fuels quickly to industrial centers at a pace that far surpassed that of clunky coal, which had to travel on congested rail lines. It might make sense that oil companies laid these pipelines to feed demand, but as Jones detailed in his book, it was actually the availability of cheap fuel that created new demand for energy-intensive technologies in the twentieth century. Oil opened the door for a host of new industries—automobile manufacturing, aerospace engineering and petrochemical businesses—that made modern America.13 Thus, for environmental historians, the laying of oil pipelines and the construction of mining channels through Colorado coal seams—stories that often garner brief mention, but not much more in standard history textbooks—stand out as central events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These developments fundamentally transformed American society, politics, economy and environment.14 And this fact was not lost on the men and women that lived through the radical changes wrought by harnessing new energy resources. Environmental historians have chronicled the ways in which the Second Industrial Revolution of the Gilded Age inspired new ways of thinking about the natural environment that influenced Progressive Era politics of the early twentieth century. Roderick Nash’s Wilderness in the American Mind (1982) is a touchstone text for those interested in this topic, as is Samuel Hays’s Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959). These works detailed the battle between “conservationists” and “preservationists” in the early 1900s. As the story goes, conservationists, such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Chief of the U.S. Forest Service Gifford Pinchot believed government had an important role to play in promoting “wise-use” of America’s ecological capital. These reformers did not believe in protecting America’s forests and streams out of a purely altruistic love of nature, but rather called for efficient government management of timber stocks and water resources because they were convinced it would ensure that industrial productivity could continue unabated. Battling the conservationists were preservationists, led by men like Sierra Club founder John Muir, who believed wilderness should be protected in its own right, regardless of the monetary value it might yield to private interests. Out of this debate grew new environmental organizations and government bureaucracies that radically reshaped the American landscape in the twentieth century.15 This progressive-era environmental battle took place in the city as well as the countryside. Beginning in the 1990s, scholars such as Joel Tarr and Martin V. Melosi pioneered the field of urban environmental history and illustrated how metropolitan environmental problems at the turn of the twentieth century breathed life into the progressive movement. (Urban environmental history is now well represented by the History of the Urban Environment series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.) In their works, Tarr and Melosi showed how pollution sparked new interest in an expanded role for government, as progressive reformers pushed for public waterworks, transportation networks and garbage collection systems that turned sullied and sewage-laden city avenues into livable urban spaces.16 Progressive reformers’ management of American watercourses produced some of the most transformative environmental battles in U.S. history, especially in the American West. Donald Worster detailed the heyday of hydrological engineering in Rivers of Empire (1985), discussing the rise and 185

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maturation of the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency created in 1902 that went on to build some of the biggest dams the world has ever seen. Worster’s central point was to show that the American West was not a land defined by a “culture of individualism, self-reliance, and diffused power,” but rather a water empire in which powerful corporations and government agencies controlled vast hydrological infrastructure. Westerners were not free to govern their lives as they saw fit, but were rather tethered to powerful, centralized institutions that used control of water to control society and economy. For Worster, “it is time that this emergent technological West, the West of the hydraulic society . . . be put beside the storybook West of fur trappers, cowboys, sodbusters, and intrepid adventurers.”17 Much of the story about big water reclamation projects has focused on the American West, but since the 1990s, environmental historians have sought to shift focus away from this region—which for so long as been the center of American environmental history—to show how water management shaped other regions of the country as well. For example, environmental historian Christopher J. Manganiello’s Southern Water, Southern Power (2015) chronicled the centrality of dam building to the development of New South industries. Taking Worster’s story to the South, Manganiello echoed themes laid out in Rivers of Empire, pointing out that southerners often accepted cheap power in exchange for loss of political power, which became increasingly consolidated in the hands of companies like Georgia Power that found ways to coopt Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dams.18 Manganiello’s work touched on New Deal politics, which has garnered a lot of attention from environmental historians in recent years. Environmental historian Neil M. Maher offered a thorough analysis of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Nature’s New Deal (2008), examining how this jobs program helped redraw the political landscape of rural America while simultaneously transforming the natural landscape of the country. Maher also showed that many New Deal projects, ostensibly pitched as efforts to improve the environment, actually bred backlash from wilderness preservationists, such as Wisconsin ecologist Aldo Leopold and Forest Service official Bob Marshall, who believed government construction projects in wilderness areas harmed rather than improved nature. Environmental historian Paul Sutter, a protégé of Donald Worster and mentor to Chris Manganiello, took up this story in Driven Wild (2002), which the University of Washington Press published in its prestigious Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series (founded by William Cronon). Prior to Sutter’s work, few environmental historians treated the interwar years as an important period in the evolution of American environmentalism. But as Paul Sutter illustrated, the New Deal construction projects in the 1930s created a crucible that forged a new, powerful environmental coalition led by activists such as Marshall and Leopold, who fought for “roadlessness” as a key attribute of wilderness preservation. In the years ahead, these wilderness warriors worked—often in tension—with a new class of outdoor recreation enthusiasts to define the environmental movement of the postwar years.19 If the 1930s helped prime Americans for a new ecological reawakening, World War II unleashed forces that emboldened environmental reformers even more. Edmund P. Russell, a founding pioneer of the war and environment subfield, wrote about this at length in War and Nature (2000), which Cambridge University Press published in its distinguished Studies in Environment and History series (a premier environmental history collection). Russell focused on the burgeoning U.S. chemical industry, which ballooned during World War I and World War II due to the U.S. military’s demand for chemicals such as DDT. After these wars, American firms, such as Dow and Monsanto, had to find new markets for their chemical creations and consequently adapted military propaganda to sell copious quantities of toxic chemicals in home markets. But as suburban communities unleashed chemical warfare in their backyards, it quickly became clear that there were some nasty consequences to this consumer culture of annihilation. Biologist Rachel Carson documented the unforeseen environmental effects of the pesticide craze in her groundbreaking 1962 work, Silent Spring, and showed how DDT decimated bird populations around the country. She also revealed research that exposed links between these chemicals and a host of human health problems. Thus, the chemical age encouraged a 186

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new environmental ethos based on ecological science that emphasized the interconnectedness of all living beings in the web of life.20 For military historians, Russell’s work was transformative. Scholars might think that the most dramatic ecological damage wrought by World War II happened during wartime, but Russell’s work illuminated how some of the biggest environmental effects of war came in the form of technologies or infrastructure that continued to impact nature long after the last shots were fired on the battlefield.21 In The Bulldozer in the Countryside (2001), historian Adam Rome built upon Russell’s findings about the links between wartime and peacetime society. Rome, a mentee of Donald Worster, examined how bulldozers—a technology that was refined and enhanced on World War II battlefields—revolutionized American society in the Cold War era and in so doing inspired a new ecological consciousness among middle class homeowners. The Bulldozer in the Countryside challenged traditional stories of the rise of the modern environmental movement that focused on saving land in national parks and battles over dams in remote corners of the country. “Though a growing concern about the loss of wilderness obviously contributed to the rise of environmentalism,” Rome wrote, “the movement also was a response to environmental change at the edges of the nation’s cities.” There, “urban planners, landscape architects” and suburban families—not just wilderness warriors and advocates of dam demolition—raised their voices in favor of environmental protection.22 This suburban environmental movement, however, pursued circumscribed objectives. As Samuel Hays and other environmental historians interested in the Cold War era have shown, postwar environmentalism was often limited to issues that affected middle class Americans’ quality of life. Suburbanites were interested in environmental causes that threatened their ability to enjoy middle class amenities—which Hays distilled to the attributes of “beauty, health, and permanence”—but abandoned larger ecological goals that were not directly tied to issues relevant to the “crabgrass frontier.”23 Rome’s work was part of a larger historiographical intervention in American history that focused on the rise of suburban politics as a central force in American politics, a topic that Russianist Kate Brown tackled in her masterful work on American consumer culture and atomic energy in the postwar era. In her award-winning book Plutopia (2013), Brown compared the sociopolitical, environmental and economic conditions of two towns—Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia—both of which were centers for the enrichment of weapons-grade plutonium during the Cold War. In her study, Brown found that these two “plutopias,” while not identical, had many commonalities. In both communities, citizens sacrificed “civil and biological rights for consumer rights,” willingly risking their health in irradiated environments in exchange for government subsidized housing and other modern amenities. For Brown, the Soviet Union and Cold War America were not that different. Both nations created securitized environments that jeopardized the health of its citizens in pursuit of atomic power. In both places, the lure of shiny manufactured goods and green suburban lawns kept citizens from fighting for aggressive environmental protections. Showing remarkable concern for a diverse array of voices, Brown’s work illustrated how Native tribes, Mexican Americans and other minorities disproportionately bore the environmental burdens associated with plutonium production. In this sense, Brown built on a growing environmental justice literature focused on exposing race- and class-based environmental discrimination in the twentieth century.24 Plutopia, like much scholarship in the environmental history canon, fundamentally reshaped common conceptions about the Cold War era. Like many scholars that now consider environmental history a home for their work, Brown came to her project as a scholar of the Soviet Union, but by using the tools of environmental history to investigate the permeable boundary between nature, the human body and political culture, she uncovered a remarkable story that blew up conceptual boundaries dividing the Soviet Union and United States. In sum, Brown’s discoveries had implications for historians far beyond environmental history, evidenced by the fact that her book won awards from more than five scholarly organizations. This is environmental history at its best. 187

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Sowing New Seeds: New Directions in Environmental History Brown’s scholarship is a fitting place to pause and reflect on the incredible breadth of environmental history literature that has been produced since the founding of the field in the early 1970s. As we have seen in this brief and sweeping survey of the field, there are very few boundaries of historical inquiry that environmental historians respect. Gender, race and class issues have been amply represented in environmental history literature and scholarship in the field has also demonstrated the permeability of geographic boundaries. Russianists have been just as welcomed in the American environmental history community as scholars of the American South. No subject of study is considered too small or too big for environmental history. The seeds of environmental history have indeed been cast far and wide. That said, while there are many paths to choose in environmental history, there is no doubt that global environmental histories are a growing trend in the field. In recent years, there have been many scholars that have called for more works that look beyond nation-states as the primary units of study. And this makes sense, considering the global nature of present-day environmental concerns, such as climate change and water resource management—problems that do not respect nation-state boundaries. One of the more promising areas where American environmental history is going global is through the fusion of business and environmental history. For example, Richard Tucker’s Insatiable Appetite (2000) examined the international operations of powerful American monopolies, such as Firestone and the Sugar Trust, showing how exploding consumptive appetites—born in the Gilded Age—fueled the destruction of ecologically diverse forests in the tropical world. Tucker’s advisee, John Soluri, has also produced promising work in this area. His Banana Cultures (2005) offered a brilliant account of how the United Fruit Company leveraged the power of the U.S. government to transform ecologically diverse forests into monocrop banana farms in Honduras throughout the twentieth century.25 New scholarship focused on multinational firms evidenced another trend that emerged in the 2000s and 2010s: a return to more materialist environmental histories. This trend was in part a response to what might be called the “wilderness debate” of the 1990s spurred on by William Cronon’s 1996 book, Uncommon Ground. In his book, Cronon argued that there was no such thing as a pristine wilderness, untouched by man. All landscapes, he explained, no matter how far removed from urban centers, bore the imprint of manmade sociopolitical systems. Understanding this, Cronon argued, was the first step toward creating a more ecologically sound society.26 While Cronon clearly sought to inspire environmental stewardship that acknowledged the links between city and countryside, some scholars read into his comments an opening for new scholarship that questioned what we mean when we speak of nature. Thus developed a vibrant debate about the social construction of wilderness. Many scholars have since devoted considerable effort to exploring the subjective attributes of terms such as “nature” and “man-made.” There is no doubt that this academic deliberation has been important in shaping our understanding of the natural world, but a new generation of young scholars is trying to bring the field back to ground—to talk about the concrete ways in which real Americans have remade the real world. Ecologists are right to say that ecosystems are complex and do not necessarily mature toward perpetual equilibrium when left untouched. Nature can be petulant, unpredictable and destructive, and, therefore, to opine a “return to nature” is in many ways a false crusade. Yet, if environmental history teaches us anything, it is that man can learn a great deal from the complex ways in which nature has sustained life on earth for so long. History also makes clear that we have imposed order on nature in ways that have often stifled the life-giving properties of ecosystems. If we hope to create a better world and if we want to use the past to find paths to regeneration in the future, we need to understand the material ways in which we have disrupted ecological systems that could feed, clothe and nurture our grandchildren, and our

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grandchildren’s grandchildren. This is the stuff of environmental history, and a new generation of young scholars is clearly poised to use the tools of this trade to make a better world. In some ways, then, you might say environmental history scholarship is trending back to where it all began.

Notes   1 Interview with Donald Worster by Lisa Mighetto, Director of the American Society of Environmental History (ASEH), March 13, 2008. http://aseh.net/about-aseh/copy_of_oral-histories-with-aseh-founders/ Donald%20Worster.pdf   2 Ibid.   3 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).   4 Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).   5 John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998); Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Jeff Crane, The Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States (New York: Routledge, 2015).   6 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. For post-contact Native American fatality rates, see Cronon, Changes in the Land, 86. For an explanation of why European nations and not Chinese imperialists conquered the New World that takes into account environmental factors, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).   7 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1980), 2.   8 Ibid.   9 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 75, 169–170. 10 Ibid. For an environmental history of colonial America that considers Native Americans’ pre-contact history in the southern colonies, see Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010), 503–504. 12 Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 42, 287. 13 J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000); Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 14 For another excellent environmental history detailing America’s fossil fuel dependency, see also Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 15 Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 16 Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996); Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America From Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 17 Robert Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 11; See also Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 18 Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Manganiello’s work adds to a growing series of works on the environmental history of the American South. In the early 2000s, the University of Georgia launched its Environmental History and the American South book series under the direction of Paul Sutter, and now features some of the best works in the regional subfield. For a summary text on the state of the field in 2009, see Paul Sutter and Christopher J. Manganiello, eds., Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

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Bartow J. Elmore 19 Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 18. 20 Edmund P. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects With Chemicals From World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169. 21 New investigations into the environmental history of the American Civil War have become welcomed additions to this field of war and environment studies. For key books on Civil War environment history, see Mark Fiege, “Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the Civil War,” in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward and Environmental History of Warfare, ed. Edmund Russell and Richard P. Tucker (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004); Lisa Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes During the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Brian Allen Drake, ed., The Blue, The Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Katie Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Adam Dean, An Agrarian Republic: Farming Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 22 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); for other touchstone texts on the environmental movement after World War II, see Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005); Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). For an excellent history of the first Earth Day and the environmental movement in the early 1970s, see Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Generation Green (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013). 23 Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 7, 9. The term “crabgrass frontier” comes from Kenneth Jackson’s excellent work Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Though Jackson did not consider himself an environmental historian, his book is nevertheless essential reading for any environmental historian interested in the development of American suburbs. 24 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. For an award-winning work on suburbanization and electrification in the post-World War II American Southwest that blends Native American and environmental history, see Andrew Needham’s work on Phoenix, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). For the pioneering text in the history of environmental justice, see Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). 25 Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). My own work, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015), builds on that of Tucker and Soluri, showing how the Coca-Cola Company reshaped ecosystems around the world. For scholars interested in works that link business and environmental history, see West Virginia University’s series launched in 2015, Histories of Capitalism and the Environment. 26 William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 69, 90.

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18 WOMEN’S AND GENDER—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Abigail Trollinger

Figure 18.1 Women’s suffrage headquarters at Upper Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division LC-USZ62–30776.

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The field of women’s and gender history has undergone almost constant revision, resulting in a body of scholarship that is thematically broad and methodologically deep. While its earliest proponents aimed primarily to add women into the historical narrative, subsequent scholars challenged that goal, even questioning the idea that “woman” was a stable enough category to study as a material reality. Despite frequent debates and revisions, however, what has emerged in the twenty-first century is a field that effectively incorporates the dual aims of ensuring the central role of gender and women in almost every other field of history, in the process innovating in methodology and theory. Throughout, historians interested in women and gender have engaged with contemporary constructions of feminism, often employing in historical research the language and priorities of activists concerned with gender inequality. Thus, while the field of women’s history did not properly begin until around the 1960s, some of its earliest American practitioners were participants in the first iteration of American feminism. In the 1880s Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton began collecting the writings of proponents for women’s suffrage, a project that would ultimately result in six volumes published over four decades. The authors were more spokespeople than historians, as the early volumes almost entirely focused on the National Woman Suffrage Association and offered very limited coverage of the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. Even after the merger of these two associations, later editions gave very little information on the more radical National Woman’s Party. Regardless, these volumes conveyed that women could be leaders, speakers and writers, and that the movement for suffrage constituted a significant social and political movement. Their collection both offers an early example of women’s history and reflects the divisions within the movement for suffrage.1 Other early writers of women’s history were noteworthy simply for inserting women into a discipline that assumed, as Arthur Schlesinger famously said, “one-half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s history.”2 In 1946 the hugely influential Mary Beard published Woman as a Force in History, which argued that while women were historically a subject sex, they were also central to the making of history. Beard challenged early feminist writers who tended to characterize women primarily as victims, ignoring the social and legal spaces in which women could access power. Beard’s work was most revealing for highlighting that while some historians had managed to “bring women in” to the story of U.S. history, they had yet to accurately characterize the central role that women played in historical change.3 This was the project embraced by the budding field of women’s history.

The Emergence of Women’s History The proper field of women’s history was born in the movement for women’s liberation, and many of its earliest scholars were motivated by the goal of securing women’s full political, cultural and social status. The first generation of scholars in the field emphasized women’s oppression and ultimate desire for parity with men, and their methodological approach was based in the idea of equality from sameness, meaning that women deserved the same rights, opportunities and benefits as men. In 1959 Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle presented a landmark critical analysis of the movement for women’s suffrage, which simultaneously established the significance of this long-ignored social movement and broke out of a tendency to canonize movement leaders. Flexner also systematically analyzed the history of oppression against women, arguing that even with an increase in education and decrease in domestic duties, nineteenth-century women were still “all dressed up and no place to go.”4 Aileen Kraditor added to Flexner’s work in 1965 with Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, which argued that the movement for suffrage must also be understood as a central part of American intellectual history. Together, Flexner and Kraditor demonstrated the historical significance of the movement for women’s suffrage and asserted that the history of women should change our overall historical narrative.5 192

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Other scholarship on suffrage built on Flexner and Kraditor’s research to present greater nuance and depth to our understanding of the movement. Anne Firor Scott undertook a social and cultural history of southern women as they challenged the limitations of their positions, arguing that even as they attempted to fulfill their roles as “ladies,” southern women used reform organizations and clubs to advance their status in society.6 In 1978, Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle published Concise History of Woman Suffrage, an edited version of the six volumes published by Anthony et al. that argued for the significance of suffrage activists and acknowledged discord in the early movement.7 Scholarship on women’s history underwent a transformation in the 1960s, as some historians questioned an emphasis on sameness and instead looked for the ways in which women served as a socially, politically and culturally distinct group, whether by choice or by lot. Many of these historians were influenced by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which described midtwentieth-century women as trapped in their homes and focused on domestic tasks to the benefit of their families and the detriment of their careers and mental health.8 For some, examining women as distinct from men meant rethinking the suffrage movement. Norton Mezvinsky’s 1961 article, “An Idea of Female Superiority,” first suggested that historians take seriously the groups who fought women’s oppression based not on the justification of rights, but on women’s fundamental moral superiority to men. In 1963 Keith E. Melder’s dissertation, “Beginnings of Sisterhood,” did similar work by focusing on women’s reform efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and arguing that reform workers developed a sense of sisterhood with each other, which drove their desire for suffrage.9 In the middle of the decade, historians like Barbara Welter, Aileen Kraditor and Gerda Lerner expanded on the idea of women’s distinctiveness. Lerner’s influential article argued that the separation of the sexes was fueled by industrial development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Welter showed that women in this period lived within a Victorian ideal of what Welter called a “cult of true womanhood,” in which they were expected to exhibit qualities like purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.”10 The concept of separate spheres influenced historians working on the twentieth century. For example, Barbara J. Harris’s research on women’s professional development in the twentieth century argued that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment did not end women’s subordination at home and work, thus revealing the strength of what she called the “ideology of inequality.”11 The concept of “separate spheres” challenged historians to look beyond political and intellectual histories, and provided a framework for understanding women’s experiences of subordination and inequality. Some historians contended that the separation of the sexes could actually be beneficial to women. In 1975 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg offered a path-breaking analysis of the “female world,” which, she argued, allowed women the social space to form intimate relationships and social networks with one another.12 Kathryn Kish Sklar’s studies of Catharine Beecher and of female reformers in Hull House suggested that some women worked within the constraints of their sphere to gain real (though limited) social power. In 1979 Estelle Freedman identified what she called a “public female sphere,” including settlement houses and women’s colleges, in which early twentieth-century women gained experience in leadership while also having a break from the frustration of competing in the men’s sphere.13 The following year Carl Degler echoed the sentiments of Freedman and others by arguing that increased separation of the sexes in fact allowed women to have more autonomy and more control over sexuality and childbirth.14 Yet the framework had its issues. In 1980 anthropologist M. Z. Rosaldo cautioned that too many scholars had slipped into conflating the ideology of separate spheres with women’s material reality. Historians like Linda Kerber were especially persuaded by Rosaldo’s suggestion that women’s identities were not rooted in their biological makeup, but instead were formed and reformed through social interactions and relationships.15 Kerber ultimately suggested that while historians’ attention to the public-private dichotomy in many ways pulled women’s history “out of the realm of the trivial and 193

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anecdotal and into the realm of analytic social history,” it was time to examine separate spheres with a critical eye.16 One of the biggest issues with overemphasizing the public-private dichotomy was the implicit (or explicit) assumption that women did not participate in public affairs, an assumption that historians challenged by examining working women. Some, like Leslie Woodcock Tentler, showed the complicated relationship that female wage earners had with their familial responsibilities. And Martha May’s study of the family wage showed that laboring women both symbolized and challenged the notion of separation, and their unequal pay proved its detrimental consequences.17 Even when historians considered working women outside of the workplace they found that young women in industrialized America lived much of their lives in the “public” sphere. Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements chronicled working-class women’s leisure activities in New York City, finding them in dance halls, at Coney Island and on the streets.18 Scholarship on working women was also shaped by emerging Marxist theory, most notably the work of British historian E. P. Thompson.19 In 1971 British scholar Juliet Mitchell published Woman’s Estate, which inspired feminist historians to consider the theoretical implications of drawing from both women’s history and Marxist theory. Mitchell argued that while Marxist theory was useful for exposing the significance of production in classing individuals, it was insufficient in analyzing the home as a place of labor. In 1976 Renaissance historian Joan Kelly published the highly influential “Social Relations of the Sexes,” which analyzed the ways that consciousness and material reality influence each other (e.g., changes in production altered the social position of women). Kelly contended that the scholarship in women’s history proved that patriarchy was nourished by major social and economic “progress.”20 Historians inspired by Mitchell and Kelly asserted that Marxist theory was not sufficient to explain women’s histories. In 1982 Alice Kessler Harris’s Out to Work demonstrated how working women experienced labor differently than their male counterparts, for instance being underappreciated at work, and thus had different interests than men.21 Susan Strasser’s study of American housework and Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother both revealed that, despite social and technological “progress” in the twentieth century, housewives experienced almost endless work and increasing levels of isolation.22 By the 1980s the first generation of women’s historians had firmly established the field of women’s history, complicated our notions of separation (whether ideological or material) and demonstrated the multiplicity of experiences of American women in the twentieth century. Yet, for the most part, these scholars continued to practice “women’s” history, the history of various Americans whose lives were distinctly shaped by their social position as women. This would change in the following decades.

From “Women” to “Gender” in the 1980s and 1990s The field of women’s history underwent profound transformation in the 1980s, driven in large part by the increased theorization of women’s history. From historians who argued that gender needed to be treated seriously as an analytical category to those theorizing the multiple and intersecting axes of discrimination that shape some historical actors, the second generation remade the field into Women’s and Gender History. Although not all historians explicitly engaged in the theoretical scholarship, this work spawned a multitude of creative, incisive and complicated studies of women and gender. One of the most significant transformations in the second generation came about thanks to the work of historian Joan Scott, who in 1986 challenged historians to more seriously treat gender as an analytical category. Scott contended that the large majority of scholarship in women’s history too often considered the category of “woman” as stable, based on discernable differences between the sexes and largely born from the functions of sex and reproduction. Scott countered 194

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that historians should instead treat gender as relational and fluid. The category of woman, she suggested, was mutually constitutive of the category of male, both categories ever-changing, born out of and signifying relationships of power. To Scott, these categories were discursively constructed, meaning that language was the site where gender was formulated, challenged and reshaped. “Woman” was not a category before it was given a name, and it was in language that the category was given strength.23 The implications of Scott’s work were vast. Historians began to distinguish between “sex” and “gender,” identifying sex (i.e. male or female) as a designation based in anatomical characteristics, and gender (i.e. woman or man) as a socially constructed category associated with femininity and masculinity. Thus, “woman” became a category that was dynamic, defined largely by social and cultural priorities but also contested by those on the margins. Although Scott argued that gender was linguistically constructed, even historians not as committed to the post-structural primacy of language readily embraced the idea that gender was changeable and historically rooted.24 Historians also took quickly to the idea that gender was relational—that the definitions of “woman” and “man” were constructed oppositionally to each other—and with that came an interest in masculinity. Early scholars of masculinity challenged the long-held notion that the men’s sphere was “the norm” against which women should be assessed, instead suggesting that what it meant to be a man was constantly evolving. Elliot J. Gorn’s work on bare-knuckle prize fighting in the nineteenth century, for instance, demonstrated that the sport not only associated masculinity with an honorable kind of violence but also challenged the dislocations that came with industrialization.25 In Manhood in America Michael Kimmel showed that American culture in the early twentieth century tolerated multiple versions of manhood. While one version (the “Self-Made Man”) emerged dominant in the century, the only real constant was the sense that American manhood was unstable, driving men to prove their manhood while rendering it impossible for them to do so.26 Scholars of American masculinity demonstrated that the category of “man” had implications far beyond the personal. Nancy MacLean’s study of the Ku Klux Klan uncovered the role of gender in shaping the Klan’s conservative ideology, a conception of masculinity that convinced even “sane, ordinary men” to engage in vigilante violence against their perceived enemies.27 Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound drew on popular culture and government propaganda to reveal the interplay between the construction of gender at home and foreign policy. In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman analyzed four figures who engaged the “fiction of male supremacy,” in the process articulating the ways in which race was central to conceptions of manhood.28 Kristin L. Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood demonstrated that conceptions of masculinity served as ideological underpinnings for imperialistic expansion in Cuba and the Philippines. These and other scholars of masculinity established that conceptions of masculinity (and gender more broadly) did not just shape Americans, but also greatly influenced American social and political history.29 While some historians in the second generation drew on Scott to analyze masculinity and femininity as mutually constructive, others in this period began more seriously considering differences between women in history. For instance, in Divided Lives, Rosalind Rosenberg challenged the notion of feminist “sisterhood” by asserting that women’s rights in the twentieth century were consistently undercut by divisions of class, race, religion and ethnicity.30 In Women, Race, and Class Angela Y. Davis argued that second-wave feminism and the scholarship that came out of it ignored these differences and offered a limited view of women and their status in society, by conflating “women” with the white, middle-class women discussed in The Feminine Mystique. Akasha Gloria Hull and Patricia BellScott put it in accessible language when they published All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, which challenged the limited nature of scholarship in African American history and women’s history. bell hooks, too, introduced feminist theoreticians to the limitedness of their work, and called for greater work from scholars knowledgeable about life in the both the margin and the center.31 Perhaps the foundational work in the emergence of what became known 195

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as intersectionality came from Kimberle Crenshaw, who argued in 1989 that scholars had thus far analyzed discrimination as occurring along a “single categorical axis,” and instead should recognize those who are “multiply-burdened.”32 Historians influenced by intersectionality increasingly focused on the differences between women, acknowledging, according to Rosalind Rosenberg, “that race and class are sometimes more powerful forces than gender in shaping women’s lives and in claiming women’s loyalty.”33 Gerda Lerner pointed towards the expansion of the field in 1972 when she published a documentary history of black women that not only inserted black women into the field but also suggested that the “domestic sphere” that had for so long been considered limiting may have been seen as an advancement for black women with enslaved ancestors.34 Years later Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham expounded on the limits of feminism, arguing that the categories of “women,” “black,” and “American” were perpetually in tension with one another, suggesting that the field of women’s history would need to change drastically if scholars wanted to take seriously the issue of race.35 In this regard, Brooks-Higginbotham looked to the National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Convention—which offered African American women to space both to weigh in on their social circumstances and to challenge white Americans’ racial domination—as an example of an institution providing social capital to “average” black women.36 In a less positive vein, in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985) Jacqueline Jones demonstrated the unique circumstances of black women’s lives, in which they worked “masculine” jobs and yet had very little leverage as women.37 Some of the most interesting scholarship on intersectionality came about in research on the history of poverty and welfare, as historians effectively uncovered and analyzed what is frequently described as the racialization and feminization of poverty. In Regulating the Lives of Women, Mimi Abramovtiz argued that the norm of the “family ethic” in the twentieth century, in which women were expected to marry and raise children, facilitated the creation of welfare policies that punished poor women not in “normative” families.38 Linda Gordon’s Pitied But Not Entitled expanded upon Abramovitz’s work by tracking the formation of the “two-tiered” welfare state, in which single mothers relied on highly stigmatized welfare programs (like Aid to Dependent Children) but unemployed men were able to access “entitlements” like Unemployment Insurance.39 And Gwendolyn Mink and Jill Quadagno analyzed poverty through the lenses of gender and race, arguing that over the course of the twentieth century American social welfare policy and culture both assumed and guaranteed that black women were the most likely to be impoverished.40 Intersectionality and the study of poverty expanded to researchers looking at reform movements in the Progressive Era and twentieth century, who found not only that poor women experienced multiple points of oppression, but also that middle class reformers constructed their identities in relation to their poorer counterparts. Peggy Pascoe’s masterly Relations of Rescue, which examines Protestant missionary women to the American West, found that women reformers in the West simultaneously sought to “rescue” women whose morals had been compromised (like Mormon women or prostitutes) and to establish their own “moral authority” in the region.41 Robyn Muncy, looking at reform activism from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, persuasively established what she called a “female dominion” of policymakers who mobilized maternalist ideas about female expertise in children’s and women’s issues to improve their professional careers while simultaneously creating policies that assumed women’s responsibility for childcare, thus effectively “shorten[ing] the leash that tied most women to the home and children.”42

The Twenty-First Century: Expansion and New Directions Recent work in U.S. women’s and gender history has taken a few paths: some building upon scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, others offering revisions of past work and still others proposing new directions for the field. 196

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While theoretical explorations of intersectionality emerged in the 1980s, recent scholarship has focused more on historicizing the intersections of privilege and oppression that many women faced. One of the most influential examples of this was Vicki L. Ruiz’s From Out of the Shadows, which examined Mexican women in United States who negotiated several parts of their identities (race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality), thus challenging both the common narrative of immigrant assimilation and the tendency to homogenize Mexican women.43 Some of the most interesting work historicizing intersectionality focused on social movements, asking how individuals with multidimensional identities partook in twentieth-century politics. Nancy A. Hewitt’s Southern Discomfort (2001) provided a complex and nuanced look at black, white and Latina women’s activism in Tampa, Florida, at the turn of the twentieth century. In her study of various groups of activists (from labor unions to literary clubs to campaigns for Cuban independence), Hewitt accessed the shifting affiliations that spurred women into activism.44 A decade later Erik S. McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom (2011) argued that mid-twentieth century black women affiliated with the Communist Party saw themselves as embodying a “triple threat” of oppression (race, gender and class), and thus formulated an intellectual framework for leftist politics that was ahead of their time.45 Two historical treatments of second-wave feminism drew from theories of intersectionality. Susan M. Hartmann’s The Other Feminists (1998) challenged the widely held notion that most second-wave feminists were white and middle class, by investigating organizations like the International Union of Electrical Workers and the National Council of Churches, where even working-class and non-white women facilitated the movement of feminist ideas and practices in America.46 Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning From Race (2011) charted the legal strategy employed by mid-twentieth century feminists, which paralleled women’s liberation with the civil rights movement. Its proponents, who argued that sexism needed to be treated with the same remedies as racism, were criticized by civil rights advocates, some feminists and many women of color but established a pattern that would continue into the twentyfirst century.47 Intersectionality, however, has not gone unrevised. More recently, Jennifer C. Nash highlighted what she understands to be the tensions within intersectionality scholarship. Most compellingly, Nash argued that, although research utilizing intersectionality has usefully brought to the forefront the experiences of multiply marginalized individuals, scholars continue to work with a vague definition of the term, and they too often rely on black women as the quintessential intersectional subjects. This process, ironically, often renders them as functions of their categories and thus less complex subjects than they are. Nash’s article challenged historians not to throw away intersectionality but to sharpen it as a theoretical tool, suggesting that there is yet room for growth in this approach to women’s and gender history.48 As with intersectionality, scholars working in masculinity studies further explored the causal relationship between ideas about manhood and foreign policy, as two books on the Cold War attest. Robert Dean’s Imperial Brotherhood (2001) examined the effect of ideas about masculinity on Cold War foreign policy, finding that their presence in elite institutions in the east, which conveyed the priorities of “imperial manhood,” influenced their formulation of foreign policy and national security measures.49 In 2005 K. A. Courdileone argued that American political culture during the Cold War was driven by broader anxieties about the “fragility of the modern self,” for which it compensated by emphasizing tough masculinity over weak or “feminine” policies.”50 Twenty-first century historians of masculinity also offered expanded research on the competing practices of manhood that coexisted in modern America. Kevin P. Murphy’s Political Manhood (2008) examined what he called “abstracted male types” (like the mollycoddle and the red blood) that contended for supremacy in twentieth-century American urban culture.51 Far away from the urban north, Craig Thompson Friend’s edited volume, Southern Masculinity (2009), considered manhood in the South since Reconstruction. As Friend and the chapter authors show, in the South masculinity has 197

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not been defined solely in contrast to the North, or to femininity; rather, the influence of categories like race, class and sexuality has engendered the existence of numerous masculinities, none of them stable or easily defined.52 Recent research has also revealed sexuality as a contested category, in which marginalized Americans used various tools available to try to refigure formerly prohibited behavior as socially acceptable. How Sex Changed (2002), by Joan Meyerowitz, offered the first historical treatment of transsexuality and established that the definitions and practices of transsexuality were historically rooted (defined and redefined by culture, politics and science). In Making Marriage Modern (2012), Christina Simmons looked to people who challenged sexual norms at the beginning of the twentieth century like reformer Margaret Sanger—who placed value on female pleasure in sex—and urban immigrant youth, who “forg[ed] new patterns of heterosexual behavior.” Despite their efforts, Simmons argued, competing claims for women’s sexuality suggest that the narrative is not solely one of progression.53 As with historians of masculinity, Meyerowitz and Simmons compellingly historicized sexual mores and boundaries.54 In labor history, historians have continued to debate the possibilities of agency and dissent among working women since industrialization. Annelise Orleck’s Common Sense and a Little Fire (1995) traced the lives of four well-known Jewish immigrant women labor organizers active early in the twentieth century, both revealing the limits of their ability to enact change and celebrating their fundamental agency.55 In Civilizing Capitalism (2000), Landon R. Y. Storrs looked at New Deal-era maternalist reformers and argued that they used sex-based policies as an “entering wedge” for more inclusive polices, an argument that suggested that middle-class women were able to affect policy by cultivating their “femaleness.”56 And in 2001 Alice Kessler-Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity challenged more hopeful notions of women’s agency in the workplace, illustrating how the longstanding and widespread conviction that the appropriate labor market should be comprised of white male breadwinners justified sex-segregated workplaces and inequalities in pay, positions, hours and opportunities for advancement, thus stripping women and non-whites of “economic citizenship” and full personhood under the law.57 These recent studies of women in labor have added depth to longstanding debates over the ability of working women and reformers to shape their lives and workplaces.58 Just as many fields in American history have celebrated a turn toward the global, scholars of women and gender in the U.S. have begun to break down the conceptual boundaries of the nation-state. In 1985 Patricia Hill’s study of the interdenominational foreign mission movement suggested that although American women experienced restrictive gender proscriptions even while abroad, international expectations about sex segregation granted them autonomous space, however small and however short-lived.59 More recently, Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicki L. Ruiz’s ambitious rethinking of U.S. immigration history showcased immigrants’ transnational ties and proved that even though immigrant lives were fundamentally bound by the nation, their definition of “American” extended beyond the United States. Their American Dreaming, Global Realities also positioned gender, race, class and spirituality as guiding concepts for understanding the experiences of migrants to the United States.60 Recent historians of women and gender have also turned their attention to conservative women, whom the ideologically progressive field has frequently treated as misguided at best. Kirsten Marie Delegard’s Battling Miss Bolsheviki (2012) locates the origins of female conservatism in the years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, as the federal government’s social welfare programs expanded rapidly. Delegard innovatively tells the story of antiradical female activists in parallel to the story of progressive women, suggesting that their seemingly opposed efforts drew on a common language and practice of activism.61 In Mothers of Conservatism, Michelle M. Nickerson used both oral histories and archival sources in an effort to fully understand what she terms “housewife populism,” a form of anti-government populism that mobilized women’s status as socially and politically marginal.62 Much of this recent work on conservative women embarks on a difficult project: to take seriously conservative women without diluting the more pernicious elements of the far right.63 198

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Finally, recent historians have also produced studies of women and beauty culture that challenge the overly simplistic conception of beauty as a mode of oppression for women.64 Tiffany M. Gill and Blain Roberts, in particular, both published studies of the relationship between beauty culture, race and African American resistance to white hegemony. Gill’s Beauty Shop Politics examined African American women’s activism through the beauty industry and revealed what she called “politics in unexpected places.”65 In Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women, Roberts analyzed how the racialized bodies of Southern women were used to both hide and uncover assumptions about class and gender.66 Both of these works suggested that while many women experienced subjugation at the hands of highly gendered beauty standards, beauty culture also offered avenues for activism and self-fashioning.67 As the work on conservative women and beauty culture suggests, recent scholarship on women and gender has engaged with the questions addressed by many third-wave American feminists about the role of choice in women’s autonomy and how we locate sites of authority and agency among women. Much of this scholarship suggests that historically women have frequently chosen to engage in what might be considered “sites of oppression” (like the beauty industry) and have even created power in the process. If gender norms are socially constructed, this scholarship asks, then to what extent did individuals’ capacity to choose their expression of gender mitigate gender-based oppression, and to what extent did structures of inequality circumscribe the agency of women in history? In light of recent debates over the meanings of feminism, sex and gender, it is clear that the field will benefit from even more scholarship that wrestles with choice and agency in difficult places.

Notes   1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage:Volume I (Rochester, New York: Susan B. Anthony, 1881).   2 Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1928), quoted in Mary R. Beard, Woman as a Force in History (New York: Persea Books, 1946), 58.   3 See, for instance, her critique of Mary Wollstonecraft. Beard, Woman as a Force in History, 98.   4 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975) [First edition: 1959], 182.   5 Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).   6 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Also see: Anne Firor Scott and Andrew M. Scott, One Half of the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975).   7 Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections From the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).   8 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963).   9 Norton Mezvinsky, “An Idea of Female Superiority,” Journal of the Central Mississippi Valley American Studies Association 2, no. 1 (Spring 1961): 17–26; Keith E. Melder, Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman’s Rights Movement, 1800–1850 (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). 10 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, Part 1 (Summer 1966): 151–174; Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1968); Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800–1840,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10 (Spring 1969): 5–15. 11 Barbara J. Harris, Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 129–130. 12 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America,” Signs 1 (1975): 1–29. See also Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 13 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs (Summer 1985): 658–77; Estelle B. Freedman, “Separation as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 3 (Autumn, 1979): 512–529. See also Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

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Abigail Trollinger As Mary Roth Walsh found, some people in the medical profession made a conscious effort to maintain the subjugation of women. Mary Roth Walsh, Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835–1975 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 14 Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America From the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 15 M. Z. Rosaldo, “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding,” Signs 5 (Spring 1980). 16 Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39, quote 38. See also Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 17 Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage,” in Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 1–21. See also Sheila Tobias and Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Susan Levine, Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 18 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 19 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). 20 Juliet Mitchell, Woman’s Estate (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 99; Joan Kelly, “The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 809–823. 21 Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 22 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983). See also Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). 23 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053–1076, 1067. See also Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 24 For examples of scholarship drawing on Scott’s work see “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/ Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Sonya O. Rose, What Is Gender History? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010). 25 Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 26 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York: Methuen, 1987); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 27 Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xi. 28 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 29 Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 30 Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). 31 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 203–205; Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982), xvii; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 44. 32 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1 (1989), 139–167, 140. See also Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).

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Women’s and Gender 33 Rosenberg, Divided Lives, x. 34 Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). 35 Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, “The Problem of Race in Women’s History,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989). 36 Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Woman’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984). 37 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 38 Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988). 39 Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994). 40 Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jill S. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mother of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). 41 Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 42 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), xv. See also Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston 1880–1960 (New York: Penguin Books, 1988); George Sanchez, “‘Go After the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican-American Woman, 1915–1929,” in Unequal Sisters, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 284–297. 43 Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011); Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 44 Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 45 Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). See also Zakiya Luna, “From Rights to Justice: Women of Color Changing the Face of US Reproductive Rights Organizing,” Societies Without Borders 4, no. 3 (2009): 343–365. 46 Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking Press, 2000). 47 Serena Mayeri, Reasoning From Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). See also Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Megan Taylor Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 48 Jennifer C. Nash, “Re-Thinking Intersectionality,” Feminist Review 89 (June 2008): 1–15. 49 Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 50 K. A. Courdileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2005), ix. See also John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); May, Homeward Bound; Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2001); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 51 Kevin P. Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 5. 52 Craig Thompson Friend, ed., Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South Since Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), xxiii. See also Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000).

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Abigail Trollinger 53 Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality From the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 54 See Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 55 Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900– 1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 56 Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 7. 57 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 58 See also Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelly and the Nation’s Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 59 Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). 60 See also Pamela McVay, Envisioning Women in World History, 1500-Present, Vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2009). 61 Kristen Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 62 Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. 63 See also Erica J. Ryan, Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015); Leslie Dorrough Smith, Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001). 64 A useful essay on recent scholarship on beauty culture is Christina Burr, “The Power of Beauty: Commercial Beauty Culture, the Body, and Women’s Political Activism,” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 2 (2017): 158–164. 65 Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 66 Blain Roberts, Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 67 See also Rebecca M. Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

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19 LGBT—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Cookie Woolner

The story of twentieth century lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history in the United States is generally told as a progress narrative about an emerging community gaining access to rights. At the center of this narrative, the Stonewall Riots of 1969 are held up as the pivotal event marking the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement. No doubt, soon the standard story of the “long” twentieth century and queer rights will end with the legal victory of same-sex marriage in 2015. However, writing this overview in the shadow of the 2016 Orlando massacre, where forty-nine people were killed at Latino Night at Pulse, a gay nightclub, it is important to recognize that like the history of many minority groups, progress for the LGBT community sometimes takes two steps forward and one step back. Twentieth-century U.S. LGBT history is a vast and capacious subfield, as Americans from all walks of life intersect with these identity categories. Thus, LGBT history is a lens through which to view American history that sheds light not only on changing gender and sexuality categories and norms, but also on a wide array of subjects ranging from the relationships between public and private, bodily autonomy and the law, power and politics and citizenship and the state, to the history of medicine and psychiatry, popular culture, social movements and much more. Notably, some of the early practitioners of what was first known as gay history in the 1970s were not academics, but activists who sought to document the history of their communities and share their findings with the public.1 In fact, early pioneers of queer history within academia were often warned that such a research focus would be a career-breaker.2 Now, in the early twenty-first century, despite the false warnings, LGBT history is a vibrant field producing cutting edge research that demonstrates the centrality of sexuality and gender to all facets of U.S. history. The terminology used to describe those who love the same sex and transgress gender norms is constantly changing and was in flux for much of the twentieth century. For the sake of convenience this chapter refers to “LGBT history” and “queer history” interchangeably.3 While histories of transgender and bisexual people sometimes overlap with “lesbian and gay” histories, they have separate trajectories as well, particularly for the former: after all, lesbian/gay/bisexual are categories referring to sexual desires, while transgender is a gender category for those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. While transgender history is a rapidly expanding subfield alongside transgender studies, thanks to the work of pioneering historians such as Susan Stryker, the history of bisexuality as a category has been paid little attention.4 This is due both to the “slipperiness” of the category as well as negative associations with the term. For example, many histories of women who had relationships with both women and men have been claimed as part of lesbian history, and both 203

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straight and gay communities have treated the figure of “the bisexual” with suspicion and derision.5 In a society more comfortable with a heterosexual/homosexual binary than a more fluid approach to sexuality, bisexuals are often viewed as untrustworthy, promiscuous “fence sitters” who cannot make up their minds. Due to the primacy of the heterosexual/homosexual binary, it is difficult to speak of a distinct “history of bisexuality.” Despite this, the issue of sexual fluidity is present in much recent queer historical scholarship. For example, Regina Kunzel’s work examines how queerness manifests in sex-segregated prisons, arguing that stable and fixed sexual identities are “distinctive fictions.”6 The “homosexual/heterosexual binary” itself was a scientific product of the late nineteenth century, and at the dawn of the twentieth century modern conceptions of gay identity were beginning to solidify but were still in flux. Influential French scholar Michel Foucault claimed that “the homosexual” became a “species” in the late nineteenth century due in part to the advent of the scientific study of sex—known as sexology—and other new regimes of power, knowledge and categorization, such as psychiatry.7 As pioneering gay historian Jeffrey Weeks first argued, “homosexual behavior” is a universal practice while “homosexual identity” is historically specific.8 The shift from viewing queer behaviors as mere acts that anyone could take part in to now viewing these acts as constituting a homosexual identity is an important intervention by this subfield. As this example shows, the notion that sexuality is socially constructed lies at the heart of the methodology of LGBT history. The word “homosexual” first appeared in print in 1892, in a Chicago medical journal.9 Prior to this, the dominant understanding of same-sex desire was the concept of “inversion”: that individuals who harbored such desires had an “inverted” gender. Reasoning that a “woman with a man’s soul” would desire women, sexologists characterized “female inverts” as masculine women who desired women, and “male inverts” as feminine men who desired men.10 Eventually “homosexuality” came to refer not to gender transgression but solely to sexual object choice, which created the possibility that feminine lesbians and masculine gay men could exist as well. As historian George Chauncey has shown, by the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, gay men had carved out a “sexual underworld” in which they socialized in the same working-class saloons and elite hotel bars as other men of their class background, allowing them to “construct a gay city in the midst of (and often invisible to) the normative city.”11 By the 1920s, urban districts such as Harlem, Greenwich Village and Chicago’s Bronzeville and Towertown had become destinations for queer nightlife. Prohibition-era speakeasies offered illicit behaviors from imbibing bootleg alcohol to interracial and same-sex dancing, and the thrill of breaking social taboos led “slumming” white and straight patrons into spaces featuring queer performers.12 One of the most popular was Gladys Bentley, a large, handsome, African American woman who wore a white tuxedo and top hat and sang popular tunes filled with dirty double entendres while playing the piano all night long.13 Bentley was a classic symbol of the “mannish woman” who became more popular in the 1920s. As masculinity was associated with men and the public sphere, masculine gender presentations for queer women made their desire for women more visible as well as their feminist aspiration to be as powerful as men.14 Gender transgression was also readily found at masquerade balls featuring “female impersonators,” as drag queens were then known, which were incredibly popular annual events in black districts of northern cities, attracting crowds of thousands of curious heterosexual onlookers.15 This was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, when African American writers like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Nella Larsen created cultural texts that scholars have mined for their queer content, both explicit and implicit.16 By the early 1930s, a new “anti-gay vigilance” led to the closing of many queer venues that thrived during Prohibition, as regulations against queer gathering spaces serving alcohol expanded. George Chauncey argues that the rapid growth and visibility of gay subcultures during Prohibition precipitated a powerful, negative cultural backlash in the 1930s. Even during the “Anything Goes” 1920s, queer representations on the stage were taken to task for obscenity. The first Broadway play to focus on the theme of lesbianism, The Captive (1926), was subjected to an obscenity trial and all its actors 204

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were arrested. In the film world, the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hays Code of 1930, sought to regulate respectability through film, banning themes related to same-sex desire, among other topics.17 Policing of sex between men increased, with growing numbers of arrests and convictions for sodomy, crimes against nature, disorderly conduct and other sexual offences.18 The Great Depression also helped further instigate a “gender crisis” as men lost their jobs and questioned their ability to support their families, a longstanding trait of successful American masculinity.19 World War II served as a turning point in LGBT history, as the mass migration of military personnel helped create new gay communities, and the war brought questions of sexuality, identity and citizenship to the forefront in new ways. Starting in 1941, the military began banning people with “homosexual proclivities” on the basis that they had “psychopathic personality disorders.” As Michael Bronski argues, this was the first time “a direct link was made between homosexual behavior and a threat to national security.”20 Despite this, many enlisted men—and women who joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC)—found same-sex partners and communities while away from the watchful eyes of family members, and came to terms with their own desires while serving in the military.21 Even though efforts were made to mark homosexuals as unfit for service, wartime personnel needs were so great that the military screening process was not very stringent. As thousands of same-sex-loving men and women took part in the war effort, their presence and the armed forces’ expanding anti-gay policies and procedures led to growing tensions. Indeed, according to historian Allan Bérubé, “gay soldiers discovered they were fighting two wars: one for America, democracy and freedom; the other for their own survival as homosexuals within the military organization.”22 The role of the state in the codification of discrimination against queer people is a growing area of interest for LGBT historians. A “top-down” approach, examining the institutions that have oppressed queer people over time, is becoming a more utilized methodology than in the past, when grassroots queer communities were more likely to be the subjects of studies in the field. Margot Canaday recently discussed the interaction of LGBT people and the state in The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America. She argued that while European states were well established prior to the rise of sexology in the late nineteenth century, U.S. bureaucracy was much more influenced by the pathologizing of homosexuality. By the mid-twentieth century, American anti-gay laws were more stringent than any in Europe, authorizing not only the medical arena but also the legal realm to categorize and discriminate against those deemed “sexual deviants.”23 The G. I. Bill, for example, was the first federal policy to outright exclude gay people from the economic benefits of the growing welfare state.24 While prior gay historians had argued that state repression of homosexuals post-World War II was the result of the war’s role in the queer community’s growing visibility, Canaday revealed a longer and older history of state regulation. Placing the history of sexuality in conversation with legal and political history promises to generate important new scholarship in the field. Many significant events that altered life for LGBT Americans took place in the postwar era. One of the most important landmarks was the release of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Analyzing thousands of interviews, Kinsey and his colleagues found that most Americans had taken part in sexual behaviors deemed immoral or illegal—such as adultery and homosexuality. They also created the Kinsey Scale, in which one’s homosexual or heterosexual desire was rated from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). As many interviewees reported that their place on the scale changed over time, the studies found that sexuality was much more fluid than anyone realized. Kinsey’s findings— that sexual variation was normal and common—and the popularity of his work were essential to the progress of the gay rights movement, as activists used his research to help negotiate scientific categories of deviant and normal.25 Another important medical breakthrough affecting LGBT America was Christine Jorgenson’s “sex change” surgery in 1952, which brought the issue of transsexuality, as it was then known, to the wider public.26 Tabloid headlines screamed “Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty” after Jorgenson’s 205

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operation in Denmark, and she launched a nightclub act upon her return home the following year. Her story broached new questions about gender in a conservative era: How do we determine who is male and female? Can one’s sex truly be “changed”?27 However, most new medical developments at this time did not support LGBT people; in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality for the first time in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Lesbians and gay men were regarded as abnormal, and same-sex desire was deemed a sickness that needed curing. Attempts at heterosexual conversion through electroshock and chemical therapy were commonly prescribed treatments in the postwar era.28 Yet the early 1950s also saw the early stirrings of the homophile movement, the first sustained political movement in the U.S. to increase the rights of gays and lesbians. It sought to present “homosexuals” as ideal American citizens, worthy of equal status and its attendant rights.29 Harry Hay founded the first homophile group, the Mattachine Society, in 1950.30 The organization’s official publication, ONE, declared in its Statement of Purpose: “Homosexuals do not have the civil rights assured all other citizens. ONE is devoted to correcting this.”31 While originally influenced by the civil rights movement, the homophile movement was nonetheless white-dominated and generally conservative.32 This first generation of gay activists were quite reliant on “respectability politics” when compared to the radical Gay Liberation Front and other post-Stonewall organizations to come. However, in the harshly intolerant Cold War context, for anyone to openly speak of same-sex desire or the rights of homosexuals was remarkably brave. While “the Red Scare” is a common term for the “witch hunt” for Communists that Senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded, historian David K. Johnson wrote of a similar “Lavender Scare.” This was a campaign by the federal government to purge suspected gay federal employees during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.33 Almost one hundred federal employees lost their jobs when conservatives argued that gay workers were security risks, as they could easily be blackmailed due to their deviant sexualities. Further, in a Senate investigation entitled, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in the U.S. Government,” gay federal workers were deemed untrustworthy because their “lack of emotional stability” and weak “moral fiber” made them “susceptible to the blandishments of the foreign espionage agent.”34 While multiple forms of state surveillance and oppression made LGBT people quite vulnerable at mid-century, this collective injustice also fostered a stronger sense of community and helped develop queer culture. Thus, while queer historical scholarship examines organized movements for social justice, it also engages with how ordinary people took part in everyday acts of resistance and created communities and partnerships. A pioneering example of this approach is found in Madeline D. Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. This study of a working-class lesbian community in mid-century Buffalo, New York argued that the first generation of “butch-femme” lesbians who wore their gender difference visibly in public as they patronized lesbian bars utilized these spaces as sites of resistance to a culture of “compulsory heterosexuality.”35 Their pride in their difference and subculture—and their readiness to fight back against homophobic violence—influenced the organized gay and lesbian liberation movement to come.36 The modern chapter of LGBT history is generally marked by the Stonewall Riots, which began on a hot night in late June 1969, now said to denote the beginning of a new era of gay identity and liberation. Police began arresting patrons at the gay bar in the Stonewall Inn in what at first appeared to be a routine drag queen bust.37 However, that night LGBT New Yorkers fought back, pushing and kicking officers to get free from the paddy wagon, as a growing crowd of queer bar-goers began throwing anything they could get their hands on at the cops, from coins and cans to bottles and bricks. Cheers of “gay power!” began to rise from the protestors, a racially diverse group of Stonewall patrons including drag queens, street kids, transgender people, hustlers and women as well as men.38 When a friend of Puerto Rican trans activist Sylvia Rivera asked her to leave the gathering, she purportedly responded, “Are you nuts? I’m not missing a minute of this—it’s the revolution!”39 After the 206

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riots ended, Craig Rodwell, owner of the gay Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, printed 5,000 leaflets that were distributed throughout gay-patronized establishments in New York. They declared that the riots would “go down in history” as “the first time that thousands of Homosexual men and women went out into the street to protest.”40 Just weeks after the uprising at Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front formed in New York, signaling a more radical approach than the homophile movement through their bold use of the word “gay,” which until then had been a secret, insider term utilized to conceal queerness.41 Months later in 1970, Sylvia Rivera and fellow Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson created Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a pioneering organization that focused on helping trans youth access food, clothing, shelter and community.42 That same year, Craig Rodwell came up with the idea for an annual Christopher Street Liberation Day to commemorate the Stonewall Riots; this march was the seedling from which a multitude of local Gay Pride (and later, LGBT Pride) marches and festivities took root in the decades to come.43 During the 1970s, other new organizations such as the Gay Activist Alliance began to turn to the state to lessen their oppression, first by fighting for non-discrimination laws in cities like New York and Philadelphia.44 Timothy Stewart-Winter’s Queer Clout: Chicago and Rise of Gay Politics showed how gay Midwesterners got involved in local politics, initially by resisting police violence and later as primarily white, middle-class people flocked to new gay urban communities, leading politicians to see them as a demographic that needed courting.45 Stewart-Winter showed that police harassment, as an issue shared by both African Americans and LGBT people, helped precipitate liberal coalitions in municipal politics. Christina Hanhardt also addressed queer politics, race and violence in Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence. Her research underscored the need for intersectional approaches to violence against the LGBT community, as calls for “safer streets” in gay urban enclaves have historically transformed into efforts to further disenfranchise the most marginal members of society: the poor, people of color, the homeless and sex workers, among others.46 Thus, tensions over the intersection of sexuality with race and class have always been present in the LGBT movement, as these recent historical works highlight. While queer women were involved in activist organizations during both the homophile and gay liberation eras, it was clear that different issues affected gay men and women’s lives. Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first women’s homophile group, had begun as a club for middle-class lesbians an alternative to the bar scene, as bars were not considered proper places for respectable women to congregate. While the Cold War is not known as a time of highly visible feminism, many women who loved women dedicated their lives to the betterment of girls and women, working as social reformers, educators, teachers and physicians.47 Del Martin, one of the founders of DOB, declared in 1959, “lesbians are women, and this twentieth century is the era of emancipation of women.”48 Moreover, many queer women were politicized in the 1960s and 1970s not through the homophile and gay liberation movements but through civil rights and feminist organizations, which culminated in the emergence of a wide range of lesbian organizations. From primarily white lesbian separatists who wanted to live communally and sustainably without men, to groups focusing on issues affecting radical African American women, such as the Combahee River Collective, these spaces offered critical theorizing about gender, patriarchal domination, lesbianism and intersectionality that remain pertinent today. The 1970s saw the emergence of gay and lesbian culture as never before, in the form of periodicals, bookstores, bars, athletic teams, books and theatrical and musical productions. As Jim Downs argued, in this decade gay people redefined homosexuality by showing the world that gay people could have a culture and should not be defined simply by their sexual acts.49 The rise of disco in the early 1970s alongside the burgeoning gay liberation movement brought the queer community, particularly gay men of color, new opportunities for intimacy, pleasure and joy on the dance floor, after many years of bar raids and surveillance.50 However, resistance to this increasingly visible gay subculture emerged on multiple fronts. In 1973, an act of arson at a New Orleans gay bar led to the death of thirty-two 207

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patrons.51 Sustained anti-gay sentiment also erupted from the burgeoning Christian Right, spearheaded by Baptist singer and orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant. After a non-discrimination ordinance was passed in Dade County, Florida in 1977, Bryant created the “Save Our Children” campaign, spreading the message that since gay people could not have children themselves, they had to recruit other people’s children to their sinister lifestyle. Further anti-gay legislation and the defeat of multiple gay rights bills across the country were immediate consequences of this widely publicized struggle between gay activists and the Christian Right.52 Also in 1977, San Francisco elected one of the first openly gay politicians, Harvey Milk, to the Board of Supervisors. Known as the “Mayor of Castro Street,” Milk was a beloved local figure who helped defeat the Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban gay people from being teachers. Weeks after the defeat of the anti-gay bill, Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by fellow Board of Supervisors member Dan White. When Milk’s assassin was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter instead of firstdegree murder in May of 1979, thousands of angry LGBT San Franciscans took to the streets of the Castro in what came to be known as the “White Night riots.”53 The 1970s gave way to the 1980s, one of the most difficult and traumatic periods of twentiethcentury LGBT history as the AIDS crisis came to dominate queer life. In 1981, newspaper and medical journal articles first appeared about gay men in major urban areas being diagnosed with pneumonia and rare cancers. AIDS was initially known as Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) because it was first detected among gay men in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and thus became associated with them. In the coming years it would become clear that while certain behaviors made some groups more susceptible than others, anyone could become a carrier. Nevertheless, the AIDS crisis further stigmatized gay male desire and identity just as the gay rights movement had been gaining momentum.54 Medical and governmental response to the crisis were so slow as to now be understood as willful negligence; President Ronald Reagan did not acknowledge and speak of the epidemic until 1985, when thousands of Americans had already lost their lives. AIDS activists then began waging a highly visible and successful fight to increase attention, research and funding for the virus.55 In particular, the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) took to the streets to protest government inaction, holding “die ins” and other planned actions and wielding signs with bold graphics and slogans like “SILENCE = DEATH.” Newly formed organizations such as New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation provided health services and education to a community held at arm’s length from many doctors and hospitals, as conservatives called for those infected to be quarantined or tattooed, among other inhumane “solutions.”56 At the same time, the burgeoning Christian Right declared AIDS a moral epidemic, which Anthony Petro examined in detail in After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. As Petro showed, figures such as Reverend Billy Graham pondered whether AIDS was “a judgment of God”; others were more sympathetic, but few Christian leaders saw gay men as innocent victims.57 To many conservatives, AIDS was deemed “the price of promiscuity”; the logical conclusion to the immoral “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.58 Despite such harmful discourse, by the mid-1990s research breakthroughs led to the discovery of protease inhibitors, an effective new treatment that helped stabilize people with HIV, leading to a drastic decrease in syndrome-related deaths. Such medical innovation came about primarily due to the insistence of AIDS activists fighting for new types of treatment.59 Despite these new developments, over 448,000 Americans died in the epidemic from 1980 to 2000.60 As George Chauncey shows, it was not until the AIDS crisis and the gay and lesbian “baby boom” of the 1980s and 1990s that the gay rights movement began to focus on fighting for marriage rights.61 In this era, a generation of gay men confronted the fact that their relationships “had no legal standing in the most ordinary, and profoundly consequential, ways.” Their partnerships were not recognized by hospitals, funeral homes or state agencies, which made dealing with a devastating illness all the more difficult.62 The early gay liberationists, inspired by other radical social movements, “were not looking for marriage and corporate jobs or acceptance into military or the church.”63 Rather, the 208

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New York branch of the Gay Liberation Front declared, “the complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come unless existing social institutions are abolished.”64 LGBT couples had long taken part in marriage-like rituals before the dawn of the movement for same-sex marriage, and starting in the 1970s, Metropolitan Community Churches regularly performed same-sex weddings for couples who had been together for at least six months.65 Similarly, as queer women began creating families with their partners and realized that only the birth mother would have legal rights to their children, securing the rights and protections bestowed through legal marriage became more of a focus within the larger movement for gay rights.66 The 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights called for the legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships, not yet through marriage, but through domestic partnerships providing the same entitlements that married heterosexuals received.67 By the early 1990s, some companies and universities began offering employees domestic partner benefits, which was a major breakthrough.68 However, as states such as Hawai’i began fighting to legalize same-sex marriage, in a preemptive move the U.S. Senate voted to pass the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), effectively clamping down on such efforts by declaring that marriage was defined only as the union of one man and one woman. Under DOMA, same-sex spouses in states granting marriage equality did not have access to federal benefits, and no state needed to validate same-sex marriages performed in another state. This was not the first setback for the queer community under the presidency of Bill Clinton. While Clinton received 75 percent of the gay and lesbian vote, he had done so making promises that he did not fulfill. For example, although he pledged to repeal the ban on gay people in the military through an executive order during his campaign as president, he introduced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), a 1994 policy that prevented discrimination against gay service men and women, but also mandated secrecy and silence upon penalty of dishonorable discharge.69 While DADT and marriage equality were issues at the forefront of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights, a growing faction within the LGBT community wanted no part in the fight for the right to serve in the military or to enter the institution of marriage. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activist groups such as ACT UP influenced and spawned a growing anti-assimilation movement, epitomized by the group Queer Nation. This grassroots political action group sought to raise queer visibility by holding events like “kiss ins” in suburban shopping malls. It also played a large role in the reclamation and popularity of the word “queer” itself.70 In an era when the mainstream gay rights movement was focused on marriage and the military, Queer Nation harkened back to the heady days of gay liberation. The organization sought to claim queer spaces and to “queer” heteronormative spaces, such as shopping centers, sports events and churches. While “queer” came to be used as a synonym for LGBT, it also suggested an anti-“homonormative” stance, as the fight for sexual freedom was not merely about gaining access to the privileges of marriage and family life. By the end of the century, queer activists were not only fighting for sexual freedom, but increasingly, for freedom from gender norms and the gender binary as well. Leslie Feinberg’s book Transgender Liberation and the formation of Transgender Nation, a Queer Nation affinity group, gestured to the burgeoning transgender rights movement that would gain momentum in the years to come.71 At the same time, mainstream gay visibility reached new heights at the end of the century with celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres coming out as a lesbian in Time magazine, and the advent of television shows such as Will & Grace. At the beginning of the next century, the influence of both of these strains can be witnessed through the arrival of national legal gay marriage on one hand and the rise of trans, non-binary and gender queer identities, communities and activism on the other. As this chapter has shown, the history of LGBT America is a dynamic field that has interwoven many important narratives into the larger story of the nation. Emphasizing the formation of new identities and communities and gaining freedom from discrimination and access to equal rights, LGBT history is part of social, cultural and political history. Ongoing work in the field seeks to connect these narratives to larger issues of the state, labor, race, migration and other significant areas of 209

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study. As the fight for full equality for LGBT people continues, historical analysis of the queer past shows no sign of slowing down. This growing field is making significant contributions to what we know about the lives of all Americans in the twentieth century.

Notes   1 John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, “Allan Bérubé and the Power of Community History,” in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, ed. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1; Steven Seidman, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142–144; George Haggerty, Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), x.   2 Lisa Duggan, “The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Gay and Lesbian History,” GLQ 2 (1995): 179–191.   3 Since the rise of queer theory/studies in the early 1990s, scholars have used the word “queer” as an umbrella term to contain a wide range of historical identities, behaviors and descriptors that generally refer to nonreproductive sex and relationships. As Jafari S. Allen has recently noted, while the term “queer” might be problematic, “no term, even those that may seem self-evidently local, indigenous, or autochthonous, is perfectly stable or synchronous with dynamic self-identification on the ground.” See Jafari S. Allen, “Black/ Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” GLQ 18, no. 2–3 (2012): 222.   4 Exceptions include: Marjorie Garber, Vice/Versa: Bisexuality and The Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).   5 For example, in one lesbian oral history community study, women spoke of “the pure versus the less-pure lesbian,” with the latter category referring to bisexual women. See Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), 386.   6 Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5.   7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).   8 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain From the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1990), 3.   9 Dr. James. G. Kiernan, “Responsibility in Sexual Perversion,” Chicago Medical Recorder 3 (May 1892): 185–210, cited in Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 10 George Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Desire,” Salmagundi 58–59 (Fall/Winter 1982–1983): 114–146; Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 557–575. 11 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 23. 12 Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 13 Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 14 Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” 566. 15 Chauncey, Gay New York, 257–263. 16 A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 17 George Chauncey, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 5–6. 18 Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 34. 19 Chauncey, Gay New York, 353. 20 Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 159. While some gay men were rejected from service during World War I, it was because they had records as “sex perverts,” not due to “homosexual personalities or tendencies.” See Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 13. 21 On the experiences of lesbians in WAC during WWII, see Leisa Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

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LGBT 22 Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire, 7. 23 Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 24 Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” The Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (December 2003): 936. 25 Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3. 26 While today the term “transgender” is preferred over “transsexual” as more inclusive, expansive and less focused on surgical interventions, the historical emergence of the latter term in the mid-twentieth century is still important to note. 27 Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1–2. 28 Vernon A. Rosario, Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 134–138. 29 In a nod to respectability politics, the word “homophile” was chosen over “homosexual” to avoid a focus on sex and sexuality and to instead highlight love, as “phile” came from the Greek word “philia” which meant “love.” See Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 5. 30 Ibid., 45–46. 31 ONE, “Statement of Beliefs and Purposes” (1953), cited in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 309. 32 Kevin Mumford, “The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969–1982,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (June 2011), 52. 33 David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 34 “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in the U.S. Government,” reprinted in Blasius and Phelan, We Are Everywhere, 243–244. 35 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980), 631–660. 36 Davis and Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. 37 At the time it was common to be arrested for cross-dressing; such state laws had been in place since the nineteenth century. See William N. Eskridge, Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 38 Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), 198. 39 Ibid., 197–199. 40 Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 187. 41 Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 82. 42 Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2008), 86. 43 Duberman, Stonewall, 211. 44 Mumford, “The Trouble with Gay Rights,” 55–56. 45 Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3. 46 Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–2. 47 Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), xxx–xxxi. 48 Faderman, The Gay Revolution, 227. 49 Jim Downs, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 192. 50 Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2011). 51 Clayton Delery-Edwards, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June24, 1973 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014). This was the largest homophobic mass killing in the U.S. before the recent 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. 52 Gillian Frank, “‘The Civil Rights of Parents’: Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant’s Campaign against Gay Rights in 1970s Florida,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (January 2013), 158. 53 Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 141. 54 Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, 225. 55 Ibid.; Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

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Cookie Woolner 56 Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, 230. 57 Anthony Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. 58 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 384. 59 Brier, Infectious Ideas, 147. 60 Sarah Watstein and John Jovanovic, Statistical Handbook on Infectious Diseases (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 47. 61 Chauncey, Why Marriage?, 3. 62 Ibid., 96, 103. The first court case to grant a same-sex couple any legal rights was Braschi v. Stahl Associates Co., a 1989 New York Court of Appeals case that decided that the surviving partner of a same-sex relationship counted as “family” under New York law. While the fight for domestic partnerships and unions began in the 1990s, few gay couples in the early AIDS crisis had such protections. 63 Tommi Avicolli Mecca, “Introduction,” in Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), xi. 64 GLF interview in underground newspaper The Rat cited in David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 219. 65 The Metropolitan Community Church was founded in 1968 by Reverend Troy Perry and eventually had hundreds of chapters, which “carried the inspirational message to gay people that God loves you.” See Downs, Stand by Me, 41. 66 Ibid., 110; Daniel Rivers’s work shows that such families had existed before the 1980s, however. See Daniel Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 67 Stein, Remaking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 169. 68 Chauncey, Why Marriage?, 116. 69 Craig A. Rimmerman, “A ‘Friend’ in the White House? Reflections on the Clinton Presidency,” in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, ed. John D’Emilio, William B. Turner and Urvashi Vaid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 45–48. 70 Bronski, A Queer History of the United States, xvii. 71 Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 86.

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20 AFRICAN AMERICANS AND CIVIL RIGHTS—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Clarence Taylor

Throughout American history people denied their constitutional rights and deprived of the rights and opportunities provided to others have taken part in social protest movements. Those involved in social protest have adopted strategies to pressure those in power to end the discriminatory and repressive measures denying them political and economic justice. The civil rights movement was the most important social protest movement of the twentieth century. The movement helped produce some important national leaders, such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, U.S. Congressman John Lewis and U.S. Congresswoman Eleanor Homes Norton. Countless numbers of people participated in civil rights campaigns across the nation helping to abolish legal segregation. The civil rights movement was the most significant social protest movement of the twentieth century because other social protest movements modeled themselves after it, including the Chicano movement, the women’s liberation movement and the gay and lesbian movement. The Great Migration helped fuel black social protest in the twentieth century. Immigration to the United States, mainly from eastern and southern Europe, helped it become an industrial power. However, the outbreak of World War I ended European immigration, forcing American industrialists to look for new sources of labor. Southern black workers became a viable source of new labor for northern industry. In order to convince black southerners to move north, labor agents representing northern industrialists traveled to the South advertising employment. In some cases, labor agents offered to pay the train fare for blacks to come north. In addition to labor agents, the black press published letters from earlier migrants who spoke of improved living conditions, economic and educational opportunities and a better racial atmosphere in the north. Southern racial terror helped spark the Great Migration. The system of Jim Crow that dehumanized black people and the extralegal means of enforcing it such as lynching helped drive blacks out of the south. The destruction of the cotton industry by an epidemic of the boll weevil forced an army of black farm workers off the land who were in need of work. Over a half million people from 1914 to 1918 moved from the south to the north. The Second Great Migration, from 1941 to 1970, was even larger, uprooting some 5 million people. Migration reshaped the urban landscape. Throughout the twentieth century black neighborhoods and black-operated institutions and organizations grew substantially. These included black churches and civil rights and civic organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The growth of black operated institutions and organizations provided African Americans with stronger voices of resistance to racial discrimination. 213

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One of the pivotal moments of the civil rights movement was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. When Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger, Montgomery’s black community organized to challenge both the arrest and the practice of legal segregation on local buses. An important figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott was E. D. Nixon, head of the local NAACP and member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Nixon also helped create the Montgomery Improvement Association. One of Nixon’s first acts after Parks’s arrest was to persuade Martin Luther King, Jr. to head the new organization and lead the boycott of public buses. Black citizens of Montgomery boycotted white owned businesses and stayed off the buses for over a year. Finally, on December 20, 1956 the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregation laws in public transportation were unconstitutional, ending the boycott successfully. The 1954 Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made legal segregation of schools unconstitutional. Brown gave hope to millions of black and white Americans and many anticipated the end of legal segregation. However, President Eisenhower did not take immediate action to enforce desegregation in public schools. Instead, black people themselves across the country attempted to ensure that segregation ended in public education. One of the most well-known cases was the battle of the Little Rock Nine at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, the school board of Little Rock agreed to desegregate its schools by sending nine African American high school students to the all-white Central High School. However, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard at the high school to prevent the nine from entering the high school. Although a court issued an injunction ordering the governor to withdraw the National Guard, when the students entered the school white demonstrators outside of the school ignited a riot. The nine had to be secretly escorted out of the school for their safety. Sparked by the riot and a request by the mayor of Little Rock, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock and nationalized the National Guard to assure that the students could safely enter the school. Thus, the federal government was forced to enforce the Brown decision. The case of the Little Rock Nine demonstrated the profound impact that local people could have on national government and powerful political figures. By 1961 activists launched several campaigns throughout the country, including Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration drive in McComb, Mississippi, and James Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi. One of the most significant was the 1961 Freedom Rides. Well over 400 black and white civil rights activists challenged segregation on interstate travel by riding in integrated teams across the South. Freedom Riders faced great danger in their effort for racial justice. A bus carrying Freedom Riders was set on fire and the riders were attacked in Anniston, Alabama by a vicious mob. When an angry crowd surrounded a Montgomery church where Martin Luther King, Jr. and supporters of the Freedom Riders were holding a rally, President Kennedy sent in federal marshals. The president’s action forced the governor of Alabama to send in the National Guard to protect King and his supporters. The action of the Freedom Riders persuaded Attorney General Robert Kennedy to petition the Interstate Commerce Commission for an order outlawing segregation in travel, which that body issued in September 1961. If the Freedom Riders convinced the Kennedy administration to take action on interstate travel, the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 moved the President to much broader measures. In the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began a boycott of downtown businesses, conducting sit-ins and demonstrations to protest racial segregation in Birmingham. In response to the protest, Public Safety Director Eugene “Bull” Conner used high-pressure water hoses and police dogs. However, the sight of nonviolent civil rights activists sprayed with powerful water hoses and attacked by dogs and hundreds of children thrown in jail shocked Americans. Moreover, the confrontation in Birmingham embarrassed Kennedy because 214

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it gave the United States’ Cold War adversaries opportunity to accuse America of human rights violations. In early May 1963, in response to the Birmingham campaign, Kennedy noted in what has become known as “An Ugly Situation in Birmingham” speech that his administration had been watching the crisis to see if there were violations of federal civil rights laws. His administration had been trying to get both sides together to come up with a settlement. The president sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham to try end “a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.”1 Although a settlement was reached that ended protest in Birmingham, national civil rights leaders would not end their own protests. In January 1963, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Negro American Labor Council and organizer of the 1941 March on Washington, called for a massive demonstration in the nation’s capital. The events in Birmingham and the civil rights leaders’ promise of continued demonstrations moved Kennedy to send a civil rights bill to Congress on June 19, 1963. However, the president did not live to see the passage of the act. President Johnson pledged his support for the Kennedy civil rights bill. Despite President Johnson’s support for the civil rights bill, southern senators launched an eightmonth filibuster, the longest in Senate history, to stop its passage. The breaking of the filibuster and the eventual passage of the bill were due to the support of Republican Everett Dirksen, the Senate Minority leader who used his power to get some fellow Republicans to embrace their civil rights heritage by voting in favor of the bill. Credit also has to be given to the NAACP’s chief lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, the United Auto Workers Union’s head counsel Joseph Rauh, civil rights activists, labor groups and ordinary Americans who wrote letters and lobbied Congress for the bill’s passage. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964. The 1964 Civil Rights Act helped end the system of Jim Crow, making it one of the most important pieces of federal legislation in the twentieth century. It required that voting rules be applied on a non-discriminatory basis. The act also outlawed discrimination in places of public accommodation such as hotels, restaurants and theaters. It banned discrimination in municipal and state-operated facilities. The law gave the U.S. Attorney General the authority to file suit against school systems that practiced racial, sexual and ethnic discrimination. Title VII of the act banned employers from racial, ethnic, sexual and religious discrimination. The march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama in 1965 was also one of the most crucial moments in the history of the civil rights movement because it led to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The march began on March 7 when 600 civil rights activists began walking from the city of Selma to the state capital demonstrating for the right to vote. After walking only six blocks and crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and local law enforcement attacked the marchers, forcing the demonstrators to retreat. The attack was televised nationwide and horrified millions of Americans who saw innocent fellow citizens tear gassed and beaten by law enforcement officers, some of whom were mounted on horseback. The attack was so brutal, the press called it “Bloody Sunday.” On March 9, two days after the first the first attempt to cross the bridge, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a symbolic march to the foot of the bridge and appealed to a federal district court for protection to lead a third march. Judge Frank Johnson ruled in favor of the demonstrators and on March 21 over 3,000 people began the march to the capital. By the time the demonstrators reached Montgomery, the number of people participating had grown to 25,000. In response to the march, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Act outlawed discriminatory practices such as literacy tests used to exclude blacks from voting. It gave the federal government oversight over elections in states where blacks were denied the franchise. The Voting Rights Act has turned the South from a region where a black person could be killed for 215

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attempting to vote to where the number of black elected officials is greater than any other region of the country. Black elected officials, according to a study by the Washington D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, have increased six-fold from 1970 to 2000.

King’s Last Campaign King’s last campaign took place in Memphis, Tennessee on behalf of striking sanitation workers. Rev. James Lawson, a close associate of King, asked him to come to Memphis to support the sanitation workers whose working conditions were deplorable. They worked long hours without overtime pay. There was no grievance procedure in place for the workers, no sick leave or paid vacation. They could be fired without due process. Their working conditions assured that they would remain in poverty. They decided to launch a strike in late March 1968 demanding union recognition.2 King’s support for the workers demonstrated his new direction in the civil rights movement. King contended that ending racial discrimination was not enough for people to achieve full equality. To help create a just society, economic barriers that trapped poor people of all races had to be eliminated. In 1968, King and SCLC launched the Poor People’s Campaign to address the problem of economic inequality. They demanded that every worker be assured a job that provided a living wage and an adequate income to those who could not find a job or were unable to work.3 King’s involvement in Memphis would cost him his life. Two days before leading a massive demonstration on behalf of the sanitation workers, King was assassinated on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.

