1. The Dynamics of American Statebuilding
1. Recent reassessments include Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Brian Balough, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Desmond King and Robert C. Liberman, “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61 (July 2009): 547; William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, 3 (June 2008): 752–772, esp. note 8, which cites recent social scientists who contend that the United States was stateless in the nineteenth century; Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Shaped by War and Trade: Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Also see Sheldon D. Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building: Financing and the Development of the American State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Jack P. Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (April 2007): 235–250; Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. chs. 1, 10; William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73, 3 (December 1986): 585–600; Hugh Davis Graham, “The Stunted Career of Policy History: A Critique and an Agenda,” Public Historian 15, 2 (Spring 1993): 15–37.
2. On situational policymaking and the dynamics of governmental action, see Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present, rev. and expanded ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), ch. 2, esp. 51–52.
3. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 15, 17–18. Bryce first published his classic study in 1889.
4. S. E. Finer, The History of Government, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1:1–34, 3:1261–1306; Raymond Grew, “The Nineteenth-Century European State,” in Statemaking and Social Movements, ed. Charles Bright and Susan Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” in States, War, Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 3; Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 2; Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. chs. 1 (Charles Tilly) and 2 (Samuel E. Finer); Charles Tilly, ed., Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 900–1990 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). This and the next several paragraphs emphasize European states, which were the most important referents for Americans.
5. S. E. Finer has criticized the overuse of the term “nation-state,” which he reserves for states where sovereignty is democratically exercised. He prefers the term “national state” for entities where a common national identity has emerged in the context of statebuilding, such as France after the French Revolution. Finer, History of Government, 1:3–4.
6. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 333; see Bobbitt’s chapter 7, “From Kingly States to Territorial States: 1648–1766,” for an insightful synthesis of this history and its literature. On war and statebuilding in European history, see Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); Andrew Lambert, War at Sea in the Age of Sail, 1650–1850 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2005); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989); Pollack, War, Revenue, and State Building.
In The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 576, William H. McNeill argues that the history of Western civilization displayed “a deeply rooted pugnacity” and “European warlikeness,” contrasting it with Chinese, Muslim, and Hindu society.
On the global outbreak of wars and major violent encounters from 1840 to 1880 (numbering 177, according to the Global Wars Project) and their impact on state alignments, see Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 619–657.
7. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 26. Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2:87, concurs. On the dynamics of statebuilding, also see Bobbitt, Shield of Achilles, chs. 5–9; Brewer, Sinews of Power; Poggi, The State, 33, ch. 6.
8. Finer, History of Government, 3:13–14.
9. The application of these conceptual references is integrated with a factual historical narrative in this book. Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New York: Free Press, 1970), 4, explains this order of analysis: “We can’t ask why until we first have systematically identified what happened and who caused it to happen.”
10. Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), ch. 10, esp. 404; David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 109, 129–134; Gavin Wright, “The Origins of America’s Industrial Success,” American Economic Review 80 (1990): 651–668.
Thomas C. Cochran, Challenges to American Values: Society, Business and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8–9, argues that the opportunities offered by the “geographical environment . . . were dominant in shaping the traditional American values and social practices.”
11. D. W. Meinig, “The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians,” American Historical Review 83 (December 1978): 1205. Meinig executed his plan in The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986–2004). William Cronon provides a model for tracing the spatial diffusion of social and economic relationships in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991). Also see Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
12. On the influence of weather (meteorological conditions) on economies, see John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); John D. Post, “Climate Change and Historical Explanation,“ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979): 291–301; John D. Post, “The Mortality Crises of the Early 1770s and European Demographic Trends,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (Summer 1990): 29–62; Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
13. James R. Akerman, “The Structuring of Political Territory in Early Printed Atlases,” Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 138–154; Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 2 (1999): 374–405; Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. 76–77, 112; J. B. Hartley, “Power and Legitimization in the English Geographic Atlases of the Eighteenth Century,” in Images of the World: The Atlas through History, ed. John A. Wolter and Ronald Grim (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1997), esp. 181–192; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 1; John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001), esp. 19; William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1966), a prize-winning study that tracks the routes of explorers and scientists with numerous detailed maps.
14. For an overview of America’s military tradition, see Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (1994; reprint, New York: Free Press, 2012). Also see Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005); John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983); Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, enlarged ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Despite its age, Walter Millis’s Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956) remains insightful. Thomas Patterson et al., American Foreign Relations, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009), reviews the geopolitical context of military activity and cites the relevant literature. Subsequent chapters cite historical studies of American policing.
15. Theda Skocpol et al., “Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished American Civil Voluntarism,” in Katznelson and Shefter, Shaped by War and Trade, 141. On war and American statebuilding, see Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
16. Hugh Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. ch. 2.
17. See, for example, Kevin H. O’Rourke, “The Worldwide Economic Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 123–149; Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State.
18. Patrick O’Brien, “Central Government and the Economy, 1688–1815,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, vol. 1, ed. Roderick Floud and Deirdre McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205–241; Jan DeVries, Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), ch. 8; Kennedy, Rise and Fall of Great Powers, xxii, 17, 197, 439; Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2:723; Hans Pohl, “Economic Powers and Political Powers in Early Modern Europe: Theory and History,” Journal of European Economic History 28, 1 (Spring 1999): 139–168; Porter, War and Rise of the State, ch. 2; Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ch. 2.
Overviews of American economic development and its linkage to long nineteenth-century governance include Engerman and Gallman, Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vols. 1 and 2; Jonathan Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Paul A. C. Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War: Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).
On the stages of economic development, see Harry N. Scheiber, “Government and the American Economy: Three Stages of Historical Change, 1790–1941,” in Essays from the Lowell Conference on Industrial History, ed. Robert Weible (Lowell, MA: Lowell Conference, 1981), 128–144.
19. On economic fluctuations during the colonial and early national periods, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), table 3.4; Post, Last Great Subsistence Crisis. For later years, see Joseph H. Davis, “An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S. Business Cycles since the 1790s,” Working Paper 11157 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005); Peter Temin, “The Causes of American Business Cycles: An Essay in Economic Historiography,” Working Paper 6692 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998). Also see David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
20. There is an extensive literature on crisis and change. Here is a sampling: Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Peter Gourevitch, Politics of Hard Times: Comparative Responses to Industrial Economic Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 22–23; Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Territory of the Historian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 111–131; Mann, Sources of Social Power, 2:221–226; Randolph Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’” Past and Present 52 (1971): 3–22; Sidney Verba, “Sequences and Development,” in Crises and Sequences in Political Development, ed. Leonard Binder et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (1978; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000). “A crisis is a break, a discontinuity, a moment in time,” according to Fernard Braudel and F. Spooner, “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 430.
For a model of how depression impacts American government, see Ballard C. Campbell, “Tax Revolts and Political Change,” Journal of Policy History 10 (1998): 153–178, reprinted in David Brian Robertson, Loss of Confidence: Politics and Policy in the 1970s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Campbell, Growth of American Government, 51–52, 295–300. Also see Larry Neal, “A Shocking View of Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 317–334; Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Douglas Hibbs, “Political Parties and Macro-Economic Policy,” American Political Science Review 71 (1977): 1467–1487.
21. For long-term economic cycles and their impact, see Fischer, Great Wave; Andrew Tylecote, The Long Wave in the World Economy: The Current Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1991).
22. Ian Tyrell argues: “It can be said that the United States exhibited strong evidence of a nation in sentiment and ideology before it developed a strong state apparatus.” Ian Tyrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86, 3 (December 1999): 1023. On nationalism in the United States, see Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (New York: Collier Books, 1957); Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
23. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 400; see in general 399–417. Also see D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 447, 45–53. The classic statement of regional influences on American history is Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of Section in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1932). Also see Michael Conzen, “American Homelands: A Dissenting View,” in Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America, ed. Richard L. Nostrand and Lawrence E. Estaville (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 238–271. An interesting essay on how regional cultures persist over time and influence political attitudes is Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011).
24. Helpful in defining these issues are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Joan Hoff, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991); Alexander Keysaar, The Right to Vote (New York: Basic Books, 2000); James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in United States History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
25. In addition to the socioeconomic development of the United States, the primary attributes of statebuilding traced in this book are territorial expansion, including the creation of governmental entities (local, state, and congressional representation); ideology, both popular and legal-constitutional; statutory actions at all levels of government; public finance (expenditures, revenue, debt, budgeting); administrative capacity, including the size and authority of the “bureaucracy”; and coercive actions, a domain that encompasses wars and military actions, policing, and criminal justice, including capital punishment and incarceration. The appendix to this book contains tables of policy enactments for selected states and cities.