Challenging the Popular View of the Civil Rights Movement For the most part, the popular image of the civil rights movement is too simplistic. In commercial films, commemorations, statements by political figures and former civil rights leaders and activists, the movement has been portrayed as a series of southern-based campaigns led by Martin Luther King, Jr. These campaigns began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Selma March. This popular view of the civil rights movement ignores the diverse makeup of the national organizations involved in the movement, as well as earlier campaigns and the northern fight for civil rights. The national civil rights movement was primarily made up of five national civil rights organizations that formed a coalition with the goal of winning voting rights and integration of public schools and public facilities. However, each of the national organizations emphasized different approaches to winning civil rights. The NAACP was the oldest civil rights organization in the country. Established in 1909 by black and white activists who wanted to end lynching, the organization had by the 1930s adopted the strategy of ending racial discrimination through the courts. The Urban League was the second oldest civil rights organization in the nation. Formed in 1910, it lobbied those in power as a means of ending racial discrimination. The more militant groups that made up the civil rights coalition were the SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). CORE, created in 1942, was made up of pacifists who adopted a Mohandas Gandhi-inspired philosophy of nonviolent resistance as both a tactic and philosophy. The SCLC was founded in 1957, a year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Known as the ministerial wing of the movement, the SCLC was led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and made up of ministers who also adopted nonviolent resistance when fighting for civil rights. SNCC grew out of the sit-in movement of 1960. In February of that year four students attending the then-named North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College in Greensboro decided to conduct a sit-in at the lunch counter of the local Woolworth store in an attempt to end the store’s racist policy of only serving white customers. Their actions encouraged other college students throughout the South who launched sit-in protests. In April 1960 student 216

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leaders of the sit-ins gathered at Shaw University and created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Similar to CORE and SCLC, SNCC adopted nonviolent resistance as a means of ending racial discrimination. Despite embracing a similar method as CORE and SCLC, SNCC adopted a different approach to leadership. SCLC relied on a top-down model. Its members believed that the ministers were the leaders of the movement and should control every aspect of civil rights campaigns. The ministers, especially Martin Luther King, Jr., were the face of the movement. When SCLC conducted a campaign, King and other ministers were the spokespeople. They decided on when and how a demonstration should be conducted and negotiated terms with those being targeted by the protest. SNCC, on the other hand, espoused a more democratic model of leadership. Adopting long-time civil rights activist Ella Baker’s group-centered leadership model, SNCC helped train those in the communities where it conducted demonstrations to take leadership of the campaigns. SNCC, realizing that any of its members could be killed, did not want the campaign to end because of their deaths. Thus, it was important that individual SNCC members did not become the face of the campaign. The different approaches to winning civil rights among the big five national organizations at times put them at odds with one another. A good example is the 1963 March on Washington, when over 200,000 people came to the nation’s capital calling for America to take action for “jobs and freedom.” However, just before the event, the NAACP and the Urban League threatened to pull out of the event if John Lewis, the head of SNCC, did not eliminate his criticism of the Kennedy Administration for not taking stronger action on civil rights. The NAACP and the Urban League had developed close ties to the administration and felt that any criticism of the president would endanger his support for the civil rights bill in Congress. After a meeting between John Lewis and other members of SNCC with the organizer of the march, A. Philip Randolph, who pleaded with SNCC to eliminate the criticism of the president in the name of unity, Lewis agreed to alter his speech.4 In addition to the national civil rights organizations, numerous civic and community groups, the most important of which were black churches, played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. The churches that were involved in the movement grew interdenominationally from those that were affiliated with predominantly white religious bodies such as Episcopalian and Presbyterian to historically black denominations such as Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Pentecostal. The contribution of black churches to the movement included providing space for meetings and helping to finance campaigns. The churches assisted in recruiting people for demonstrations and became centers for training in nonviolent disobedience. They also helped inspire and lift the spirits of participants at nightly meetings where people gathered to hear spirituals and other songs of encouragement, sermons from the clergy and testimonies from laypeople. Black churches became the headquarters for numerous campaigns in towns and cities throughout the nation.5

Beyond Ministerial Leadership Black religious leadership during the civil rights period extended beyond clerical figures, most of whom were men. Black churches helped mold a leadership style that emphasized cooperative values of democracy, equality and mutuality. The nurturing of cooperative values was usually outside the conventional avenues of ministerial training such as seminaries, ministerial alliances and denominational conventions that emphasized a hierarchical approach. Women played a crucial role in the Montgomery boycott. Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council, had her organization print of thousands of leaflets asking black Montgomery citizens to not ride the buses. Black women active in the boycott belonged to Baptist churches and were active in their choirs, missionary societies, usher boards and other auxiliaries. These women not only stayed off the buses, but also attended nightly meetings at churches and donated money to the campaign. For one year, amid threats, bombings and arrests, blacks stayed off the buses and boycotted 217

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businesses in the downtown area. The boycott demonstrated the power of community organizing and the role ordinary people could play in the fight for freedom. One civil rights leader who was instilled with the cooperative values of black church culture was Ella Baker. Born in the early part of the twentieth century in Norfolk, Virginia, she was raised in a religious home. Baker applied her religious values to politics. During the Depression she joined the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, eventually becoming national director of that organization. By 1941 she became an assistant field director of the NAACP and two years later she was appointed national director of branches. After leaving the NAACP, Baker joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, becoming the organization’s interim executive director. One of Baker’s most significant contributions to the movement came in 1960 when she attended a meeting of leaders of the sit-in movement at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The students at the meeting formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Baker became one of the group’s closest advisors. The students were guided by Baker and adopted her philosophy of participatory democracy, emphasizing group-centered leadership. Even though Baker and other women have not received the same national and international attention as male leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., they were pivotal to the success of the civil rights movement.6

A. Philip Randolph and the Long Civil Rights Movement One of the most important contributions to civil rights scholarship over the last decade has been the notion of the long civil rights movement. According to proponents of this view, the civil rights movement began decades before the Brown decision of 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. Recently, scholars writing on the long civil rights movement have noted the contributions to the movement by Asa Philip Randolph (1889–1979). Randolph was one of the most prominent black freedom fighters of the twentieth century. He was editor of the Messenger, a black socialist weekly; a labor organizer; president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first black labor union to be recognized by a major corporation; head of the March on Washington Movement; and convener of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1925 Randolph was asked to help the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in its fight to win the right to collectively bargain with its employer, the Pullman Company. George Pullman created the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1867. The most important components of Pullman’s operations were the porters. Pullman recruited former slaves to perform the various services required on the train to make passengers comfortable. The services included accepting and discharging customers, taking care of luggage, making the beds, changing the linen, cleaning the cars and waiting on passengers. Apparently, Pullman came to the conclusion that former slaves were the best people to perform these tasks because of their time spent in servitude. Hence, from the start of the Pullman Company’s incorporation, black men were relegated to the job of porter. By the 1920s the Pullman Company was the largest employer of black men in the United States. Porters were paid poorly, worked long hours and were treated badly by management. A porter’s monthly salary was less than an average white New York City factory worker. The company expected blacks to be grateful, loyal and obedient to their employer and management. They were also required to be polite to the passengers regardless of the circumstances. Because they depended on tips to supplement their meager wages, porters dared not challenge rude and disrespectful customers. Although the first generation of porters did not express their displeasure about their working conditions, the more educated black men who replaced the former slaves were more willing to articulate their dissatisfaction with their treatment. Randolph at first was reluctant to get involved in the Brotherhood’s struggle to win recognition as the collective bargaining agency for Pullman porters, but after he investigated their grievances he decided to help lead the campaign for recognition. Under his leadership, chapters of the BSCP were 218

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organized nationwide. The fight to win recognition took twelve years. The company employed a host of intimidation tactics, including creating and using a spy network, firing workers, persuading religious leaders and many of the black middle class to publicly denounce the Brotherhood and organizing a company union to undermine the Brotherhood’s legitimacy. The union’s membership, which had reached a high of nearly 7,000 in 1928, fell to around 770 by 1932. However, Randolph, the organizers and members of the BSCP persevered. Randolph and the BSCP did not only turn to porters to win recognition but also relied on support from community, labor and civic organizations. In particular, Randolph requested and received support from many in the various black religious communities. Black pastors allowed Randolph to hold BSCP meetings in their churches. When he addressed meetings of porters, Randolph did not speak of socialism but used the religious oratory with which many in the black community were acquainted. Finally, in 1937 the union won recognition after the passage of an amendment to the Railway Labor Act in 1934 giving Pullman porters and dining car cooks and waiters the right to organize and collectively bargain. Eventually the Railroad Mediation Board ordered an election for employee representatives for the porters, and the BSCP overwhelmingly won. By the summer of 1935, the Brotherhood began formal negotiations with the Pullman Company. The fact that Randolph and the members of the BSCP stayed the course and did not fold led to the union’s victory. Moreover, the BSCP should be seen as more than a labor organization. Randolph and leaders of the organization interpreted their struggle as one for civil rights. Throughout his public career, Randolph argued that civil rights must be linked to the rights of working people, and in numerous speeches and letters Randolph contended that the battle for recognition was to win dignity and respect for black people. When Nazi Germany began invading and occupying countries in Europe, American industries contracted with government to increase production of ships, tanks, guns and other items for defense. Despite the urgent need for tens of thousands of skilled workers to help in the production of these items, war production companies refused to hire blacks. The federal government refused to take steps to end the racial discriminatory actions of these industries. In fact, the administration publicly announced that it would continue to segregate black and whites who enlisted in the armed services. In response to this blatant discrimination, Randolph launched the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), which helped organize thousands of people of African origin in the United States to march on the nation’s capital in 1941, demanding that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issue an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry. In addition to Randolph, the March on Washington Committee included prominent black leaders such as Walter White of the NAACP and Lester Granger of the Urban League. Although Eleanor Roosevelt met with Randolph and White to ask them to call off the march, Randolph refused, insisting that the president first agree to ban discrimination in the defense industry. The threat of thousands of black people coming to Washington D.C. to protest convinced FDR to hold a meeting with Randolph and other march leaders in June of 1941. Although the president also attempted to convince Randolph to call off the march, he refused unless an executive order was issued. Eventually, FDR authorized his close ally, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, to work out a compromise with Randolph. That compromise was Executive Order 8802, banning employment discrimination in defense industries and government. FDR also created a temporary Fair Employment Practices Committee to help insure that defense manufacturers would not practice racial discrimination. In the wake of this major victory in forcing the government to take action against discrimination, Randolph agreed to call off the march. Randolph’s confrontation with FDR would not be the last time he clashed with a U.S. president. He believed that President Harry S. Truman’s 1947 call for a peacetime draft was an opportunity to demand an end to discrimination in the armed forces and announced a campaign of civil disobedience to force the president to issue an executive order ending segregation in the military. Truman responded by calling a meeting of prominent black leaders including Randolph, but nothing was resolved. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee considering the draft bill, Randolph 219

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warned that if segregation was not ended in the armed services, blacks would refuse to serve. Under pressure from Randolph and other black leaders and fearing the loss of the black vote in a close election, Truman decided to issue Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, ending discrimination in the United States military.7 Randolph’s prominence as a civil rights leader had faded by the time the modern civil rights movement emerged. New leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin of the Congress of Racial Equality and John Lewis and Diane Nash of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee moved to the forefront in the fight for racial justice. In addition, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam gained a great deal of attention condemning white racism and calling for the separation of races as the solution to the race problem in America. However, Randolph remained a respected figure in the civil rights community. In 1963 Randolph and Bayard Rustin suggested that a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom be organized. They met with black leaders and Randolph was selected as national director of the march, while Rustin was chosen as the march’s organizer. Civil rights groups, labor unions, civic organizations and prominent individuals endorsed the endeavor. President Kennedy met with March organizers and expressed fear that violence was going to erupt in the streets, thereby harming the chances of passing his proposed civil rights bill. The civil rights leaders did not back down. Randolph responded to Kennedy by pointing out to him that blacks were already in the streets and that it would be better for them to come under the influence of civil rights leaders. To ensure a positive tone from speakers at the event, Randolph convinced John Lewis, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to alter his speech calling for a scorched earth policy to win civil rights. Despite Kennedy’s reluctance, on August 28, 1963, 250,000 people came to the to the nation’s capital, making the March on Washington one of the most memorable events in modern American history. The most outstanding moment of the march was when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.8 In 1964 Randolph created the A. Philip Randolph Institute to strengthen the ties between labor and civil rights organizations. He contended that the civil rights movement needed the help of labor to help advance economic justice for African Americans. In 1965 the Institute created the A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund to establish a forum where people could discuss strategies for social justice. The Fund was a think tank for the civil rights movement. Due to ill health, Randolph retired from his position as president of the BSCP and vice-president of the AFL-CIO executive council in 1968. He died on May 16, 1979 at the age of 89.9

Northern Civil Rights Another important contribution to civil rights scholarship over the last two decades has challenged the popular view of civil rights campaigns outside the South. Scholars writing on the northern civil rights movement note that the movement, as in the South, fought for integrated schools and access to public accommodations. However, a major issue for the northern movement was stopping police brutality against black citizens. As early as the 1920s black people organized to challenge police brutality, which many viewed as a form of racial terror sanctioned by the state. The Brooklyn branch of the National Equal Rights League, an early civil rights organization headed by the Reverend Thomas Harten of Holy Trinity Baptist Church, led demonstrations against police assaults of blacks. In July 1925, 2,000 people attended a National Equal Rights rally at Holy Trinity protesting the “apparent propaganda of racial prejudice and oppression carried on by the police force in Brooklyn.”10 Several black men had been picked up and brought in for questioning in an investigation of the murder of a white woman. The protesters at Holy Trinity created a committee to call upon the district attorney of Brooklyn and demand an end to police harassment of black men. Another National Equal 220

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Rights League rally at Holy Trinity attracted 1,000 people protesting the beating of a black woman by a policeman. A few days later Harten led a crowd of hundreds of protesters to Brooklyn Borough Hall. The protesters demanded that officials take action against the police officer. The protests against police brutality proved that social protest against racial injustice existed long before the 1950s.11 Northern civil rights demands also included equal treatment in public services and employment. Long before the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, Harlem, which contained the largest black community in the country, had a bus boycott. Harlem residents complained that the New York City’s Omnibus Corporation had adopted a policy of excluding blacks from employment. In 1941, there were no black bus drivers or mechanics working for Omnibus. The Harlem Labor Union, an independent labor organization that campaigned for jobs for Harlem residents, began demonstrating at bus stops. The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., head of the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, teamed up with the Manhattan branch of the National Negro Congress and the Harlem Labor Union to launch a boycott of the Omnibus Corporation, demanding that it hire blacks as bus drivers and mechanics. Scholars of the Northern civil rights movement have argued that the movement was indigenous, relying on both local leadership and community organizations. This was true in the Harlem Bus Boycott. Black churches helped provide charismatic leadership, raised funds for civil rights campaigns and gave ordinary people the opportunity to participate in social protest movements. Powell helped draw hundreds of people to his church in support of the bus boycott; one rally drew over 1,500 protesters. Supporters of the boycott donated money and were inspired by speeches from Powell at its headquarters in the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Labor supported the boycott through Michael Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union. Quill also agreed to open membership of the TWU to blacks. Boycotters demonstrated at bus stops throughout Harlem as well as other places in the community. Those writing on the Montgomery Bus Boycott note that activists organized carpools to help transport boycotters. This strategy was also used in the Harlem Bus Boycott. Boycotters used taxis and the subway, both of which were affordable for working-class people. Over 60,000 people stayed off the Omnibus daily, causing great financial difficulty for the company. After one month of boycotting, protesters were able to force Omnibus to the negotiating table. In the end, the company agreed to hire one hundred blacks as drivers and mechanics. In addition, the company agreed to ensure that 17 percent of its workforce was black. The Congress of Racial Equality was at the forefront of New York City’s civil rights organizations, demanding that blacks receive fair treatment in services and jobs. Brooklyn’s CORE was the first CORE chapter to use direct militant action such as picketing and sit-ins. Its diverse membership consisted of both young blacks and whites and middle-age militants who had been involved in radical politics since the 1940s. Starting in the summer of 1962 Brooklyn CORE initiated “Operation Clean Sweep,” demanding that city officials end their discriminatory practice of providing unequal sanitation services to the predominantly black community of Bedford-Stuyvesant. In order to put pressure on the city to act, Brooklyn CORE organized Bedford-Stuyvesant residents and dumped garbage on the steps of City Hall. In the summer of 1963 Brooklyn CORE also launched a dual campaign against bias in the construction industry and unemployment in black communities, demanding jobs for blacks and Puerto Ricans at the Downstate Medical Center project. Downstate was also chosen because of the racially discriminatory policies practiced by the numerous building and construction trade unions working on the project. CORE asked the black clergy of Brooklyn to assist in the campaign. The black ministers stepped to the forefront by organizing the Ministers’ Committee for Job Opportunities. For two weeks hundreds of protesters, including many members of the black churches of Brooklyn, denied trucks entrance to the work site by lying down in the streets. By the end of the protest over seven hundred people had been arrested. The Downstate campaign helped focus attention on the construction 221

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industry, one of the most discriminatory in the county. The campaign forced state, city and union officials to take action against racial discrimination in that industry. In addition, they helped make people aware that racial discrimination was not limited to the South. It was also a Northern problem. The largest civil rights campaign in the country took place in New York City in the winter of 1964. It was led by the Reverend Milton Galamison, pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, and president of the grassroots organization Parents Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools. Galamison became a vocal critic of the New York City Board of Education for not ending segregation in the public schools. Soon after the Brown decision, City College of New York psychology professor Kenneth Clark accused the New York City Board of Education of deliberately segregating its schools. Although Board officials publicly supported the Brown decision, they made little effort to desegregate the school system. Instead, Superintendent of Schools William Jansen argued that segregation in New York was not due to any deliberate attempt on the board but a result of housing segregation. While not condoning segregation, Jansen contended that he supported the neighborhood school concept, arguing that children should attend schools in their own communities. The Brooklyn branch of the NAACP, headed by Galamison, pointed out that even when black and white children lived near one another, the Board zoned them to different schools. In 1960, Galamison resigned the presidency of the Brooklyn NAACP and organized the Parents Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools. This interracial organization pressured the Board to come up with a plan to integrate the schools. In 1963 Galamison became head of the City-Wide Committee for School Integration, a group that consisted of the New York branches of the NAACP, CORE and the Harlem Parents Committee. On February 3, 1964 the City-Wide Committee launched a school boycott in an attempt to force the New York City Board of Education to formulate a timetable and plan to integrate the public schools. Over 460,000 students, or about 45 percent of the student body, stayed out of school. There were demonstrations at hundreds of schools in the city and thousands marched to the Board of Education. Despite the success of the boycott, the coalition soon fell apart. Some of the participants accused Galamison of acting arbitrarily by calling for a second boycott. Although Galamison carried out a second boycott, it was half the size of the first. By 1965 it was clear to many activists and parents that the Board of Education was not coming up with a timetable and plan for citywide school integration. Many of these activists and parents instead began to demand community control of the schools. They reflected a new sentiment that was sweeping the nation. Instead of calling for integration, blacks began to demand empowerment. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality switched from propounding the “beloved community” to advocating Black Power. Moreover, new leaders emerged in the freedom struggle who were committed to Black Power objectives rather than goals advocated by mainstream civil rights leaders. By the late 1960s, civil rights had been supplanted by Black Power.12 Over the last decade a number of works have focused on civil rights in the West. One of the best works is Robert Self ’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Self examined the rise of the Black Power and conservative tax reform movements in Oakland during the 1960s and 1970s. Self noted how Oakland transformed in the 1940s from a city that attracted working class whites and blacks and benefited from New Deal programs. The attempt to build Oakland into a viable city was undermined by political figures and real estate developers, who created new tax markets that enriched the suburbs. In addition, urban renewal and the construction of new highways and port services devastated the predominantly black community of West Oakland. Self ’s work challenged the popular argument that the Black Power era was a period of decline in the Black Freedom struggle. Instead, he portrayed Black Power as a continuation of the freedom struggle. Black Power advocates turned to municipal politics in an attempt to address the concerns of black Oakland. However, they were faced with a growing tax reform movement that was successful in severely limiting funding to urban centers like Oakland.13 222

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Another important work is Mark Brilliant’s The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978. Brilliant maintained that California, with its racial diversity, had a broad based civil rights movement. The author called California America’s “civil rights frontier.” His focus was on legal and legislative initiatives pursued by a host of reformers. They included liberal lawyers, lawmakers and leaders in statewide civil rights organizations. In the 1950s civil rights laws addressing employment and housing discrimination were passed in the state. However, various racial minorities addressed their own particular grievances without probing into the ways in which their agenda impacted other groups. By the late 1950s there was no unified effort to fight discrimination. Politicians championed the anti-discrimination agenda of particular groups while alienating others. In the mid-1960s, California Governor Ronald Reagan and Republican leaders effectively exploited ethnic and racial differences by opposing African American civil rights while supporting some of the objectives of Mexican American such as bilingual education. This resulted in the breakup of the Democratic coalition. Brilliant’s focus on civil rights battles in California demonstrated the complicated history of pursuing social justice in a multiracial environment.14

Myths of the Post-Civil Rights Era Many writers, scholars and activists contend that the civil rights movement is over and we are now in a new “post-civil rights era.” Proponents of the post-civil rights notion contend that the civil rights movement was successful in its goal of eliminating legal discrimination. They also agree that black America is now facing a new set of problems not addressed by the civil rights objectives and tactics of a generation ago. Advocates of the post-civil rights idea fail to see that the struggle for civil rights has always been a broader political project. Many involved in the civil rights movement consistently spoke about more than just the eradication of legal discrimination. Eliminating economic inequality was an important objective of the movement.15 The August 1963 March on the Nation’s Capital was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph, one of its key organizers, linked the black struggle to class and economic justice. The organizers of the 1963 march wrote that “America faces a crisis, millions of Negroes are denied freedom, millions of citizens, black and white are unemployed,” and they demanded “meaningful civil rights laws,” “massive federal works programs” and “full and fair employment.”16 Martin Luther King, Jr. not only contended that the goals of the civil rights movement were to win the right to vote, gain equal access to public accommodations and end school segregation, but also to win economic security for millions who were in poverty. As early as 1958, a year after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized, King called for economic justice for black and white workers. “Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims,” King declared.17 In 1963 King also called for a G. I. Bill for the poor.18 King continued his quest for economic democracy until his death. Going beyond the issues of voting rights and public accommodation, he noted the importance of health care as a civil rights issue and launched the Poor People’s Campaign.19 In an essay published shortly after his death, King made a case for what would later become “affirmative action”: Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate heath care—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms. This fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain prices. The 223

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desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and appointment of a few black public officials.20 The argument that we are in a post-civil rights era that calls for “imaginative” and “innovative” goals and strategies that include “self-help” and the reformation of black behavior ignores compelling evidence that racism still matters and is still having a devastating impact on black America. Now more so than ever, Americans need to help accomplish the objectives of equality and justice that civil rights leaders and activists fought and died for a generation ago.

Notes   1 President John F. Kennedy’s Statement and Press Conference about Violence in Birmingham, May 8, 1963, www.pbs.org./wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/ps.c.html, accessed 3 February 2017.   2 Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007).   3 “Goals of the Poor People’s Campaign,” PBS-1968. www.pbs.org.wbgh/anex/eyesonthe prize/sources/ps_ poor.html. Also see Honey, Going Down Jericho Road.   4 Among some of the best works on the NAACP are Patricia Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2010); Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).   5 Some of the best works on the civil rights movement and ministerial leadership are Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1984); Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Glenn S. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).   6 Some of the best works on women and civil rights movement are: Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks (New York: Beacon Press, 2014).   7 A good book on A. Philip Randolph’s effort to integrate the armed forces is David Welky, Marching Across the Color Line: A. Philip Randolph and Civil Rights in the World War II Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).   8 For the March on Washington see William P. Jones, The March on Washington, Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014); Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America During the King Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).   9 Since 2008 there has been a growing scholarship on Randolph and the civil rights movement. Some of the best works on Randolph and civil rights are Cornelius L. Bynum, A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 10 Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 123 11 Ibid. pp. 123-124 12 Over the last decade historians have turned to the northern civil rights struggle. Among the most notable works are Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Story for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2006); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015); Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 13 Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 14 Mark Brilliant, The Color of America has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15 Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 843.

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21 LATINO/A HISTORY—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Felipe Hinojosa

In 2016, President Obama made an historic visit to Cuba. The first U.S. president in eighty-eight years to visit Cuba, Obama was there to begin the diplomatic process of normalizing relations between the two nations. The president met with Cuba’s president, Raul Castro, visited the José Marti monument in Havana, had a private meeting with political dissidents and took in a baseball game between the Cuban national team and the Major League team, the Tampa Bay Rays. Adding to the geopolitical drama of the president’s visit was the fact that it took place against the backdrop of a hotly contested presidential election where two Cuban Americans were vying for the Republican nomination in 2016. Both candidates opposed the president’s visit to Cuba, even as most Cubans on the island and the U.S. agreed it was time to fix diplomatic ties with Cuba. Aside from the political theatrics, President Obama’s visit shined a light on Cuban and Cuban American communities in particular and Latino politics in general. The case of Cuba is one piece— granted a rather large piece in U.S. diplomatic history—of the larger Latino experience in the United States. It is a window into how the shared legacies of colonialism and immigration have shaped the Latino experience in the United States throughout much of the twentieth century. Today Latinos make up 17.3 percent of the total U.S. population. Most reside in California, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Florida, New York and New Jersey, but increasingly Latinos are settling in the Midwest, the South and the Pacific Northwest.1 The current waves of Latino immigration are part of larger historical trends that date back to the middle of the nineteenth century. And yet, Latinos remain absent or often misrepresented in most U.S. history textbooks, treated as new immigrants with no real historic connection to the nation. As a field of study, Latino history is relatively new. Its lineage is tied to the foundational fields of Chicana/o and Puerto Rican studies that emerged as a result of student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chicana/o and Puerto Rican studies aimed to tell the stories of community formation and political struggle that have left an indelible mark on American culture and history. The emergence of these fields of study came at the same time that the field of U.S. history experienced its own transformation. Following what historian Michael Kammen called the “historiographical whirlwind” of the 1960s and 1970s, historians turned away from political and social institutions as central categories of analysis and increasingly examined everyday social and cultural life.2 Latino history, then, is a field of study that brings together multiple national origin groups—from Cubans to Mexicans— whose shared struggles for citizenship rights in the face of limited social mobility, racialization and varied immigration histories have unified Latina/o communities in the United States. This chapter tells their story.3 226

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Colonial Legacies: 1848 and 1898 The years 1848 and 1898 hold particular importance in Latino history as both are tied to colonial shifts by the United States into Latin America and the Caribbean: The expansion of slavery, access to important ports in the Gulf of Mexico, a presence on the Pacific coast and the elimination of the threat of rival nations all drove Euro-Americans West. In 1846 the U.S. declared a war of aggression against Mexico to expand its landholdings all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Historian Ernesto Chávez has argued that this was an “expansionist war” that “also proved to be one of the causes of the Civil War” as the move west fired up debate about whether slavery would be expanded to the new territories.4 The war ended with Mexico ceding over half of its northern territory with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Almost immediately, approximately 115,000 Mexican families found themselves foreigners in their native land. Even with some of the limited protections of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by the end of the nineteenth century Mexicans lost their lands, suffered violence and racism and were relegated to low-wage labor across the Southwest.5 And as the nation set its eyes on further expansion, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other groups would suffer a similar fate at the hands of the Euro-Americans. Growing industrialization and productivity during the second half of the nineteenth century prompted a search for external markets and strategic locations for economic expansion. In the 1890s two islands in the Caribbean fit that requirement: Cuba and Puerto Rico. At the time Cuba was engaged in a struggle for independence from Spain. While the United States was not initially involved in that struggle, calls for intervention came in 1898 after a U.S. battleship, the USS Maine, mysteriously sank off the coast of Havana. As a result, Congress declared war on Spain on April 24, 1898. In what Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war,” the Spanish-American War ended after only a few months of fighting with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898. As a result, Spain gave up control of Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (for $20 million) to the United States.6 The acquisition of these territories continued the trend set by the colonization of Mexico, not so much in terms of territorial expansion but in economic and military control. In Cuba, for example, the U.S. established the Platt Amendment, which gave it the right to intervene in Cuban affairs as it deemed fit. Securing trade routes and economic stabilization prompted an extension of the Monroe Doctrine in 1904 that gave the United States the right to intervene militarily in the Caribbean in order to protect its economic interests. This invariably opened the door to continued interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. For the island of Puerto Rico, the question of statehood remained mired in congressional debates about how full incorporation of the island “would bring into the Union areas populated by inferior races.”7 Even after Congress passed the Foraker Act in 1900, which organized a civilian government for Puerto Rico and replaced the military rule, Puerto Rico continued to be defined as a foreign territory. The “inferior races” debate in Puerto Rico paralleled the debate that U.S. politicians and intellectuals engaged in over territories in the Southwest and the supposed “Mexican problem.” Not surprisingly, these debates reflected the social and political climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Consider that the same Supreme Court that legalized racial segregation in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson later affirmed the colonial condition of Puerto Rico and solidified it as the “colony of the American century.”8 At the dawn of the twentieth century, the colonial projects that began with the annexation of Mexico had extended to the Caribbean and points further south in Latin America. As the United States grappled with its growing power and economic influence around the globe, increased immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean revealed how white supremacy, rooted in anti-black and anti-Mexican violence, would adversely affect the lives of Latino and Latina immigrants in the United States.

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The Immigrant Generation: Violence, Citizenship Rights and Education During the first half of the twentieth century, a perfect storm of revolution in Mexico and labor shortages in the United States forced large numbers of Mexican immigrants to flee their home country. Between the 1910s and 1920s nearly 1 million Mexicans entered the United States, heavily recruited to work in places like the steel mills of south Chicago, the cotton fields of central Texas and the copper mines of Arizona. The number of Puerto Ricans and Cubans migrating to the mainland during this period remained low and those who did migrate were either well-educated or working-class cigar workers. In 1917, the Jones Act granted United States citizenship to all Puerto Ricans, but the number of migrants to the mainland remained low until the years after World War II.9 While the immigrant experiences of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans differed along the lines of citizenship and sheer number, both groups forged movements for dignity and civil rights during this early period. The Puerto Rican “Pioneer Migrants,” as scholars have called them, organized nationalist groups in New York that stood for the independence of Puerto Rico.10 One of the most important figures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was Arturo Schomburg, who in 1891 moved to New York City and joined the struggle for Puerto Rican and Cuban independence. A Puerto Rican of African descent, Schomburg became a black nationalist and internationalist whose work was central to the pan-Africanist visions of the Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionary clubs at the time. In 1918 Bernardo Vega and Jesús Colón organized a Spanish language branch of the U.S. Socialist Party and the following year organized “Alianza Obrera” to forge a common socialist agenda. From the beginning, Puerto Rican politics in the United States were tied to social justice movements around the globe, especially because of the island’s colonial status in relation to the United States. The possibility of incorporating an “inferior race” of Puerto Ricans whose democratic ideals were considered suspect at best worried many U.S. lawmakers. These same fears kept the territories of New Mexico and Arizona from not becoming states until 1912 when a sufficient number of EuroAmericans settled the territory. In Texas, violence against Mexicans had become an epidemic at the turn of the century. Historians William Webb and Clive Carrigan found that in the early twentieth century Mexicans in Texas “faced unparalleled danger from mob violence . . . [and] lived with the threat of lynching throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.”11 The mob violence against Mexicans was alarming. Carrigan and Webb suggest that nearly 600 Mexicans were lynched in Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The threat of violence and the desire to build dignified communities inspired Mexican and Mexican American leaders to mount a series of resistance movements in Texas and across the Southwest. In 1911 Nicasio Idar, editor of the La Cronica newspaper in South Texas, called leaders together for the Primer Congreso Mexicanista as a way to strategize against the racial discrimination Mexicans faced and the segregation of Mexican children in public schools. This type of organizing was typical in the Southwest as groups like the Alianza Hispano Americana (started in 1890s) and La Liga Protectora Latina, both in Arizona, organized to protect Mexican and Mexican American families against the threat of violence. The most explosive form of resistance took place in 1915 with the Plan de San Diego in South Texas. The revolutionary plan proposed to reclaim the Southwest for Mexicans, Indians, Japanese and African Americans and all other oppressed people. While the plan was discovered before the revolution could take shape, the rebels did launch attacks on irrigation stations, railroads and called for the death of all white men over the age of 16. The organizers of the Plan de San Diego were concerned about the increased racial discrimination that had come as a result of the increasing capitalist and industrial development in South Texas.12 The Plan de San Diego and the racist backlash that it sparked, mostly from the trigger-happy Texas Rangers, helped “turn Mexicans into Americans,” as historian Ben Johnson put it, and ushered in a political shift that prompted Mexican Americans to frame their cause as citizens of the United States.13

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The “Mexican American” generation that emerged during this time stressed citizenship, acculturation to U.S. society and, as historian Lorena Oropeza argued, a “politics of supplication” that differed from the radical movements of the early twentieth century.14 For Mexican Americans, these were deliberate strategies as they faced increased anti-immigrant rhetoric in the 1920s. A series of new immigration laws enacted in 1921 (Emergency Quota Act) and 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) limited immigration from eastern and southern Europe and restricted immigration from Asia. Even as Mexican immigration to Texas “constituted a ‘second color menace’ in the western South,” its value as a cheap labor source was large enough to keep it out of most restrictionist immigration policies enacted during this time.15 The onset of the Great Depression, however, changed that as Mexicans were targeted by local and federal officials in a repatriation campaign that in the 1930s deported nearly 500,000 Mexicans, 60 percent of whom were citizens of the United States.16 The politics of the 1920s gave rise to one of the oldest and strongest Latino civil rights organizations: the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Organized in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas, by a new generation of leaders that considered “themselves part of a progressive and enlightened leadership elite,” LULAC became the most important civil rights organization for Mexican Americans during the middle part of the twentieth century.17 Historian Ignacio García has argued that much of the defining philosophy of LULAC centered on a belief “in the fundamental goodness and ‘fairness’ of American society.”18 In terms of social justice movements, the middle part of the twentieth century gave rise to multiple political strategies from the Mexican American population. In San Antonio, labor organizer Emma Tenayuca emerged as a powerful voice in the 1930s when she organized workers for higher wages at the Southern Pecan Shelling Company. Groups like El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (1939) formed an agenda around labor and civil rights that incorporated Latino immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos. The FBI later targeted many of these groups with heavy surveillance and in some cases Latina/o activists were deported without warning for their activities. LULAC, on the other hand, thrived in the 1940s and 1950s as a group set on working within the political system to bring about social change. Nowhere was this more important than in challenging the de facto segregation of Mexican school children. So-called Mexican schools populated the landscape across Texas, where by the 1940s 122 school districts in fifty-nine counties across the state had operated segregated Mexican schools.19 While Mexicans were classified as “white,” and thus not subject to de jure segregation like African Americans, they were nonetheless considered a “separate class” by school districts and administrators in Texas in order to justify segregationist practices. The struggle for educational equality had two main components: a focus on the public schools and a focus on the community.20 The group’s first court case came in 1930 with Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra. While the judge granted an injunction against the school district, a Texas court of appeals voided the decision. Regardless of the outcome, the case spurred the growth of LULAC throughout the state and helped launch communication efforts that coalesced around the movement to end segregation of Mexican American school children. This case was followed by a series of court victories across Texas and the Southwest that slowly dismantled the system of school segregation of Mexican school children. The most significant case came in 1946 with Méndez v. Westminster, which was the first federal court case to hold that separate schools for children of color were not equal. The federal court in California found that the Westminster school district in Santa Ana segregated Mexican American children because of the color of their skin and their surnames. Soon after the court victory, California started closing down Mexican schools across the state. The landmark case paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ended legal segregation in public schools for African Americans. The first half of the twentieth century gave rise to multiple movements for civil rights that emerged among Puerto Ricans in the Northeast and Mexican Americans in the Southwest. The struggles of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans remained separate for the most part. But that would change with the onset of World War II when wartime industries brought both groups into closer contact as 229

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Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans migrated west and to the urban north. The years during and immediately after World War II saw the convergence of Latino communities as the fight for citizenship rights intensified.

Latinos at Mid-Century: Migration, Labor and War In the post-World War II era, scholars reassessed the role of race and ethnicity in American culture. Consensus, not conflict, became their organizing principle. With greater assimilation and social contact, sociologists argued, the days of blatant discrimination were numbered.21 These works shaped how scholars began interpreting the large numbers of Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York in the postwar era. Oscar Handlin’s classic work The Newcomers (1962), for example, argued that overpopulation on the island had led to a surplus of workers, most of whom left the island for better opportunities.22 Still others argued that the large number of Puerto Ricans leaving the island had more to do with the industrialization programs launched by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. In 1935 President Roosevelt instituted the Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) as a means to address the social and economic problems of the island. During its tenure, the PRRA built 178 rural and urban schools and instituted recreational programs in the arts, clubs and sports. By 1938 an estimated 120 million dollars had been injected into the island, bringing about massive changes to the island’s infrastructure.23 In 1948 Governor Luis Muñoz Marín instituted “Operation Bootstrap,” which offered incentives including tax breaks to U.S. companies to invest or relocate to the island. While industrialization led to some improvements, the corporatization of the island displaced many rural farmers and propelled the largest migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland in history. The lack of employment on the island along with U.S.-sponsored labor recruitment programs compelled thousands of Puerto Ricans to leave the island in the years after World War II. Historian Virginia Sánchez-Korrol found that over 4,200 Puerto Ricans arrived on the mainland every year between 1946 and 1956. The number of Puerto Ricans grew from nearly 70,000 in the 1940s to almost 900,000 in the 1960s. Most settled in New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago.24 Reasonably priced flights from San Juan to New York made the migration possible for many who otherwise had limited options. For Puerto Ricans, the migration experience served as a watershed moment in the development of a Puerto Rican identity in the postwar era. In his seminal work, Divided Borders (1993), Juan Flores argued that migration patterns at the turn of the twentieth century and in the postwar era served as critical points in the development of Puerto Rican identity.25 In New York City, where nearly 85 percent of Puerto Ricans put down roots, East Harlem (better known as El Barrio) and the Bronx were popular destinations. Aside from mutual aid and labor organizations, the Catholic Church and small storefront Pentecostal churches served as important orienting points. Nearly 60 percent of the newly arrived migrants attended Pentecostal churches in El Barrio.26 A desire to recreate Puerto Rico in New York moved many to maintain cultural and kinship bonds through music, food, religion and activism. Women were especially important in forging community organizations in Puerto Rican communities. One of the most recognized figures was Antonia Pantoja, who in the 1950s set in motion a movement to hire bilingual teachers and organized the Hispanic American Youth Association. In 1961 Pantoja founded ASPIRA (Spanish for “Aspire”) as a way to develop leaders, provide pathways for Puerto Ricans to attend college and work to reform the public education system of New York City. As the Puerto Rican population migrated north in large numbers, Mexican immigration also spiked upward. Like labor recruitment programs for Puerto Ricans, Mexican workers were recruited through the Bracero Program to meet labor needs at the height of World War II. With more than 500,000 Mexican American men and women serving in the war, Mexican workers, or Braceros, were recruited to work in the agricultural fields of central California and industries like the railroad and 230

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steel mills in South Chicago. From the beginning of the program until its official end in 1964, the working and living conditions of most Braceros prompted organizations like the National Farm Labor Union led by Ernesto Galarza to launch a number of labor strikes. The paltry working and living conditions of Mexican workers was symptomatic of a larger antiMexican sentiment that thrived on the home front during World War II. Nowhere was this more evident than on the streets of Los Angeles in 1943, when hundreds of Mexican American youth who fashioned the “Zoot Suit” style were violently attacked by white servicemen. Mexican American youths who wore the drape pants and fingertip-length coats were stripped of their clothes and beaten in front of crowds who supported the violence. The attacks stemmed from the xenophobic anxieties and a sense that non-white youth were a weight on a nation mired in a war overseas. The years after World War II witnessed increased political activism by Latinas/os—many of whom were returning war veterans—for full inclusion into society. While the United States promoted “democracy” across the globe, Latinas/os mobilized political movements on the home front for democratic equality. Driving much of this activism was the politics of the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, which pitted “godless communism” against Western, and “godly,” capitalism. This epic geopolitical battle hit full force in 1959 when a young group of rebels led by Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba’s president and took over the country. The United States responded out of political fear that Cuba might succumb to the pressures of the Soviet Union and create a domino effect where other countries in the Western hemisphere might fall to communist rule. The Cuban revolution forced thousands of Cubans to leave the island in the years after 1959. While immigration from Cuba dates back to the nineteenth century, Castro’s revolution set in motion the largest movement of Cubans to the United States. The first wave of refugees, most of whom were white and of the professional class, numbered nearly 250,000 and arrived in south Florida between 1959 and 1962. To deal with the crisis, President Eisenhower called on charitable organizations to help pay for much of the resettlement. The political winds changed, however, when the Kennedy administration established the Cuban Refugee Program in 1961. The program provided financial assistance for Cuban refugees, small business loans and professional training programs. By 1974 the program had resettled 299,326 of the 461,373 Cubans who registered with them. With the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, Cubans were not only given formal permission to stay in the country, but also afforded a pathway to citizenship. No other Latin American immigrant group has received the welcome that Cubans did in the immediate years after 1959. That privileged immigration status has marked Cuban American history as an exception to the broader Latino experience in the United States. But that exception obscures more than it reveals, especially since much of Cuban American history tends to leave out the Afro-Cuban population. While their numbers were initially small—in the years after 1959 black Cubans made up between 3 and 9 percent of the exile community—their experiences in the United States differed radically from their white compatriots. Most black Cubans avoided south Florida and instead settled in the New York/New Jersey area.27 By 1970 the number of exiles from the professional class diminished significantly, down to 12 percent, while the number of working class exiles rose to 60 percent. This second wave of Cuban migration came after 1965 when Fidel Castro announced that people with relatives in the United States would be allowed to leave the island. The United States government immediately began chartering between 3,000 to 4,000 flights every month for those who wished to emigrate. By 1977 more than a half a million Cubans had resettled in the United States. Miami was the center of Cuban life, as it was home to half of the 800,000 Cubans in the United States by 1980. The New York area came in second with more than 150,000 Cubans spread across New York and New Jersey.28 While Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans fought for civil rights under a cloud of suspicion, the first wave of Cuban exiles wanted nothing to do with anti-racist movements that criticized the government of the United States. Part of the reason, of course, had to do with the privileged status 231

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Cubans held, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. According to historian Devyn Benson, Cuban exiles “received nearly four times the financial aid that African Americans received and most of them were white and middle and upper class.”29 This is not to say that Cuban Americans were completely absent from civil rights activism. In many cases Cuban Americans joined Chicana/o and Puerto Rican organizations in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York as a way to show solidarity. Cuban exiles also organized groups such as Agrupación Abdala and the Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD) that represented both the ethnic politics and foreign policy focus that dominated exile politics in the civil rights era. These groups helped build bridges of communication between Cuban exiles and the Cuban government.30 But for the large majority of first wave Cuban exiles, civil rights were not a priority since many were not willing to criticize a government that helped them start new lives in south Florida and across the Northeast. The years during and after World War II saw the growth of the Latino population in the United States. Spurred on by labor recruiters, guest worker programs and, as was the case in Cuba, political revolution, Latinos arrived in major metropolitan areas like Chicago and Los Angeles, and rural areas across the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. These migration patterns would set the stage for the eruption of a militant activism by Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chicana/o and Puerto Rican Civil Rights: Race, Politics and the Search for Identity Questions about identity have been central to the development of Chicana/o and Puerto Rican social movements. The perennial questions of ¿Quien soy? y ¿Quienes somos? (Who am I? and Who are we?) were foundational in developing resistance movements that mobilized around nationalism, feminism and anti-racism.31 Chicana/o and Puerto Rican movements drew on their own histories for inspiration, but they also looked to groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and anti-colonial movements in Africa, southeast Asia and Cuba for encouragement and solidarity. These movements were bold in their critiques of police brutality, economic exploitation and the sexist and racist rhetoric that demonized Latinos and Latinas as indolent, criminal and perpetually foreign.32 The explosive politics that emerged during this time galvanized Chicana/o and Puerto Rican communities into the national spotlight and brought much needed attention to the plight of Spanishspeaking communities across the United States. Both movements mobilized for culturally relevant education, access to healthcare, election of Latinos to public office and labor rights. In 1968 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act, which mandated that bilingual education programs be made available to English language learners. At the collegiate level, the activism of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to Chicana/o and Puerto Rican studies programs at institutions such as the University of Texas Austin and Hunter College in New York City. While different in scope and focus, these programs were the first institutionalized educational programs devoted to the study of Spanish-speaking populations across the United States. The 1960s witnessed the transformation of segregationist and racist laws that defined much of the history of the United States. The Civil Rights Act (1964), the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) expanded civil rights to African Americans and other minorities in the United States. Often forgotten in this mix of important civil rights legislation, however, is the Hart-Celler Immigration Act (1965), which prioritized family reunification and undid the restrictionist immigration policies established in the 1920s. The Hart-Celler Act opened the door to increased immigration from Latin America by granting 120,000 visas for countries in the Western hemisphere and, most importantly, providing an exception for immediate family members of visa holders. This piece of legislation increased Latino immigration and helped kickstart the demographic revolution of the last forty years. 232

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In the 1960s a group of young Puerto Rican activists who called themselves the Young Lords forged a new political agenda by bridging “homeland politics—independence for Puerto Rico—with the issues affecting their working-class community.”33 The group first emerged in Chicago in 1968 and later chapters were started in New York, Philadelphia and across the East Coast. Women were central to combining local and homeland politics as much of the Puerto Rican activism emerged out of local neighborhoods, whether Lincoln Park in Chicago or East Harlem in New York. Activists like Esperanza Martell started out as a member of El Comité, an organization committed to pushing back urban renewal programs in Manhattan in the late 1960s, and later helped organize the Latin Women’s Collective, which worked to “develop writing, speaking and analytical skills and the courage to take up the struggle against sexism within us and our community.”34 The Young Lords adopted a 13-point plan that advocated for the end of racism, self-determination for all Latinos and equality for women, or “down with machismo and male chauvinism.”35 Groups like the Young Lords were often anticapitalist, critical of U.S. foreign policy and committed to working to end racism, classism and sexism in their communities.36 The Young Lords were critical of systemic inequality and committed to local politics in their approach to civil rights activism. They built community and neighborhood coalitions that listened first to community leaders—mothers and faith leaders—as they mobilized. In Chicago they pushed back against urban renewal programs that threatened to transform the mostly Puerto Rican and working-class community of Lincoln Park in the 1960s.37 For example, in 1969 they forged a coalition with white and black activists to stage a takeover at the McCormick Theological Seminary. While the takeover lasted only a few days, the impact was felt. Six months after the takeover, the Young Lords worked with Seminary leaders to draw up a plan for a mixed-income neighborhood in Lincoln Park for the city of Chicago to consider. In the end, the city rejected the neighborhood plan, but not before the Young Lords had left a lasting legacy in a community where poor and working-class voices were seldom heard. The vision of community empowerment spread by the Young Lords made an important impact in places such as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Here, Puerto Rican activists took over churches and hospitals to use church space for day care facilities during the workweek, make healthcare access available and provide breakfast programs modeled after the ones first organized by the Black Panther Party. In this way, Puerto Rican activists brought attention to communities that were often lost in the shuffle of urban renewal, suburbanization and white flight.38 The Chicano movement was the largest organized movement of Mexican Americans in U.S. history. While regionally bound to the Southwest, the movement also had strong organizations in the Midwest, including Chicago and rural towns across Iowa, Indiana and Michigan. Here Mexican American farmworkers made annual treks to work in the fields, picking everything from cherries to tomatoes. Chicano movement activists mobilized for better education, farm worker rights, political representation and an end to racism and sexism in their communities. Leaders such as José Angel Gutierrez helped establish La Raza United party as a third-party alternative to the Democratic and Republican machines in Texas and across the Southwest and Midwest in the 1970s. But the issue that brought the most national attention was farm labor organizing. For Mexican Americans the small town of Delano, California, holds special significance because it was the place where the most successful agricultural rights movement in U.S. history was launched in 1962. That year Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, both young and optimistic, began visiting farm workers across the San Joaquin Valley in order to forge relationships with families and convince them that their working conditions could indeed change. Farm labor and domestic workers were not protected under minimum wage laws or eligible for unemployment insurance and so organizing farm laborers was a huge risk for Chavez and Huerta. But it was a necessary move. Farm workers lacked basic necessities like drinking water, adequate housing, healthcare, restroom facilities and lunch or rest breaks. The United Farm Worker (UFW) movement, or La Causa as it was also known, 233

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captured the imagination of people across the country and helped cement Cesar Chavez as a national civil rights leader.39 The farm worker movement also inspired multiple forms of Chicana/o activism in the late 1960s and 1970s. The UFW provided an effective link and practical training ground for movement organizations with diverse agendas that saw the success of the UFW as something worth replicating. Young Chicanos and Chicanas from Los Angeles, South Texas and places across the Southwest organized on a platform that centered the Mexican American experience and addressed the economic, racial and gender based disparities that existed in their communities. In Los Angeles, for example, young Mexican Americans walked out of their high schools in protest of the racist and often exclusionary practices of public schools that were rampant in 1968. Student walkouts spread across the Southwest to places like Phoenix, Arizona and Pharr, Texas, where school reform movements left a powerful legacy as school districts worked to better the educational opportunities for Chicana/o students. Women played an important role in the movement. They not only demanded to be leaders within the movement—insisting that they not be relegated to minimal roles—but also reoriented the timeline of Chicana/o history by highlighting the conquest and genocide of Indigenous peoples. In this way, Chicanas interpreted the conquest of the Americas in 1519 as the foundation of Mexican American history and not 1848, as many historians had posited at the time. In doing so, Chicanas “placed the issues of gender and power at the very center of the political debate about the future and the past” and challenged the universal idea that centered men as the main engines of social change.40 While men criticized Chicana feminists as cultural sell-outs for adhering to feminist politics, Chicanas argued that understanding racial and socioeconomic injustice could never be separated from gender and sexist policies used to marginalize women. Chicanas blended gender consciousness and solidarity with nationalistic militancy. They used print culture, including the newspapers Hijas de Cuauhtémoc and Encuentro Feminil, as a way to spread their message.41 They organized important conferences: The Chicana caucus at the Chicano Raza Unida Conference in Houston and Austin (1970); the National Chicana Conference in Houston (1971); and the Raza Unida Conferences (1972–1974). For Chicanas and other women of color, understanding and opposing the ways in which gender is compounded by issues of race and class have remained important parts of feminism.42 The Chicana/o and Puerto Rican movements established their own action plans and their own distinct leadership and focused on issues that mattered to each group separately. In some cases they did overlap, as was the case in Chicago where Mexican Americans joined the Young Lords Organization and Puerto Ricans were involved in Chicano causes. Chicago is a unique case because it was the only major city with both a large Mexican American and Puerto Rican population. That geographic proximity led to interactions that were rarely seen in other communities. Another place where both groups came together to share a common agenda was in Catholic and Protestant churches. In the Catholic Church, Latina nuns organized Las Hermanas as a way to bring together Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latin America religious women to challenge the sexism of the Catholic Church. The group’s lasting legacy was the development of a Latina feminist theology, or Mujerista Theology. Mexican American priests organized their own movement called PADRES in San Antonio as a way to lobby for more Chicano bishops and to help start the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) in order to provide culturally relevant religious instruction. Protestant Latinos in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Mennonite traditions organized similar groups. Although for the most part these groups functioned outside of the traditional Chicano movement, they nonetheless were influenced by movement politics, and their activism helped reform a history of racism and paternalism against Latinos in Catholic and Protestant churches. Many of these churches were on the frontlines of the Sanctuary movement when they provided shelter and basic necessities for thousands of war refugees fleeing Central America in the 1980s. 234

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Conclusion Since the 1965 Immigration Act, Latin American immigration to the United States has not only increased but also diversified. Immigration from the Dominican Republic and Central and South America has vastly changed the demographic landscape of both the Latino population and the U.S. population in general. This immigration has also been a response to American military intervention in these nations. Interventions in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in Central America in the 1980s often worsened conditions and triggered immigration to the United States. This is a theme that is at the core of the Latino experience: The interplay between colonialism and immigration has served to inspire struggles for citizenship rights within a heterogeneous Latina/o community. Nonetheless, as this chapter has shown, shared experiences of racialization, immigration and limited social mobility have helped forge pan-ethnic unity as a minority in the United States. In 1980 the Latino population numbered 14.8 million and 6.5 percent of the total U.S. population. Today Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States, numbering just over 55 million people and 17.3 percent of the total population. An overwhelmingly young population—the median age of Latinos is 28—the numbers are expected to grow, driven by a combination of births in the United States and continued immigration.43 Today Latinos are more visible then ever and are an increasingly important part of American society. Yet, even as the number of Latinos continues to grow, they continue to lag behind in political representation, graduation rates, college attendance and socioeconomic status. Demographic revolution will mean little if steps are not taken to address the important issues of jobs, education and immigration that matter most to Latinos. To make matters worse, in the years since the attack on the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, the anti-immigrant rhetoric against Latinos has increased dramatically, making it almost impossible for Congress to pass common sense immigration legislation. Today’s Latino population is more diverse than ever. It includes long-time residents, undocumented immigrants, U.S. citizens, people whose foods and versions of speaking Spanish vary and whose politics are a mix of conservative and liberal staples. And yet given all this diversity, Latinos share a common immigration experience and a history of colonialism that continues to shape a pan-ethnic unity that challenges our collective understanding of U.S. history. As we learn the story of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, we learn much about the core fabric of this nation in terms of immigration, civil rights and the democratic principles that guide our hope for the future.

Notes   1 Eileen Patten, “The Nation’s Latino Population Is Defined by Its Youth,” Pew Research Center, April 20, 2016. www.pewhispanic.org/2016/04/20/the-nations-latino-population-is-defined-by-its-youth/   2 Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).   3 A brief note on terminology: Latino is a pan-ethnic term that identifies a group of people that trace their lineage to the Caribbean and Latin America. Latinos have varied national histories, citizenship status and religious traditions. They span the racial spectrum from black to mestizo to white. When addressing this broad population, I will use “Latino” or “Latina/o.” When needing to be specific, I will identify groups based on their national origins. I use “Puerto Rican,” for example, to identify the Puerto Rican population both on the island and the mainland. I use “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” or “Chicana/o” to identify people of Mexican descent in the United States.   4 Ernesto Chávez, The U.S. War With Mexico: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), vii.   5 Laura Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 43–45.   6 César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 14.   7 Ibid., 25.

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Felipe Hinojosa   8 Ibid., 30.   9 Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 81. 10 Antonio M. Stevens-Arroyo and Ana María Díaz-Ramírez, “Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Struggle for Identity,” in The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, ed. Anthony Gary Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin, 2nd ed. (New York: CBS College Publishing, 1982). 11 William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848–1928,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 414. 12 Elliot Young, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 140–141. 13 Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 14 Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Si, Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 13. 15 Neil Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 16 Francisco Balderrama, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). 17 David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 77. 18 Ignacio M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos Among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 10. 19 Cynthia Orozco, “Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra,” TSHA Online. https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/ articles/jrd02 20 Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000); Carlos K. Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007). 21 Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Doubleday Press, 1958); Christopher Ellison and Daniel Powers, “The Contact Hypothesis and Racial Attitudes among Black Americans,” Social Science Quarterly 75 (June 1994): 385–400. 22 Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Press, 1962). 23 Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 36. 24 Virginia Sánchez Korrol, “Centro/Center for Puerto Rican Studies,” Hunter College. http://centropr.hunter. cuny.edu/education/puerto-rican-studies/story-us-puerto-ricans-part-four; Stevens-Arroyo and DíazRamírez, “Puerto Ricans in the United States.” 25 Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993), 141. 26 Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites, 42. 27 Devyn Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 135. 28 Michael Bustamante, “Anti-Communist Anti-Imperialist? Agrupación Abdala and the Shifting Contours of Cuban Exile Politics, 1968–1986,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 74–75. 29 Benson, Antiracism in Cuba, 140. 30 Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Carmen Teresa Whalen, eds., Major Problems in Latina/o History (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015), 365. 31 George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9. 32 Andrés Torres, “Political Radicalism in the Diaspora: The Puerto Rican Experience,” in The Puerto Rican Movement:Voices From the Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 3. 33 Valerio-Jiménez and Whalen, Major Problems in Latina/o History, 369. 34 Ibid., 360. 35 Ibid., 355. 36 Jorge Duany, “The Rough Edges of Puerto Rican Identities: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism,” Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3 (October 2005). 37 Jeffrey Ogbar, “Puerto Rico en mi Corazón: Puerto Ricans, Black Power, and Puerto Rican Nationalism in the U.S., 1966–1972,” Centro Journal 18, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 149–169; Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Latino/a History 38 Felipe Hinojosa, “Sacred Spaces: Race, Resistance, and the Politics of Chicana/o and Latina/o Religious History,” in A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History, ed. Carlos K. Blanton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 113. 39 Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015). 40 Ramon Gutierrez, “Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the Dream of Equality,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 51. 41 Maylei Blackwell, “Contested Histories: Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, Chicana Feminisms, and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement, 1968–1973,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, eds. Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aída Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Patricia Zavella. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 42 Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 43 Patten, “The Nation’s Latino Population Is Defined by Its Youth.”

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22 NATIVE AMERICA—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Sherry L. Smith

About one hundred years ago, San Francisco’s leaders celebrated their city’s achievements. Not only had it recovered from the devastating 1906 earthquake, it sat on the cusp of a future American empire. As the shining culmination of European and Anglo American expansion across the continent, the city now positioned itself to lead America’s push into Pacific markets. Completion of the Panama Canal only underscored the city’s bright future. So, it hosted the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition, a world’s fair perched on the peninsula overlooking the Golden Gate. The Exposition grounds and buildings trumpeted success, with one notable exception. A huge statue of a Native American on horseback struck a different note. Slumped over a bedraggled horse and carrying a drooping lance, the Indian equestrian conveyed defeat and impending death. James Fraser’s End of the Trail was not alone in asserting Native extinction. For years, Seattle-based photographer Edward S. Curtis had canvassed the country photographing Native Americans before they vanished. This idea had deep roots in Anglo American aspirations, policies and actions. It was based on the assumption that “civilization” would inevitably conquer “savagery,” leaving Indians with only two options: assimilation or extinction. Centuries of land displacement, disease and warfare, not to mention policies of forced acculturation for those who survived such calamities, nearly made that outcome a reality. The 1900 United States census counted the Indian population of the United States at 237,196 people. There was no denying its steep decline.1 But disappear they did not. Individuals, cultures, tribes and nations survived. By 2010, 2.9 million residents of the United States identified as Native American and an additional 2.3 million as partIndian. Today there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes, including more than 220 Alaska Native villages plus a handful of tribes recognized by states. Revitalization, restoration and renewed sovereignty and treaty rights sound the themes of twenty-first-century Native life in the United States.2 How to explain this remarkable turn-around? Much twentieth-century Native American scholarship addresses this fundamental question. These histories share several assumptions. First, historians of twentieth-century Native America simply believe the era deserves attention. This may seem obvious, but most Indian history focuses on the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Scrutiny of the last one hundred years is comparatively scarce. But scholars now understand the revitalization of people and power deserves investigation too. Second, they believe to understand Native survivals one must focus squarely on Native peoples’ actions to counter the devastation of conquest. At their lowest ebb of power and population, Indian people fought back. They did not surrender. Instead, they insisted their position as sovereign nations be acknowledged and treaty rights respected. They did not withdraw from the modern world, 238

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but rather engaged it. The federal government’s power over reservations and tribal governments proved daunting, but Indians found ways to resist even as they disagreed among themselves about tactics and strategies. They went to court. They went to work. They joined the military and fought in foreign wars. They migrated to cities and returned home—some to stay, others to visit and rekindle ties. They opened casinos and built energy companies. They continued their own religious practices. They demanded the nation live up to its promises and, eventually, they succeeded in turning the tide. It has not been a story of unrelenting victories. There has been movement forward and backward, success and failure, but the overall trajectory of restoration and revitalization is undeniable.3 In addition, historians assume a deep context of imperialism or settler colonialism as the backdrop to twentieth century developments. The drive to dispossess Native Americans of land and natural resources, political power, sovereignty and cultural autonomy did not end with the completion of the so-called frontier era in American history. Throughout the twentieth century, threats to Native lives and livelihoods resurfaced. Settlers’ descendants periodically resumed their assault on Native property. The federal government continued to play an enormously intrusive role in Native lives, sometimes seeking to protect Indians from private, state and corporate interests but more often enabling those interests. Policies crafted by presidents and Congress continued to matter and so too did American courts where disputants sought peaceful resolution. The tangled web of Native relations with state, local and federal governments, then, remains an extremely important component of twentieth century historiography. As demands for tribal selfdetermination and renewed sovereignty picked up, there was no denying these concepts (particularly treaty rights) rested upon the American political and legal structures that gave them meaning and power. One can make the case that tribal sovereignty is inherent. Nevertheless, its explicit recognition in the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution and the treaties, laws and court cases that followed buttress its validity. Tribal authority comes from within the American political system, not outside it. Challenges to that authority have continued to crop up through legislation and litigation and undoubtedly always will.4 Finally, historians of twentieth-century Native America acknowledge the importance of incorporating Native ways of knowing and understanding into the production of scholarship. Spirited conversations about “indigenizing the academy” inform the field. Native scholars, in particular, have made demands for incorporation of oral history sources and Native values, research that proves useful to Indian communities and theoretical approaches that reflect Native ways of conceptualizing the world and the processes and purposes of history itself. But it has been difficult to realize these goals and aspirations. The vast majority of articles and books addressing American Indians continue to reflect traditional academic forms, methods, sources and epistemologies. Addressing this gap between traditional academia and traditional knowledge remains an important challenge for the future.5 In the years immediately leading up to the twentieth century, things looked bleak for Native America. On a wintry day in December 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the Seventh Cavalry killed more than two hundred Lakota. The army called the engagement a “battle,” the Lakota, a “massacre.” What was less visible but even more devastating for Natives across the nation was the federal allotment policy. Codified in the Dawes Act of 1887, the government began dismantling reservations by carving them into individual homesteads for tribal members and then selling or leasing the remainder of reservation land to non-Indians. Originally created through diplomacy, negotiation, executive order and/or treaty making with sovereign nations and in exchange for cessation of huge swaths of property, reservations represented federal commitment to tribal perpetuation. But by the twentieth century, policies had changed. Now Indian land bases and tribal governments were considered anomalies and impediments to national growth. They had to go. In exchange, Indian people would become citizens of the United States and, as private property holders, presumptive capitalists. Tribal political allegiance, social orientation and culture would presumably fade away. Once the federal government slated a particular reservation for allotment, participation was compulsory. Between 239

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the onset of allotment and its final end in 1934, Native Americans’ estates dwindled from about 138 million to 48 million acres of land. It was a devastating policy.6 The problems Native Americans shared in the early decades of the new century, then, were concerted assaults on their property, political institutions, social structures and cultures. They lacked political power in Congress and opportunities to unite with other tribes in their common struggle. Historians have thus found most early evidence of effective resistance in local, reservation-based studies. The power differential between the federal government and individual tribal governments was huge. Yet, in their efforts to stem the hemorrhaging of property and power, tribal leaders established the groundwork upon which later generations built effective strategies. As Frederick Hoxie’s Parading Through History showed, Crow tribal leaders in Montana, for instance, formed a new representative tribal government and a business committee to defend their people and property. Both institutions salvaged resources and established a political foundation for future action. Consequently, while the Crow Act of 1920 led to allotment and the sale of surplus lands, it stipulated division of the tribe’s unallotted lands only among tribal members. Reservation lands never became public domain and so were not directly and immediately available to non-Indians. While transferred to individual ownership, it was still Crow ownership. Further, mineral rights remained under tribal control. Importantly, leaders demonstrated their sophistication and determination to craft new political structures and participate in the legal and political process on behalf of tribal goals.7 Although Congress applied the allotment policy widely, not all tribes faced allotment. The Navajos or Dine occupied a huge reservation in the Southwest, a region less attractive to Americans clamoring for Indian farmland. Being spared the ravages of allotment, however, did not mean the Navajos escaped pressures for their resources, particularly minerals and oil resting just beneath their grazing lands. In the 1920s, as oil companies sought permission to survey Navajo lands, the Department of the Interior decided that any oil and gas royalties or other revenues related to such development belonged to the entire tribe. Desiring to expedite their development, the Secretary of the Interior created a tribal council consisting of twelve members. Initially, the council wielded very little power. Yet it represented a “vital step,” as Peter Iverson explained in Dine: A History of the Navajos, “toward a more cohesive approach to Navajo issues, a centralized authority that could examine the larger picture.”8 In the short term, non-Indian economic interests dominated the council. But over time, benefits of new tribal institutions paid economic and political dividends to the Dine instead. Several factors help define and explain this critical turning point when Native Americans emerged from the shock of conquest, determined to master the American political system and pushed back against forced acculturation and further dispossession of economic resources. One particularly critical factor was education. Policymakers expected education to accelerate acculturation and assimilation. Providing education that instilled European notions of possessive individualism, self-reliance and the importance of private property along with English literacy, Christianity and acceptance of Anglo gender norms had long characterized the federal government’s “civilization program.” The period between 1875 and 1928 witnessed this push at its apotheosis, with funds pouring into off-reservation boarding schools, to supplement those on reservations. Children as young as 5 or 6 left home for institutions such as the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania or the Sherman Institute in California, sometimes with parents’ reluctant approval and sometimes under the force of military threat. Ironically, the system often resulted in resistance to its architects’ plans. Boarding schools became sites of resistance, places that trained graduates in skills they eventually deployed for tribal political power, cultural renaissance and reservation-based economic development projects. Of course, children had limited access to power while enrolled in these schools. A rich and growing body of scholarship investigates how the students coped. They suffered, undoubtedly, from homesickness, loneliness, depression, cultural disorientation and physical diseases. Yet David Wallace Adams’s Education of Extinction and other studies provided significant evidence that boarding school students found comfort in one another, played football, put on plays, learned valuable information and skills, 240

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resisted authorities and eventually found their way in the world—sometimes apart from their tribal roots, yet often, back home. It is a story of complicated experiences and outcomes. To be sure, more research on the lives of these former students needs to be done.9 Several studies demonstrate the imprint such education had on the creation of early pan-Indian organizations such as the Society of American Indians, founded in 1912, which pushed for universal citizenship, a court of claims for Indians and respect for all Native American cultures. Using the English language, these now “educated” Indians criticized the nation’s treatment of Indigenous people and denied its claims of superiority, as they called for an end to reservations and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Other boarding school alums found unity with reservation-based people through the Native American Church. Its rituals and use of peyote as a sacrament combined Christian and Native elements. Peyote use attracted opposition from states that passed drug laws to outlaw it, and not all tribal councils embraced it (the Navajo tribal council banned it, for instance). Yet, as Thomas C. Maroukis noted in The Peyote Road, in 1918 the Church incorporated in Oklahoma, using familiarity with the American idea of separation of church and state as foundation for their religious freedom.10 Lessons learned through education paid dividends to tribes, as well. Some returning students realized their new understanding of the larger world and skills could be extremely valuable in crafting strategies of resistance and revitalization. Sherman Institute graduate Robert Yellowtail, for instance, testified before a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 1919, that the Crow reservation was a “separate, semi-sovereign nation in itself ” and that none other than President Woodrow Wilson had recently “assured . . . the people of the whole world, that the right of self-determination shall not be denied to any people.”11 These very words, not to mention the political sophistication of his argument, demonstrated mastery of the dominant culture. Moreover, it reached beyond the United States. In venturing out beyond reservation boundaries, Native Americans such as Yellowtail engaged an international political context, reasserting sovereignty while advocating a new kind of hybrid citizenship that insisted Native people were members of both nation and tribe. Yellowtail’s rhetoric, then, points to another important factor in the turn toward survival and revitalization: changing national and global contexts. Education alerted Indian people to new developments that they could capitalize upon for their own purposes. They found in American arguments for participation in World War I, for instance, traction to support their claims for self-government. Calls to defend freedom, democracy and the end of European imperialism worked into the hands of Indian intellectuals who challenged the nation to address the consequences of colonialism at home and abroad. And actions spoke louder than words. Although many Indians were not citizens in 1917, debate arose among them about whether they should participate in the war. Some thought it made no sense to die overseas for freedoms they were denied at home. Nevertheless, thousands registered for the draft. Interestingly, 90 percent of off reservation boarding school students volunteered compared to 20 to 40 percent from reservation communities. Choctaw and Comanche soldiers provided unbreakable codes, anticipating the more famous Navajo Code Talkers of World War II.12 Officials interpreted such participation as evidence of successful assimilation policies. Indian leaders saw it differently, according to Paul Rosier’s Serving Their Country. They explained their motives by advancing a hybrid form of patriotism and citizenship whereby the federal government honored treaties that protected Indian nationalism and Native Americans would provide service to the American state that fought to make the world safe for democracy.13 In other words, Indians were tribal citizens and American citizens. Hybrid citizenship thus resuscitated treaty rights and argued their legitimacy in the context of the Law of Nations and in the new postcolonial order defined by President Wilson and other internationalists. For such arguments to result in significant political change, however, non-Indians had to accept them. In the immediate context of World War I and the decade that followed, there is little evidence that presidents, Congress, policymakers or the American people agreed. Nevertheless, nonIndian intellectuals, scholars and writers were beginning to reject centuries-old assumptions about 241

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“civilization” and “savagery”—the concepts that had justified imperialism—and joining Native American thinkers and leaders who had long challenged such ideas. A cluster of historians, including Frederick Hoxie in The Final Promise, Phil Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places and myself in Reimagining Indians, excavated this intellectual pivot point, focusing on the professionalization of anthropology, with its concept of culture as relative and pluralistic, and tracking these ideas’ dissemination in popular culture as well. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas stressed diversity of culture and scrapped the idea of associating culture (singular) with civilization (Western or European). They discredited the belief that all tribal societies ranked below Europeans ones, appreciated Native American cultures in all their diversity and strove to understand Indians on their own terms. These new ideas were not without shortcomings. They tended to fix Indian cultures in time as “traditional” and gave nonIndians the power to define what was “authentic” and what was not.14 Yet these new sensibilities had the positive effect of undermining, albeit gradually, the policies of forced assimilation and eventually proved useful in supporting Indians’ demands for cultural and political revitalization, self-determination and sovereignty. How changing ideas had reconfigured the goals of federal Indian policy became clear during the Depression when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed John Collier, a social worker and executive director of the American Indian Defense Association in the 1920s, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Widely recognized as a significant turning point in Indian policy, scholars have nevertheless debated the virtues, flaws and long-term consequences of the Collier era ever since. Embracing the value of Native American cultures and committed to perpetuating rather than destroying them, de-emphasizing possessive individualism while championing cooperation and group culture, Collier’s Indian New Deal ended the allotment policy once and for all. It worked to expand and reconsolidate reservations, ended government suppression of religions and dances, provided economic development funds and established tribal councils in about 180 communities. Collier believed that imperial capitalism decimated Indian people and supported internal decolonization. But he also understood Native Americans needed to be integrated into the American system of market capitalism. He hoped they could maintain their cultural values in the process. Finally, although he believed he knew what was best for Native Americans and fashioned one basic policy for all tribes in spite of their many differences, he also knew their consent was critical to his policy’s success. Accordingly, Collier integrated self-determination into his signature legislation, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). Each tribe would decide, through referendum, whether or not to participate. This was unprecedented in American history. In the end, it fell short of reestablishing complete sovereignty or solving economic devastation caused by dispossession, but some historians believe it represented an important step in the right direction. Others emphasize Collier’s heavy-handed tactics to gain Indian support, tone-deafness regarding Native concerns and imposition of non-native political structures.15 No one, however, disputes the path-breaking nature of requiring tribal consent. It was also deeply frustrating for Collier because seventy-seven tribes turned down his new deal, including the Navajo. The Navajo New Deal began not with the IRA, but with efforts to address devastating drought, which along with overgrazing by Navajo livestock had decimated Dine rangeland. Soil conservationists and Collier’s policymakers deepened the problem by ignoring the cultural meaning of sheep and failing to incorporate women in solving the environmental problem. Instead, federal authorities insisted on a livestock reduction program: the slaughter of thousands of sheep and goats. Consequently, the traumatized Navajo not only rejected long-range conservation policies but ultimately the IRA when it came up for a tribal vote in 1935. Although a defeat for Collier’s blueprint, the vote nevertheless affirmed the broader goal of reasserting Native power. As historian Marsha Weisiger put it in Dreaming of Sheep, Collier “had hoped the act would remake the Navajos into models of Indian self-determination. What he failed to understand was that they decided to become just that.”16 242

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More research regarding tribes that accepted the Indian Reorganization Act, however, remains to be done. Those who rejected the IRA have garnered a disproportional amount of scholarly attention. How did the 174 tribes that accepted it fare in the decades that followed? What were the economic costs and benefits? In what arenas did they exercise genuine power and authority? Where did they fall short? What has been the long-term consequence of this flawed but important policy shift back to tribal power? Paul Rosier’s Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation argued that tribes embraced the IRA because they saw its political economy structures as a logical first step in determining their future. Did others share this view?17 Interestingly, it was not Indian resistance that ended New Deal initiatives but a changing global context. World War II dramatically shifted national priorities away from domestic and toward international issues. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor mobilized Native Americans to fight for their homeland but also, again, advance long-term goals of recovery and revitalization. Approximately 25,000 Native American men and some women served in the armed services during World War II. As we learned from Kenneth Townshend’s World War II and the American Indian, many others supported the war effort on the home front by laboring in defense plants. Both precipitated significant migration from reservations to urban areas or, in the case of soldiers, other parts of the world.18 Indian warriors fighting on behalf of the United States made great copy for the American war propaganda efforts. What better advertisement for American virtue than the formerly conquered now picking up arms in that nation’s defense against outside threats? What better answer to Nazi doctrines of racial superiority than American claims of racial equality, represented by a Native American in an army uniform and serving in an integrated unit? Undoubtedly, Indians fought to protect their nation, but the hybrid-citizen activists among them expected to turn military service into political capital for fights back home: securing treaty rights and voting rights in order to protect reservations, cultures and sovereignty. Coming into direct contact with other peoples’ struggles against colonialism around the world served to underscore their identity as colonized people rather than simply another minority that sought integration. The Indian Reorganization Act began the federal government’s process of addressing these demands. Military service could certainly help advance them at war’s end.19 But in the wake of World War II, a new generation of non-Indian policymakers opposed such goals. Interpreting Indian military service and migration as repudiation of reservation and tribal life, Anglo politicians began formulating a policy to accelerate such outcomes even before the war had ended. In a throwback to pre-New Deal ideas, congressmen proposed legislation to terminate federal funding for tribes. Their ultimate goal was eventual termination of all tribes, treaties, reservations and the federal trust relationship that provided protection from outside exploitation but also hamstrung self-determination. Old ideas of acculturation revived. Incorporation and integration became the clarion call. That termination policies would also open up Native American resources to non-Indians motivated some of its advocates and terrified its opponents.20 At mid-century it seemed the nation was looking backward rather than forward. Many Native activists mobilized to fight this reversal of fortunes. Scholarship focuses firmly on that fight. Not surprisingly, veterans initially formed the bulwark of resistance and did so through tribal councils and pan-Indian organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians. By the 1940s, as Fred Hoxie showed in This Indian Country, Indians were better prepared thanks to education and military service to create effective, long-lasting organizations to address shared problems. The NCAI saw termination as a disaster and fought it valiantly. Yet in the budget-cutting context of the postwar years and the racial politics of the brewing civil rights movement that advanced integration over segregation, Native calls for rights to a special status—granted by the nation’s treaties—did not find much support. Congress churned out termination legislation, ignoring Indian resistance.21 Throughout the termination era, Indian people never surrendered, as Fred Hoxie demonstrated in This Indian Country and Roberta Ulrich in American Indian Nations From Termination to Relocation. It has taken historians some time to acknowledge the long Red Power movement, however. For many years 243

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the more militant, media-attracting, urban-based organizations and leaders associated with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Washington D.C. headquarters in 1972 and the hamlet of Wounded Knee in 1973 captured most scholarly attention. Only more recently have books such as Daniel Cobb’s Native Activism in Cold War America and Charles Wilkinson’s Blood Struggle examined more closely the actions of more mainstream tribal leaders, Indian intellectuals such as D’Arcy McNickle and Vine Deloria, Jr., college students from rural and reservation backgrounds who founded the National Indian Youth Council and the NCAI, the Association of American Indian Affairs and the Coalition of American Indian Citizens. All pushed for reform through more conventional tactics as well as early versions of the more spectacle-like forms of resistance that captured most public attention.22 Particularly concerned with economic development, some activists called upon the federal government to initiate a domestic Point Four program analogous to the one designed to aid other colonized people around the globe. Conflating Cold War and homeland contexts, advocates called for substantial federal aid to create employment on reservations and restore Native sovereignty. At first, they did not succeed. Such ideas began to mesh, however, with the liberal political turn in the early 1960s when Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson addressed racial and economic injustice in the nation. George P. Castile’s To Show Heart and Thomas Clarkin’s Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations track the implications for Native Americans. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Community Action Program, both parts of Johnson’s War on Poverty, offered Indian communities ways to develop economic projects, administer them and thus realize a measure of self-determination on the tribal level. These activities also helped build a stronger foundation for tribal sovereignty, provided Indian people greater access to and leverage with the federal government and contributed to the cultural renaissance of Native America.23 As more militant demands for change accelerated in arenas as diverse as black nationalism and the war in Vietnam, a younger generation of Native Americans took note of direct protest through confrontation as an alternative tool for change. Southern sit-ins inspired Pacific Northwest fish-ins, where tribal members pushed for recognition of treaty-guaranteed fishing rights that had been denied by states. Activists publicly violated state laws, facing prosecution and jail. The brewing escalation eventually led to federal intervention in the courts on the side of tribal rights, culminating in the 1974 United States vs. Washington Supreme Court decision. This landmark ruling upheld the rights of Native Americans in Washington and Oregon to fish at off-reservation sites (as promised in nineteenthcentury treaties) and to share equally in the commercial fishery. It was a stunning victory.24 Other 1970s demonstrations and takeovers, well documented in Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior’s Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, lacked the treaty-based justification of the fishing rights battles. Led by student and urban-based Indians, the occupations of Alcatraz, the BIA and Wounded Knee could never lead to direct realization of sovereignty. Participants did not represent tribal governments, with legal standing in the American system. In fact, the young militants often (although not always) provoked the opposition, rather than the admiration, of more conservative tribal leaders. These spectacles, however, served another purpose: They brought Native calls for political, economic and cultural revitalization into the national conversation. The media attention and non-Indian support for groups such as the American Indian Movement (AIM) garnered enormous public sympathy and eventually political change. Effecting substantive change required the support of Indians and non-Indians—urban and reservation-based Native Americans, tribal council members and supporters of AIM, individuals willing to commit acts of civil disobedience and lawyers willing to represent them. Some worked in the halls of Congress and tribal offices, others in the damp cells of an abandoned federal prison in San Francisco Bay or the wintry, windswept hamlet of Wounded Knee. Together, as I argued in Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power, they moved the nation to resurrect treaty rights and sovereignty and replace paternalism with political partnerships.25 244

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President Richard Nixon’s 1970 message to Congress, announcing a new era of self-determination for Native people, set the stage. Congress subsequently passed a slew of laws ranging from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, Indian Child Welfare Act, American Indian Religious Freedom Act, Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act and Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to name a few. Although both Democrats and Republicans supported such legislation, not all non-Indians supported these goals. Opponents tested the laws in court with mixed results. Land claims, treaty rights, rights to manage reservation resources and to define tribal membership were often upheld, but the Supreme Court struck down tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians who committed crimes on tribal lands. And the fact that tribal sovereignty depends ultimately on the support of non-native peoples strikes some as a crucial weakness.26 Focusing on twentieth-century Native American political history provides cohesion to the story of an incredibly diverse people. Yet it ignores many other aspects of Native lives, including those that affected their more immediate and personal experiences. Scholars are just beginning to investigate topics about work, family and identity, for instance. How did Indian people support themselves economically during the twentieth century? Where did they find jobs and what changes did they make to obtain them? How did they balance economic survival with their desire to maintain personal and cultural ties to reservations and tribes? How did tribes reconcile development of reservation mineral and other natural resources with environmental concerns and spiritual connections to the land? What long-term consequences did poverty have on family life? And given the increased engagement with the modern world, capitalism, urban life and increased intermarriage with people of other tribes or non-Indians, what have been the consequences for Indians’ culture and identity? Who is Indian? Is it possible to be a Native American in a capitalist culture—an issue Alexandra Harmon’s Rich Indians examined? Does ancestry or culture define a person’s Native identity? And how do tribal cultures and traditions survive in the twenty-first century? The answers are complicated and still unfolding. Yet some patterns are clear. As noted above, allotment’s disastrous assault on Indian property led to a drastic decline of Indian landholding. The Great Depression followed allotment’s calamitous effects, and policymakers’ expectations that Native Americans would support themselves as individual farmers and ranchers proved ephemeral in many cases. Consequently, many turned to wage work: on railroads or irrigation projects; in coal mines or on New York City high-rise construction sites; through production and sale of arts and crafts; or as farm contract labor. This pivot accelerated during World War II as opportunities for good-paying jobs encouraged migration away from reservations and toward cities. After the war, the termination policy included a formal relocation program that offered transportation to urban areas and initial help in finding work. After this, relocatees were on their own. Some faltered; others did well.27 It helped that earlier generations, primarily boarding school graduates, had pioneered life in cities, as did the Indian community centers that cropped up in neighborhoods and provided various forms of support. Research on the consequences of engaging with capitalism, urban life and modernity is well underway. Studies indicate there is no inherent contradiction between engaging the capitalist market or living in cities and sustaining tribal identities, cultures and citizenship, although to be sure, some found the experience disorienting, difficult and sometimes destructive. Not surprisingly, a spectrum of experiences unfolded. Moreover, in some cases cities came to Indians. Natives lived on the shores of Puget Sound for centuries before Seattle’s founders showed up, as Coll Thrush’s Native Seattle so ably demonstrated. They remain, to this day, a part of that city’s fabric. Although more research is needed, it appears that flexibility rather than fragility and adaptation rather than extinction characterized many Indians’ experiences in twentieth-century workplaces and urban enclaves.28 By the last quarter of the twentieth century, prospects for reservation-based economic opportunities improved. Development (often with federal financial and legislative support) of manufacturing, tourism, natural resource extraction and gaming provided jobs and opportunities for prosperity. 245

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Thirty percent of the lower forty-eight states’ coal reserves, 37 percent of uranium, 3 percent of oil and gas and 10 percent of onshore natural gas rest on Indian lands. With national appetites for energy resources growing and federal impediments to tribal development falling away, some tribes moved quickly to cash in. Enhanced recognition of sovereignty meant Indians now exercised more power over exploitation of their reservation resources. Yet such projects elicited internal debate and division as some tribal members advocated for jobs while others worried about environmental degradation. And nothing could protect energy tribes from the inevitable ups and downs of the global markets. Energy development thus provided opportunities but also posed serious economic and environmental risks. Open pit coal mines, nuclear energy waste sites or fracking underground oil wells struck some as antithetical to Native concepts of sacred lands. But continued poverty hardly promised to preserve and perpetuate tribal culture.29 The gaming industry, particularly attractive to tribes who lacked natural resources, posed other dilemmas. Indian sovereignty and special status made possible the emergence of this economic activity in the 1980s, although the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act required tribes to sign compacts with the state where they resided regarding matters such as revenue sharing. Clearly a hedge on tribal sovereignty, such arrangements have also created opposition from non-Indians who do not understand why gaming income is exempt from state and federal taxes or oppose casinos in their neighborhoods. This backlash has challenged the perpetuation of Indian nations’ special status and raised questions about who truly is an “Indian” eligible to receive casino proceeds.30 Issues regarding Indian identity are also controversial within tribes. As an indication of their sovereign power, tribes define their own membership criteria. For some, the degree of ancestry determines eligibility. For others, residence on the reservation or cultural practices come into play. Extensive intermarriage outside the tribe or with non-Indians complicates the ancestry issue and poses future problems for descendants who lack the required percentage of “Indian blood” to qualify for membership.31 Identity issues also relate to nations or tribes. In this case, the federal government decides which communities qualify for trust protection, assistance programs and other advantages of nationhood. Tribes with treaties automatically have formal recognition. But Indian communities who had no treaties have requested formal recognition as well. The Federal Acknowledgement Project of the Bureau of the Indians, which Congress created in 1978, has evaluated more than two hundred groups’ claims. Most have been turned down in a process fraught with inconsistencies and the irony of depending upon the United States government to determine what constitutes Indian identity on the tribal level. That the federal government sometimes recognizes new groups as “tribes,” however, symbolizes the renewed relevance of tribal life in the United States. Out of the ashes of the nineteenth century, Native American nations, cultures and peoples have undoubtedly arisen anew over the last century.32 Meanwhile, the long shadow of dispossession and policies designed to extinguish tribes and Native cultures continue to wreak havoc in Indian communities and within Indian families. Historians have not focused as much attention as have anthropologists or sociologists on studies of drug and alcohol, teen suicide, diabetes and other health problems that plague Indian communities. One area which has received historical scrutiny, however, is child welfare and adoption practices. Removing children from Native families was a longstanding policy that sharply accelerated during the off-reservation boarding school period and continued after World War II with practices that led to thousands of Native children being placed, particularly by state governments, in foster care, institutions or non-Indian adoptive homes. Mothers and families fought to reclaim their children. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 strengthened the sovereign rights of tribal courts to determine the fate of their children, but recent judicial outcomes have undermined that legislation.33 The twentieth century began with Fraser’s The End of the Trail and its announcement of Native American demise. The dawn of the twenty-first century, by contrast, witnessed the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall. Although the exhibits 246

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initially sparked spirited debate and criticism, no one doubts the museum stands as a powerful symbol of Native peoples’ survival, resilience and revitalization.34 Will that story continue? Historians usually refrain from predicting the future. Yet neither recent events nor scholarly trends give any indication it is diminishing. The resurgence of Native political, economic and cultural power is undeniably impressive. Only time itself, however, will tell.

Notes   1 Sarah Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).   2 Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).   3 Donald Fixico, Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).   4 Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).   5 Donald Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2003); Devon H. Mihesuah and Angela Cavendar Wilson, eds., Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).   6 David N. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).   7 Frederick E. Hoxie, Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1865–1935 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).   8 Peter Iverson, Dine: A History of the Navajos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 135; Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Reclaiming Indian History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007).   9 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); John R. Gram, Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Boarding Schools (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 10 Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices From the Progressive Era (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2001); Thomas C. Maroukis, The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and the Native American Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). 11 Quoted in Paul C. Rosier, Serving Their Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55. 12 Rosier, Serving Their Country; Susan Applegate Krouse, North American Indians in the Great War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 13 Rosier, Serving Their Country, 55. 14 Frederick E. Hoxie, The Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1888–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). 15 David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 16 Marsha Weisiger, Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 179. 17 Paul C. Rosier, Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912–1954 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). See also Jennifer McLerran, A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–1943 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009). 18 Kenneth William Townshend, World War II and the American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Herman Viola, Warriors in Uniform: The Legacy of American Indian Heroism (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2005). 19 Rosier, Serving Their Country. 20 Roberta Ulrich, American Indian Nations From Termination to Restoration, 1953–2006 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). 21 Frederick E. Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). 22 Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005); Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence:

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Sherry L. Smith University Press of Kansas, 2008); Daniel M. Cobb and Loretta Fowler, eds., Beyond Red Power: American Political Activism Since 1900 (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). 23 Thomas A. Britten, The National Council on Indian Opportunity: Quiet Champion of Self-Determination (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014); Thomas Clarkin, Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 1961–1969 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). 24 Wilkinson, Blood Struggles; Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities Around Puget Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 25 Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like A Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996); Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 26 David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); David E. Wilkins, Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 27 Colleen O’Neill, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 28 Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories From the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 29 Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, The State of Native Nations: Conditions Under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Sherry L. Smith and Brian Frehner, eds., Indians & Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010); James Robert Allison, III, Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 30 W. Dale Mason, Indian Gaming: Tribal Sovereignty and American Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Steven Andrew Light and Kathryn R. L. Rand, Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 31 Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nations of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 32 Mark Edwin Miller, Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Mark Edwin Miller, Claiming Indian Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). 33 Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Wenona T. Singel and Kathryn E. Fort, eds., Facing the Future: The Indian Child Welfare Act at 30 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009); Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 34 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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23 ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Cindy I-Fen Cheng

Asian American history arose to critique dominant narratives of U.S. history. It bound the task of filling in gaps in U.S. historiography to interrogating values that shaped an elite Eurocentric masculinist approach to the study of past events, rendering visible certain people and ideas and others to the margins. Given this genealogy, which privileges historical writings published after the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies following the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State College, Asian American history not only shifted who could be the nation’s storytellers, but also emerged as a composite of narratives that aimed to unsettle the various power structures at work to make minor people and perspectives even as it often replicated the values that it challenged. At best, Asian American history is engaged in the ongoing process of self-reflection, questioning who in Asian American studies can act as appropriate agents of change and constitute the “bottom” from where a bottom-up approach of past events are told. These queries include assaying the effectiveness of using history to search for upstanding assimilable Asian Americans to counter negative stereotypes over using history to reveal how racism shapes the way people are seen, providing a context in which to examine why certain immigrants are marked as “good” and distinguished from the “bad.” Finally, Asian American history makes known the political economy of archives that governs knowledge production. It highlights how the same social forces that propelled the forgetting of Asian American histories also dictated which primary sources should be preserved, where they are to be housed and who could have access to them. Besides deepening understandings of history and memory, scholars of Asian American history have advanced the use of oral histories or the retelling of lived experiences to develop alternative sources and stories left out of mainstream archives and historical narratives. As a critique of U.S. history, Asian American history’s dominant frameworks, methodologies and sources are designed principally to recast forgotten histories and reinterpret skewed accounts. As such, it is enmeshed in the messy politics of representation. For instance, despite the tacit understanding that the category of Asian Americans consists of many different Asian nationalities, questions loom over which groups from the Asian continent should be included; many scholars, for instance, continue to voice concern with the decidedly East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) bias within the field. Moreover, the field is replete with contested portrayals of Asian Americans. While some accounts portray Asian Americans as a cohesive group bounded together by shared experiences, others depict Asian Americans as fragmented groups that sometimes organize under the category of “Asian American” to fight for shared political goals. To develop further the constructed quality of “Asian American,” works on Asian American history also consider the ways in which Asian Americans are subjects called 249

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forth by U.S. immigration and naturalization laws to reveal the demands of U.S. capitalism. Additionally, given how Asian American history rose in part to challenge racist caricatures that cast Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, many historical accounts set out to show Asian Americans not only as assimilable but also as indispensable members of the nation. But as some scholars have argued, the trope of “becoming American” as both the assumed goal and lived reality of all Asians in the United States belies the persistence of transnational linkages and treats culture as discrete entities. Notably, scholars of Asian American history have also keenly explicated how ideas about gender, sexuality and class complicate the racial formations of Asian Americans and how the status of Asian Americans is defined in relation to that of other racial and ethnic minorities. With these points in mind, the examination of the activities and lived experiences of Asians in twentieth-century United States is also a foray into the changing frameworks and values that govern historical inquiry. This chapter highlights some of these changes. It begins with a critical discussion of Ronald Takaki’s 1989 Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans and how its importance for mainstream readers extended beyond simple recasting of the forgotten histories and buried voices of Asian Americans.1 For scholars of Asian American history, the success of Strangers From a Different Shore brought to the fore a host of representational concerns that would define and shape the writing of Asian American history for generations that followed. As this chapter surveys how scholars have addressed some of these concerns, it veers away from making neutral claims about the different approaches to Asian American history. Instead, it ties the development of these different approaches to the goal of creating frameworks that allow for a more expansive representation of viewpoints and a more nuanced critique of the various powers at work to sideline accounts where immigrants and racialized minorities act as the frames of reference. This chapter thus surveys the disparate avenues that scholars have taken to align Asian American history with the quest for a fair and just relation between individuals and society. It argues that Asian American history cannot be studied apart from its social justice ethos. Beyond adding to the historiography of U.S. twentieth-century, Asian American history transforms how these narratives are written and taught.

Cultural Nationalism and Its Limits A year after the release of Strangers From a Different Shore, Amerasia Journal dedicated a special issue to assaying the scholarly impact of this book. Given how Strangers From a Different Shore was the first book on Asian American history that garnered a wide-reaching mainstream readership, its success intensified concerns over how best to represent the lived experiences of Asians in the U.S. In his opening remarks, Russell Leong, editor of the special issue, raised questions over who possessed the authority to speak on behalf of a diverse community. Many contributors to this special issue found disturbing how Takaki had failed to properly cite the contributions of colleagues in his retelling of Asian American history as a communal history. Others critiqued Takaki for relying on a narrow and random group of oral histories to represent the voices of a whole community.2 For literary critic Elaine Kim, Takaki’s problematic portrayals of Asian American women as mere extensions of men demonstrated how historical writings, far from being unmediated neutral accounts of past events, were developed through a certain set of values.3 Taken together, the critiques chronicled in this special issue revealed how scholars expected more from Asian American history than narratives that plugged into gaps left open by an overdetermined focus on European Americans in mainstream historical accounts. Many scholars of Asian American history sought to generate narratives that did not replicate exclusionary mechanisms that only made visible the agency of male actors and cast aside how the field of Asian American studies was brought about through collective struggle and thereby made accountable to the interests of a broader community. Outside the concerns that were raised in the 1990 special issue of Amerasia Journal, Strangers From a Different Shore made known certain unquestioned norms of the field, the most prominent being 250

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the task of combatting the stigma of the perpetual foreignness of Asian Americans by claiming their Americanness. Takaki tackled this undertaking by collapsing differences in the patterns of Asian immigration within an overarching framework to show that despite the various contexts from which Asian immigrants come, Asian immigrants all worked hard and contributed to economic development of the nation, struggled against racist laws and challenged their marginalization through collective action. As Asian immigrants invested their political energies towards improving their social standing in the U.S., they successfully transitioned from being sojourners to settlers. Guided by this prescriptive framework, Takaki painted an ideal portrait of Asian Americans that, while working to establish Asian Americans as rightful members of the nation, sidelined the many who did not aspire to become American. Rather than tackle xenophobia and racism by disrupting the exclusionary mechanisms of the U.S. national identity, the trope of “becoming American” developed how Asian Americans contributed to the making of an inclusive America, but stopped short of promoting the acceptance of differences in favor of showing how Asian immigrants were like other hardworking European immigrants and white Americans. By assigning an essential character to Asian Americans, Takaki also blurred how the lived experiences of a Punjabi Sikh differed from that of a Chinese railroad worker. The trope of “becoming American” stamped out any meaningful discussions about how the United States used its immigration laws to quell the political activities of South Asians challenging British colonialism over India. Beyond seeking to claim a place in the United States, the collective action of South Asians to upend racist legislations was driven by the desire to establish an independent India. Notably, the influence of this cultural nationalist approach was also seen in Judy Yung’s 1995 study, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco.4 While Yung effectively unsettled Takaki’s male-centered account of Asian American history by highlighting the lives and activities of Chinese women in the U.S., she nevertheless advanced a narrative of progress whereby Chinese women slowly shed the mores of their home country only to become “in step” with white Americans, fighting and claiming their place in the U.S. Similarly, Sucheng Chan drew on the “becoming American” framework in her woman-centered account of Asian American history such that the myriad of differences that separated the lived experiences of a Korean immigrant woman in Riverside, California from Chinese women in San Francisco faded into the background in favor of a generic story about the struggles against racism and the quest to belong to the nation.5 But what made Chan’s 1990 oral history on Mary Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, a standout study was her frank discussion about oral histories as a historian’s craft. While Chan had sought to present Quiet Odyssey as an unmediated account of Lee’s life, she nevertheless explained in the book’s appendix the choices that she made when crafting and editing this account. In so doing, Chan laid the groundwork for examining experiential narratives as stories forged within and not outside of the politics of representation. Besides advancing the development of alternative sources left out of traditional archives and upholding the belief in the lived experiences of everyday people as history-making, Chan made it possible to analyze the context and values that shape the telling and retelling of personal experiences. Oral histories, as Chan’s account showed, are products of history and memory. Notwithstanding the narrative blind spots and limits of Strangers From a Different Shore, Takaki’s path-breaking work made some impressive historiographical interventions. As Strangers From a Different Shore together with Sucheng Chan’s 1991 Asian Americans: An Interpretive History have shown, the conventional markers of periodization for U.S. history are not readily applicable for Asian American history.6 For many Americanists, the Reconstruction Era has emerged as an accepted marker distinguishing modern American history from early American history. But for scholars of Asian American history such as Takaki and Chan, who draw on immigration patterns and legislations to trace the history of Asian Americans, the Reconstruction Era is ineffective in demarcating any discernable trends given how it cuts into the first critical wave of mass immigration from China. As Mae Ngai suggested in her 2003 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, when interpreted through the lens of immigration history, the U.S.’s twentieth century appears to dawn with 251

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passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.7 While immigration restriction and exclusion initiates the making of modern America, the period from 1924 onwards is noted for the gradual liberalization of U.S. immigration policies. The disconnect that exists between the periodizations of Asian American history and U.S. twentieth-century history crucially demonstrates how the process of separating history into discrete blocks of time to showcase a stable set of characteristics is based on the privileging of certain events, regions and demographics over others. More important, the disconnect not only situates Asian American history outside of mainstream demarcations of U.S. history but also serves as a critical reminder of the arbitrariness of historical periodizations. For historian Gail M. Nomura, the field of the U.S. West further exposes the subjective quality of U.S. historiography, revealing regional biases that draw on occurrences of the East Coast and New England states to narrate trends in U.S. history and that conceive the nation largely through a north and south divide. But as Nomura contended in her essay, “Asia and Asian Americans in the history of the U.S. West,” these biases strategically situate the U.S. West as a field of study that disrupts the notion of westward expansion as a seamless movement from U.S. East to U.S. West.8 It also underscores a context whereby Asian Americans played a special role in the nation’s development, expanding conceptions of the “west” and “westward expansion” to include the divisions, connections and continuities between the Eastern and Western worlds. In American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941, Dorothy Fujita-Rony carried forward this far-reaching understanding of the “west” to show not only how U.S. westward expansion extended past the continental U.S. to include the Philippines but also how Filipino migration to the U.S. transformed the U.S. Pacific Northwest into a transpacific region.9 A compelling aspect of this study lies in the way Seattle emerged as a site that both blurred the East-West divide and sustained its divisions, highlighting how the U.S. colonial takeover of the Philippines generated a social unevenness that dictated the flow of people, idea, goods and resources from East to West. Against the trend of earlier works on Asian American history, Rick Baldoz’s 2011 The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946 did not collapse the story of Filipino Americans back into a cultural nationalist approach.10 Rather, he utilized the system of colonial migration and American imperialism as narrative structures to distinguish the immigration of Filipinos from that of Chinese and Japanese. Difference, in this view, was not reduced to a generalized statement about how all human experiences are varied. It was embedded within discussions on Filipino migration to bring to the fore the disparate systems of power at work to govern the movement of people, goods and ideas. This compelled Asian American history to deepen its understanding and critique of U.S. capitalism and how it worked to structure the uneven movement of people, goods and ideas between the United States and the Philippines. Baldoz shows how the U.S. colonial takeover of the Philippines led to the creation of a new legal status that separated Filipinos from other Asian and European immigrants. As U.S. nationals, Filipinos not only bore the mark of being colonial subjects of the U.S., but also were allowed because of this status to immigrate to the U.S. during a time when no other Asian groups could enter, though this status did not extend to a granting of naturalized citizenship. In the early 1930s when the exclusion movement targeted Filipinos, Baldoz underscored how the terms of exclusion differed from that of earlier Asian groups. Building on works by scholars such as Linda España-Maram, Baldoz detailed how, unlike in the case of Chinese male laborers, dominant society did not construct the deviance of Filipino male workers as asexual bachelors but as hypersexualized predators given how many had dared to cross the colorline and dance with white women in taxi dance halls.11 The exclusion of Filipinos was thus carried out to mitigate both labor and sexual competition in the preservation of white male privilege. Notably, Catherine Ceniza Choy in her 2003 Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History detailed how the colonial system of labor migration was still in place even after the United States had officially ended its colonial rule over the Philippines, manifested by the gendered migration of Filipina nurses to the United States.12 252

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As scholars of Asian American history foregrounded U.S. westward expansion and the growth of American imperialism, they also profoundly shifted the study of Asian immigration to Hawai’i. Some of the earlier works, such as Ronald Takaki’s 1983 Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 and Gary Okihiro’s 1991 Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945, highlighted the important role that Japanese immigrants played in the development of Hawai’i’s economy.13 Writing against the perception of Hawai’i as a racial paradise given its diverse demographics, Takaki and Okihiro showed how Hawai’i’s sugar plantations advanced a system of economic racism that kept Japanese immigrants at the margins. Economic and racial exploitation, however, also spurred them to collective action, as many Japanese immigrants joined labor unions and forged interracial and inter-ethnic coalitions to fight for better wages and living conditions. But as editors Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura argued in their 2008 volume of collected essays, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life, the unqualified casting of Asian immigrants as representing the margins of society that pushed mainstream society to realize its full democratic potential is predicated on an important omission: that Asian settlement in Hawai’i contributed to the displacement of Native Hawaiians and the erosion of the Native Hawaiian way of life.14 Considering this occurrence, Fujikane and Okamura posed a series of questions for scholars of Asian American history. They asked scholars to confront how the success of Asians in Hawai’i was achieved through the supplanting of Native Hawaiians and not just through social activism and hard work. They further pushed scholars to consider how the skewed immigrant tale of struggle and resistance, where American democracy is readily available to all who are willing to fight for it, promoted the goals of American imperialism and the belief in American exceptionalism. Finally, Fujikane and Okamura asked scholars of Asian American history to return to their social justice roots and challenge the system of colonialism by writing narratives where Asian Americans in Hawai’i are portrayed as settler colonialists and not just as the exploited class.

Development of a Transnational Approach Historian Madeline Y. Hsu continued the steering of Asian American history away from a cultural nationalist approach. With her 2000 study, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943, she helped to usher in the transnational turn of American history.15Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home shattered perceptions that Chinese exclusion resulted in the permanent fracture of ties between Chinese immigrants in the United States and families and networks in China, along with notions that Chinese immigrants were locked in a state of unbelonging, rendered immobile and ineffectual in both U.S. and Chinese societies. Instead, Hsu showed how Taishanese immigrants managed to create an economic niche in the United States while remaining active and valued family members in China. Similarly, Eiichiro Azuma detailed in his 2005 book, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, how Japanese in the United States prior to World War II often found themselves negotiating between their American nationality and their Japanese racial formation.16 And David Yoo in his 2010 study, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945, highlighted how religious activities propelled the transnational migrations of Korean Americans and connected those in the United States with the broader transnational movement for Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule.17 Collectively, these works contributed to breaking the either/or framework of national belonging, underscoring how notions of culture and national identity do not exist in discrete self-contained units. Rather than claim America as the true home for Asian Americans to rid the stigma of perpetual foreignness, these scholars showed how the U.S. national identity was forged through its relationship with other countries such that Asian Americans embodied and carried forward these transnational linkages. Authors Richard Kim and Seema Sohi further built on this transnational framework and expanded their examinations of Asian American political activism. As Kim detailed in his 2011 study, The Quest 253

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for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905–1955, the political activities of Korean immigrants in the United States could not be limited to examining their participation in strikes against Hawaiian plantation owners.18 Besides challenging racism and economic exploitation in the U.S., Kim underscored how Korean Americans dedicated their energies and resources to liberate Korea from Japanese colonial rule, such that the study of Korean independence would not be complete without taking into account the transnational political activism of Koreans in exile. In Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America, Sohi highlighted the way labor migrants, students and intellectual activists came together to contest the unjust rule of the British Raj over India.19 Considering how the collective action of South Asians in North America nearly unseated British colonialism during World War I, Sohi argued that the United States allied with the British and actively sought to quell the political activities of South Asian Americans while enacting immigration restrictions to prevent the entrance of South Asians to the United States. These measures prompted South Asians to link their fight for civil rights in the United States to their fight for Indian independence. The result was the forging of a particular brand of transnational political activism that tied homeland politics to domestic civil rights measures. Besides recasting studies of immigration, identity formation and political activism, the framework of transnationalism allowed scholars of Asian American history to advance studies on war and society. Ji-Yeon Yuh made known in her 2004 book, Beyond Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, how the creation of American military bases following the U.S. occupation of South Korea (1945–48) and the Korean War (1950–53) structured the transnational migration of Korea military brides to the United States.20 Her examination of the lives of these women crucially brought together the messy histories of Japanese and U.S. colonialisms as well as military prostitution. Arissa Oh highlighted another legacy of the Korean War; in her 2015 book, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption, she details how the U.S. adoption of mixed race babies from Korea or “G. I. babies” not only developed a template for international adoption but also mapped the neocolonial relationship between the United States and Korea.21 Outside of the Korean War, scholars of Asian American history are making significant inroads into the scholarship of the Southeast Asia War, which encompasses U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and its covert military operations in Laos and Cambodia. Against the trend of mainstream scholarship preoccupied with the trauma of American soldiers following the Vietnam War, Asian American studies scholars underscore the plight of Southeast Asian refugees. While more work needs to be done in this area, historian Sucheng Chan has published a series of oral histories to detail the often tragic tales of flight of the displaced Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong and Cambodians, along with the difficulties that they encountered in the resettlement and adjustment to life in the United States.22 Importantly, critical refugee studies scholars, exemplified by the work of Yen Le Espiritu, have also charted a new direction for refugee scholarship that moves away from the tragic tales of flight to show how the success stories of Vietnamese refugees in the United States have worked to boost the rescue fantasies of the nation and justify its military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.23 The influence of this line of thinking is seen in the work of historian Chong Moua. In her 2016 essay, “Refugee Memoryscape: The Rhetoric of Hmong Refugee Writing,” Moua examined letters written by Hmong refugees in various refugee camps to show how they forged a counter-memory to the U.S. national discourse.24 Hmong memoryscape disrupts the belief in American exceptionalism, highlighting how instead of providing freedom to the displaced Hmong, the U.S. had fractured the cohesiveness of a community now spread out around the world because of its covert military operations in Laos. Perhaps the most enduring influence of Asian American history on the study of war and society rests with the scholarship on Japanese internment. Among the definitive works on this subject is Roger Daniels’s 1993 book, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in WWII.25 In it, Daniels revealed how concerns over national security during World War II advanced xenophobic and racist sentiments that led to the denial to Japanese Americans of their constitutional protections as American citizens 254

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and as legal residents of the United States. The internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese in the United States, as Daniels compellingly argued, was thus based not on actual crimes committed but on race. Greg Robinson, with his 2009 study, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, significantly broadened the scope of Japanese internment and detailed how beyond the United States, the Japanese were rounded up and incarcerated in Canada and in various parts of Latin America.26 With this expanded framework of the study of Japanese internment, Robinson promoted and helped to initiate a hemispheric understanding of Asian America. Importantly, the analysis and critiques that scholars of Asian American history developed on Japanese internment have shaped recent scholarship on the War on Terror and the subsequent surveillance of Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and South Asian Americans. The emergence of the Brown Threat, which has spread to include Latinx populations, has reinvigorated the study of Japanese internment, stretching its relevance to deepening investigations into the inner workings of race, national security and civil liberties.

Beyond the Black/White Binary Finally, the survey of the shifts and trends of Asian American history requires an analysis of the many narratives that seek to go beyond a black/white binary in the examination of race relations and social change in the United States. Within Asian American history, two definitive works chronicle the rise of “Asia America.” Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, edited by Steven Louie and Glenn Omatsu, laid the groundwork for understanding Asian American social activism from 1965 to 2001.27 A conglomeration of various snapshots detailing the political activities of Asian American activists, this 2001 volume documented the rise of an Asian American consciousness that bound activists together to champion issues that affected their community. Among the legacies was the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies on college campuses, aimed at carrying forward education on Asian American issues and promoting social justice. Daryl J. Maeda, in his 2009 study, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America, similarly charted the rise of the Asian American movement, which saw the joining together of socially conscious Asian Americans in solidarity with other non-white groups in the fight for Ethnic Studies and black liberation and against the war in Vietnam.28 Notably, both studies go beyond the streets to trace the cultural history of social activism through protest songs, movement posters, comics and newsletters. In many ways, Scott Kurashige’s 2010 The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles carried forward the analysis of Maeda, Louie and Omatsu by highlighting other moments of interracial solidarity that saw the joining together of blacks and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles in the fight against housing segregation and for the election of the city’s first black mayor.29 Notably, Cindy I-Fen Cheng showed in her 2013 book, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War, how for Asian Americans, civil rights reforms went beyond the fight against race-based restrictions in housing to include immigration reform.30 Thus, the 1960s civil rights movement also witnessed the coming together of various Asian groups to challenge the racial and national preferences of the nation’s immigration policies. Finally, the works of Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Yuichiro Onishi developed the international scope of Asian American and African American social activism. As Wu explored in her 2013 book, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era, American radicals who traveled to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War sought to change the political imaginary of antiwar protests, as they saw themselves as part of an international movement against colonialism and military violence.31 Similarly, Onishi went outside the United States to trace the development of Afro-Asian solidarity. In his 2013 study, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa, Onishi detailed the formation of Afro-Asian radicalism and internationalism in Japan and Okinawa.32 For some scholars, the task of going beyond a black/white binary calls for new directions in the study of Asian American history. In closing, this chapter highlights the works of two scholars who are 255

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charting new frontiers in the field of Asian American history. Vivek Bald, with his 2013 study, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian Americans, has written one of a small handful of accounts in U.S. historiography on Muslim American life during the turn of the twentieth century.33 He further examined how their work as peddlers took them from New Jersey into the American South, where many had to negotiate their racial belonging in the white/black schema of the Jim Crow era. Bengali Harlem thus stretched the domain of Asian American history to consider the experiences of Asian Americans in Dixie as well as groups whose racial formations are defined through religious affiliations. In a similar fashion, Nayan Shah is working to reorient the study of Asian American history. In Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West, Shah examined the ways in which government officials relied on immigration laws to regulate the sexual practices of South Asian American immigrants.34 Where his earlier work, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, took readers to the opium dens of Chinatown to develop how healthcare officials constructed the racial and gendered deviance of Chinese immigrants, Shah’s 2012 study brought readers to alleyways and back streets of urban areas, to the borderlands of the straight state, where intimate relations were taking place between South Asian immigrant men and where state officials had arrested these men and pushed for their deportation.35 The use of immigration policies to regulate the sexual practices of South Asian immigrant men, argued Shah, contributed to the forging of a national belonging through sexual citizenship. Shah’s queering of Asian American history thus advances the ability of Asian American history to unsettle the various powers that work to marginalize people and perspectives. This chapter featured some key works of Asian American history to show how scholars are continually engaged in an ongoing process of self-reflection as they explore different avenues through which a fair and just relation between individuals and society can be promoted. Their endeavors not only stretch the potential of Asian American history to advance social justice; they also develop and transform the frontiers of U.S. history.

Notes   1 Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Press, 1989).   2 See Russell C. Leong, “Opening History to Hear New Voices,” Amerasia Journal 16, no. 2 (1990): 63–69; Sucheng Chan, “Strangers From a Different Shore as History and Historiography,” Amerasia Journal 16, no. 2 (1990): 81–100; L. Ling-chi Wang, “A Critique of Strangers From a Different Shore,” Amerasia Journal 16, no. 2 (1990): 71–80.   3 Elaine H. Kim, “A Critique of Strangers From a Different Shore,” Amerasia Journal 16, no. 2 (1990): 101–111.   4 Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).   5 See Sucheng Chan, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990).   6 See Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne, 1991). See also Shelley SangHee Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2013); Erica Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).   7 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).   8 Gail M. Nomura, “Significant Lives: Asia and Asian American in the History of the U.S. West,” Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 69–88.   9 Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919– 1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). 10 Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 11 See Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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Asian American History 12 Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 13 Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983); Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 14 See Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). 15 Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 16 Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 17 David Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 18 Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905–1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 20 Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 21 Arissa Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 22 See Sucheng Chan, ed., The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight and New Beginnings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Sucheng Chan, ed., Hmong Means Free (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 23 See Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 24 Chong A. Moua, “Refugee Memoryscape: The Rhetoric of Hmong Refugee Writing,” in The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies, ed. Cindy I-Fen Cheng (New York: Routledge, 2016): 117–128. 25 Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in WW II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). 26 Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 27 Steven G. Louie and Glenn K. Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2001). 28 Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 29 Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 30 Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 31 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 32 Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 33 Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 34 Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 35 See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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24 IMMIGRATION AND ETHNICITY—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Stephanie Hinnershitz

For decades, an image from 1907 of mainly Jewish immigrants awaiting entry to the United States at Ellis Island came to symbolize the arrival of millions of Italians, Poles, Slavs, Jews from various nations and others yearning to breathe free in America. Plastered on textbooks, memorialized on posters and utilized in numerous presentations on immigration history, Alfred Steiglitz’s photo The Steerage of “huddled masses” seeking refuge from economic, social and political unrest was representative of the wave of immigrants who arrived in the United States between the 1880s and World War I. As millions of school children across the country learned, immigrants like those depicted in the black-and-white photo escaped hardship and found new hope in America.1 Unfortunately, this interpretation of the photo is incorrect. Recently, immigration historian Donna Gabaccia explained that rather than entering the United States, the immigrants in this iconic photo were preparing to leave “the promised land” after being denied admission by immigration officials. Such revelations disrupt the traditional narrative of twentieth-century immigration history. The United States was not always the final destination for immigrants. Their reasons for returning home or moving on to another nation challenge the notion that all immigrants found success and new hope in America and wished to assimilate to American culture. While perhaps jarring to those raised with the exceptionalist view that America was the end goal for all immigrants, the shattering of this national myth portrays what immigration historians have been arguing since the late twentieth century: Immigration history, like immigration itself, is dynamic, cuts across national borders, cultures and events and defies beloved national myths.2 Immigration history as a subfield has a more recent historiography rooted in the Cold War pageantry following World War II as well as contradictions in American immigration policy and its ideas of freedom at that time. In order to trace the rise of twentieth-century immigration history, one need look no farther than historian Oscar Handlin’s 1951 classic and foundational text The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Handlin, the son of Jewish émigrés who settled in the United States during the early 1900s, argued that white European immigrants who came to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century faced hardships as part of their “uprooting” when fleeing turmoil and persecution in Europe. However, they eventually found success after abandoning many of their customs and assimilating to American culture. The comforting myth of America as a crucible where immigrants could shed their old selves and emerge as cultural, social and political (if they chose or could obtain citizenship) Americans played out in the late 1940s when Displaced Persons fled the ruins of postwar Europe to escape to America. However, restrictive race and nation-based quotas from the Immigration Act of 1924 and exclusion policies 258

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severely limited the number of “third wave” immigrants coming to America and barred virtually all Asians.3 In the post-WWII United States, where all ethnicities and races had proven their worth by fighting in the war abroad or on the home front, such measures could not stand.4 Many would come to believe that America’s position of superiority during the Cold War was dependent on its ability to receive and welcome migrants from around the world, particularly those in Soviet-controlled or influenced regions. Politicians and the federal government viewed Asian Americans and Asian immigrants as potential allies in the ideological fight against Soviets after the “fall” of China to communism; however, immigration policies that restricted Asian migration complicated these views.5 In 1943, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, allowing a trickle of Chinese to enter the United States and providing avenues for naturalization, but this was a token measure to assuage the United States’ Chinese allies during the war rather than an important policy shift. During the 1950s, containing communism at home was just as important as containing communism abroad. These goals were reflected in policies such as the 1952 Walter-McCarran Act, which provided a small increase in the number of Asian immigrants allowed to enter the United States and allowed all Asians to naturalize (voiding the Supreme Court’s 1923 decision in the Thind v. United States case), but also added more opportunities for the deportation of “subversive” immigrants.6 The number of immigrants entering the United States under the 1952 Act was not significantly different than before, but by the mid-1960s, Congress addressed calls for a more liberal immigration policy that aligned with America’s desire to be seen as a democratic beacon in the world, particularly for those who might be seeking refuge from the Soviet Union. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had long argued for more liberal policies to allow more eastern European refugees into the United States while the quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924 were still in effect. Other groups, including Jewish American and Italian American organizations as well as religious groups, echoed these calls and challenged the discriminatory and restrictive immigration measures.7 A combination of Cold War tactics and growing embarrassment in the wake of outdated laws prompted President Johnson to sign the Hart-Celler Bill (named for sponsors Senator Philip Hart and Representative Emanuel Celler) into law in October of 1965. The resulting act abolished race and nation-based quotas, instead implementing a standard 290,000-visa ceiling for immigrants, including those from the Western Hemisphere who were previously exempt from quotas. The Act also provided special provisions and prioritization for those wishing to reunite with family members or who possessed special skills or knowledge that could alleviate labor shortages. As Mae Ngai has argued, although more “liberal” in the numbers of immigrants it allowed to enter the United States, the Immigration Act of 1965 still maintained the spirit of restrictive immigration policies by privileging economics and politics over the lives of immigrants desperately seeking entrance into the United States.8 However, the Act did have a significant impact on immigration to the United States. Before the signing of the Act, Johnson and Senator Ted Kennedy assuaged fears that the Immigration Act would radically alter the ethnic make-up of the United States by insisting that the Act was more symbolic than anything else.9 In fact, Johnson famously suggested that there would be no new immigrants coming from Asia and the main result of the Act would be to reunite families who had been separated. Johnson’s predictions proved wrong. By the 1970s, following the implementation of the Immigration Act of 1965 in 1968, immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and all parts of South and Central America began to arrive in the United States in increasingly larger numbers.10 The growing number of new immigrants during the late 1960s and early 1970s coincided with other social and political changes in the United States. The African American civil rights movement was, as historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall suggested, “long” in that it began well before the landmark protests, court cases and legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, and also “wide” in that it influenced other rights movements.11 By the late 1960s, Chicanos, Native Americans, feminists, gay Americans and Asian Americans also protested poor working conditions, discrimination, prejudice and violence through sit-ins, lobbying and organization. Such action carried over into the realm of academia. 259

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In 1968, the Third World Liberation Front, a multiethnic organization largely composed of the second and third-generation sons and daughters of Asian immigrants as well as newcomers who protested the Vietnam War, imperialism and general mistreatment of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States, along with the Black Student Union, held a strike against San Francisco State University and its president, S. I. Hawakaya. The protesters demanded more courses on ethnic history and culture in the United States to offset the white, Eurocentric classes on Western Civilization and “great white male” history. Campuses along the West Coast such as the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University soon experienced similar student protests as minority students pushed the institutions to recognize the growing diversity on college campuses. From these student protests came the growth of ethnic studies programs at schools nationwide as ethnic identities went beyond sociological definitions to become powerful political and cultural tools.12 As academia became more diverse during the 1960s, the study of American history became more inclusive and focused on telling stories “from the bottom up.” Social history had its roots among postwar European historians who turned to studying peasants and laborers, but in the United States this subfield of history became more centered on race and ethnicity. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan’s 1963 book Beyond the Melting Pot rejected the notion that America served as the crucible that “blended” different ethnicities and cultures together; racial and ethnic minorities appeared to hold on to aspects of their culture and identities.13 Armed with quantitative skills and new analytical lenses, scholars created microhistories that examined understudied communities of workers, women and African Americans in the United States, from the smallest counties to neighborhoods in larger cities. Historians also turned to the experiences of immigrant groups not included in Handlin’s The Uprooted.14 With more ethnic and racial minorities gaining access to secondary and post-secondary education, they yearned to write their “own” histories that outlined the pasts of Asians, Chicanos and non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants. This required digging into the history of immigration and shifting attention away from Ellis Island and other eastern seaports to other areas, including the South, the Midwest and the West Coast. New microhistories and larger narratives of Chinese and Mexican immigrants filled journals and books.15 Ethnic historical societies such as the Chinese Historical Association (founded by famed Chinese American actor and art scholar Chingwah Lee) allowed local communities a window into their own history. Incidents of violence, discrimination and prejudice against Asians, Latinos, Italians, Jews and other ethnic groups that were hidden beneath layers of celebratory and exceptional accounts of America’s history as a melting pot galvanized communities to preserve history in order to push for redress of past wrongs.16 There were deep connections between immigration and other forms of history, echoing Handlin’s still-relevant claim that immigration history is American history and vice versa. Immigration history grew so rapidly as a subfield that historians formed the Immigration and Ethnic History Society in 1965 to promote further studies. More than just an offshoot or an extension of social history, immigration history was growing into a distinct field with its own terms, methodologies and central questions by the 1970s and 1980s. Oral histories, family records, genealogical information and local sources provided new material to write the histories of previously unexamined immigrants. Similarly, as more female historians entered the academy, many turned to analyzing the immigrant experience through the eyes of women. Donna Gabaccia’s From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (1984) and Virginia Yans’s Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (1982) challenged the male-dominated narrative of Italian immigration history and sought to uncover the ways in which migration and settlement altered the traditional gendered roles of women in America versus their roles in the “Old World.” Historians were guided by questions of which groups were overlooked and whether or not their inclusion in the larger story of immigration history changed the narrative. The field even claimed one of its first general texts, Roger Daniels’s Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, a sweeping account of American immigration history that has been updated three times since its publication in 1990. Immigration history had arrived.17 260

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For all the new studies in immigration history, however, scholars were generally more interested in adding unheard voices to the narrative than challenging the narrative itself. The general arch of the immigrant experience remained largely intact: Immigrants leave, immigrants arrive in the United States, immigrants struggle, but immigrants endure. During the 1980s, when immigration-themed films such as the animated children’s movie An American Tail, the Robin Williams’s comedy Moscow on the Hudson and Eddie Murphy’s comedic romp Coming to America appeared, immigration history reflected the larger narrative of American exceptionalism and the United States as a receptive if not always welcoming nation. Such glowing sentiments belied rising tensions over newly settled Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, increasing numbers of Latinos and resulting racial discrimination and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided amnesty for illegal immigrants who entered the country before January 1, 1982. Also, social scientists and policy experts appeared to be beating historians to the punch when it came to studies of immigrant groups arriving after 1965 who were facing unique challenges.18 Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, immigration history underwent a rebirth that reflected new approaches and new questions influenced by multiple disciplines and a focus on immigration history beyond the early twentieth century. In 1990, immigration historian Virginia Yans-McLaughlin “peered back on historiography of immigration from the vantage point of the 90s” and noted the need to “move immigration studies forward by involving interdisciplinary work.”19 Yans edited the aptly titled Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (1990), a collection of essays from top immigration scholars seeking to reframe how immigration history was approached. Yans identified the need to challenge the notions of “American exceptionalism . . . the uniqueness of United States history, individual achievement, and the great melting pot as givens of the immigrant experience,” in order to provide a framework that does not “stand in easy harmony with the political consensus of the 1980s.”20 Challenging “accepted myths of individual and national autonomy” by conversing with sociologists, political scientists and others, Yans placed immigration history in a new structural context, looking at how labor, capitalism, ethnicity and gender shaped immigrant experiences rather than just chronicling the endless march of individual immigrants towards Americanization. Neither the “melting pot” nor “ethnic pluralism” of the 1970s accurately captured the “complex processes” of immigration. Yans proposed “revising accepted wisdom” of both immigration history and national myths of exceptionalism by “questioning the classical assimilation model, which proposes a linear progression of immigrant culture toward a dominant American national character” and citizenship.21 During the 1990s and early 2000s, historians grappled with larger concepts such as policy, ethnicity, race, assimilation and citizenship, which, as Yans projected, challenged the narrative of immigration history. Lucy E. Salyer in Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Erika Lee in At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 both turned to legal history and underutilized records from the National Archives relating to Chinese immigrant processing to carefully analyze the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on immigration laws and policies. They showed how they intersected with definitions and ideas of citizenship and belonging, bridging Asian American history with immigration and American history more generally.22 In the same vein, historians such as David Roediger in Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs turned to whiteness studies to investigate the historical processes of assimilation, acculturation and naturalization. He explained how previously “non-white” immigrants and ethnicities including Italians, Jews and other eastern/southern Europeans became “white” by adapting to racial structures in the United States that placed African Americans and other minorities in the lower classes of society during the early-to-mid twentieth century.23 Perhaps the most influential argument presented in Yans’s work for more recent developments in immigration history, however, is the need to expand the study of U.S. immigration history beyond 261

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the nation’s borders. Yans did not explicitly refer to calls for immigration historians to reach across borders and oceans as “transnationalism,” but the key concepts were there.24 Yans built on historian Frank Thistlewaite’s 1960 essay “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” which argued that “Americanists were almost exclusively preoccupied with immigrant adjustment and focused on only one geographic point in a world system,” creating a restricted vision of a more global history of migration.25 In response, the rise of transatlantic history in the late 1980s and early 1990s addressed issues such as the connectivity of Atlantic nations and peoples during the colonial era and nineteenth centuries due to economics and politics, but the scope was still narrow.26 By the early 1990s, as more immigrants from the “Third World” began arriving in the United States, the need for understanding American history within a larger system became apparent. Plus, a more global understanding of migration argued that immigrants did not often intend to remain in the United States and certainly did not always intend to become citizens or even culturally “American.” With increasing discussions of “globalization” during the 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of transnational scholarship garnered attention. In their seminal work Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, published in 1993, sociologists and anthropologists Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc used migration to outline the contours of the emerging field of transnational studies. As immigration scholars, Basch, Schiller and Blanc focused on how people and ideas “move above, below, through and around, as well as within the nation-state.” They defined transnationalism “as the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies and origin and settlement” and “who act in ways that challenge our previous conflation of geographic space and social identity.”27 Through this approach to migration, they sought to explore “the ways transmigrants are transformed by their transnational practices and how these practices affect the nation-states of the transmigrant’s origin and settlement.”28 Immigration scholars were at the forefront of the “transnational turn” during the mid-to-late 1990s, identifying transnational actors—immigrants—as challenges to borders and the idea of nation states.29 American historians soon followed the lead of social scientists in reframing United States history through transnationalism. In 2000, following a series of retreats and meetings in La Villa Pietra, Italy, a group of American historians issued a report outlining the ways in which American history could be reframed to be more transnational. Thomas Bender urged historians to think about American boundaries and borders and the ways in which they are as permeable as they are fixed—rethinking the central place of the nation-state and nation-building in American history. Only through such approaches, he argued, could historians disrupt the “master narrative” of American exceptionalism and understand America’s part in transnational forces. Ideally, historians would come to understand that “the lived and experienced connections in transnational space need to be explored—both the channels that facilitate movement and the ruptures, discontinuities and disarticulations that structure inequalities and constitute the basis for national and other forms of differentiation.”30 Drawing on the rise of African diaspora history and transatlantic history, the historians gathered at La Pietra dedicated themselves to engaging in history that decentered the nation, without forgetting its importance in American history. As a result, the acts of “minor transnational actors” and borderland studies of individuals making their homes and living irrespective of a nation’s boundaries became new topics of interest. Considering the emphasis after the transnational turn in American history on the flow of peoples and ideas, it would make sense that immigration history would rise to the forefront of an example of transnational history.31 But was immigration history inherently transnational history simply through the act of studying the experiences of peoples who came to and settled in the United States? By the early 2000s and in the midst of globalization and an increasingly diverse immigrant and ethnic population in the United States, many immigration historians argued that immigration history itself was not automatically transnational. As with scholars in other fields, immigration historians were guilty of placing an 262

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emphasis on America and failing to understand the history and characteristics of sending countries and the migrants’ ties to them. Although immigration historians had long since been interested in examining the links between immigrants and their home countries, such studies appeared superficial and still American-centric. Was there a way to examine the experiences of immigrants in the United States without undermining the role of the nation or of the sending nation?32 Many historians offered ways of examining the ties that have historically bound immigrants to both the United States and their homelands. Immigration history is not inherently transnational, and simply including discussions of homelands (or the “push” factors in immigration history) in larger works on immigrant groups in the United States is not a transnational approach. Transnational immigration history is about the dynamic process of migration: deciding to leave, moving to a new country, settling and making a new home while remaining in touch with the old through a variety of means and actions. Asian American history has benefited from a transnational approach that challenges the transpacific focus on waves of Asian immigrants who arrived on the West Coast between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2008, Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa identified key characteristics of what transnational Asian American history should aim to do: provide substantial focus on the stories and historical context in Asia as well as in the Americas (requiring non-English training); examine Asian migration to the Americas and its impact on Asia and on U.S.–Asia relations; investigate migratory circuit and border crossings—not only across the Pacific but also across the Atlantic and within the Western ­Hemisphere; and emphasize the mutual, interactive nature of cultural, institutional, and economic flows.33 Such guidelines are reflected in more recent studies within the past ten years that look at previously understudied groups as well as understudied transnational connections. For example, moving beyond the early Chinese and Japanese immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians such as Catherine Ceniza Choy, Arissa Oh and Eleana J. Kim have recently focused on Asian adoption following World War II within the context of Cold War politics and transnational family formation.34 Erika Lee’s own most recent work, The Making of Asian America: A History, was also transnational in scope, covering a wide variety of ethnic groups including Southeast Asians, refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and groups arriving within the past ten years. Asian migrants share not only transpacific ties, but also hemispheric connections found in the border crossings of Chinese, Japanese and other groups from Canada, the United States, Mexico and Central and South America.35 Transnational concepts also shape approaches to understanding the historical process of assimilation and its effect on ethnic identity. Assimilation has long been an important concept in scholarship relating to the study of immigration and immigration history, going back to early sociologists such as Robert Park who approached assimilation as a straightforward march from “ethnic” to “American.”36 Most white migrants could accomplish this transition, while others—Asians and non-whites—had a more difficult time or were unable to do so under laws then in effect. This concept of assimilation also shaped early histories, such as Oscar Handlin’s work. But more recent historians have come to question the place of assimilation in immigration history or view it as an entirely “coercive process,” one in which immigrants feel compelled to conform if they wish to succeed in America.37 When placed within the context of transnationalism and transnational ties, traditional understandings of the processes of assimilation or acculturation become particularly problematic. Robert Courtney Smith’s study of Mexican immigrants who made their homes in New York City during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries challenged the idea of assimilation as a linear process by examining the ways in which Mexican immigrants not only maintained ties with Mexico through economics (remittances) and politics (staying abreast of local elections and developments in Mexico), but also 263

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created new identities that that challenged gender norms and traditional culture. Living in the United States and building a life that is still connected to local Mexican communities rather than “Mexico” itself creates unique local, transnational identities that are not always easily identifiable as completely “ethnic” or “racial.” Rather than relying on the phrases “transnational” or “transnational migrants” to describe the Mexican immigrants who fashioned new ways of life in the United States that neither severed nor fully embraced traditional cultural norms, Smith argued that the phrase “transnational life” more aptly describes “those practices and relationships linking migrants and their children with the home country, where such practices have significant meaning.”38 In other words, transnationalism is no more a straight-forward process than assimilation. Focusing on the transnational lives of migrants reveals the day-to-day or “local transnationalisms” that occur rather than those that are part of the larger structures of nation-states.39 The transnational turn has certainly opened up American immigration history in terms of inclusivity and scope, but more recently historians have moved towards embracing larger categories of race, ethnicity, immigration and rights as useful lenses of analysis to see how waves of migrants and ethnic groups have shaped the United States during the twentieth century. Scott Kurashige examines Japanese American and African American interactions during the civil rights movement in Los Angeles, while Mark Brilliant and Shana Bernstein cast a wider net with similar objectives over larger areas of California to understand how different ethnicities and races contributed to the issues and debates of political and justice movements from the 1940s through the 1960s. The inclusion of immigrants in the narrative of mid-twentieth-century justice movements complicates the history of the civil rights movement. Nico Slate takes this concept further by looking at transnational anti-colonialist activism among southeast Asian immigrants in the United States during the early-to-mid twentieth century and their interactions with pan-Africanist and African American civil rights activists who also opposed imperialism and colonialism. In many ways, immigration history has grown beyond a “specialty field” to fully integrate with other methodologies and historiographies, realizing Handlin’s argument that American history is immigration history and vice versa. Also, using a wider lens to understand immigration history does not, as some have argued, erase the “nation” from transnationalism.40 Literature on American immigration history of the twentieth century has dramatically evolved since Oscar Handlin penned The Uprooted. More recently, the focus on transnational migration places America within a global context while balancing the impact that immigrants had and continue to have on the social, political, economic and cultural direction and development of the United States. Doing so has decentered the nation-state in immigration history without losing sight of its power and, more importantly, raises a challenge to the notion of American exceptionalism in immigration history. Returning to the photo of immigrants awaiting the ship that would take them away from America, how many more families and immigrants crisscrossed the United States during the twentieth century, seeking shelter and opportunity? How many fled—voluntarily or otherwise—their shattered dreams? As more migrants arrive in the United States, the story of twentieth-century immigration history will undoubtedly become more diverse and global. This new narrative will not displace the importance of the United States, but it will link the nation to a more global tale of movement.

Notes   1 Donna Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 24–25.   2 Ibid., 25.   3 As colonial subjects, Filipinos were allowed to continue to enter the United States when others Asians were prohibited from doing so.   4 See Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951); John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1964). See also David A. Gerber, “The Uprooted Would Never Have Been Written If Oscar

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Immigration and Ethnicity Handlin Had Taken His Own Latter-Day Advice,” Journal of American Ethnic History 32, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 69–77; David Rothman, “The Uprooted: Thirty Years Later,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 3 (1982): 311–319 for more on Handlin’s interpretations of immigration history. Tara Zahra’s The Great Departure: Mass Migration From Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016) also examines some of the same groups and themes as Handlin, but does so from the viewpoint of emigration from Europe as opposed to the perspective of the United States as it looked at immigration from Europe. See also Susan L. Carruthers, “Between Camps: Eastern Bloc ‘Escapees’ and Cold War Borderlands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 911–942 for more on “displaced persons” and wartime refugees.   5 See Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2013) for more on Asian Americans in the Cold War.   6 Despite the appearance of liberalization, the McCarran-Walter Act also provided for harsh entry barriers to those who were suspected of subversive activities. See Michael G. Davis, “Impetus for Immigration Reform: Asian Refugees and the Cold War,” Journal of American East-Asian Relations 7, no. 3/4 (1998): 127–140 for more on the issues surrounding the McCarran-Walter Act. For more on the Thind case, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 38, 42–43.   7 For more on the activism surrounding the Immigration Act of 1965, see Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 227–240; Gabriel Chin and Rose Cuison Villazor, eds., The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Margaret Sands Orchowsky, The Law That Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).   8 Mae Ngai, “The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudices: The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration Reform,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCarin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006): 108–128.   9 See Tom Gjelten, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 132–133. 10 Ibid., 132. 11 Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. See also Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) for more on the “wide” civil rights movement. 12 See Karen Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (New York: Verso, 2016); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Daryl Joji Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement (New York: Routledge, 2011); Carlos Munoz, Youth Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso, 2007); Paul Chaat Smith, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1997); Judy Tzu-Shun Wu, “Hypervisibility and Invisibility: Asian/ American Women, Radical Orientalism, and the Revisioning of Global Feminism,” in The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, ed. Moon Ho-Jung (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). 13 See Nathan Glazier and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 14 Rudolph J. Vecoli’s article, “Contandini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (1964): 404–417 challenged Handlin’s notion of assimilation as well as pointing out its limited focus on migrant groups beyond the “older” Europeans. 15 See Sucheng Chan, “Introduction: Chinese American Historiography-What Difference Has the Asian American Movement Made?,” in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Sucheng Chan and Madeline Y. Hsu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 1–20 for more on Asian American and Asian immigration historiography during the 1960s. See Manuel P. Servin, The Mexican-Americans: An Awakening Minority (Beverly Hills, CA: Prentice Hall College Division, 1970); Matt S. Mejer and Feliciano Rivera, The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (New York: Arte Publico Press, 1997) for some early works on Mexican American history. 16 Chang, “Introduction,” 18. See also Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); Him Mark Lai and Madeline Y. Shu, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (New York: AltaMira Press, 2004); Lai, Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014) for more on Asian American activism and history.

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Stephanie Hinnershitz 17 See Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880– 1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Virginia Yans, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 18 See Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape From Violence: Conflict the and Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Linda Basch, Christna Blanc-Szanton and Nina Glick Schiller, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992) for more on social sciences and studies of immigration during the late 1980s and early 1990s. 19 Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 4. 20 Yans-McLaughlin, Immigration Reconsidered, 5. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 See Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 23 See David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 24 Yans-McLaughlin, Immigration Reconsidered, 5, 7. 25 Frank Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” reprinted in Population Movements in Modern European History, ed. Herbert Moller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1964), 77. 26 See Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2011) for more on transatlantic history. 27 Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7–8. 28 Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound, 9. 29 See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 17–57 for more on the “transnational turn.” 30 Thomas Bender, The LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession (Organization of American Historians/New York University Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History, 2000 [cited May 24 2016]). www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/final.html 31 See Shuh-Mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) for more on “minor transnationalism.” 32 Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, “What Is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (October 2005), xi. 33 Lee and Shibusawa, “What Is Transnational Asian American History?,” x. 34 See Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Arissa Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 35 See Lee, Making of Asian America, for more on recent trends in Asian American transnational history. 36 Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” The American Journal of Sociology 36, no. 6 (May 1928): 881–893. 37 See Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 524–588. 38 Robert Courtney Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 6. 39 Smith, Mexican New York, 15. 40 See Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Brilliant, The Color of America has Changed; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

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25 METROPOLITAN—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Andrew R. Highsmith

Introduction Two reflections on the state of the art of American urban history help to explain the field’s evolution over the past half-century. In 1970, Richard C. Wade, whose mid-century writings had helped launch the modern field of urban history, bemoaned the lack of scholarship on cities, claiming “historians have arrived at the study of the city by slow freight.”1 Yet, in 2015, Michael B. Katz, commenting on the avalanche of urban history scholarship that had been produced since Wade’s observation, took a far more optimistic view. “As a field,” Katz wrote, “urban history never has shimmered so vibrantly.”2 Both were right. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when scholars belatedly established what became known as the “new” urban history, historians have written extensively on America’s urban, suburban and metropolitan pasts. They have produced thousands of metropolitan-themed offerings—everything from books, articles and films to museum exhibits, blogs and podcasts—all testaments to the growth and dynamism of the field. Scholars have written celebratory biographies of urban centers and big city mayors, imagined cities as both sites and places, probed the processes of urbanization and used quantitative methods to piece together the day-to-day lives of ordinary city dwellers. More recently, they have addressed the causes and consequences of mass suburbanization, grappled with the myriad forces undergirding persistent social inequalities, situated urban history within the development of global capitalism, re-envisioned the temporal and spatial scope of social justice movements, documented the transnational urban past and explored the roots of mass incarceration. Historians have written mountains of narrowly crafted monographs intended for small audiences of specialists, but also major works of synthesis designed to shape government policies and public opinion. In truth, the massive growth in metropolitan history scholarship over the past half-century—and particularly over the past several decades—has made it difficult even to read comprehensively in one’s own narrow subfields, let alone take stock of the field as a whole.3 Consequently, this chapter pursues the narrower objective of analyzing recent scholarship and trends in twentieth-century American metropolitan history, particularly over the past decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive review of the literature produced during this period, I have chosen instead to survey several key areas in which scholars have focused as well as a few emerging spheres of inquiry.

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Foundations Much of the recent historiography of twentieth-century metropolitan America is rooted in three key mass migrations that unfolded during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first—the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration of millions of immigrants and rural Americans to large industrial centers—helped to transform the United States into a predominantly urban nation, but also led to rising conflicts over race, class, ethnicity and space. The second, the accelerated migration of white families and businesses from cities to the suburbs after World War II, eroded urban economic power, hardened lines of racial inequality and, over time, spurred new grassroots social movements. The final migration—that of people, capital and resources from the “Rust Belt” to the “Sunbelt”— shifted the balance of economic and political power in the United States away from the older industrial centers of the North and Midwest to the sprawling, fast-growing metropolitan regions of the South and West. Over the past generation, scholars of the American metropolis have focused carefully on the causes and consequences of these three shifts and, in the process, set the stage for a great deal of recent scholarship. Although numerous accounts have influenced the recent trajectory of metropolitan historiography, three seminal books stand out: Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto (1983); Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier (1985); and Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996). In Making the Second Ghetto, Hirsch explored how a combination of grassroots racism, violence and segregationist public policies helped to create a reconstituted “second ghetto” for African Americans in Chicago.4 Such policies were not unique to Chicago, or cities, for that matter.5 As Jackson illustrated in Crabgrass Frontier, his synthetic history of suburbanization in the United States, the federal housing policies that were instrumental to the rise of the mass suburb after World War II were deliberately discriminatory and helped to create racial and economic imbalances between sprawling, majority-white suburbs and impoverished, segregated central cities.6 Building upon these contributions, Sugrue documented the roots of Detroit’s “urban crisis,” finding that they first took shape during the post-World War II era as a result of white racism, discriminatory housing policies and the shifting of industry and resources away from the increasingly black and poor urban core.7 The rise of the so-called Sunbelt—a vast and geographically contested region occupying swaths of the American South and West—has also attracted significant attention. The earliest accounts of the region’s development were marked by a multiplicity of voices and interpretations. Whereas some scholars asserted that the Sunbelt was geographically incoherent and little more than a marketing gimmick, others identified a more well-defined region marked to varying degrees by economic dynamism, decentralized development, massive federal investment and a new breed of so-called colorblind political conservatism that emphasized economic growth over social equity.8 Through their investigations of the forces underlying the emergence of fragmented, unevenly developed and starkly unequal metropolitan regions, Hirsch, Jackson, Sugrue and a host of Sunbelt specialists significantly shaped the trajectory of the field. In recent years, however, scholars have developed novel approaches to explaining the same phenomena while pursuing new lines of inquiry that have taken the field in exciting, albeit labyrinthine, new directions.

The New Suburban and Metropolitan Histories Although the fates of cities and suburbs have always been intertwined, scholarship in urban and suburban history has often proceeded along parallel tracks. As Charles Tilly pointed out in 1996, scholars of cities too often “take city limits as boundaries for the analysis of ostensibly self-contained urban processes.”9 With few exceptions, much of the early scholarship on suburbanization followed 268

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a similarly narrow path, with suburban historians focusing almost exclusively on events occurring outside the city limits. Since Tilly’s observation, however, scholars have forged a new metropolitan synthesis of urban and suburban history—one that explores relationships between cities and suburbs and the development of metropolitan regions as a whole. Among these accounts, Robert O. Self ’s American Babylon (2003), a case study of race, politics and regional development in postwar Oakland, stood out for its metropolitan spatial orientation. Self ’s major contribution was to bring together the literatures on the urban crisis and mass suburbanization, showing how suburban overdevelopment and urban underdevelopment were two sides of the same metropolitan coin. Self further demonstrated how such uneven patterns of development helped to produce two key strains of postwar American politics: black power and white suburban conservatism.10 Self ’s study was part of a much broader early twenty-first century wave of metropolitan-oriented scholarship linking the fates of cities and suburbs.11 In 2006, Sugrue and Kevin M. Kruse took stock of this scholarship in The New Suburban History. As the two noted, much of this new literature emphasized the political economy of metropolitan development, particularly during the postwar era.12 To cite just one example, in Cities of Knowledge (2005) Margaret Pugh O’Mara documented how Cold War defense initiatives and corporate investment strategies dovetailed to drive the emergence of the high-tech “knowledge economy”—an economic sector rooted in suburban sprawl and the fragmentation of metropolitan regions along lines of race, class and educational achievement.13 The postwar spatial reorganization of metropolitan America also triggered the growth of new social and political movements on both the left and right. Mortgage redlining, employment discrimination and other policies and practices contributing to racial and economic inequality gave rise to major civil rights campaigns in the metropolitan North and West that scholars have only recently begun to document. Moving beyond traditional narratives and chronologies of the civil rights movement that focus primarily on the South during the 1950s and 1960s, scholars such as Jeanne F. Theoharis, Komozi Woodard and Matthew J. Countryman drew attention to freedom struggles occurring all over the United States. Historians also emphasized the multiracial contexts in which civil rights and Black and Brown Power campaigns often took shape and, incorporating Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s work, posited a more expansive chronology for the “long civil rights movement.”14 The restructuring of metropolitan America also fundamentally reshaped electoral politics. However, historians disagreed about the dominant political ethos of the postwar era. On one hand, scholars such as Lisa McGirr and Kevin Kruse argued that factors related to mass suburbanization were instrumental to the rise of a new, ideologically hardened variety of political conservatism.15 On the other hand, Matthew D. Lassiter found that the twin forces of residential segregation and suburban sprawl produced a center-right variety of “colorblind conservatism” that dominated American politics from the 1960s onward.16 For his part, Darren Dochuk found the roots of the modern conservative movement in the evangelical political machines that whites built during and after World War II.17 Taking a somewhat different approach, Robert Self traced the roots of modern conservatism to battles over gender, sexuality, race and, crucially, the family.18 Although the fast-growing metropolises of the South and West proved to be fertile ground for the resurgence of the Republican party, liberalism remained a potent force in postwar America. As Guian A. McKee pointed out, urban policymakers in cities such as Philadelphia battled to create jobs and counteract decades of disinvestment long after the era of liberal economic reform had ostensibly ended.19 And the suburbs, too, proved to be crucial seedbeds of liberalism. Lily Geismer traced the rise of a new strand of liberal politics rooted not in traditional constituencies such as the urban working class, but rather among middle-class professionals living in high-tech, postindustrial suburbs.20 Beyond reinvigorating American political history, the metropolitan spatial turn engendered fresh ideas about regional geographies. In 2009, Andrew Needham and Allen Dieterich-Ward asserted that the new suburban and metropolitan histories had reinforced artificial boundaries between 269

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metropolitan areas and their rural hinterlands. As a corrective, the two posited the more expansive concept of the “metropolitan region”—an area encompassing cities, suburbs and surrounding rural areas.21 Putting the idea of the metropolitan region into practice, Needham’s Power Lines (2014) probed the connections between the growth of Phoenix and the human and environmental devastation that occurred in distant Navajo lands.22

Metropolitan Diversification The diversification of cities and suburbs has been a dominant theme in metropolitan historiography in recent years. Vast in scope, this literature has addressed a range of themes, including decline and ascendance, the variety of urban and suburban forms and the growing demographic diversity of metropolitan areas. Historians of U.S. metropolitan areas have addressed the themes of growth and decline for decades. In Crabgrass Frontier, Jackson narrated a history of middle-class white suburbanization that, while accurate in many respects, reified notions of suburban homogeneity. Moreover, in documenting the impact of suburbanization on central cities, Jackson painted a rather monolithic portrait of urban decay.23 Similarly, Sugrue’s chronicle of Detroit’s urban crisis left little room for hope about the fate of urban America. Taken together, these two works created a somewhat binary portrait of the city-suburban divide: cities as non-white spaces of decline, suburbs as well-off havens for the white middle class. Others took a different view, however. In 2001, Heather Ann Thompson made the case that “determination—not decline or decay—best characterizes our nation’s cities.”24 Alison Isenberg, Sharon Zukin and Chloe E. Taft reached similar conclusions, emphasizing the persistence of urban renewers and city dwellers in modern America.25 Even among the many recently published works on neighborhood racial succession and urban disinvestment, scholars such as Wendell E. Pritchett, Amanda I. Seligman and Julia Rabig emphasized the tenacity of city dwellers and the staying power of urban communities.26 As part of this shift, historians including Samuel Zipp, Lydia R. Otero and N.D.B. Connolly devoted significant attention to the history of urban renewal.27 Suleiman Osman, Brian D. Goldstein and others focused on the issue of gentrification, highlighting its roots and effects and the persistent battles over the fates of cities and urban neighborhoods.28 The explosive growth of suburbs (and exurbs) during the second half of the twentieth century forced scholars to develop a variety of new terms and typologies to account for the dizzying array of metropolitan forms. As Timothy Gilfoyle pointed out in 2010, scholars began using words such as “megalopolis,” “edge cities,” and “post-suburbs” to capture the diversity of metropolitan forms, particularly those in the fast-growing Sunbelt.29 As the sprawling megaregions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century grew and diversified, longstanding definitions of the urban, suburban and rural fell by the wayside. Although New Urbanists bemoaned the deleterious impacts of mass suburbanization, others—namely Robert Bruegmann—celebrated suburban sprawl as a reflection of American democracy and economic vitality.30 Scholars of metropolitan diversification also pointed to significant demographic shifts that complicated the traditional city-suburb binary. In one such account, Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz argued that the late twentieth-century influx of Latino migrants to American cities injected new investment and vitality into formerly struggling urban areas.31 Historians also looked to overturn stereotypical notions of suburbia and suburban dwellers. For instance, Becky Nicolaides documented the history of working-class white suburbanization in Los Angeles.32 In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2009, scholars such as Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube continued to emphasize the class diversity of suburbia, highlighting rising rates of suburban poverty.33 Historians also found ample evidence of suburbanization among people of color. Andrew Wiese traced the largely neglected history of black suburbanization in the United States, concluding that 270

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“historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites.”34 A host of additional scholars, including Emily E. Straus, also documented the long history of African Americans, Latinos and other racial minorities in the suburbs.35 As part of the turn toward metropolitan diversification, scholars rethought the white-black racial binary that had long shaped urban and suburban studies scholarship. In one strand of this literature, researchers pieced together the neglected histories of Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in U.S. metropolitan areas.36 In another, historians such as Scott Kurashige and Wendy Cheng explored the multiracial contexts in which cities, suburbs, regions and states developed, especially in the more diverse metropolitan areas of the West Coast.37 Although race and class were principal frames of analysis in the literature on metropolitan history, gender and sexuality as well as intersectional approaches to multiple categories of identity exerted a significant influence on the field. A number of historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explored the gendered dimensions of women’s activism in urban reform movements.38 Some, including Daphne Spain, maintained that female reformers were participating in forms of “municipal housekeeping” rooted in part in women’s concerns as mothers and caretakers.39 Jessica Ellen Sewell located the roots of women’s suffrage and other reform movements within processes of urbanization and the changing gender norms that ensued as women increasingly engaged in “everyday” activities in the urban public sphere.40 The emphasis on gender among historians of the Progressive Era carried over into scholarship on the post-World War II period, where scholars such as Michelle M. Nickerson highlighted the ways in which suburban white women employed notions of domesticity and women’s intuition to claim positions of power within the conservative movement.41 Historians also employed the category of gender to rethink the history of suburban development and mass consumption. In A Consumers’ Republic (2003), a major work of synthesis, Lizabeth Cohen showed how a variety of federal housing, tax and education policies—including the landmark Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which was instrumental to building modern suburbia— “buttressed a male-directed family economy.”42 Scholarship on black women and girls shed fresh light on myriad questions that many historians had long considered answered. Rhonda Y. Williams challenged the dominant view that public housing was a failure by documenting the ways in which subsidized housing programs engendered grassroots activism and upward social mobility for many black women.43 Employing a similar bottom-up approach, Annelise Orleck explained how poor black women in Las Vegas, in the face of deep structural inequities, created an array of little-known but successful urban antipoverty programs.44 And Marcia Chatelain added a litany of long-silenced voices to the history of the Great Migration by tracing the difficult experiences of black girls in Chicago.45 Intersectional approaches to metropolitan history created new knowledge about the complex interplay among race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Although much of the metropolitan history scholarship centered on social and political fragmentation, some emphasized the rich and largely untold history of coalition building across such divisions. In a study of the War on Poverty in San Francisco, Martin Meeker revealed how a diverse collection of activists in search of federal antipoverty funds built “a true minority constituency” that crossed lines of race, class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.46 Likewise, Tamar W. Carroll’s work on AIDS, antipoverty and feminist activism in postwar New York featured urban actors—men, women, queer and transgender—from a range of different racial and ethnic backgrounds who united to forge vital social justice movements.47 Timothy StewartWinter extended this line of thinking into the electoral sphere, highlighting the ways in which gay and African American activists united to achieve a measure of political power in Chicago.48 Scholars of sexuality and the LGBTQ experience also infused the discipline with new vitality. One key strand in this literature addressed the ways in which gay men and lesbians used and claimed rights to metropolitan space as a means of forming communities and political movements.49 Another 271

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significant (and related) theme in this literature revolved around the close association of LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups with cities. Nan Alamilla Boyd and Josh Sides explored the processes of LGBTQ community development within the central city, arguing that violence, police repression and moral panics helped to shape a queer culture and politics that was decidedly urban in nature.50 Bryant Simon continued that line of spatial analysis by highlighting the ways in which gays and lesbians revitalized depressed urban neighborhoods in Atlantic City.51 Not everyone viewed LGBTQ history as necessarily urban, however. Notably, Tim Retzloff documented the presence of a politically active community of gay people in suburban Detroit.52 Others, including Clayton Howard, brought the metropolitan spatial vantage point to bear in LGBTQ scholarship by exploring the ways in which normative sexuality factored into federal housing policies.53 Regardless of the thematic or topical content, recent scholarship in metropolitan history has reflected a strong postwar orientation. In recent years, however, scholars have addressed this temporal imbalance with a number of works of urban and suburban history set largely or entirely in the preWorld War II period. Interestingly, though, many of these studies spoke directly to issues raised by chroniclers of the postwar era. For example, Robert Lewis’s study of the suburbanization of manufacturing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered a compelling counterpoint to the dominant postwar periodization of urban deindustrialization.54 In similar fashion, Shannon King offered an alternative chronology for the civil rights movement by looking at the rich protest traditions built by black Harlemites in the early twentieth century.55 Despite the overarching historiographical emphasis on the postwar decades, scholars such as these made compelling cases for the significance of early twentieth-century developments.