Howard H. Lenter, “The Concept of the State,” Comparative Politics 16 (April 1984): 368, lists ten components of a “complex political organization.”
26. A useful overview of federalism and its literature is David Brian Robertson, Federalism and the Making of America (New York: Routledge, 2012). Classic overviews are W. Brooke Graves, American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, and Current Status (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), and Harry N. Scheiber, “The Condition of American Federalism: A Historian’s View,” in The New Federalism, ed. Frank Smallwood (Hanover, NH: Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, 1967).
2. Rise of the Little Republics
1. D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. 23–154; Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1971), ch. 1; Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1932), plates 22–25; Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1980). A lyrical geographic portrait on North America appears in Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 403–410.
2. By the mid-seventeenth century many North Americans probably had pocketsized atlases such as John Gibson’s Atlas Minimus or, a New Set of Pocket Maps of the Several Empires, Kingdoms, and States of the Known World (London, 1758). See Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 6, 38, 79; Andrew Lambert, War at Sea in the Age of Sail, 1650–1850 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2005).
3. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 76–86; John Brewer, Sinews of Empire: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Peter Mathias, First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), table 12; P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100, 337.
4. Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Trade and Balance of Payments,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2:722–723.
5. Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 17.
6. On population growth as the primary source of economic growth, see Engerman, Cambridge Economic History of the United States, 1:226–227.
7. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), ch. 11; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 1; Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 134–136.
8. Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 43–45, 153, 197–210, 244, 643–658, chs. 13, 45; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War (New York: Viking, 2005), chs. 3, 4; Lawrence Martin, ed., The George Washington Atlas (Washington, DC: US George Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1932), plate 48.
9. Bruckner, Geographic Revolution in Early America, 56–57, 95.
10. Barnet Schester, George Washington’s America: A Biography through His Maps (New York: Walker, 2010), 10, 275–280 (reproduction of his “Yale” atlas); H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 244, 296–297, 306, 323, 336–337; John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 56, 92, 93; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia [1781] (original English edition published 1785; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Library and the French Connection,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1993): 681–682; David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 149; Lucille Griffith, The Virginia House of Burgesses, 1750–1774 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1968), 131; Bruckner, Geographic Revolution in Early America, ch. 2.
11. Henry Popple’s America Septentrionalis, a Map of the British Empire in America (1733) was “the first large-scale printed map of North America,” according to Short, Representing the Republic, 59. Popple, clerk to the Board of Trade, was assigned the task of producing a British cartographic version of North America; the Board of Trade sent a copy to each governor of the American colonies.
12. Short, Representing the Republic, 93; McCullough, John Adams, 148; Brands, First American, 335, 348; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 218, 334–335; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 357, 773; Smith, Virgin Land, 146.
13. Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Knopf, 1970), chs. 1, 5; Meinig, Atlantic America, 245–250, 426; Engerman, Cambridge Economic History of the United States, 1:249–250; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), books 1 and 2.
14. Meinig, Atlantic America, 303–306; Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in Marshall, Oxford History of the British Empire, 2:212–222; Eliga H. Gould, “A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 481, 484; Timothy H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 19–31.
15. Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1968), 57, 136, 160.
16. Milton Klein, “Leadership in Colonial and Revolutionary America,” in Law as Culture and Culture as Law, ed. Hendrick Hartog and William E. Nelson (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 2000), 58–80; Griffith, Virginia House of Burgesses, ch. 7. A classic portrait of political leadership in colonial Virginia is Charles S. Sydnor, Gentlemen Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952).
17. Jack P. Greene, “Colonial Assemblies,” in Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, vol. 1, ed. Joel H. Silby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 23–37. Greene’s bibliography includes many of his own publications on colonial legislatures.
18. Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 24–109; H. James Henderson, “Taxation and Political Culture: Massachusetts and Virginia, 1760–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, 1 (1990): 90–144; Nicolas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 58–66; Griffith, Virginia House of Burgesses, 134, 138–139; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 1.
19. Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years War (New York: Norton, 1974), 41–61; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: The Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1994), 1–12; Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 6–22.
20. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), chs. 4, 5; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in United States History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 2.
21. Henderson, “Taxation and Political Culture,” 94–95, 98; Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), chs. 3, 8.
22. DeVoto, Course of Empire, 224.
23. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), 61.
24. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
25. Greene, Peripheries and Center, 89, 108, 133.
26. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), chs. 1–11; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative History of the Continental Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), chs. 2, 3.
27. Jack P. Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (April 2007): 241.
28. For speculations on British intransigence, see Greene, Peripheries and Center, 143; David Hawk, The Colonial Experience (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 568. Also see Brewer, Sinews of Power.
29. Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 153–158.
30. Peter G. Thomas, Lord North (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 71–91; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 4, 190–193; Anderson, People’s Army, 61; James K. Martin and Mark E. Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic 1763–1789 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006), 19, 26; Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 9, 56, 58.
3. Forging a National State
1. Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), chs. 11–13; Eric Nellis, The Long Road to Change: America’s Revolution, 1750–1820 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2007), ch. 3.
2. David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), chs. 1–3.
3. Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 322–323; David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 92; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 97, 312.
4. Morton Borden and Penn Borden, The American Tory (New York: Prentice Hall, 1972), 23; Catherine S. Crary, ed., The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
5. Rakove, Beginnings of National Politics, ch. 5.
6. McCullough, 1776, 134–148.
7. Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997).
8. In addition to coastal locations, the war spread west of the Appalachian Mountains. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
9. McCullough, 1776, 293. Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), skillfully describes Washington’s personal qualities. See also Don Higginbotham, “Military Leadership in the American Revolution,” in War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 84–105; James K. Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006).
10. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 139.
11. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 130–133; Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, 376, 406, 462, 576–578; Allan R. Millet and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (New York: Free Press, 1994), 51; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19–21, 29–43.
12. John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 241–245.
13. Paul Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), ch. 2; Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), chs. 1, 2; Walter Nugent, Structures of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 24–28. According to Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, 11–12, Massachusetts issued 1,554 commissions for privateering, and Congress issued 550.
14. John W. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 177; see also 173–177, 237–242; Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, 20–21; John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983), ch. 3; Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956), 23, 35–37.
15. Francois Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 655; Richard W. Van Alstyne, Empire and Independence: The International History of the American Revolution (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), 1, 8, ch. 8; H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 335, 348; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 139–149.
16. D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 311–323; James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), chs. 7, 8; Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, 140; Chernow, George Washington, 538, 594–595. For a fine portrait of the trials of a loyalist, see James S. Leamon, The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist: For God, King, and for Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), chs. 5, 6. Also see James W. Ely Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32–38.
17. Marc Kruman, Beyond Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Roscoe L. Ashley, The American Federal State (New York: Macmillan, 1902), appendixes E and G.
An ongoing debate is whether the states preceded the formation of a national government. My reading of this question is twofold. First, there is no simple answer because the choice between options (states or Congress) requires assumptions about the identification of a viable government. The political situation was fluid in 1775 and 1776, as colonists sought effective organizations to resist an invading army. A reciprocal interaction occurred between local (state, town, county) and national (congressional) bodies—all elected in some fashion—during this crisis period. Second, the issue is largely irrelevant because the American national state has always contained state and national components, with a history of continuous negotiation between parts of the polity.
18. Peter S. Onuf, “The Origins and Early Development of State Legislatures,” in Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, ed. Joel H. Silbey (New York: Scribner, 1994), 1:175–194; Kruman, Beyond Authority and Liberty, chs. 3–7.
19. Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12–13; Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, ch. 2; Allan Nevins, American States during and after the Revolution, 1775–1789 (New York: Macmillan, 1924), ch. 9; Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), ch. 3.
Generalizations about state and municipal actions face several constraints. The large number of subnational governments (eventually fifty states and several thousand municipalities) and the widening scope of their policy activity, coupled with gaps in the archival records and scholarship on the subject, impede a comprehensive reconstruction of past governance. Readers must understand that some statements about subnational governments are informed approximations. The state and municipal actions listed in the appendix suggest patterns of subnational statutory enactments and judicial rulings.
20. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–48; Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), ch. 4.
21. Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), ch. 1; Nevins, American States, 555; Chernow, George Washington, ch. 38, 627; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987), chs. 2, 3; Andrew Robertson, “Look on This Picture . . . and on This! Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images in the United States, 1787–1820,” American Historical Review 106 (October 2001): 1268.
22. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 393–394.
23. Charles T. Bullock, Historical Sketch of the Finances and Financial Policy of Massachusetts from 1780 to 1905 (New York: American Economic Association, 1907), 9–20; Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 37–47; Nevins, American States, ch. 9; Brown, Redeeming the Republic, ch. 3, 83–84, 123–135; Van Beck Hall, Politics without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780–1791 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), ch. 4; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, January 22, 1786, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 8:479. Madison referred to “the pestilent effects of paper money” in Federalist 44 and pushed tirelessly for restrictions on state legislatures that enacted such “evils.”
24. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 6, in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1961), 35; James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, March 18, 1786, in Rutland and Rachal, Papers of James Madison, 8:502; Samuel McKee, ed., Alexander Hamilton’s Papers on Public Credit, Commerce and Finance (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 9.
25. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 63 (table 3.4), 367–375; Cathy Matson, “The Revolution, the Constitution, and the New Nation,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1:375–381; Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, ch. 3; Richard B. Morris, The Forging of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), ch. 6, 259–265; Gordon C. Bjork, “The Waning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 541–560; Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 35–42; David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), esp. ch. 2; Alan Schaffer, “Virginia’s ‘Critical Period,’” in Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernathy, ed. Darrett Bruce Rutman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964); John H. Flannagan Jr., “Trying Times: Economic Depression in New Hampshire, 1781–1789” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1972), 5–81.
26. David M. Ludlum, Early American Winters, vol. 1, 1604–1820 (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1966), 151–154; David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 142; Rutland and Rachal, Papers of James Madison, 8:11, 16, 346, 514; Chernow, George Washington, 624, 648–649, 658, 665, 702, 723, 737. Washington noted, “A great Hoar frost and ice at least r of an inch thick” on April 16, 1785, in The Diaries of George Washington, ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 4:121. H. H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past and Future, vol. 2, Climate History and the Future (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978), 835, cites the winters of 1783–1784 and 1784–1785 as the coldest on record since 1738 in the eastern United States.
27. On the historical recurrence of depressions and tax revolts, see Ballard C. Campbell, “Tax Revolts and Political Change,” Journal of Policy History 10 (1998): 153–178; Ballard C. Campbell, “Depressions and Politics in American History,” Long Term View: A Journal of Informed Opinion 4 (1999): 13–21.
28. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 41–49, 94–96, 110–122, 126; Flannagan, “Trying Times,” esp. 177–180; Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York: Vintage, 1950), 238–240; Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, 83–88; Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 57, 83, 124–126; Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), ch. 6; Morris, Forging of the Union, 157–158 (on New York). Also see Cathy Matson, “Liberty, Jealousy, and Union: The New York Economy in the 1780s,” in New York in the Age of the Constitution, 1775–1800, ed. Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). State tax efforts in the late 1780s are reported in Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the United States Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), tables 1–4.
29. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 128.
30. Chernow, George Washington, 695; Morris, Forging of the Union, 266; James T. Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), 98–105.
31. On the depression and tax revolts as accelerators of the movement to hold a constitutional convention, see Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War (New York: Viking, 2005), 185–186; Brown, Redeeming the Republic, esp. 160–167, 85–90; Matson and Onuf, Union of Interests, chs. 3, 4; Morris, Forging of the Union, 265; Nettles, Emergence of a National Economy, 60, 89–92; Nevins, American States, 570; Schaffer, “Virginia’s ‘Critical Period,’” 159; Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 120–128. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, chs. 10, 11, esp. 404, 465, expressed an alternative view. Also see Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), chs. 9–11.
32. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 179–180.
33. For overviews of the Constitutional Convention, see Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, ch. 25; Merrill Jensen, The Making of the Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1964); Don Higginbotham, “George Washington’s Contribution to American Constitutionalism,” in War and Society in Revolutionary America; Don Higginbotham, “War and State Formation in Revolutionary America,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Papers of the key figures of the period are available online at http://founders.archives.
34. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, sees conservatives’ desire to counteract the states’ refusal to pay war debts with specie as the central dynamic behind the writing of the Constitution (3–41, 49, 179–180); Federalists, he argues, inserted the term “justice” in the preamble of the Constitution as a rebuke to laws that paid creditors in deflated paper money (227).
35. See James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 8, 1784, October 3, 1785, January 22 and March 18, 1786, and James Madison to George Washington, December 9, 1785, in Rutland and Rachal, Papers of James Madison, vol. 8. In the parlance of eighteenth-century political theory, “faction” meant a conspiratorial group that used corrupt means to gain power and install a despotism. Today, the term refers to an interest group or a group within a political party.
36. Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, ch. 13. Hamilton wrote fifty-one of the Federalist essays, Madison wrote twenty-nine, and John Jay wrote five.
37. Richard Henry Lee, “Letters from the Federal Farmer,” October 8, 1787, in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2:227.
38. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913), esp. 188. My assessment of Beard’s contention about the writers of the Constitution rests on several theorems. First, among any group of legislators, there are likely to be several motivations influencing policy decisions; seldom, if ever, do individuals within a large body think exactly alike. Moreover, individual lawmakers may be motivated by several factors related to a specific issue. Second, there is no way to prove that the economic motives of decisionmakers predominated in their policy deliberations. Simply put, overt behavior does not disclose motivation, which originates in the psychological recesses of the human mind. Third, logic suggests that most individuals do not consciously act contrary to their personal economic interests, assuming that decisionmakers clearly recognize that how they vote will have a significant impact on their interests. These axioms apply to the debate in the states over ratification of the Constitution in 1787 and 1788. Fourth, legislators (and delegates) tend to explain their decisions publicly with reasoning designed to influence political outcomes, which may or may not overlap with their private feelings. It is well known among students of Congress that speeches on the chamber floor are often framed to please the speaker’s constituents.
39. Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution, 1781–1788 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Forrest McDonald, The Formation of the American Republic, 1776–1790 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965); Brown, Redeeming the Republic; Edling, Revolution in Favor of Government; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, chs. 10–13.
40. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ch. 9; Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage, 1965), 394–395.
41. Henry Steele Commager, “Leadership,” in American History and the Social Sciences, ed. Edward N. Saveth (New York: Free Press, 1964), 258–273; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 52–53.
42. James Huston, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765–1900,” American Historical Review 98 (October 1993): 1079–1105, offers an instructive explanation of the link among aristocracy, wealth, and republican political theory in the Revolutionary era. He argues that a government controlled by wealthy aristocrats was bound to turn a republic into a tyrannous oligarchy. Aristocrats gained their wealth by governmental favoritism and special privileges, and they used their wealth to corrupt politics, leading down the path to despotism.
43. S. E. Morison, Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929), 313.
44. Jensen, Making of the Constitution, chs. 11–13; Brown, Redeeming the Republic, ch. 14; McDonald, Formation of the American Republic, 7, 8; Main, Anti-Federalists; Hall, Politics without Parties, ch. 9; Flannagan, “Trying Times,” ch. 6; Greene, Peripheries and Center, ch. 9; Storing, Complete Anti-Federalist, esp. vol. 1; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 260–269.
45. Brutus argued in the New York Journal (October 1787) that the new government was a complete government, not a confederation. Storing, Complete Anti-Federalist, 1:365, 391.
4. Geographic and Economic Expansion
1. On Jefferson’s empire of liberty, see Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 357, 376; Peter Gay, “The Enlightenment,” in Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (1968; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44; Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 396.
2. Thomas G. Patterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Relations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 1:100; Frank Freidel and Norman Pollack, eds., Builders of American Institutions: Readings in United States History (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 184, 186 (“Annexation of Texas”); James D. Richardson, comp., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1910), 5:3336, 3339.
3. S. E. Finer, The History of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1:8; Merle E. Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 40–41; William H. Goetzmann, When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Diplomacy, 1800–1860 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), xiv–xv, 104–105. In Cohen v. Virginia (1821), Chief Justice John Marshall referred to the American states as “members of one great empire.” Stanley I. Kutler, ed., The Supreme Court and the Constitution: Readings in American Constitutional History, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977), 48.
4. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 3:2231.