New Directions Urban historians have long been at the forefront of connecting their research to contemporary societal problems. That sort of engagement with current affairs continued in the twenty-first century as scholars grappled with a host of issues, including the sharpening social polarization stemming from economic globalization and the neoliberal turn in American politics, the rise of mass incarceration and the emergence of global cities and regions. Although scholarly works in these areas played only a limited role in shaping public opinion, the twenty-first century surge in policy-oriented, civic-minded scholarship reflected historians’ increasing efforts to acquire broader audiences and greater influence.56 Evidence of this shift could be found in a variety of subfields, not least in the wave of political and economic histories published in the new millennium. In a 1998 essay on the state of the field of urban history, Timothy Gilfoyle identified culture as the most significant interpretive paradigm of the late twentieth century.57 Although works by Michael Lerner, Laura Barraclough, Eric Avila and many others testified to the continued vibrancy of urban and suburban cultural history, interest in political economy and the history of capitalism swelled in the twenty-first century.58 But new work in this sphere often bridged what were once major conceptual and methodological gaps between political and economic history, social and cultural history and metropolitan spatial analysis.59 Scholars of the early twentieth century played an important role in shaping this emerging sphere of inquiry. David Huyssen found that urban reformers in New York City, far from mitigating the excesses of capitalism, often deepened chasms between the rich and poor.60 Along similar lines, Daniel Amsterdam identified urban business leaders in the 1920s as key political players furthering the interests of capital, though often in surprising ways.61 Scholars of the postwar era also illuminated the rising power of big business. In her history of Walmart, Bethany Moreton identified the rural and small town communities of the Sunbelt as crucial seedbeds for the emergence of a populist brand of Christian free enterprise that ultimately propelled Sam Walton’s company to international dominance while depressing workers’ wages, particularly within the female-dominated service sector.62 For her part, Kim Phillips-Fein documented 272

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the prominent role that business leaders—as opposed to the suburban white homeowners featured in other “rise of the right” accounts—played in building the modern conservative movement.63 Scholarship on the history of debt and consumption helped to place persistent socioeconomic chasms into a broader perspective. Louis Hyman traced the history of personal debt in the United States, illustrating the ways in which indebtedness fueled American economic growth while hardening social inequalities. Along the way, Hyman’s work also shed light on the home foreclosure crisis that triggered the Great Recession.64 A large body of research on housing and property underscored the promises and pitfalls of debt while introducing new racial, gender, class and spatial dimensions to histories of the American metropolis. Lizabeth Cohen’s work on mass consumption highlighted the economic inequality and social polarization that accompanied the national embrace of suburbanization and consumer capitalism.65 David M. P. Freund showed how discriminatory federal housing policies helped to produce new market-based rationales for residential segregation.66 Beryl Satter offered an in-depth look at how “contract lending” and other forms of institutionalized legal and financial exploitation helped to keep many African Americans locked in impoverished, segregated neighborhoods.67 And N.D.B. Connolly traced how real estate and redevelopment practices in South Florida drove an insidious form of metropolitan growth rooted simultaneously in white supremacy, racial segregation and class exploitation.68 Adopting a similarly materialist approach, sociologist Matthew Desmond investigated the roots of America’s contemporary housing eviction crisis, finding its origins in an inequitable distribution of wealth that kept large numbers of African Americans, particularly women, locked in economically exploitative relationships with their landlords.69 The growing historiographical emphasis on property—particularly real estate—elicited criticism from some scholars, however. For example, historians of education such as Matthew Lassiter, Jack Dougherty, Ansley Erickson and Karen Benjamin argued for “a new methodological approach that recognizes the mutually constitutive nature of public education and private housing on the metropolitan landscapes of modern America.”70 International capitalist expansion exerted an extraordinary influence on American metropolitan regions during the twentieth century, leading some toward depopulation and deindustrialization while transforming others into major hubs of the global economy. Beyond accelerating the flow of capital, jobs and goods across borders, globalization helped to unleash new patterns of immigration and cultural exchange and, in the process, transformed the economic and social fabric of the United States. Although social scientists and historians in other fields have long recognized and written about such global shifts, urban historians were slow to embrace the “transnational turn,” preferring instead local, regional and national frames of analysis.71 Reflecting on the limits of these dominant orientations, in 2014 Andrew Sandoval-Strausz suggested that the field had reached “a chronological and conceptual impasse.” “The time has come for the next urban history,” he added, “one that analyzes U.S. cities in their transnational contexts.”72 In truth, though, scholars of the metropolis had taken up the challenge of writing transnational history even before Sandoval-Strausz issued his call.73 Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof authored one such account entitled A Tale of Two Cities (2008), an exploration of how the postwar migrations of Dominicans to New York City reshaped life not only in the city, but also within the island nation itself.74 For his part, Christopher Klemek linked the metropolises of America’s eastern seaboard with European cities such as London and Berlin in a transoceanic account of the rise and fall of modernist planning.75 One of the most ambitious of the new transnational accounts was Carl H. Nightingale’s global history of segregation from ancient times to the present. Exploring the deep roots of “city-splitting,” Nightingale found that segregation, first by color and eventually by race, emerged in European colonies during the eighteenth century, only later finding its way to the cities of the United States.76 Sociologist Mitchell Duneier built on this work by offering an intellectual history of the concept of 273

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the ghetto from its origins in sixteenth-century Venice to the hyper-segregated cities and suburbs of the twenty-first century.77 Nancy H. Kwak brought new wisdom to the subject of housing, long a staple in metropolitan history, by incorporating a thoroughly transnational perspective. Kwak’s work highlighted how American business and political leaders promoted private home ownership not simply to bolster the U.S. economy, but also as a means of furthering global economic growth, anti-communism and American hegemony.78 Others employed transnational approaches to rethink the history of immigration, xenophobia and mass deportation in the United States. Geraldo L. Cadava documented the long history of crossborder exchanges between the United States and Mexico, demonstrating that recent disputes over the border and immigration, far from being the results of timeless political, racial and ethnic divisions, were rooted in broader structural economic changes that marginalized both immigrant and Native American workers.79 Kelly Lytle Hernández, Robert T. Chase, Torrie Hester and a host of others demonstrated how immigration controls and deportation policies—some dating back to the era of Chinese exclusion, others more recent—helped to criminalize millions of immigrants while laying the foundation for what many now refer to as the “carceral state.”80 The late twentieth- and early twenty-first century growth of the nation’s carceral infrastructure triggered an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship, much of it by urban historians. Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Kali Nicole Gross, respectively, documented the ways in which white fears regarding urban lawlessness and racial purity fueled the criminalization of blackness in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities.81 Adopting a multiracial approach, Miroslava Chávez-Garcia described how racial prejudice and eugenic pseudoscience led to the criminalization of young black and Mexican American city dwellers in the early twentieth century.82 Scholars of the more recent past showed how white fears of black and brown criminality persisted into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and among both liberals and conservatives. Elizabeth Hinton illustrated how the social welfare programs of the Great Society era, rooted in part in racist notions of black lawlessness, ultimately gave way to a bipartisan assault on drugs and crime that targeted minority communities well before the “law and order” regimes of the Nixon and Reagan administrations.83 In her work on crack cocaine and the militarization of urban police forces in the 1980s and 1990s, Donna Murch found that the War on Drugs produced sharp polarization within the black community along lines of “class, ideology, faith, and age.” While some African Americans demanded tougher penalties for drug crimes, others resisted the expansion of the carceral state.84 Fears of crime, as Matthew Lassiter proved, were often starkest in segregated white suburbs, where authorities saw themselves as protecting “innocent” white suburban youth from black and Latino “drug pushers” operating out of cities. Adopting a metropolitan spatial approach, Lassiter linked the rise of the carceral state to suburban moral panics and the rise of a bipartisan law and order consensus.85 In another critique of liberal law and order politics, Naomi Murakawa traced the roots of mass incarceration to the 1940s and 1950s, when civil rights liberals, in response to racist violence against African Americans, expanded the criminal justice system that would ultimately imprison millions of black and brown people.86 Marie Gottschalk drew attention to the multi-causal forces undergirding mass incarceration by identifying the ways in which four distinct reform movements—those in favor of women’s, prisoners’ and crime victims’ rights as well as opposition to the death penalty—reshaped approaches to crime and punishment.87 Gottschalk also explained the resilience of mass incarceration by pointing to the limitations of the dominant reform strategies revolving around racial disparities and bipartisan, raceneutral reforms.88 New works on the political economy of mass incarceration also shaped the field. In an account focusing on the growth of California’s prison system since the 1980s, Ruth Wilson Gilmore showed how the defeat of radical social justice movements, the deepening of the urban crisis, the decline of 274

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organized labor and new patterns of rural investment laid the foundation for the massive growth of the state’s criminal justice system.89 Although academic historians have often struggled to find large audiences for their work, metropolitan-themed scholarship on mass incarceration opened up new possibilities for reaching broader publics. In perhaps the clearest example of this, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), a book that frames the War on Drugs as a reconfiguration of the nation’s racial caste system, quickly achieved best-seller status while triggering new public and legislative scrutiny of mass incarceration.90 Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water (2016), a history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its “tough on crime” legacy, also received major publicity. Arriving in print after several years of heightened activism against police brutality and mass imprisonment, Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work garnered large audiences within and outside of academia.91

Conclusion Nearly twenty years ago, Timothy Gilfoyle argued that fragmentation was a defining feature of historical scholarship on cities and metropolitan regions. “Recent urban historiography mirrors the city itself,” he claimed, “devoid of continuity, collective agreement, or a single, unifying theme.” Scholars, Gilfoyle concluded, had abandoned unifying metanarratives in favor of conceptual approaches that were largely “divorced” from each other. Some interpreted the turn away from synthesis as a sign that the field had become too insular—that scholars had effectively sealed themselves off from one another and, more disconcertingly, from the broader public sphere. For Gilfoyle, though, the historiographical chaos was simply a reflection of the dynamism and diversity of metropolitan spaces.92 Much has changed since Gilfoyle assayed the state of the field in the late 1990s. Since then, a number of clearly identifiable themes have emerged to connect scholarship across various subfields of metropolitan history. Without question, one of the central themes has been that of persistent social inequality along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and other categories. Along with that, scholarship has also cohered around the history of social movements to eradicate such inequalities. Another dominant theme in the recent literature relates to the issue of metropolitan diversity— namely, the wide range of urban and suburban forms and the rising demographic diversification of metropolitan areas. Though still underway, the conceptual shifts toward metropolitan and regional spatial orientations, the histories of property and capitalism, transnationalism and carceral studies are likely to produce new historiographical connections as well. Although most metropolitan historians continue to favor case studies over synthetic interpretations, the fragmentation that Gilfoyle identified in the 1990s has undoubtedly diminished. Alongside these shifts, metropolitan history scholars have been increasingly engaged in civicminded scholarship, advocacy and activism in recent years. Although this trend is most noticeable among scholars of mass incarceration, historians have sought relevance outside of their narrow academic fields in other ways as well, engaging in public scholarship on issues ranging from police violence to presidential politics.93 Still, much of what Gilfoyle wrote remains applicable today, particularly his point about the flourishing of the field. In addition to the contributions highlighted above, many other avenues of inquiry, far too many to name here, have proven to be fruitful. Scholars of metropolitan history have continued to break new ground by complicating the culture versus structure binary, exploring the ways in which ideas and modes of living shaped and were in turn shaped by larger political and economic structures.94 In the areas of planning and architecture, historians have documented changes in housing styles and the built environments of metropolitan areas and analyzed how municipal policymakers and consultants hardened social and spatial inequalities.95 Scholars of labor have documented the globalization of the American workforce and drawn attention to the experiences of women, convicts, service workers and others traditionally excluded from labor history.96 New work on technology and 275

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transportation has expanded the spatial parameters of the metropolis, explored the development of the nation’s infrastructure and explained how and why so many of the nation’s schools, roads and water pipes came to be so outdated and decrepit.97 Environmental urbanists have analyzed the causes and consequences of sprawl and identified new spheres of social inequality and resistance to ecological injustice.98 And scholars of space and place have documented the ways in which racism shaped urban development and employed geographic information system technology to study the spatial evolution of metropolitan areas.99 As N.D.B. Connolly wrote in a recent reflection on the state of metropolitan history, “Times are indeed good.”100 Still, scholars of America’s metropolitan past face numerous challenges. One of the most troubling paradoxes of the last few decades is that metropolitan history’s recent renaissance has occurred during a time in which the discipline of history has been mired in a deep crisis. In universities across the United States, enrollments in history courses have declined significantly. Jobs for professional historians, urbanists included, have dwindled. And, despite the best efforts of many, few historians have gained positions of prominence within the realm of public affairs.101 Recent scholarship in the field has thoroughly reconfigured understandings of twentieth-century U.S. history, but how many, beyond the walls of academe, are aware of that? How can historians of urban and metropolitan spaces reach larger audiences, stimulate greater interest in history and gain a measure of authority in the public sphere? Fully answering these questions is beyond the scope of this chapter, to be sure, but part of the solution lies in the production of scholarship that addresses issues of major public concern in ways that are both analytically rigorous and accessible. Collectively, the works under review here have largely succeeded in that regard. A key remaining challenge, though, is to find newer and better ways of amplifying this historical knowledge so that it can reach and influence the broader public.

Notes   1 Richard C. Wade, “An Agenda for Urban History,” in The State of American History, ed. Herbert J. Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 43.   2 Michael B. Katz, “From Urban as Site to Urban as Place: Reflections on (Almost) a Half-Century of U.S. Urban History,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (July 2015): 564.   3 On the field’s evolution, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (March 1998): 175–204.   4 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).   5 See Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).   6 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. 190–230.   7 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).   8 Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).   9 Charles Tilly, “What Good Is Urban History?,” Journal of Urban History 22, no. 6 (September 1996): 710.   10 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 11 Matthew D. Lassiter, Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); N. D. B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12 Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 6. 13 Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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Metropolitan 14 Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. See also Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Sonia Song-Ha Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). For a reappraisal of the southern movement, see Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 15 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 16 Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 198. 17 Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). 18 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). 19 Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 20 Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 21 Andrew Needham and Allen Dieterich-Ward, “Beyond the Metropolis: Metropolitan Growth and Regional Transformation in Postwar America,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 7 (November 2009): 943–969. 22 Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 23 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, esp. 219–230. 24 Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 8. 25 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Chloe E. Taft, From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 26 Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn; Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Julia Rabig, The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 27 Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lydia R. Otero, La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); Connolly, A World More Concrete. 28 Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Brian D. Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 29 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “American Urban Histories,” in A Century of American Historiography, ed. James M. Banner, Jr. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 161. 30 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000); Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 31 A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America,” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (December 2014): 804–831. 32 Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920– 1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 33 Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014). 34 Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. 35 Emily E. Straus, Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, California (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 36 Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country:

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

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Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Wendy Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). See, for example, Marta Gutman, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 137. Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Martin Meeker, “The Queerly Disadvantaged and the Making of San Francisco’s War on Poverty, 1964– 1967,” Pacific Historical Review 81, no. 1 (February 2012): 21–59. Tamar W. Carroll, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Tim Retzloff, “Gay Organizing in the ‘Desert of Suburbia’ of Metropolitan Detroit,” in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, ed. John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul and Katherine Solomonson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Clayton Howard, The Closet and the Cul de Sac: Sex, Politics, and Suburbanization in the San Francisco Bay Area (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). Robert Lewis, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Shannon King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York: New York University Press, 2015). See, for instance, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns,” 176. Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Laura R. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). LeeAnn Lands, The Culture of Property: Race, Class, and Housing Landscapes in Atlanta, 1880–1950 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). David Huyssen, Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Daniel Amsterdam, Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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Metropolitan 63 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009). See also Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 64 Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 65 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic. 66 David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 67 Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 68 Connolly, A World More Concrete. 69 Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016). 70 “Special Section: Schools and Housing in Metropolitan History,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 2 (March 2012): 196. 71 Key works influencing urban history’s transnational turn include: David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Vicki L. Ruiz, “Nuestra América: Latino History as U.S. History,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (December 2006): 655–672. 72 Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes,” 805. 73 See Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 74 Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York After 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 75 Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism From New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 76 Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 77 Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). 78 Nancy H. Kwak, A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 79 Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 80 See, for example, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Heather Ann Thompson, “Constructing the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 18–24; Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States Through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 73–86; Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 141–151. 81 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Kali Nicole Gross, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 82 Miroslava Chávez-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 83 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 84 Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late TwentiethCentury War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 163. 85 Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 126–140. 86 Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 87 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 88 Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 89 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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Andrew R. Highsmith 90 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 91 Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016). 92 Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns,” 191–193. 93 See Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. 94 See Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 95 Charles E. Connerly, “The Most Segregated City in America”: City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 96 Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 97 Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Stephen Graham, ed., Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails (New York: Routledge, 2009). 98 Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 99 Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 100 N. D. B. Connolly, “Notes on a Desegregated Method: Learning from Michael Katz and Others,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 4 (July 2015): 585. 101 Robert B. Townsend and Julia Brookins, “The Troubled Academic Job Market for History,” Perspectives on History 54, no. 2 (February 2016), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectiveson-history/february-2016/the-troubled-academic-job-market-for-history; Julia Brookins, “Survey Finds Fewer Students Enrolling in College History Courses,” Perspectives on History 54, no. 9 (September 2016), https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2016/ survey-finds-fewer-students-enrolling-in-college-history-courses.

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26 AMERICAN WEST—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY John William Nelson

I grew up watching John Wayne westerns with my father. Even now, as I think about the twentiethcentury West, my mind inevitably reverts to Big Jake, a 1971 John Wayne movie set along the Mexican border in 1909. The film is unusual in that, unlike most westerns, it takes place in the early twentieth century on the verge of a new era in the West. The movie opens by juxtaposing historical photographs from a refined eastern seaboard with those from a more rugged western landscape. Images from the east depict scenes of cultural and economic progress—bustling cities, opera performances, flourishing sports and leisure, while to the west viewers catch glimpses of dangerous cattle drives, squalid mining camps and dead outlaws laid out in the streets. Through this opening montage, a booming voiceover asserts the enduring distinctiveness of the West as a region. Yet, as the drama of the film plays out, the viewer senses that in the dawning of the twentieth century, even this western world was changing. John Wayne’s character, Jacob McCandles, a recalcitrant holdover from the bygone West, faces the new realities of automobiles, motorcycles and repeater weapons while also contending with his rebellious sons’ progressive-era sensibilities. Over the course of the film, he and his Native compatriot Sam lament the passing of the bison and the changing landscape of the Southwest as oil rigs and boomtowns go up around them. Even the kidnapping that draws McCandles across the Mexican border and forms the main tension of the film recasts the turmoil of the borderland as a new and more sinister iteration of older western violence. By the end of the story, the viewer is left feeling a bit unsure about this burgeoning new era in the West—it seems more incorporated into the national trends of technological advances, urbanization and modernization, yet there lingers a distinctiveness that seems to set the region apart even as the American century begins.1 Such tensions of regional distinctiveness remain an animating question for historians of the American West. An outdated John Wayne movie might seem like an odd place to begin conceptualizing the history of the twentieth-century American West, but actually, the film works as a starting point for framing how historians have come to understand the region. For many decades, the region’s twentieth-century history remained overshadowed by the stereotypical imagery of an older, wilder West. Even the Western History Association, the premier scholarly organization dedicated to the West’s history, remained preoccupied with the evocative nineteenth-century images of wagon trains, shoot-outs, Indian raids and cattle drives into its twenty-first century existence. Until 2006, the association retained its original logo, featuring a wagon wheel with a flaming arrow stuck through it. The film Big Jake moves away from these older expectations of the West and, rather, features a dynamic region in the midst of transformation as it enters the twentieth century. Though the film remains problematic in other ways, 281

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its setting and storyline embody many of the major trends that have defined the last hundred years of Western history and the ways scholars now understand it.2 Legacies of violence, porous borders and transnational connections, Indigenous persistence, booming growth, environmental exploitation and the lingering question of regional distinctiveness in the face of modernization all feature in the film and continue to dominate the stories historians tell about the American West over the past century. For many years, the history of the twentieth-century West remained a stunted field. Well into the 1970s, scholars still tackled the long shadow of Frederick Jackson Turner, whose infamous “Frontier Thesis” of 1893 had dominated the narrative of western history in triumphalist and racialized tones, casting the struggle for the West as a contest between “savagery” and “civilization” as white, masculine settlement rolled westward.3 Besides these more widely known issues with Turner’s legacy, his conceptualization had the effect of ending the West’s history in 1890 with the closing of the frontier. From a Turnerian viewpoint, there remained nothing to see or study in the West after the civilizing force of the frontier had rolled through—the interesting events had already happened.4 Beginning in the 1970s, historians began to challenge this picture of the West. A new generation of historians, trained in the social history of the day, mounted a concerted effort to revolutionize a field that for many decades had fixated on narratives of the conqueror. The older history of the West had fetishized images of the cowboy, the wagon train and the sod-busting homesteader while downplaying the roles of marginalized groups in the making of the modern West. Revising this narrative, scholars of the “new Western history” explored the experiences of ethnic minorities in the region, returned women to the story and reexamined Indigenous peoples not as defeated recipients of “civilization,” but as significant historical actors themselves.5 Since the 1980s, scholars like Patricia Nelson Limerick, Carl Abbott, Elliott West and Richard White have urged the field to break down outdated assumptions, stereotypes and easy categorizations. Their efforts have served as a foundation to push the periodization of the American West well into the twentieth century, urbanize its rural imagery and bring marginalized actors back to the center of the story.6 By 1987, Patricia Nelson Limerick had turned the narrative of frontier triumph back onto itself with The Legacy of the Conquest. Whereas Turner had lamented the end of the frontier following the 1890 census, Limerick asserted that actually, the processes inherent in the “frontier” had persisted long into the twentieth century. Moreover, these processes were not positive—rather, Limerick defined the twentieth-century West as a landscape of conquest, where the violent legacy of its past persisted into the present.7 Other scholars have followed this history of frontier violence forward and historians no longer view the twentieth-century West as somehow absent from its longer history of brutality. Recent studies have examined the contested memories of the frontier past at places like Sand Creek, the Washita and Mankato, where Indigenous communities still contend with government agencies and local interests over the commemoration of such sites.8 Still other scholars, working on the earlier history of the western borderlands, have become more adept at carrying the repercussions of their narratives forward to the twentieth century. In his monograph, Violence Over the Land, on the long history of the Paiute, Ute and Shoshone peoples, Ned Blackhawk began and ended with his own family’s connections to the history. He also provided a particularly disturbing scene of bloodshed as the book’s epilogue, as state authorities massacre Shoshone Mike and his family in Nevada in 1911.9 Similarly, in a recent work on the Makah people, Joshua Reid bookended his narrative of earlier Euro-Indigenous interaction in the Pacific Northwest with accounts of more contemporary whaling controversies.10 There seems a growing willingness among scholars to recognize that violence against Native people continued in the West and elsewhere throughout the twentieth century, and persists even today in many forms. These processes of violence have not taken place solely between the United States authorities and Indigenous peoples, however. A legacy of turmoil existed in the Southwestern borderlands long before the United States laid claim to the region, and several historians have worked to illuminate 282

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the cycles of upheaval that have continued along this permeable boundary line during the twentieth century.11 Sam Truett, for instance, has shown the mobile and often unstable nature of life along the U.S.–Mexico border from early mining efforts into the 1920s as borderlands people contended with shifting geopolitics and business ventures on both sides of the line.12 Meanwhile, other works have highlighted the artificiality of the geopolitical boundary and the continuing plight of migrant peoples across the region. Most of the recent scholarship on the southern border stresses the unpredictability of the borderland.13 Inconsistent immigration policies and varying accessibility have posed both opportunities and dangers for people living and crossing the border.14 The Bracero Program, which saw thousands of migrant workers enter the United States from Mexico beginning in 1942, has attracted a particularly high level of scholarly interest over the past two decades. Historians have highlighted the disjointed immigration and labor policies of the government program during World War II and after, while also studying the effects of the program on Chicano culture and identity within the United States.15 Recently, Mireya Loza has also challenged accepted notions of Bracero uniformity and shown the striking diversity of migrant workers’ identities, objectives and responses to discrimination.16 Mae Ngai, in her book Impossible Subjects, demonstrated how Mexican migrants in the mid-twentieth century fit into the longer legal history of U.S. immigration policy as it set precedents for new racialized categories of “illegal aliens” within American society.17 Notably, such recent scholarship has expanded its analysis beyond the experience of single migrant communities, examining instead the intersecting challenges of racialized policies of immigration for many ethnic minorities and immigrant groups during the twentieth century. While the southern borderland and its subsequent migrations have long attracted serious scholarship, the northern boundary of the western United States remained an unexplored frontier until very recently. Only now have scholars begun to appreciate the intertwined nature of life on both sides of the U.S.–Canadian line. Scholars working north of the border have likewise begun to examine how the history of the Canadian West in the twentieth century correlates with and diverges from the trajectory of the western United States.18 Environmental historians have also pushed this northern boundary, showing how preexisting ecological realities can stymie lines drawn on a map by nation states.19 Studies over the past decade have shown how people on both sides of the border navigated the transnational implications of indigeneity, prohibition and smuggling, fishery rights, avian migrations and the booming auto industry, to name but a few.20 As scholars continue to push the northern limits of the American West, one expects to find that the Canadian boundary offers the same vibrancy and permeability as its southern counterpart. As historians redefine the conceptual and geographic borders of what constitutes the “American West” in the twentieth century, they have inevitably drawn scholarly energy from the wider trend towards transnational history. No longer content to confine themselves to the synthetic borders of the modern nation state, historians have pushed beyond national frameworks, following processes and making previously unexplored connections. Scholars of the American West have proven no exception to this wider trend, and the twentieth-century West lends itself to this good work—from its porous borders, to its immigrant enclaves, to the battles over immigration, labor and racial equality across its human landscape.21 While this transnational “turn” has proven an exciting and productive avenue for much recent scholarship, western historians must be careful not to imbibe its methodologies without critiquing its assumptions. Transnationalism may provide one way to escape national frameworks, but it still privileges Euro-American conceptions of the nation state. In a region like the West, where a multitude of Indigenous nations claim sovereignty, transnationalism as a scholarly innovation seems trite—the history of the West is, and always was, a history of transnationalism, even within its U.S. borders. For centuries, Indigenous peoples have navigated their nations’ relationships with the United States and other regional actors, and as historians continue to frame their narratives about the West, we would do well to remember this.22 283

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Yet transnational approaches, when done carefully, have yielded insightful studies on multiple levels. Some of the most effective work addressing the twin concerns of indigeneity and transnationalism within the American West has embraced a comparative approach to “settler colonialism” and its ongoing legacy not just in the West, but in other colonial societies as well. Increasingly, scholars have chosen to frame the history of Native peoples’ experience in the American West as part of a larger narrative of Anglo American imperialism across the globe.23 Exploring the twentieth-century implications of racialized settler colonization and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to it has proven fruitful in places as diverse as the South Pacific, Alaska, Canada, the American West, Siberia and even London.24 If one doubts the continued applicability for settler colonial studies in the American West, one need look no farther than the parallel dramas that played out recently between the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock and the militant takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The notably divergent approaches to the protests, and their differing legal outcomes, demonstrate the lingering relevance of the West’s settler colonial past and present even today.25 It would seem that scholars of comparative and transnational settler societies still have much urgent work to do. In spite of the mistreatment Native peoples have undergone and continue to experience in the modern era, Indigenous cultures have endured and thrived in every corner of the twentieth-century West. Yet until very recently, many historians of the modern West overlooked such vibrant persistence. Over a decade ago, Philip Deloria explored the cultural rupture that ultimately excluded Native Americans from holding a conceptual space within modern society in his study Indians in Unexpected Places. Part history and part cultural critique, Deloria’s work demonstrated how, over the early decades of the twentieth century, Indians tried unsuccessfully to carve their own space in modernity by embracing performance, athletics, technologies and music. Such attempts proved futile because of the “key ideologies” that non-Native society already held against Indigenous Americans—a collective consciousness that limited Native peoples to “inevitable disappearance, primitive purity, and savage violence” and cast Indians and modernity as mutually exclusive phenomena.26 Deloria’s exposition and historicization of Native people’s exclusion from twentieth-century America has become a call to action for many scholars who continue to study Indigenous persistence in the modern era and assert Native continuity within the twentieth-century West. In the past decades, scholars of an Indigenous twentieth-century West have proven successful in highlighting the previously ignored history of Native peoples in the twentieth century. Indigenous advocacy itself served as one of the major impetuses for the retelling of this history in the modern era as groups like AIM (American Indian Movement) and the Red Power social movement emphasized the plight of Native Americans in the latter half of the twentieth century.27 But as recent historians like Bradley Glenn Shreve and Daniel Cobb have demonstrated, Indigenous peoples advocated for themselves both before and after the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and the era of civil rights, and the entire twentieth century can be viewed in this light.28 Today, there is a growing interest in the field of modern Indigenous history, both in the West and beyond. Notably, Yale University Press has launched The Henry Row Cloud Series, meant to encompass works that consider American Indians and modernity as interest in twentieth-century Indigenous history grows.29 One might anticipate that this scholarly momentum will continue to grow in the coming years as the wider field of American history works to better incorporate Indigenous peoples into its narratives. Nowhere have scholarly efforts to underscore Indigenous persistence been stronger than in the cityscapes of the American West.30 Cultural conceits assume that if Native Americans belong anywhere in twentieth-century history, it is on the rural reservations of the West, not the city streets of the metropolitan United States.31 As Coll Thrush baldly put it, until fairly recently “Indian and urban histories” remained “somehow mutually exclusive” phenomena within western history.32 But over the past two decades, along with broader trends in social history, postcolonial thought and cultural studies, historians have begun to investigate these tidy distinctions that leave American Indians relegated away from urban history. Scholars currently advancing Indigenous history into the modern cityscape 284

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contend with both historiography and broader cultural misunderstandings about Native peoples. As William Cronon wrote in his foreword to Thrush’s book Native Seattle, the idea of an inevitably vanishing Indigenous race “has always been a cruel lie, distorting the actual lives and histories of peoples who remain fully present in the transformed landscape” of modern America.33 Bringing Indigenous peoples into the story of the urban landscapes of twentieth-century cities fights against such misconstrued notions. Indigenous urban histories have become an integral part of recent scholarly efforts to incorporate Native peoples’ persistence into the story of the modern United States. Given the recent explosion in scholarship on Indigenous urban spaces, one might hope the impetus to intertwine Native and urban history continues until it becomes “expectation” rather than “anomaly.”34 Surveying the field today, one will find a monograph on Indigenous people’s experience in many, if not most, of the West’s major cities. Historians working to highlight the urban nature of Indigenous history in the modern West are no abnormality in the broader trajectory of Western historiography. In recent decades, many scholars in the field have turned towards western cities to make sense of the region in its modern context. For many years, Carl Abbott led the field of western urban history as one of its early advocates, but today he is joined by a force of scholars extrapolating the urban history of the twentieth-century West.35 Several scholars, energized by the new Western history, have begun to highlight the experiences of the marginalized within such urban histories. Scholars are exploring African American experiences in the new urban West, for instance, and examining civil rights movements in a region that has often been excluded from this history.36 An appreciation for the rise of western cities as a political and demographic force within the greater United States has also served as part of this scholarly realization, while other historians in the tradition of Abbott examine the state power inherent in the urbanizing process.37 No longer the setting for only stories of the rural and the natural, historians have recast the twentieth-century West as a scene of urbanization, population booms and infrastructure development. As the late Anne Butler phrased it, a burgeoning group of scholars has pushed against the old conceit of the “urban west” as an “oxymoron,” and now, an urbanized West seems to be the accepted norm.38 Thanks to the work of scholars over the past few decades, the technological center of Silicon Valley, the Sunbelt Cities of the Southwest and the urban hubs of the Pacific Coast have all become the standard imagery of the modern American West.39 Much of the urbanization and buildup of infrastructure in the twentieth-century West owes itself to heavy-handed government involvement. Beginning in the 1990s, Richard White rewrote the West as a region of state power rather than weakness in its nineteenth-century context. According to White, nowhere did the federal government have more room to flex its muscle than in the colonial marchlands to the West. Here, the U.S. government fought and displaced Native Americans, brought unruly citizens to heel, promoted agricultural revolution, claimed millions of acres of land for itself and shored up inefficient railroads and other infrastructure with its investments and subsidies.40 The state as a regional juggernaut, however, did not disappear with the turning of the twentieth century. Whereas common wisdom might imagine the wide-open West as a place for “rugged individualism,” nowhere did the federal government remain more involved during the twentieth century than in its western reaches. The state played a central role in early conservation efforts beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth as it created national parks at the expense of local Native Americans and white settlers alike.41 The government’s involvement with the West proved especially strong during the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal policies, as multiple scholars have highlighted the public works projects and programs promoted in the western states.42 During World War II and the Cold War, the West became the State’s nuclear playground. The government, in many ways, has even served to shape the Sunbelt boom of the past half-century. State sanctioning directs urban development, regulates water and resource acquisition and provides tax benefits, zoning loopholes and other legal breaks to incentivize continued growth and economic movement towards the region’s urban centers.43 285

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The unmitigated growth of the twentieth-century West, however, involved more than just its urbanization. Rapid development in the West proved pervasive through much of the century, as demographic shifts populated Western states, new energy sources erupted west of the Mississippi and government investment flowed westward. Population and politics played into all this growth as well. With the twin tragedies of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, thousands of families lit out for the territory. In scenes reminiscent of Steinbeck, middle- and lower-class citizens from across the South and central Plains began to move to the greener pastures of California, bringing with them their religious and political backgrounds.44 Scholars like Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson have demonstrated how this population shift in turn influenced the political, religious and cultural landscape of the West and wider America well into the late twentieth century.45 Indeed, it seems that the West’s Sunbelt lifestyle has set the standard for much of the American experience writ-large in the late twentieth century. Western states continue to gain influence in national elections and have drastically shifted political clout beyond East Coast strongholds in the last half-century.46 Midwestern baby boomers and snowbirds aspire to winters in sunny Arizona while eastern millennials have become the latest throng to make a run for the promised lands of Colorado and the Pacific Northwest.47 Likewise, western lifestyles, commodities and recreation have spread across the country, monopolizing consumer culture well beyond the West’s borders. Scholars have demonstrated how Americans from all regions now aspire to ski, fish, vacation and even retire in the picturesque settings of the western United States.48 Western commodities have spread across the country in unanticipated ways. The image of a New Yorker reading a digital copy of Outside magazine while hunched over his Silicon Valley laptop in the corner of a Manhattan Starbucks has now become commonplace, and epitomizes such trends. Western brands dominate the market, while the economy and demography of the nation continue to tilt westward. Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher anticipated these trends in their synthetic work on the American West, but the trajectory has only escalated over the past two decades.49 While the West has boomed as a land of plenty in the twentieth century, a cadre of scholars has been quick to point out the myriad costs of this prosperity, in socioeconomic as well as ecological terms. Themes of environmental degradation and exploitation have long served as an animating interpretation of western landscapes, dating back at least to Donald Worster’s explanation of the Dust Bowl as a human-induced calamity on the Great Plains.50 Other, more recent scholarship continues to explore the ecological exploitation of the region’s water supply and the environmental impacts of wide ranging economic pursuits, from gold mining to salmon fishing.51 Urban histories like Matthew Klingle’s Emerald City also highlight the environmental footprint of cityscapes upon the Western landscape.52 More recently, environmental historians have even showed how programs and agencies dedicated to conservation—notably the National Parks Service—have often employed misguided approaches that lead to ecological disasters of their own.53 Though Western historians of the environment are now more cautious in their valorization of nature as somehow separate from culture, they nonetheless continue to show how human action influences and often disrupts non-human species and environments.54 Similar to other narratives of exploitation and ecological degradation, energy reliance and its wideranging implications for society remain growing themes of exploration within American history, and the West has played center stage in such accounts. Thomas Andrews examined the intersectional human and ecological tragedy of intensive mining in the Colorado Rockies in his groundbreaking Killing for Coal, becoming one of the first scholars to pair labor and environmental histories in what he described as the “workscape” of the Colorado coalfields, a pace shaped by “human labor and natural processes.”55 Andrews not only traces the events leading to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, but the wider shift in American society that brought about a reliance of fossil fuels.56 Andrew Needham has also shown the importance of regional coal deposits to the modern rise of Phoenix, while both he and Richard White have demonstrated how dams have harnessed the power of western rivers to 286

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the detriment of their surrounding inhabitants and ecologies.57 A comparative history by Kate Brown followed the insatiability of American energy needs to their Cold War conclusions in Plutopia as she studied the myriad problems involved in plutonium production in Hanford, Washington.58 Whether it be the coal deposits of the lower Rockies, the hydroelectric power of the Colorado and Columbia Rivers, or more inventive forms of energy sourcing, like plutonium and nuclear energy, the twentiethcentury growth of the West has come at a high price. Andrew Needham, in his recent work Power Lines, examined the regional dimension of this growth and exploitation in the context of Phoenix over the course of the twentieth century, and tied together many of the themes animating Western history today. His examination covered the economic opportunity and exploitation that allowed Phoenix to blossom as a desert metropolis over the course of the twentieth century, often at the expense of Navajo people in Northern Arizona. Needham traced his narrative beyond the boundaries of Phoenix itself, following the lines of power—both electrical and political—from the air conditioners of white suburbia to the hydroelectric dams and coal deposits of the Navajo hinterland. By doing so, Needham demonstrated that even environments and people who remain out of sight to Sunbelt metropolitans fit within the narrative of modern western expansion, urbanization and exploitation.59 Needham’s work also breaks down the perceived urban, suburban and rural divides, building on work by William Cronon and others who have extended urban studies beyond the metropolis itself and examined its intertwined relationships with hinterland resources and peoples.60 Such a method pairs with the wider turn in recent urban and western histories that take into account “regional relationships and patterns” and the constant flux of “energy, water, investment, credit, goods, people, and political influence” flowing between a metropole and its periphery regions.61 As Western historians begin to widen their scope to factor in the profound reach of cities into the modern era, such methods also open up possibilities to explore how rural populations and landscapes influenced and interacted with metropolitan areas, and vice versa. This regional approach to understanding western cities connects many of the themes of the twentieth-century West as historians continue to study its urbanization, development, demographics and environmental impacts. The American West, it seems, persists now as a dynamic set of subregions—twentieth-century iterations of the city-state—while maintaining a distinct western character influenced by its past and its continued growth in the present. The West in many ways has been a microcosm for the wider trajectory of twentieth-century American historiography while still maintaining its distinctiveness. As such, the West maintains its scholarly position as a region of “critical importance” within the wider “history of the nation.”62 The West continues as a region steeped in a past and present that can be both complex and disturbing. Indigenous people persist in the face of ongoing disenfranchisement and marginalization. Multiethnic communities struggle for their voice while undocumented immigrants continue to cross a Southwestern border that has long been a site of movement, exchange and upheaval. While the West has served as a cradle to environmental sensibilities, it has also been scene to ecological destruction as the region urbanizes and modernizes. Over the last few decades, scholars have underscored such ironies and countercurrents, and recast the field as both more encompassing and exciting. In a decision reflective of the field as a whole, in 2006 both the Western Historical Association and its journal, The Western Historical Quarterly, embraced a new “sunburst” logo meant to demonstrate the now far-reaching potential of scholarship of the American West. The field of Western history continues to expand along with its region in innovative ways, opening up new avenues of inquiry as scholars continue to push both its conceptual and geographic boundaries. Big Jake, if anything, highlights continued vitality in the face of rapid change. In this way, at least, the film gets it right in its categorization of the twentieth-century West. Jacob McCandles, John Wayne’s character, continues to cross paths with antagonists throughout the movie that had once known him, but years later have presumed him dead. Every scene where someone new encounters the aged McCandles they express astonishment and mutter, “I thought you were dead,” to which they 287

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receive the wry response from him: “Not hardly.” McCandles is mistaken for a man who has outlived his time. But the punchline of all this is that he has not lived past his time, and is as lively as ever—a force to be reckoned with. Taking stock of the now thriving renewal of scholarship that has pulled the West’s history into the twentieth century, one might echo a similar sentiment about the entire region. Once relegated to the fringes of American history in the modern era, the West, with its frontier legacy, Indigenous persistence, transnational connections, Sunbelt cities, ecological implications and regional dynamism, offers a vibrant field that remains anything but dead. Historians have now largely recast the West—not as a place left to the dusty nostalgia of the nineteenth century, but as a thriving, often transnational, sometimes exploitative, modern region at once representative of and distinctive to the twentieth-century American narrative. As historians in the past several decades have shown, the twentieth-century West remains a lively field worthy of further exploration and inquiry.

Notes   1 George Sherman, Big Jake (Hollywood: Cinema Center Films, 1971); Dave Kehr, “The Many Shades of Wayne (The Horse Soldiers, The Comancheros, Rio Lobo, Big Jake),” The New York Times, 2011, 11.   2 For more perspective on the portrayal of Native peoples in the western genre, see Leanne Howe, Harvey Markowitz and Denise K. Cummings, Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins—American Indians and Film (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013); Neil Diamond, Catherine Bainbridge and Jeremiah Hayes, Reel Injun: Native American Portrayal in Hollywood (New York: Lorber Films, 2010).   3 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (From Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin) (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).   4 Martin Ridge, “Turner the Historian: A Long Shadow: (A Centennial Symposium on the Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner),” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993): 133–144; John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).   5 Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner, II and Charles E. Rankin, Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).   6 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton and Company, 1987); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993); Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).   7 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest.   8 Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael A. Elliott, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Waziyatawin Wilson, “Voices of the Marchers,” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1/2 (2004): 293–334; Kelsey Carlson and Gareth E. John, “Landscapes of Triumphalism, Reconciliation, and Reclamation: Memorializing the Aftermath of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862,” Journal of Cultural Geography (2015), 1–34.   9 Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 284–288. 10 Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 1–18, 271–281. 11 For the earlier, dynamic nature of this borderland see James Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Natale A. Zappia, Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); for the more recent turmoil and violence of the border, see Nicole Marie Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 12 Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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American West 13 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 14 Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 15 Albert Camarillo, “Looking Back on Chicano History: A Generational Perspective,” Pacific Historical Review 82, no. 4 (2013): 496–504; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 16 Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 17 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 18 Lorry W. Felske and Beverly Jean Rasporich, Challenging Frontiers: The Canadian West (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004). 19 Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 976–986; Ian Tyrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies and Internationalisation of American History,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 168–192; Ian Tyrell, “The ‘Nature’ of Environmental History: New Views from the Pacific,” in Nature et Progrès: Interactions, Exclusions et Mutations, ed. Pierre Lagayette (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006), 11–31. 20 Seema Sohi, “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.–Canadian Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 420–436; Stephen T. Moore, Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); White, “The Nationalization of Nature”; John J. Bukowczyk, Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650–1990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). 21 Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America; David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism From Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Kurt E. Kinbacher, Urban Villages and Local Identities: Germans From Russia, Omaha Indians, and Vietnamese in Lincoln, Nebraska (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015); David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 22 M. Pernau, “Provincializing Concepts: The Language of Transnational History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 483–499; Robert Warrior, “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 119–130; Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz and Sabine N. Meyer, Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)motion, Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives: 1 (New York: Routledge, 2015). 23 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; Annie E. Coombes, Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press; Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2006); John Mack Faragher, “Commentary: Settler Colonial Studies and the North American Frontier,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 1–11. 24 Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1031–1055; Tyrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies and Internationalisation of American History”; David Wrobel, “Considering Frontiers and Empires: George Kennan’s Siberia and the U.S. West,” Western Historical Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2015): 285–309; Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 25 “7 Defendants In Oregon Wildlife Refuge Occupation Found Not Guilty,” NPR.org, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/27/499668126/defendants-in-oregon-wildlife-refuge-occupation-found-notguilty, accessed 1 July 2017; Robinson Meyer, “The Standing Rock Sioux Claim ‘Victory and Vindication’ in Court,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2017. www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/dakota-access-standingrock-sioux-victory-court/530427/. 26 Philip Joseph Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 10. 27 Ned Blackhawk, “Look How Far We’ve Come: How American Indian History Changed the Study of American History in the 1990s,” Magazine of History 19, no. 6 (2005): 14. 28 Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Bradley Glenn Shreve, Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). 29 “The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity | Yale Group for the Study of Native America (YGSNA),” http://ygsna.sites.yale.edu/about-us/henry-roe-cloud/henry-roe-cloud-series-­americanindians-and-modernity, accessed 1 July 2017.

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John William Nelson 30 Donald Lee Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Bonita Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Myla Vicenti Carpio, Indigenous Albuquerque (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011); Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Rosalyn R. LaPier, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016). 31 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places; Stephen Greetham, “Tribes in ‘Unexpected Places’,” American Indian Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2014): 428. 32 Coll Thrush, Native Seattle Histories From the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 13. 33 William Cronon, “Foreword: Present Haunts of an Unvanished Past,” in Native Seattle Histories From the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), vii. 34 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 6. 35 Abbott, The New Urban America; Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier. 36 Matthew C. Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Quintard Taylor, “Facing the Urban Frontier: African American History in the Reshaping of the Twentieth-Century American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2012): 4–27. 37 Carl Abbott, How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, 1st ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 38 Anne M. Butler, “Not Only Wide Open Spaces: Urban History and the American West,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 1 (2011): 124. 39 Char Miller, Cities and Nature in the American West (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010); Darren Dochuk and Michelle M. Nickerson, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 40 White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton and Company, 2011). 41 Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 42 Neil M. Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43 Carl Abbott, “Beyond the Fringe,” Reviews in American History 44, no. 1 (2016): 167–174. 44 James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 45 Michelle Nickerson, “Politically Desperate Housewives: Women and Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles,” California History 86, no. 3 (2009): 4–67; Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: Norton and Company, 2011); Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 46 Jennifer L. Robinson and W. David Patton, The Rise of the West in Presidential Elections (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010). 47 Claire Cain Miller, “Where Young College Graduates Are Choosing to Live,” The New York Times, October 20, 2014, sec. The Upshot. www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/upshot/where-young-college-graduates-arechoosing-to-live.html; “College Destinations Index 2017,” American Institute of Economic Research, www. aier.org/cdi, accessed 1 July 2017. 48 Annie Gilbert Coleman, Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); William Philpott, Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013); Lincoln Bramwell, Wilderburbs: Communities on Nature’s Edge (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Jen Corrinne Brown, Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 49 Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 50 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); For a more recent interpretation of the Dust Bowl from a scientific perspective, see Siegfried D. Schubert, Max J. Suarez, Philip Pegion, Randal D. Koster, and Julio Bacmeister, “On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl. (Reports),” Science 303, no. 5665 (2004): 1855–1859.

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American West 51 Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking Press, 1986); Joseph E. Taylor, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999); Kathryn Taylor Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). 52 Matthew W. Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 53 Thomas G. Andrews, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 54 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness:  Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28; Paul Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 94–120. 55 Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 125. 56 Ibid., 108. 57 Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 58 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 59 Needham, Power Lines. 60 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991); Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 61 Abbott, “Beyond the Fringe.” 62 John Mack Faragher, “‘And the Lonely Voice of Youth Cries ‘What Is Truth?’: Western History and the National Narrative,” Western Historical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2017): 3.

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27 BORDER/LANDS—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Sheila McManus

North America has a longer and richer history of transnational historiography than is commonly known. It could hardly have been otherwise for three nation states whose histories are so thoroughly entangled with each other and with global patterns of colonialism and imperialism. The most basic definition of transnational history is that it asks questions that transcend the boundaries of the nationstate. It has thus become a broad catch-all category that can include imperial, colonial, transoceanic, borderlands and comparative questions. As Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund wrote recently, transnational history does not naively ignore or stubbornly deny the importance of national borders or nationalist ideologies, and the state and the nation continue to matter. However, this approach emphasizes experiences and processes below and above the national scale, and it can illustrate how local and regional histories can cross national borders.1 The twentieth- and early twenty-first-century North American historiography that focuses on continental rather than imperial, colonial or transoceanic questions falls into two broad categories: a borderlands model that has dominated the writing about the U.S.–Mexico border and a comparative model that has dominated that of the U.S.–Canada border. Both can be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century, but they began to flourish in the 1920s as the post-WWI political climate encouraged North American scholars to reconsider the value of continental connections. The borderlands model has been the subject of many useful debates over what exactly historians mean when we use the term to describe our work. Here I am using “borderlands” quite narrowly to refer to the specific subset of comparative and transnational history that analyzes the spaces around national and political borders, not as spaces of bifurcation and stark, immutable national difference, but as zones where innumerable relationships continue to exist across the line and in fact are produced by the line itself. Comparative history tends to see nation-states and borders as fixed ontological realities, but nonetheless “challenges historiographic assumptions about uniqueness and enables scholars to test hypotheses and ask questions that they would likely not have otherwise asked.” It thus “call[s] into question older historiographic mainstays” that tend to be grounded in nationalist narratives.2 It is impossible to capture the full scope of North America’s transnational scholarship in one chapter because it encompasses hundreds of monographs and thousands of scholarly articles. Instead, I provide a brief overview of some of the dominant patterns and key monographs. 292

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The United States-Mexico Border In 1921 U.S. historian Herbert Eugene Bolton published The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, and it is now regarded as the foundational text in the field of U.S.–Mexico borderlands scholarship. He wanted to challenge the dominance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” in U.S. historiography, as well as the widespread assumption that the only “frontier” that mattered in American history was the westward-moving Anglo American one. Bolton focused on “Spanish pathfinders and pioneers in the region between Florida and California,” honorable men who were “proud, stern, hardy, and courageous . . . loyal to King and Mother Church, humble only before the symbols of their Faith.”3 Putting aside this highly romanticized narrative, what surprises the modern reader is the resolutely continental and global nature of Bolton’s field of view. In addition to creating what would become a rich and profoundly important field in American historiography, he insisted that the Spanish influence in what became the U.S. Southwest was important, and that it was best understood in a wider context. Not surprisingly, women, Indigenous peoples and non-elite Hispanic peoples were little more than backdrop and caricatures in Bolton’s tale, and they remained largely absent from the field for decades. The amount of scholarship on the Spanish Borderlands grew dramatically through mid-century, but generally followed Bolton’s template by focusing on elite Spanish men and institutions. There were a few exceptions, books that began the process of including a wider range of human experiences, from Carey McWilliams’s 1948 monograph North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States, to the 1960s and the first books to challenge Bolton’s casual dismissal of the Indigenous people of the Southwest, such as Edward Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 and Max L. Moorhead’s The Apache Frontier: Jacobo de Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain 1769–1791.4 Bolton’s influence on the field was so great that John Francis Bannon’s The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821, published nearly a full half-century later, built on but did not really change his template. In his preface Bannon wrote that his work, “in a sense, is a golden jubilee volume,” the purpose of which was “to retell that story of the Borderlands, or, as someone has facetiously suggested, of the ‘Boltonlands.’” He synthesized the scholarship published since 1921 and continued to challenge, even more pointedly than Bolton had, the hegemonic, Turnerian narrative of Anglo American expansion. The protagonists remained the same: white men who could do no wrong. But where Bolton’s early twentieth-century perspective rendered Indigenous peoples nearly invisible, Bannon’s mid-twentieth century Jesuit worldview had more space for them. His observation that “Anglo Americans were late arrivals” in every region of the continent except the eastern seaboard was not just about noting the areas where the Spanish were there ahead of other Europeans. More strikingly he observed that none of the newcomers were ever “really confronting a virgin wilderness” because Indigenous peoples were there first.5 Bannon portrayed them as savage, uncivilized children who were lucky to get so much attention from the caring Christian conquerors, but at least he gave them credit for being there. These dominant characteristics of the first fifty years of borderlands scholarship shifted dramatically in the years immediately following Bannon. As with so much North American historiography in the latter half of the century, the field was profoundly altered by the emergence of ethnohistory and social history, and by the powerful currents of the social justice movements that helped give rise to and shape this scholarship. For example, historians began to pay serious attention to Indigenous peoples as actors in their own right, with narratives and perspectives worth understanding. The 1970s and 1980s saw the publication of dense and innovative monographs like Elizabeth A. H. John’s Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795, which insisted on the persistence and resurgence of Indigenous peoples, as well as books focused more specifically on the Kickapoos, Yaquis, Apaches and Papagos (Tohono O’odham).6

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Another important development in the immediate post-Bannon years was the rapid emergence of scholarship about the histories of non-elite Spanish settlers during the Spanish era and Spanishspeaking peoples in the borderlands after 1821, much of it by Chicana/o scholars. A wealth of groundbreaking scholarship emerged, from Oakah L. Jones’s study of the everyday people who had accompanied Bolton’s “armored knights,” to Albert Camarillo’s Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930; Arnoldo de Léon’s The Tejano Community, 1836–1900; Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; and Oscar J. Martínez’ Troublesome Border. Anzaldúa’s impact is particularly fascinating as hers was not really a historical monograph at all, yet her description of the border as an “open wound/dividing a pueblo, a culture,/ running down the length of my body” quickly became one of the most widely cited images in Southwest borderlands studies and helped signal the sea-change taking place in the scholarship.7 Martínez stated bluntly that his work was “about conflict in the U.S.–Mexico border region,” and that what seemed like disorder and chaos to outsiders was in fact “the normal functioning of the border: By nature, border zones, especially those that are far removed from the core, spawn independence, rebellion, cultural deviation, disorder, and even lawlessness.”8 Thanks to the work of this generation of scholars of Indigenous and Hispanic/Chicano history, the Bolton/Bannon view of the borderlands as a site of peaceful, civilized conquest was no longer sustainable. Southwest borderlands historiography owes its intellectual roots to Bolton, but the foundation for the contemporary discipline was laid by David J. Weber. Weber’s work—including dozens of articles and edited collections: The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (1982); The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992); and Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (2005), which took a hemispheric approach—had a profound impact on the field. Weber’s masterful syntheses reflected the profound changes the discipline had undergone by embracing the diverse human history of the Southwest. In The Mexican Frontier the years between 1821 and 1846, decades that had not been well-treated by American or Mexican historians, finally received a thorough and balanced treatment. In The Spanish Frontier his goal was to explain Spain’s impact on the lives, institutions, and environments of native peoples of North America, and the impact of North America on the lives and institutions of those Spaniards who explored and settled what has now become the United States. Weber also rejected what was becoming a standard bifurcation in the field between the eastern and western portions of Spain’s holdings in North America, with the latter increasingly standing in for the whole. He revisited Bolton’s central concerns and continued the fight to have the United States’ Spanish colonial history given as much prominence as the English, but with a critical methodology and an attention to diversity informed by the more recent scholarship.9 Borderlands historians have yet to win the battle to have “colonial America” be more than just a synonym for English colonial America, but the dominant features of Southwest borderlands historiography continue to be its depth, complexity and multivocality. For example, the historiography of Indigenous peoples has continued to expand both its temporal range and analytical tools by placing Indigenous people and practices at the center of the sweeping changes that took place across what is now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. It includes work like Cynthia Radding’s Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700– 1850, which “explores the multilayered meanings of culture, community and ecology.” Juliana Barr’s Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands demonstrated that Indigenous women played essential roles as mediators and peace brokers between Indigenous groups, and continued to try to play that role between Indigenous people and Spanish colonizers in spite of the latter group’s deeply misogynistic views. Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War proved that the 1846–48 U.S.–Mexico war only unfolded as it did 294

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because of decades of intense raiding by Indigenous groups against each other and the rising tide of colonial settlement. Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire argued that the Comanche people were an imperial power on the southwestern plains, claiming a term rarely applied to the behavior and political structures of Indigenous groups. And while the southern Great Plains has been the main focus for much of this work, Steven Hackel, Kent Lightfoot and Bárbara Reyes brought new critical attention to colonial California, its Indigenous peoples and the Spanish mission system, a topic that had languished somewhat since the mid-twentieth century. Taken together, these books and many others demonstrated powerfully that placing Indigenous people’s experiences and perspectives at the center of our analyses of conquest and colonization profoundly alters what we thought we knew about those processes.10 Of all the southwest borderlands fields, Hispanic and Chicana/o history has experienced the most dramatic growth in the last thirty years. For example, it now includes more studies from the perspective of northern Mexico, such as Jesús de la Teja’s San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier; William E. French’s A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico; Cheryl English Martin’s Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century; Miguel Tinker Salas’s In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato; and Laura Shelton’s For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850.11 Other scholars have examined the diverse experiences and complicated identities of everyday people, and their challenges and persistence in a world of shifting national and racial categories. Oscar J. Martínez argued in his 1994 monograph Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–Mexico Borderland that “borderlanders on both sides of the dividing line manifested substantial diversity,” and the field has produced several sophisticated and insightful studies of these fluid, historically contingent borderlands identities, including Benjamin Johnson’s Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans; Andrés Reséndez’s Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850; Erick Meeks’s Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona; Raúl A. Ramos’s Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861; Anthony Mora’s Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912; and Janne Lahti’s Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico.12 There are also close studies of local and regional economies, such as Armando C. Alonzo’s Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900; Juan Mora-Torres’s The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910; Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands; and Monica Perales’s Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community.13 This complexity and diversity is invisible in present-day reporting on and perceptions of the region, and several recent studies helped explain how the U.S.–Mexico border came to be perceived as a line of stark demarcation and dehumanization. For example, Rachel St John’s A Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border provided an excellent overview of the creation and impact of the border line. Monographs that examined different aspects of border policing include Patrick Ettinger’s Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930; Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol; and Miguel Antonio Levario’s Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy. Katherine Benton-Cohen’s Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands and John McKiernan-González’s Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 explored other strategies white workers and the state employed to try to make the border a line of racial exclusion. What is so useful about this scholarship is that it historicized and thus denaturalized the violent and exclusionary policies and practices that created and continue to define the modern border.14 From the larger umbrella of both Hispanic and women’s history came a striking new development, the emergence of critical scholarship on the history of women, gender and sexuality in the 295

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borderlands. So pervasive were the masculine narratives of what borders and conquests and nations meant and looked like that it took years for these new questions and topics to begin to make an impact on the borderlands scholarship. To a greater extent than with other emerging fields, a significant proportion of the key historiography of women, gender and sexuality was published in journals and anthologies. For example, the work of path-breaking Chicana feminist historian and activist Antonia Castañeda was scattered across anthologies and journals. Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s 1991 book When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 challenged the familiar tropes of manly Spanish conquest by examining them through the lens of marriage, gender and sexuality. Ana Maria Alonso’s Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender in Mexico’s Northern Frontier updates Oakah Jones’s work on the peasant colonists of the Spanish/Mexican north with an insightful gendered analysis of how notions of masculinity and femininity worked with and against racial and ethnic categories to create the borderland identities of the ordinary people who lived there. The turbulent middle decades of the nineteenth century, with their multiple colonial, racial, social and legal regimes, receive close attention in Deena J. González’s Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880, María Raquél Casas’s Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 and Laura Shelton’s work mentioned above. As González noted, when women’s experiences are taken seriously the prevailing narrative of a peaceful takeover “is simply untrue.”15 A fascinating and important new addition to borderlands historiography is the work examining Asian exclusion in the borderlands. Andrea Geiger’s Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters With Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 was the first book to take a continental view of the ways that Japanese migrants played the rules and officials at both borders against the other to gain entry. Grace Peña Delgado’s Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands and Julia María Schiavone Camacho’s Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 build on Erica Lee’s enormously influential 2003 monograph At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era 1882–1942 to explore the complex identities that resulted from Chinese migrants’ interactions with the U.S.–Mexico border.16

The U.S.–Canada Border Just as Bolton’s work and lasting influence meant that a borderlands methodology would dominate the writing on the U.S.–Mexico border, so too did the extraordinary Carnegie Series on the Relations of Canada and the United States help ensure that a comparative approach would dominate in the north. Historian James Shotwell, then Director of the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, proposed the series in 1933 and became the overall editor. Between 1936 and 1945 twenty-five books were published, focusing primarily on the economic, political and social histories that connected the two nations. The first in the series was CanadianAmerican Industry: A Study in International Investment, written by Frank A. Southard, Jr., Kenneth W. Taylor and Herbert Marshall; the last was John Bartlet Brebner’s North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. The series covered a wide range of topics, including political and diplomatic histories; histories of specific economic sectors and infrastructure; key cross-border regions; and cross-border migration. All were joint publications of Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Ryerson Press in Toronto, Ontario. This was not the first time historians had written about the relationship between Canada and the United States, but the series’ breadth reflected a new historiographical desire for continental—rather than imperial or national—analyses.17 John Bartlet Brebner was one of the key historians behind the series, and his own continental vision preceded the Carnegie books and mirrored Bolton in many ways. Brebner’s Ph.D. thesis was published in 1927 as New England’s Outpost: Acadia Before the Conquest of Canada. The Explorers of North America 1492–1806 was published in 1933, and The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony 296

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During the Revolutionary Years, intended as a sort of sequel for New England’s Outpost, was published in 1937. Much like Bolton, the central concern of Brebner’s early work was that the continent’s history made more sense from a continental and not a national perspective. However, WWII had a significant impact on his thinking and on the book that became the final work in the Carnegie Series, North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. It was not so much that Brebner had changed his mind about the value of a continental approach, but now he had a new appreciation for how that too could be limiting. Sometimes it just wasn’t possible to explain everything “in merely North American terms.”18 Given the twenty-five books published by the Carnegie series by the end of WWII, it is not surprising that there was not a lot of historical scholarship published on the Canada-U.S. border and relationship for the next few decades. For a while, it seemed as if everything had been said. Canadian-American relations were a perennial topic for Canadian political scientists and geographers throughout the twentieth century, but relatively few historians on either side of the border produced significant works about it. When they did engage again, beginning in the 1960s, their perspective was decidedly less rosy than that exhibited in the Carnegie series. For example, Robin Winks’s The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States (1960) began by stressing the close relationship between the two countries, but noted that textbook clichés “cannot stand the test of historical scholarship.” He argued that “the period of the American Civil War, 1861–1865, was one of unusual tension along the border” and helped create two very different nations.19 Robert Craig Brown’s Canada’s National Policy, 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (1964) echoed Winks’s criticisms of the early twentieth-century historiography’s positive view of the relationship. Brown wrote that while the neighbors “had common problems” and “to a large extent, shared a common way of life,” so too have there been “quarrels and differences” and “dissimilar solutions.”20 This focus on the differences between the two countries remained a key theme well into the NAFTA years, with such monographs as John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall’s Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (1994) and Elizabeth Mancke’s The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (2005). Thompson and Randall focused primarily on the 1940s to the 1980s and argued that shallow “platitudes” of amity and accord “belie the dissonance of the nineteenth century and exaggerate the harmony of the twentieth.” Mancke’s work studied the Revolutionary era to explain why these two British colonies chose different paths, and thus why the two contemporary nation-states have such different views about what constitutes appropriate government behavior. By contrast, Greg Donaghy’s Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States 1963–1968 (2003) argued that the working relationship during these years was constructive, productive and led to policy decisions that continued to draw the two nations closer together and not further apart.21 The more recent comparative scholarship has also begun to explore a growing number of subnational themes, some of which, like renewed attention to the sheer volume of Canadian migration into the United States and the effect that had on both countries, had roots in the Carnegie series. More than fifty years after Marcus Hansen’s The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples and Leon Truesdell’s The Canadian Born in the United States were published, historical geographer Randy Widdis’s With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration Into the United States and Western Canada 1880–1920 (1998) and Bruno Ramirez’s Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (2001) brought fresh analyses and insights to the topic. Widdis focused on the southward and westward movements of English-speaking migrants from central and eastern Canada, and Ramirez combined transatlantic and continental lenses to study English-speaking and Frenchspeaking migrants who moved south across the border. The economic history that had featured so prominently in the Carnegie series also received some interesting new additions, such as Sterling Evans’s 2007 continental comparative study Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the HenequenWheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950.22 297

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An exciting new development has been the emergence of comparative studies about Canadian and American Indigenous peoples. In his 1998 monograph Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History, Roger L. Nichols undercut the dominant nationalism in Canadian historiography by arguing that “the Indian-white story in Canada resembles that in the United States closely.” That conclusion was echoed three years later in Jill St. Germain’s Indian Treaty Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877, which demonstrated that for all the differences in how Canada and the United States negotiated and implemented their many treaties with Indigenous peoples, neither could be described as successful. The history of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest has benefited from such work as Paige Raibmon’s Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter From the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast and Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson’s Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898.23 However much the comparative approach to American-Canadian historical scholarship dominated, its hegemony was never complete. An important trio of mid-century monographs represented the first examples of a borderlands methodology (if not the term itself) being applied to the northern border: Joseph Kinsey Howard’s Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (1952), Paul F. Sharp’s Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865–1885 (1955) and Warren L. Cook’s Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 (1973). It is no accident that all three focused on the western borderlands; in both countries it was harder to shoehorn the West’s history into the dominant nationalist historiographical narratives, and the long history of cross-border connections was harder to ignore. For example, Howard’s central subject was the Métis empire on the northern Great Plains, which provided a useful lens for him to examine Native-white relations on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel and conclude that “the West was a social and economic entity” where the “boundary, in fact, made very little sense to anybody on either side of it.” Sharp’s Whoop-Up Country took a more nuanced approach, insisting that “similarity does not imply identity.” His work is famous for noting that the “Whoop-Up Trail” that connected northern Montana and southern Alberta in the late nineteenth century “symbolized the economic, social, and cultural ties that for many years defied a politically inspired division of the northern plains.” Nevertheless, he also argued that “nationalism, the most pervasive force in our modern world, was unaffected by its movement into this semi-arid and treeless plains country. It created Canadian plainsmen to the north and American plainsmen to the south.” Two decades later Warren L. Cook published Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819. He noted that there were no fewer than “five life styles competing for hegemony over the same territory”—Spanish, Indian, British, Russian and American—and “Spanish alternatives, choices, successes, and failures can be understood only in the context within which they acted.” It was an important addition to the continental field, which by the 1970s was losing that broader lens as it was gaining more nuanced analyses of local and regional histories.24 In the last twenty years, borderlands studies have become a regular feature of the historiography of the Canada–U.S. borderlands, particularly along the western border. John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl’s 1995 monograph Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building explored the many close social and economic connections between white settler communities of northern Montana, southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. No fewer than four books were published between 2001 and 2006 on Indigenous peoples in the Northern Great Plains borderlands, including two on the territory that was dominated by the Blackfoot peoples and would become the Alberta-Montana borderlands—Ted Binnema’s Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains, and my own The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands—and two on the Lakota, Beth LaDow’s The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland and David McCrady’s Living With Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands. Three other monographs focus on the Pacific Northwest borderlands and bring stunningly rich analyses to completely new topics. Kornel Chang’s Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.–Canadian Borderlands joins Andrea 298

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Geiger’s work, mentioned above, in exploring Asian migration and both include not just borderlands and continental analyses but the wider transpacific context as well. Lissa K. Wadewitz’s fascinating environmental and oceanic analysis, The Nature of Borders: Salmon and Boundaries in the Salish Sea, leaves the land behind completely. And although the West has dominated much of this new borderlands scholarship, there are important exceptions, such as Francis M. Carroll’s A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783–1842.25 This brief overview has only skimmed the surface of the scholarship that aims to understand these two borders and the complicated relationships they symbolize and perpetuate. Even a quick look at the dominant trends, monographs and historians, however, reveals some broad similarities and differences. One of the most obvious similarities is the extent to which specific national contexts repeatedly shaped and reshaped historians’ transnational analyses. This had an impact on everything from who was writing these histories (there is a distinct north-to-south pattern, where historians based in the U.S. have dominated the U.S.–Mexico scholarship and those based in Canada have dominated the U.S.–Canada scholarship) to the intellectual and political perspectives of the research. The biggest difference, besides the two different methodological trajectories, is of course the sheer scale of the U.S.–Mexico scholarship compared to the U.S.–Canada scholarship. The most significant gains in the last century have come from the increasing multivocality of the work and the widening of historians’ lenses; perhaps the most striking loss was the continental and global perspectives espoused by the early twentieth-century writers, although some recent books have begun to change that. If we return to Bryce and Freund’s definition of “transnational history,” in the twentieth century the borderlands scholarship has excelled at studies “below” the national scale while the comparative scholarship excelled at studies “above” that level. Taken together they can tell us as much about the entangled histories of these three nation states in the last 100 years as they do of the histories that came before.

Notes   1 Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund, eds., Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 3.   2 Ibid., 7.   3 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1894); Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), vii, 3.   4 Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Orig published 1948, republished 1990 by Praeger in Westport, CT); Max L. Moorhead, The Apache Frontier: Jacobo de Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain 1769–1791 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968); Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962).   5 John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974, first published 1970 by Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, Inc.), ix, 3, 1.   6 Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1975); Felipe A. Latorre, The Mexican Kickapoo Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); Edward Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians: Spanish Contact With the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981); Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Yaqui Resistance and Survival: The Struggle for Land and Autonomy 1821–1910 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 1750–1858 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); William B. Griffen, Utmost Good Faith: Patterns of Apache-Mexican Hostilities in Northern Chihuahua Border Warfare, 1821–1843 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Bernard Fontana, Of Earth and Little Rain: The Papago Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989).   7 Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American

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Sheila McManus Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Arnoldo de León, The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, 1987); Oakah L. Jones, Nueva Vizcaya: Heartland of the Spanish Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).   8 Martínez, Troublesome Border, xi, 2.   9 David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 8; David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 10 Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 5; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S. Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Bárbara O. Reyes, Private Women, Public Lives: Gender and the Missions of the Californias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). 11 Jesús de la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); William E. French, A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Cheryl English Martin, Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Laura Shelton, For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010). 12 Oscar J. Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), xvi–xvii; Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Erick Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 13 Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Juan Mora-Torres, The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Janne Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 14 Rachel St John, A Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Patrick Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Miguel Antonio Levario, Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2012); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); John McKiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 15 I am grateful to Betsy Jameson for her insight about the relative proportion of women’s and gender history in journals and anthologies compared to monographs. Castañeda’s articles have been gathered in a single volume: Three Decades of Engendering History: Selected Works of Antonia Castañeda, ed. Linda Heidenreich and Antonia I. Castañeda (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2014); Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Ana Maria Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender in Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3; María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007).

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Border/Lands 16 Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters With Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Erica Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era 1882–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 17 The only complete list ever published of the entire series is on p. 386 of its final volume, J. B. Brebner’s North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States and Great Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press and the Ryerson University Press, 1945). 18 J. B. Brebner, New England’s Outpost, Acadia Before the Conquest of Canada (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927); J. B. Brebner, The Explorers of North America, 1492–1806 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955; reprint Originally published A & C Black, Ltd., 1933); J. B. Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937); J. B. Brebner, North Atlantic Triangle (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968, originally published Yale and Ryerson, 1945), xxxv. 19 Robin W. Winks, The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States (4th ed. published Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998, originally published Johns Hopkins, 1960), xvii–xviii. 20 Robert Craig Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 3. 21 John Herd Thompson and Stephen Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (2nd ed. 1997; 1st ed. 1994; Athens: University of Georgia Press), 1–2; Elizabeth Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Greg Donaghy, Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States 1963–1968 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003). 22 Marcus Lee Hansen, completed by J. B. Brebner, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (New Haven and Toronto: Yale University Press and Ryerson University Press, 1940); Leon E. Truesdell, The Canadian Born in the United States: An Analysis of the Statistics of the Canadian Element in the Population of the United States, 1850–1930 (New Haven and Toronto: Yale University Press and Ryerson University Press, 1943); Randy Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration Into the United States and Western Canada 1880–1920 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998); Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007). 23 Roger L. Nichols, Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xvii; Jill St. Germain, Indian Treaty Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867– 1877 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter From the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). 24 Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1952), 14–15; Paul F. Sharp, Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865–1885 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 3, 8; Warren L. Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), ix. They had forerunners in the Carnegie series, as two of the three earlier monographs which had examined cross-border regions had focused on the West: F. W. Howay, H. F. Angus and W. N. Sage, British Columbia and the United States: The North Pacific Slope From Fur Trade to Aviation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Toronto, ON: The Ryerson Press, 1942); J. P. Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 1811–1849: A Regional Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Toronto, ON: The Ryerson Press, 1942). 25 John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl, Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building, an Anthropological History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Theodore Binnema, Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2001); Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); David McCrady, Living With Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the CanadianAmerican Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.–Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon and Boundaries in the Salish Sea (Seattle and Vancouver: University of Washington Press and University of British Columbia Press, 2012); Francis M. Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783–1842 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

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28 AGRICULTURAL AND RURAL—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Figure 28.1  Grain elevator in Sisseton, South Dakota, 1939. John Vachon, photographer. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF33–001660-M3.

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A rural and agricultural history of the United States in the twentieth century could be written solely as a declension narrative of farms failing, rural communities shrinking and a way of life being irretrievably lost or bypassed by an increasingly urban nation. Indeed, a good portion of the story of America’s rural places has been written in precisely that way, and for obvious reasons. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was still a rural and agricultural nation. In 1900, there were 5.7 million farms in the United States, and 39 percent of the population lived on farms. The rural share of the population was 60 percent. The United States was home to a rural majority. By 2000, however, there were only 2.1 million farms, with 1 percent of the population in agriculture, and 21 percent of the population living in rural areas. Additionally, 93 percent of farm families received some part of their income from off-farm labor.1 The countryside had changed, and in dramatic ways. To take this story no further than a discussion of declining population, however, is to neglect the many other stories developing in the countryside during these years. Rural and farm people, just like the nation’s urban and suburban populations, carried on living in the face of change. Family roles evolved, farming people both accommodated and resisted technological and economic innovations and communities remade themselves in the face of social and demographic change. While the tendency has often been to see rural and farm families and communities as being acted upon by malevolent forces beyond their control, recent scholarship reminds us that rural people were actors in their own right, and worked to retain a way of life that made sense to them, within the context of their own values and culture. Historians have called the early years of the twentieth century the “golden age of American agriculture.” After the rather violent ups and downs of the agricultural economy in the late nineteenth century, a period of prosperity lasted from 1897 to 1919, the year after the end of World War I. Prices for agricultural goods were strong relative to the cost of agricultural inputs. While most farm families could not be characterized as wealthy, and many remained poor, the average farming family had a fighting chance of seeing their incomes cover their expenses in this time period.2 This was also a time and place, according to historian Hal Barron, where Jeffersonian beliefs about independence and local autonomy prevailed. As he wrote in Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930, farming people had a distinct set of values. Although they would be faced in short order with many demands for change, farm people continued to believe in older traditions. They believed in the centrality of the family farm and the local community. They saw agriculture both as a way of making a life and making a living. They also believed in the importance of agriculture to the health of the nation, not just in an economic sense, but in a cultural sense as well. They molded their family lives to fit these beliefs.3 One of the shared expectations in this world was work for all. In most families, men retained primary responsibility for the fields and the large livestock, while women and children were a flexible workforce, available for whatever tasks the farm required. Women cared for their homes and families, but they also tended gardens, raised chickens, milked cows, processed milk, fed and cared for hired laborers and worked in the fields when needed. Women also contributed their efforts to community enterprises, such as schools and women’s clubs. This broad interpretation of women’s work was as true on Midwestern farms as those of southern tenants.4 A very important part of their jobs, according to historian Mary Neth, was “making do and doing without.” Her book, Preserving the Family Farm: Farmwomen, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940, detailed the many ways that farmwomen cut the coat to fit the cloth, in order for their families to survive as frugally as possible from month to month and year to year.5 This economizing often meant that women did without household improvements they might have wanted, such as indoor plumbing or a washing machine. While anthropologist Jane Adams found that southern Illinois women often deeply resented such economizing, historian Grey Osterud found that rural New York women accepted and encouraged their husbands “putting the barn before the house.”6 While indoor plumbing might make washing considerably easier, it would not contribute to the family income as would a new dairy 303

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barn. Farms survived because women economized, something that was especially important in hard times. As Osterud demonstrated in this and earlier work on nineteenth-century farming families, mutuality or a shared commitment between men and women to the success of farms and families continued to be an essential element of survival in uncertain times.7 She wrote: The tendency to see power within marriage as a zero-sum game was not shared by rural women, who regarded cooperation as necessary in decision making as well as labor. When they revolted, they rebelled not against their men-folks but with their husbands and neighbors against the milk processors who paid them less than the full value of what they produced.8 Farm and family, and their survival, came first. Adults were not the only laborers bound to the farming enterprise. Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest, 1870–1920 provided a discussion of the contours of children’s lives and labor, much of which was true for farm children in regions beyond the Midwest.9 Children of all ages contributed to their families’ efforts. Young children worked under the supervision of their mothers, but boys usually began to work with their fathers around age 7 or 8, and assumed the work of a man in the fields when they became large and strong enough. Girls generally continued to work beside their mothers as they grew, developing the skills to one day maintain their own homes and gardens. It would not have been unusual, however, for a girl to work outside with her brothers and father. Some fathers believed that tasks that required precision, such as planting corn, needed a female touch. Necessity also propelled girls into the fields. When a family could not afford hired labor, girls often took the place of hired men. Additionally, families that found themselves with daughters instead of sons or with boys who were far younger than their sisters made use of girls as needed in the fields. While many Native-born parents, and especially mothers, did not like the idea of girls who plowed, hoed and harvested, genteel definitions of girls’ work gave way to financial exigency. This was yet another version of putting the barn before the house. In an increasingly individualistic world, farm homes remained a corporate enterprise where all contributed to the success—or failure—of the whole.10 American law accommodated the needs of farms. In the early years of the twentieth century, not all states had laws requiring children to attend school. Some states such as Iowa, highly dependent on agricultural income, waited until the early years of the twentieth century to legislate in favor of primary education. Additionally, mandatory education would come especially late to the South, where white legislators wished to avoid the costs of educating African American children. Even when states required attendance, most required it only of children from age 6 or 7 to 14, and allowed them to be excused from school “for cause,” which generally included labor on a parent’s farm. Child labor laws were no help to farm children, either. While some states did attempt to protect children from dangerous employment in mines and factories, they did not attempt to protect children from equally dangerous employment on their parents’ farms.11 Indeed, as historian Megan Birk showed in her book, Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest, most state legislatures were happy to allow the indenture of poor and neglected children on farms in order to alleviate chronic labor shortages. It was only in the 1920s that states began to favor more protective and less labor-oriented arrangements for the care of needy youth.12 The average child, working on a parent’s land, remained unprotected. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century, farming families found themselves under increasing scrutiny by reformers. As the United States urbanized, one of the greatest concerns of the United States Department of Agriculture was how to keep an adequate population of farmers on the land.13 In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt called for the creation of the Country Life Commission to investigate the problem. This commission, made up of individuals who were horticulturalists, rural sociologists, foresters and editors, rather than farmers, distributed questionnaires and held hearings, in order to understand the problems of the countryside. In 1909, the Commission returned with its 304

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findings and recommendations. Its report noted that rural society lacked a number of important resources, such as a “highly organized” rural society, sufficient knowledge about conditions and possibilities in the various regions, good schools and good highways. The commissioners also noted that business interests monopolized the rivers and forests, and many farming communities suffered from widespread soil depletion. The report identified a number of other economic and social problems, including a lack of agricultural credit, a labor shortage, and the burdens of farmwomen.14 The Commission developed a number of specific improvements to “fix” these problems, but also suggested that there were four general panaceas to the problems of rural life: knowledge, education, organization and spiritual forces. In terms of knowledge, the commissioners argued that an educated farmer was one who knew how to address the problems presented by soils, climate and disease. They wanted better rural schools for children, vocational training to keep young people on the farm and extension to inform farmers of the newest in agricultural practices. In regard to organization, the Commission maintained that farmers should band together to promote their own welfare. It also argued for revitalized rural churches, since “spiritual ideas among rural people must be energized.” Only in the final pages of the report did the Commission address the problem of poverty. “When an entire region or industry is not financially prosperous, it is impossible, of course, to develop the best personal and community ideals.” Then it dismissed this, asserting that farmers put too much emphasis on income, when their real concern should be improving the character of rural people. Farmers, the Commission opined, were far too concerned with money, and not concerned enough with the character of their communities.15 Predictably, findings of this sort did not sit well with farm people. While they might have wished for better roads and greater access to natural resources, the idea that they should embrace consolidation of churches and schools rankled. Local control mattered to farm people. The criticisms within David Danbom’s 1979 book, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930, still ring true. Danbom argued that the Country Life Commission and movement were largely peopled by urban Americans who were more concerned about insuring a stable farming population that would efficiently produce food for the urban masses than about the very real economic problems facing farming families.16 Consequently, reform would come to the countryside, but at a relatively slow pace due to the objections and protests by rural people. Despite the response by rural people, which ranged from tepid to hostile, the Commission’s recommendations did not go unheard in reforming circles. Kevin Lowe’s 2016 study, Baptized With the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America, explored the vastly understudied religious response to the Country Life Commission’s ideas. Church leaders, for example, heard the call for improved spiritual life in the countryside, and pushed for many reforms to churches, including improved training for pastors. This movement had rather surprising help from the states in the form of public colleges and universities developing courses for ministers and missionaries working in rural communities. Reformers encouraged the creation of multi-church, multi-denomination parishes, an approach that worked in some communities, but not others.17 Reform came from agriculture’s inner circle as well. The land grant colleges continued with their agricultural research, while the extension service took the innovations from the land grants to the farmers. Under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, the federal government made funds available for counties to hire both county agents and home demonstration agents to instruct farm people about improved crops and farm homes.18 This impetus to improve agriculture did not just extend to the adult population on farms. While production-based clubs for farm children grew up in various places at various times, by the early years of the twentieth century, the idea had been embraced by the United States Department of Agriculture. This impulse took the form of 4-H, the USDA’s development program for agricultural youth. As Gabriel Rosenberg described in his 2016 book The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America, the habits of adult farmers were notoriously hard to change, so reformers reasoned that the best way to improve agriculture was through teaching young people. 305

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Those youth would have the opportunity to influence their parents’ actions, and to develop better farms than their parents’ as they developed their own enterprises. Rosenberg argued that another goal informed 4-H programs: keeping the best and the brightest on the land, and encouraging them to make fruitful heterosexual unions with other bright young people.19 Although these were the organization’s goals, the degree to which 4-H activities actually influenced behavior remains elusive. Farmwomen, too, found themselves bombarded by USDA efforts, in the form of extension homemaker’s clubs. Surveys in the early twentieth century found farmwomen discouraged by the low level of amenities in their homes. The lack of running water, electricity and modern appliances made their busy working lives difficult, in some cases to the point of desperation. The solution to this problem, according to the USDA, was to encourage farm families to make improvements to their homes that would allow farmwomen to be more like their cousins in the city. This would make farmwomen happier, reformers reasoned, and therefore more likely to remain on farms, guaranteeing the next generation. As historians Katherine Jellison and Mary Neth argued, however, reformers were not always in tune with what farmwomen wanted. Acquiring appliances for the home often compromised their ability to make do and do without. Additionally, they did not necessarily want to pursue a middleclass, urban lifestyle. Instead, they wanted to have more time for their flocks and gardens.20 This is not to say that extension services operated in the same way in all communities. In particular, extension efforts with African American populations heavily emphasized the practical. In Mama Learned Us to Work: Farmwomen in the New South, historian Lu Ann Jones described the efforts of Emma L. McDougald, who in 1922 became Wayne County, North Carolina’s first African American home demonstration agent. She worked with a poor constituency, 83 percent of whom were tenant farmers. Her approach was to go into a community and ask, “What is the greatest need of the people and how shall I attain it?”21 McDougald and others like her paid close attention to the conditions of the families in their communities, and tailored their programs to specific needs. Discussions about gardening and food preservation might flow into lessons on related topics such as health and sanitation.22 They also worked to counter the prejudices of white extension agents, and to teach a “politics of respectability” to the families with whom they worked. As Jones wrote, “clean homes and yards, good grooming and attention to personal hygiene, and decorous behavior could translate into assertions of dignity and pride. Such actions announced, ‘I am somebody.’”23 As with extension programs in white communities, African American women chose, and did not choose, to join. As Kelly Minor found in her study of African American home extension efforts in Florida, “home demonstration was a collection of reform possibilities offered by its agents but judged by its audience.”24 Extension with African American populations operated within other limitations as well. As Debra Reid has shown in her study of extension efforts in Texas, “whites expected rural blacks to farm but not to outperform white farmers, and they expected the extension agents to maintain the racial status quo.”25 But even within these limitations, the African American agents were able to achieve important goals, such as developing canning centers, giving their constituents the opportunity to practice self-government and helping to improve education and living conditions.26 While domestic concerns helped to mold the governmental approach to agriculture and farm families, the increasingly chaotic international situation also deeply influenced their fortunes. World War I brought high income and high hopes to American farming families. In the long run, however, the results of the war were terribly damaging. Rural depopulation, although already well-established by this date, accelerated as a result of the war. Young people had the option to leave the countryside either through enlistment in the nation’s armed forces or in order to pursue war-related employment in factories and offices.27 Perhaps even more damaging was the economic fallout in the immediate postwar years from government policies adopted during the war. Firm in the belief that “wheat would win the war,” the United States Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers to invest heavily in their operations, buying new land and new equipment. Farmers obliged, often taking out loans at high wartime rates of interest to expand their operations. This strategy helped American farmers 306