5. I use the term “antebellum era” to refer to the years between 1790 and 1860.
6. D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 18–23, pt. I, ch. 9.
7. B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), volumes for Europe, Asia and Africa, and Americas; David Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (New York: Norton, 1998), 232; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), tables A1-c, A2-c, A3-c.
8. A useful review of these themes is Meinig, Continental America, 3, 197–211.
9. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), ch. 32; Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty’: Expansion and Republicanism, 1775–1825,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, 1 (September 1989): 1–20; Meinig, Continental America, 214–217; Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1984), 133–138; Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
10. Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 672.
11. Wood, Empire of Liberty, 286, ch. 10; DeVoto, Course of Empire, ch. 10, esp. 411, 430. Robert Lee, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,” Journal of American History 103, 4 (March 2017): 924, estimates that the purchase of 222 land cessions from Native Americans cost $2.6 billion in nominal terms.
12. DeVoto, Course of Empire, chs. 10, 11, esp. 397, 424, 527; Wood, Empire of Liberty, 374–382.
13. The story of American penetration of the Far West is traced in Goetzmann, When the Eagle Screamed; William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1966), chs. 1–9; Meinig, Continental America; John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), chs. 5–7.
14. On the popularity of geography textbooks, see Short, Representing the Republic, 14–17.
15. On the idea of “natural” boundaries of the United States, see Meinig, Continental America, 211–212. Transcontinental railroad predictions are from George H. Douglas, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Life (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 97–98; James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 46, 48, 96; Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 265.
16. Meinig, Continental America, 128–158.
17. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 686–688. The “reannexation” of Texas derives from the region’s cession to Mexico in the treaty of 1819.
18. Ray Allen Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), ch. 7.
19. Polk left little information that explains his interest in expanding the United States. He died in 1849. On his motivations concerning Oregon, Texas, and the West, see Charles Sellers, James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), ch. 6, esp. 232; Goetzmann, When the Eagle Screamed, chs. 3, 4, esp. 239; Meinig, Continental America, 145; Kenneth J. Hagan, The People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), 132–137; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 766–767. Generally, see Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Knopf, 1963).
20. Frederick Merk, “Dissent in the Mexican War,” in Dissent in Three American Wars, ed. S. E. Morison et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 44.
21. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 247–255; Merk, Manifest Destiny, chs. 4, 5.
22. Meinig, Continental America, 458.
23. Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11–12, gives a range of between 600,000 and 1.8 million Amerindians.
24. Meinig, Continental America, pt. I, ch. 5; Francis Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Malcom J. Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies and Institutions, 1775–1850 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Paul VanDevelder, Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), esp. ch. 6; Andrew Cayton, “Separate Interests and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 39–67.
25. Joel Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele, A Brief History of the United States (1871; reprint, New York: American Book Co., 1912), 12–15.
26. Frymer, Building an American Empire, 36–40.
27. In addition to the original thirteen states, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maine (originally part of Massachusetts), Texas, West Virginia (originally part of Virginia), Alaska, and Hawaii did not possess a public domain.
28. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), ch. 1, discusses the motives and implications of state-imposed schemes of systematic measurement and data archiving.
29. A readable account of federal land policy is Everett Dick, The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Land from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). Roughly a quarter of the public domain disposed of in the fifty states by 1960 occurred via the homestead law. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), ch. 2, esp. 58, 67–68, captures Americans’ passion to own property, how US policy helped them get it, and the significance of land distribution to American history.
30. On settlement, see Billington, Far Western Frontier; Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 158; Meinig, Continental America, 457–458, esp. figs. 27 and 28, which display the paths of migration.
31. The states form the institutional building blocks of representation in the national legislature (House and Senate) and are the units for the selection of presidential electors.
32. Meinig, Continental America, pt. II, esp. figs. 68 and 71.
33. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), offers a superb portrait of how Chicago integrated agricultural and resource industries and their marketing and transportation dimensions. Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants (1941; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1968), 73–82, provides a classic view of Boston and identifies manufacturing and other new enterprises.
34. Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Economic History, 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 28.
35. For profiles of the land, see Paul Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); Meinig, Continental America, pt. II, chs. 3–6. Diana Muir, Reflections on Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), is informative about New England’s natural endowment.
On the importance of land to American economic development, see Robert E. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–56; Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” in Engerman and Gallman, Cambridge Economic History, 2:685–732; Stanley Lebergott, “The Demand for Land: The United States, 1820–1860,” Journal of Economic History 45 (June 1985): 181–212; Peter Temin, “Free Land and Federalism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21, 3 (Winter 1991): 371–390; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York: Norton, 1978), esp. 45–47, 72; John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 11–12.
36. Ballard C. Campbell, American Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2012), 244–245.
37. The discussion of the spread of agriculture and the growth of industries related to natural resources in this and the next several paragraphs is based largely on Gates, Farmer’s Age; Meinig, Continental America; Faulkner, American Economic History; Engerman and Gallman, Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, esp. chs. 1, 8; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Muir, Reflections on Bullough’s Pond. See also James Norris, Frontier Iron (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964).
38. For an incisive portrait of agriculture in the antebellum period, see Gates, Farmer’s Age; Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South, esp. 55–62, 90–91.
39. Evan Cornog, The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 107–169; Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), esp. chs. 1–4; Julius Rubin, “An Imitative Public Improvement: The Pennsylvania Mainline,” in Canals and American Economic Development, ed. Carter Goodrich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 67–106; Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969).
40. George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1951); Albert Fishlow, “Transportation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Engerman and Gallman, Cambridge Economic History of the United States, 2:542–543; Meinig, Continental America, pt. II, chs. 8, 9; T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Knopf, 2009), chs. 3–6, 11; John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 9.
41. Winifred B. Rotherberg, “The Invention of American Capitalism,” in Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, ed. Peter Temin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 93; Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr, Business Enterprise in American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), ch. 3.
42. Thomas C. Cochran, “The Business Revolution,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1449–1466, emphasizes the importance of “social structure and culture values” in promoting economic growth. Also see Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), esp. 90; Wiebe, Opening of American Society, 151–152, 219–221, on banking and personalized credit.
43. Meinig, Continental America, pt. II, chs. 8–12. Also see Licht, Industrializing America, chs. 1–3; Muir, Reflections on Bullough’s Pond, esp. ch. 10; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Mansel Blackford, A History of Small Business in America (New York: Twayne, 1991), ch. 1.
44. I agree with Wiebe, Opening of American Society, ch. 13, on this point concerning the industrial transformation.
45. Gallman, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” esp. table 1.6. The sparseness of data about the macrodimensions of the antebellum economy cautions against a literal acceptance of quantitative indicators of national income; a more prudent approach is to read the data as a basis for reasoned conjecture.
5. Nationalism and Public Policy
1. Ron Chernow, George Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 45–58.
2. Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (New York: Collier, 1955), 9–10.
3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Potter, “Historian’s Use of Nationalism,” American Historical Review 67 (July 1962): 936. Also instructive on modern nationalism is S. E. Finer, The History of Government, vol. 3, Empires, Monarchies and the Modern State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1447, 1547–1553, 1649; Robert H. Wiebe, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
4. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).
5. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), ch. 2.
6. Quoted in Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 15.
7. Michael Kraus and David D. Joyce, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 92–97; Barbara J. Mitnick, ed., George Washington: American Symbol (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 9–108; Zelinsky, Nation into State, 186, 215–220.
8. Howard H. Martin, “The Fourth of July Oration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 44 (December 1958): 393–401. My comments on the development of nationalism in antebellum America rely heavily on Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), pt. 7, esp. 308–323 on oratory; Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Henry Steele Commager, “The Search for a Usable Past,” American Heritage 16 (February 1965): 4–9, 90–96; Merle E. Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), ch. 16; D. W. Meinig, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Paul C. Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Zelinsky, Nation into State; in addition to the works cited in notes 10–13 below.
9. Meinig, Continental America, 413.
10. On schools and schooling, literacy, and publications, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), esp. chs. 5, 9, 11, 14; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226–229, chs. 12, 16; Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955); Meinig, Continental America, 415–416.
The Massachusetts Historical Society was founded in 1791, the New York Historical Society in 1804, the Boston Athenaeum in 1807, the Boston Public Library in 1852, and the New York Public Library in 1854.
11. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 220–231.
12. Curti, Roots of American Loyalty, ch. 2; Ray Allen Billington, ed., Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 51, 56, 86–138.
13. John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600–1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001), 17–18, 121–157; David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (London: Laurence King, 2000), 192–197; James H. Merrell et al., American Conversations (Boston: Pearson, 2013), ch. 12. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (1980; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13, claims that nature worship was more strongly nationalistic in America than anywhere else.
14. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 698; James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1887 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), chs. 1, 2; Frank Friedel and Norman Pollack, eds., Builders of American Institutions: Readings in United States History (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), 187–188; D. W. Meinig, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4–8.
15. For the suggestion that socioeconomic conditions impact politics, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984); Robert H. Wiebe, Self Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chs. 1–3. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), ch. 1, emphasizes the influence of religious evangelicalism and the rise of democratic politics. See also Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chs. 1–3.
Key statements on the development of political parties are William N. Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); the essays by Ronald P. Formisano and William G. Shade in Paul Kleppner, ed., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Joel H. Silbey, American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); and the essays by Ronald Formisano, David Waldstreicher, Joel Silbey, and Michael Holt in Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).
16. Wiebe, Self Rule, 83; William N. Chambers, “Parties and Nation-Building in America,” in Political Parties and Political Development, ed. J. LaPalombaa and M. Weiner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). On the connection among citizenship, politics, and nationalism through the War of 1812, see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; Andrew Robertson, “Look on This Picture . . . and on This: Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820,” American Historical Review 106 (October 2001): 1263–1280; Nicole Eustace et al., “Interchange: The War of 1812,” Journal of American History 99 (September 2012): 520–555.
17. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), chs. 4–8. On the conflict over national ideals, see Curti, Roots of American Loyalty, ch. 6.
18. Western New York and northern New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) is an example of a regional cluster of states.
19. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Sections and Nation,” Yale Review (1922), in Billington, Frontier and Section, 136–153. A recent Turnerian approach to American politics is Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011). On regionalism, see D. W. Meinig, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 400–405, 444–453; Meinig, Continental America, pt. II. In the latter (ch. 3), Meinig identifies four regions in the early nineteenth century: New England; Virginia, Kentucky, and the southern Midwest; the midlands of central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; and South Carolina and its extension into the Gulf coast. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, ch. 5, sees distinct versions of nationalism in New England, the South, and the West.
20. William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), esp. pt. 2, ch. 13; William H. Truettner, “Ideology and Image: Justifying Westward Expansion,” in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ed. William H. Truettner (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 27–53; Patricia Hills, “Picturing Progress in the Era of Westward Expansion,” in Truettner, West as America, 97–147.
21. Bryan F. LeBeau, Currier and Ives: America Imagined (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).
22. US Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States, vol. 4, Compendium (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 152. Illiteracy among whites aged twenty years and older was 1.88 percent in New England and 9.22 in the South.
23. Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 202.
24. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 732–738; Grant, North over South, 50. Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1976), ch. 6, describes the South as the region least in step with trends of modernization.
25. Boorstin, Americans, 170, ch. 22; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York: Norton, 1978), chs. 2–4; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Doubleday, 1961); Grant, North over South; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; John L. Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Spring 2009): 1–33.
Excellent comparative analyses of interstate and intrastate variations are James H. Broussard, The Southern Federalists, 1800–1816 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), on Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), on Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The intensifying conflict between sectionalism and nationalism is explored in chapter 7.
26. Meinig, Continental America, ch. 13. Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), closely examines the connection of religion, race, and localism to personal identities and politics in the Delaware River region (1770s–1830s). On local identities in the Midwest, see James H. Madison, Heart Land: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
27. Turner, “Sections and Nation,” 152.
28. Report no. 107, House of Representatives, 22nd Congress, 2nd session (February 25, 1833), 3.
29. On the origin and development of federalism, see Boorstin, Americans, pt. 8, 395, who cites the diffusion of power in colonial America and its collective relation to the British government as the origin of American federalism; David Brian Robertson, Federalism and the Making of America (New York: Routledge, 2012); Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), esp. citations beginning on 349. On the fragility of a consensus about the union during the early republic, see Nagel, One Nation Indivisible, ch. 1; Michael Kammen, A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1986), 51–67, chs. 3, 4; William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), chs. 2, 3, 320, 241.
30. William Anderson, The Units of Government in the United States: An Enumeration and Analysis (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1934), fig. 1; US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series A43–52. I estimated the number of town and township governments by multiplying the number of counties in the fifteen states that had towns or townships in 1850 by a factor of fifteen subcounty governments per county. My estimate of subcounty governments per county was based on the number of towns in all Wisconsin counties in 1900. In 1900 Wisconsin had 70 counties, 1,045 towns, 115 cities, and 146 villages. Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, The Wisconsin Bluebook 1968 (Madison: Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, 1968), 89.
31. A very long list of scholars has made this point since the classic portrayal of American federalism by James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888), esp. chs. 26–28. A fine illustration is Donald U. Pisani, “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” Journal of American History 74 (December 1987): 740–768.
32. Regarding federalism and spatial diversity, Boorstin, Americans, 402, observes that “American politics was primarily a by-product of geography.”
33. Stephen Skowronek argues that the noncentralized governmental structure of federalism was “most clearly responsible for the distinctive sense of statelessness in our political culture.” Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 18, observes that America’s “double organization” government was “puzzling” to Europeans.
34. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 85–95, 143; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 97–99; Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 86. Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 97n50, reports that New York State adopted 38 acts affecting New York City between 1786 and 1795, 199 between 1826 and 1835, and 412 between 1846 and 1855.
35. Clay McShane, “Gilded Age Boston,” New England Quarterly 74 (June 2001): 274–302; sources listed for Massachusetts in the appendix.
36. Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 366. When considering this and later observations about fiscal activities as indicators of governance, it is important to recognize two critical points. First, the impact of civic action does not reduce solely to fiscal activity, as governmental power touches numerous elements of society. Second, financial data for the nineteenth century, especially related to local governments, are incomplete.
37. Joel Tarr, “The Evolution of Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure, ed. Royce Hanson (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1984), 13–18; Martin Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), ch. 4, esp. table 4.3; Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 4; Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860 to 1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. appendix, table A.1, on police uniform adoption dates; Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), ch. 6.
38. Boorstin, Americans, pt. 3; Meinig, Continental America, 363–371; Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 314–319, 322–323; Tarr, “Evolution of Urban Infrastructure,” 8, 13; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), 31–41, 295–303, on the great competition between Chicago and St. Louis. On New York constitutional and legal action as a model for other states, see Joseph A. Ranney, Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), esp. ch. 3.
39. Important studies of the mercantile and egalitarian phases of state economic policy are L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York: New York University Press, 1947); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); Harry N. Scheiber, “Federalism and the American Economic Order, 1789–1910,” Law and Society Review 10 (Fall 1975): 58–118; Theodore C. Pease, The Frontier State, 1818–1848 (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1918), 221–232, 317; Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Edward C. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History 1820–1900, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 132–137; William G. Shade, “Louis Hartz and the Myth of Laissez Faire,” Pennsylvania History 59 (July 1992): 256–273. Pisani, “Promotion and Regulation,” assesses much of this literature. Also see the citations in chapter 4 concerning internal improvements. The appendix lists sources for the state actions in tables A.2 and A.3. The depression of 1837–1844 is examined in chapter 6.
40. The concept of law as an instrument that releases entrepreneurial energy is from James William Hurst, Law and Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956). State action, courts, and legal instrumentalism are assessed in William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
41. David B. Davis, “Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787–1861,” American Historical Review 63 (October 1957): 23–46; Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chs. 4, 5; David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), 48–81, 238–254; Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), ch. 5. The national government did not authorize federal penitentiaries until the 1890s.
42. The militia was also called into New York City for riots in 1806 and 1834. James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), chs. 1–4; Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban, ch. 4; Monkkonen, Police in Urban America; Charles S. Syndor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819–1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 36–37; Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice in Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 141–142.
43. Cremin, American Education, esp. ch. 5; John S. Gilkeson Jr., Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 32–35.
44. Gilkeson, Middle-Class Providence, 32–35; Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1800–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 19–21, 49; Shammas, History of Household Government, 116–120. For state and municipal actions, see tables A.1 (on Massachusetts) and A.2 (sample states) in the appendix.
45. Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1948), appendix II; Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), chs. 5–11.
46. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), chs. 15–18.
47. Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1960), chs. 3, 4; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1994), 99, 124–139; Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), chs. 1, 2, 5; Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), chs. 4, 5; Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 189–192; John G. Burke, “Bursting Boilers and the Federal Power,” Technology and Culture 7 (Winter 1966): 1–23; Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization, ch. 2; Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954), esp. ch. 23.
48. A. Hunter Depree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 36–37, 91–114; William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1966), chs. 7–9; John, Spreading the News; Wood, Empire of Liberty, 478–479.
49. Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 15, 56, notes that the census at midcentury was “probably” the largest centralized clerical operation of the federal government; John, Spreading the News.
50. Balogh, Government out of Sight. The governing activities reviewed here and in chapters 9 and 10 render Skowronek’s characterization of the nineteenth century as a polity of “courts and parties” a misleading oversimplification. See Skowronek, Building a New American State, ch. 2.
6. The Dynamics of Antebellum Governance
1. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 27; Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 139, 153, 157, chs. 29, 30.
2. US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series R163; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. table 2.1, 104; White, Jeffersonians, 328–329.
3. Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 170; White, Jeffersonians, 329.
4. Allan R. Millet and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1994), chs. 4, 5; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), chs. 6–9.
5. Matthew A. Crenson, The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), argues that the Jacksonians emphasized the character of administrators over the efficiency of administrative bureaus. White, Jacksonians, is the classic study, esp. chs. 20–22, 27. Also see Nicholas R. Parrilo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1789–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 89–98.
6. Joseph Cooper, The Origins of the Standing Committees and the Development of the Modern House (Houston, TX: Rice University Studies, 1970); Norman K. Risjord, “Congress in the Federalist-Republican Era, 1789–1828,” Allan G. Bogue, “The U.S. Congress: The Era of Party Patronage and Sectional Stress, 1829–1881,” and William G. Shade, “State Legislatures in the Nineteenth Century,” all in Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, vol. 1, ed. Joel H. Silbey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 35–37; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 161. This discussion is also based on my research into the legislative journals and manuals of all the states.
7. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technology and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chs. 6, 7; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The United States Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), ch. 2, esp. 57–59. The outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 caused many federal workers to abandon the city for several months. The availability of mass-produced pencils was also a post–Civil War development.
8. Police force size is based on Alan Anderson, The Origins and Resolution of an Urban Crisis: Baltimore, 1890–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 38; Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 126; James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 51; Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 149; US Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States, vol. 4, Compendium (Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, 1853), 142, 147. Data on incarceration facilities (jails and prisons) are not available, but it is a good bet that virtually every county and all but the smallest municipalities had a lockup. Federal employee data are from US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series R163, Y308, Y309.
9. Graham H. Stuart, The Department of State: A History of Its Organization, Procedure and Personnel (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 22, 36, 69, chs. 7, 8, 11; James S. Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 29.
10. Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler and Robert L. Ivie, Congress Declares War: Rhetoric, Leadership, and Partisanship in the Early Republic (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 21–22; E. B. Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975), 68–76.
11. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 51; Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), chs. 3–5.
12. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), ch. 9; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 11; Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative States in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chs. 1–3.
13. Steinberg, Transformation of Criminal Justice, esp. ch. 1; Richardson, New York Police, 74.
14. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 12–17, 60, 74, ch. 2, 274n46; Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), chs. 2, 3; Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 53–57. The classic legal treatise on the police power is Thomas M. Cooley, Constitutional Limitations (1868; reprint, Boston: Little Brown, 1871), esp. 573–596.
15. Hyman and Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law, ch. 2; Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 13.
16. Edward S. Corwin, “The Extension of Judicial Review in New York, 1783–1905,” Michigan Law Review 15 (February 1917): 281–313; Peter J. Galie, Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 79–80; James A. Henretta, “The Rise and Decline of ‘Democratic-Republicanism’: Political Rights in New York and the Several States, 1800–1905,” in Toward a Usable Past: Liberty under State Constitutions, ed. Paul A. Finkelman and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 50–90; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 36; Margaret V. Nelson, A Study of Judicial Review in Virginia, 1789–1928 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), 32–35, 202, 205; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 222–229.
17. On the Supreme Court in the antebellum era, see Urofsky and Finkelman, March of Liberty; Alfred H. Kelly, Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development (New York: Norton, 1991). Also see Wood, Empire of Liberty, 438–455.
18. Herbert Kaufman, Are Government Organizations Immortal? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976), 48–49.
19. Richard McCormick’s contention in “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66 (September 1979): 279–298, that public policy during most of the nineteenth century was largely “distributive” in nature, and Stephen Skowronek’s claim in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 2, esp. 24, that “courts and parties” characterized the antebellum polity, distort the reality of the period. Regulation, taxation, the provision of services, and the use of coercive force were major lines of civic action.
20. Age data are from US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States (1975), series A119–134. Here, the original states include the first thirteen plus Vermont and Maine. Also see Walter Nugent, Structures of American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), ch. 3.
21. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chs. 4, 5, 12; Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), chs. 7, 8, 14, 15. Also see John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), esp. ch. 2; Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), chs. 4, 5; Wood, Empire of Liberty, ch. 19; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
22. On panics and depressions in the antebellum era, see B. U. Ratchford, American State Debts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1941); Samuel Rezneck, Business Depressions and Financial Panics: Essays in American Business and Economic History (New York: Greenwood, 1969); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 372–378, 334–351; Charles Warren, Bankruptcy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); and the works cited below in notes 23 and 24.
23. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 146–147, 396; John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Sellers, Market Revolution, chs. 4, 5; Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), ch. 6.
24. Carter Goodrich, “The Revulsion against Internal Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 10 (November 1950): 145–169; Gunn, Decline of Authority, esp. chs. 5, 6; Kermit Hall, “Mostly Anchor and Little Sail: The Evolution of American State Constitutions,” in Finkelman and Gottlieb, Toward a Usable Past; Galie, Ordered Liberty, ch. 6; Sellers, Market Revolution, 149, 164–171.
25. Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), chs. 3, 4. Eugene H. Roseboom, The Civil War Era, 1850–1873 (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1944), 44–45; Harvey H. Segal, “Cycles of Canal Construction,” in Canals and Economic Growth, ed. Carter Goodrich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 169–215. According to Ray Allan Billington, The Far Western Frontier (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 135, the population of Texas grew from 36,000 in 1836 to 143,000 in 1846.
26. On the rise of the second party system, see Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1968), 17–22; Richard P. McCormick, “Political Development and the Second Party System,” in The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William N. Chambers and Walter D. Burnham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 90–116; Ronald P. Formisano, “Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes–System, No,” in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Paul Kleppner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 33–76; William G. Shade, “Political Pluralism and Party Development: The Creation of the Modern Party System, 1815–1852,” in Kleppner, Evolution of American Electoral Systems, 77–112; Joel H. Silbey, American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). For citations to the literature, see Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). Howe, What Hath God Wrought, offers a superb survey of these events.
27. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 154, tables on 72, 1042, 1050, 1108; Michael F. Holt, “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior,” in A Master’s Due, ed. William J. Cooper et al. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 16–58.
28. Thomas B. Alexander, Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Voting Patterns in the United States House of Representatives, 1836–1860 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967); Joel H. Silbey, The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior, 1841–1852 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967).
Excellent state studies include Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture; Mark W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); William G. Shade, The Democratization of the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972).
29. James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 24–28, 173, 202–203; Shade, Banks or No Banks, 200–223.
The impact of economic depression on parties and politics requires a cautionary note. First, like other aspects of the economy, depression was usually not the sole influence on political behavior. Second, the impact of economic stress on politics varied geographically—among regions and states and even within states—during the nineteenth century. The formation of a broadly nationalized economy was a development of the twentieth century. The economic localism of the antebellum era was a primary reason, but not the sole reason, that economic shocks played out differently in different locations and sometimes at different times. The connection between local economies and depression remains greatly understudied.
30. William N. Chambers, “Party Development and the American Mainstream,” in Chambers and Burnham, American Party Systems, 3–32; Wiebe, Opening of American Society, ch. 16.
31. Suggestive on these points is Daniel W. Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77 (March 1991): 1216–1239; Michael Kammen, A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1987); William G. Shade, “The Myth of Laissez Faire,” Pennsylvania History 59 (July 1992): 256–273.
32. Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Several historians have argued that sectional conflict linked to the South’s defense of slavery and its fierce states’ rights sentiment constrained the exercise of federal powers. See Ronald P. Formisano, “State Development in the Early Republic, 1775–1840,” in Shafer and Badger, Contesting Democracy, 7–35; Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 3.