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to feed their nation’s civilians, soldiers and allies. Europe’s farmers quickly recovered from the effects of the war, however, and prices fell. Farmers were left with expanded operations and loans they could not afford to pay. For many farming families, the Great Depression did not begin in the late 1920s, but in the early 1920s. Foreclosures skyrocketed and families left agriculture at an accelerated rate.28 In the face of the intractable problems of the 1920s, some farmers sought shelter in cooperation, in the form of farm bureaus. Although a number of historians have been quite critical of the American Farm Bureau Federation, arguing that it represented the interests of a more corporate agriculture against those of family farms, historian Nancy K. Berlage argued in her 2016 work that many different types of farmers joined and profited from the experience.29 With a progressive view of the needs of agriculture, farm bureau members adopted science, organization and business models as their tools. While members often believed that businesses had not done right by farmers, “their solution,” Berlage argued, was to become more like them—an attempt to beat them at their own game. They sought to emulate corporate men and their style of organization down to the last detail, with farm men dressing in business suits and ties, and women in their Sunday best when attending local, state and national meetings, where they meticulously followed Robert’s Rules of Order.30 Berlage argued that farmers were fighting fire with fire: They believed they were being unfairly marginalized by a powerful urban world and that the values and techniques of the past no longer served them well. Farm people tried to correct this wrong by turning to collective action on scientific, economic, political, and social fronts.31 Unfortunately, organization could not adequately protect farming families against the extreme conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. When the depression finally caught up with the rest of the country, farming families continued to feel its effects profoundly. The era was marked by falling prices, foreclosures and impoverishment. For example, between 1929 and 1932, wheat fell from $1.05 to $0.38 a bushel, corn from $0.77 to $0.32 a bushel and hogs fell from $12.93 to $6.13 per hundredweight. Gross farm income fell 60 percent in just three years.32 Interestingly enough, hard times often enhanced the importance of women’s productive roles within their families. As Deborah Fink and Dorothy Schwieder discovered when they studied Midwestern farm families, the small amounts of money women generated with their butter and eggs, often derisively termed “pin money,” could become absolutely essential, and even the most important part of a family’s income during an economic downturn.33 Farm families struggled, and when they persisted, it was because they made do, did without and innovated in order to survive. They also turned to the government for support, as needed. The role of the government in farmers’ lives increased significantly during the depression. Theodore Saloutos’s 1982 book, The American Farmer and the New Deal, remains the standard text, detailing the many ways in which the federal government interacted with and aided farming families during the 1930s.34 The Agricultural Adjustment Act and Administration (AAA), launched in 1933, paid farmers to reduce their production of certain commodities, such as cotton, corn, hogs, wheat, dairy products, tobacco and rice. The government hoped to increase prices, and farm incomes, by inducing artificial scarcity. Although probably the most important government farm program, the AAA was only one element of the New Deal program. The Soil Conservation Service, created in 1936, paid farmers to undertake measures to save their land. The Farm Security Administration served as a lender of last resort to low income farming families. Probably the best loved of the New Deal agricultural programs was the Rural Electrification Administration, which provided loans to rural electric 307

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cooperatives, in the hope of finally bringing electricity to isolated rural communities. Historian Sarah Phillips, in her 2007 book This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal, argued that these efforts were particularly important because they mark one of the few attempts by America’s policymakers to really grapple with the question of rural sustainability. They wanted to know how many farmers were necessary not only to produce the nation’s food and fiber, but also to preserve its land, water and rural communities. Ultimately, the government’s agents came to believe that the answer to the problem of farm poverty and community sustainability was that the nation needed fewer, better farmers.35 The conditions of the 1930s were terribly destructive for sharecroppers and other tenant farmers, particularly in the southern United States. As a group, southern tenant farmers were the most impoverished of farming families in the country. Many of them relied exclusively upon the production of cotton for their livelihood, and the price of cotton fell to unprecedented lows during the decade. Unfortunately, federal policies in the 1930s did little to help them. As Saloutos wrote, they fared badly in part because the AAA programs were built around commodities instead of people. Poor farmers who struggled to make a living on the land were not the AAA’s prime concern. Many in the agricultural establishment believed there were too many people on the land; and one way of eliminating distress on the farm was by getting people off the land and into cities.36 When the Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid the owners of southern cotton enterprises to take their land out of production, the money did not generally trickle down to the tenants on those farms. Even adjustments to the program did little to help tenants and other small farmers. Neither did the government program aid farm laborers. This was intentional. According to Saloutos, federal policy was to support larger and more efficient farmers whose “operations . . . were sufficient to attain a satisfactory standard of living,” meaning one that mirrored the urban middle class.37 Depression in the cotton belt, in particular, led to an increasing labor migration out of depressed communities and into the stream of migrant laborers who picked the fruit and vegetables of Florida and the East Coast, a migration that Cindy Hahamovitch details in her book, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945. By 1940, between 40,000 and 60,000 migrants were coming to Florida farms each year.38 The effects of the Great Depression were variable by region, and in some places, environmental collapse accompanied economic disaster. On the Great Plains, this took the form of the Dust Bowl. Historians, in general, agree that the Dust Bowl added insult to injury for farmers who not only saw the value of their products fall, but whose production was slashed to the bone by year after year of drought and dust storms. Where historians disagree is in the degree to which the problems of the 1930s can be characterized as “man-made.” Donald Worster, in his 1979 book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, laid the problems of the decade solidly at the feet of farmers, driven by greed, who busted the sod and planted wheat, reaping the benefits during World War I. In his view, the capitalist system and its attendant lack of concern for the soil led directly to blowing dust.39 More recently, Geoff Cunfer has published On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. He used GIS to painstakingly track land usage in areas affected by the drought and dirt storms of the 1930s. His findings cast doubt on Worster’s conclusions; many of the acres most seriously affected by wind erosion in the 1930s were pasturelands that had never been put to the plow. Cunfer’s research showed that weather was more important than human action in causing the Dust Bowl.40 Dirt storms and economic challenges were not the only forces changing the shape of rural life. In the first half of the twentieth century, new technology was revolutionizing life on the farm. Katherine Jellison’s 1993 work, Entitled to Power: Farmwomen and Technology, 1913–1963, examined 308

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the complicated relationship between farm people, and especially farmwomen, and the technological changes infiltrating the countryside. As previously discussed, women had their own reasons for adopting new technology. If indoor plumbing and a new washing machine saved them time on the laundry, that time could be used to improve their flocks of chickens or to invest in market gardening. Not all adoptions of technology were directly related to farm productivity, however. Buying a car served a dual purpose. It might help a farmer get to town for parts, but it might also take the family to town on Saturday for an evening’s entertainment. A new radio would provide the weather report and livestock prices, but it would also entertain a farmwoman during a long, lonely afternoon of chores. Electricity on the farm powered milking machines, but it also made it possible for the family to read in the evening.41 Ronald Kline’s research has also shown that farm people adopted technology on their own terms. Farm people, for example, resisted developing the roads necessary for automobile use in the countryside, but once it was there, they adapted the car to “wash the clothes, plow the fields, and carry produce to town.” Farm people approached technological change in inventive and original ways.42 World War II had as great an impact upon farming families as World War I, but in somewhat different ways. The economic impact was not as devastating, largely because farmers had learned some lessons about expanding in the face of what were likely to be short term demands. In order to gain farmers’ cooperation, the federal government guaranteed increased prices into the postwar years. Even more dramatically than in World War I, the population shifted away from the countryside. Many had stayed on farms during the depression because there was no good place to go. The war, in a matter of months, changed the situation; the nation’s population permanently shifted toward urban areas. Nevertheless, agricultural production increased, largely made possible by farmers substituting machinery, such as the tractor, for absent labor.43 This was to be the story of the second half of the twentieth century. With less available labor, and more and better machines available, farmers substituted machines and chemicals for labor. In order to pay for these innovations, farmers worked more land. The role of farmers’ agency in this process was the subject of J. L. Anderson’s 2008 book, Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and the Environment, 1945–1972. Anderson argued that “farmers who worked the land during the postwar period not only accepted the industrial ideal, but made it their own.”44 Anderson traced a number of changes on Iowa’s farms, including the adoption of pesticides and herbicides, automated milking systems and hybrid seed, among others. Anderson found that farmers generally adopted new technologies freely, because of the potential improvements to their economic wellbeing. Much like farm people from earlier eras, they adopted these technologies on their own terms—and sometimes in frightening ways. This is particularly visible in Anderson’s discussion of farmers’ use of DDT, the pesticide banned in the United States in 1972 because of its disastrous environmental effects. Farmers adopted DDT because of its amazing ability to kill flies, mosquitos and other insect pests that made their lives difficult and their farms less profitable. They also, unfortunately, used DDT on their own terms, in copious amounts and on surfaces, such as the interior of the farmhouse, against the advice of the manufacturer and the extension service. After all, if a little DDT was good, wouldn’t more be better?45 Farmers exercised their independence against expert advice, sometimes to the detriment of their own health and the health of the environment. Where were women to fit in this new agricultural world of big machines and big farms? Given the enormous capital requirements of post-World War II agriculture, farmwomen could no longer pull their families away from the abyss by making do and doing without. The flocks of chickens that had long made the difference between success and failure had been swallowed up during the war by corporate chicken farming, made big and made into men’s work. In the face of this competition, back yard flocks no longer made sense.46 A woman’s traditional activities, raising food for the family and for sale, no longer packed their economic punch. Historian Katherine Jellison found that women’s 309

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place was increasingly behind the wheel of a car as the farm’s chief errand runner, or using it to connect farm to town as women took jobs in town to bolster a family’s economic position.47 Sociologist Rachel Rosenfeld, who surveyed farmwomen’s work habits in the 1980s, discovered that roughly a third of them plowed, disked, cultivated or planted. Slightly over half of them worked during harvest, running machinery or trucks. About two-thirds cared for animals. Women did the books and paid the bills in nearly 80 percent of farm households. More than 85 percent cared for vegetable gardens or animals for home consumption, and cared for children.48 In spite of their apparently diverse and “modern” work roles, farmwomen were increasingly out of step with urban perceptions of a woman’s place. As Deborah Fink reported in Open Country, Iowa, women continued to do enormous amounts of work around the farm, but rarely took full credit for what they had done, characterizing their labors as “helping out.” They did not think of themselves as farmers. Although second-wave feminism encouraged middle-class urban and suburban women to think about their own individual rights in the home and in the workplace, farmwomen perceived themselves differently. As Jenny Barker Devine argued in her 2013 book, On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farmwomen’s Activism Since 1945, farmwomen continued to see themselves as members of a corporate entity: the family farm. When they became activists, it was not on their own behalf, but their families’. Barker Devine calls this activity a form of agrarian feminism, where women stepped outside their comfort zones and promoted products and policies that might secure their families’ futures. Farmwomen joined the Porkettes to promote Iowa chops, organized on behalf of the Farmers’ Union and enrolled in Farm Bureau educational programs.49 Farmwomen in the 1980s identified themselves and their concerns very much as farmwomen had in the first decades of the twentieth century. The place of children in this world deserves further study. By the end of the twentieth century, as David Danbom has noted, farms were “mainly a place where people grow up. When they have reached adulthood, they are more likely to leave and become accountants or computer programmers or retail clerks than they are to follow in their parents’ footsteps.”50 Rural life no longer made economic demands that differentiated child life in that location from child life in cities and suburbs. The many variables that went into that change, however, remain unexplored. Following World War II, farms became more highly mechanized, limiting the amount of labor needed. States began to require children to attend more years of school, and taking children out of school in order to do farm work received more scrutiny. High school graduation, gradually, became the rule rather than the exception. Americans increasingly privileged the urban over the rural. As an immediate post-World War II study by Horace Miner indicated, towns had become the focal point of rural children’s lives, often as a result of the influence of consolidated schools and team sports.51 The moment at which rural children became, for most purposes, urban, merits more discussion. The Farm Crisis of the 1980s, too, has yet to receive the full consideration it deserves from historians. The crisis had its greatest impact in the Midwest, and was particularly difficult for farmers in early middle age. A number of factors came together in those years, causing disaster for many a farm family. Since the early 1970s, input prices had been rising steeply, largely due to the increasing cost of energy. Additionally, land values rose significantly and lenders began to make loans not on the basis of income, but on the value of land. Many borrowed against the value of their land to make expensive improvements. High interest rates made this a risky proposition. When the bottom fell out of agricultural prices in the 1980s, farmers with heavy debt burdens went out of business in astonishing numbers. The only book length treatment of this subject is Mark Friedberger’s 1989 work Shake-Out: Iowa Farm Families in the 1980s, which concluded that the cultural traits that made corn-belt agriculture strong in previous generations were the traits that would keep farmers afloat during and after the crisis. He wrote that a “yeoman style of farm management,” characterized by “continuity, risk-aversive financial practices, the limitation of expansion to fit family needs, intergenerational succession, and cooperation” epitomized the farms that survived. Further, “the passion of the 1970s for specialization fell 310

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short where diversification succeeded.”52 Friedberger, however, researched these farming families and gauged their success in 1989, when the crisis had yet to run its course. The “shaking-out” described in Friedberger’s work continued for another decade, and the time has come for further consideration of the impact of the crisis of the 1980s on the fortunes of the nation’s farmers and the small communities they supported. Any discussion of rural America at the end of the twentieth century requires careful attention to the issue of region. As has always been the case, there was not a single rural America in the twentieth century, but many. This is particularly true when examining the issue of poverty. In all regions of the United States, rural poverty is greater than in metropolitan areas. The degree to which it is greater, however, varies significantly. While the difference between levels of rural and metropolitan poverty is only seven-tenths of 1 percent in the Northeast, 21.8 percent of the rural South lives in poverty, as compared to 16.1 percent of its urban population. The deepest pockets of poverty in the United States lie in the Mississippi Delta, scattered locations throughout the Deep South, Appalachia and the Indian reservations of the Great Plains and West. These, plus the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, are also the areas with the greatest levels of persistent rural poverty, lasting at least thirty years.53 When deeply impoverished rural communities attempt to find a way out, the path can be tortuous. David Lewis has studied the Skull Valley Goshutes, a Native American band living just south and slightly west of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. With very few other economic development options available to them, the tribe attempted to bring a nuclear waste facility into their valley, hoping to generate jobs that might bring their people back from urban centers. The resulting tempest divided the band, and brought down the wrath of much of the state government. As Lewis commented, “nobody really wanted a high-level radioactive waste dump in Skull Valley, Utah, or for that matter, anywhere in rural America. What Goshutes wanted—and still need—is the economic promise to help create the physical and cultural community they imagine.”54 For isolated, high poverty rural communities, the situation of the Skull Valley Goshutes is a familiar one. With no good opportunities for development remaining, the question becomes which unattractive option to pursue. The story in other rural communities, however, seems to be more promising. When sociologist Robert Wuthnow studied the rural Midwest for his book, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s, he found a region in the midst of economic restructuring that had improved its prospects. The number of farms had fallen since the 1950s, but so had the level of poverty. What emerged from several decades of winnowing and sifting was a region better prepared to meet the economic challenges of the twenty-first century.55 In his further work, Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future, Wuthnow found a surprising resilience in the nation’s out-of-theway places. A desire for community, a slower pace of life and face-to-face interactions continues to encourage people to choose small towns. Additionally, Wuthnow found a flexibility of views in such places. While political conservatism might seem to carry the day, Wuthnow found it to be a thoughtful conservatism that sometimes led to surprises at the ballot box. People might hold their tongues in public, to keep the peace, while voting for measures and candidates that seem out of place with those public stances.56 When it comes to an analysis of rural and agricultural America in the last years of the twentieth century, the rural sociologists, economists and policy analysts, of course, have gotten there first. To what degree these observations will hold, once the historians arrive on the scene, has yet to be determined. Wuthnow aside, the view is somewhat dimmer, with books like Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America and Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town tolling the death knell for communities throughout the nation’s broad, lightly inhabited middle.57 There are many stories yet to be written about rural and agricultural America. The historians have barely ventured into the last two decades of the century, leaving that ground for the most part to 311

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economists, political scientists, rural sociologists and others scholars less concerned with the passage of time and historical perspective. For the latter decades of the twentieth century, historians must confront many of the same questions that have shaped our understanding of the early and mid-century story. They need to ask who is in the driver’s seat, and to what end? What does rural sustainability look like in a United States where 80 percent of the population lives in urban areas and a high percentage of the poor live in rural communities? What matters most: the production of a secure and abundant food supply or other questions about quality that have been neglected? Does it matter how and by whom food is produced? What role does—and should—the government play in this process? The way farmers make decisions has been complicated by the entry of new actors in the story. Historians of agriculture in the late twentieth century will be required to grapple ever more often with the influence of consumer behavior on farmers’ actions. As Kendra Smith-Howard showed in her book, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900, consumer demand for food that is more “pure” or “natural” can lead to processors and farmers rejecting certain agricultural innovations, such as the injection of dairy cows with bovine growth hormone in order to boost milk production.58 With new actors, technologies and questions, it’s a brave new world, virtually incomprehensible from the point of view of the rural people of 1900.

Notes   1 Anne Effland and Carolyn Dimitri, “Milestones in U.S. Farming and Farm Policy,” United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2005-june/data-feature.aspx#. VthiG0bitqM, accessed 3 March 2016.   2 The best general history of agricultural and rural America is David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Danborn, Born in the Country, 161. Also useful is R. Douglas Hurt, American Agriculture: A Brief History (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994).   3 Hal Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 14–16.   4 For a discussion of women’s work in the upcountry South see Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).   5 Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 17–39.   6 Jane Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois, 1890–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 207–210; Grey Osterud, Putting the Barn Before the House: Women and Family Farming in Early Twentieth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 27–45.   7 See also Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farmwomen in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).   8 Osterud, Putting the Barn Before the House, 30.   9 See Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 10 Ibid., 36–60. 11 Ibid., 12–23. 12 See Megan Birk, Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); see also Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm, 158–181. 13 Gabriel Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 46–47; Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm, 199–203. 14 These details about the Country Life Commission can be found in 60th Congress, 2d Session, Document No. 705, Report of the Country Life Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909). 15 Report of the Country Life Commission, 17–18, 63. 16 David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), 74. 17 Kevin M. Lowe, Baptized With the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 18 Danbom, Born in the Country, 174.

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Agricultural and Rural 19 See Gabriel Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 20 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 137–139; Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farmwomen and Technology, 1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 33–41. 21 Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farmwomen in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 139. 22 Ibid., 144. 23 Ibid., 153. 24 Kelly A. Minor, “‘Justifiable Pride’: Negotiation and Collaboration in Florida African American Extension,” in Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett, Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families Since Reconstruction, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 225. 25 Debra Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007), xxvi. 26 Ibid., 191. 27 Danbom, Born in the Country, 178–180. 28 Ibid., 185–197. 29 For examples of works more critical of the Farm Bureau, see Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 134–135; Adams, The Transformation of Rural Life, 218–220. 30 Nancy K. Berlage, Farmers Helping Farmers: The Rise of the Farm and Home Bureaus, 1914–1935 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 50. 31 Ibid., 51. 32 Danbom, Born in the Country, 199. 33 Dorothy Schwieder and Deborah Fink, “Plains Women: Rural Life in the 1930s,” Great Plains Quarterly 8 (Spring 1988): 83–84. 34 Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982). 35 Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19. 36 Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal, 98. 37 Ibid., 261. 38 Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 124–125. The Great Depression contributed to the growth of migrant streams on both the east and west coasts. See also James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5–8. 39 Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 40 Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005), 143–163. 41 Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farmwomen and Technology, 1913–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 42 Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 276. 43 Hurt, American Agriculture, 357–358. 44 J. L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology and the Environment, 1945–1972 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 12. 45 Ibid., 15–27. 46 Deborah Fink, Open Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition and Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 153. 47 Jellison, Entitled to Power, 183. 48 Rachel Ann Rosenfeld, Farmwomen: Work, Farm, and Family in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 56–57. 49 Jenny Barker Devine, On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farmwomen’s Activism Since 1945 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013). 50 Danbom, Born in the Country, 251. 51 Horace Miner, Culture and Agriculture: An Anthropological Study of a Corn Belt County (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949), 74. 52 Mark Friedberger, Shake-Out: Iowa Farm Families in the 1980s (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 143.

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Pamela Riney-Kehrberg 53 United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, “Geography of Poverty,” www.ers. usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being/geography-of-poverty.aspx, accessed 4 March 2016. 54 David Lewis, “Skull Valley Goshutes and the Politics of Place in Rural Utah,” in Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West, ed. David B. Danbom (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015), 262. 55 Robert Wuthnow, Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 56 Robert Wuthnow, Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 57 See Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 58 Kendra Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 154.

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29 CONSUMERISM AND POPULAR CULTURE—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Emily A. Remus

On the threshold of the twentieth century, economist Simon Patten theorized that the United States was evolving from a “pain economy” rooted in scarcity to a “pleasure economy” based on abundance. The transition had been sparked by new manufacturing and distribution methods that granted consumers access to an ever-increasing array of goods—from ready-to-wear clothing to convenience foods to home appliances. As Americans came to rely on getting and spending to fulfill more of their everyday wants and needs, consumption levels soared to unprecedented heights. Yet sustaining these conditions, Patten predicted, would require a break with the past, a remaking of old “ideals, impulses, and institutions.” The effects of the break would be far-reaching. Indeed, in Patten’s view, the growth of the consumer economy was destined to transform everything from morals and customs to civic standards, social relationships and the built environment. In short, the ascent of consumer capitalism would create American culture anew.1 For nearly a century after Patten marked the leap from scarcity to abundance, the study of consumer culture remained mainly the province of economists, political theorists and cultural critics. Only in the 1970s, amid the “cultural turn,” did historians begin to devote sustained attention to consumption. That initial research focused on advertising, commercial amusement and the development of a mass market.2 But in the decades that followed, interest in consumer culture penetrated new subfields and areas of inquiry, moving from intellectual and cultural history to intersect with urban history, women’s and gender history, business history, political history and the histories of race, civil rights, sexuality and the United States in the world. Just as consumer culture has come to permeate daily life since Patten’s time, so too it has seeped into nearly every corner of American historiography. Historians hardly echo Patten’s unabashedly celebratory view of consumer culture. Nevertheless, the broad scope of their work affirms his prophecy that the ascent of a “new order of consumption” would shape practically every aspect of modern life.3 The origins of American consumer culture—and a robust demand for manufactured goods— reach as far back as the era of early colonial settlement.4 Yet only in the twentieth century, most historians agree, did the United States conclusively become a consumer society, oriented toward the buying and selling of goods and services. The material conditions to support this shift had emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Industrial capitalists in that era discovered new energy sources and production technologies that vastly expanded the quantity and variety of manufactures available for purchase. As supply surged ahead, enterprising merchants introduced new distribution and merchandising techniques that stimulated demand and dramatically expanded the market for the nation’s industrial bounty. By the 1890s, department stores, which concentrated a range of goods under one 315

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roof, had sprouted in the retail districts of most major cities. These commercial palaces, together with mail-order catalogues, made shopping convenient, affordable and entertaining.5 The material and institutional developments of the late nineteenth century garnered tributes to American commercial enterprise. But rising consumption levels also aroused tremendous alarm among contemporary moralists and social critics. For centuries, consumption had been associated with extravagance and greed. So, too, it was seen as running counter to democratic values of plain living, thrift and self-denial. The growth of the consumer economy required a release from these restraints, according to historians. Indeed, as T. J. Jackson Lears explained in a classic 1983 essay on advertising, “To thrive and spread, a consumer culture required more than a national apparatus of marketing and distribution; it also needed a favorable moral climate.”6 The creation of that climate was a central focus of influential studies by Lears, Warren Susman, Daniel Horowitz, Jean-Christophe Agnew and Neil Harris. This work highlighted the conflict between an older producerist ethic of hard work and a nascent culture of consumption animated by self-indulgence, novelty and acquisition.7 Although historians have since challenged this stark duality, the early literature on consumer culture rightly underscored the profound moral and psychological changes that accompanied the new economic conditions. The rise of a culture of consumption had especially dramatic consequences for women. By the early twentieth century, women had emerged as the nation’s primary “purchasing agents,” credited by trade journals and marketing experts with controlling at least 80 percent of all consumer spending. Women were also entering the marketplace in growing numbers as retail and service ­workers—the store clerks, waitresses and cashiers who helped to sustain commercial growth. The central role played by women meant that scholars of women and gender were among the first to explore the fertile terrain of consumer history. Almost immediately, a debate emerged over the consequences of women’s engagement with consumer culture. Did that engagement generate new opportunities or restrictions? Many cultural historians writing in the 1980s, such as Kathy Peiss, William Leach, Elizabeth Ewen and Joanne Meyerowitz, emphasized the autonomy, pleasure and possibilities for self-expression that women of different classes discovered in commercial venues, from elegant department stores to cheap dance halls.8 The women who flocked to these places, in Peiss’s words, “pushed at the boundaries of constrained lives and shaped cultural forms for their own purposes.”9 By contrast, historians such as Susan Porter Benson, Elaine Abelson and Ruth Schwartz Cohen highlighted the “dark underside” of consumer culture.10 Their research exposed the inequalities of class and gender reinforced by the new culture, as well as the pressures it placed on women to adhere to ever-rising standards of fashion and comfort. Drawing on these initial debates, historians came to develop a dialectical view that acknowledged the freedoms as well as the restraints emanating from consumer society. This framework was fully articulated by a new cohort of consumer historians whose research expanded the scope of inquiry to consider how the ascent of consumer capitalism shaped the lived experiences and subjectivity of other groups that had long been marginalized in the economic realm, notably African Americans.11 In the age of Jim Crow, scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen, Grace Hale, Robert Weems and Ted Ownby revealed, black consumers encountered the marketplace on very different terms than white patrons. Across the country, African Americans were denied service or subjected to segregated accommodations, price gauging and discourtesy.12 Nevertheless, consumption provided African Americans, who were typically denied access to traditional forms of power, an avenue for asserting public influence and demanding respect. In the 1930s, for example, African American activists initiated “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, which called on black shoppers to avoid stores that did not employ black workers.13 The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 later enabled black consumers to combat discrimination on public transit.14 Consumer culture also offered more informal ways of asserting independence. As Tera Hunter argued in her study of Jim Crow Atlanta, for some black consumers the decision to wear brightly colored clothes or patronize a dance hall condemned by white reformers embodied self-determination.15 316

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Like the scholarship on women, early histories of black consumption affirmed that ordinary consumers were anything but passive pawns of capitalists. As Lizabeth Cohen explained, “Consumption involved the meeting of two worlds—the buyer’s and the seller’s.”16 But exploring the buyer’s world proved more difficult than navigating the better traveled—and more richly documented—terrain of the seller. As a result, the balance soon tipped in favor of “supply-side” studies focused on the businessmen and institutions that produced commercial culture, especially advertisers, retailers and mass-circulation magazines. This trend was reinforced by William Leach’s influential Land of Desire (1993). A decade before the book’s publication, Leach had explored the world of the buyer in an essay arguing for the “emancipating impact” of department stores on women.17 In Land of Desire, however, his attention shifted decisively to sellers. Leach claimed that the culture of consumption that emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1930 was “among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created.” It was “not created by ‘the people,’” he wrote, “but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites.” As a result, the production of that culture, not its reception by consumers, was the “key subject.”18 Increasingly, historians focused on retailing, marketing and advertising rather than on consumer reception. This seller-oriented scholarship delivered significant insights into how American capitalists stimulated consumer demand in the half-century before World War II. Urban merchants, led by department store owners, aroused shoppers’ desires by providing convenient services, such as free returns and home delivery, as well as entertaining spectacles such as window displays and fashion shows.19 New wants were also induced by advertisers seeking to sell a vast array of manufactured goods. These admen created new markets by persuading consumers to desire entirely new products, such as safety razors and vegetable-oil shortening, as well as specific brands, such as Campbell’s soup and Kohler faucets.20 Their efforts were abetted by a growing number of professional salesmen, who traveled door-to-door educating consumers about different products, and by mass-circulation women’s magazines, which upheld consumption-oriented visions of domestic life.21 The resulting surge in spending was sustained by cheap credit from merchants and financing companies who offered consumers opportunities to buy now and pay later through installment plans.22 At stake in supply-side histories was the triumph of business in legitimating a culture of spending and accumulation. Meanwhile, the perspective of consumers receded to the periphery. That emphasis has begun to shift in recent scholarship: the world of the buyer has come back into focus. Today, without dismissing the influence of capitalists, historians of consumption are once again foregrounding reception, probing how Americans have shaped, not just been shaped by, the consumer order. This work implicitly has challenged the longstanding argument that consumer culture was imposed without consent or contest. Pioneering the approach are political historians, such as Lizabeth Cohen, Meg Jacobs and Lawrence Glickman, who have examined the ways consumers organized to influence spending.23 Their research has been framed by an assumption that consumption was not a private decision, as many business scholars had maintained. Instead, as Glickman wrote, it was a “fundamentally social act with far-reaching consequences.”24 Those consequences often reinforced the culture of individualism and materialism promoted by consumer capitalists. But in some instances, according to political historians, the choices consumers made could be organized to constrain the excesses of the market and achieve shared objectives. Consumer action has, of course, figured in American political culture since the days of the Boston Tea Party.25 But only in the twentieth century, scholars have shown, did the ability to consume come to be viewed as a right of citizenship and a marker of full membership in the polity.26 As part of this shift, the consuming public began to insist that the state had an obligation to safeguard their interests in the marketplace. The first campaigns to secure consumer protections emerged in the Progressive Era, when reformers, clubwomen and muckraking journalists called on the government to set standards for product safety and quality. Their efforts inspired significant new regulatory legislation, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which targeted food adulteration and misbranding. A 317

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subsequent wave of consumer activism in the 1930s and 1940s encompassed grassroots boycotts with a range of goals, from reducing meat prices to securing truth in labeling.27 Throughout each wave, consumer politics were entwined with labor activism. Trade unionists, for example, demanded living wages based on proliferating consumer needs.28 African Americans pushed to integrate sales work by boycotting retail stores.29 Consumer groups, such as the National Consumers’ League, channeled the purchasing power of members—mostly middle-class white women—to improve conditions for retail and industrial employees.30 The aims of these groups varied, but each advanced a vision of consumer culture that challenged the interests of corporate capitalism. The scholarship on consumer activism has integrated consumer culture into the history of American politics, a field that once largely dismissed consumption. This research has also revealed the crucial role of the state in enabling the growth of consumer society. By enacting product safety and quality standards, as well as fighting inflation, legislators and state officials helped to create an environment where Americans felt safer consuming in the first half of the twentieth century. The courts assisted in this work by opening new channels for individuals to obtain monetary damages from manufacturers who sold faulty products, even if, as Barbara Welke has argued, such recompense never truly accounted for the loss of life or limbs.31 Local government also took a hand in creating a consumerfriendly environment. In turn-of-the-century Chicago, for example, city officials and business leaders collaborated to curb street harassment and ensure that women shoppers felt comfortable traversing the city without male escorts.32 Much of the latest work on consumer culture has focused on the decades after World War II, when the enabling actions of the state were especially decisive. The Depression had established that consumer spending was essential to the nation’s economic health. New Deal recovery efforts had promoted consumption by reducing unemployment, increasing wages and stabilizing prices.33 After the war, the state’s role in managing demand expanded further, as the federal government introduced new programs to stimulate individual spending. The most prominent initiative was the G. I. Bill of 1944, which provided veterans access to low-interest mortgages.34 Although homeownership rates had been climbing since the 1920s, the G. I. Bill fueled a housing construction boom of unprecedented proportions. Most of the new homes were single-family dwellings in recently built suburban developments.35 Residents filled them with the latest consumer technologies, such as electric vacuums, refrigerators and lawnmowers.36 To reach their new homes, which were typically far from public transit, they purchased automobiles. The auto-centricity of postwar life ensured that suburban growth continued apace after 1956, when the federal government financed the construction of more than 41,000 miles of road via the Interstate Highway Act. This legislation also spurred commercial development along the nation’s highways, where motorists sought out amenities such as restaurants and motels.37 In this same period, the federal government began laying the foundation for a mass market food economy by providing subsidies to agribusiness and implementing regulations to reduce the cost of transporting food products.38 The consumer abundance of the postwar years became a principal component of American national identity as the Cold War and an ideological battle against communism intensified. At home and abroad, political leaders and propagandists touted capitalism as a better provider of prosperity and comfort.39 Yet not all Americans shared in this consumer plenty. Early histories of consumer culture highlighted its potential to draw people together in “consumption communities.”40 Recent scholarship on the postwar era, by contrast, has underscored the many ways consumer culture reinforced social differences and inequalities. African American consumer activism in the form of boycotts and sit-ins helped to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations.41 But even after this landmark legislation was enacted, black consumers continued to grapple with problems of exclusion and inequality. As whites fled the perceived disorder of urban centers, commercial growth followed them to the suburbs. Those left behind, primarily racial minorities, could not easily access the manicured shopping malls, amusement parks and country clubs 318

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that proliferated in outlying suburbs. The new paradigm of race and space sustained postwar inequality and fortified a private, sanitized cultural order rooted in the “vanilla suburbs.”42 Women, too, experienced uneven gains in the postwar decades. Middle-class housewives enjoyed new purchasing power and authority in the marketplace, but were pressured by retailers and advertisers to adhere to a rigid model of femininity that prioritized consumption-driven domestic ideals.43 Working-class wives, by contrast, were joining the paid labor force at unprecedented rates. As retail clerks, waitresses, hotel maids and other pink-collar employees, they powered the booming service economy. Indeed, according to Bethany Moreton’s groundbreaking study of Walmart, women’s work enabled the rise of America’s largest retailer. By upholding an evangelical ethos of service, Moreton has revealed, Walmart’s leaders exploited the skills of married white mothers from small towns and rural areas, a previously “undervalued human resource.”44 In addition to extending chronological boundaries, scholars of consumer culture have also pressed beyond the boundaries of the nation. This transnational approach has proven especially productive in studying the role of consumer culture in American imperialism. The United States emerged as a global power at the dawn of the twentieth century. However, as historians have shown, its influence rested on economic strength, not statecraft or military might. By exporting branded products, advertisements, films and even retail business models, the United States established a global “Market Empire” that expanded over the course of the century.45 Within the nation’s boundaries, American consumers, notably wealthy white women, enacted imperial aspirations by consuming “exotic” imported fashions, art and household objects. Their consumption transformed private domestic spaces into “contact zones” with Asia and the Middle East and, ultimately, reinforced notions of American cultural superiority.46 Similarly, in the decades before Hawai’i statehood, white audiences eagerly attended the performances of hula dancers touring the mainland as a way “to possess their island colony physically and figuratively.”47 Attention to the transnational circulation of people and commodities has also generated important work on the relationship between tourism and American globalization. In the United States-Mexico borderlands, Mexican sightseers, shoppers and guest workers who journeyed across the border carried back with them, according to Geraldo Cadava and Alexis McCrossen, “new ideas about consumption, along with suitcases, sacks and boxes of consumer goods associated with the United States.” This type of border-crossing consumerism fueled commercial growth in border cities and made the region a staging ground for globalization.48 American travelers also played a crucial role in spreading the influence of the United States beyond its mainland boundaries. In Cuba and Hawai’i, for example, enclaves of wealthy white travelers served as “hill stations” for surveillance while also cementing a reliance on American capital.49 In the Cold War era, when international tensions were mounting, tourism took on new significance. Travelers to Europe were encouraged by politicians and social critics to act as ambassadors of American values abroad.50 Hawai’i, formerly sold as a colonial paradise, was now a state and marketed as a place where Americans could demonstrate their racial tolerance to the decolonizing world through the immersive multicultural experiences of the tourism industry.51 During the Vietnam War, a different sort of traveler, the American serviceman, also took on the role of consumer emissary, this time infusing consumer values into the theater of modern warfare.52 In contrast to transnational scholars who emphasized movement, urban historians of consumer culture have increasingly insisted on the importance of space and place. In her 2001 presidential address to the Urban History Association, Lizabeth Cohen called for attention to the impact of consumption on the physical landscape.53 Two years later, she issued her own response—A Consumers’ Republic (2003). In this groundbreaking text, Cohen argued that suburban housing and commercial development redefined the nature of public space in the postwar era. No longer did Americans rub shoulders in diverse downtown shopping districts but rather “were separated by class, race and less so gender in differentiated commercial subcenters.”54 Other historians have since heeded Cohen’s call to probe the interconnections of consumption and spatial change. This work has demonstrated 319

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that consumer practices profoundly influenced urban development long before the postwar era on which Cohen focused.55 In the 1920s, according to Alison Isenberg, the preferences of female shoppers influenced real estate prices and helped determine whether a downtown flourished or, in the case of many small communities, declined.56 Even earlier in the century, as my research has revealed, the flow of women consumers on Chicago streets framed civic leaders’ approach to traffic congestion and, ultimately, left an imprint on the city’s blueprint for development, Daniel Burnham’s famed Plan of Chicago (1909).57 Scholarly attention to space has illuminated the tendency for sites of consumption to become centers of conflict over access to the fruits of American abundance. In many instances, restaurants, hotels and stores reinforced entrenched hierarchies. But in some cases, consumer spaces offered possibilities to claim new rights and opportunities. For women, these spaces could supply independence and personal pleasure.58 So, too, they provided a foothold in the public sphere that could, as Jessica Sewell has argued, be parleyed into political action.59 For African Americans, black-owned consumer businesses, notably theaters, beauty parlors and barbershops, offered “safe spaces” for exchanging information and political organizing.60 Commercial sites were also essential to the social lives and political activity of gays and lesbians. Most obviously, gay and lesbian bars provided possibilities for expressing and exploring queer sexuality. Furthermore, the aggressive policing of these spaces spurred civil rights organizing and helped gay and lesbian activists gain public attention.61 While scholarship on commercial spaces has been firmly grounded in the material realm, another growth area has emphasized boundlessness and the ability of consumer culture to penetrate nearly every sphere of human existence. In particular, this literature has focused on a relentless drift toward “commodifying everything,” from memories and emotions to religious beliefs, relationships and experiences.62 Some of the earliest contributions brought to light the commercialization of Christmas, Mother’s Day and other holidays, as well as traditions, especially those associated with weddings.63 Scholars have also explored the commodification of historical memory. Studies in this area have shown, for example, that capitalists exploited popular longing for discarded racial and gender hierarchies by evoking romanticized visions of slavery to sell southern vacations, Hollywood films and Aunt Jemima pancake mix.64 Other research has highlighted the buying and selling of racial and ethnic identities through clothing, jewelry, food and various products.65 Interest in the commodification of childhood has also blossomed, and recent works have shown that Americans are being drawn into the market at ever younger ages by advertisers, toy manufactures and television programmers.66 Even life and death, according to Nancy Tomes’s study of health care, have been pulled into the web of consumption, as policymakers, drug companies and health care providers treat modern patients as consumers.67 Accounts of consumer culture, which have lately broadened in chronological, geographic and empirical scope and shed light on realms once considered removed from the marketplace, confirm Simon Patten’s vision that the growth of the consumer economy would have sweeping consequences, touching every aspect of American life. Still, research remains to be done, especially on the latter twentieth century. From the recession of the 1970s to the boom years of the 1990s, Americans faced new limits on their consumption, technological innovations that drew retail transactions into their homes via the internet, and an increasingly globalized economy. As new scholarship examines these areas, it will offer greater insight into a consumer order that, more than a century ago, Patten deemed “the new basis of civilization.”68

Notes   1 Simon Patten, The Theory of Social Forces (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1896), 75–80, 85, 92–95.   2 On advertising, see Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 1976); Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940

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Consumerism and Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). On commercial amusement, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On the development of the consumer economy, see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973).   3 Simon Patten, The Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1889), vi.   4 See James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 125–151.   5 For helpful overviews, see Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV (Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 2009).   6 T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1920, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 1–38.   7 Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization”; Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Neil Harris, “The Drama of Consumer Desire,” in Yankee Enterprise, ed. Robert Post and Otto Mayr (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1981); Jean-Christophe Agnew, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James,” in Fox and Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption.   8 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); William R. Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925,” Journal of American History 71 (September, 1984); Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage-Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).   9 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 6. 10 Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go a-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5; Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 11 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Robert Weems, Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, & Culture, 1830–1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 12 For classic studies of discrimination against black shoppers, see especially Hale, Making Whiteness; Weems, Desegregating the Dollar; Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi. Several essays from the recent collection Race and Retail also shed light on discriminatory retail practices. See especially Mia Bay, “Traveling Black/Buying Black: Retail and Roadside Accommodations during the Segregation Era,” in Race and Retail, ed. Mia Bay and Ann Fabian (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015). 13 Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114–139; Weems, Desegregating the Dollar, 57–58; Cohen, Making a New Deal, 153–154. 14 Weems, Desegregating the Dollar, 61–63. 15 Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Nan Enstad also stresses the personal politics of fashion and consumer culture in her important study of white working women’s labor activism. Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 16 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 116. 17 Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption,” 320. 18 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), xv, xiv. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore:

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Emily A. Remus Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Nancy Koehn, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust From Wedgwood to Dell (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 21 Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promise of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 22 Martha Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 23 Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Landon Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 24 Glickman, Buying Power, 3. 25 Ibid., 31–60; T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 26 Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 27 Glickman, Buying Power, 155–253; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 17–110; Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 28 Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997). 29 Traci Parker, “Southern Retail Campaigns and the Struggle for Black Economic Freedom,” in Bay and Fabian, eds., Race and Retail. 30 Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism; Glickman, Buying Power. 31 Barbara Young Welke, “The Cowboy Suit Tragedy: Spreading Risk, Owning Hazard in the Modern American Consumer Economy,” Journal of American History 101 (June 2014): 97–121. See also Sally Clarke, Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 32 Emily A. Remus, Consumers’ Metropolis: How Monied Women Purchased Pleasure and Power in the New Downtown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 33 Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 18–61. 34 Ibid., 118, 137–145; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 77, 85–86. 35 Richard Harris, Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 36 Shelley Nickles, “More Is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54 (December 2002): 581–622; May, Homeward Bound. 37 May, Homeward Bound, 161; Lawrence B. Glickman, “Consumer Activism, Consumer Regimes, and the Consumer Movement,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 410. 38 Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). On federal policy also influencing department and chain store growth in this period, see Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 39 May, Homeward Bound; McGovern, Sold American; Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 40 Boorstin, Americans, 89; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 41 Weems, Desegregating the Dollar, 69; Parker, “Southern Retail Campaigns,” 78. 42 Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1; Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; Victoria Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 43 Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise.

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Consumerism and Popular Culture 44 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 67. 45 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3. See also Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006); Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–122 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 46 Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8; Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 47 Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 11. 48 Alexis McCrossen, Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 51; Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Geraldo L. Cadava, “The Other Migrants: Mexican Shoppers in American Borderlands,” in Bay and Fabian, eds., Race and Retail. 49 Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 50 Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 51 Sarah Miller-Davenport, “A Montage of Minorities: Hawai’i Tourism and the Commodification of Racial Tolerance,” The Historical Journal 60 (September 2017): 817–842. 52 Meredith Lair, Armed With Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 53 Lizabeth Cohen, “Is There an Urban History of Consumption,” Journal of Urban History 29 (December 2003): 87–106. 54 Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 288. 55 For more on the postwar era, see especially Avila, Popular Culture; Ellen D. Wu, “Deghettoizing Chinatown: Race and Space in Postwar America,” in Bay and Ann Fabian, eds., Race and Retail; A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America,” Journal of American History 101 (December 2014): 804–831. 56 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 83. 57 Remus, Consumers’ Metropolis. 58 Emily A. Remus, “Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in Finde-Siècle Chicago,” Journal of American History 101 (December 2014): 751–777. 59 Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 60 Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Quincy Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Tiffany Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 61 Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Christopher Agree, “Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco’s Gay Bars, 1950–1968,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (September 2006): 462–489; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), 29–66. 62 Susan Strasser, Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. 63 See especially Karal Ann Marling, Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 64 Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Karen L. Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 65 See, for example, Erika Marie Bsumek, Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Kathy Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an

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Emily A. Remus Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Yong Chen, Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 66 Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Lisa Jacobsen, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Paul Ringel, Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). 67 Nancy Tomes, Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients Into Consumers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 68 Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1907).

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30 SCIENCE, MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Myrna Perez Sheldon

Figure 30.1 Explosion from the Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico, 1945. Berlyn Brixner/Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It is a truism bordering on cliché that science, medicine and technology had a profound effect on the American twentieth century. In our own century, science appears to touch every facet of American life—from the digital landscape of the public sphere, the advances of the health sciences, to the continued capacity for remote and deadly warfare. But a history of science in the American twentieth century must be more than a chronological observation of the scientific fields and technological innovations that have ushered in contemporary life in the United States. Rather, such a history must also consider how scientific practices, cultures and epistemologies have transformed American governance, articulations of its national character and the reaches of its imperial ambitions. During the 325

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twentieth century, science became indispensable to American democracy. By mid-century, technology fueled the nation’s military dominance in a new global order. Science became critical to narratives of America’s exceptionalism—its claims to modernity, prosperity and enlightenment. Where Protestantism had once proposed itself as a unifying foundation for American national culture, science was now the guarantor of America’s claim to a unique place in the postwar world order. Indeed, if there is a linchpin for American science in the twentieth century, it is unquestionably the Cold War. The federal funding of large-scale basic research, comprehensive and ambitious public science education and the social scientific influence on government policy are only a few of the now indelible features of contemporary American society that are the results of the Cold War. But America also revolutionized science. As the United States overtook Europe as the intellectual and financial center of the natural and social sciences, the national ambitions and anxieties of American society transformed twentiethcentury intuitions about the character and purpose of science. In the contemporary world, scientific research is performed on a large scale, largely through federal and corporate funding, and by professionals. In public life, science is perceived to be a value-neutral intellectual enterprise; the pronouncements of scientific experts are meant to be free from political and cultural bias. And modern governments manage, comprehend and visualize their citizenry through the collection and management of population data sets. Although the instrumentalization of society and the value-neutrality of science were at work before the Cold War, it was this period that saw an unprecedented alignment between state power, scientific endeavor and technological innovation. But in order to understand how remarkable this period was, it is necessary to examine the character of the natural and social sciences in the half century before this era. During the nineteenth century, American intellectuals were often conscious of the European dominance of the natural sciences. American naturalists and natural philosophers were particularly influenced by their counterparts in Great Britain, partly because of a shared language, but also because Britain outpaced France after the first half of the nineteenth century and took center stage in the natural sciences. Some of this was attributable to the luminosity of Britain’s most famous Victorian scientist, Charles Darwin, but was also due to the role that Darwin’s scientific circle played in the professionalization of the sciences in Great Britain. Historians interested in the rise of modern science often examine processes of professionalization in order to situate science in its various cultural contexts. Understanding how an intellectual field is professionalized—how its degrees are conferred and organized, how its practitioners are funded and trained—reveals an extraordinary amount about the contours of knowledge-making and its place in a given culture.1 Darwin himself held no formal degrees and no paid position in natural history, partly because he came from a family of means, but largely because these credentials were scarce for naturalists in his generation. However, by the 1870s, a younger generation of scientists, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley, campaigned vigorously for the place of professional science in Victorian England. Huxley envisioned a new world in which scientists, not the clergy, would serve as the moral leaders of society. His vision fueled the tensions between science and religion in the late Victorian world; but it also carved out the more practical elements of British professional science, including the founding of the journal Nature, and the rise of natural science degrees and university professorships.2 By the close of the century, both Darwinism and British professional science set a covetous example for American naturalists, natural philosophers and intellectuals across the sciences. Historians interested in the early years of American science have concentrated particularly on the attempts by American scientists to establish a unique national scientific culture while simultaneously emulating Europe. Pioneering scholarship in this area focused, for example, on the founding of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1847 as a hallmark moment in a new national identity for science.3 As historical interest in American science expanded, scholars worked to incorporate scientific endeavors into a more holistic account of the intellectual culture of the growing republic.4 For instance, they have studied the role that surveying expeditions and natural history collecting 326

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played in asserting American national character during this period of geographic expansion.5 Natural history museums were sites not only of public entertainment and education—they were spaces in which national ambitions, racial anxieties and cultural pride mingled with scientific research. But the coherency of antebellum intellectual culture, in which natural history and philosophy intermingled freely with other intellectual pursuits, was fractured by the Civil War and further dispersed by the rise of Darwinian thought and the massive industrialization of the Gilded Age.6 The meaning and practice of science transformed in the United States (as in Europe and its colonial endeavors in Central Asia, Latin America and the subcontinent) as industry commanded the resources and technical capacity of a new class of experts in a larger and more complex managerial state. The rise of massive industry and the accretion of enormous capital to a select group of American families facilitated the growth of novel patronage networks for science, particularly university-based science.7 With this foundation, a new generation of academic scientists sought more quantified, experimental and laboratory-based practices in a host of new fields, including psychology, physiology, genetics and modern physics. In this period, American universities were founded or remodeled on the principles of modern German research universities, in which scientific research, not sectarian religious education, became the primary goal of the academic community.8 Importantly, many of the religious arguments that were made for the ethical benevolence of Gilded Era capitalism were deployed for science, particularly that private funding was better than public money for producing disinterested science.9 Until World War II, most academic science was funded by the private foundations that bore the names of captains of industry—Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. The same wealth that funded charities and the arts also propelled American science forward with the energy and ambition of the country’s desire for technological progress and a place on the world’s political stage. But the turn of the twentieth century was a tumultuous period, in which population growth, increased immigration and rapid urbanization created a new and more diverse American demographic landscape. The reform movements of the era, whether the philanthropy of the Protestant Social Gospel or the social hygiene of eugenics, were means for social and intellectual elites to cope with a rapidly changing American society. Beginning in the 1880s, eugenics arose as a capacious term for the scientific and lay interest in bettering America’s population through the careful moderation of individual sexual health and attempts to encourage the sexual reproduction of desirable (i.e. Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) people. The popularity of eugenics in the early twentieth century was the result of confidence in the new hereditary science of Mendelian genetics, but it was also fueled by a longstanding vernacular interest in the relationship between sexual relationships and racial character. The extensive historical literature on American eugenic thought and practice demonstrates how fluidly ideas of race progress, the science of heredity and sexual morality intermingled in the professional world of genetic science as well as in the realms of public health policy, social reform and self-improvement literature.10 There is a similarly vast scholarship on the influence of the Protestant Social Gospel on everything in American culture from gender politics to race relations, temperance movements and urban planning.11 However, there has been less success in fashioning a comprehensive picture of this period that understands how these two forces—one religious, the other scientific— influenced or contradicted one another. Much of the work on religion and eugenics has focused on the response of specific religious groups to eugenic thought, and there is little scholarship that assesses the mutual exchange between American Protestantism and eugenic conceptions of race progress.12 There is historical work yet to do in order to have a full picture of science, religion and reform at the turn of the American twentieth century. By the opening of World War II, the natural sciences had evolved into professional disciplines with their own journals, training and credentialing procedures, professional societies and distinctive funding sources.13 And a diverse array of fields that investigated human society—referred to as the “social,” “behavioral” or “human” sciences—similarly gained in prominence and professionalism. Reformers in the Progressive Era had turned to such fields as economics and sociology in their quest for scientific 327

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answers to poverty and models for appropriate government interventions in a society dominated by capitalism.14 Along with psychology and anthropology, these fields developed and employed a series of quantitative, laboratory and experimental practices that flowed easily back and forth between the natural and social sciences. Indeed, the neat divisions between the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities that emerged at American universities by the end of the century were in part the result of Cold War funding decisions by institutions such as the National Science Foundation. How the federal government came to have such an outsized influence on the American academy is part of the story of science in World War II. The wartime effort to research, build and deploy the atomic bomb galvanized a new relationship between the federal government and American science.15 At the core of this was the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos—the largest scientific collaboration in history, requiring more than 150,000 researchers and two billion dollars—that built the weapons that were used in the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August of 1945. Los Alamos required an influx of funding and new models of cooperation between the academy, industry and the federal government. And the war catalyzed a flood of defense funding into research labs across the country.16 The scale of funding encouraged a new type of science, a “Big Science” in which research was performed not by individuals, but by industries. But Big Science did more than build weapons for the American war effort. It cemented science as the guarantor of American military superiority and its best defense against threats to American democracy. When World War II gave way to the Cold War, the threat of global communism solidified this new relationship between American science and American governance. The potential of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union convinced elites of the need for American scientific and technological superiority. Naturally, federal funding was concentrated in the sciences closest to defense interests, including nuclear physics, engineering and weapons development. Accordingly, early historical accounts of Cold War science focused on the physical sciences at the center of the militaryacademic-industrial complex. Scholars were especially concerned to examine how military interests influenced the research agendas—or even the conclusions—of the Cold War physical sciences.17 They also wanted to understand the distinctions between American and Soviet science, as a proxy for the relationship between science, democracy and communism.18 Subsequently, scholars expanded their gaze to the other fields affected by the new size of Cold War science. Chief among these disciplines was genetics. The twentieth-century was truly the “century of the gene.” A series of discoveries—of chromosomes, the structure of DNA and the relationship between protein and DNA that revealed genes as codes of information—exalted genetics as the science of human nature.19 Critically, the ongoing achievements of genetic science depended on new sources of federal funding, particularly from organizations such as the National Institute of Health. These histories, whether concentrated on biology or physics, advanced scholarship in the history of science on the complex interplay between science and society, culture and research practice and natural knowledge and politics. But the largely internal focus of these studies meant that history of Cold War science was largely sequestered from political histories of the same period. More recently, historians of science have broadened their accounts from the center of the militaryindustrial-academic complex to the pervasive transformation of American society by Cold War science. A critical aspect of this new scholarship is the recognition that the United States emerged in this period as a new center of gravity on the stage of international science. The upheavals of two World Wars and the subsequent economic depression in Europe meant that a generation of scientists and intellectuals fled to the United States. Across a variety of fields, from nuclear physics to evolutionary biology, medicine and economics, American science became less concerned with emulating Europe and more preoccupied with securing federal grant money. For scholars of each of these sciences, following the intellectual center of these disciplines often meant shifting from Europe to the United States. But just as nineteenth-century accounts of science are incomplete without a consistent interrogation of the role of science in Europe’s colonial endeavors, twentieth-century accounts of science 328

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must be considered lacking if they do not contend with the transnational ambition of America’s involvement in third-world development programs and its anxieties over global communism. To this end, recent scholarship on Cold War science has focused on the technologies and ideologies of modernization that shaped the United States’ domestic social policies and its engagement with countries in the so-called Third World—those areas in the Global South that did not align with the Soviet Union or the United States. During the Cold War, Americans viewed science as a bulwark against communism both at home and abroad. This manifested in two distinct ways. First, elites were concerned that poverty made domestic and foreign populations more susceptible to the influence of communism. This fear galvanized American efforts to track, manage and solve problems of poverty. Issues such as malnutrition, overcrowding, access to water, birth rates and education were now viewed as the properties of populations, and as emergent demographic features that extended beyond any single individual.20 This twentieth-century understanding of poverty differed from the nineteenthcentury approach to reform, which had viewed social problems as the summation of individual character. Nineteenth-century reformers had aimed their efforts at personal “vices” and focused on diet, temperance and sanitation in their quest to cleanse American society.21 The rise of population and hereditary sciences transformed the American approach to social engineering. Although mingled with neo-Lamarckian evolution, eugenic ideologies of the turn-of-the-century downplayed the importance of the social and physical environment, and instead viewed poverty as a reproductive feature of populations to be managed through the collection and deployment of demographic data.22 During the Progressive Era reformers had “scrutinized poor people in the hopes of creating a knowledge base for informed social action.”23 The confidence in social scientific data carried through the liberalism of the New Deal and continued to shape social welfare programs through the end of the Cold War. This mode of conceptualizing poverty also guided American foreign policy during the Cold War. Particularly during the Kennedy administration, “modernization theory” shaped the creation of programs such as the Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the Peace Corps and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam.24 Heavily influenced by evolutionary models of social and biological progress, these programs framed Third World countries as “behind” in their social development. Certainly, developmental models of civilization had been influential both in the United States and in Europe since the late eighteenth century. But Cold War programs applied these notions in novel ways, through extensive consultation with social scientists, the creation of bureaucratic infrastructures and the collection of social scientific data at an unprecedented scale. New scholarship on Cold War science, thus, has placed an emphasis on the rise of the social sciences in this period, especially in demography, economics and sociology. These scholars seek to understand both the conceptual and pragmatic uses of “development” and how the ever-present specter of communism shaped social scientific models and their deployment at home and abroad.25 The second battleground on which American science was to meet the forces of communism was much smaller—in the mind of the average American citizen. Elites looked to science to cultivate the intellectual habits and personal virtues that were necessary to sustain American democracy. It was a stunning transformation for a country that had a long-held confidence in religious belief as the moral foundation for democracy. Since the founding period, American intellectuals had argued that a Protestant society was uniquely suited for democracy; Cold Warriors now contended that science was the surest way to cultivate a democratic citizenry. One such argument rested on the conviction that science engendered liberalism—that scientific practices helped instill an openness and flexibility of mind, rather than the dogmatism and adherence to authority that American science advocates believed were the key features of communism.26 The intertwined concerns about American democratic character and the nation’s supremacy in the nuclear standoff with the USSR undergirded many iconic moments during the Cold War. For instance, the launch of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik famously galvanized funding for the American space program.27 The space race was widely viewed as 329

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a direct analog to competition with the Soviet Union over nuclear weapon technologies. But Sputnik also engendered concerns over the state of the nation’s public science education programs. Starting in 1958, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Biology Studies Curriculum Studies Council brought together academic scientists with educators to augment the science curriculum in American classrooms.28 But these programs did not merely hope to put more scientific information into the hands of America’s youth. The curricula these councils developed for math, physics and biology were intended to cultivate the critical open-mindedness Cold War reformers believed were the hallmark of democracy. Programs such as the “New Math” curriculum developed textbooks and pedagogical methods for public school classrooms. In the case of the “New Math,” the developers believed that a more open-ended (and often unintuitive) approach to math instruction would encourage the mental flexibility necessary for democracy.29 The pervasiveness of American confidence in science during this period was remarkable. Even conservative Protestant communities, which were notably antagonistic to evolutionary science during the Progressive Era and during the rise of the modern creation-science movement in the 1970s and 1980s, were enthusiastic participants in Cold War science.30 Convictions that science was a unified and objective epistemology allowed it to mirror the stability of the postwar liberal consensus.31 The universalizing arguments of liberalism—that American values were human values, and American rights were human rights—gave American elites a confidence to expand America’s reach on the global stage. Science served as an epistemological ground for that expansive confidence. Further, America’s claims to technological supremacy were not solely expressions of military dominance; they were also a framing device for a particular domestic social order. This was clear, for instance, during the famous “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. During the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, the two leaders had a series of exchanges while viewing a recreation of a suburban American home, which proudly displayed a set of kitchen and other domestic appliances. Nixon argued that U.S. domestic technology was a sign not only of the nation’s technical prowess (a capacity that was a clear metaphor for American nuclear capacity), but also of the prosperity of American capitalism that allowed American housewives to remain at home. Conversely, Khrushchev asserted that the Soviet Union’s superiority was demonstrated by its communist commitment to full gender participation in the labor force. During the exchange, Nixon intermingled arguments for U.S. military dominance and the gendered arrangements of suburban domesticity.32 Indeed, one of the most enduring cultural touchstones for the latter half of the twentieth century was the image of suburban life that raised the “baby boomer” generation. This generation grew up in a world fashioned by postwar prosperity and technology and laced with the uncertainties of nuclear warfare. They built the infrastructure of suburbia, reinforcing racial divisions and instilling a gendered vision of family life that would idealized for the rest of the century. Science was at the heart of this vision, providing both epistemological grounding and the promise of technological security in the face of the ongoing threat from the Soviet Union. Science during the Cold War sought unity against communism. This belief was expressed both in the philosophical assertions of the period and the aims of professional scientific societies.33 However, historians of Cold War science have become increasingly interested in tracking the variations and contradictions of the Cold War period. This is particularly true for histories that examine science during the social tumult brought on by the Vietnam War. Scholars have studied, for instance, the influence of the 1970s counterculture on new philosophical directions in physics, and the negotiations of community boundaries on the fringes of the scientific world.34 And more attention has been paid to the emergence of the radical science movement—a set of activist organizations within the professional scientific community that channeled a generational disillusionment with the military-industrial complex. The radical science movement was just one sign that this generation of America’s scientists were deeply affected by the social protest movements of the Vietnam era. Many of them came of age 330

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during the student protest movements of the era and therefore sought either to incorporate or limit these new leftist politics into their scientific practices. In fact, the emergence of New Left and Christian Right movements in the 1970s and 1980s brought about politically opposing but epistemically parallel criticisms of the American scientific establishment. The New Left manifested in a series of social movements that motivated leftist politics not through class solidarity but through a belief in the transformational power of knowledge. These disparate social causes—the civil rights, anti-Vietnam, second wave feminist, anti-nuclear, gay liberation and environmental movements—shared a conviction that established modes of power and authority were oppressive. The Christian Right emerged as an alliance between the Cold War political worldview of the Republican party and the social aims of evangelical Protestants. Its rapid ascent to power after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan infused conservative politics with the aims of biblical Christianity, in a manner that continues into the twenty-first century. These two cultural movements had contradictory political aims. The Christian Right wanted to reassert the Christian foundations of Western civilization and its seminal role in American democracy. The New Left attempted to reimagine democracy through the voices of a set of previously silent political actors. However, both laid siege to the assumptions of the American liberal consensus that science was a precursor to democracy and justice. In their own way, each questioned the exclusive epistemic authority of the scientific community over the natural world, human nature and the direction of social reform. On the right, this arose most prominently in the modern American creationist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and the criticisms of climate-change science in the early twenty-first century.35 Creationists were particularly vocal in their challenges to the epistemic authority of modern science—arguing that Darwinian science had influenced the West to turn away from Christianity, thereby leading Western society away from its deeply held values of life and human dignity. This narrative was promoted by evangelical theologians, for instance Francis Schaeffer, who argued in a series of films and books that Darwinian evolution was responsible for undermining the authority of Biblical values in Western culture.36 Schaeffer also contended that the erosion of the Christian worldview was most clearly demonstrated in the legalization of euthanasia and abortion. Schaeffer’s arguments helped solidify anti-abortion activism as a key signatory of public religious identity for a generation of evangelicals.37 The broader Christian Right united these criticisms of secular humanism with conservative gender politics and an allegiance to the Republican party. Cultural historians have carefully studied the rise of the Christian Right and the role of evangelical theology and religious experience in the shaping of twentieth-century American politics. However, there has been less effort to contextualize creationism within this broader political movement. Recognizing the institutional and intellectual role of creationism within the Christian Right allows us to locate the criticism of professional scientific expertise within this influential political realignment. Notably, creation-science was distinct from the anti-evolution movements of the early part of the century, in that it viewed itself as a science.38 Creation-science advocates adopted the practices and organizational structures of establishment science, founding their own peer-reviewed journals, natural history museums and expertise credentials. By the end of the century and into the next, the Intelligent Design movement and rightwing criticisms of climate-change science would echo creation-science’s distrust of the professional scientific establishment. Although the aims of the New Left and the Christian Right were politically distinctive, they had a common foe in the universalism of the postwar liberal consensus. The tension between a Christian identity and religious diversity had existed since America’s founding; evangelicals now claimed Christian virtue was a necessary and non-negotiable precursor to American democracy. They largely rejected the calls of mid-century religious liberals to expand the vision of American national identity to include a diversity of religious traditions, including secular humanism. In view of the threat of new religious and ethnic diversity brought on by new waves of immigration in the 1970s, as well as secular humanism, evangelicals advocated for traditional family values and Christian principles in education 331

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policy and social morality legislation. Creationism was only one component of this movement, but a critical one in that it specifically targeted the scientific community as an enemy of a Christian America. The New Left also leveled a critique against the American science community, but it was one that sought social progress and identity politics, not evangelical morality. Many New Left activists believed that science was complicit with the oppressions enacted by establishment power structures. Environmentalists protested science for its technological destruction of the natural world. Feminists accused the biological sciences of promoting the historical oppression of women and racial minorities. And radical scientists criticized nuclear technology for its role in global warfare. The democratizing sentiment of the New Left engagement with science is perhaps best captured in the name of one of the leading radical science organizations: “Science for the People.”39 One of the most prominent radical science protests of the 1970s erupted at Harvard University over the publication of biology text titled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.40 Edward O. Wilson’s book argued that new evolutionary models for sociality could and should be applied to humans to explain the arrangements of gender relations and the capacity for human warfare. Sociobiology was protested by a set of Boston-based academics, who believed that Wilson’s book promoted scientific racism and sexism. This group, an offshoot of Science for the People called the Sociobiology Study Group, articulated a common radical science concern—that the cultural authority of Wilson’s science would allow him to promote sexist ideas with a veneer of scientific respectability.41 Wilson responded to his critics with the confidence of postwar liberalism in the universality of science and the foundational role of science in American democracy.42 Although the public debates over sociobiology largely subsided after the 1970s, the terms of the controversy were reflected in ongoing divides over science in the American academy during the 1980s and 1990s. Within American intellectual life, academic debates over scientific expertise were one means by which the tension between two major perspectives on American democracy and social justice were articulated. On the one hand were public scientific intellectuals, who believed that American rights were based in Enlightenment thinking and that this universal human rights framework undergirded the “inexorable logic of the expanding moral circle.”43 Although at the nation’s founding, civic rights were only accorded to white men, liberal intellectuals believed that the logic of these rights was such that it was inevitable that they would expand to include women and racial minorities. From this perspective, the moral task of American social progress was to extend these rights to previously disenfranchised groups, while maintaining the basic system that had framed those rights in the first place. On the other hand, many scholars in the critical humanities (i.e. postcolonial, feminist, queer and critical-race studies) contended that the Enlightenment framework of the founding was not simply an imperfect beginning to American democracy, but rather, a worldview that had created a systemic set of oppressive categorizations and violences. These scholars highlighted, for instance, the ability of the founders to argue for natural rights while denying suffrage to women and enslaving persons of African descent. And they contended that these white male elites had organized modern science precisely to argue that these bodies were not fully human and were therefore incapable of possessing the rights of American citizenship. From this perspective, a more just and peaceful world would come not by correcting the existing American system, but through a more radical disruption. So-called postmodern critiques of science from this period had this ethic at their base. Not only did the fields of feminist and postcolonial science studies wish to highlight the historic role of science and technology in the oppression of marginalized communities; they also wished to give voice and dignity to alternative forms of knowledge.44 If the claim of modern science was also an a claim of authoritative knowledge by white male elites over the bodies and minds of others, then the critiques of science in the critical humanities were a kind of identity politics that responded to this oppression. Here it was possible for a trans person to declare that they know their body more than science did, or a queer black woman to claim exclusive knowledge over her body and self. Ultimately, these were 332

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attempts to assert the full humanity and civic importance of lives and bodies that historically had little dignity in the American context. After all, twentieth-century American histories have not only been concerned with the broad outlines of democracy’s possibilities, but have also sought to describe the contours of the social movements that brought new voices and identities to the forefront of American politics. How did science figure in these ongoing culture debates over the divisions and boundaries of the United States, whether racial, physical or national, during the twentieth century? One arena of scholarship that has taken up this question in recent years is the cultural history of American eugenics. American studies scholars have looked beyond the official reaches of organizations such as the Eugenics Records Office and the American Eugenic Society in order to track the influence of eugenic thinking and culture in a multiplicity of spaces, from the conservation ambitions of Theodore Roosevelt, the calls for “Negro uplift” in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois or the white nationalism in the economic writings of feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.45 In each of these cases, the imperative of population improvement and progressive social evolution was directed at different goals—whether it was the preservation of America’s white racial stock, the improvement of African American social standing or the advocacy of white women’s rights on the basis of their importance to racial improvement. Eugenic thinking demonstrated a similar variability in its scientific foundations, vacillating between models based on Mendelian genetics, neo-Lamarckian environmentalism and Darwinian selection.46 However, although the aims and scientific bases of eugenics differed, eugenic social movements were united in a common belief in the promise of scientific progress and a desire for government intervention in social problems. At the heart of these movements was a cultural imaginary of an improving modernism that conceived of American society not as a group of citizens with rights, but a body politic that needed to be measured, assessed and regulated. This, of course, is the central contention of Michel Foucault’s thesis on the rise of biopower and the formulation of biopolitics in the modern world. Foucault locates the transition to modern biopolitics in the eighteenth century, when the realization that humans are a species—that is a genealogically connected and historically bound entity—changed the relationship between the ruler and the governed.47 In Foucault’s reckoning, the rise of population thinking meant that individuals no longer had contractual relationships with the state, but were rather part of a body politic to be medicalized and quantified. The challenge for historians of American politics or public policy and for political theorists specializing in the American context is to understand how the formulations of Enlightenment contractual governance that make up the architecture of the U.S. constitutional and legal system were transformed by this new relationship between the state and its citizens. In other words, during the twentieth century scientific imaginaries were a lens by which the nation filtered debates over diversity and unity and between exclusion and inclusion. This was particularly true in the demographic transitions brought on by the influx of immigration, beginning in the 1970s, from Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, which outpaced European immigration for the first time in the nation’s history.48 The pressure put on the nation’s historically Protestant identity, already challenged by waves of Catholic and Jewish immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was now stretched to a breaking point. In this multiethnic and multi-religious democracy, science seemingly offered a stable and universal ground on which to build social policy and negotiate civil rights. Eugenics was merely one expression of this modern confidence in the authority and capacities of scientific knowledge. As an epistemology, a practice and a profession, science has been integral to twentieth-century contests over what America was to be, and for whom. Historians of American history cannot afford to sequester the history of American science into a subfield of special interest. Rather, when science is placed at the center of historical analyses of American culture and politics, many disparate cultural movements and debates—whether evangelical right-wing politics, American colonial modernism or Cold War gender politics—are brought into clear focus. Whether we seek to understand 333

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the transformation brought to American public life by new scientific practices and technologies or to understand new imaginaries of democracy and civil rights, science must be at the center of our histories.

Notes 1 Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis (1988): 373–404; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Alex Csiszar, “Seriality and the Search for Order: Scientific Print and Its Problems during the Late Nineteenth Century,” History of Science 48 (2010); Frank M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” Isis 69, no. 3 (1978): 356–376. 2 Ruth Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s,” Annals of Science: A Quarterly Review of the History of Science Since the Renaissance 55, no. 1 (1998): 1–33; Melinda Clare Baldwin, Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 3 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael Mark Sokal, Bruce V. Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 4 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, Historical Writing on American Science: Perspectives and Prospects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 5 Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 7 Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 8 Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 9 Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University, 302–334. 10 Diane B. Paul, “Reflections on the Historiography of American Eugenics: Trends, Fractures, Tensions,” Journal of the History of Biology, April 6, 2016. 11 Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, eds., Gender and the Social Gospel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 12 Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); Sharon Mara Leon, An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle With Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 13 Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, “Disciplining and Popularizing: Evolution and Its Publics from the Modern Synthesis to the Present,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (2014): 111–113. 14 John Louis Recchiuti, Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1–4. 15 Audra J. Wolfe, Competing With the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 10. 16 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 17 Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18, no. 1 (1987): 149–229; Dan Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–56,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20, no. 2 (1990): 239–264. 18 Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 19 Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Dorothy Nelkin and Mary Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique the Gene as a Cultural Icon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 20 Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics From the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 2–3.

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Science, Medicine and Technology 21 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 53–55; Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2–3. 22 Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 99–100. 23 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. 24 Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Wolfe, Competing With the Soviets, 55–73. 25 Wolfe, Competing With the Soviets, 55. 26 Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 27 Roger D. Launius, John M. Logsdon and Robert William Smith, Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years Since the Soviet Satellite (London: Routledge, 2014). 28 Laura Engleman and Rodger W. Bybee, The BSCS Story: A History of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (Colorado Springs, CO: BSCS, 2001); Edward J. Larson, Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133, 148, 165. 29 Christopher J. Phillips, The New Math: A Political History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 30 James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–3. 31 Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus From the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 32 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 19–23. 33 Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 34 David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012); Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 35 Myrna Perez Sheldon, “Claiming Darwin: Stephen Jay Gould in Contests over Evolutionary Orthodoxy and Public Perception, 1977–2002,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (March 2014): 139–147; Myrna Perez Sheldon and Naomi Oreskes, “The Religious Politics of Scientific Doubt: Evangelical Christians and Environmentalism in the United States,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology, ed. John Hart (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2017), 348–365. 36 C. Everett Koop and Francis A. Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Westchester: Crossway Books, 1984). 37 Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 237. 38 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 39 Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 40 Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975). 41 Neil Jumonville, “The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate,” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 3 (2002): 569–593; Myrna Perez, “Evolutionary Activism: Stephen Jay Gould, the New Left and Sociobiology,” Endeavour 37, no. 2 (2013): 104–111. 42 Perez, “Evolutionary Activism,” 105–107; Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). 43 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 337. 44 Sandra Harding, “Postcolonial and Feminist Philosophies of Science and Technology: Convergences and Dissonances,” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (December 2009): 401–421; Sarah S. Richardson, “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges,” Synthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 177, no. 3 (2010): 337–362. 45 On Theodore Roosevelt and eugenics, see Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170–216; Lovett, Conceiving the Future, 109–130. On W.E.B. Du Bois and eugenics see Daylanne K. English, Unnatural

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Myrna Perez Sheldon Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 35–64. On Charlotte Perkins Gilman and eugenics see Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 121–169; Jane Carey, “The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years,” Women’s History Review 21, no. 5 (2012): 733-752. 46 Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity, 99–100. 47 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 16. 48 Bill Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 100–101; Darren E. Sherkat, Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identities (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

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31 SPORT AND LEISURE—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Travis Vogan

Figure 31.1 Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, ppmsc.00048.

The twentieth century saw sport and leisure calcify their already prominent roles as sites of cultural production in the United States. Indeed, sport and leisure are far more than diversions. Sport creates social bonds that unite otherwise disparate groups. Sports figures compose some of the most iconic representatives of twentieth century U.S. culture. Sport vernacular has been appropriated by a variety 337

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of discourses to describe effort, collaboration, triumph and failure. More people watch television coverage of the National Football League (NFL) Super Bowl than vote in the general presidential election.1 While Americans might prefer sport consumption to voting, sport is not apolitical. It composes a common mechanism through which dominant attitudes and social relations are formed, reinforced and challenged. Moreover, sport—because of its intimate connection to deeply held values—has become a big business and driving force in the rise and proliferation of mass media.

Early Twentieth Century The turn of the twentieth century’s industrialization and urbanization marked an increase in leisure time and disposable income that many Americans happily devoted to sport—from participating to attending games to gambling. While football, cycling, horse racing and prize fighting all enjoyed popularity, baseball, as Warren Goldstein showed in his exploration of the sport’s early history, had firmly established itself as the nation’s preferred sporting spectacle and the “national pastime” by 1900.2 The sport was both popular and carried mythic significance as an expression of the United States’ identity, a quality on which Major League Baseball (MLB) has traded ever since. In A Brief History of American Sports, Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein noted that baseball and other sports’ meanings and renown were aided by a swell of newspaper coverage that identified sport as a handy way to increase circulation.3 Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World established the first newspaper sports department in 1883. Though widespread and lucrative, sport and sports journalism lacked the respectability other sites of culture enjoyed. In fact, many sportswriters for the illustrated and tabloidesque National Police Gazette used pen names to protect their reputations. The muscular Christianity movement, which linked physical fitness to moral virtue, also propelled sport’s pervasiveness. Proponents of muscular Christianity, according to Clifford Putney’s history of the movement, assumed that participation in sport could counteract the softening of (male) bodies that urbanization produced through the increase in relatively sedentary office labor.4 President Theodore Roosevelt, who overcame health problems as a child by adopting a rigorous exercise regimen, embraced these attitudes and advocated “the strenuous life” that sport fostered. “We admire,” said Roosevelt in an 1899 speech, “the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.”5 One year later, Roosevelt used football to explain his values: “In life, as in a foot-ball game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard.”6 Muscular Christianity precipitated the adoption of athletic programs in schools and the development of organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and eventually the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). In fact, James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 while working at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.7 Beyond the relationship between football and muscular Christianity that Roosevelt described, Yale University’s Walter Camp—the so-called father of modern football—developed the sport into its American form by taking inspiration from the scientific management techniques Frederick Winslow Taylor used to organize industrial labor. “The object,” Camp wrote in his 1910 Book of FootBall, “must be to use each man to the full extent of his capacity without exhausting any. To do this scientifically involves placing men in such position in the field that each may perform the work for which he is best fitted, and yet not be forced to do any of the work toward which his qualifications and training do not point.”8 “Taylor and Camp shared a common vision for the American future,” observed football historian Michael Oriard in Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle.9 Football, as Camp developed it, at once reflected industrialized society and protected against the corporeal and moral softening that proponents of muscular Christianity fretted it would create amongst the nation’s men. 338

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Contradicting common narratives of social progress, sport actually became less racially integrated as the twentieth century commenced. Major League Baseball unofficially began prohibiting black players in the 1880s. Heavyweight champion prizefighter John L. Sullivan, as Michael T. Isenberg outlined in his biography of the famed boxer, refused to compete against black challengers. “I will not fight a Negro,” Sullivan staunchly declared in 1892. “I never have and I never shall.”10 While black boxers often fought against whites in lower weight classes, they were barred from competing for the heavyweight title because of the heavyweight champion’s position as a symbol of masculinity’s peak—a role that, as boxing historian Jeffrey T. Sammons observes, needed to be occupied by a white man for white supremacist racial hierarchies to persist.11 Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, only received a long overdue title opportunity in 1908 after repeatedly taunting champion Tommy Burns. Biographers including Randy Roberts, Theresa Runstedtler and Geoffrey Ward outlined how Johnson blatantly defied racial norms by flaunting his wealth and affection for white women.12 He goaded and punished Burns throughout their December 26, 1908 title bout in Sydney, Australia until police stopped the fight in the fourteenth round. “No event in forty years has given more genuine satisfaction to the colored people of this country than the signal victory of Johnson,” reported the Richmond Planet after the match.13 While a moment of pride for many African Americans, Johnson’s title-winning victory provoked a rush to reinstate the racial order it disrupted. Journalists and fight fans called for retired former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries to return to the ring and put the unruly Johnson in his place. “Jeff, it’s up to you,” wrote Jack London. “The white race must be rescued.”14 Jeffries consented and even remarked that he was “going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”15 Billed by savvy promoter Tex Rickard as “The Fight of the Century”—the first of many fights that would carry the grandiose moniker—Johnson and Jeffries’s July 4, 1910 match in Reno, Nevada attracted 20,000 spectators. As with Burns, Johnson easily beat Jeffries. The result triggered racial violence throughout the country. In Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, media historian Dan Streible explained that even films of the fight were banned from interstate transit because of fears regarding how audiences might react to moving images of a black man pummeling a symbol of white masculinity.16 Early twentieth-century sport also secured Victorian gender norms that equated femininity with fragility. In 1912, Ladies Home Journal published Harvard physical educator Dudley Allen Sargent’s article “Are Athletics Making Women Masculine?” The study questioned whether sports participation would erode the boundaries separating men and women—differences future researchers, as Susan Cahn explained in Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport, exposed as mutable social constructions.17 Other commentators speculated that participation in sport would harm women’s bodies and ability to procreate—another pseudoscientific myth that was debunked.