33. In addition to the citations in chapters 4 and 5 on the connections among federalism, civic competition, and economic promotion, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), ch. 8; Harry N. Scheiber, “Urban Rivalry and Internal Improvements in the Old Northwest, 1820–1860,” Ohio History 71 (October 1962): 227–239, 290–292.
34. The use of coercive force alone calls into question the contention that no state existed before the Civil War. To paraphrase Shakespeare, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
7. The Civil War Builds New States
1. Michael E. Woods, “What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature,” Journal of American History 99 (September 2012): 415–439.
2. My selection of factors closely resembles the four “central issues” in Arthur Bestor, “The American Civil War as a Constitutional Issue,” American Historical Review 69 (1964): 327–352, a classic interpretation of the breakdown of the union. Roy F. Nichols, Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style (New York: Atheneum, 1963), suggests that overlapping regional cultures could not overcome territorial and socioeconomic stresses.
3. James D. Richardson, comp., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Literature and Art, 1910), 208, 1512–1513. This philosophical motif was repeated by presidents in the late nineteenth century. See Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 15–16.
4. Les L. Benedict, “Abraham Lincoln and Federalism,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 10 (1988–1989): 1–45. Different perspectives on the nature of the federal union were reflected in the use of terms such as “confederate republic” and “compact.” For example, in the election of 1852, the three major parties—Democratic, Whig, and Free-Soil—acknowledged that the federal government had limited powers. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 3 (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 951, 954, 956.
5. Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976).
6. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), chs. 3, 6.
7. Roy Franklin Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1948), is a famous charge against parties. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), esp. chs. 1, 2, suggests how an expansion of the scope of political conflict changes the calculus for outcomes.
8. The drama and significance of the Civil War have understandably attracted many scholars, and they have crafted some of the finest historical literature. James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), and David H. Donald, Jean Baker, and Michael F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 2001), are excellent overviews. My personal favorites on events leading up to the Civil War are Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978); James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). The volume of scholarship reviewed by Woods, “What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion,” demonstrates this continuing interest.
9. Robert W. Fogel, “Toward a New Synthesis on the Role of Economic Issues in the Political Realignment of the 1850s,” in American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), esp. 181–187.
10. Prior to southerners’ withdrawal from Congress, the Republicans had 29 Senate seats and their opponents 37; in the House, Republicans controlled 108 seats and their opponents 129.
11. A provisional constitution was adopted on February 7 and was replaced by a second document on March 11, 1861. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee joined the Confederacy between April 17 and June 8, 1861.
12. Peter B. Knupfer, The Union as It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
13. A conspiracy is a covert plot among two or more schemers to achieve an objective. Conspiratorial plots are often viewed as corrupt, in the sense that individuals use secretive, illegal, or immoral means to gain their ends. Conspiratorial ideas may have apparent links to reality, but as nobody can predict the future with total accuracy, many far-fetched outcomes may seem possible. Potter, Impending Crisis, 252; Foner, Free Soil, 87–102; William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 360–365.
14. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, chs.7, 8, esp. 236–242, 258–259; Hyman and Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law, 195; William H. Seward, “Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Works of William H. Seward, vol. 4, ed. George E. Baker (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 299; Foner, Free Soil, esp. 87–90, 97–102, chs. 4, 9; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 360–365; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 147.
15. David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 105; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 131–132, 241–245; Hyman and Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law, 125–139; Potter, Impending Crisis, ch. 17, esp. 454.
16. Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1984), 356–370; Grant, North over South, ch. 6; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 311–313. It is important to note that opinion was hardly unanimous in the North or the South; the literature that traces the coming of the Civil War demonstrates this diversity.
17. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 3336–3339. On European nationalism and its possible influence on Lincoln’s conception of nation, see Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (New York: Collier Books, 1957), ch. 3; Carl Degler, “One among Many: The U.S. and National Unification,” in Lincoln: The War President, ed. Gabor S. Boritt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 4. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 619–657, discuss the political ramifications of 177 wars and armed conflicts that occurred between 1840 and 1880.
18. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 3334. An insightful analysis of how circumstances prodded Lincoln and the Republicans toward war is David Potter, “Why Republicans Rejected Both Compromise and Secession,” in The Best American History Essays on Lincoln, ed. Sean Wilentz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 175–188. Also see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), 125–138, 156–160.
19. General Joseph Johnston surrendered to General William T. Sherman on April 26, 1865, in North Carolina.
20. White males in uniform represented roughly half the white male population aged fifteen to forty-nine.
21. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, enlarged ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), ch. 10.
22. Mark R. Wilson, The Business of the Civil War: Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Weigley, History of the United States Army, 216–232; Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), ch. 6. Union war mobilization was conducted according to prevailing capitalist and republican norms: the national government purchased goods and services from private enterprises at negotiated prices (as opposed to confiscation and forced labor); Congress and state legislatures imposed taxes via conventional political processes (i.e., elected representatives, votes on fiscal legislation). See Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 3, esp. 188, 192.
23. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, 2:26–248; Weigley, History of the United States Army, 220–224; Donald, Lincoln, 458.
24. Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation on the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), ch. 3; Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), chs. 13, 14; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, ch. 3.
25. Richardson, Greatest Nation on the Earth, ch. 4. See Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, ch. 4, for a detailed analysis of federal finance during the Civil War and early Reconstruction.
26. Richardson, Greatest Nation on the Earth. On party responses to legislative issues during the Civil War and Reconstruction, see Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Glenn M. Linden, “‘Radical’ Political and Economic Policies: The Senate, 1873–1877,” Civil War History 14 (September 1968): 240–249; John L. McCarthy, “Reconstruction Legislation and Voting Alignments in the House of Representatives, 1863–1869” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970). Ariel Ron, “Summoning the States: Northern Farmers and the Transformation of American Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American History 103 (September 2016): 347–374, notes the influence of constituent pressure on passage of the Agricultural College Act (1862).
27. Koistinen, Beating Plowshares into Swords, ch. 5; Charles J. Bullock, Historical Sketch of the Finances and Financial Policy of Mass. from 1780 to 1905, 3rd ser., vol. 8:2 (New York: Publications of the American Economic Association, 1907), 59–69, 130; Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 143–149, 161–171; Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 196–202; Eugene H. Roseboom, The Civil War Era, 1850–1873 (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1944), 145, 380, 426–427; Arthur C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848–1870 (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919), 274–284.
28. James McPherson, “Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,” in Wilentz, Best American History Essays, 175–188.
29. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, is a splendid review of Civil War military operations; the major turning points of the war are reviewed on 858. Also see John Keegan, The American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009). A handy synopsis of major battles and accompanying maps is Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Concise Historical Atlas of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
30. Keegan, American Civil War, 121–122, 142, speculates that McClellan chose an amphibious route to Richmond during his Peninsula Campaign because of the numerous rivers that obstructed a land march south from Washington, DC. The undulating Mississippi River, with its many bayous and swamps, greatly complicated Grant’s attack on Vicksburg in 1863.
31. Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956), ch. 2.
32. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 233–255; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Random House, 1952).
33. There is a huge literature on Lincoln as a war leader. See, for example, McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; Donald, Lincoln; Wilentz, Best American History Essays. Mark E. Neely Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 7, argues that customary partisanship devolved during the war into Republicans’ denunciation of northern Democrats for treasonous conspiracy.
34. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chs. 1–3; Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: Norton, 1974). Hyman and Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law, chs. 9–12, track changes in southern state constitutions.
35. Brooks Simpson, “1868,” in American Presidential Campaigns and Elections, vol. 2, ed. William G. Shade and Ballard C. Campbell (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 438–439; Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: Norton, 1877), 190, 191.
36. Charles W. Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).
37. On southern terrorism and northern intervention, see Foner, Reconstruction, chs. 9–12.
38. The adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which declared that all persons were entitled to use private accommodations, was an exception; the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1883.
39. For further discussion of the political repercussions of the 1870s depression, see chapters 9 and 10. Also see Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 11; Ballard C. Campbell, “1873: Financial Panic and Depression,” in American Disasters (New York: Check-mark Books, 2008).