1920s: “The Golden Age of Sports” As the 1920s emerged, Richard O. Davies explained that sport “became, seemingly overnight, very big business.”18 Known as the “Golden Age of Sports,” the 1920s welcomed a rise of sport celebrities— all of whom were white men—including golfer Bobby Jones, tennis player Bill Tilden, boxer Jack Dempsey, football player Harold “Red” Grange, football coach Knute Rockne and, perhaps most notably, baseball player George Herman “Babe” Ruth. These figures became household names not just on account of their prodigious sporting skills, but because their images were crafted and used to sell a broad range of products during a prosperous time. In Pastime: Baseball as History, Jules Tygiel claimed Ruth symbolized not only the exuberance and excesses of the 1920s, but the emergent triumph of personality and image in a modern America suddenly positioned to glorify these attributes. 339

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Lavishly chronicled on radio and in print, memorialized in photos and film, elevated to a new form of adoration in testimonial advertising and molded by shrewd public relations, Ruth fulfilled people’s fantasies and embodied their new reality.19 Ruth, in fact, was the first athlete to be represented by a press agent. The Golden Age of Sport, as Gorn and Goldstein averred in their Brief History of American Sports, “could be known equally as the Golden Age of American Sport Promoters, since it was in that decade that the boosting and selling of sports became a powerful force.”20 Increases in media coverage augmented this influx of promotion. Complementing Gorn and Goldstein’s assertion, journalist and cultural critic Robert Lipsyte claimed the 1920s could very well be known as “the Golden Age of Sportswriting” because of the important role journalists played in constructing the decade’s many iconic athletes.21 By 1920, one in every four readers purchased a newspaper for the sports page. These lucrative sports departments were often allowed to edit their own copy, which permitted embellishment “that would not be tolerated on any other page.”22 The era’s most prominent sportswriters, a group called the “Gee Whiz” school, actively fashioned athletes into idealized heroes and avoided reporting on their faults. As Grantland Rice, the group’s most prominent scribe, once famously said, “when a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business.”23 Bordering on promotion, Rice’s nationally syndicated journalism, according to biographers Charles Fountain and Mark Inabinett, helped to create the pantheon of romanticized sporting idols that made the 1920s so “golden.”24 This media coverage’s overwhelming focus on white male athletes also reinforced longstanding assumptions regarding the types of bodies that warranted celebration. Though the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) did not even begin offering women’s track and field championships until 1924, a group of talented women athletes gained national fame for their abilities during the 1920s. In 1926, 19-year-old Gertrude Ederle became the sixth person and the first woman to swim across the English Channel. She finished with a time ninety minutes faster than her speediest male predecessor. More prominently, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias—who was nicknamed after Babe Ruth because of her tendency to hit home runs—excelled in baseball, track and field, basketball and golf. Didrikson Zaharias was arguably America’s greatest all-around athlete since Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Native American tribe who played professional football, baseball and basketball and won two gold medals at the 1912 Summer Olympics that were eventually stripped because of his involvement in professional sports. Much like Jack Johnson, Didrikson Zaharias openly defied dominant expectations. When one journalist asked the phenomenal athlete if there was anything she did not play, she flippantly replied: “Yeah, dolls.” Also like Johnson, Didrikson Zaharias’s rebelliousness provoked criticism. Much of the media coverage she received mocked her “mannish” appearance and questioned her femininity. These critiques, Susan Cayleff explained in her study of the multi-sport star, eventually pressured Didrikson Zaharias to soften her image by wearing makeup and dresses and by publicizing her marriage to the professional wrestler George Zaharias.25 Despite the monumental athletic successes women like Ederle and Didrikson Zaharias enjoyed during the 1920s, they received less media coverage and promotion than their male counterparts and, as a result, had fewer opportunities to capitalize on their talents—which were all the more impressive given the dearth of athletic opportunities available to women at the time. The decade’s biggest sporting event was Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney’s September 25, 1927 heavyweight title fight in Chicago’s Soldier Field—a rematch of their bout one year earlier, which Tunney had won. Behind Rickard’s promotional prowess, the fight attracted 104,943 attendees and drew a gate of $2,858,660, by far the largest of any prizefight up to that point. The match, which Tunney won by unanimous decision, was controversial because many observers claimed that Dempsey’s seventh round knockdown of Tunney had the defending champion down for longer than the ten seconds required for a knockout. But beyond this infamous dispute—known throughout sports lore 340

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as the “long count”—the nascent medium of radio made the fight a collectively experienced national media spectacle that, according to Bruce J. Evensen’s history of the bout and its cultural impact, drew “more people than any other civic spectacle in the history of the Americas.”26 The National Broadcasting Company’s broadcast of the fight was listened to by 50,000,000 people. The rematch thus marked a confluence of the promotion, media and celebrity that characterized 1920s U.S. sport culture.

Sport and Global Politics in the 1930s In 1894, French educator and historian Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and revitalized the ancient Olympic Games, which started in Athens two years later. The revived Olympics, Allen Guttmann and David Goldblatt note in their respective histories of the event, were designed to be a global and apolitical competition among amateurs that would use sport to foster peace.27 However, they quickly became a politicized instrument of nationalism. This was most pointedly displayed at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, which Adolf Hitler used to promote his Nazi party and attendant philosophy of Aryan racial superiority. But African American sprinter Jesse Owens registered the Games’ most dominant performance by winning four gold medals. “No European crowd has ever seen such a combination of blazing speed and effortless smoothness, like something blown in a gale,” wrote Grantland Rice of Owens’s triumphant runs.28 Hitler refused to congratulate the athlete who so powerfully disproved his racial bigotry. Two years later, African American heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, the first black heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson, reinforced the point Owens’s performance made on the international stage by knocking out the German Max Schmeling. Schmeling won their first bout just before the 1936 Olympics, a victory that emboldened Hitler’s racist efforts. The boxer, observed sportswriter Heywood Broun, “was expected to dramatize the new German anthropological theories and demonstrate Nordic superiority.”29 Sixty-four percent of the United States’ radios tuned in to hear Louis knock Schmeling out in the first round from New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Given heavyweight boxing’s prominence, Louis’s achievement made him one of the first African Americans to garner praise across racial divisions. It “opened the door to a wider, more cosmopolitan sense of American national identity,” observed Lewis Erenberg in his cultural history of the fight.30 But like Owens, Louis was particularly inspiring to disenfranchised African Americans. Author and critic Richard Wright viewed Louis as a “symbol of freedom” for African Americans who were “forced to live a separate and impoverished life.” His victory over Schmeling, Wright continued, marked “a meager acceptance of their humanity” within otherwise dehumanizing sociopolitical circumstances.31 African American athletes like Owens and Louis were accepted in part because they behaved deferentially and did not disrupt the status quo. Louis, as Randy Roberts’s biography of the boxer detailed, took careful measures to serve as a non-controversial contrast to Jack Johnson.32 He was humble in victory, did not publicly cavort with white women and served in the military during World War II. Regardless, these African American heroes still faced discrimination within the nation they represented so well. Owens was forced to work on the vaudeville circuit after returning from the Olympics and even raced against automobiles and horses to make ends meet.

World War II and Integration The military’s conscription of so many American men to serve in World War II created new sporting opportunities for historically marginalized groups. For instance, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, which lasted from 1943–1954 and was commemorated in the 1992 Hollywood film A League of Their Own, emerged to sate the United States’ hunger for its depleted national pastime. The war effort also spurred racial integration. “All but the morally blind,” noted Guttmann in A Whole 341

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New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports, “saw that Afro-Americans who had served the country in combat deserved the opportunity to participate freely in American sports.”33 MLB Commissioner Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler concurred. “If they [African Americans] can fight and die on Okinawa, Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific, they can play ball in America,” he said.34 African American and white sportswriters were also calling for baseball’s integration, for both moral reasons and on the grounds that it would improve Major League Baseball’s quality of play. Professional baseball’s traditionalist owners, however, were reluctant to integrate. In 1946 they struck down the prospect of integration by a vote of 15–1. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey was the lone dissenter. Motivated by a combination of social consciousness and economic opportunism, Rickey sought to begin integrating with a player who he believed could handle the pressure and scrutiny that would come along with breaking baseball’s color line. He settled on Jackie Robinson, a second baseman for the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs, even though African American players like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige were more accomplished. But Robinson was younger, had excelled in several sports while attending UCLA and served in the Army during World War II. Rickey wagered that Robinson would draw less criticism than most, and, more important, could gracefully absorb the abuse he would undoubtedly receive. Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy explained how Robinson’s 1947 Dodgers debut was met with a rash of death threats and hate mail that he weathered en route to winning the National League Rookie of the Year award and leading the league in stolen bases.35 According to Richard O. Davies’s Sports in American Life, even President Truman’s creation of a Commission on Equal Rights, his bold step in ordering the desegregation of the military, and the strong civil rights plank in the platform on which he campaigned for re-election in 1948 did not affect the public consciousness as did Jackie Robinson.36 While a significant advance in racial equality, the integration in baseball that Robinson and Rickey sparked decimated the Negro Leagues—which featured a distinctive style of play rooted in African American culture—as Major League Baseball signed away the best black players. Other sports integrated around the same time as baseball. The NFL, which segregated in 1933, began integration in 1946 when the Los Angeles Rams signed Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, both of whom played football with Robinson at UCLA. The National Basketball Association followed suit in 1950. Certain franchises within these organizations, however, were slow to conform. Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox did not field a black player until 1959. The NFL’s unfortunately named Washington Redskins, which owner George Preston Marshall infamously envisaged as the “team of Dixie,” only integrated in 1962 after the federal government threatened to deny the franchise use of a publicly funded stadium in Washington D.C., a story Thomas G. Smith chronicled in Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins.37

Mass Media and Sport as Big Business Though the first sports television broadcast showcased a 1939 baseball game between Columbia University and Princeton, the medium did not become a fixture in American homes until the middle 1950s. As with radio, sport stood among television’s most popular subject matter. Consequently, sports organizations expressed concern that television broadcasts would harm ticket sales. MLB Commissioner Ford Frick, for instance, commanded that the “view a fan gets at home should not be any better than that of the fan in the worst seat in the ballpark.”38 By contrast, the National Football League embraced television’s potential to build a national audience for what was at the time the United States’ third most popular sport. In America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, historian Michael MacCambridge outlined how the 1958 NFL championship between the 342

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New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, a contest colloquially referred to as the “Greatest Game Ever Played,” brought into focus the medium’s power.39 The Colts won the championship in “sudden death” overtime on a dramatic eighty-yard drive orchestrated by quarterback Johnny Unitas. But much like Dempsey and Tunney’s 1927 match, the game’s importance is largely indebted to the fact that a national audience experienced its dramatics live. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, a promotionally minded executive with a background in public relations who took over the league in 1959, used TV as a main ingredient of his efforts to expand professional football. Biographers Jeff Davis and John Fortunato detailed how Rozelle convinced NFL owners to adopt a revenue-sharing model that would ensure the league’s overall financial viability.40 “While the NFL’s teams are clearly competitors on the field, they are coproducers and co-sellers in producing and marketing,” Rozelle explained. “In this regard, they are not competitors; rather, they are partners acting together in a common enterprise.”41 Rozelle then persuaded Congress to pass the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, which exempted professional sports organizations from antitrust laws that prohibited collective television contracts. The massive contracts that resulted quickly made television the NFL’s largest revenue source. Rozelle augmented the television revenues by instituting a variety of promotional efforts to sculpt the league’s image. He launched NFL Properties in 1963, which handled licensing, merchandising and publishing. The following year, he compelled the league’s owners to create NFL Films, which filmed each game and produced dramatic made-for-TV documentaries celebrating pro football. These ventures fashioned a positive brand for the league and distributed it beyond games and live broadcasts of them. Not coincidentally, professional football was the United States’ most popular sporting spectacle by the middle of the 1960s. The NFL solidified its organizational power by merging with the rival American Football League in 1966. Though less popular than the NFL, the AFL—which launched in 1960—survived on its television contracts and created a bidding war for talent that escalated salary expenditures for both leagues. Under Rozelle’s leadership, the reformed league developed a marquee championship game eventually named the Super Bowl. As Michael Oriard pointed out in Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport, by the end of the 1960s “the Super Bowl had become not just an NFL championship game and an unofficial national holiday but also the NFL’s own best advertisement for itself.”42 By 1975 media scholar Michael Real would call the Super Bowl a “mythic spectacle” and even the “capstone of an empire” because it so poignantly showcases professional sport’s capacity to articulate dominant ideologies and promote consumer culture.43 As the NFL used television to fuel its growth, David A. Klatell and Norman Marcus’s Sports for Sale, Ron Powers’s SuperTube and Benjamin G. Rader’s In Its Own Image traced how television networks increasingly employed sport to build an audience.44 In particular, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) used sport to break out of its third place standing among the United States’ three major networks. During the late 1950s, ABC both began acquiring contracts to telecast sporting events and developed a distinctive way of packaging them, spearheaded by producer Roone Arledge. Arledge likened typical sports television broadcasts, which tended to use one or two cameras situated far from the action, to “looking out on the Grand Canyon through a peephole in a door.”45 By contrast, he sought to create immersive spectacles that would do justice to sport’s excitement. Upon his supervisor’s urging, Arledge penned an internal memorandum—now a founding document in sports television— outlining his proposed creative method. “Heretofore, television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer—now we are going to take the viewer to the game!” Arledge promised to adopt a bevy of stylistic accouterments that would use sporting events to tell engaging and humancentered stories that would expand sports TV’s audience beyond its stereotypically male viewership. “In short,” he wrote in closing to his memo, “we are going to add show business to sports!”46 Arledge seasoned his entertainment-driven practices with journalism by not allowing sports leagues to approve the announcers ABC employed and by hiring polarizing commentators like Howard Cosell. 343

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ABC used Arledge’s approach to develop programs like the non-live weekend anthology show Wide World of Sports (1961–1998). Wide World of Sports in turn composed a template ABC used to modernize coverage of the Olympic Games and transform the event into a TV-driven mega spectacle. Moreover, Arledge teamed with Rozelle to create Monday Night Football in 1970. The program employed a variety of dramatic flourishes to package professional football games in ways that would attract prime time audiences accustomed to sitcoms and variety shows. It demonstrated the viability of sports as prime time TV entertainment and motivated big-ticket sporting events like the World Series and Super Bowl to move to prime time.

Struggles for Justice in Sports No athlete of the 1960s better understood television’s dual capacity to cultivate celebrity and get a political point across than the boxer Muhammad Ali, who proclaimed himself “The Greatest” before many knew of him beyond his hometown of Louisville. The fighter, who went by his birth name Cassius Clay until 1964, won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics as a light heavyweight. But the 18-year-old African American Olympian grew disillusioned after returning to the United States to face the same racial prejudices he confronted before becoming a champion. Clay reportedly threw his medal into the Ohio River when he was denied service at a local restaurant. Whether or not this apocryphal tale is factual, biographer David Remnick explains that the young pugilist was undoubtedly enraged by the cruel irony of the fact that he could win a gold medal for his country yet still be barred from a hometown eatery and places like it.47 Clay grew into a heavyweight and earned the title with a surprising February 25, 1964 victory over Sonny Liston in Miami. The following day, he changed his name to Ali and announced his conversion to Islam, a decision that immediately transformed him from a plucky loudmouth into a mysterious threat. Ali accompanied his metamorphosis with heightened political outspokenness. The boxer’s controversy amplified when he refused military induction in 1967 and famously claimed “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” “Nothing alienated him from his detractors more than this,” observes historian Michael Arkush.48 The New York State Athletic Commission immediately stripped him of his title and boxing license—a decision the United States’ other commissions all followed—and a federal court sentenced him to five years in prison and issued him a $10,000 fine. Ali had the resources to stay out of prison through funding a protracted appeals process, but his boxing license was not reinstated until 1970. “Since the days of Jack Johnson,” Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein argued, “the white world had not seen a black hero who cared so little for the niceties of white opinion, who seemed so determined not to ‘know his place.’”49 Ali inspired other athletes to take a political stand. For instance, a group led by San Jose State University sociology professor Harry Edwards called the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) organized a boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City by the United States’ many participating African Americans. The group threatened to boycott unless three principal demands were met: 1) Restore Ali’s title; 2) remove Avery Brundage, a known racist who supported Hitler’s 1936 Olympic campaign and owned a Santa Barbara, California country club that did not allow blacks or Jews, as IOC chair; and 3) disinvite apartheid nations South Africa and Rhodesia from Mexico City. Only the third demand, for which other groups had also pushed, was met. The movement, however, fizzled and left only the possibility of individual protest, which African American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos most notably exercised after respectively placing first and third in the 200-meter dash. The sprinters stood shoeless on the medal stand, bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists as the “Star Spangled Banner” played. The IOC banished them from the Olympic Village and forbade them from further participation in the Games. Smith and Carlos’s demonstration, as Amy Bass and Douglas Hartmann’s studies of its buildup and legacy showed, further reinforced the Olympics’ position as a visible political platform.50 344

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Women athletes of the 1960s and 1970s—who still had far fewer opportunities to participate in sports than their male counterparts—waged struggles that accompanied, complemented and intersected with efforts to attain racial equality. An important step toward gaining these rights was Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which guaranteed that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Publicly funded organizations that offered boys and men’s sports suddenly had to provide opportunities for girls and women as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) resisted and even attempted to subvert Title IX, which executive director Walter Byers argued could mark “the possible doom of intercollegiate sports,” before it begrudgingly started facilitating opportunities for women’s sport.51 While Title IX ensured greater prospects for girls and women, these opportunities—as scholarship on the history women’s sport points out—were far from equivalent.52 Girls and women routinely received inferior facilities, equipment, promotion and media coverage. Tennis player Billie Jean King confronted these imbalances in the professional ranks by advocating for women to receive prize money equal to men and by organizing the Women’s Tennis Association. In 1973, King participated in arguably the decade’s most prominent women’s sporting event when she defeated retired male tennis pro and self-proclaimed “chauvinist pig” Bobby Riggs in a “Battle of the Sexes” match. Though gimmicky, the match filled the Houston Astrodome to capacity and attracted 90,000,000 television viewers worldwide. As Susan Ware’s Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports and Selena Roberts’s A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game showed, the “Battle of the Sexes” composed a massive platform through which to showcase women’s ability to excel and draw an audience in the sporting arena.53 Alongside the efforts to increase racial and gender equality, baseball player Curt Flood and Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Marvin Miller worked to end professional baseball’s reserve clause, which effectively eliminated players’ ability to negotiate with teams other than the one to which they were contracted. After a 1972 player strike, Major League Baseball agreed to arbitration and was eventually constrained to eliminate the reserve clause in 1975—an implementation and legacy that Robert F. Burk chronicled in Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921.54 Though Flood never enjoyed the fruits of his efforts, Guttman notes that MLB salaries tripled between 1976 and 1980 and generated a swell of labor disputes across professional sports.55

Toward the Twenty-First Century Despite these conflicts, sport’s popularity continued to grow. No development better illustrates America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for sports than the ascent of cable television and the 1979 launch of the Entertainment Sports Programming Network (ESPN), the first outlet wholly devoted to providing around-the-clock sports TV. By 1983, ESPN was cable television’s most popular channel. As Travis Vogan explained in his cultural and institutional history of ESPN, the media outlet stood among the world’s most valuable media properties by the century’s end and spawned even more specifically focused offshoots.56 Sport’s presence also magnified in marketing and advertising, as a wide variety of companies used athletes to shop their wares. By the middle 1990s, NBA star Michael Jordan was the world’s most recognizable person—the Pope ranked second.57 But Jordan’s phenomenal basketball talents alone do not explain his fame. Rather, his pervasiveness—as Walter LaFeber noted in Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism—was a product of his image traversing the globe through all manner of commercially driven objects, media texts and advertisements.58 At first glance, the differences that separate U.S. sport culture between 1900 and 2000 indicate significant social progress. The country’s two most famous athletes—Jordan and golfer Tiger Woods— were African Americans. Like Woods, emerging tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams were black 345

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athletes dominating a country club sport traditionally reserved for moneyed white people. The U.S. women’s national soccer team’s 1999 World Cup-winning effort attracted millions of spectators, drew increased interest in women’s sport and attested to Title IX’s vast benefits. But inequalities remained—and persisted—amid these inspiring developments. Black athletes were consistently discouraged from pursuing leadership positions in team sports like catcher in baseball and quarterback in football—a practice called “stacking” that subtly reinforces racial hierarchies. Despite the vast number of African Americans in professional sports, there was a disproportionately low quantity in prominent coaching and management positions. While sporting opportunities for women increased substantially, women’s sport received only a fraction of the media attention men’s sport attracted. In fact, a study conducted by sport sociologists Michael A. Messner and Cheryl Cooky found a decline in television coverage of women’s sports from 1989 to 2009.59 Though there were a scattered few openly gay female athletes by the century’s end, there were no openly gay active male athletes in major sports—a paucity and imbalance that demonstrates sport’s position as a reinforcement of dominant sexual mores. As a site of cultural production and expression, then, sport powerfully reflected twentieth-century America’s triumphs, aspirations and blemishes. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 signaled the twenty-first century’s cultural birth because they so drastically reshaped the nation’s values and practices. As a consequence of its role as a common expression of community and nationalism, sport provided a key way that Americans made sense of this tragedy and the changes it ushered. For instance, one month after the attacks, President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch of Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, not far from the fallen and still smoldering World Trade Center towers. In contrast to the weak lobs that generally mark first pitches, Bush threw a hard strike that was subsequently interpreted as a symbol of the United States’ virility and resolve during a vulnerable time. In fact, Bush’s metaphorically potent pitch drew on the links between physicality and virtue that Theodore Roosevelt and other proponents of muscular Christianity celebrated one hundred years prior. Thus, while sport changed in important ways over the course of the twentieth century, many of its mythic qualities and functions—for better or worse—remained constant.

Notes 1 Brandon Schlager, “More People Watched Super Bowl XLIX Than Voted in the Presidential Election— again.” The Sporting News, February 5, 2015, www.sportingnews.com/nfl/news/more-people-watched-superbowl-xlix-than-voted-in-presidential-election/1x5qpbnnwvsyr1l6v8yf1va3bl, accessed 30 July 2016. 2 Warren Goldstein, Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 3 Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 108. 4 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 5 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” Speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, IL, April 10, 1899, in Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York: Co-Operative Publication Company, 1900), 3–22, 4. 6 Theodore Roosevelt, “The American Boy,” in The Strenuous Life (New York: Co-Operative Publication Company, 1900), 128–137, 137. 7 Rob Rains, James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 8 Walter Camp, The Book of Foot-Ball (New York: Century, 1910), 212–213. See also Julie Des Jardins, Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 9 Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 46. 10 Quoted in Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 293. 11 Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 12 Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983); Theresa Runstedtler and Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (Berkeley:

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Sport and Leisure University of California Press, 2013); Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 13 Quoted in Roberts, Papa Jack, 55. 14 Ibid., 68. 15 “Is Prize-Fighting Knocked Out?” Literary Digest, July 16, 1910, 85. 16 See Dan Streible, Fight Films: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 17 Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 3. 18 Richard O. Davies, Sports in American Life: A History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 127. 19 Jules Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85. 20 Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 193. 21 Robert Lipsyte, Sportsworld: An American Dreamland (New York: Quadrangle, 1975), 170. 22 Bruce J. Evensen, When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), xv. 23 Quoted in Ira Berkow, Red: A Biography of Red Smith (New York: Times Books, 1986), 105. 24 Charles Fountain, Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). 25 Susan E. Cayleff, Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 4, 23, 116. 26 Evensen, When Dempsey Fought Tunney, ix. 27 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); David Goldblatt, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016). 28 Quoted in Jeremy Schaap, Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 177. 29 Heywood Broun, “It Seems to Me,” New York World-Telegram, June 24, 1938. 30 Lewis Erenberg, The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5. 31 Richard Wright, “High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom,” New Masses 28, no. 2 (1938): 18–20, 18. 32 Randy Roberts, Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 33 Allen Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 128. 34 Ibid., 128. 35 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 36 Davies, Sports in American Life, 215. 37 Thomas G. Smith, Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). 38 Quoted in Roone Arledge and Gilbert Rogin, “It’s Sports, It’s Money, It’s TV,” Sports Illustrated, 25 April 1966, 100. 39 Michael MacCambridge, America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation (New York: Random House, 2004). 40 Jeff Davis, Rozelle: Czar of the NFL (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2007); John Fortunato, Commissioner: The Legacy of Pete Rozelle (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006). 41 Pete Rozelle, “Is It ‘Parity’? ‘Mediocrity’? Pete Rozelle Says No,” New York Times, January 3, 1982, S2. 42 Michael Oriard, Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 98. See also Richard C. Crepeau, NFL Football: A History of America’s New National Pastime (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 43 Michael Real, “Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle,” Journal of Communication 25, no. 1 (1975): 31–43, 31. 44 David A. Klatell and Norman Marcus, Sports for Sale: Television, Money, and the Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ron Powers, SuperTube: The Rise of Television Sports (New York: Coward-McCann, 1984); Benjamin G. Rader, In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports (New York: Free Press, 1984). 45 Roone Arledge, Roone: A Memoir (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 29. 46 Ibid., 30–31. 47 David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Random House, 1998).

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Travis Vogan 48 Michael Arkush, The Fight of the Century: Ali vs. Frazier (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2008), 3. 49 Gorn and Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports, 219. 50 Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 51 Quoted in Cahn, Coming on Strong, 254. 52 See Cahn, Coming on Strong; Susan Ware, Title IX: A Brief History With Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2006); Jaime Schultz, Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 53 Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005); Susan Ware, Game, Set Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 54 Robert F. Burk, Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 55 Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 137. 56 Travis Vogan, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 57 Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia, 165. 58 Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999). 59 Michael A. Messner and Cheryl Cooky, “Gender in Televised Sports News and Highlight Shows, 1989– 2009,” Center for Feminist Research, University of Southern California, 2010.

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32 DISABILITY—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Daniel J. Wilson

Disability history is a relative newcomer to historical scholarship. It emerged in the late twentieth century along with the rise of disability activism that culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Disability had come under study earlier by medical and social historians exploring the ways in which medicine and society dealt with individuals with physical and mental disabilities. There had been previous studies, for example, of wounded veterans of our nation’s wars and the nineteenth-century asylum movement that built institutions to care for the mentally ill and those unable to care for themselves. These older histories of disability were largely based on a medical model of disability. Medical models of disability focus on the impairment and on the efforts of medical professionals to treat and cure the impairment. As Kim Nielsen observed, “this framework considers disability to stem from bodily-based defects and tends to define disabled people almost exclusively by those diagnostic defects.”1 Without ignoring the role of medicine in the lives of individuals with disabilities, the new generation of disability historians emphasizes a social model of disability in which social factors stigmatize disabilities and those who have them and which place barriers—physical, social, political and psychological—to the rights of the disabled and to their full participation in the social, economic, intellectual and political life of the community. On this point, Nielsen argued that “disability is not just a bodily category, but instead and also a social category shaped by changing social factors—just as is able-bodiedness.”2 Over time, and over the twentieth century, she noted, these social factors have shifted: “Which bodily and mental variabilities are considered inconsequential, which are charming, and which are stigmatized, changes over time—and that is the history of disability.”3 As the late Paul Longmore noted, “historical study of disability is developing rapidly.”4 Historians of disability have been opening new avenues of scholarship focused on the experience of men, women and children with disabilities. In part, this is driven by the recognition that Douglas Baynton was right when he wrote that “disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it.”5 The range of subjects that fall under the umbrella of disability history is, accordingly, now wide, touching on most subjects in twentieth-century American history. Longmore argued that in recent American history, as in all previous eras, disability-related experiences and issues, controversies and campaigns appeared in virtually every social institution and sphere; in lawmaking and policy administration, in professional and institutional practices, and in Americans’ understanding about some of their most basic values, values regarding equality and fitness for citizenship, autonomy and appearance, gender and sexuality, progress and the “health” of society.6 349

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In addition, Longmore argued that this new conception of disability underlay both “activism and academic work.” Both activists and disability scholars, including historians, recognize that most individuals with disabilities find stigma, social and physical barriers and prejudice to be more limiting than their physical and mental impairments.7 Finally, he argued that much disability history is “part of a search for a ‘usable past’ for the disability rights movement.” Disability historians tend to see their historical work as contributing to political and social activism on behalf of disability rights.8 Susan Burch and Michael Rembis echoed Longmore when they wrote that “disability history engenders myriad transformative possibilities that point to exciting new pathways for understanding the past.”9 Not surprisingly, historians have often focused on the struggle of individuals with disabilities to organize, advocate and agitate on their own behalf. These historians have discovered a long history of self-advocacy by individuals and groups on behalf of a wide range of disabilities. An early example was the League of the Physically Handicapped, which emerged in the 1930s to protest the exclusion of disabled individuals from the work relief projects of the New Deal. The Roosevelt administration had excluded the disabled from the work programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) on the grounds that they were unemployable. The members of the League conducted a sit-in at the New York offices of New York’s Emergency Relief Bureau, picketed WPA offices and traveled to Washington to meet with WPA chief Harry Hopkins. Eventually, they secured some 1,500 jobs in New York for individuals with disabilities. Although they failed substantially to alter the government’s overall policies regarding employment of the disabled, the “League members’ similar backgrounds and shared experiences fostered a group identity that generated an oppositional political consciousness.”10 Paul Longmore and David Goldberger found that disability activism was often rooted in groups of disabled friends who had met through one of the institutions or organizations serving the disabled. They concluded that the actions of the League members “highlights major themes of modern disability history, with its complicated interactions among institutional, group, and individual actors and its complex interplay of public policies, professional practices, and cultural values.”11 The struggle for disability rights in the twentieth century was waged both by groups organized around a particular disability and by cross-disability organizations. Over the course of the century, students who were blind and deaf were often educated in state-run boarding schools where they created communities and networks that sometimes gave rise to advocacy organizations.12 Individuals who were deaf were particularly concerned to support the viability of American Sign Language and to contest the oralism of many of their teachers. This advocacy would lead most dramatically to the Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet University in 1988. Gallaudet students mounted a protest against the appointment of a hearing president that led eventually to the appointment of the first deaf president, I. King Jordan.13 Individuals who are deaf have also led the movement to claim and legitimate deaf identity, emphasizing the social, cultural and political aspects of deafness. Men and women who consider themselves culturally deaf are united by a shared experience, by a unique language and the conviction that they are not disabled but rather a cultural minority.14 Individuals who were blind also sought to use advocacy to speak for themselves rather than to be represented by professionals speaking on their behalf. As Catherine Kudlick has noted, one group of largely blind members were “the forerunners of today’s political interest group.” These blind individuals believed they should “not only enjoy a slice of the American political pie, but also have a say in its ingredients.” The “other group comprised experts” on blindness, such as teachers, social workers and doctors, who “claimed authority based on their advanced training and experience, which they enjoyed by virtue of their official paid positions.”15 In 1940, Jacobus tenBroek established the National Foundation of the Blind (NFB) on the premise that the NFB “is not an organization speaking for the blind; it is the blind speaking for themselves.” The initial focus of the NFB was on increasing employment opportunities for the blind, although it soon took on other related causes affecting them. In 1961, dissidents unhappy with the philosophy and approach of the NFB established the American Council of the Blind (ACB). Like the NFB, the ACB has become an advocacy organization with particular 350

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emphasis on accessibility. Though they differ somewhat in philosophy and approach, and tensions remain between the two groups, they have also cooperated on a number of occasions for the mutual benefit of their members, including supporting legislation expanding the rights and opportunities of people with disabilities.16 The civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s and the student and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 1970s inspired young adults with disabilities to create advocacy organizations to demand an end to discrimination of all kinds and for civil rights for the disabled. They also demanded accommodations so they could fully participate socially, politically and economically in society. Not surprisingly, one of these movements began in Berkeley, California, a center of campus and antiwar protests. Ed Roberts, a polio survivor dependent on an iron lung for part of the day, had to sue the University of California at Berkeley in order to be admitted. Once admitted, Roberts was housed in the college infirmary, which was the only place that could handle his iron lung. When word got out that Roberts had been admitted, a number of other young disabled men and women applied, were admitted and joined Roberts in the infirmary. There the new residents formed a group called the “Rolling Quads.” They soon began to push the University to make the campus more physically accessible to individuals with disability impairments. They also established the Disabled Students Program to help these students with everything from facilitating wheelchair repairs to securing attendant care. The Rolling Quads soon turned their attention to the city of Berkeley and “organized an agency in 1972 governed by and for people with disabilities, the Center for Independent Living (CIL).” As Roberts noted, “the Berkeley CIL was revolutionary as a model for advocacy-based organizations; no longer would we tolerate being spoken for.”17 The Berkeley CIL became the model for hundreds of Centers for Independent Living established throughout the United States.18 Other advocacy groups were forming at the same time. For example, Disabled in Action was established in New York in 1970 by Judith Heumann. Heumann, a polio survivor who used a wheelchair, had trained to become a teacher. However, the New York Board of Education refused to license her. Heumann publicized her plight, and she sued in federal court. The case was settled. Heumann received her license, and eventually taught at the school she had attended. Her experience made her realize “that successful use of the media and legal system by the civil rights movement of the 1960s had potential pertinence to disability.”19 In 1973, Heumann moved to Berkeley to become deputy director of the CIL. Ten years later, Heumann and Roberts created the World Institute on Disability focused on conducting research on disabilities, developing public policies and training individuals in research, policy and advocacy concerning independent living for individuals with disabilities.20 One of the key steps in the growing campaign for disability rights was the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that Richard Nixon signed into law on September 26, 1973. While disability activists had supported the bill, they were not directly responsible for the insertion of its key provision, Section 504. A congressional staffer inserted this section in order to connect the act to previously enacted civil rights legislation. It read: No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, as defined in Section 7(6), shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. As Lennard Davis argued, “Section 504 became the first brick in the groundwork” that led to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Section 504 “was the first federal language that clearly and uncompromisingly guaranteed the civil rights of people with disabilities.”21 In order for Section 504 to be effective, regulations needed to be drafted and approved by the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) specifying how the section was to be implemented by federal agencies. John Wodach and his staff in the Office of Civil Rights wrote the regulations. 351

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The drafting took several years and was slowed by officials in the administrations of both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. In early 1977, disability activists mounted protests demanding the approval and publication of the regulations, since Section 504 could not be enforced until they were in place. Sitins and demonstrations occurred in Washington D.C. and at several of the regional offices of HEW. The most significant of these sit-ins took place at the HEW office in San Francisco. Led by Judith Heumann, disability activists occupied the HEW offices from April 5 to April 30, 1977. On April 28, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano signed the regulations as written. The sit-in ended shortly thereafter and Section 504 became operational.22 In the years following approval of the Section 504 regulations, disability activists throughout the nation fought to secure their implementation. Access to public transportation, particularly buses, became an early focus of agitation. Activists took to the streets to block inaccessible buses and to the courts to force public transportation agencies to make buses accessible.23 Disabled activists soon organized to push for an end to discrimination consistent with the intent of Section 504 and to make the nation accessible for a wide range of disabilities. The organizations significant in disability activism of the 1970s and 1980s included Disabled in Action, established by Heumann in 1970. Since its founding, it has held consciousness-raising sessions, published a monthly journal and organized protests. In 1979, the Berkeley CIL established the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) to “promote the integration and civil rights of people with disabilities.” DREDF focuses on changing law and public policy through offices in Berkeley and Washington D.C.24 Because enforcement of Section 504 involved laws and the establishment of government policy, a cadre of disability lawyers emerged, eager to sue businesses and governments to guarantee the accessibility promised under Section 504. One of the most active of the new disability rights organizations has been ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit from 1983 to 1990 and American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today since 1990). Although ADAPT has had success in bringing suits, it has seen itself primarily as a “street fighter.” ADAPT has often used the tactics of street theater such as blocking buses that lacked wheelchair lifts. The tactics were designed to force governments and the public to recognize discrimination and to change laws and practices that discriminated against the disabled.25 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed by Congress and signed by President George H. W. Bush on July 26, 1990, capped two decades of agitation and advocacy by disability activists and their able-bodied colleagues. Lennard Davis recounts how an informal coalition of disability activists and government insiders, including supportive congressmen and senators as well as congressional staffers, worked together to draft the legislation and secure its passage through Congress and signature by the president. A key figure behind the hard negotiations and in building support for the emerging legislation was Justin Dart, a conservative Texan who used a wheelchair because of adolescent polio. Dart traveled throughout the country to build support for the bill. His role “merged activist, strategist and ambassador.”26 By the mid-1980s it was clear that court rulings had limited the effectiveness of Section 504 and this became part of the impetus for this new bill. In January 1988, the National Council on Disability published a report outlining the shortcomings of Section 504 and suggesting a new broader anti-discrimination bill. After long and tense negotiations involving elected officials, staff members and disability activists, including members of DREDF, the Americans with Disabilities Act passed and was signed into law. It quickly became the basis for establishing the civil rights of the disabled and reducing, if not ending, discrimination on the basis of disability.27 While the ADA marked a landmark in establishing the civil rights of individuals with disabilities and has made a significant difference in the lives of many of the disabled, the legislation did not usher in utopia. Governments at all levels resisted implementation of the act and individuals and businesses have challenged its requirements in court and refused to comply with its provisions. This resistance was often based on anticipated costs and on an ideological opposition to federal regulation of the actions of individuals and businesses. Disabled individuals have had to bring suits to force compliance, but courts have sometimes ruled against disabled plaintiffs. In 2008, Congress passed and President 352

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George H. Bush signed the ADA Amendments Act to address some of the issues that had risen regarding implementation of the ADA. While deficiencies remain and resistance continues, there is no doubt that the work of disability activists and the ADA and its subsequent amendments have measurably improved the lives of individuals with disabilities.28 Beyond activism and civil rights, disability has played a significant role in debates regarding immigration. The growing desire to limit the number and kind of immigrants admitted to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on those individuals with infectious or contagious diseases and those thought unfit to work in industrializing America and to become citizens. Initially designed to exclude individuals with a range of mental and physical disabilities, the exclusionary impulse eventually categorized entire ethnic and racial groups as disabled and, hence, unfit for American entry and citizenship. Following Congressional passage of a new immigration law in 1891, the federal government took complete control of the process of admitting new immigrants. The law required Public Health Service (PHS) officers to ensure that no individuals with infectious or contagious diseases were admitted through Ellis Island or other ports of entry. In addition to excluding certain diseases, the inspectors were also given authority to bar individuals who were likely to become public charges—in other words, be unable to support themselves and likely to become dependent on state assistance. As Amy Fairchild has written, the PHS was to admit only those who would make “a good industrial citizen: one who would remain healthy, be a useful worker, and not become dependent upon the charity of the nation.”29 As these regulations evolved over the next three decades, disability, actual or perceived, became a useful tool to exclude those thought unfit to work. Douglas C. Baynton’s writings on immigration have been especially notable for drawing attention to the ways in which immigration restriction was largely based on the concept of disability as well as actual and perceived disability in individuals and in racial and ethnic groups. In an essay that ranges beyond immigration, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” Baynton argued that “the concept of disability was instrumental in crafting the image of the undesirable immigrant.” The grounds for exclusion on the basis of disability “were steadily tightened as the eugenics movement and popular fears about the decline of the national stock gathered strength.”30 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, any disability, whether an actual mental or physical impairment or one based only on widely shared preconceptions, was thought to make it impossible for individuals to support themselves and, thus, likely to become a public charge. As time went on and the number of immigrants increased, disability as an effective tool of exclusion was applied not only to individuals but also to certain ethnic groups who were thought “mentally and physically deficient,” thus justifying excluding whole categories of immigrants. Baynton concluded that “American immigration restriction at the turn of the century was also clearly fueled by a fear of defectives in the land.”31 Baynton’s subsequent writings have explored in greater depth the exclusionary tactics’ impact on particular types of disability and the ties between immigration restriction based on disability and eugenics. For example, Baynton found that individuals who were deaf were often rejected even when they could provide solid evidence that they had worked in their native country and when they had a job waiting for them in the United States. The deaf, he wrote, were typically excluded because they were “culturally defined as social dependents rather than social contributors.” This assumed that all deaf individuals, no matter their previous work history, were destined to remain dependent and, inevitably, to become a public charge. The PHS also excluded the deaf because they were “seen as bearers of a potentially defective heredity,” offering the PHS grounds to bar entry.32 At the turn of the twentieth century, debates about restricting the admission of immigrants considered too disabled to work joined a growing eugenics movement that considered individuals with certain disabilities unfit to procreate and a threat to the reproductive health of the United States. As Baynton has argued, there were two senses in which “disability as a handicap” took shape: “the economic race for life in which an individual might succeed or fail, and the evolutionary competition by which races and nations would rise or fall.”33 The eugenics movement argued that for the human 353

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race to improve and progress, certain individuals and groups needed to be prevented from passing on their defective genes to their descendants. “By the late nineteenth century, both non-white ‘lower’ races and defective individuals were similarly described as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks.”34 Baynton found that there were two ways of preventing defective individuals and groups from ruining the genetic future of the nation: “the curtailment of reproduction by undesirable citizens” and “the restriction of immigration by means of screening immigrants for defects.” These two actions would ensure the growth of “a physically, mentally, and morally superior human race.”35 Drawing on longstanding prejudices against individuals with disabilities and certain ethnic and racial groups, as well as on the new science of Mendelian genetics, eugenicists argued that their methods of restricting immigration, institutionalizing defectives and sterilizing those likely to pass on their defective genes would prevent the “coming degeneration of the country.”36 Many eugenicists focused on the vague and expansive category of the feebleminded. Gerald O’Brien noted that these individuals, “especially the higher-functioning morons, were believed to be the nucleus from which a wide range of social evils, including poverty, drunkenness, sexually transmitted diseases, and a range of other disability conditions emanated.”37 Eugenics embraced both negative eugenics, “preventing the procreation of the ‘unfit’” through immigration restriction, institutionalization, and sterilization, and positive eugenics “centered on promoting the procreation of the ‘fit.’”38 Henry Goddard, a psychologist and eugenicist, introduced the term “moron” for high functioning feebleminded individuals. As Wendy Kline observed, this “new category essentially blurred the distinction between behavior that was unmistakably ‘normal’ and behavior that was ‘pathological.’”39 This brought groups such as unwed mothers and prostitutes under the umbrella of the category “feebleminded.” After 1910, the categories of feebleminded and moron “became almost synonymous with the illicit sexual behavior of the woman adrift.”40 To prevent the degeneration of the white race through the activities of these immoral and disabled women, eugenicists increasingly advocated involuntary sterilization. Between 1927 and 1957 approximately 60,000 individuals, most of them labeled feebleminded, were sterilized; 60 percent of these were women, and a majority white and poor.41 In his careful study of Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that legalized involuntary sterilization, Paul A. Lombardo found two central themes supporting this practice. First, “sterilization would reduce sexual misconduct” such as “masturbation, fornication, incest, homosexuality, and prostitution” through “applied medical hygiene.” Second, “sexual surgery was a means to reducing social costs and the community burden posed by the unfit progeny of unfit citizens.”42 Eugenics as practiced in the United States accepted the existence of the disabled and unfit in society but tried to prevent additional representatives from entering the nation as immigrants and to prevent those already here from having children who could inherit the disability and so weaken the strength of the American people. The history of individuals with cognitive and developmental disabilities is much broader than their place in the history of eugenics. Such individuals can be found in the colonial era, but it was in the nineteenth century that doctors, reformers and others took up the cause of the feebleminded and mentally retarded. James Trent’s work has uncovered the many phases of the nation’s attempt to understand and care for those with mental disabilities. He has explored the age of the asylum in the nineteenth century, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the push for deinstitutionalization in the late twentieth century.43 Susan Burch and others have explored the ways in which Native Americans and African Americans were diagnosed with mental illnesses and cognitive impairments and institutionalized in often appalling conditions.44 Institutionalization of individuals with mental and cognitive disabilities was rationalized as providing for those unable to care for themselves, but it often placed these men and women in custodial care where treatment was minimal or nonexistent. Individuals who were blind or deaf often experienced institutionalization at state schools. These boarding schools provided education through the high school level. Deaf students could also attend Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., which was established in 1864. These boarding schools 354

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were formative experiences for the young men and women who attended. In the schools for the deaf they were introduced to a rich culture centered on American Sign Language. Sign language was controversial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many of the hearing teachers of the deaf tried to repress the use of sign in the schools. Now recognized as a separate language, sign language persisted in spite of efforts to stamp it out and became a central factor in the creation of deaf culture.45 The culturally deaf, those who use sign and consider themselves to be a cultural minority, have been the subject of several studies.46 Recent technological advances, such as cochlear implants, have posed challenges to the deaf community and to the survival of sign language.47 Wars have long disabled soldiers, but it is only in the twentieth century that rehabilitation of the wounded and disabled veteran has come to the fore. Disabled veterans from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War sought and often received pensions or free land in compensation for their war-inflicted disabilities. As Beth Linker argues, rehabilitation during and after World War I sought to reduce the cost of cash pensions. “With proper physical and vocational reconstruction,” it was believed, “blind men, deaf men, and dismembered men could all produce wealth and contribute to society.”48 This ideal of rehabilitation had a significant impact beyond treating wounded veterans. It led to “the formation of entirely new, female-dominated medical subspecialties, such as occupational and physical therapy,” and the rehabilitative ideal was soon extended to civilians with disabilities such as polio patients.49 Although wounded and disabled veterans have received considerable attention from historians, David A. Gerber maintained that their history has not been fully integrated into disability history nor addressed from the perspective of Disability Studies. Historians have largely focused on veterans as a problem for the state or from the perspective of the medical model of disability. Gerber acknowledged that disabled veterans challenge the perspective that views disability as “a variable social construction, a problem in cultural norm formation, or a source of individual and group identity.”50 Historically, he argued, disabled veterans have been largely unwilling to enlist in disability activism that challenges cultural norms regarding the body and impairment. Most disabled veterans “usually aspire to little more than a return to civilian life. They embrace conventional roles and identities. They see nothing much to be gained in celebrating what to them are conceived as losses and sacrifices.”51 Gerber’s anthology, Disabled Veterans in History, and his own essays on disabled veterans, demonstrated that at least some efforts have been made to bring the history of disabled veterans under the umbrellas of disability history and Disability Studies, although more certainly can be done.52 While disability historians have focused on areas where disability figures prominently, they have also uncovered myriad ways in which disability shaped individuals’ lives, laws, policy, culture, art and literature.53 For example, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous cities throughout the United States passed what came to be called “ugly laws.” These laws targeted individuals “who ‘exposed’ disease, maiming, deformity, or mutilation for the purpose of begging.” As Susan Schweik commented, these laws expressed “disability oppression deployed and embedded, ideologically and structurally, in classed, capitalist (and also gendered and racialized) social relations.”54 If disabled beggars were an affront to urbanites’ sensibilities, later in the century disabled children were often paraded through fundraising telethons as poster children. After mid-century, these telethons became major sources of revenue for organizations such as the Muscular Dystrophy Association, National Easter Seals Society and the March of Dimes. Paul Longmore observed that these telethons “dwelt on the quest for cure—or quasi-cure of overcoming disability through rehabilitation.” But they also “defined the social roles and identities available to people with disabilities. Without cures that would make them socially normal, they would be ‘invalids’ or must become ‘overcomers.’”55 The struggle to come to terms with a disability even made it into the daily comics page when BD, a character in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip, lost a leg in the Iraq war. Trudeau traced BD’s struggle to accept his loss, to adjust to his prosthetic leg and to return home.56 People with disabilities have been a presence in American history from the beginning, but only recently have historians begun to uncover that history. The deaf, blind and the physically and mentally 355

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impaired have all suffered from stigmatization, prejudice and discrimination. Beginning in the nineteenth century and with increasing success in the twentieth century, disabled men and women have come together to advocate for and agitate on behalf of their civil and legal rights. This movement for disability rights is also a part of the history being recovered. As these examples suggest, disability truly can be found everywhere once you begin to look for it.

Notes 1 Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), xiv. Nielsen’s book is the first comprehensive history of disability in the United States. 2 Ibid., xv. 3 Ibid., xvii. 4 Paul K. Longmore, “Making Disability an Essential Part of American History,” OAH Magazine of History 23 (July 2009): 11. 5 Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 52. 6 Longmore, “Making Disability and Essential Part of American History,” 14. 7 Paul K. Longmore, “Introduction,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 1–2. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Susan Burch and Michael Rembis, “Re-Membering the Past: Reflections on Disability Histories,” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 6. See also, Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” The American Historical Review 108 (June 2003): 763–793; Beth Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (Winter 2013): 499–535; Catherine J. Kudlick, “Comment: On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (Winter 2003): 540–559. 10 Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History,” in Longmore, Why I Burned My Book, 83. 11 Ibid., 86–87. 12 Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 14–32. 13 Ibid., 28–29. 14 Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); John Vickery Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989); Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 15 Catherine J. Kudlick, “The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem of The Outlook: Two Advocacy Journals Reinvent Blind People in Turn-of-the-Century America,” in Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 190. 16 Fleisher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 21–26. 17 Ibid., 37–42. 18 Ibid., 43–48. 19 Ibid., 71–73. 20 Ibid., 41. See also the Roberts and Heumann interviews in Fred Pelka, What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 21 Lennard J. Davis, Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans With Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 10–11. See also, Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993), 64–65; Richard K. Scotch, “‘Nothing about Us without Us’: Disability Rights in America,” OAH Magazine of History 23 (July 2009): 17–22; Richard K. Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 22 Davis, Enabling Acts, 12–14; Shapiro, No Pity, 64–70; Fleisher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 53–56; Pelka, What We Have Done, 261–282. 23 Fleisher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 56–70. 24 Ibid., 71–79. See also, Pelka, What We Have Done, 339–354.

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Disability 25 Fleisher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 79–85. On ADAPT, see also, Shapiro, No Pity, 127–140; Pelka, What We Have Done, 376–396. 26 Davis, Enabling Acts, 39. 27 Davis, Enabling Acts, is the most detailed account of the writing of the ADA but see also Pelka, What We Have Done, 413–547; Shapiro, No Pity, 105–141; Flesher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 88–109. 28 Davis, Enabling Acts, 225–251; Fleisher and Zames, The Disability Rights Movement, 93–109. 29 Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 14. See also, Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 30 Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 45. See also, Douglas C. Baynton, “Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of Disability in Citizenship Debates,” PMLA 120 (March 2005): 562–567; Jay Dolmage, “Disabled Upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island,” Cultural Critique 77 (Winter 2011): 24–69. 31 Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 47, 50. See also Douglas C. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (Spring 2005): 31–44. 32 Douglas C. Baynton, “‘The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: U.S. Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882–1924,” Sign Language Studies 6 (Summer 2006): 394–395, 412. See also Daniel J. Wilson, “‘No Defectives Need Apply’: Disability and Immigration,” OAH Magazine of History 23 (July 2009): 35–40. 33 Douglas C. Baynton, “‘These Pushful Days’: Time and Disability in the Age of Eugenics,” Health and History 13 (2011): 48. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 6–7. 36 Gerald V. O’Brien, Framing the Moron: The Social Construction of Feeble-Mindedness in the American Eugenic Era (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 4. See also, Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 11. 37 O’Brien, Framing the Moron, 7. 38 Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3. 39 Ibid., 24. 40 Ibid., 29. 41 Anna Stubblefield, “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability and Eugenic Sterilization,” Hypatia 22 (Spring 2007): 162. 42 Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), xiii–xiv. See also, Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck (New York: Penguin Press, 2016); Paul A. Lombardo, Angela Logan and Maxwell J. Mehlman, eds., A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 43 James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Steven Noll and James W. Trent, Jr., eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 44 Susan Burch, “‘Dislocated Histories’: The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2 (Fall 2014): 141–162; Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner, Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 45 See Baynton, Forbidden Signs. 46 See Van Cleve and Crouch, A Place of Their Own; Burch, Signs of Resistance. 47 For a personal perspective on these issues, see Kristen C. Harmon, “Growing Up to Become Hearing: Dreams of Passing in Oral Deaf Education,” in Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity, ed. Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 167–198. 48 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2. See also John M. Kinder, Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 49 Linker, War’s Waste, 6–7. For polio rehabilitation, see Daniel J. Wilson, Living With Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 50 David A. Gerber, ed., Disabled Veterans in History, revised and enlarged ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), x–xi.

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Daniel J. Wilson 51 Ibid., xiii. 52 See, for example, David Gerber, “Creating Group Identity: Disabled Veterans and American Government,” OAH Magazine of History 23 (July 2009): 23–28; David A. Gerber, “Blind and Enlightened: The Contested Origins of the Egalitarian Politics of the Blinded Veterans Association,” in Longmore and Umansky, eds., The New Disability History, 313–334. See also, John M. Kinder, “‘Lest We Forget’: Disabled Veterans and the Politics of War Remembrance in the United States,” in Burch and Rembis, Disability Histories, 163–182. 53 Some sense of the range can be found in the 750 essays in Susan Burch, ed., Encyclopedia of American Disability History, 3 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2009). 54 Susan M Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 2, 16. 55 Paul K. Longmore, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity, ed. Catherine Kudlick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 102. 56 G. B. Trudeau, The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005).

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33 RELIGIOUS—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Sarah Ruble

“Mr. President,” the letter began, “why do you exclude us from your prayers?” Written by the Hindu International Council Against Defamation (HICAD) in September 2001, the missive bemoaned that in his post-9/11 public prayers, George W. Bush publicly recognized only three religious traditions in the country: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The letter enumerated ways Hindus benefited the United States: low divorce rates, high educational achievement, homeownership. When the president addressed the almighty, he should include such model citizens in his supplications.1 The letter, written at the beginning of the twenty-first century during a crisis, revealed much about the shape of ordinary twentieth-century American religion. Its signatories reflected a century of growing religious diversity. The letter also bespoke the import of religion for millions of Americans. Although down from mid-century highs of religious affiliation, around two-thirds of Americans still affiliated with a religious tradition in 1999.2 That the letter addressed the president as prayer-inchief was unsurprising after a century in which religious folk had used the political realm to shape the country as they saw fit, with varying degrees of success. In all, the letter provided a perfect coda to a century in which religion played a significant role. Yet for all the ways religion was (and remains) deeply embedded in the United States, historians often ignore it. In a 2004 Journal of American History article, Jon Butler noted that in twentiethcentury historiography, religion often acts like a jack in the box.3 It pops up now and again (Scopes Trial! Nation of Islam! Moral Majority!) and then lies dormant until a new crisis or debate causes it to burst out. To be sure, Butler’s observation was a criticism. As a historian of U.S. religion, Butler recognized that religion and, more specifically, religious people, rarely lie dormant. In ways both ordinary and extraordinary, they act simultaneously as religious folk and everyday Americans—going to services, buying books, lobbying presidents and running for school boards. Thus, while religion only occasionally pops up in many studies of twentieth century U.S. history, its pervasiveness has made for a historiography in the subfield of American religious history that, as John T. McGreevy notes, boasts diversity as an “organizing principle.”4 For historians of U.S. religion, narrating the twentieth century demands making sense of sprawl without reducing it to a grid. One way to make sense of the sprawl is to track two themes, both evident in the HICAD letter. The first focuses on how religious folks contested and defined their religious identities along with their American identity. The second theme considers the role of religion in politics, particularly the role of religious people in political movements and in catalyzing political realignments. Although below I organize the history and historiography around how these themes appear in (roughly) the first and second halves of the century, they run together as people and traditions engaged the political 359

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process as part of their quest to define themselves and their country. Twentieth-century U.S. religion is no more contained by a simple organizing schema than it is reducible to a few jack-in-the-box moments.

1900–1950: Traditions Defining Themselves and Making Claims about the United States In 1908, The Melting Pot opened on Broadway. Written by Israel Zangwill (a Brit), it celebrated Americanization and assimilation. With protagonists who were Russian Jews, Zangwill acknowledged that the new immigrants to the U.S. often were not Protestant Anglo-Saxons. Still, Zangwill lauded their assimilation into “American” culture. The reality of early twentieth-century religion, however, was significantly more complicated, particularly for those who were not Anglo or Protestant. Zangwill’s optimism aside, Jews proved a case in point. Some Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe may have found a more hospitable environment in the U.S. than the one they left, but anti-Semitism existed in the United States and had since the earliest Jewish communities came to colonial America.5 The 1915 Leo Frank case, involving the lynching of a Jewish man falsely accused of rape, testified to AngloProtestant distrust of Jews. So too did restrictive housing practices and exclusions from many clubs and community organizations. The United States also raised questions within Judaism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, three major streams emerged among religious Jews: Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. The movements differed in their adherence to Jewish law and tradition. All faced questions about retaining religious identity in a cultural context where religion was a private choice. They also all faced the reality that many Jews did not affiliate with any synagogue, although the non-affiliated often retained strong commitments to the Jewish people. However, Jewish life in the first half of the twentieth century involved more than negotiating between a sometime hostile larger culture and an oft-divided community. Historians, particularly American Jewish historians, have long explored the significant roles of Jews in shaping U.S. culture and how Jews understood and exhibited their identity as they did so.6 As Melissa Klapper noted, for Jewish women in the suffrage, birth control and peace movements of the early twentieth-century, activism provided a space where Jewish women could choose how to fit together their female, American and Jewish identities even as those identities (particularly the latter two) “played a role in limiting and directing Jewish women’s social and political activism.”7 Studies on Jewish people within larger cultural movements complicate stories too long focused on white Protestants, illumine the various experiences of Jews in the United States and present a fuller picture of U.S. history. Catholics too navigated external distrust and internal tensions while also shaping the larger culture. Early twentieth-century Catholicism was, to borrow historian Tom Tweed’s terminology, a “consolidated” Catholicism.8 Clergy and many laity shared a common agenda: “to build institutions, contest Protestants, mobilize women, engage children, incorporate immigrants, and claim civic space.”9 This last point warrants emphasis. Even as Catholics faced external suspicion, and even as historians have sometimes painted the early twentieth-century church as inwardly focused and parochial, the Catholic Church sought a place in the American mainstream. U.S. Catholics lived out their Catholicism as Americans and comprised a significant percentage of the populace. As Leslie Tentler rightly noted, by sheer dint of numbers, their commitments were significant American commitments, albeit ones that challenged what many Protestant Americans believed to be the country’s values. The Catholic agenda was not parochial. Whether through building hospitals and becoming part of the health care system or engaging public debates about sex and contraception, Catholics sought a prominent place in the country’s public life.10 As Catholics and Jews contested American and religious identities, so too did African Americans. Recent work has emphasized the diverse religious identities of African Americans and their many 360

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strategies for negotiating a racist culture. There was not one strategy because there was not a singular “black church.”11 The black Savannahians who Adele Oltman claimed engaged in a project of “Black Christian Nationalism,” emphasizing middle-class respectability and traditional gender norms as part of a larger project of working toward racial justice, differed from the African American holiness women Anthea Bulter described as challenging both gender norms and racial inequality on the basis of their experience of sanctification and spiritual empowerment.12 Likewise, works focusing on the Great Migration have explored the differing spiritualties and practices of Northern black Christians and Southern immigrants. For example, Wallace Best argued that Southern immigrants to Chicago demanded the black religious establishment include Southern pieties and practices and, in so doing, changed the city’s religious landscape. Lerone Martin demonstrated that black Christians in the Southern diaspora availed themselves of new technology, namely the phonograph, to listen to familiar Southern preachers in the unfamiliar context of the North and Northern black churches.13 Moreover, recent scholarship has attended to groups, often ignored or described as inauthentically religious, that have never been included in the mythical “black church.” Scholars now argue for the theological seriousness of groups such as the United Negro Improvement Association, the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Nation of Islam, all of which arose and gained significant adherents in the North during the 1920s and 1930s.14 In rejecting Christianity and white supremacy, Sylvester Johnson contended that these groups “critiqued the political aims of White religion and the colonial paradigm of White civilizationism.”15 Recent works by Johnson and Edward Curtis focused on how adherents used beliefs and practices from extant religions to address their contexts. Scholars increasingly see the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and the Moorish Temple (among others) as intellectually and theologically robust traditions engaged in a project that drew from sources worldwide and whose telos of black liberation was similarly global. The Pentecostal movement did not start as a worldwide movement, but over the course of the twentieth-century it became one. Pentecostalism emerged among black and white Christians in the early years of the twentieth century with an emphasis on God’s miraculous intervention in everyday life and what adherents called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Like some other Protestants, Pentecostals believed individuals needed a conversion experience. Drawing upon New Testament language, they also emphasized a subsequent event, the Holy Spirit’s baptism, marked by signs such as speaking in tongues (sometimes the sudden ability to speak an extant language, but more often a private prayer language) and spontaneous healing. Some treatments of Pentecostals, particularly white Pentecostals, have portrayed them as largely poor people looking desperately for millennial hope. More recent scholarship has nuanced that view. While some early Pentecostals were certainly what Randall Stephens termed “religious mavericks,” others were more within the mainstream or more interested in joining it.16 For example, Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal preacher who created her own religious empire in California during the 1920s, certainly claimed insider status. McPherson not only built the Angelus Temple, an auditorium seating 5,300 people, owned a radio station (a first for a woman in the United States) and commanded newspaper inches all over the country, but also entered the political realm to “restore” Christian America. As Matthew Sutton argued, her campaigns against teaching evolution and prohibition repeal were part of her effort to craft a Christian identity for the United States and to place her tradition squarely within its mainstream.17

1900–1950s: Religious Folks Are Political Folks Prime position in the mainstream already had other Protestant contenders. For several scholarly generations, the main religious story of the early twentieth century was a contest between liberals and conservatives (called Modernists and Fundamentalists during their famous battles of the 1920s) that culminated in the Scopes Trial. The trial, the story goes, ended in a Fundamentalist rout and their 361

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ensuing cultural quiescence until the 1940s, when some re-emerged with the label evangelical, or until the 1970s when others became culturally engaged through the Religious Right. In this narrative, more liberal versions of Protestantism, largely housed in what became known as “the mainline” denominations, reigned culturally triumphant for a few decades, enjoying public prestige and political access. Recent scholarship nuances and corrects this narrative. Work by scholars such as Matthew Bowman and Priscilla Pope-Levison has contested the simple binary division between liberal and conservatives since it elides people (female evangelists and liberals who called themselves “evangelical” foremost among them) who do not fit nicely on either side.18 Scholars have also contested descriptions of conservative homogeneity. One common trope is that conservatives were uniformly anti-modern. Brendan Pietsch, however, contends that historians have labeled a broad swath of conservatives as Fundamentalists and then defined Fundamentalists as anti-modern, ignoring the ways some conservatives embraced modernity.19 They also embraced politics. White Protestant conservatives consistently participated in politics during the first half of the twentieth century, although whether they overwhelmingly participated as Republicans depended on region. As Matthew Sutton has shown, northern conservatives began identifying with the GOP in the 1920s. They largely disagreed with President Roosevelt, often describing the New Deal as an imminent apocalypse. Works by Alison Collis Greene and Darren Dochuk demonstrate that southern, largely white, conservatives had different political trajectories, both from Northerners and each other. Many started as part of the New Deal coalition, but came to resent an interventionist government. Those Southerners, particularly from Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma, who moved to California in the 1940s to work in the new defense industries, had supported some government assistance during the Depression and certainly welcomed government contracts to manufacturers. They turned away from the Democratic party in California as progressives sought a more active role for the government in the economy and in creating equal opportunity for people of all races. With their strong commitments to individualism and entrepreneurship, these conservatives refashioned conservatism in Southern California and, eventually, the entire country.20 Thus, although the coalition that would become the committed Republican Religious Right did not fully form until the 1970s, conservatives remained active in politics throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Their involvement became particularly evident in the 1950s when, as Kevin Kruse recounts, conservative businessmen reacting against the New Deal helped “invent” the notion of a Christian America in order to promote their economic agenda. Emphasizing the country’s supposed relationship with the almighty, for example, by inserting of “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, served to create a vision of the United States as undergirded by a religion that itself purportedly underwrote free-market capitalism.21

1950–2000: An Expanded Sacred Canopy and What It Means to Be American Even as some conservative Protestants embarked on a new phase of the old errand to make the United States their idea of a godly nation, the country did, after World War II, boast a more inclusive religious landscape. Christian businessmen did not get the Protestant Christian nation they wanted. The move toward a “Judeo-Christian” nation in the 1950s signaled growing acceptance by white Protestant Americans of white Jews and Catholics. While Cold War politics certainly helped unify “godly” Americans against the godless Communist threat, the tri-faith United States was not solely an antiSoviet reaction. Kevin Shultz has demonstrated that the work of Catholic and Jewish groups prior to the war, particularly when they partnered with Social Gospel Protestants in relief agencies, culminated after the war in an expanded sacred canopy, at least for Jews and white Christians.22 Inclusion was a decades-long process, not a Cold War innovation. 362

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This expanded canopy had ramifications for Jewish religious identity, albeit not always clear or consistent ones. According to Lila Corwin Berman, many mid-century Jewish leaders promoted a sociological definition of Jewishness, a definition they believed described Jews both as both distinctive and good Americans. That definition began to unravel as Jews looked more and more like their non-Jewish neighbors and increasingly married and reared children with them.23 While Jews did not lose their identity in the 1960s, they had to articulate it in different ways. Increasing intermarriage in the late twentieth century also forced consideration of what it meant to be Jewish.24 Still, scholars have argued Jewish identity remained significant. In their work on postwar Jewish women, Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn and Rachel Kranson argued that “as American Jewish women negotiated the constraints of the postwar years, they looked to Jewish cultural traditions, political networks, and religious institutions for opportunities to transcend the boundaries of domesticity.”25 The expanded canopy might have meant less hostility, but it did not undermine the distinctive networks and commitments Jewish women relied upon as they engaged public life. Likewise, the clear extension of the sacred canopy to Catholics settled some questions about Catholicism’s place in the United States (namely that it had one) and raised others. As it had before the war, the Catholic Church continued its involvement in social issues. Since the election of the first Catholic president in 1960, in a campaign that saw John F. Kennedy strongly avowing church-state separation, Catholics became increasingly influential in U.S. politics. If, as Lawrence McAndrews notes, they did not always get what they want—“just wars” and an end to abortion, to name two things—the church successfully shaped debates and forced the country to discuss its concerns.26 It is worth noting, however, that “the Catholic Church” suggests a much more united entity than what exists. Some scholars claim that, particularly since the 1960s with the reforms of Vatican II, increased acculturation on the part of many Catholics and increased immigration, there are American “Catholicisms.” Late twentieth-century Catholics included liberals who rejected church teachings on birth control and conservatives who fought against what they perceived as the post-Vatican II church’s capitulation to the modern world; Cuban exiles who, while making common cause with other Catholics, retained a national identity; and independent Catholics who broke communion with the Vatican and often took progressive stances on issues such as ordination for LGBTQ persons and women.27 Although the image of an expanded sacred canopy rightly names a more inclusive religious landscape, it also elides exclusions, both religious and racial. Native Americans, for example, encountered government policies that proved a mix of increasing permissions and continuing repressions. Tisa Wenger has shown that during the Pueblo Indian Dance controversy of the 1920s, some Pueblos and their white supporters successfully made the case that the dances were religious and, thus, constitutionally protected.28 Yet religious freedom did not protect Native Americans from having their children sent to government boarding schools to be “Christianized” and “civilized” well into the 1930s. Nor did it protect all religious practices. In 1918, the Native American Church (NAC) incorporated, largely to protect the use of peyote, which the government considered a drug, in its central ceremony. The NAC battled state and federal laws against peyote throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In perhaps the most momentous religious freedom ruling of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court in the 1990 Smith v. Oregon case accepted peyote as a religious practice, but refused to protect it (or any other religious practice needing special exemptions). For Native Americans, identifying some practices as “religious” bore another cost. As Wenger wrote, “to make the case for religious freedom, Indians have had to represent their traditions according to prevailing concepts of what counts as religion.”29 Gaining protections on everything from Pueblo Dances to peyote demanded accepting the Euro-American separation of the religious and non-religious. That is not to suggest that Native Americans fully adopted Euro-American understandings of religion, or that Native American lifeways are static. Rather, it suggests the careful and creative navigating many Native Americans have done to survive in white institutions. Take Native Americans in the largely white Assemblies of God denomination. Angela Tarango contends that they 363

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used Pentecostal theology, particularly a commitment to Indigenous control over churches, to advocate for religious autonomy and authority. Like the Pueblo, Native American Pentecostals adapted a largely white tradition to make the case for their spiritual sovereignty.30 The postwar era’s larger canopy also failed to erase historic exclusions of African Americans. Histories of the civil rights movement have considered the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in addressing Southern segregation. Beyond the obvious contributions—many of the most visible national leaders were ministers and churches provided recruitment networks—recent scholarship has found others. Religion provided a site where black and white Southerners could participate in what Paul Harvey has called “racial interchange” or “the exchange of southern religious cultures between white and black believers in expressive culture.” These interchanges led to “liminal moments” where shared experiences transcended race and sowed the seeds for a more long-lasting “Christian interracialism” opposed to racial segregation.31 According to David Chappell, black churches also provided theological resources, particularly hope, that contributed to the civil rights movement’s success.32 Other historians have focused on ways the movement was and should be treated as exceptional. Barbara Dianne Savage has called the movement “miraculous” but cautioned that “it was brief, bold, and breathtaking, difficult to replicate or sustain, and experienced firsthand by only a small remnant of true believers.”33 Miraculous moments should not be treated as paradigmatic of black religious movements, nor used, implicitly or otherwise, to sustain narratives of the naturalness of religion for black people. Historians can explore the import of religion within the movement without “burdening” (to use Curtis Evans’s term) African Americans with the expectation that their religious institutions should be uniquely capable of affecting significant social change. Changes wrought in the 1960s have continued to reverberate throughout U.S. culture. The story in religion is no different. One significant change came in 1965 with alterations to U.S. immigration law. Immigration laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries favored European immigrants. These laws served a larger agenda of defining U.S. identity as white and Christian (with a partial exception for Jews). The Supreme Court encoded that understanding in a 1923 ruling in which Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh, was denied citizenship. As an Indian, and, hence, of Aryan descent, Thind was white, but the Court decided that Americanness demanded both whiteness and Christianity.34 The year after the Thind decision, Congress lowered immigration quotas even for European immigrants, effectively stemming the tide of immigration for several decades. When Congress rewrote the laws in 1965, multiple criteria, rather than simply country of origin, determined who could emigrate. Although Christians still constituted the majority of immigrants, more people who were not Christian or Jewish emigrated to the United States than ever before. Muslims were a case in point. Although Muslims had been in the United States since colonial times, sustained communities only appeared in the early years of the twentieth century when immigrants from Greater Syria arrived. In 1934, they established the oldest surviving U.S. mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Even more Muslims immigrated after 1965. The story of this post-1965 Islam is one of increasing diversity. Recent immigrants joined African American Muslims—including those who followed former Nation of Islam leader W. D. Mohammed into Sunni Islam—white converts, and third- and fourth-generation Muslims. According to Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Muslim organizations tried to create a pan-Islamic identity among American Muslims without success.35 Diversity within religious traditions is an old American story. Buddhists too came to the United States in increasing numbers after 1965. Like Muslims, they had boasted some communities prior to the changes in immigration. Japanese Buddhists started the Buddhist Mission to North America in the last years of the nineteenth century. World War II and the internment of around 120,000 Japanese Americans prompted the mission to change its name to the Buddhist Church of America and to create a congregational style familiar to Christians and Jews.36 While the BCA remained primarily immigrant, Buddhism also grew in the white population both in terms of converts and in the appropriation of Buddhist practices such as mindfulness.37 364

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As the sacred canopy expanded, some Americans questioned the assumption that God and country should be so twined. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Christian missionaries were among the doubters. At the turn of the twentieth century, many missionaries assumed a close relationship between Christianity and Western civilization. During the twentieth century, however, some missionaries rejected the notion that salvation demanded Christian faith. Usually associated with mainline denominations, these missionaries turned increasingly to alleviating social ills. Particularly after 1960, some mainline denominations and missionaries claimed that the United States contributed to the problems they were addressing abroad.38 They were not alone. William Svelmoe and Alan Scot Willis, among others, have shown that diffidence toward their nation was not the sole provenance of more theologically liberal missionaries. Cameron Townsend, founder of the evangelical group Wycliffe Bible Translators/Summer Institute of Linguistics, criticized U.S. policies toward Mexico and in the 1930s worked with that country’s socialist president, Lázaro Cárdenas.39 During the 1960s, missionaries and the mission executives in the Southern Baptist Convention prodded the convention on race, urging it to reject the racist practices of the U.S. South in order to be both faithful and effective abroad.40 Involvement in what was increasingly a worldwide missionary movement provided opportunities for American missionaries and their supporters to hear theologically conservative Christians abroad critique U.S. policy. Even many missionaries who maintained that Christian faith was necessary for salvation untwined God from country.

1950–2000: Religious Rights and Lefts Of course, not all conservatives accepted such untwining. Those who participated in the Religious Right certainly wanted the United States to maintain what they perceived to be a necessary relationship with God. Scholars have produced much literature about this group and on late twentieth-century religious conservatives more generally. The literature demonstrates that good scholarship on the Religious Right requires nuance, particularly since there is often so little in popular literature. It is tempting to describe the Religious Right as a monolith. Yet as Neil Young has argued, for the three groups who contributed most to the Religious Right—evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons—cooperation across religious lines did not dissolve theological disagreements. At times, leaders within each group emphasized the import of distinctive theology over the unity of political coalitions.41 Furthermore, good scholarship has corrected truncated narratives that make the Religious Right a jack-in-the-box, suddenly appearing just in time to elect Ronald Reagan. Conservatives never retreated from politics and they certainly did not burst without warning on the political scene. What changed in the last part of the twentieth century, as Daniel K. Williams pointed out, was a consistent identification with one party and over time, significant influence within that party.42 Although the Religious Right did not emerge whole cloth in 1980, it certainly bore the imprint of changes wrought in the 1960s and 1970s. Exactly what changes mattered most for its emergence, however, remains contested. Molly Worthen has argued that an increasingly secular nation produced within the white evangelical movement differing responses to new social, political and intellectual challenges. Not all evangelicals became part of the Religious Right, but some did as they sought to define a Christian worldview that, among other things, could shape public life.43 Other scholars emphasize political developments, particularly the civil rights movement and feminism. Some focus on the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision catalyzing the right; others attribute its rise to the protection of the tax-exempt status of so-called segregation academies and Bob Jones University (which had a policy against interracial dating). Seth Dowland presented a narrative that brings together various strands of scholarship, including race and abortion, in arguing that white evangelical feared the dissolution of the nuclear family owing to feminism, the sexual revolution, gay rights and the desegregation of protected, “family-friendly” white neighborhood 365

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enclaves.44 Their “family values” proved a potent political slogan and encapsulated their major concerns. Not surprisingly, given the issues on which the Religious Right focused, much of the recent work about it pays significant attention to gender. Scholars have long been interested in how Protestant conservatives have used gender to solidify inter-group identity and how women particularly have navigated gender roles that would seem to (or do) deny them authority in their communities. According to Betsy Flowers, questions related to the ordination of women, for example, were at the center of the Southern Baptist Convention’s postwar history and the consolidation of power by denominational conservatives in the 1980s.45 Championing traditional masculinity in “Christian” ways helped in the success of ventures as seemingly disparate as Billy Graham revivals and Walmart.46 A growing literature on politically liberal evangelicals and the Protestant mainline has joined the extant literature on conservatives. The “evangelical left,” a constellation of groups espousing many traditional evangelical orthodoxies, or at least practicing evangelical piety, while criticizing the right’s comfort with militarism, capitalism and (at least what the left sees) as sexism and increasingly heterosexism, has received recent attention.47 Groups such as Sojourners, led by Jim Wallis, and Evangelicals for Social Action, founded by Ron Sider, contended that American Christians have sold their Christian birthright for a pottage of American (read as conservative) identity. Scholars have also recently attended to one of the questions posed about both the evangelical left and the mainline, namely, why they were not more efficacious. Certainly, the mainline “declined” in the last decades of the twentieth century if you measure in pew-sitters and dollars contributed. Yet the mainline was more successful than declining numbers might suggest. David Hollinger has demonstrated that on issue after issue, the mainline won in the larger culture: pluralism has been embraced (to the extent that growing numbers of people identify as non-religious), and more and more ways of arranging one’s family are seen as acceptable (the mid-1990s saw some of the earliest moves toward general acceptance of same-sex relationships).48 What the mainline achieved in the late twentieth century was not unlike what Matthew Hedstrom argued it did in the early twentieth century—an adoption by the culture at large of the spiritual themes in religious liberalism.49 Because cultural observers (historians often included) have been looking for jack-in-the-boxes, they have not noticed the profound changes the Protestant mainline made to the U.S. landscape itself.

Conclusion The religious landscape in 2001, when Hindu Americans protested their exclusion from an evangelical president’s prayers, was the product of an “American century” deeply influenced by religion. Not all Americans were religious by the end of the century, but all had to contend with the effects of religion in public life. Historians must also contend with religion. It is worth revisiting our narratives where religion does not appear to ask how it might have played a role. Were people who made purportedly secular arguments during the workday reading religious books before bed? How might various forms of activism have relied on religious networks? There is also much work to do in uncovering untold stories. While it may be difficult to know what stories we do not yet know, it seems reasonable to suggest that those stories whose sources are not in English—those of immigrant groups, for example—remain woefully understudied. Religious actors do not begin to affect the United States only when their adherents can write the president in English. The field of religious history, then, will become ever more sprawling. The two themes I ­identified— identity and political involvement—may well not weave through all the stories that remain to be told. Other themes will emerge and new questions arise. But, whatever they are, if we do our work well, the picture of religion as a jack-in-the-box will be impossible to sustain. 366

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Notes 1 Prema Kurien, “Mr. President, Why Do You Exclude Us from Your Prayers? Hindus Challenge American Pluralism,” in Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in a Multireligious America, ed. Stephen Prothero (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 119–138. 2 “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Religion,” Gallup News, n.d., www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx; and Frank Newport, “Americans Remain Very Religious, but Not Necessarily in Conventional Ways,” Gallup News, 24  December 1999, www.gallup.com/poll/3385/americans-remain-very-religious-necessarily-conventionalways.aspx. 3 Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (March 2004): 1357–1378. 4 John T. McGreevy, “American Religion,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 243. 5 Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 200 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 6 The March 2009 volume of American Jewish History has a forum regarding the “invisibility” of Jews in the larger field of U.S. history. 7 Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 3. 8 Thomas A. Tweed, America’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 11 Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 12 Adele Oltman, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 13 Lerone A. Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 14 Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Edward E. Curtis, IV, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960– 1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 15 Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000, 274. 16 Randall J. Stephens, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 17 Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18 Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Priscilla Pope-Levison, Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 19 B. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 20 Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012); Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 21 Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Reprint ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 22 Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, Reprint ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 23 Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 24 Sylvia Barack Fishman, Double or Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Marriage (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004).

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Sarah Ruble 25 Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson, “Introduction,” in A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in Postwar America, ed. Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 3. 26 Lawrence McAndrews, What They Wished for: American Catholics and American Presidents, 1960–2004 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 27 Gerald Poyo, Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960–1980: Exile and Integration (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Colleen McDannell, The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Joseph P. Laycock, The Seer of Bayside:Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Julie Byrne, The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 28 Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 6. 29 Ibid., 237. 30 Angela Tarango, Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 31 Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South From the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 3. 32 David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 33 Savage, Your Spirits Walk, 2. 34 Jennifer Snow, “The Civilization of White Men: The Race of the Hindu in the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 259–282. 35 Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 36 Duncan Ryūken Williams, “From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: Lessons from the Internment of Japanese American Buddhists,” in Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in a Multireligious America, ed. Stephen Prothero (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 63–78. 37 Jeff Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 38 Scott Flipse, “To Save ‘Free Vietnam’ and Lose Our Souls: The Missionary Impulse, Voluntary Agencies, and Protestant Dissent against the War, 1965–1971,” in Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, ed. Grant Wacker and Daniel H. Bays (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 206–222; Sarah E. Ruble, The Gospel of Freedom and Power: Protestant Missionaries in American Culture After World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 39 William L. Svelmoe, A New Vision for Missions: William Cameron Townsend, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the Culture of Early Evangelical Faith Missions, 1896–1945 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). 40 Alan Scot Willis, All According to God’s Plan: Southern Baptist Missions and Race, 1945–1970 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004). 41 Neil J. Young, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 42 Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, Reprint ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 43 Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 44 Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 45 Elizabeth H. Flowers, Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 46 Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 47 Brantley W. Gasaway, Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 48 David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); see also Elesha J. Coffman, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 49 Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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34 FOOD AND HEALTH—A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY Benjamin E. Zeller

Figure 34.1 “Food Will Win the War”—poster urging Americans to ration and save food during World War II. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–54959.

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I spent a semester as a Fulbright scholar in Turku, Finland. Fulbright scholars focus on researching and teaching, but also engaging in what the State Department refers to as civilian diplomacy. For me, this meant a lot of eating with my Finnish colleagues. One evening we agreed to host a Finnish colleague from my department, who asked us to serve “traditional American food.” My spouse and I were flummoxed. What is traditional American food? Meatloaf? Contemporary California cuisine? Tacos? Succotash? Our daughter, then 3 years old, saved us: Macaroni and cheese, she insisted, was the taste of home. This question—what is American food?—has driven historians of food and health for the past half century. The United States of America is an immigrant nation, defined by a patchwork of imported and transposed food practices from a multitude of different cultures. Furthermore, regionalism has defined the United States since before the nation even existed. Food and health practices in one part of the country vary as much from other parts of the country as do the cultures and norms of different nation states in contemporary Europe. This rich and complicated field has provided fertile ground for historical studies of food and health in the United States. This chapter considers food in terms of production, preparation and consumption of edible products, including the histories of what is and is not eaten in the United States. This includes drink, as well the history of what people do not eat. In terms of health, I focus here on health as it relates to food, encompassing the histories of nutrition and diet. I exclude the history of exercise and leisure, as well the history of medicine, as these areas of health are less germane to the intersection of health and food. I trace the major trends in developments of twentieth-century American food practices as well as their historical treatment by scholars. One of the most important storylines I offer is the proliferation of studies on food and health in the past few decades, as well as an impressive increase in methodological diversity.

Situating the Study of American Foodways Cultural historian Megan Elias aptly noted in her reflection on integrating the study of food into public history sites that “food helps to answer larger questions about how cultures change over time and how people define their own cultures.”1 As a part of culture, the history of food and health is an interdisciplinary endeavor. Scholars researching the topic work within a variety of academic settings and disciplines and employ a diverse range of methodological lenses. The historiography of the field therefore cannot be confined only to professional academic historians working in departments of history, but folklorists, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, museum curators and public historians. Uniting these scholars has been the concept of a “foodway” as the shared food practices of a culture, region or nation. Models of health and nutrition are embedded within such foodways. The concept of foodway has now achieved broad acceptance among scholars of food, yet the usage of the term emerged only recently. Folklorist Don Yoder brought the term to prominence in the 1970s, and it is from his work and that of others involved in the interdisciplinary field of folkway and folklore studies that some of the most influential treatments of the history of American food emerged. Yoder received his training in religious studies and focused much of his early work on the study of the Pennsylvania Dutch, which was his own family heritage, a tradition deeply tied to the topics of immigration, religion and agriculture. Yoder himself credited John J. Honigman for coining the term “foodway,” but it was Yoder who popularized it. Yoder emphasized questions of regionalism and the development of differentiation between various American foodways and those of European foodways. His 1971 essay, “Historical Sources for American Foodway Research and Plans for an American Foodways Archive,” followed a year later by “Folk Cookery,” published in a well-respected folklore anthology, served as calls to take seriously American foodways among the scholarly community.2 In the decades that followed, many scholars took up Yoder’s call. The study of food has flourished. American folklorists—and then historians, anthropologists and other academics—turned to food in 370

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the 1970s and 1980s for a particular reason. The late twentieth century witnessed a “food revolution” as baby boomers reacted against the mass-produced foodways of their 1950s childhoods and embraced a variety of alternative food practices ranging from the gluttonous and epicurean to the healthy and simplistic. Most importantly, a new “American cuisine” emerged during this time period that reshaped global foodways. Alice Waters championed what she called a new “California cuisine” emphasizing fresh seasonal local ingredients. Cinemagoers watched as Woody Allen ordered “alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast” at a trendy Los Angeles restaurant, satirizing Waters’s California cuisine, in 1977’s hit Annie Hall. Although tending towards the hagiographic, the essayist and biographer Thomas McNamee got it right in terms of the subtitle to his history of this period: “The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution.”3 While this food revolution churned its way through American gustatory culture, historians of food began to do the same with the history of American food and diet. During these decades, from the 1970s to today, historians increasingly turned to twentieth-century American food and health as areas of research. They joined folklorists, biographers, anthropologists, nutritionists and cultural theorists in charting out the story of twentieth-century American foodways. This new wave of historical research has done much to chart the lived experiences of individuals and groups that previously had received scant attention: women, servants, immigrants and religious minorities. It also has called attention to everyday bodily practices as a location for historical study, challenging the traditional historiographic emphases.

Early Nutritional Models and American Foodways The historical trajectory of American food and health serves as a model of framing the historiography. The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the modern industrial food system as well as the birth of the concept of “health” in the modern sense as rooted in nutrition. Histories of these developments entangle with the broader history of science, a point that Walter Gratzer made in his Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition.4 Focusing on the transatlantic and reaching back into the nineteenth century, Gratzer persuasively argued that models of nutrition constantly change and that the history of nutritional science is mostly a history of scientific errors. Scientific and nutritional dead-ends throughout the early twentieth century included fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of nutrients and hygiene, but a slowly emerging synthesis in the first three decades of the twentieth century led to the birth of the modern model of vitamins and other nutrients. The older model of folk knowledge based on centuries of experience slowly gave way to nutrition science, with its alphabetically labeled vitamins (A, C, D, etc.), minerals and the model of calories, carbohydrates and fats. One cannot help but compare the slow and sometimes retrograde development of health science in the early twentieth century to similar developments in the broader history of the biological science, perhaps most notably detailed in Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man and similar works that chronicled the often-abortive attempts of modern scientists to comprehend the human body.5 Slowly though, the modern consensus emerged. Several excellent histories recount the story of health and food during this period. Harvey A. Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet has become the classic chronicle of this era and the book to which all later studies refer.6 Levenstein argued that the American diet fundamentally reconfigured between 1870 to 1930 due to a confluence of economics and governmental, scientific and cultural actors. The aforementioned discoveries about vitamins and nutrition, the burgeoning fields of home economics and hygiene, shifting family norms and industrial changes are all part of Levenstein’s story. All conspired to lead to the modern scientific and cultural models of nutrition, which continue to this day. Laura Shapiro tread similar ground in her Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, which not only highlighted gender (hence the title) but scientific and cultural shifts as well.7 New ideas of nutrition and healthy eating, and how women 371

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responded and creatively engaged with them, emerged as tropes in Shapiro’s history. Both books have become classics and remain in print; Shapiro updated her volume with a new afterword in 2008. Megan Elias’s Food in the United States, 1890–1945 provided a more recent but quite similar assessment of this formative period and the interplay of cultural, scientific and social changes impacting American foodways. Elias’s book suffered from the fact that it was published in the Greenwood Press “Food in American History series,” which sadly languished after Greenwood’s acquisition by the publishing conglomerate ABC-CLIO. Shapiro and Levenstein’s books by contrast still receive billing through the very popular “Food and Society” series published by University of California Press. All three cover basically the same ground and make essentially the same argument of a massive social shift in American foodways led by developments in nutritive science during this era.

Early Twentieth Century The most significant story in early twentieth-century American history involving food and health is the federal experiment with the legal prohibition of alcohol, enacted in 1919 with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and repealed in 1933. Growing out of the earlier temperance movement, Prohibition drew from religious, social, hygienic and political contexts. The topic has inspired hundreds of popular histories and recently a Ken Burns documentary. While few historians have recently attempted the sort of sweeping histories of the movement that were published previous to the 1980s, scholars have produced numerous monographs detailing specific moments, locations or forces involved in Prohibition.8 Most notable is Michael A. Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, which provided a detailed history of the enactment and enforcement (or lack thereof) and decline of prohibition in this city.9 Read in conjunction with Bruce E. Stewart’s Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle Over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia, one can see the enormous regional differences in the social and cultural history of Prohibition.10 Too often the histories told about food and health in general miss the regional variation, and this is especially true in cases where the story is a national one such as Prohibition. Attention to the differences across region in how and why individuals and groups drank (or not) during Prohibition helps nuance the historiographical treatment. Methodological diversity provides another manner of considering the history of food and health generally and Prohibition in particular. Again, to take just two examples of recent work on this topic: Catherine Gilbert Murdock employed a gender studies approach to the topic in her Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940, whereas Ann Marie E. Szymanski utilized political history in her Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes, a history of the evolution of the temperance movement in early twentieth-century America.11 Though looking at the same movement and in some cases even the same figures, these two historians crafted completely different narratives about the development of ideas and practices about alcohol leading to the Prohibition movement. Yet fascinatingly, all of these texts—and nearly all others published on the topic—gave rather short attention to the actual practice of the drinking of alcohol, focusing more attention on social issues than the actual foodstuff and the associated foodways. Murdock came closest in her chapter on drinking in the Victorian home, but still the focus tended to remain on drinking as a powerful social act and not the drink as a form of food or nutrition. Future cultural historians may find the actual practices of drinking and avoiding drinking during Prohibition to be fruitful areas of research. The methodological and topical diversity that one witnesses in the study of Prohibition represents the broader scholarly engagement with the history of food in America. Looking at works that focus on the history of the first half of the twentieth century, several recent books highlighted this diversity while providing an overview of the types of history and the topics of study that historians currently consider. The sort of topics that historians have recently covered shows the incredible diversity in the 372

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history of food and health and the lack of a central narrative. Rather than develop a metanarrative or historic trajectory, historians have focused on pertinent themes. One recent trend has been to focus on economics and issues of class as uniting the historical developments in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Some historians have simply retread existing Marxist models, while others employed newer social history approaches. Andrew P. Haley’s Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 followed a Marxist historiographic approach and is a good example of that school.12 He focused on social class and followed the conflict model of American historiography, with emphasis on class conflict in particular. Haley chronicled the development of the restaurant as a locus of class-consciousness and argued that middle class Americans worked out their tensions and concerns at and through the table. Haley emphasized the active consumption patterns of primarily urban middle-class Americans, seeing their choices as mediated by topics such as respectability, cosmopolitanism and control. Haley was correct to turn our attention as historians to the fact that developments in food and health during this time period varied by social class, and that the sort of massive foodway shifts witnessed in the early twentieth century did not occur evenly in all places and among all groups. Haley and other Marxist historians have been critiqued for an overreliance on conflict models, and this remains an important area of debate within the study of twentieth-century American foodways. To give another example of the economic turn in the study of foodways, one can look to the other end of the country and production cycle and Douglas Cazaux Sackman’s Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Sackman focused on the social and economic forces in West Coast agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s, including industrial development, immigration and labor issues.13 Writing as a labor historian, Sackman turned our attention to how corporations, industrialists, agriculturalists and the workers they employed created a modern agricultural industry in California. He focused less on conflict but equally on power and social exchange. His approach was apt, as the history of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries does revolve around the industrialization of the American food system, the creation of a new modern agricultural economy rather than the small-scale frontier farmers and the development of a new labor class of food production workers. Yet economic and social history approaches do not tell the entire story of foodway developments during this period. For a more complete picture, one must also consider the work of cultural historians. Though one can plausibly claim dozens of competing forces shaping the American foodways during the early to mid-twentieth century, two best illustrate the sort of changes occurring: first, the emergence of advertising and the response of consumers to advertising; and second, changes in foodways as a result of American involvement in the two World Wars. Americans before the early twentieth century generally ate what they produced, or if they lived in cities, what they could easily and inexpensively buy locally. Certainly this varied by social and economic class, ethnicity and cultural location. Yet by and large choices were limited. With the advent of industrial food production choices became legion and advertising emerged as a force instructing and cajoling American consumers to make choices about what foods were healthiest and best. The study of advertising is itself a distinct historiographic field; however, a good example of the crossover between the history of advertising and the history of food and health is the work of Katherine J. Parkin in her Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America.14 Her book offered an excellent example of how today’s historians have culled through the ephemera of history to uncover the history of American foodways. Parkin studied advertisements in women’s magazines and how they convey ideas about food, nutrition, family and gender. Parkin situated the advertisements within massive cultural shifts occurring during the twentieth century as women entered the workplace and gained greater equality, while simultaneously facing new notions of proper models of food preparation and consumption as ideal homemakers. Food, in other words, functions within a broad matrix of culture and cultural flux. 373

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Food rationing during the two World Wars provides another of the central pivot points of the story of American food and health, not only because of the rationing itself but because of its longterm effects. With European production stalled by the two wars, American food rationing (voluntary during the First, federally mandated during the Second) led to increased exports to the Allies and the emergence of the United States as the world’s breadbasket. A famous propaganda poster during World War I declared that “food will win the war.” It not only did just that, but also reshaped the place of America in the world. As part of the process of globalization, the United States became further integrated into the worldwide food industry. It also led to changes in America foodways with a resurgence of interest in canning and preserving, and later during World War II the “victory garden” phenomenon redirected Americans towards a model of home food production many had relegated to the preindustrial past. Both reversed some of the movement towards centralization and industrialization of American food production of the previous half-century. While several excellent histories exist on food rationing during both world wars, Rae Katherine Eighmey’s book on the case of Minnesota during World War I provided a good example of the use of microhistory within the historiography of food and health.15 While it is doubtful that many historians have thought much about the foodways of Minnesota during the years 1917–1919, Eighmey showed in her Food Will Win the War: Minnesota Crops, Cooks, and Conservation During World War I that the consideration of the wartime experience of everyday civilians through their foodways reveals central facets of how Americans experienced the war. As a work of microhistory, Eighmey focused on the experiences of ordinary people in their kitchens, and she employed cookbooks and cultural artifacts as her sources. She delved into individual lives of consumers and producers, politicians and soldiers. It is representative of dozens of similar microhistories of the foodways of particular times and places that have proliferated in recent decades. Summarizing this diverse array of recent works on the early twentieth-century history of American foodways—I have mentioned only a handful out of dozens of books and many more scholarly articles—one cannot help but note the diversity of approaches. Scholars have rightly embedded the study of food and nutrition within broad social and cultural forces, including changes in science, economics, politics and global history. While authors do sometimes overlook the food itself in order to focus on these “bigger” issues, actual foodstuffs remain at the center of the story, even if only because they reveal larger trends to which the authors point. Cultural historian Andrew Haley defended this position in his essay on “The Challenges of American Culinary History.” He wrote that “ultimately, I believe that culinary history offers us meaningful insights into how people thought about themselves and how they related to their bodies, to each other, and to their politics.”16 Studying food and health opens avenues for understanding the history of individuals and groups on a fundamental level.

Postwar Shifts For right or wrong, the 1950s in America is synonymous with suburban middle-class life, which itself features as one of its most potent symbols the suburban family dinner of processed industrial food. This represented a culmination of a number of historical developments beyond merely the new massproduced food industry, including the G. I. Bill, increased education and the birth of the suburbs; segregation and the emergence of a white middle class; the postwar industrial boom, increased income and consumption of household commodities; technological changes including food processing, transportation, refrigeration, microwaves and kitchen appliances; and shifting cultural norms about the nuclear family and the place of mealtime within the domestic sphere. All of these conspired to lead to the development of the suburban kitchen, dinner table and backyard barbeque grill as the loci of a new middle class American identity. Unsurprisingly, historians have turned to this period with gusto. Public historian Laura Shapiro, already mentioned here for her work on early twentieth-century American foodways, more recently 374

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published a history of postwar food, Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America.17 Shapiro emphasized women’s roles and industrial food developments, and how the two interacted in sometimes unexpected ways. While industrial food and professional advertisers pushed processed foods into American kitchens, middle-class American women reacted with a mix of acceptance and hostility. Careful not to project a monolithic view of American women, Shapiro nevertheless indicated that the kitchen remained an arena of female domesticity and that the arrival of industrial food was not always greeted with glee. Indeed, the confluence of gender, industrial food and postwar American foodways has emerged as one of the most important areas of study in the field. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America can be read alongside Shapiro’s Something in the Oven to reveal the tension and creativity at play as mid-century American women responded to the proscriptive messages arriving from both marketers and cookbook publishers about the nature of womanhood, food and household health.18 Neuhaus traced a long history, looking back to the 1920s and forward to the 1960s, but found the same ideology of domesticity and gender enforced through social and cultural institutions and enacted within individual kitchens. These and other historians persuasively argued that food and cooking in the home became a domain where mid-century American women as homemaking mothers wrestled with issues of gender, family, health and nutrition. Historians have focused less on developments in American foodways during the late 1960s into the 1970s. During this time the postwar foodways represented by processed foods served by white middle-class housewives in picket-fenced suburbs achieved cultural dominance. Yet by the late 1970s, a food revolution was brewing. The aforementioned work by McNamee on Alice Waters and the California food revolution helped trace the food revolution of the late 1970s into the 1980s, during which new models of health, diet, active lifestyles and an emergent “foodie culture” reshaped American foodways into their more contemporary forms.19 Such models included new scientific approaches to nutrition, cultural norms about exercise and diet and a shift towards fresh, seasonal and regional foods. At the same time, globalization reminded both diners and historians that what people have historically eaten must be understood as embedded within the flows of people, products and cultures. Perhaps because the history is so recent, and historians have not had the benefit of hindsight, relatively little historical work has been published on these transformations of the 1970s into the 1990s. Food critics, food anthropologists, nutritionists and modern-day food revolutionaries can be read to supplement this lack of historical attention. The story of the fragmentation of the monolithic American foodways during the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century remains to be written.

Major Historiographic Themes While gender and its relationship to American kitchens and big agribusiness represent one of the most fruitful areas of recent research—especially when considering the mid-century period—another area of equal important and scholarly focus has been the study of American foodways as they relate to immigration and ethnicity. Two of the most influential books on American foodways published in the last fifteen years focused on these topics, each taking a long historical glance that covers nearly a century: Hasia R. Diner’s Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration and Psyche A. Williams-Forson’s Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power.20 These two books are the most frequently cited by today’s generation of historians of American foodways because they so persuasively tied food and health to matters of ethnicity, race, class, gender and immigration, issues that have come increasingly to the fore in the wake of globalization. Hardly a university course or monograph on recent American foodways does not include or cite the work of Hasia Diner. Diner argued that food played a central role in immigration and the lives of newly immigrated Americans, and that food must be at the center of the story of immigration and therefore the story of America. She noted that in many cases, hunger and malnutrition pushed 375

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individuals and groups out of the Old World to the United States. Having arrived in a land of plenty, they used food to construct new ethnic identities in America. The adaptation and creation of new food traditions by these three ethnic groups varied, as did the need or desire to assimilate into broader American foodway culture. Yet in each case, Diner argued, immigration led to the creation of Italian American, Irish American and Jewish American foodways distinct from those in Europe. Diner did not take the next step in Hungering for America of showing how these three ethnic foodways (and others) fundamentally reshaped American foodways, but one can read this into her history as a sort of implicit footnote. Other historians have therefore picked up where Diner left off, and argued persuasively how immigrant food actually created a new American foodway over the course of the twentieth century. To provide only two examples: American geographer Richard Pillsbury argued in his No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place that such “foreign” ethnic foods as spaghetti and bagels became the hallmarks of American cuisine.21 He pushed his argument too far, since some foods remain marked as foreign even in the twenty-first century, but his overall point is a valid one: out of the various immigrant foodways a new American foodway was born. In an analogous way, one can make the case that some ethnic foodways were really born in America. “Chinese food” and “Jewish food” are amalgamations of various regional cuisines repackaged for American consumption in California and New York, but now have taken on lives on their own. Simone Cinotto made an excellent case for this sort of process in The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City, noting that the immigrants’ creation of “Italian food” was distinctive from the regional cuisines of Italy and in fact was a unique American innovation.22 One can make similar arguments about many other ethnic immigrant foodways. Williams-Forson’s Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs turned our attention from immigration and ethnicity to race and ethnicity. She focused on African American foodways and particularly the way that black women have interacted with the chicken as symbol and foodstuff. Delving into the nineteenth-century history of slave provisions and female black cooks, early twentieth-century black women entrepreneurs and contemporary film and literature, Williams-Forson viewed food as a lens through which to read the history of race and gender in America. Williams-Forson’s work achieved broad public attention, with reviews in the New York Times Book Review and other outlets, and helped to spread the historical study of food into the public arena. She did not offer a specific narrative or seek to craft a broad argument about food and health, but nevertheless the book achieved wide recognition for its placement of food practices at the center of the study of African American history and life. Historians have produced many excellent monographs on individual ethnic groups and their foodways, but the four groups covered by Diner and Williams-Forson receive the most attention. Frederick Douglass Opie’s Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America and Rebecca Sharpless’s Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 merit consideration for providing two very different approaches to exploring African American engagements with food.23 While Opie turned his attention to the foodways produced by black Americans for themselves, Sharpless considered the unusual case of a foodway emerging from one ethnic group that cooks for another. Both these texts, alongside that of Williams-Forson, helped demonstrate that we cannot study African American foodways as monolithic or uniform. One could add numerous examples of how historians have approached Jewish American foodways, Irish American foodways and Italian American foodways in analogous ways. The past two decades have seen a new historiographic trend in the study of American foodways: “biographies” of particular foods, such as cod, corn, peanuts or tomatoes. Generally tightly told stories of culture at work in the emergence or creation of specific foods as central to American foodways, the best of these histories are microhistories that illuminate important forces at play in American society. The worst of such histories are narrow and dull. Science, nutrition, economics, politics, social class, race and region all emerge as players in these histories. 376

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Listing these food biographies would be a fruitless endeavor, given their sheer volume. Andrew F. Smith, a culinary historian who has worked extensively on tomato history as well as edited The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, has alone authored nearly a dozen such food biographies. His Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food stands out as a good example of the entire historiographic trend.24 Smith chronicled the pre-modern history of tomato soups, American agricultural developments in the nineteenth century, economic and scientific changes in the canning industry and social and cultural developments in the twentieth century that led tomato soup to stardom. Its subsequent immortalization at the brush of Andy Warhol was perhaps the most obvious demonstration of its new fame. Smith’s more recent historical work on sugar, hamburgers, potatoes and turkey all followed the same pattern. There is a rough division among such food biographies among those who emphasize social developments in industry, government and politics in telling their histories, and those who focus on cultural shifts in taste, diet, material and consumption patterns. Though one might roughly envision this as a divide between social/cultural and production/consumption, the separation is not a firm one. Among the best of recent books taking a more “social” approach to food biographies, Carolyn Thomas de la Peña’s Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda and Amy Bentley’s Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet both do an excellent job of showing how the economics, politics and science of food all combine to lead to new developments in food and health.25 Two books with a more “cultural” approach, emphasizing the material culture and consumption side of food and health, are Paul R. Mullins’s Glazed America: The History of the Doughnut and Maria Balinska’s The Bagel: the Surprising History of a Modest Bread.26 What unites all these approaches is a tendency to read a broad and expansive history through a single food product, following the pattern of typical microhistories. Though focusing on one or more specific foodways, such historians paint with a broader brush.

An Example of Thematic Approaches: Religion and Food Some of the major themes that have emerged from this consideration of the historiography of food and health in twentieth-century America have included gender, region, material culture, ethnicity and food biographies. Because the production of food history is scattered among different fields and subfields, it is difficult to summarize the most salient of these themes and most important historiographic developments for the entire topic. Professional and public historians, food critics, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, curators, nutritionists and area studies specialists have all contributed to the academic study of the history of American foodways. Rather than seek to do the impossible and summarize a disparate field comprised of scholars in multiple disciplines, programs and institutional locations, I conclude this chapter with an example of how the historiography has developed within one particular academic community, that of scholars of American foodways working on the topic of religion and food. I focus on this area not only because it is one within which I have worked, but because it highlights themes such as embodiedness and vernacular practice that may offer fruitful future areas of research for other scholars. The historiography of religion and food in America also reveals patterns that have developed in other subfields and specialties. Though some specialists in American religious history had shown interest in food as it relates to religious customs as early as the 1970s and the work of folklorist Don Yoder’s studies on the Pennsylvania Dutch, no historian attempted to write systematic histories of food practices among any American religious group before Daniel Sack’s Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.27 Sack’s work grew out of his involvement with the Material History of American Religion Project, which itself grew out of the “material turn” in American religious history that increasingly looked to material culture, vernacular and folk practices and what came to be called “lived religious” practices of everyday people. The mainline and mainstream white Protestants Sack studied had not previously 377

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been considered as producers of any particular religious foodway, and generally were studied as builders of institutions and writers of theology. Sack showed how in fact such Protestants had developed a unique array of food practices, ranging from specific approaches to sacramental food consumption to soup kitchens to church potlucks. Sack challenged other historians of American religion to remember that Methodists, Presbyterians and their fellow Protestants indeed participated in food practices and not merely biblical studies. Four years later, fellow Material History of American Religion Project participant R. Marie Griffith published Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity.28 Griffith expanded Sack’s focus on mainline white Protestants to include alternative Christian movements, including the metaphysically oriented New Thought movement, African American groups and Christian weight loss movements. She focused on food and health as arenas of contestation and control, realms where individual American Christians wrestled with questions about what it means to be embodied and the meaning of the body itself within the Christian context. She argued that ideas about health and food emerged from religious ideologies about the nature of the divine, the material and the relationship between the two, as well as discourses about science, race, ethnicity and gender. American religious historians researching food since the publication of this book have looked to it as a historiographical pivot point. Two other books have fundamentally shifted the conversation and led to burgeoning interest in food among American religious historians. Both are anthologies whose editors intentionally sought to broaden the study of religion and American foodways. Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch’s Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias looked to food and foodways among Americans seeking to create utopian projects, ranging from sixteenth-century Puritans to twentieth-century hippies.29 Many of the same themes that Sack and Griffith developed—the need to look at everyday practices and questions of embodiment—percolated through the histories included in Eating in Eden. The book was followed almost a decade later by another anthology, Religion, Food, and Eating in North America, edited by Benjamin E. Zeller, Marie W. Dallam, Reid L. Neilson and Nora L. Rubel.30 The editors of this anthology explicitly saw themselves as working towards coherence in a burgeoning field of study, and sought to bring together an array of voices of historians interested in American religion and food. These included specialists in specific religions (Protestantism, Judaism, Buddhism and Mormonism) as well as historians interested in thematic considerations such as vegetarianism, interreligious contact and race. The editors argued that four foodways themes, which they labeled as theological, identity, negotiated and activist, can provide structure to the study of American religious food and health. Contemporary American religious historians look to these four books as part of a historiographic trajectory that marks the development of the study of religion and food from an unrecognized field to an inchoate one to an organized subfield within U.S. religious history. From Sack’s initial argument that historians really ought to study food and not just theology among religious Americans, to the attempts of Zeller et al. to provide an organizational model for the subfield, one can see in a twentyyear period the emergence of a new scholarly community of researchers interested in the history of religion and American foodways.

Future Directions There exists tremendous popular interest in the history of heath, food and eating in the United States. University presses and trade publishers alike have rushed to respond to this interest, as have departments of history, the media, museums and other cultural institutions. In her 2004 essay titled “Ruminations on the State of American Food History,” food writer Sandra Oliver lamented that “the study of food history is burdened by too much reliance on cookbooks, the overrepresentation of the elite, and an underrepresentation from material culture and the craft of historic cookery.”31 This criticism, though fair at the time, has clearly faded in the past decade. 378

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The past forty years witnessed a food revolution involving new models of health, nutrition, diet, food and drink choices and broader food culture. California Cuisine, Julia Child, the Food Network, celebrity chefs, food reality television, dieting crazes, vegetarianism, holistic and alternative health and body movements and the foodie subculture have all fundamentally reshaped American foodways. Future generations will write the histories of these specific developments, but the tremendous changes affecting contemporary culture have certainly driven today’s historians to look backwards and ask if similar shifts and developments occurred in the long twentieth century as well. As should be clear by the historiography, the answer is yes. Simultaneously, the emergence of Food Studies as an academic field has led to a burgeoning interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse movement of scholars interested in the history of religion and food in the United States. This has been institutionalized in publisher series such as the University of California Press’s “California Studies in Food and Culture” and Columbia University Press’s “Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.” A complete list of just the monographs and anthologies published in these two series on topics related to twentieth-century America would be exhaustive, and one could in fact write the historiography of the field just by studying the backlists and current catalogs of these two presses, alongside a few others active in the subfield, such as the University of North Carolina Press, Greenwood Press (now ABC-CLIO) and Johns Hopkins University Press. Historians have aptly and justifiably focused in the past twenty years on fleshing out the history of food and health in America, developing what is a comparatively new field of study. Other than a few common themes than run across the scholarship, such as gender, ethnicity and materiality, one is hard pressed to find much continuity. As was evident from the example of historians active in the study of religion and food, crafting organizational models or structures for the broader field seems to be the next task of historians active in the study of food and health in the twentieth-century United States. There are, in other words, plenty of dishes laid out before the historian. What is needed is a proper menu.

Notes 1 Megan Elias, “Summoning the Food Ghosts: Food History as Public History,” The Public Historian 34, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 14. 2 Don Yoder, “Historical Sources for American Foodway Research and Plans for an American Foodways Archive,” Ethnologia Scandinavica 5 (1971): 41–44; Don Yoder, “Folk Cookery,” in Folklore and Folklife, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 325–350. 3 Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Penisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). 4 Walter Gratzer, Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981). 6 Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 7 Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 8 The previous historiographic trend of magisterial approaches and grand narratives is best represented on this topic by Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us From Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976). 9 Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 10 Bruce E. Stewart, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle Over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 11 Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Ann Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 12 Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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Benjamin E. Zeller 13 Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 14 Katherine J. Parkin, Food Is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 15 Rae Katherine Eighmey, Food Will Win the War: Minnesota Crops, Cooks, and Conservation During World War I (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010). 16 Andrew P. Haley, “The Nation before Taste: The Challenges of American Culinary History,” The Public Historian 34, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 57. 17 Laura Shapiro, Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Viking Press, 2004). 18 Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Sherrie A. Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). 19 McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Penisse. 20 Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 21 Richard Pillsbury, No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 22 Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 23 Frederick Douglass Opie, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 24 Andrew F. Smith, Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 25 Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Amy Bentley, Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 26 Paul R. Mullins, Glazed America: The History of the Doughnut (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 27 Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 28 R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 29 Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch, eds., Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 30 Benjamin E. Zeller, Marie W. Dallam, Reid L. Neilson and Nora L. Rubel, eds., Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 31 Sandra Oliver, “Ruminations on the State of American Food History,” Gastronomica 6, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 91.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers for figures are in italics. 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Rosenberg) 305–306 1920s 15–24; African American and civil rights history 220–221; agricultural and rural history 307–308; border/lands history 292; consumerism and popular culture 320; economics and capitalism 111; intellectual history 117–119; labor and working class history 153; Latino/a history 229; legal and constitutional history 174; LGBT history 204–205; religious history 361–363; sport and leisure history 339–341; women’s and gender history 117 1960s 61–70; Cold War and 55–56; disability history 351; economics and capitalism 104, 111; food and health history 375; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 162; immigration and ethnicity 259–260, 264; intellectual history 117–119; labor and working class history 154–156, 233–234; Latino/a history 226, 231–235; legal and constitutional history 172; LGBT history 208; metropolitan history 267; Native American history 244; religious history 363–365; social and cultural history 139, 143–144; sport and leisure history 344–345; women’s and gender history 192 1970s 72–83; agricultural and rural history 310–311; American West 282; consumerism and popular culture 315; economics and capitalism 108, 111; environmental history 146, 182–183; food and health history 370–371, 375; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 163; immigration and ethnicity 259–261; labor and working class history 154–156; Latino/a history 226, 232; liberalism and conservatism 133–134; metropolitan history 267; Native American history 245–246; religious history 362; science, medicine, and technology 330–332;

social and cultural history 139–143; sport and leisure history 345 1980s 84–93; agricultural and rural history 310–311; food and health history 371; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 163; immigration and ethnicity 260–262; intellectual history 116; labor and working class history 156; Latino/a history 234; LGBT history 208–209; liberalism and conservatism 131–132; Native American history 246; science, medicine, and technology 330–332; women’s and gender history 194–196 1990s 94–103; food and health history 375; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 163; immigration and ethnicity 261–262; intellectual history 116; LGBT history 208–209; liberalism and 129–130; science, medicine, and technology 331–333; social and cultural history 139; women’s and gender history 194–196 AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act and Administration) 307–308 AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) 340 Abbott, C. 282, 285 ABC (American Broadcasting Company) 343–344 ABC-CLIO (publishers) 372 Abelson, E. 316 Abernathy, R. 220 abortion 72, 77, 88, 96. see also Roe v. Wade (1973) Abramovitz, Mimi: Regulating the Lives of Women 196 Abramovitz, Moses 105 Abrams, E. 133 Abyssinian Baptist Church 221 ACB (American Council of the Blind) 350–351 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 208–209

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Index ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) (1990) 349–353 Adams, D.: Education of Extinction 240–241 Adams, H. 116; The Education of Henry Adams 118 Adams, J. 303 ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) 352 Addams, J. 10, 117, 172; Twenty Years at Hull House 118 Adler, J. 32 adoption practices 246, 254, 263 Adorno, T. 144 AEI (American Enterprise Institute) 76, 132 aesthetic representation 121–122 affirmative action 66, 77, 88, 99, 129–131, 223–224 Afghanistan 51, 74, 87, 101–102 Afghanistan War 254 AFL (American Federation of Labor) 10, 42, 153–154 AFL (American Football League) 343 AFL-CIO 154, 220 Africa 100, 143, 164, 167, 232 African American and civil rights history 213–225; 1920s 15, 18–21; 1960s 61–67; 1970s 77–79; 1980s 88; 1990s 96, 99–100; agricultural and rural history 304–306; American West 285; Cold War 49–54; consumerism and popular culture 316–320; disability history 354; economics and capitalism 109; food and health history 375–378; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 165; Great Depression and New Deal 28–29, 32–33; immigration and ethnicity 259–261; intellectual history 123–124; labor and working class history 20, 152–154; legal and constitutional history 174–178; LGBT history 204, 207; liberalism and 129–130; metropolitan history 268–274; Progressive Era 6–8, 11; religious history 360–361, 364; science, medicine, and technology 333; social and cultural history 140–145; sport and leisure history 339–346; women’s and gender history 123, 152–153, 174–176, 195–199, 207, 271; World War II 43 African American holiness movement 361 African immigration 259, 333 African Methodist Episcopal churches 217 Afro Caribbeans 20, 156 Afrocentrism 96 Afro-Cubans 231 AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) 156 After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Petro) 208 After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Garland) 22 Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Wheeler) 17–18 Age of Contradiction (Brick) 62 Age of Evangelicalism, The (Miller) 97 Age of Fracture (Rodgers) 90, 95, 98, 119–120, 139 Age of Inequality 75

Age of Reagan, The 85 Age of Roosevelt, The (Schlesinger) 26 Agnew, J-C. 120, 316 agribusiness 21–22, 375 Agricultural Adjustment Act and Administration (AAA) 307–308 agricultural and rural history 31, 302–314, 373. see also food and health history agricultural rights movement 233–234 Agrupación Abdala 232 AIDS 89, 96, 130, 208–209 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 208–209 AIDS Foundation 208–209 AIM (American Indian Movement) 64, 72, 244, 284 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 245 Alaska Native villages 238 Al Bundy (television character) 97 Alcatraz Island 244 alcohol 9, 16–18, 372–373 ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) 132 Alexander, M.: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 100, 130, 275 Alexander, S. 174 Algerian War 165–167 Ali, M. 344 Alianza Hispano Americana 228 Alianza Obrera 228 All American Girls Professional Baseball League 341 Allen, H. 31 Allen, W. 371 Alliance for Progress with Latin America 329 All in the Family (Self) 95–96 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (Berman) 143 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Hull and Bell-Scott) 195 Alonso, A.: Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender in Mexico’s Northern Frontier 296 Alonzo, A.: Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 295 Al-Qaeda 101 alt-right 135 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) 340 Amerasia Journal 250–251 America Between the Wars (Chollet and Goldeier) 100 American Academy for the Advancement of Science 326 American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Self) 63, 130, 222, 269 American Broadcasting Company (ABC) 343–344 American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth-Century (Lichtenstein) 120 American Council of the Blind (ACB) 350–351 American cuisine 371 American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) 352 American Dreaming, Global Realities (Gabaccia and Ruiz) 198

382

Index American Empire (Bacevich) 100 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) 76, 132 American Eugenic Society 333 American Farm Bureau Federation 307, 310 American Farmer and the New Deal, The (Saloutos) 307–308 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 10, 42, 153–154 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 156 American Football League (AFL) 343 American Hippies (Rorabaugh) 65 American Humor (Rourke) 140 American Indian Defense Association 242 American Indian Movement (AIM) 64, 72, 244, 284 American Indian Nations From Termination to Relocation (Ulrich) 243 American Indian Religious Freedom Act 245 American Indians. see Native American history Americanization 4, 7–8, 167, 360 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) 132 American Mind Cure 73 American National Exhibition 330 American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Lumpkins) 19 American Psychiatric Association 72, 79; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 206 American Red Cross 167 American Samoa 12 American Sign Language 350, 355 American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) 182 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) 349–353 American Tail, An (film) 261 American West 281–291; Asian American history 252; environmental history 182–186; metropolitan history 269–271; Progressive Era 7; women’s and gender history 196 American Woman Suffrage Association 192 American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941 (Fujita-Rony) 252 America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation (MacCambridge) 342–343 America’s Wars for the Greater Middle East (Bacevich) 100 Ames, R. 87 Amsterdam, D. 272 anarchism 10 Anderson, A.: Reagan in His Own Hand 86 Anderson, C. 165–167 Anderson, J.: Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and the Environment, 1945–1972 309 Anderson, M.: Reagan in His Own Hand 86 Anderson, O. 44 Anderson, T. 62 Andrews, T. 156–157; Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest War 184–185, 286 Angelus Temple 361

Anglo-Saxon identity 6 Annie Hall (film) 371 Anthony, S. 192–193 anti-miscegenation laws 8 Anti-Saloon League 16 anti-Semitism 44, 360 Anzaldúa, G.: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza 294 Apache Frontier: Jacobo de Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain 1769–1791 (Moorhead) 293 apartheid 344 A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Bynum) 20 A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund 220 A. Philip Randolph Institute 220 Appiah, K. 122 Apple 78, 183 Arab Americans 255 Arab countries 74, 101 Arab-Israeli conflict 101, 167 Arafat, Y. 101 “Are Athletics Making Women Masculine?” (Sargent) 339 Arendt, H. 121 Aristotle 116 Arizona 12, 54, 228 Arkush, M. 344 Arledge, R. 343–344 arms race 86 Armstrong, E. 89 Armstrong, L. 51 Arnesen, E. 55; Brotherhoods of Color 152 “Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History” series 379 ASEH (American Society for Environmental History) 182 Asia 151–152, 164, 167 “Asia and Asian Americans in the history of the U.S. West” (Nomura) 252 Asian American history 249–257; border/lands history and 296, 299; immigration 21, 89, 259–264, 333; labor and working class history 152; metropolitan history and 271 Asian American movement 255 Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Chan) 251 Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (Louie and Omatsu) 255 Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life (Fujikane and Okamura) 253 ASPIRA 230 Assemblies of God denomination 363–364 assimilation 10, 230, 238–242, 261–264, 360 associationalism 108–110 Association of American Indian Affairs 244 asylum movement 349 At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Lee) 21, 261, 296

383

Index Atlanta Riots 11 atomic bombs 40, 328 At the Dark End of the Street (McGuire) 63 Attica uprising 80, 275 Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter From the LateNineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Raibmon) 298 Averaged American, The (Igo) 118 Avila, E. 272 Azuma, E.: Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America 253 baby boomer generation 330 Bacevich, A. 102; American Empire 100; America’s Wars for the Greater Middle East 100 Backlash (Faludi) 88 Backwoods Pragmatists (Flores) 122 Bagel: the Surprising History of a Modest Bread (Balinska) 377 Baker, E. 217–218 Bakker, J. 72 Bald, V.: Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian Americans 256 Baldoz, R.: The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946 252 Baldwin, D. 28; Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life 20; Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem 20 Baldwin, J. 119, 123 Balinska, M.: The Bagel: the Surprising History of a Modest Bread 377 Balkans 100 Balogh, B. 107 Baltimore Colts 343 Banana Cultures (Soluri) 188 bank failures 27, 108 banks 77–78, 98, 110 Bannon, J.: The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821 293–284 Baptist churches 217–218 Baptized With the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America (Lowe) 305 Barak, E. 101 Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Weber) 294 Barker Devine, J.: On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farmwomen’s Activism Since 1945 310 Barman, J.: Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 298 Barnett, I. 17 Barr, J.: Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands 294 Barraclough, L. 272 Barron, H.: Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 303 Basch, L.: Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States 262

baseball 338–342 Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Tygiel) 342 basketball 338, 342, 345 Bass, A. 344 Bates, B.: Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America 20 Batlan, F. 174, 177 Battle of Mogadishu 101 Battle of the Bulge 40–41 Battle of the Sexes tennis match 345 Battling Miss Bolsheviki (Delegard) 198 Bauman, R. 67 Bayly, C. 39 Baynton, D. 349; “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” 353–354 BCA (Buddhist Church of America) 364 BD (comic strip character) 355 Beard, C. 38–39, 105, 133, 140 Beard, M. 140; Woman as a Force in History 192 beauty culture 199 Beauty Shop Politics (Gill) 199 Becker, C. 140 Beckert, S. 106, 120, 157, 168 Becoming Mexican-American (Sánchez) 153 Bederman, G.: Manliness and Civilization 195 Beecher, C. 193 “Beginnings of Sisterhood” (Melder) 193 Bell, D. 48–49, 120 Bell, J. 67 Bell Curve, The 96 Bell-Scott, P.: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave 195 Bender, T. 262 Bending Toward Justice (May) 66 Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian Americans (Bald) 256 Benjamin, K. 273 Bennett, J.: Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building 298 Bennett, W. 135 Benson, D. 232 Benson, S. 316 Bentley, A.: Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet 377 Bentley, G. 204 Benton-Cohen, K.: Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands 295 Berger, P. 119 Bergin, A. 111 Berkeley, CA 351–352 Berlage, N. 307 Berlin Wall 48, 84–86 Berman, L. 363 Berman, M.: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air 143 Bernanke, B. 27 Bernstein, D. 173

384

Index Bernstein, R. 121 Bernstein, S. 264 Berube, A. 270 Bérubé, A. 205; Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II 44 Best, W. 361 Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Azuma) 253 Beyond Equality (Montgomery) 151 Beyond Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (Yuh) 254 Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Ramos) 295 Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer and Moynihan) 260 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) 241, 244–246 Big Jake (film) 281, 287–288 Big Science 328 Bilingual Education Act 232 Bin Laden, O. 101 Binnema, T.: Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains 298 Biology Studies Curriculum Studies Council 330 Biondi, M. 63 Bird, K. 87 Birk, M.: Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest 304 Birmingham Campaign (1963) 214–215 Birmingham School scholars 142 birth control 10–11, 79 Birth of a Nation (film) 9–11 bisexual history 79, 203–204 Black Against Empire (Bloom and Martin) 64 Black Americans. see African American and civil rights history Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 143 black churches 213, 217–222, 361 Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Levine) 141 Blackfoot 298 Black Freedom Struggle 28, 140, 152, 222 Blackhawk, N.: Violence Over the Land 282 Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Urban Industrial Proletariat (Trotter) 19 Black Nationalism 123 Black Panther Party (BPP) 63–64, 232–233 Black Power 63, 73, 123, 222, 269 black Savannahians 361 Black Student Union 260 Blackwater (private security contractors) 102 Blackwell, M. 64 black/white binary 255–256, 271 Blanc, C.: Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized NationStates 262 Blee, K.: Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s 18 Blight, D.: Race and Reunion 145 blindness 350–351, 354–356

Blood in the Water (Thompson) 275 Blood Struggle (Wilkinson) 244 Bloody Sunday 215 Bloom, A.: The Closing of the American Mind 88 Bloom, J.: Black Against Empire 64 Blower, B. 122 Blumenthal, S. 85 Blyth, M. 111 boarding schools 240–241, 245–246, 350, 354–355, 363 Boardwalk Empire (television show) 15 Boas, F. 140, 242 Bob Jones University 365 Bobos in Paradise (Brooks) 100 Bodnar, J. 145 Bodroghkozy, A. 144 Bolton, H. 296–297; The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest 293–296 Book of Foot-Ball (Camp) 338 Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Davis and Kennedy) 206 Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Meek) 295 Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Mora) 295 border/lands history 274, 292–301; United StatesCanada border 21–22, 283; United States-Mexico border 21–22, 32, 319 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa) 294 borderlands model 292, 298 Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Benton-Cohen) 295 Border Patrol 22 Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–Mexico Borderland (Martínez) 295 Borgwardt, E. 167; A New Deal for the World 41 Boris, E.: Home to Work 152 Bork, R.: Slouching Toward Gomorrah 96 Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Griffith) 378 Borstelmann, T. 76, 165 Borus, D. 118 Bose, S. 41 Bosnia 101 Boston Red Sox 342 Boston Tea Party 317 Bouk, D. 32 Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 (Evans) 297 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 100 Bowman, M. 362 Boyd, N. 272 Boyle, K.: The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 155 Boy Scouts of America 7

385

Index BPP (Black Panther Party) 63–64, 232–233 Bracero Program 230–231, 283 Bradford, M. 135 Bradley, M. 162 Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport (Oriard) 343 Braunstein, P. 73 Brebner, J.: The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years 296–297; New England’s Outpost: Acadia Before the Conquest of Canada, the Explorers of North America 1492–1806 296–297; North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain 296–297 Bretton Woods 108–110 Brick, H. 120; Age of Contradiction 62 Brief History of American Sports, A (Gorn and Goldstein) 338–340 Brief History of Neoliberalism, A (Harvey) 98 Brier, J. 89 Briggs Initiative 208 Brigham, R. 164 Brilliant, M. 55, 177, 264; The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 223 Brinkley, A. 29, 33, 42–43, 52, 109, 176; “The Problem of American Conservatism” 87 Briones, M.: Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America 43–44 Britain 12, 38–39, 151, 254 Brody, D.: Steelworkers in America 150–152 Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto 311 Bronski, M. 205 Brooks, D.: Bobos in Paradise 100 Brooks-Higginbotham, E. 196 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) 20, 152, 214, 218–220 Brotherhoods of Color (Arnesen) 152 Broun, H. 341 Brown, K. 54; Plutopia 187, 287 Brown, R.: Canada’s National Policy, 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations 297 Brownlee, W. 86 Brown Power 269 Brown Threat 255 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 54–55, 172, 177–178, 214, 218, 222, 229 Bruegmann, R. 270 Brundage, A. 344 Brutes in Suits (Pettegrew) 124 Bryant, A. 132, 208 Bryce, B. 292, 299 BSCP (Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) 20, 152, 214, 218–220 Buchanan, P. 97–98, 135 Buckley, W., Jr. 132, 135 Buck v. Bell (1927) 354 Buddhist Church of America (BCA) 364

Buddhist Mission to North America 364 buffalo 184 Buhle, M. 124; Concise History of Woman Suffrage 193 Buhle, P.: Concise History of Woman Suffrage 193 Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Williams-Forson) 375–376 Bulldozer in the Countryside, The (Rome) 187 Bulter, A. 361 Bundy, M. 65 Burch, S. 350, 354 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) 241, 244–246 Bureau of Investigation 17. see also FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Bureau of Reclamation 186 Burger Court 178 Burgin, A. 87, 97–98, 120; The Great Persuasion 119 Burk, R.: Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921 345 Burke, K. 119 Burleigh, M.: Moral Combat 41 Burnham, D. 9 Burns, J. 53; Goddess of the Market 120 Burns, K. 15, 372 Burns, T. 339 Burroughs, E.: Tarzan series 143 Bush, G.H. 96–102, 352–353 Bush, G.W. 96, 100–102, 134–135, 346, 359 Business History Conference 106 business Progressivism 23 Business Roundtable 72, 76 Butler, A. 285 Butler, Jon 359 Butler, Judith 123; Gender Trouble 96 buy American campaign 99 Buzzanco, R. 62, 165 Byers, W. 345 Bynum, C.: A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights 20 Byrne, J.: Mecca of Revolution 167 Byrne, M. 87 Cadava, G. 274, 319 Cahn, S.: Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport 339 Califano, J. 352 California 21–23, 55, 99, 223, 295 California cuisine 371, 375, 379 “California Studies in Food and Culture” series 379 Camacho, J.: Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 296 Camarillo, A.: Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 294 Cambodian refugees 254, 261 Cambridge History of the Second World War, The 39 Cambridge University Press 186 Caminetti v. United States (1917) 17 Camp, W.: Book of Foot-Ball 338

386

Index Campbell, D. 44 Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (Thompson and Randall) 297 Canada’s National Policy, 1883–1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (Brown) 297 Canaday, M. 32; The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America 52, 130, 205 Canadian-American Industry: A Study in International Investment (Southard, Taylor, and Marshall) 296 Canadian border. see United States-Canada border Canadian Born in the United States, The (Truesdell) 297 Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Okihiro) 253 Cannery Workers, Cannery Lives (Ruiz) 153 Cannon, L.: President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime 85 capitalism. see economics and capitalism Capital Moves (Cowie) 110 Capozzola, C. 89 Cappozola, C. 175 CAPs (Community Action Programs) 66–67 Captive, The (film) 204–205 carceral state. see prison system Cárdenas, L. 365 Caribbean 89, 227 Carlos, J. 344 Carnegie foundation 327 Carnegie Series 296–297 Carrigan, C. 228 Carroll, F.: A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783–1842 299 Carroll, T. 271 Carson, R.: Silent Spring 75, 182, 186–187 Carter, D. 88, 98 Carter, J. 74, 81, 352 Caruso, E. 145 Casas, M.: Married to a Daughter of the Land: SpanishMexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 296 casinos 246 Castañeda, A. 296 Castile, G.: To Show Heart 244 Castro, F. 231 Castro, R. 226 Catholic Church 230, 234, 363 Catholics and Catholicism 6, 53, 132, 333, 360–365 Cato Institute 76 Caught (Gottschalk) 100 Cayleff, S. 340 Cazenave, N. 66–67 Cebul, B. 31 censorship 8, 16 Census Bureau 38 Center for Independent Living (CIL) 351–352 Central America 234–235, 259 Central High School (Little Rock, AR) 54–55, 214 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 74, 129, 168 Centre for the Study of Social History 151 Century of Struggle (Flexner) 192–193

Certeau, M. de 142 Chain Reaction (Edsall) 88 Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Maeda) 64, 255 Challenge of Interracial Unionism, The (Letwin) 153 “Challenges of American Culinary History, The” (Haley) 374 Chamberlain, P. 167 Chambre, S. 89 Chan, S. 254; Asian Americans: An Interpretive History 251; Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America 251 Chandler, Albert 342 Chandler, Alfred 107, 163 Chang, K.: Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.– Canadian Borderlands 298–299 Changes in the Land (Cronon) 182–184 Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Reséndez) 295 Chaplin, C. 17, 138 Chappell, D. 364 Chappell, M. 66, 77 charity organization movements 6 Chase, R. 274 Chateauvert, M. 156 Chatelain, M. 271 Chauncey, G. 204, 208; Gay New York 27 Chavez, C. 233–234 Chávez, E. 227 Chávez-Garcia, M. 274 Cheap Amusements (Peiss) 194 Cheney, D. 101–102 Cheng, C.: Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War 255 Cheng, W. 271 Chicago, IL 16, 28, 54–55, 64, 234, 268, 271, 318–320 Chicago Defender 7 Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Baldwin) 20 Chicana/o history 226, 232–234, 294–296 Chicano Americans 64, 79, 129, 140 Chicano movement 233–234 Chicano Raza Unida Conference 234 Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Camarillo) 294 Chickering, R.: A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 39 Chidester, J. 86 Child, J. 379 Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (Riney-Kehrberg) 304 child labor laws 304 children 196, 246, 303–306, 310 Children’s Bureau 18 Chile 74 Chin, C. 165

387

Index China 39, 74, 87, 98–101, 251–253, 259 China Trade Bill (2000) 98 Chinese Americans 7–8, 11, 64, 251, 259 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 21, 259–261, 274 Chinese Historical Association 260 Chinese immigrants 21, 174, 252–253, 261–263 Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (Camacho) 296 Choctaw 241 Chollet, D.: America Between the Wars 100 Chomsky, A. 156 Choosing War (Logevall) 65 Choy, C. 263; Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History 252 Christian amendment 53 Christian Broadcasting Network 78 Christian Coalition 97 Christian Right 76–77, 97, 132–134, 208, 331–332 Christians and Christianity 65, 72, 76–77, 88, 97–99, 134, 241, 338, 346, 359–366, 378. see also specific denominations Christian weight loss movements 378 Christophers, B. 110 Christopher Street Liberation Day 207 Church, F. 74 Churchill, W. 41 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 74, 129, 168 CIL (Center for Independent Living) 351–352 Cinotto, S.: The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City 376 CIO (Congress of Industrial Organization) 29, 42, 154 cities. see metropolitan history Cities of Knowledge (O’Mara) 269 citizenship 229, 241 Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (Cheng) 255 City Beautiful movement 9 City-Wide Committee for School Integration 222 Civilian Conservation Corps 31, 42 civilization program 240–241 Civilizing Capitalism (Storrs) 198 Civil Rights Act (1964) 29, 61, 66, 129, 172, 177, 215, 232, 318 Civil Rights Bill (1991) 99 Civil Rights Era, The (Graham) 66 civil rights history. see African American and civil rights history Civil War Years: Canada and the United States, The (Winks) 297 Clansman, The (Dixon) 11 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings (1991) 100 Clark, K. 222 Clarkin, T.: Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations 244 Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (Woloch) 18 Classroom Wars (Petrzela) 95–96 Clay, C. 344

Clayson, W. 67 Clean Air Act (1970) 75 Clement, E.: Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 17 Clifford, C. 85 climate change 75, 146, 188, 331 Clinton, B. 94, 97–102, 139, 209 Clinton, C. 94 Clinton, H. 94 cliometrics 105–106 closed door policy 21 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom) 88 CNN 78, 84 coal industry 156–157, 184–185, 246, 286–287 Coalition of American Indian Citizens 244 Cobb, D. 284; Native Activism in Cold War America 244 Cobble, D.: The Other Women’s Movement 152 Cohen, A. 29 Cohen, L. 29–30, 111, 273, 317; A Consumers’ Republic 271, 319–320; Making a New Deal 153 Cohen, R. 316 Cohen-Cole, J. 123 COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence programs) 20 Cold War 48–59; 1970s 74–75; 1980s 84–87; 1990s 95, 100–102; American West 285–287; consumerism and popular culture 318; economics and capitalism 105; environmental history 187; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 162–168; immigration and ethnicity 258–259, 263; intellectual history and 119; Latino/a history 231; LGBT history 206–207; liberalism and conservatism 129–130, 133–135; Native American history 244; religious history 362; science, medicine, and technology 326–331; social and cultural history 140, 143–144; women’s and gender history and 197 Coll, S. 87 collective memory 145–146 Collier, J. 242 Collins, R. 85–89 Colombia 5, 156 Colón, J. 228 colonialism 41, 50–51, 156, 183–184, 227, 239–241, 252–254, 284, 292–295 Colorado 184–185 colorblindness 96, 268–269 Colored Cosmopolitanism (Slate) 122 Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Freund) 130 Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (Brilliant) 223 Columbia University Press 379 Comanche 241, 295 Comanche Empire, The (Hämäläinen) 295 Combahee River Collective 207 Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Sport (Cahn) 339

388

Index Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Bérubé) 44 Coming to America (film) 261 Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (Daniels) 260 Commission on Training Camp Activities 17 Committee of Fourteen 6 Common & Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Binnema) 298 Commons, J. 150–151; History of Labour in the United States 150–151 Common Sense and a Little Fire (Orleck) 198 communism 49–56, 74, 86, 154, 231, 259, 328–331, 362 Communist Party 55, 197 communitarianism 95, 100 Community Action Programs (CAPs) 66–67 comparative model 292 Comstock Act 7, 11 Concise History of Woman Suffrage (Buhle and Buhle) 193 Congress: 1920s 17–18, 21–22; 1960s 61–62, 172; 1970s 72, 75, 80; 1980s 89; 1990s 97–102; Cold War 52–54; conservatism and 132; disability history 352–353; immigration and ethnicity 259; labor and working class history 153–154; Latino/a history 227, 232; legal and constitutional history 175; LGBT history 209; Native American history 240, 243–246; Progressive Era 9–12; religious history 364; sport and leisure history 343; World War II 42 Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) 29, 42, 154 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 43, 216–217, 220–222 Connelly, M. 167; A Diplomatic Revolution 165–166 Conner, E. 214 Connolly, M. 168 Connolly, N. 30, 270, 273–275 consensus school 140–142 Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Hays) 185 conservationism 31 conservatism. see liberalism and conservatism Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (Gottfried) 135 “Conservative Ascendency, The” (Critchlow) 133–134 Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Schneider) 134–135 Conservative Mind, The (Kirk) 135 Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989 85 Constitution. see legal and constitutional history; specific amendments consumerism and popular culture 108–111, 176, 315–324; Great Depression and New Deal 29–30; metropolitan history 271–273; Progressive Era 8–9; World War II 29–30 Consumers’ Republic, A (Cohen) 271, 319–320 Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Shah) 256

Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (Yoo) 253 contraception 10–11, 79 Contract with America 98 Cook, J. 146 Cook, W.: Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 298 Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Sharpless) 376 Cooky, C. 346 CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) 43, 216–217, 220–222 corporatism 163 Cosell, H. 343 Costigliola, F. 163–165, 168; “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration” 164–165 Cotkin, G. 117–118, 121 cotton production 157, 308 Coubertin, P. de 341 Council for National Policy 132 Council of Economic Advisors 42 counter-intelligence programs (COINTELPRO) 20 Country Life Commission 304–305 Countryman, M. 63, 269 Courdileone, K. 197 Cowie, J. 33, 52, 87, 141, 155, 175; Capital Moves 110; The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics 130–131; Stayin’ Alive 145, 154–155 Crabgrass Frontier (Jackson) 268–270 crack cocaine 274 Crane, J.: The Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States 182 Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Muncy) 18 creationism 331–332 Crenshaw, K. 196 Crespino, J. 65, 88 Crist, D.: The Twilight War 87 Critchlow, D.: Debating the American Conservative Movement 133; “The Conservative Ascendency” 133–134 Croly, H. 117, 128 Cronon, W. 285–287; Changes in the Land 182–184; Uncommon Ground 188 Crosby, A.: Ecological Imperialism 183 Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Langum) 17 Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ramirez) 297 Crow 240–241 Crow Act (1920) 240 Crucible, The (Miller) 53 Cuba 5, 22, 74, 195, 226–227, 319 Cuban Adjustment Act (1966) 231 Cuban Americans 226–228, 231–232 Cuban Refugee Program 231 Cuban revolution 231

389

Index Cullather, N. 167 Cullen, C. 204 Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (Lahti) 295 cultural history. see social and cultural history cultural nationalism 250–253 cultural turn 139–143, 152, 163–166, 315 Culture and Personality scholarship 123 Culture as History (Susman) 141 Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Lasch) 73 culture wars 67, 88, 95–97, 119, 139 Cumings, B. 40, 112 Cunfer, G.: On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment 308 Curtis, E. 361 Curtis, E.S. 238 Cushman, B. 176 Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Spicer) 293 DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) 209 Dailey, J. 43 Dakota Access Pipeline 284 Dallam, M.: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America 378 Dallek, R. 66, 85 Danbom, D. 310; The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 305 Daniels, R.: Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life 260; Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in WWII 254–255 Darnton, R. 142 Dart, J. 352 Darwin, C. 118, 124, 326 Darwinism 53, 116–117, 327, 331–333 Dauber, M. 30, 175 Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) 207 Daughters of the American Revolution 20 Davies, G. 66 Davies, R. 339; Sports in American Life 342 Davis, A.: Women, Race, and Class 195 Davis, J. 343 Davis, L. 351–352 Davis, M.: Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition 16 Davis, M.D.: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community 206 Dawes Act (1887) 239 D-Day 40 DDT (pesticide) 75, 186–187, 309 deafness 350, 353–356 Deaf President Now 350 Dean, R. 165; Imperial Brotherhood 197 Death of Nature (Merchant) 183 death penalty 178

Debating the American Conservative Movement (Critchlow and MacLean) 133–134 defense funding 328 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) (1996) 97, 209 Defense Planning Guidance (1992) 101–102 DeGeneres, E. 209 Degler, C. 193 De Grazia, V.: Irresistible Empire 143 deindustrialization 78, 87, 134, 141–142, 272 Delano, California 233–234 Delay, B. 168 DeLay, B.: War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War 294–295 Delegard, K.: Battling Miss Bolsheviki 198 Delgado, G.: Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands 296 Deloria, P.: Indians in Unexpected Places 242, 284 Deloria, V. Jr. 244 Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra (1930; Texas) 229 Democratic Party: 1960s 61–62, 67; 1970s 77; 1980s 85, 88; 1990s 96; African American and civil rights history 223; Cold War 52; economics and capitalism 109; Great Depression and New Deal 26–31; labor and working class history 154–155; legal and constitutional history 172; liberalism and conservatism 128–129, 133; Native American history 245; religious history 362; social and cultural history 141 Democratic Surround, The (Turner) 119 demographics 53–55 Dempsey, J. 339–341 Deng, X. 98 Denning, M. 153 Department of Education 99 deregulation 77–78, 98, 111, 155, 273 Derrida, J. 96, 142 desegregation. see segregation/desegregation Desmond, M. 273 détente 74, 86, 133 Dewey, J. 117, 122–123 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (American Psychiatric Association) 206 Diamond, J.: Guns, Germs, and Steel 183 Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (Temin) 108 Didrikson Zaharias, M. 340 Dieterich-Ward, A. 269–270 Diggins, J. 86 Dine 240–242 Dine: A History of the Navajos (Iverson) 240 Diner, H. 363; Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration 375–376 Dinnerstein, L. 89 diplomacy. see foreign relations and U.S. in the world Diplomatic History (Zeiler) 166 Diplomatic Revolution, A (Connelly) 165–166 Dirksen, E. 215

390

Index “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” (Baynton) 353–354 disability history 349–358 Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) 352 Disability Studies 355 Disabled in Action 351–352 Disabled Students Program 351 Disabled Veterans in History (Gerber) 355 discourse of Man 118 Displaced Persons 258 Divided Borders (Flores) 230 Divided Lives (Rosenberg) 195 divorce. see marriage and divorce Dixiecrats 130 Dixon, T.: The Clansman 11 DNA 328 DOB (Daughters of Bilitis) 207 Dochuk, D. 52–54, 88, 269, 286, 362 Dog Day Afternoon (film) 145 Doherty, T. 144 DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) (1996) 97, 209 Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940 (Murdock) 372 domestic partnerships 209 domestic workers 152–153 Dominican Republic 227, 235, 273 Dominicans 273 Donaghy, G.: Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States 1963–1968 297 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) 209 Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns 316 Doonesbury comic strip (Trudeau) 355 Dougherty, J. 273 Douglas, A.: Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s 18 Douglas, S.: Listening In 144 Dower, J. 164; War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War 39 Downs, J. 207 Downstate Medical Center 221–222 Down to Earth (Steinberg) 182 drag queens 204–207 Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943 (Hsu) 253 Dreaming of Sheep (Weisiger) 242 DREDF (Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund) 352 Drift and Mastery (Lippmann) 128 Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (Maddow) 102 Driskell, J.: Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics 18 Driven Wild (Sutter) 186 Drug Enforcement Administration 72 Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Lerner) 372

DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) (American Psychiatric Association) 206 D’Souza, D. 88 Dubofsky, M. 152 Du Bois, W. 7, 20, 122–123, 143, 333; Souls of Black Folk 118 Dudziak, M. 51, 165 Duncan, R. 145–146 Duncan, S. 156 Duneier, M. 273–274 Dunning School 182 Dust Bowl 286, 308–309 Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Worster) 308 Earth Day 75 East Asians 174 Eastern Europe 49, 86–87, 151–152 Eastern Europeans 6, 21, 32, 259, 261 Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (Madden and Finch) 378 Ebonics 96 Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Sohi) 253–254 Ecological Imperialism (Crosby) 183 economic crash (2008) 155 Economic Opportunity Act (1964) 232 economics and capitalism 104–115; 1960s 68; 1970s 74–79; 1980s 89–90; 1990s 97–100; African American and civil rights history 216, 223–224; Asian American history 250–253; Cold War 51–52; environmental history 184; food and health history 373; Great Depression and New Deal 27–28, 32; intellectual history and 120–121; Latino/a history 231; legal and constitutional history 172; liberalism and conservatism 131–134; metropolitan history 267, 272–273; Native American history 242–245, 244, 245; Progressive Era 5–6, 9; religious history 362; science, medicine, and technology 327–330; social and cultural history and 139; see also consumerism and popular culture; labor and working class history Ecuador 74 Ederle, G. 340 Edmund Pettus Bridge 215 Edsall, T.: Chain Reaction 88 Education Act (1972) 345 Education of Extinction (Adams) 240–241 Education of Henry Adams, The (Addams) 118 Edwards, H. 344 Edwards, R. 15 Egypt 74 Ehrman, J. 85–86 Eichengreen, B. 27 Eighmey, R.: Food Will Win the War: Minnesota Crops, Cooks, and Conservation During World War I 374 Eighteenth Amendment 9, 16, 372 Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan, The (Ehrman) 85

391

Index Eisenhower, D. 33, 50–55, 128, 177, 206, 214, 231, 259 Ekbladh, D. 51, 167 Elbaum, M. 63 El Comité 232 El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española 229 Elias, M. 370; Food in the United States, 1890–1945 372 Ellington, D. 51 Ellis Island 21, 258–260, 353 Ellison, R. 123 Emerald City (Klingle) 286 Emergency Quota Act (1921) 21 Emergency Relief Bureau 350 Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Choy) 252 employment non-discrimination 43 “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in the U.S. Government” (Senate investigation) 206 Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda (Thomas de la Peña) 377 Encuentro Feminil (newspaper) 234 Endangered Species Act (1973) 72 “End of History?” (Fukuyama) 89–90, 97 End of the Trail, The (Fraser) 238, 246–247 energy crisis 72–75, 111 Engerman, S. 105; Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (TOTC) 106 England 38, 42, 87 Enlightenment 117–119, 142–143, 183, 332–333 Enola Gay exhibit (1995) 96 Enstad, N.: Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure 145 Entertainment Sports Programming Network (ESPN) 345 Entitled to Power: Farmwomen and Technology, 1913–1963 (Jellison) 308–310 environmental history 181–190; 1970s 75, 146; American West 286; Great Depression and New Deal 31; labor and working class history 286–287; Progressive Era 11; World War II 39–40 Environmental Protection Agency 111, 176 Environment in American History: Nature and the Formation of the United States (Crane) 182 Epic Encounters (McAlister) 144–145 Episcopalian churches 217 Equal Protection Clause 177 Equal Rights Amendment 77–79 Erenberg, L. 145, 341 Erhard, W. 72 Erickson, A. 273 Erman, S. 174 Ernst, D. 175 Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem (Baldwin and Makalani) 20 España-Maram, L. 252 Esperdy, G. 32 Espiritu, Y. 254 ESPN (Entertainment Sports Programming Network) 345

ethnicity. see immigration and ethnicity Ethnic Studies 249, 255 Ettinger, P.: Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 295 Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Stern) 23 eugenics 10, 22–23, 173–174, 274, 327–329, 333, 353–354 Eugenics Records Office 333 evangelicals 53, 65, 76–77, 88, 96–99, 134, 155, 269, 331–332, 365–366 Evangelicals for Social Action 366 Evans, S.: Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950 297 Evensen, V. 341 evolution 329–332 Ewen, E. 316 exceptionalism 5, 106, 161–162, 254, 261–262, 326 Executive Order 8802 43, 219 Executive Order 9981 220 expansionism 12, 162–165, 227, 238, 293 Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations 161 Fairchild, A. 353 Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) 43 Fair Employment Practices Committee 219 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) 28, 175, 176 Fall of the House of Labor, The (Montgomery) 151–152 Faludi, S.: Backlash 88 Falwell, J. 77, 80, 132 Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Yans) 260 Family of Man exhibit (Museum of Modern Art) 119 Faragher, J. 286 Farber, D. 62 Farm Crisis 310–311 Farmer, J. 220 Farmers’ Union 310 farming. see agricultural and rural history Farm Security Administration 307 farmworkers 5, 21–22, 29, 153, 175, 213, 231–234 fascism 32, 43, 118, 161 Fass, P. 140–141 Fatah 101 Faubus, O. 214 Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (Mancke) 297 Faust 143 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 20, 32, 229 FDA 111 FDR. see Roosevelt, F. Fear Itself (Katznelson) 52 Federal Acknowledgement Project 246 Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956) 54 Federal Express 79

392

Index federal government: 1920s 20; 1960s 61, 66–67; 1970s 76; agricultural and rural history 304–308; American West 285; Cold War 51–53; consumerism and popular culture 318; disability history 352–353; economics and capitalism 111–112; Great Depression and New Deal 28–31; LGBT history 205–206; liberalism and 128–129; Native American history and 238–247; Progressive Era 10–12; science, medicine, and technology 326–333; World War II 38, 43 Federal Housing Act (1934) 32 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 30–32 Federal Indian Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Clarkin) 244 Federal Republic of Germany 64–65 Federal Reserve 27, 108 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 107, 111 Federal Water Pollution Act (1972) 75 FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) 132 feeblemindedness 354 Feimster, C.: Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching 17 Feinberg, L.: Transgender Liberation 209 Felton, R. 17 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 96, 152, 193–195 femininity 195–198, 319, 339 feminism. see women’s and gender history FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission) 43 Fernández, L. 153 Feurer, R. 154 Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the TexasMexico Border, 1848–1942 (McKiernan-González) 295 FHA (Federal Housing Administration) 30–32 Fiege, M.: The Republic of Nature 182 Field, A. 27 Fighting for American Manhood (Hoganson) 195 Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Streible) 339 Filipinos 64, 174, 252 film 8–9, 144, 153 Final Promise, The (Hoxie) 242 financialization 98, 112 Finch, M.: Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias 378 Fink, D. 307; Open Country, Iowa 310 Fink, L.: Workingmen’s Democracy 153 Firestone 188 Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Friedrich) 40 Fischer, B. 86 fishing rights 244 Flamm, M. 67 Fleet Foxes: “Helplessness Blues” 139 Flexner, E.: Century of Struggle 192–193 FLN 167 Flood, C. 345 Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 (Cook) 298 Flores, J.: Divided Borders 230

Flores, R.: Backwoods Pragmatists 122 Flowers, B. 366 Fogel, R. 105; Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (TOTC) 106 Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Kruse and Tusk) 43 Foley, M. 88 “Folk Cookery” (Yoder) 370 Foner, N. 89 Fones-Wolf, E. and K.: Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie 134 food and health history 369–380 “Food and Society” series 372 foodie culture 375 “Food in American History series” 372 Food in the United States, 1890–1945 (Elias) 372 Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America (Parkin) 373 Food Network 379 food rationing 374 food stamp program 176 foodways 370–380 Food Will Win the War: Minnesota Crops, Cooks, and Conservation During World War I (Eighmey) 374 “Food Will Win the War” poster 369 football 338, 342–344 Foraker Act (1900) 227 Forbath, W. 176 Ford, G. 81, 130, 352 foreclosures 273, 307 foreign mission movement 198 foreignness 251–253 foreign relations and U.S. in the world 161–171; 1960s 65–66; 1980s 86–87; 1990s 100–102; Cold War 50–51; Great Depression and New Deal 31–32; Progressive Era 5–7, 11–12; science, medicine, and technology 329; sport and leisure history 341; World War II 38–42 Førland, T. 68 formalism 118 Förster, S.: A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 39 Fortner, M. 67 For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Shelton) 295–296 Fortunato, J. 343 fossil fuels 184–185, 286–287 Fostering on the Farm: Child Placement in the Rural Midwest (Birk) 304 Foucauldian critique 116 Foucault, M. 95–96, 142, 204, 333 foundationalism 117 Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) 132 Foundation for the Realization of Man, The 72 Fountain, C. 340 four freedoms 38

393

Index Fourteen Points 12 Fourteenth Amendment 21, 173 Frank, D. 154 Frank, L. 360 Frank, M. 156 Frank, T. 99–100; What’s the Matter With Kansas? 96 Fraser, F.: The End of the Trail 238, 246–247 Fraser, S. 28–29; The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 87, 154 Fraterrigo, E. 54 Freedman, E. 193; Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation 17 Freedom Dreams (Kelley) 63–64 Freedom From Fear (Kennedy) 44 Freedom Is Not Enough (MacLean) 66 Freedom Rides 214 free-market economics 30, 76, 87 French, W.: A Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico 295 Freud, S. 118 Freudian psychology 116, 124 Freund, A. 292, 299 Freund, D. 30, 273; Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America 130 Frick, F. 342 Friedan, B.: The Feminine Mystique 96, 152, 193–195 Friedberger, M.: Shake-Out: Iowa Farm Families in the 1980s 310–311 Friedman, M. 95, 98, 108 Friedman, T.: The World is Flat 98 Friedrich, J.: The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 40 Friend, C.: Southern Masculinity 197–198 From Civil Rights to Human Rights (Jackson) 63 Fromm, E. 140 From Out of the Shadows (Ruiz) 197 From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Gabaccia) 260 From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Hinton) 88 Fronc, J.: New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era 16–17 “Frontier Thesis” (Turner) 282, 293 Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (Hahamovitch) 308 FTC (Federal Trade Commission) 107, 111 “Fuck the Police” (N.W.A.) 96 Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands (Truett) 295 Fujikane, C.: Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life 253 Fujitani, T. 39 Fujita-Rony, D.: American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919– 1941 252 Fukuyama, F. 100; “The End of History?” 89–90, 97 Fulbright scholars 370

fundamentalists and fundamentalism 9, 76–77, 168, 361–362 Furies, The 79 Gabaccia, D. 258; American Dreaming, Global Realities 198; From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 260 Gabin, N. 152 Gaddis, J. 50, 86, 162–163 Gaines, K.: Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century 19 Galamison, M. 222 Galarza, E. 231 Gallaudet University 350, 354–355 Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Ware) 345 gaming industry 246 Gandhi, M. 216 García, I. 229 Gardner, L. 162 Garland, L.: After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 22 Garnett, W. 53–54 Garraty, J. 31–32 Garvey, M. 20, 361 Gay Activist Alliance 207 gay and lesbian rights. see LGBT history Gay Liberation Front 206–209 gay marriage 89, 203, 208–209 Gay Men’s Health Crisis 208 Gay New York (Chauncey) 27 Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) 208. see also AIDS Geary, D. 66, 123 Geertz, C. 142 Gee Whiz school 340 Geiger, A.: Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters With Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 296–299 Geismer, L. 269 gender. see women’s and gender history Gender Trouble (Butler) 96 General Electric 78 genetics 328 Genovese, E. 140 Genter, R. 121; Late Modernism 119 Georgia Power 186 Gerber, D.: Disabled Veterans in History 355 Gerhard, J. 124 Germany 40, 44, 111, 164, 219 Germany, K. 67 Gerstle, G. 28–29; The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 87, 154 GhaneaBassiri, K. 364 G.I. Bill 31, 42, 52, 128, 205, 318, 374 Gibson, J. 342 Gilbert, J. 31, 141 Gilded Age 15, 184–185, 327. see also 1920s; Progressive Era

394

Index Gilfoyle, T. 270–272, 275–276 Gill, T.: Beauty Shop Politics 199 Gillespie, D. 51 Gilman, C. 333 Gilman, N. 51 Gilmore, G. 28 Gilmore, R. 274–275 Gilroy, P.: The Black Atlantic 143 Gingrich, N. 97 Giuliani, R. 100 Glass-Steagall Act (1933) 98 Glazed America: The History of the Doughnut (Mullins) 377 Glazer, N.: Beyond the Melting Pot 260 Glendon, M. 167 Glickman, L. 30, 317; A Living Wage 154 Global Cold War, The (Westad) 168 globalization 50–51, 78–79, 98, 156, 262–263, 273, 319–320, 374–375. see also economics and capitalism; foreign relations and U.S. in the world Global South 63–65, 156–157, 329 global warming 185 Goddard, H. 354 Goddess of the Market (Burns) 120 Godfather, The (film) 77 God-Fearing and Free (Stevens) 119 Goedde, P. 164 Goffmann, E. 119 Goldberger, D. 350 Goldblatt, D. 341 Goldeier, J.: America Between the Wars 100 gold standard 27, 74, 108 Goldstein, B. 270 Goldstein, W. 344; A Brief History of American Sports 338–340 Goldwater, B. 61, 132 Gómez-Quiñones, J.: Making Aztlán 64 Gompers, S. 153 González, D.: Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 296 Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the CanadianAmerican Boundary, 1783–1842 (Carroll) 299 GOP. see Republican Party (GOP) Gorbachev, M. 86 Gordon, C. 110 Gordon, L.: Pitied But Not Entitled 196 Gore, A. 97 Gorn, E. 195, 344; A Brief History of American Sports 338–340 Goshutes 311 Gosse, V. 88; Rethinking the New Left 62–63 Gottfried, P.: Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right 135 Gottschalk, M. 274; Caught 100 Gould, D. 89 Gould, S.: Mismeasure of Man 371 Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century (Martin) 295

Graham, B. 53, 208, 366 Graham, H. 86; The Civil Rights Era 66 Gramsci, A. 153 Gramscianism 156 Grange, H. 339 Granger, L. 219 Great Compression 75, 110–111 Great Depression and New Deal 25–36; 1920s and 15–18; 1980s and 87; agricultural and rural history 307–309; American West 285–286; consumerism and popular culture 318; disability history 350; economics and capitalism 105, 108–109; environmental history 186; intellectual history 116–117; labor and working class history 153–154; Latino/a history 229; legal and constitutional history 172–176; LGBT history 205; liberalism and conservatism 128–132; Native American history 242–243; religious history 362; science, medicine, and technology 329; social and cultural history 141; women’s and gender history 196–198 Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment 221 Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Cowie) 130–131 Great Gatsby, The (film) 15 Great Migration 19–20, 28, 64, 152, 174, 213, 271, 361 Great Persuasion, The (Burgin) 119 Great Plains 184, 286, 298, 308 Great Recession 89, 112, 270, 273 Great Society 51, 61–62, 66–67, 84, 154, 274 Greenberg, A. 165 Greene, A. 362 Greene, J. 156; Pure and Simple Politics 153 Greenwood Press 372, 379 Greif, M. 118, 121 Greiner, B.: A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945 39 GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) 208. see also AIDS Grieve, V. 144 Griffith, R.: Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity 378 Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) 177 Gross, A. 174 Gross, K. 274 Gross Domestic Product 110 Grossman, J.: Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration 19 Guam 12, 174, 227 Guatemala 51, 74 Guglielmo T. 32 Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond) 183 Gutierrez, J. 233 Gutiérrez, R.: When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 296 Gutman, H. 150–152; “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919” 151

395

Index Guttmann, A. 345; A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports 341–342 Habe, H.: A Walk in Darkness 44 Hackel, S. 295 Hahamovitch, C.: The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 308 Haiti 101, 164–165, 227 Haley, A.: “The Challenges of American Culinary History” 374; Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 373 Hall, J. 55, 259, 269 Hall, S. 66, 142, 153 Hämäläinen, P.: The Comanche Empire 295 Hamas 101 Hamer, F. 213 Hamilton, S. 111 Handlin, O.: The Newcomers 230; The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People 258–260, 263–264 Haney-Lopez, I.: White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race 22 Hanhardt, C.: Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence 207 Hanoi’s War (Nyugen) 168 Hansen, A. 108 Hansen, Marcus: The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples 297 Hansen, Miriam 144 Harlem Bus Boycott 221 Harlem Labor Union 221 Harlem Parents Committee 222 Harlem Renaissance 18–21, 204 Harmon, A.: Rich Indians 245 Harris, A.: Out to Work 194 Harris, B. 193 Harris, L.: Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy 19 Harris, N. 316 Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act (1914) 9 Hart-Celler Immigration Act (1965) 21, 177, 232, 259 Harten, T. 220 Hartman, A. 88, 99; A War for the Soul of America 95–97, 119 Hartmann, D. 344 Hartmann, S.: The Other Feminists 197 Hartz, L. 105, 131–132, 150 Harvard University 332 Harvey, D. 87, 98–100; A Brief History of Neoliberalism 98 Harvey, P. 364 Hasegawa, T. 40 Hawai’i 12, 38–40, 209, 253–254, 319 Hawakaya, S. 260 Hawley, E. 107, 163 Hay, H. 206 Hayek, F. 132

Hays, S. 182, 187; Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency 185 Hays Code (1930) 205 health. see food and health history Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) 351–352 Heap, C. 27–28; Slumming 145 Hedstrom, M. 366 Hegarty, M. 44 Heidegger, M. 121 Heineman, K. 62, 88 “Helplessness Blues” (Fleet Foxes) 139 Henry Row Cloud Series, The 284 Heritage Foundation 76, 111, 132 Hernández, K. 274; Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol 21–22, 295 Herzog, D. 44 Herzog, J. 53 Hester, T. 274 Heumann, J. 351–352 HEW (Health, Education and Welfare) 351–352 Hewitt, N.: Southern Discomfort 197 HICAD (Hindu International Council Against Defamation) 359 Hicks, C.: Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 19 Hidden Hand, The (Immerman) 168 Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (newspaper) 234 Hill, A. 100 Hill, P. 198 Hindu International Council Against Defamation (HICAD) 359 Hindus and Hinduism 164, 359, 366 Hine, R. 286 Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Hine) 19 Hinton, E. 67, 81, 274; From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime 88 Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (Smith) 244 Hiroshima 40, 328 Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Rotter) 40 Hirsch, A.: Making the Second Ghetto 268 Hispanic American Youth Association 230 “Historical Sources for American Foodway Research and Plans for an American Foodways Archive” (Yoder) 370 History of Labour in the United States (Commons) 150–151 Hitchcock, W. 40–41 Hitler, A. 40–42, 341 Hmong 254 Hobbs, A. 174 Hoberman, J. 144 Hobsbawm, E. 139 Hoffnung-Garskof, J.: A Tale of Two Cities 273 Hogan, M. 110, 163 Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America (Opie) 376

396

Index Hoganson, K. 165, 167; Fighting for American Manhood 195 Höhn, M. 164 Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (James) 20 Hollinger, D. 53, 366 Holloway, P.: Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 23 Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Carr and Kefalas) 311 Holocaust 41, 44 Holy Trinity Baptist Church 220–221 Home to Work (Boris) 152 Homeward Bound (May) 195 homophile movement 206–207 homosexual, as term 204 homosexuality. see LGBT history; sexuality Honduras 188 Honey, M. 154 Honigman, J. 370 hooks, b. 195 Hoover, H. 108 Hopkins, H. 350 horizontal integration 107 Horowitz, D. 316 Houdini, H. 143 housing eviction crisis 273 housing segregation 30, 222, 255, 268–269, 273 Howard, C. 272 Howard, J.: Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest 298 How Sex Changed (Meyerowitz) 198 Hoxie, F.: The Final Promise 242; Parading Through History 240; This Indian Country 243 Hsu, M.: Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943 253 Huerta, D. 233–234 Hughes, D. 182 Hughes, L. 204 Hull, A.: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave 195 Hull House 18, 193 human rights/humanitarianism 41, 101, 167 Human Rights Revolution, The 167 Humphrey, H. 62, 145 Hundred Days 28 Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Diner) 375–376 Hunt, M. 163–164 Hunter, J. 88, 95–97 Hunter, T. 153, 316 Huntington, S. 97 Hussain, S. 100–102 Huxley, T. 326 Huyssen, D. 272 Hyman, L. 32, 78, 112, 273

Idar, N. 228 “Idea of Female Superiority, An” (Mezvinsky) 193 Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (Kraditor) 192–193 identity 119, 139–145, 204, 232–234, 245–246, 263–264, 359–360 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim) 116 Ienaga, S. 39 Igo, S.: The Averaged American 118 “I Have a Dream” speech (King) 220 illegal immigration 22, 32, 89, 174, 261, 283 Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (Ettinger) 295 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 98 Immerman, R. 165; The Hidden Hand 168 Immerwahr, D. 51 Immigration Act (1924) 258–259 Immigration Act (1965) 89, 177, 235, 259 Immigration and Ethnic History Society 260 immigration and ethnicity 258–266; 1920s 15–23; 1970s 77; 1980s 89; 1990s 99–100; 2000s 261–263; Asian American history 250–256; disability history 353–364; economics and capitalism 108; food and health history 375–376; Great Depression and New Deal 32–33; Latino/a history 228–231, 235; legal and constitutional history 174; liberalism and 131; metropolitan history 268, 274; Progressive Era 6–10; religious history 364; science, medicine, and technology 333; social and cultural history 141; see also illegal immigration Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (Yans-McLaughlin) 261–262 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986) 89, 261 Imperial Brotherhood (Dean) 197 imperialism 7, 11–12, 39–40, 68, 143–144, 165, 174, 195, 239–242, 252–253, 284, 292, 319 Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Ngai) 251–252, 283 Inabinett, M. 340 incarceration. see prison system India 122, 164, 254 Indian Affairs 241–244 Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) 245–246 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act 245–246 Indian New Deal 242 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) 242–243 Indians. see Native American history Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act 245 Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (Nichols) 298 Indians in Unexpected Places (Deloria) 242, 284 Indian Treaty Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877 (St. Germain) 298 Indigenous history. see Native American history individualism 39, 54, 73, 128–129, 285 Indonesia 74

397

Index industrial food production 371–375 industrialization 107, 198, 227, 230, 327 Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and the Environment, 1945–1972 (Anderson) 309 inflation 75, 78, 111 influenza epidemic 12 Inherit the Wind (play) 53 In Its Own Image (Rader) 343 Innes-Jiménez, M. 153 In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (Kessler-Harris) 18, 152, 198 Insatiable Appetite (Tucker) 188 institutionalization 354–355 Insular Cases (1901) 174 integration, of sports 341–342 intellectual history 116–126 Intelligent Design movement 331 internationalism 38, 63, 129, 241 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 98 International Olympic Committee (IOC) 341, 344 International Union of Electrical Workers 197 International Workers of the World (IWW; Wobblies) 10, 150–152 internment 43–44, 254–255 intersectionality 196–197, 271 Interstate Commerce Commission 107, 214 Interstate Highway Act 318 In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato (Salas) 295 Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (Bentley) 377 Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (PhillipsFein) 134, 155 IOC (International Olympic Committee) 341, 344 IRA (Indian Reorganization Act) 242–243 Iran 38, 50–51, 74, 87, 100–102 Iran-Contra scandal 87 Iraq 100–102 Iraq War 254 Irish Americans 6 Iriye, A. 163–164; Power and Culture: The JapaneseAmerican War 1941–1945 39 iron curtain 41 Irresistible Empire (De Grazia) 143 Irwin, J. 167 Isaac, J. 48–49; Working Knowledge 121 Isenberg, A. 270, 320 Isenberg, M. 339 Islam. see Muslims and Islam Islamic fundamentalism 168 isolationism 1, 12, 41, 50, 101, 108, 133–135 Israel 72–74, 101–102, 144, 167 Isserman, M. 62 Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (Cinotto) 376

Italian Fascism 32 Italians 6, 258–261 Iverson, P.: Dine: A History of the Navajos 240 IWW (International Workers of the World; Wobblies) 10, 150–152 Jackson, J. 213 Jackson, K. 30; Crabgrass Frontier 268–270 Jackson, T.: From Civil Rights to Human Rights 63 Jacob McCandles (movie character) 281, 287–288 Jacobs, M. 30, 111, 176, 317 Jacobson, M. 32 Jacoby, R.: The Last Intellectuals 123 James, H. 108 James, W. 116, 121; Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America 20; Pragmatism 118 Jameson, F. 142 Jane Crow 23. see also Jim Crow Jansen, W. 222 Japan 38–40, 111, 164, 254 Japanese Americans 37–39, 43–44, 64, 296 Japanese immigrants 22, 174, 252–253, 263 Japanese internment 43–44, 254–255 jazz 143 Jefferson, T. 128 Jeffords, S. 164 Jeffreys-Jones, R. 165 Jeffries, J. 9–11, 339 Jellison, K. 306; Entitled to Power: Farmwomen and Technology, 1913–1963 308–310 Jenkins, P. 84–85 Jewett, A. 123 Jewish immigrants 22, 198, 258–261 Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (Davis) 16 Jews and Judaism 6, 11, 16, 41, 333, 359–364 Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America (Briones) 43–44 Jim Crow 23, 28–30, 33, 42–43, 54–55, 122, 153, 172–176, 213–215, 256, 316 John, E.: Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 293 John Birch Society 155 Johns Hopkins University Press 379 Johnson, B. 228; Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans 295 Johnson, D. 206 Johnson, F. 215 Johnson, H. 85 Johnson, J. 9–11, 17, 339–341, 344 Johnson, L. 21, 51, 61–62, 65–67, 129, 155, 176, 215–216, 232, 244, 259 Johnson, Marilynn 89 Johnson, Marsha 207 Johnson, S. 361

398

Index Johnson, W. 106 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) 174, 252 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies 216 Jones, B. 339 Jones, C.: Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America 185 Jones, D. 87 Jones, J.: Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow 196 Jones, L.: Mama Learned Us to Work: Farmwomen in the New South 306 Jones, O. 294–296 Jones, P. 63 Jones, W. 153, 154 Jones Act (1917) 228 Jordan, I. 350 Jordan, M. 345 Jorgenson, C. 205–206 Joseph, P. 63 journalism 6–7, 123, 340 Journal of American History 359 Journal of American History, The (Noggle) 15 Joy of Sex, The 73 Judaism. see Jews and Judaism “Judeo-Christian tradition” 118, 362 Kammen, M. 144, 226 Kant 116 Kaplan, A. 164 Kasson, J. 143 Katz, M. 267 Katznelson, I. 31–33, 109, 175; Fear Itself 52; When Affirmative Action Was White 130 Kazin, M. 62 Kelley, R. 28, 145, 153; Freedom Dreams 63–64 Kelly, J.: “Social Relations of the Sexes” 194 Kengor, P. 86 Kennan, G. 161; “Long Telegram” 49–50, 164–165 Kennedy, D. 109; Freedom From Fear 44 Kennedy, E.: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community 206 Kennedy, J. 61, 65, 129, 165, 214–217, 220, 231, 244, 259, 363 Kennedy, R. 61, 214 Kennedy, T. 259 Kenya 101 Kerber, L. 193–194 Kercher, S. 145 Kessler-Harris, A. 31, 110; In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America 18, 152, 198 Keynesianism 42, 79, 98, 108–110, 128–130 Keys, B. 167 Khrushchev, N. 51, 330 Kiffmeyer, T. 67 Kikuchi, C. 43–44 Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest War (Andrews) 184–185, 286 Kim, E. 250, 263

Kim, R.: The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905–1955 253–254 Kimball, R. 88 Kimmel, M.: Manhood in America 195 King, B. 345 King, M., Jr. 54, 60, 61–63, 154, 213–220, 223–224; “I Have a Dream” speech 220 King, R. 96 King, S. 272; Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era 18 Kinsey, A.: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female 205; Sexual Behavior in the Human Male 205 Kinsey Report 119 Kirby, J.: Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 182 Kirk, R.: The Conservative Mind 135 Kirkpatrick, J. 133 Kitchen Debate 51, 330 KKK (Ku Klux Klan) 6, 11, 18, 54, 195–196 Klapper, M. 360 Klarman, M. 174, 177 Klatell, D.: Sports for Sale 343 Klein, J. 30 Klein, K. 121 Klemek, C. 273 Kline, R. 309 Kline, W. 64, 354 Klingle, M.: Emerald City 286 Kloppenberg, J. 117; Reading Obama 119 Kneebone, E. 270 Knights of Labor 150, 153 Kohl, S.: Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building 298 Kohn, S. 363 Kolko, G. 39, 162 Konefsky, A. 172 Korea 39, 49, 254 Korean Americans 251–254 Korean War 50, 66, 129, 254 Kornbluh, F. 66 Kornweibel, T.: Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919–1925 20 Korstad, R. 29, 67, 154 Kosovo 101 Kotz, D.: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism 98 Kraditor, A.: Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 192–193 Kramer, P. 165 Kranson, R. 363 Krippner, G. 112 Kristol, I. 95–96, 133 Krugman, P. 100 Kruse, K. 30, 65, 88, 362; Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement 43; The New Suburban History 269; One Nation Under God: How

399

Index Corporate America Invented Christian America 134; White Flight 134 Kudlick, C. 350 Kuhn, T. 121; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 119 Kuhnian paradigms 116 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 6, 11, 18, 54, 195–196 Kunzel, R. 204 Kurashige, S. 264, 271; The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles 255 Kuwait 100–101 Kuznetz, S. 105 Kwak, N. 274 Laats, A.: The Other School Reformers 95 labor and working class history 109–112, 149–160; 1920s 16–22; 1960s 233–234; 1970s 77–78, 81; 1980s 87; 1990s 98; African American and civil rights history 20, 218–222; Cold War 51–52; conservatism 131–132; environmental history 184–188, 286–287; Great Depression and New Deal 27–29; Latino/a history 230–234; legal and constitutional history 176–177; metropolitan history 269; Progressive Era 6, 10–11; social and cultural history 140–141; women’s and gender history 197–198 labor migration 156, 252 Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Jones) 196 La Causa 233–234. see also United Farm Workers (UFW) La Cronica newspaper 228 Ladies Home Journal 339 Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (Enstad) 145 LaDow, B.: The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland 298 LaFeber, W.: Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism 345; The New Empire 162 La Guardia, F. 219 Lahti, J.: Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico 295 Lake, A. 98 Lakota 239, 298 La Liga Protectora Latina 228 land grant colleges 305 Land of Desire (Leach) 317 Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Grossman) 19 Langer, S. 121 Langum, D.: Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act 17 Laotian refugees 254, 261 La Pietra report (2000) (Organization of American Historians) 156 La Raza United party 233 Larsen, N. 204 Lasch, C. 140; The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations 73 Las Hermanas 234 Lassiter, M. 65, 88, 273–274; Silent Majority 134

Last Intellectuals, The (Jacoby) 123 Late Modernism (Genter) 119 Latham, M. 167 Lathrop, J. 18 Latin America 87, 164, 167 Latino/a history 226–237, 255; 1920s 22; 1960s 64; immigration 89, 261, 333; labor and working class history 152; metropolitan history and 270–271; see also Chicana/o history; Mexicans and Mexican Americans Latin Women’s Collective 232 “law and order” 72, 81 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration 80 Law of Nations 241 Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Salyer) 261 Leach, W. 316; Land of Desire 317 League Against Imperialism 167 League of Nations 167 League of Their Own, A (film) 341 League of the Physically Handicapped 350 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) 229 Lears, J. 118–120, 141–143 Lears, T. 316 Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 (Barman and Watson) 298 Lebanon 51 Lebow, R.: We All Lost the Cold War 86 Lee, E. 174; At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 21, 261, 296; The Making of Asian America: A History 263 Lee, M.: Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America 251 Leffler, M. 50, 86, 163–165 Legacy of the Conquest, The (Limerick) 282 legal and constitutional history 172–180. see also Supreme Court Leighninger, R. 31 leisure. see sport and leisure history Leloudis, J. 67 Léon, A. de: The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 294 Leonard, T. 173 Leong, R. 250 Leopold, A. 182, 186 Lerner, G. 193, 196 Lerner, M. 272; Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City 372 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history. see LGBT history “Letter to the New Left, A” (Mills) 56 Lettow, P. 86 Letwin, D.: The Challenge of Interracial Unionism 153 Lev, P. 144 Levario, M.: Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy 295 Levenstein, H.: Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet 371–372

400

Index Levine, L. 144; Black Culture and Black Consciousness 141 Levinson, M. 87 Levittowns 53 Levy, J. 120 Lewinsky, M. 97 Lewis, D. 311 Lewis, D.L.: When Harlem was in Vogue 18 Lewis, J. 213, 217, 220 Lewis, R. 272 LGBT history 203–212; 1960s 64; 1970s 72, 79–80; 1980s 89; 1990s 96; Cold War 52; consumerism and popular culture 320; labor and working class history 155–156; liberalism and 129; metropolitan history and 271–272; Progressive Era 8; social and cultural history 140; sport and leisure history 346; World War II 44 liberal consensus 128–129, 330–332 liberalism and conservatism 127–135; 1920s 117; 1970s 72–77, 80–81; agricultural and rural history 311; Cold War 52–56; Great Depression and New Deal 29–33; intellectual history 118–121; labor and working class history 155; legal and constitutional history 176; LGBT history 208; metropolitan history 268–269, 273–274; religious history 365–366; science, medicine, and technology 329–330; women’s and gender history 198; World War II 42–43 liberal tradition 128, 131–134, 150 libertarianism 61–62, 65, 99, 120, 132 Lichtenstein, N. 87, 99, 112, 155; American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the TwentiethCentury 120; The Retail Revolution 99; State of the Union 154–155 Lichtman, A.: White Protestant Nation 133 Life magazine 1, 53–54 Lightfoot, K. 295 Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (Smith and Warrior) 244 Limbaugh, R. 97 Limerick, P.: The Legacy of the Conquest 282 Lincoln, A. 86 Lindsay, J. 67 Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border (St. John) 295 Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (McManus) 298 Linker, B. 355 Lippmann, W. 26, 48, 116–117; Drift and Mastery 128 Lipset, S. 52 Lipsitz, G.: Time Passages 145 Lipsyte, R. 340 Listening In (Douglas) 144 Liston, S. 344 Little Rock Nine 55, 214 Little Steel Strike 29 Living for the City (Murch) 64 Livingston, J. 100, 120; The World Turned Inside Out 119

Living Wage, A (Glickman) 154 Living With Strangers: The Nineteenth-Century Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands (McCrady) 298 Lobbying America: The Politics of Business From Nixon to NAFTA (Waterhouse) 134 Lochner, J. 173 Lochnerism 172–174 Lochner v. New York (1905) 173 Locke, J. 128, 150 Logevall, F.: Choosing War 65 Lombardo, P. 354; Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2010) 23 London, J. 339 long Civil Rights movement 18–19, 28, 55, 63, 72, 218–220, 259, 269 Longmore, P. 349–350, 355 long New Deal model 29 long Progressive Era model 15–19 long Sixties model 62 “Long Telegram” (Kennan) 49–50, 164–165 Los Alamos 328 Los Angeles Times 10 Louie, S.: Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment 255 Louis, J. 341 Louro, M. 167 Love Canal 75 Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Clement) 17 Lowe, K.: Baptized With the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America 305 Loza, M. 283 Luce, H. 1–3, 144 Luckmann, T. 119 Ludlow Massacre 157, 185, 286 Luhrmann, B. 15 LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) 229 Lumpkins, C.: American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics 19 lynching 5, 11, 19–20, 174, 228, 360 MACC (Mexican American Cultural Center) 234 MacCambridge, M.: America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation 342–343 Macdonald, D. 123 Mack, K. 174 Mackenzie, G. 66 MacLean, N. 178, 195; Debating the American Conservative Movement 133–134; Freedom Is Not Enough 66 Madden, E.: Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias 378 Maddow, R.: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power 102 Madison, J. 128 Madonna: Sex 96

401

Index Madrid Conferences (1991) 101 Maeda, D.: Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America 64, 255 Maher, N. 31; Nature’s New Deal 186 Maier, C. 163, 166 Major League Baseball (MLB) 338–339, 342, 345 Makah 282 Makalani, M.: Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem 20 Makdisi, U. 165 Making a New Deal (Cohen) 153 Making Aztlán (Gómez-Quiñones and Vásquez) 64 Making Marriage Modern (Simmons) 198 Making of Asian America: A History (Lee) 263 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson) 140, 150–151 Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910 (Mora-Torres) 295 Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Delgado) 296 Making the Second Ghetto (Hirsch) 268 Malcolm X 61, 145, 220 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge 284 Malloy, S. 40 Mama Learned Us to Work: Farmwomen in the New South (Jones) 306 Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Smith) 23 Mancke, E.: The Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 297 Manela, E. 166–167 Manganiello, C.: Southern Water, Southern Power 186 Manhattan Project 40, 328 Manhood in America (Kimmel) 195 Manliness and Civilization (Bederman) 195 Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Neuhaus) 375 Mann, J. 86, 102 Mann Act (1910) 7, 11, 17, 175 Mannheim, K.: Ideology and Utopia 116 Man Show, The (television show) 97 manufacturing 54–55, 78, 108 Mapp Motion Picture Censorship Act (1922; Virginia) 23 March on Washington (1941) 215 March on Washington Committee 219 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963) 63, 149, 154, 217–220, 223 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights (1993) 209 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (1987) 209 March on Washington Movement (MOWM) 20, 43, 218–219 Marcus, N.: Sports for Sale 343

Margo, R. 110 Marine Corps 39 Maroukis, T.: The Peyote Road 241 marriage and divorce 54, 96–97, 174, 178, 296. see also gay marriage Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820–1880 (Casas) 296 Marshall, Bob 186 Marshall, Burke 215 Marshall, G. 342 Marshall, H.: Canadian-American Industry: A Study in International Investment 296 Marshall, J. 39 Marshall Plan 110 Martell, E. 232 Martin, B.: The Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan 88 Martin, C.: Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century 295 Martin, D. 207 Martin, L. 361 Martin, W.: Black Against Empire 64 Martínez, O.: Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.– Mexico Borderland 295; Troublesome Border 294 Marwick, A.: The Sixties 62 Marx, K. 118, 124 Marxism 156, 162, 194, 373 masculinity 7–8, 28, 39, 124, 195–198, 205, 296, 366 Massenburg Public Assemblages Act (1926; Virginia) 23 mass incarceration. see prison system Material History of American Religion Project 377–378 materialism 63, 104–106, 273, 377–378 maternalism 16–18 Matlock, J. 86 Matrix, The (film) 102 Mattachine Society 206 Matusow, A. 66; The Unraveling of America 62 May, E. 44, 141, 163; Homeward Bound 195 May, G.: Bending Toward Justice 66 May, L. 144 May, M. 194 Mayeri, S. 178; Reasoning From Race 197 McAlister, M. 164–165; Epic Encounters 144–145 McAndrews, L. 363 McCarthy, J. 49, 132, 206 McCarthyism 49–53 McCartin, J. 87, 153–156 McCormick Theological Seminary 232 McCrady, D.: Living With Strangers: The NineteenthCentury Sioux and the Canadian-American Borderlands 298 McCrossen, A. 319 McDonald’s 99 McDougald, E. 306 McDuffie, E.: Sojourning for Freedom 197

402

Index McGirr, L. 65, 175, 269; “Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?” 87; Suburban Warriors 134; The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State 16 McGreevy, J. 359 McGuire, D.: At the Dark End of the Street 63 McKay, C. 20 McKee, G. 269 McKevitt, A. 167 McKiernan-González, J.: Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 295 McKinley, W. 10 McManus, S.: The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands 298 McNamee, T.: “The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution” 371, 375 McNeill, J. 185 McNickle, D. 244 McPherson, A. 361 McWilliams, C.: North From Mexico: The SpanishSpeaking People of the United States 293 Mecca of Revolution (Byrne) 167 “‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening, The” (Wolfe) 72–73 media 9, 43, 97, 144, 340–346 Medicaid 176 medical models of disability 349 Medicare 176 Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (LaDow) 298 Meek, E.: Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona 295 Meeker, M. 271 Mehrotra, A. 175 Melder, K.: “Beginnings of Sisterhood” 193 Melosi, M. 185 melting pot 21, 260–261 Melting Pot, The (play) 360 Menand, L.: Metaphysical Club 118 Mendelian genetics 327, 333, 354 Méndez v. Westminster (1946) 229 Mennonites 234 Merchant, C. 182; Death of Nature 183 Meredith, J. 214 Messenger, The (magazine) 20, 218 Messner, M. 346 Metaphysical Club (Menand) 118 Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town 311 Methodists 234 Metropolitan Community Churches 209 metropolitan history 267–280; American West and 284–285; Cold War 54; environmental history 185; Great Depression and New Deal 28; Progressive Era 8

Mettler, S. 31 Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC) 234 Mexican border. see United States-Mexico border Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (Weber) 294 Mexicans and Mexican Americans 7–8, 11, 21–22, 29, 55, 153, 177, 197, 228–232, 263–264 Mexico 5, 122, 174, 227, 274 Meyerowitz, J. 123, 316; How Sex Changed 198 Mezvinsky, N.: “An Idea of Female Superiority” 193 Mian, A. 108 Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (LaFeber) 345 Microsoft 78, 183 Middle East 74, 84, 87, 100–102, 143–144, 164, 167 Middle Eastern immigration 259, 333 Midwest 134, 153–154, 207, 303–304, 307, 311 Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Hernández) 21–22, 295 migrant laborers 308 migration. see immigration and ethnicity “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (Thistlewaite) 262 Milam, E. 124 Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (Levario) 295 military 12, 50, 85–86, 102, 205, 209, 214, 239, 243, 254, 330 military draft 129, 219–220, 241 Military Intelligence Division 20 Milk, H. 208 Miller, A.: The Crucible 53 Miller, K. 173 Miller, M. 345 Miller, S. 88; The Age of Evangelicalism 97 Mills, C. 123; “A Letter to the New Left” 56 Milne, D.: Worldmaking 168 Miner, H. 310 Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples, The (Hansen) 297 Ministers’ Committee for Job Opportunities 221–222 Mink, G. 196 Minor, K. 306 Minority Rights Revolution, The (Skrentny) 66 Miscamble, W. 50 miscegenation 8, 22–23 Misery Index 75 Mismeasure of Man (Gould) 371 missionaries 365 Mitchell, C. 215 Mitchell, J.: Woman’s Estate 194 Mitchell, M.: Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction 19 Mittelstadt, J. 66 Mitter, R. 39 Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Barron) 303 MLB (Major League Baseball) 338–339, 342, 345

403

Index modernism 117–119, 124, 143, 333 Modernist America (Pells) 122 modernity 143 Modernization Credit Plan (1934) 32 modernization theory 51 Modern Times (film) 138 Mohammed, W. 364 Molina, N. 174 Moliterno, J. 174 Monday Night Football (television show) 344 monetarism 108 Monk, T. 145 Monroe Doctrine (1904) 227 Montgomery, D. 150–152; Beyond Equality 151; The Fall of the House of Labor 151–152; Workers’ Control in America 151 Montgomery Bus Boycott 214–218, 221, 316 Montgomery Improvement Association 214 Mont Pelerin Society 111, 119–120 Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle Over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia (Stewart) 372 Moorhead, M.: The Apache Frontier: Jacobo de Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain, 1769–1791 293 Moorish Science Temple of America 361 Mora, A.: Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 295 Moral Combat (Burleigh) 41 Moral Majority 77, 132 moral panics 16–17 Mora-Torres, J.: The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society in Nuevo León, 1848–1910 295 Moreton, B. 88, 112, 120, 155, 272, 319; To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise 99, 134 More Work for Mother (Schwartz Cowan) 194 Morgan, F.: Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America 20 Morgenthau, H. 161 Mormons 365 Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s 85 “morons” 354 Morris, E. 85 Moscone, G. 208 Moscow on the Hudson (film) 261 Moser, R. 88 Moses, B. 214 Mothers of Conservatism (Nickerson) 198 Motion Picture Production Code 205 Moua, C.: “Refugee Memoryscape: The Rhetoric of Hmong Refugee Writing” 254 movement of movements model 62–63 MOWM (March on Washington Movement) 20, 43, 218–219 Moynihan, D.: Beyond the Melting Pot 260 Moynihan Report 123 Ms. magazine 79

Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921 (Burk) 345 Muhammad, K. 32, 274 Muir, J. 181, 185 Mujerista Theology 234 Mullins, P.: Glazed America: The History of the Doughnut 377 multiculturalism 99, 140 Muncy, R. 196; Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 18 Muñoz Marín, L. 230 Murakawa, N. 274 Murch, D. 274; Living for the City 64 Murdock, C.: Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940 372 Murphy, E. 261 Murphy, K.: Political Manhood 197 muscular Christianity movement 338, 346 Museum of Modern Art 119 Muslims and Islam 97, 168, 255–256, 359–361, 364 Myrdal, G. 118 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) 6–7, 54–55, 174, 213–219, 222 NAC (Native American Church) 241, 363 Nadasen, P. 66, 152 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 98, 155, 297 Nagasaki 40, 328 Naismith, J. 338 NAM (National Association of Manufacturers) 111, 132 Napalm: An American Biography (Neer) 40 Nash, D. 220 Nash, J. 197 Nash, R. 182; Wilderness in the American Mind 185 Nasserism 167 National Air and Space Museum 96 National Archives 261 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 6–7, 54–55, 174, 213–219, 222 National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs 7 National Association of Evangelicals 53 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 111, 132 National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Convention 196 National Basketball Association (NBA) 342, 345 National Board of Censorship 8 National Broadcasting Company 341 National Chicana Conference 234 National Civic Federation 10 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) 345 National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) 243–244 National Conservative Political Action Committee 76 National Consumers’ League 318 National Council of Churches 197

404

Index National Council on Disability 352 National Environmental Policy Act (1970) 75 National Equal Rights League 220–221 National Farm Labor Union 231 National Football League (NFL) 338, 342–344 National Foundation of the Blind (NFB) 350–351 National Guard 54–55, 214 National History Standards 96, 99 National Indian Youth Council 64, 244 National Institute of Health 328 nationalism 118, 341 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (1935) 153, 175–176 National Labor Relations Board 29 National Negro Congress 221 National Origins Act (1924) 21–22 national parks 9–11 National Parks Service 9, 286 National Police Gazette 338 National Review 132, 135 National Rifle Association 76 National Right to Work Committee 155 National Science Foundation 328–330 National Security Agency 129 National Security Council 65 National Socialism 32, 118 National Woman Suffrage Association 192 National Youth Administration 42 Nation of Islam 220, 361, 364 Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc) 262 Native Activism in Cold War America (Cobb) 244 Native American Church (NAC) 241, 363 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act 245 Native American history 238–248; 1960s 64; 1970s 72, 79; agricultural and rural history 304; American West and 281–285; border/lands history and 293–299; disability history 354; environmental history 182–184, 187; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 168; labor and working class history 156; metropolitan history and 271, 274; Progressive Era 7–8, 11; religious history 363–364 Native Hawaiians 253 Native Seattle (Thrush) 245, 285 Native Son (Wright) 44 NATO 50 natural history museums 327 naturalization 10, 21–22, 250, 259–261 Naturalization Act (1870) 21 natural sciences 327–328 Nature 326 Nature of Borders: Salmon and Boundaries in the Salish Sea (Wadewitz) 299 Nature’s Nation (Opie) 182 Nature’s New Deal (Maher) 186 Navajo 240–242, 270, 287

Navajo Code Talkers 241 Navajo New Deal 242 Nazism 38–43, 219, 243 NBA (National Basketball Association) 342, 345 NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) 345 NCAI (National Congress of American Indians) 243–244 Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game (Roberts) 345 Needham, A. 269–270, 286–287; Power Lines 270, 287 Neer, R.: Napalm: An American Biography 40 Negro American Labor Council 215 Negro Leagues 342 Neilson, R.: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America 378 neoconservativism 76, 86, 96–97, 101–102, 135 neo-Lamarckianism 329, 333 neoliberalism 53, 97–102, 111, 119, 133, 155–156 Neth, M. 306; Preserving the Family Farm: Farmwomen, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 303 Neuhaus, J.: Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America 375 Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years (Brebner) 296–297 New Age movement 73 Newcomers, The (Handlin) 230 New Critics 118 New Crowd Negroes 20 New Deal. see Great Depression and New Deal New Deal Coalition 31, 52, 128–130 New Deal for the World, A (Borgwardt) 41 New Democrats 98 New Empire, The (LaFeber) 162 New England 156, 183–184 New England’s Outpost: Acadia Before the Conquest of Canada, the Explorers of North America 1492–1806 (Brebner) 296–297 new institutional economics movement 106 New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The (Alexander) 100, 130, 275 New Labor History 151–152 New Left 62–63, 129, 133, 143, 151, 162–163, 331–332 New Math curriculum 330 New Mexico 12, 228 New Negro Movement 20, 28 New Republic 128 New Right 76, 97, 132 New Social History 151 New Suburban History, The (Sugrue and Kruse) 269 Newsweek 76 New Thought movement 378 New Urbanists 270 New York 8–10, 16–19, 80, 204, 207, 220–222, 271–273, 351 New York Giants 343

405

Index New York magazine 72–73 New York State Athletic Commission 344 New York Stock Exchange 108 New York Times 105 New York Times Book Review 376 New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Fronc) 16–17 New York World (Pulitzer) 338 NFB (National Foundation of the Blind) 350–351 NFL (National Football League) 338, 342–344 Ngai, M. 32, 174, 259; Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America 251–252, 283 Niagara Movement 6–7 Nicaragua 227 Nichols, R.: Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History 298 Nickerson, M. 54, 271, 286; Mothers of Conservatism 198 Nicolaides, B. 30, 270 Nielsen, K. 349 Nietzsche, F. 121–124 Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan (Peretti) 16 Nightingale, C. 273 Nineteenth Amendment 17, 173, 193, 198 nineteenth-century 5–6, 107, 116 Nisei 43–44 Nixon, E. 214 Nixon, R. 51, 62, 65–67, 72–76, 80–81, 130, 141, 145, 155, 245, 274, 330, 351 NLRA (National Labor Relations Act) (1935) 153, 175–176 No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place (Pillsbury) 376 Noggle, B.: The Journal of American History 15 Nomura, G.: “Asia and Asian Americans in the history of the U.S. West” 252 Nonaligned Movement 167 Norrgard, C.: Seasons of Change 156–157 North, D. 105 North, the 11, 18–21, 28, 55, 63, 198, 216, 220–223, 269 North Africa 38, 42 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 98, 155, 297 North Atlantic Triangle: The Interplay of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain (Brebner) 296–297 North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College 216–217 North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (McWilliams) 293 North Vietnam 168 Norton, E. 213 “Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?” (McGirr) 87 nuclear technology 40, 86, 285, 311, 329, 332 nutritional models 371–372, 375

N.W.A.: “Fuck the Police” 96 Nyugen, L-H.: Hanoi’s War 168 Oakland, CA 222 Obama, B. 89, 112, 226 object/subject problem 117 O’Brien, G. 354 Occupational Safety and Health Administration 111, 176 O’Connor, M. 120 Office of Civil Rights 351–352 Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) 66–67 Office of Economic Opportunity and the Community Action Program 244 Office of War Information 43 Oh, A. 263; To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption 254 oil 72–75, 185, 240, 246 Ojibwes 156 Okamura, J.: Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life 253 Okihiro, G.: Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 253 Oklahoma 12, 241 Oliver, S.: “Ruminations on the State of American Food History” 378 Olmsted, K. 30 Oltman, A. 361 Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) 344 Olympics 341, 344 O’Mara, M.: Cities of Knowledge 269 Omatsu, G.: Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment 255 Omnibus Corporation 221 On Behalf of the Family Farm: Iowa Farmwomen’s Activism Since 1945 (Barker Devine) 310 ONE (magazine) 206 O’Neill, T. 85 One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Kruse) 134 Onishi, Y.: Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa 255 On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (Cunfer) 308 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) 72 Open Country, Iowa (Fink) 310 Operation Bootstrap 230 Operation Clean Sweep 221 Operation Desert Shield 100–101 Operation Desert Storm 101 Operation Uphold Democracy 101 Operation Wetback 177 OPHR (Olympic Project for Human Rights) 344 Opie, F.: Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America 376 Opie, J.: Nature’s Nation 182

406

Index opium 9, 256 oral histories 239, 249–251, 254, 260 Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Sackman) 373 Organization of American Historians: La Pietra report (2000) 156 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 72 Oriard, M.: Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport 343; Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle 338 Orientalism 144, 164 Origins of the Urban Crisis, The (Sugrue) 63, 268 Orlando massacre (2016) 203 Orleck, A. 66, 271; Common Sense and a Little Fire 198 Oropeza, L. 64, 229 Oslo Accords (1993) 101 Osman, S. 270 Osterud, G. 303–304 Otero, L. 270 Other Eighties: The Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan, The (Martin) 88 Other Feminists, The (Hartmann) 197 Other School Reformers, The (Laats) 95 Other Women’s Movement, The (Cobble) 152 outside agitator thesis 20 Outside magazine 286 outsourcing 78 Out to Work (Harris) 194 Owen, C. 20 Owens, J. 341 Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, The (Smith) 377 Ozawa, T. 22 Ozawa v. United States (1922) 22 PA (Palestinian Authority) 101 Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.–Canadian Borderlands (Chang) 298–299 Pacific Northwest 21, 244, 252, 298 PADRES 234 Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women (Roberts) 199 Paige, S. 342 paleo-conservatives 135 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 101, 167 Palestinian Authority (PA) 101 pan-Africanism 20, 228, 264 Panama and Panama Canal 5, 12, 51, 156, 238 Panama Pacific Exposition 238 Pan-Arabism 167 Panic of 1893 74, 107–108 pan-Indian organizations 241–243 pan-Islamic identity 364 Pantoja, A. 230 paper son system 21 Parading Through History (Hoxie) 240 Parents Workshop for Equality in New York City Schools 222

Paris Peace Accords 72 Parker, A.: Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism 16 Parker, K. 177 Parkin, K.: Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America 373 Parks, R. 54, 214 Parsons, E. 116 Parsons, T. 118–121 particularisms 118–119 Pascoe, P.: Relations of Rescue 196 Pastime: Baseball as History (Tygiel) 339–340 PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization) 155 Patel, K. 32 Paterson, T. 162 Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Szymanski) 372 patriarchy 7–10, 30–31, 194 patriotism 9, 38, 241 “patriotutes” 44 Patten, S. 315, 320 Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835– 1920 (Takaki) 253 Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Barr) 294 Peace Corps 51, 329 Peaceful and Working People: Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (French) 295 peace with honor 72–74 Pearl Harbor 38–40, 43, 243 Peirce, C. 121 Peiss, K.: Cheap Amusements 194 Peiss, P. 316 Pells, R. 143; Modernist America 122 Pennsylvania Dutch 370, 377 Pentagon, The 129 Pentagon Papers (1971) 74 Pentecostals and Pentecostalism 53, 217, 230, 361, 364 Perales, M.: Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community 295 Peretti, B.: Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan 16 Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (Shapiro) 371–372 Perils of Dominance (Porter) 65–66 periodization: 1920s 15–19; 1980s 84–85; African American and civil rights history 18–19; American West 282; Great Depression and New Deal 33; intellectual history 117–120; metropolitan history 272 Permissive Society: America 1941–1965, The (Petigny) 44, 130 Perot, R. 98 personal computers 100, 183 pesticides 75, 186–187, 309 Petigny, A.: The Permissive Society: America 1941–1965 44, 130

407

Index Petro, A. 96; After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion 208 Petrzela, N. 99; Classroom Wars 95–96 Pettegrew, J.: Brutes in Suits 124 peyote 241, 363 Peyote Road, The (Maroukis) 241 Philadelphia Tribune 7 Philippines 5, 12, 38–39, 42, 51, 174, 195, 227, 252 Phillips, K. 152 Phillips, S. 31; This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal 308 Phillips-Fein, K. 30, 87, 111, 120, 272–273; Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan 134, 155; What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II 134 philosophical thought 121–122 Phoenix, AZ 54, 270, 286–287 PHS (Public Health Service) 353 Pietsch, B. 362 Pillsbury, R.: No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place 376 Pinchot, G. 185 Pioneer Migrants 228 pioneers 183–184 Pitied But Not Entitled (Gordon) 196 Pittsburgh Courier 7 Plan de San Diego 228 Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) 96 Platt Amendment 227 Playboy magazine 54, 144 plea bargaining 175 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 227 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 101, 167 Plutopia (Brown) 187, 287 PNAC (Project for a New American Century) 102 Podhoretz, N. 133 Point Four program 244 police brutality 9–11, 96, 207, 220–221, 232, 275 policing 15–17, 20, 274–275 Polish immigrants 258 political-economic history 107–112 Political Manhood (Murphy) 197 Poole, M. 31 Poor People’s Campaign 216, 223–224 poor relief 31, 175 Pop Art 119 Pope-Levison, P. 362 popular culture. see consumerism and popular culture Popular Front 153 population size, Progressive Era 4, 9–10 Porkettes 310 porn industry 73 Porter, E. 143 Porter, G.: Perils of Dominance 65–66 Porter, S. 167 positivism 118, 143 Post, R. 173

Post-American World (Zakaria) 98 post-civil rights era, myths of 223–224 postcolonial studies 164, 332–333 postmodernism 116–119, 123–124, 141–146, 162, 332–333 post-revisionism 162–163, 182 postwar consensus 109–111 poverty 6, 67, 99, 196, 223–224, 246, 270, 305, 311, 328–330 Powell, A., Jr. 221 Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941–1945 (Iriye) 39 Power Lines (Needham) 270, 287 Powers, R.: SuperTube 343 pragmatism 117–118, 122–124 Pragmatism (James) 118 Presbyterians 217, 234 Preserving the Family Farm: Farmwomen, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940 (Neth) 303 President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (Cannon) 85 Preston, A. 165; The War Council 65 Primer Congreso Mexicanista 228 Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in WWII (Daniels) 254–255 prison system 11, 32, 67, 72–73, 80–81, 100, 178, 267, 272–275 Pritchett, W. 270 privacy rights 177 privatization 98–100 “Problem of American Conservatism, The” (Brinkley) 87 Pro-Family movement 76–77, 80, 88 Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO) 155 Progressive Era 4–15; consumerism and popular culture 317–318; environmental history 185–186; intellectual history 116; legal and constitutional history 172–174; liberalism and 128; metropolitan history and 271; science, medicine, and technology 327–330; women’s and gender history 196 progressivism 4–5, 12, 15, 105, 117, 122, 198 Prohibition 9–11, 16–18, 175, 204, 372–373 Prohibition (documentary) 15 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) 102 Proposition 209 (1996) (California) 99 prostitution 8–9, 17, 44, 254 Protestant Church 234 Protestants and Protestantism 9, 196, 326–333, 360–362, 366, 377–378 Protestant Social Gospel 327 Prothero, S.: Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars 95–97 PRRA (Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration) 230 psychotherapies 73 public education 8, 11, 54–55, 96, 99, 214, 229, 234 public health 12 Public Health Service (PHS) 353

408

Index public housing 271 public intellectuals 123 public transportation 352 Pueblo Indian Dance controversy 363–364 Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) 230 Puerto Ricans 226–230 Puerto Rico 12, 227 Puget Sound 245 Pulitzer, J.: New York World 338 Pullman, G. 218 Pullman Palace Car Company 218–219 Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America (Bates) 20 Pulse (gay nightclub) 203 Punitive Expedition 5 Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (Smith-Howard) 312 Pure and Simple Politics (Greene) 153 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) 317 Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and ProCensorship Activism (Parker) 16 Puritans and Puritanism 53, 150, 182, 378 Putnam, R.: Bowling Alone 100 Putney, C. 338 Quadagno, J. 196 Queer Clout: Chicago and Rise of Gay Politics (StewartWinter) 207 queer history 203–212. see also LGBT history Queer Nation 209 Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905–1955 (Kim) 253–254 Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (Lee and Chan) 251 Quill, M. 221 Quine, W. 121 Rabban, D. 175 Rabig, J. 270 Rabin, Y. 101 Race and Reunion (Blight) 145 race/racism: 1920s 18–20; 1960s 66–67; 1970s 77–81; 1980s 88–89; 1990s 96; Asian American history 255–256; Cold War 51–55; consumerism and popular culture 320; environmental history 187–188; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 162–165; Great Depression and New Deal 27–32; intellectual history and 122–124; Latino/a history and 232–234; legal and constitutional history 174; LGBT history and 207; liberalism and conservatism 130–131, 134; metropolitan history 268–271; Progressive Era 6–12; science, medicine, and technology 327, 332; social and cultural history 141–143; sport and leisure history 344–346; women’s and gender history 199; World War II 39–40, 43–44; see also African American and civil rights history; immigration and ethnicity

Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Tuttle) 19 Racial Integrity Act (1924; Virginia) 23 Radding, C.: Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700– 1850 294 Rader, B.: In Its Own Image 343 Radford, G. 31 radicalism 15, 20, 28, 62–64, 67–68 Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Wu) 255 radio 97, 144. see also media Radio Corporation of America (RCA) 155 Raibmon, P.: Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter From the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast 298 Railroaded (White) 184 Railroad Mediation Board 219 railroads 184–185 Railway Labor Act 219 Rakove, R. 168 Ramirez, B.: Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration From Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 297 Ramos, R.: Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 295 Rand, A. 53–56, 120 Randall, S.: Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies 297 Randolph, A. 20, 43, 154, 215–220, 223 rape 17, 63, 79 Ratner-Rosenhagen, J. 121–122 Rauh, J. 215 Raza Unida Conferences 234 RCA (Radio Corporation of America) 155 Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Oriard) 338 Reading Obama (Kloppenberg) 119 Reagan, N. 127, 208 Reagan, R. 52, 72, 75–77, 81, 84–90, 96–100, 127, 133–135, 141, 154–155, 223, 274, 365 Reagan in His Own Hand (Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson) 86 Reaganomics 85 Real, M. 343 realism 161–162, 165 Reasoning From Race (Mayeri) 197 Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation (Rosier) 243 Reconstruction 15, 18, 197–198, 251–252 redbaiting 51–53 Red Cross 11 Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Freedman) 17 redlining 30, 269 Red Power movement 243–244, 284 Red Scare 20 Red Summer (1919) 11, 20 Reed, R. 97 Reeves, K. 102 refugee aid initiatives 167

409

Index “Refugee Memoryscape: The Rhetoric of Hmong Refugee Writing” (Moua) 254 refugees 234, 254, 259–261 Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880 (González) 296 Regulating the Lives of Women (Abramovitz) 196 Rehabilitation Act (1973) 351–352 Reid, D. 306 Reid, J. 282 Reidel, B. 87 Reimagining Indians (Smith) 242 Reimers, D. 89 Relations of Rescue (Pascoe) 196 Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Zeller, Dallam, Neilson, and Rubel) 378 religious history 359–368; 1970s 73; 1980s 88; Cold War 53–55; food and health history 377–378; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 164–165; Great Depression and New Deal 32; Native American history 241; Progressive Era 9; see also specific religions Religious Right 362, 365–366 relocation programs 245 Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s (Wuthnow) 311 Rembis, M. 350 Remnick, D. 344 Renda, M. 165 representation 249–251 Republican National Convention (1992) 97 Republican Party (GOP): 1960s 61–62, 67; 1970s 77–81; 1980s 84–85, 88; 1990s 97–98; African American and civil rights history 223; Cold War 50–53; Great Depression and New Deal 26; legal and constitutional history 172; liberalism and conservatism 128–135; Native American history 245; religious history 362; science, medicine, and technology 331; social and cultural history 141; World War II 42 Republic of Nature, The (Fiege) 182 Reséndez, A.: Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 295 reservations 7, 239–241 Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Danbom) 305 respectability politics 19, 28, 206, 306 Retail Revolution, The (Lichtenstein) 99 Rethinking the New Left (Gosse) 62–63 Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (Aubry and Travis)73 Retzloff, T. 272 Reuther, W. 155 revisionism 162–163, 166, 173, 182 Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Levenstein) 371–372 Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans (Johnson) 295

Reyes, B. 295 Rice, C. 102 Rice, G. 340–341 Rich Indians (Harmon) 245 Richmond Planet 339 Rickard, T. 339–340 Rickey, B. 342 Riesman, D. 119, 120 Riggs, B. 345 Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Mitchell) 19 right-to-work legislation 176 Riney-Kehrberg, P.: Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play and Coming of Age in the Midwest, 1870–1920 304 Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, The (Kotz) 98 Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, The (Fraser and Gerstle) 87, 154 Rivera, S. 206–207 Rivers of Empire (Worster) 185–186 Roaring Twenties 15. see also 1920s Roberts, B.: Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women 199 Roberts, E. 351 Roberts, M. 40–41 Roberts, R. 339–341 Roberts, S.: A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game 345 Robertson, P. 97 Robert’s Rules of Order 307 Robinson, G.: A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America 255 Robinson, J. 217, 337, 342 Rockefeller Drug Laws 80 Rockefeller foundation 327 Rockman, S. 106 Rockne, K. 339 Rodgers, D. 31, 98–102, 107, 122, 140; Age of Fracture 90, 95, 98, 119–120, 139 Rodwell, C. 207 Roediger, D. 32; Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs 261 Roe v. Wade (1973) 72, 172, 177–178, 365 Rolling Quads 351 “Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution, The” (McNamee) 371, 375 Rome, A.: The Bulldozer in the Countryside 187 Romer, C. 27 Roosevelt, E. 167, 219 Roosevelt, F. 26–32, 38–39, 42–43, 49–50, 85, 98, 108–109, 129, 174–176, 219, 230, 242, 285, 350, 362 Roosevelt, T. 11–12, 128–129, 135, 172, 181, 185, 304, 333, 338, 346 Rorabaugh, W.: American Hippies 65 Rorty, R. 121 Rosaldo, M. 193

410

Index Rosenberg, E. 163–165 Rosenberg, Gabriel: The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America 305–306 Rosenberg, Gerald 177 Rosenberg, R. 124, 196; Divided Lives 195 Rosenfeld, R. 310 Rosenzweig, R. 150, 153 Rosier, P.: Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation 243; Serving Their Country 241 Ross, S.: Working-Class Hollywood 153 Rotter, A. 164–165, 168; Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb 40 Rourke, C.: American Humor 140 Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Jones) 185 Rozelle, P. 343–344 Rubel, N.: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America 378 Rubin, J. 121 Ruiz, V.: American Dreaming, Global Realities 198; Cannery Workers, Cannery Lives 153; From Out of the Shadows 197 “Ruminations on the State of American Food History” (Oliver) 378 Rumsfeld, D. 102 Running Steel, Running America (Stein) 155 Runstedtler, T. 339 Rural Electrification Administration 307–308 rural history. see agricultural and rural history Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Kirby) 182 Russell, E.: War and Nature 186–187 Russia. see Soviet Union Rust Belt 54, 76, 268 Rustin, B. 220 Ruth, G. 339–340 Rwanda 101 Ryerson Press 296 Sachs, J. 27 Sack, D.: Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture 377–378 Sackman, D.: Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden 373 Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Hanhardt) 207 Sagebrush Rebellion 75 Said, E. 144, 164 St. Germain, J.: Indian Treaty Making Policy in the United States and Canada, 1867–1877 298 St. John, R.: A Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border 295 SALAD (Spanish American League Against Discrimination) 232 Salas, M.: In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato 295 Saloutos, T.: The American Farmer and the New Deal 307–308

Salyer, L.: Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law 261 same-sex marriage 89, 203, 208–209 Sammons, J. 339 San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier (Teja) 295 Sánchez, G.: Becoming Mexican-American 153 Sánchez-Korrol, V. 230 Sanctuary movement 234 Sandoval-Strausz, A. 270, 273 San Francisco, CA 208, 238 San Francisco State College 249 San Francisco State University (SFSU) 64 Sanger, M. 11, 198 Sargent, Daniel 74, 167 Sargent, Dudley: “Are Athletics Making Women Masculine?” 339 Satchmo Blows Up the World (Von Eschen) 143 Satter, B. 73, 273 Savage, B. 364 Savage, K. 145 “Save Our Children” campaign 208 Schaeffer, F. 331 Schaffer, R. 40 Schaller, M. 85 Schickler, E. 29 Schiller, N.: Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized NationStates 262 Schivelbusch, W. 31–32 Schlafly, P. 77, 80, 132 Schlesinger, A., Jr. 33, 86, 192; The Age of Roosevelt 26 Schlozman, D. 29 Schmeling, M. 341 Schneider, G.: The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution 134–135 Schomburg, A. 228 Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (Driskell) 18 Schrijvers, P. 40–41 Schulman, B. 77; The Seventies 85 Schumpeter, J. 105 Schuyler, L.: The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s 18 Schwartz, A. 108 Schwartz Cowan, R.: More Work for Mother 194 Schwarz, J. 31 Schweik, S. 355 Schwieder, D. 307 science, medicine, and technology 78, 112, 325–336. see also disability history; intellectual history Science for the People 332 Scientific Revolution 183 SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) 214–219 Scopes Trial 361–362 Scott, A. 193

411

Index Scott, J. 86, 145, 194–196 Seasons of Change (Norrgard) 156 Seattle, WA 252 second bill of rights 38 Second Great Migration 213 Second Industrial Revolution 185 second Intifada 101 Second Klan 11 Second World 49 Section 504 (Rehabilitation Act) 351–352 Securities and Exchange Act (1934) 175 Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919–1925 (Kornweibel) 20 segregation academies 365 segregation/desegregation 4, 7–8, 33, 51, 54–55, 63–65, 134, 174, 177, 214, 222, 232, 273. see also African American and civil rights history Seigel, M.: Uneven Encounters 143 SEIU (Service Employees International Union) 154 Selective Service Act (1917) 17 Self, R. 67, 88, 99, 155; All in the Family 95–96; American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland 63, 130, 222, 269 Seligman, A. 270 Selling Sounds (Suisman) 144–145 Selma to Montgomery March (1965) 215–216 Senate Armed Services Committee 219–220 Senate Committee on Indian Affairs (1919) 241 separate spheres 193–194 September 11, 2001 97, 101–102, 235, 346 Service, R. 86 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 154 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944) 53, 271 Serving Their Country (Rosier) 241 settler colonialism 239, 284 Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890–1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building (Bennett and Kohl) 298 Seventies, The (Schulman) 85 Sewell, J. 271, 320 Sex (Madonna) 96 sexology 204–205 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinsey) 205 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey) 205 sexuality 7–8, 27–28, 44, 73, 96–97, 123–124, 256, 271–272, 295–296, 327, 354. see also LGBT history; women’s and gender history Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Holloway) 23 Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Harris) 19 SFSU (San Francisco State University) 64 Shah, N.: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown 256; Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West 256 Shake-Out: Iowa Farm Families in the 1980s (Friedberger) 310–311

Shapiro, L.: Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century 371–372; Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America 374–375 sharecroppers 153, 308 Sharfstein, D. 174 Sharp, P.: Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865–1885 298 Sharpless, R.: Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 376 Shelton, L.: For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 295–296 Shenk, T. 32 Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) 18 Sherman Antitrust Act 173 Shermer, E. 155 Sherry, M. 40 Shibusawa, N. 164, 263 Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, The (Kurashige) 255 shipping containers 79, 87 Shotwell, J. 296 Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins (Smith) 342 Shreve, B. 284 Shultz, K. 362 Shuttlesworth, F. 220 Sider, R. 366 Sides, J. 272 Sikhs and Sikhism 364 Silent Majority 77 Silent Majority (Lassiter) 134 Silent Spring (Carson) 75, 182, 186–187 Silicon Valley, CA 112 Simmons, C.: Making Marriage Modern 198 Simmons, W. 11 Simon, B. 272 Simpson, B. 167 Simpson, O. 96 Sioux Pine Ridge reservation 72 Six Day War (1967) 101 Sixteenth Amendment 173 Sixties, The (Marwick) 62 Skinner, B. 121 Skinner, K.: Reagan in His Own Hand 86 Sklansky, J. 120 Sklar, K. 193 Sklar, R. 144 Skrentny, J.: The Minority Rights Revolution 66 Skull Valley, UT 311 Slate, N. 264; Colored Cosmopolitanism 122 slavery 106, 227 Slavic immigrants 258 Slouching Toward Gomorrah (Bork) 96 Slumming (Heap) 145 Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future (Wuthnow) 311

412

Index Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Perales) 295 Smith, A.: The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink 377; Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food 377 Smith, J.D.: Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia 23 Smith, J.E. 50 Smith, J.S. 31 Smith, P.: Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee 244 Smith, R. 263–264 Smith, S.: Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power 244; Reimagining Indians 242 Smith, Thomas: Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins 342 Smith, Tommie 344 Smith-Howard, K.: Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 312 Smith-Lever Act (1914) 305 Smith-Rosenberg, C. 193 Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian 246–247 Smith v. Allwright (1944) 43 Smith v. Oregon (1990) 363 Smoot-Hawley tariff 26–27 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) 214–222, 232 Sneider, A. 165 Snyder, S. 167 soccer 346 social and cultural history 138–148 Social Gospel Protestants 9, 362 socialism 20, 49, 65, 154, 218–219, 228 social memory 145–146 “Social Relations of the Sexes” (Kelly) 194 Social Science Research Council (SSRC) 105 Social Security Act (1935) 18, 31, 175–176 Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 Society for U.S. Intellectual History 121 Society of American Indians 241 Sociobiology Study Group 332 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson) 332 Sohi, S.: Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America 253–254 Soil Conservation Service 307 Sojourners 366 Sojourning for Freedom (McDuffie) 197 Sokol, J. 63–64 Sollors, W.: The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s 44 Solow, R. 105 Soluri, J.: Banana Cultures 188 Somalia 101 Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (Shapiro) 374–375 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 118

Souper Tomatoes: The Story of America’s Favorite Food (Smith) 377 South, the 5–7, 11, 18–19, 54–55, 153–154, 182, 186–188, 193, 197–199, 268–269, 303–304 South America 129, 235, 259 Southard, F., Jr.: Canadian-American Industry: A Study in International Investment 296 South Asians 251, 254–256 Southeast Asia 61, 74 Southeast Asian refugees 254 Southeast Asia War 254 Southern Baptist Convention 365–366 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 214–219 Southern Democrats 42, 52, 132 Southern Discomfort (Hewitt) 197 Southern Europeans 6, 21, 32, 261 Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Feimster) 17 Southern Masculinity (Friend) 197–198 Southern Pecan Shelling Company 229 Southern Water, Southern Power (Manganiello) 186 South Korea 87, 254 South Park (television show) 96 Soviet-Afghanistan war 87 Soviet Union 38–42, 48–56, 74, 84–87, 161–167, 187, 259, 328–330 space race 329–330 Spain 5 Spain, D. 271 Spanish, American, Cuban and Filipino War 5 Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD) 232 Spanish-American War 227 Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (Bolton) 293–296 Spanish Borderlands Frontier 1513–1821, The (Bannon) 293–294 Spanish Frontier in North America, The (Weber) 294 Sparrow, J. 109; Warfare State 43 Spicer, E.: Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 293 Spindletop oil reserves 185 sport and leisure history 337–348 Sports Broadcasting Act (1961) 343 Sports for Sale (Klatell and Marcus) 343 Sports in American Life (Davies) 342 Springer, K. 64 Springsteen, B. 145 Sputnik 329–330 SSRC (Social Science Research Council) 105 Staiger, J. 144 Stalin, J. 49–50 Standing Rock 284 Stanton, E. 192 STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) 207 Starr, K. 97

413

Index State Department 143, 370 State of the Union (Lichtenstein) 154–155 Stayin’ Alive (Cowie) 145, 154–155 Stearns, P. 140 Steelworkers in America (Brody) 150–152 Steger, M. 87 Steiglitz, A.: The Steerage 258 Stein, J. 87, 111; Running Steel, Running America 155; We All Lost the Cold War 86 Stein, M. 64 Steinbeck, J. 286 Steinberg, T.: Down to Earth 182 Stephanson, A. 49 Stephens, R. 361 sterilization programs 10, 22–23, 173–174, 354 Stern, A.: Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America 23 Stern, H. 97 Stevens, J. 121; God-Fearing and Free 119 Stewart, B.: Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle Over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia 372 Stewart-Winter, T. 64, 271; Queer Clout: Chicago and Rise of Gay Politics 207 Stiglitz, J. 100 Stimson, H. 40 stock market crash (1929) 26–27 Stonewall Riots (1969) 203, 206–207 Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (John) 293 Storr, L. 30 Storrs, L.: Civilizing Capitalism 198 Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Canaday) 52, 130, 205 Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (Howard) 298 Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (Shah) 256 Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Takaki) 250–251 Strasser, S. 194 Straus, E. 271 Straussians 135 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) 207 Streible, D.: Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema 339 Strode, W. 342 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 119 Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (FonesWolf and Fones-Wolf) 134 Stryker, S. 203 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 214–222, 232 Studies in Environment and History series 186 Suburban Warriors (McGirr) 134 suburbia/suburbanization 30, 53–54, 65, 187, 267–272

Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters With Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (Geiger) 296–299 suffrage 10–11, 16–18, 191, 192 Sufi, A. 108 Sugar Trust 188 Sugrue, T. 270; The New Suburban History 269; The Origins of the Urban Crisis 63, 268; Sweet Land of Liberty 55, 63 Suisman, D.: Selling Sounds 144–145 Sullivan, J. 339 Sullivan, P. 28 Summer in the City (Viteritti) 67 Sunbelt 30, 53–55, 76, 85, 110, 134, 155, 285–272 Sunday, B. 9 Super Bowl 338, 343–344 Superfund Law (1980) 75 SuperTube (Powers) 343 Supreme Court 17, 22–23, 43, 54, 72, 79–80, 96, 172–180, 227, 245. see also specific cases Suri, J. 67–68 surveillance 16–17, 20, 255 Susman, W. 120, 316; Culture as History 141 Sutherland, G. 22 Sutter, P.: Driven Wild 186 Sutton, M. 88, 361–362 Svelmoe, W. 365 Sweeney, J. 154 Sweet Land of Liberty (Sugrue) 55, 63 Syria 102 Szefel, L. 121 Szymanski, A.: Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes 372 Taft, C. 270 Taft, R. 133–135 Taft-Hartley Act (1946) 52, 154, 176 Takaki, R.: Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 253; Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans 250–251 Tale of Two Cities, A (Hoffnung-Garskof) 273 Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Hicks) 19 Talmud 139 TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families) 98 Tani, K. 30–31, 175 Tanzania 101 Tarango, A. 363–364 tariffs 26–27, 108 Tarr, J. 185 Tarzan series (Burroughs) 143 taxes 42–43, 98, 112 Taylor, F. 338 Taylor, K.: Canadian-American Industry: A Study in International Investment 296 Teja, J. de la: San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier 295 Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (Léon) 294

414

Index Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Alonzo) 295 telethons 355 televangelism 76–77 television 144, 343–346. see also media Temin, P.: Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? 108 temperance movement 16, 372 Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) 98 Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (Sollors) 44 tenant farmers 303, 308 Tenayuca, E. 229 tenBroek, J. 350 Ten Commandments, The (film) 144 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 186 tennis 345–346 Tentler, L. 194, 360 termination policy 243–245 Terrell, M. 7 Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Douglas) 18 terrorism 84, 97, 101–102 Terrors of the Table: The Curious History of Nutrition (Gratzer) 371 Texas 43, 228–229 Thatcher, M. 98 Theoharis, J. 269 therapeutic culture 73 Thind, B. 22, 364 Thinking Orientals (Yu) 124 Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (Baldoz) 252 Third Reich 40–41 Third World 49, 65, 86, 167–168, 262, 329 Third World Liberation Front 260 This Indian Country (Hoxie) 243 This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Phillips) 308 Thistlewaite, F.: “Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” 262 Thomas, C. 100 Thomas, W. 17 Thomas de la Peña, C.: Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin to Splenda 377 Thompson, E. 145, 194; The Making of the English Working Class 140, 150–151 Thompson, H. 80, 270; Blood in the Water 275 Thompson, John: Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies 297 Thompson, Julia 146 Thoreau, H. 182 Thorpe, J. 340 Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender in Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Alonso) 296 Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2010) (Lombardo) 23 three-strikes laws 100 Thrush, C. 284; Native Seattle 245, 285

Tichenor, D. 89 Tilden, B. 339 Till, E. 54 Tilly, C. 268–269 Time-Life 144 Time magazine 209 Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (TOTC) (Fogel and Engerman) 106 Time Passages (Lipsitz) 145 Title IX 79, 345–346 Title VII 215 Tokyo 40 Tolerant Allies: Canada and the United States 1963–1968 (Donaghy) 297 Tomes, N. 320 Tooze, A. 41 To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Oh) 254 To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Moreton) 99, 134 To Show Heart (Castile) 244 TOTC (Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery) (Fogel and Engerman) 106 Townsend, C. 365 Townshend, K.: World War II and the American Indian 243 Trachtenberg, A. 120 Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The (Williams) 162 Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Robinson) 255 transgender history 79, 203–204, 209 Transgender Liberation (Feinberg) 209 Transgender Nation 209 transnationalism 122, 156, 166–168, 253–254, 262–264, 273–274, 283–284, 292, 299, 319 Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (Onishi) 255 Transport Workers Union (TWU) 221 transsexuality 198, 205–206 Treaty of Detroit 155 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 174, 227 Treaty of Paris (1898) 227 Trent, J. 354 Triangle Shirtwaist fire 10 tribal councils 240–244 Trilling, L. 123 Trinity Broadcasting 72 Trinity nuclear test 325 Triumph of Improvisation, The (Wilson) 168 Trotter, J. 20–21, 152; Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Urban Industrial Proletariat 19 Troublesome Border (Martínez) 294 Troy, G. 85 Trudeau, G.: Doonesbury comic strip 355 Truesdell, L.: The Canadian Born in the United States 297 Truett, S. 283; Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands 295

415

Index Truman, H. 49–50, 65, 129, 165, 206, 219–220, 342 Trump, D. 135 Tucker, R.: Insatiable Appetite 188 Tunney, G. 340–341 Turk, K. 178 Turner, Fred 121, 140, 150; The Democratic Surround 119 Turner, Frederick Jackson: “Frontier Thesis” 282, 293 Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920 (Haley) 373 Tusk, S.: Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement 43 Tuskegee Institute 7 Tuttle, W.: Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 19 TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) 186 Tweed, T. 360 Twenty Years at Hull House (Addams) 118 Twilight War, The (Crist) 87 TWU (Transport Workers Union) 221 Tygiel, J.: Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy 342; Pastime: Baseball as History 339–340 Tyson, T. 63 UAW (United Auto Workers) 152, 155 UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, The (Boyle) 155 UCAPAWA (United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America) 153 Ueda, R. 89 UFW (United Farm Workers) 153, 233–234 Ugly American, The 51, 55–56 ugly laws 355 Ulrich, R.: American Indian Nations From Termination to Relocation 243 Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Yung) 251 “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration” (Costigliola) 164–165 uncertainty 117 Uncommon Ground (Cronon) 188 underground press 144 unemployment: 1970s 75; Progressive Era 6 Unemployment Insurance 196 Uneven Encounters (Seigel) 143 UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) 20, 361 unions. see labor and working class history Unitas, J. 343 United Auto Workers (UAW) 152, 155 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) 153 United Daughters of the Confederacy 20 United Farm Workers (UFW) 153, 233–234 United Fruit Company 188 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s (UNRRA) 41

United States-Canada border 21–22, 283, 292, 296–299 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 304–307 United States-Mexico border 21–22, 32, 274, 282–283, 292–296, 319 United States vs. Washington (1974) 244 United States v. Thind (1923) 22, 364 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 167 universalisms 118–119, 331–332 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 20, 361 University of California at Berkeley 351 University of California Press 372, 379 University of North Carolina Press 379 University of Washington Press 186 Unraveling of America, The (Matusow) 62 UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s) 41 Updike, J. 26 Updike, W. 26 Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Gaines) 19 Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Handlin) 258–260, 263–264 uranium 246 urban history. see metropolitan history Urban History Association 319 Urban League 216–219 urban renewal programs 222, 232 USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) 304–307 U.S. Department of Labor 18 U.S. in the world. see foreign relations and U.S. in the world U.S.–Mexico war 294–295 USS Cole 101 USS Maine 227 U.S. Socialist Party 228 USSR. see Soviet Union Vanderbilt foundation 327 Vanderlan, R. 123 Vargas, Z. 29, 153 Vásquez, I.: Making Aztlán 64 Vatican II 363 Vega, B. 228 vertical integration 107 Veterans Administration 30 Victorianism 9, 117, 339 victory gardens 374 Vietnam 129, 329 Vietnamese refugees 254, 261 Vietnam War 61–68, 72–74, 129, 162–164, 167–168, 254–255, 330–331 View, The (television show) 97 Villa, P. 5

416

Index Violence Over the Land (Blackhawk) 282 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) 100 Virginia 23 vitamins 371 Vogan, T. 345 Volstead Act (1919) 9 Von Eschen, P. 51, 165; Satchmo Blows Up the World 143 voting rights 15, 55, 214 Voting Rights Act (1965) 61, 66, 129, 215–216, 232 Vulcans 102 WAC (Women’s Army Corps) 205 Wade, R. 267 Wadewitz, L.: The Nature of Borders: Salmon and Boundaries in the Salish Sea 299 Wagner Act (1935) 29, 153–154 Wake Island 12 Walk in Darkness, A (Habe) 44 Wall, W. 32 Wallis, J. 366 Wall Street Journal 101 Walmart 99, 112, 155, 272, 319, 366 Walter-McCarran Act (1952) 259 Walton, S. 99, 134, 272 Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Radding) 294 War and Nature (Russell) 186–187 War Council, The (Preston) 65 Ward, G. 339 Ward, J. 30 Ware, C. 140 Ware, S.: Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports 345 Warfare State (Sparrow) 43 War for the Soul of America, A (Hartman) 95–97, 119 Warhol, A. 144, 377 War of 1812 26 War of 1898 163–165 War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.– Mexican War (DeLay) 294–295 War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, The (McGirr) 16 war on crime 67, 80 War on Drugs 80–81, 88, 178, 274–275 War on Poverty 66–67, 155, 176, 244, 271 War on Terror 102, 255 Warren Court 178 Warrior, R.: Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement From Alcatraz to Wounded Knee 244 War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (Dower) 39 Washington, B. 7 Washington, K. 342 Washington consensus 98 Washington Redskins 342 Watergate 72–74, 142, 177

Waterhouse, B. 111; Lobbying America: The Politics of Business From Nixon to NAFTA 134 water management 185–188, 286 Waters, A. 371, 375 Waters, M. 89 Watson, B.: Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–1898 298 Wayne, J. 281–282, 287 WB (World Bank) 98 WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) 16 We All Lost the Cold War (Lebow and Stein) 86 Webb, W. 228 Weber, D.: Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment 294; The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico 294; The Spanish Frontier in North America 294 Weber, M. 143 Weeks, J. 204 Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s, The (Schuyler) 18 Weinberg, G. 41; A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II 39 Weinrib, L. 175 Weisbrot, R. 66 Weisiger, M.: Dreaming of Sheep 242 welfare/welfare state 30–31, 52, 61, 67, 77, 98–100, 108–109, 176–177, 196–198 Welke, B. 174, 318 Wells, R. 145 Weltanschauung 163–164 Welter, B. 193 Wenger, T. 363 West, C. 123 West, E. 282 Westad, O. 50, 86; The Global Cold War 168 Western Historical Quarterly, The 287 Western History Association 281 Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series 186 What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II (Phillips-Fein and Zelizer) 134 What’s the Matter With Kansas? (Frank) 96 Wheeler, L.: Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 17–18 When Affirmative Action Was White (Katznelson) 130 When Harlem was in Vogue (Lewis) 18 When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Gutiérrez) 296 White, A. 29 White, D. 208 White, G. 176 White, M. 118 White, R. 182, 282, 285–286; Railroaded 184 White, W. 219 white Americans 6–11, 19, 29, 54–55, 62–64, 67, 77, 129, 134, 333 White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (HaneyLopez) 22

417

Index White Citizens Councils 54 White Flight (Kruse) 134 whiteness 21–22, 32, 143, 174, 261 White Night riots 208 White Protestant Nation (Lichtman) 133 White Slave Traffic Act (1910) 17. see also Mann Act (1910) white supremacy 11, 18, 22–23, 33, 52, 61–64, 122, 130, 154, 227 Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (Guttmann) 341–342 Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865–1885 (Sharp) 298 Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (King) 18 Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Prothero) 95–97 Widdis, R.: With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration Into the United States and Western Canada 1880–1920 297 Wide World of Sports (television show) 344 Wiebe, R. 163 Wiese, A. 270–271 Wilder, C. 30 wilderness 54, 184–188. see also environmental history Wilderness in the American Mind (Nash) 185 Wilentz, S. 86, 140 Wilkinson, C.: Blood Struggle 244 Will & Grace (television show) 97, 209 Williams, D. 88, 365 Williams, M. 31 Williams, Raymond 153 Williams, Rhonda 271 Williams, Robert 63 Williams, Robin 261 Williams, S. 345–346 Williams, V. 345–346 Williams, W. 163–164; The Tragedy of American Diplomacy 162 Williams-Forson, P.: Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power 375–376 Williamson, H. 104 Willis, A. 365 Willrich, M. 173 Wills, G. 85 Wilson, E.: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis 332 Wilson, J. 86; The Triumph of Improvisation 168 Wilson, W. 12, 19–20, 98, 129, 241 Wilsonian principles 167 Winks, R.: The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States 297 Wirth, L. 116 Wisconsin School 162–163 With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration Into the United States and Western Canada 1880–1920 (Widdis) 297 Wobblies (International Workers of the World; IWW) 10, 150–152 Wodach, J. 351–352

Wolcott, V. 28 Wolfe, T.: “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” 72–73 Wolfowitz, P. 101–102 Woloch, N.: A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s 18 Woman as a Force in History (Beard) 192 Woman’s Estate (Mitchell) 194 Women, Race, and Class (Davis) 195 Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Morgan) 20 Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Blee) 18 women’s and gender history 191–202; 1920s 16–18, 117; 1960s 64–67; 1970s 73, 77–80; 1980s 88; 1990s 96–100; African American and civil rights history 217–218; agricultural and rural history 303–310; Asian Americans 250–251; border/lands history 293–296; Cold War and 54; consumerism and popular culture 316, 319–320; economics and capitalism 110; environmental history 183, 188; food and health history 371–375; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 162–165; Great Depression and New Deal 27–32; immigration and ethnicity 259–260; intellectual history 116, 123–124; labor and working class history 152–155; Latino/a history 230–234; legal and constitutional history 172, 176–177; liberalism and conservatism 129–131; metropolitan history 271–272; Progressive Era 6–11; religious history 360, 366; science, medicine, and technology 330–333; social and cultural history 140–142; sport and leisure history 339, 345–346; World War II 44 Women’s Army Corps (WAC) 205 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) 16 Women’s Political Council 217 Women’s suffrage headquarters 191 Women’s Tennis Association 345 Wood, M. 165 Woodard, K. 269 Woods, R. 66 Woods, T. 345 “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919” (Gutman) 151 Workers’ Control in America (Montgomery) 151 working class history. see labor and working class history Working-Class Hollywood (Ross) 153 Working Knowledge (Isaac) 121 Workingmen’s Democracy (Fink) 153 Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Roediger) 261 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 26, 42, 104, 350 World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, A (Weinberg) 39 World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945, A (Chickering, Förster, and Greiner) 39

418

Index World Bank (WB) 98 World Cup 346 World Institute on Disability 351 World is Flat, The (Friedman) 98 Worldmaking (Milne) 168 World Series 344–346 World Trade Organization (WTO) 98 World Turned Inside Out, The (Livingston) 119 World War I 17–20; African American and civil rights history 213; agricultural and rural history 303, 306–308; Asian American history 254; disability history 355; economics and capitalism 107–108; environmental history 186; food and health history 374; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 163, 167; Great Depression and New Deal 27; labor and working class history 153; legal and constitutional history 175–176; Native American history 241–242; Progressive Era 5–9, 12 World War II 37–47; African American and civil rights history 219; agricultural and rural history 309; American West 283–285; consumerism and popular culture 29–30; environmental history 186–187; food and health history 374; foreign relations and U.S. in the world 161, 164; Great Depression and New Deal 27; Latino/a history 229–232; LGBT history 205; liberalism and 128–129; metropolitan history 272; Native American history 241–245; science, medicine, and technology 327–328; sport and leisure history 341–342 World War II and the American Indian (Townshend) 243 Worster, D. 182, 187, 286; Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s 308; Rivers of Empire 185–186 Worthen, M. 365 Wounded Knee 72, 239, 244 WPA (Works Progress Administration) 26, 42, 104, 350 Wright, R. 341; Native Son 44 WTO (World Trade Organization) 98 Wu, J. 66; Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era 255 Wuthnow, R.: Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s 311; Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future 311 Wycliffe Bible Translators/Summer Institute of Linguistics 365

xenophobia 231, 251, 254–255 Yale University Press 284, 296 Yans, V.: Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 260 Yans-McLaughlin, V.: Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics 261–262 Yellowtail, R. 241 YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) 338 Yoder, D. 377; “Folk Cookery” 370; “Historical Sources for American Foodway Research and Plans for an American Foodways Archive” 370 Yom Kippur war 72 Yoo, D.: Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 253 Young, A. 213 Young, C. 63 Young, M. 163–164 Young, N. 365 Young Americans for Freedom 132 Young Lords 233–234 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 338 Young Negroes’ Cooperative League 218 Yu, H.: Thinking Orientals 124 Yugoslavia 100 Yuh, J-Y.: Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America 254 Yung, J.: Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco 251 YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) 338 Zaharias, G. 340 Zakaria, F.: The Post-American World 98 Zakim, M. 120 Zangwill, I. 360 Zaretsky, N. 145 Zeiler, T.: Diplomatic History 166 Zelizer, J. 66, 77, 176; What’s Good for Business: Business and American Politics Since World War II 134 Zeller, B.: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America 378 Zierler, D. 167 Zipp, S. 270 Zolberg, A. 89 Zukin, S. 270

419