40. Foner, Reconstruction, 523. Republicans lost twenty-four House seats in the Northeast, twenty-three in the Midwest, eight in the West, and thirty-nine in the South. House election results are based on my analysis of data in Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998); Stanley B. Parsons, United States Congressional Districts and Data, 1843–1881 (New York: Greenwood, 1986); Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989 (New York: Macmillan, 1989). Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 190–201, and Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 121–142, found that antitemperance (liquor policy) sentiments contributed to Democratic gains in some states.
41. Michael F. Holt, “From Center to Periphery: The Market Revolution and Major-Party Conflict, 1835–1880,” in The Market Revolution in America, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 224–256; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (1965; reprint, Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1992), ch. 7; Walter T. K. Nugent, Money and American Society, 1865–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1968), chs. 15, 16, 268–269.
42. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1–2; Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 545ff; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, ch. 6. Bensel argues that the failure of Reconstruction was linked to “the stalemated American state of the late nineteenth century” (413).
43. Texas v. White, 7 Wall 700 (1869); Collector v. Day, 11 Wall 178 (1871).
44. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, chs. 4, 5, esp. 268–292.
45. Susan Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ea636.
46. For city and state finances, see the sources listed for table 5.2 in chapter 5 and for tables A.2 and A.3 in the appendix. Foner, Reconstruction, 486.
47. US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistical of the United States to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series Y308, Y309. Also see Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, tables 6.4 and 6.5 for 1877. Brown, Modernization, ch. 7, called the expansion of the federal bureaucracy during the Civil War an expression of modernization. Also see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 515–516.
48. James C. Mohr, The Radical Republicans and Reform in New York during Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War–Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 147–151, 159–160, 173–176, 218–219. See tables A.2 and A.3 in the appendix.
49. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 88–90; Grant, North over South, 153–172; Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 203; Degler, “One among Many”; David M. Potter, “Civil War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. C. Vann Woodward (1968; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135–145.
8. Social and Economic Transformations
1. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman: Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains (1885; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1996), 9–10.
2. Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, The Formative Years, 1858–1886 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 313–346.
3. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 325 (map), 198–201, 216–220, 363–366, 372–373; Rodman W. Paul, The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859–1900 (1988; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), ch. 9.
4. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 829.
5. Robert Wooster, The American Military Frontiers: The U.S. Army in the West, 1783–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chs. 10–12; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 267–270; D. W. Meinig, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 159–161.
6. Charles W. Calhoun, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017), 265–275, 247–248.
7. Calhoun, Presidency of Grant, 274.
8. Meinig, Transcontinental America, prologue, pt. 2, chs. 1–8, pt. 3, chs. 2, 3; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011); Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999), esp. 40–41, 48–49, 52–53. The early transcontinental railroads required the transfer of people and goods between lines at key junctures; not until the advent of standardized rail gauges, coordinated time zones, and the construction of union stations in the 1880s could a passenger ride a single train from coast to coast.
9. Carl Abbott, How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), ch. 8; Donald J. Pisani, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 99–103, 170–177; Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 3; Robert Cherny and William Issel, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 162, 175–176, 182–184. On efforts to attract eastern capital to develop western economies, see Noam Maggor, “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” American Historical Review 122 (February 2017): 55–84.
10. Meinig, Transcontinental America, pt. 2, pt. 3, ch. 5; Abbott, How Cities Won the West, chs. 4–7; Philip R. VanderMeer, Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860–2009 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010).
11. David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), tables 1-3, 1-4; Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), esp. ch. 1.
12. Maggor, “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists.”
13. Ernst G. Timme, ed., The Blue Book of the State of Wisconsin (Madison, WI: Democratic Printing Co., 1885), 402–407; Walter F. Dodd, State Government (New York: Century Co., 1923), ch. 15; Charles A. Beard, American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 768–775. Specific county offices (and county functions) varied both between and within states. New York had 932 towns in 1918; a report to the Illinois legislature in 1935 counted 12,000 local governments in the state, including 1,463 townships and 1,123 incorporated municipalities.
14. There is no comprehensive census of the number of governments in the nineteenth century. James Bryce reported that Ohio possessed 1,284 subcounty governments in 1888, divided among 38 cities, 429 villages, 32 hamlets, and 785 un-incorporated places or towns. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 610n1, ch. 48 generally. In 1900 Pennsylvania had 2,382 minor civil divisions, Tennessee had 1,551, and New York had 974. US Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth, 1790–1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 77. See chapter 4 for my estimate of towns and townships in the antebellum era.
15. William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966; reprint, New York: Knopf, 2006), chs. 9–15.
16. Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 237–258; White, Railroaded. On state and local subsidies, see Edward C. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1820–1900, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 309–316, 431–432; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1992), 340–345. On the restriction of local rail subsidies, see Carter Goodrich, “The Revulsion against Internal Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 10 (November 1950): 156–159; Horace Scrist, An Economic Analysis of the Constitutional Restriction upon Public Indebtedness in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1914), 54–60, appendix II; Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 286–288.
17. Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1968); Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), chs. 1–4.
18. Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad, vol. 1, 1846–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 448–451.
19. Stover, Routledge Historical Atlas of American Railroads, 21, 38–39, 48–49, 52–53; Meining, Transcontinental America, pt. 3, ch. 3, 255 (map of Iowa); Thornbrough, Indiana, 351 (map); Stephen J. Hornsby and Richard Judd, Historical Atlas of Maine (Orono: University of Maine Press, 2015), plate 44; John F. Stover, American Railroads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 143–144, 149–150.
20. Charles W. Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, 234–240; William B. Munro, Municipal Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1934), ch. 44; Hornsby and Judd, Historical Atlas of Maine, plate 44; Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 64.
21. David B. Tyler, Steam Conquers the Atlantic (New York: Appleton-Century, 1939), 353–380.
22. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), chs. 6, 7; Bernard A. Weisberger, The Dream Maker: William C. Durant, Founder of General Motors (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), chs. 5–7; Stanley Lebergott, The American Economy: Income, Wealth, and Want (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 290.
23. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), ch. 6; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), 333; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), ch. 6.
24. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 109–117; Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 53–58, 419; Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation, 2:318–334, 435–442. An excellent case study is Richard C. Overton, Burlington Route: A History of the Burlington Lines (New York: Knopf, 1965), esp. chs. 9–14. On the role of investment banking and railroads, see Vincent P. Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), chs. 2–4, 7; White, Railroaded, ch. 1.
25. Hounshell, From the American System, chs. 6, 7.
26. Thomas K. McCraw, American Business since 1920: How It Worked (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2009), ch. 2; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, ch. 7; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, ch. 3.
27. Robert E. Gallman, ed., Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 1, esp. 3–6, 23, 56; Meinig, Transcontinental America, 240. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, pt. I, argues that per capita measures of national income significantly understate the advance in the standard of living between 1870 and 1940.
28. Peter Temin, “Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Economic History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (Winter 1991): 371–389; Michael R. Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in Gallman, Cambridge Economic History, 2:143–206; Robert E. Lipset, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” in Gallman, Cambridge Economic History, 2:685–732; Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success,” American Economic Review 80 (1990): 651–668; Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860–1897 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), ch. 7. For a portrait of economic development in the West, see Paul, Far West. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, contends that individuals’ greater longevity, largely due to health improvements, led to increased growth in the gross domestic product after 1900. The bulk of American exports in the nineteenth century were agricultural commodities and refined minerals.
29. Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58 (June 1998): 345–374; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Education and Income in the Early Twentieth Century: Evidence from the Prairies,” Journal of Economic History 60 (September 2000): 782–818.
30. Allan G. Bogue, “Changes in Mechanical and Plant Technology: The Corn Belt, 1910–1940,” Journal of Economic History 43 (March 1983): 1–25. Increases in yields and outputs suggest the impact of science and technology on agriculture.
31. “Greatest Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century,” National Academy of Engineering, 2000, http://www.greatachievements.org/.
32. Joel Mohr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Chandler, Visible Hand, chs. 8, 9; Charles K. Hyde, “Iron and Steel Technologies Moving between Europe and the United States before 1914,” in International Technology Transfer: Europe, Japan, and the USA, ed. David J. Jeremy (Brookfield, VT: Elgar, 1991), 51–73. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, pt. I, stresses the role of technology in improving the standard of living.
33. On corporate organization and expansion, see Chandler, Visible Hand; Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1920, 3rd ed. (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006); Tony Freyer, Regulating Big Business: Anti-Trust in Great Britain and America, 1880 to 1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Naomi R. Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
34. On the panics and depressions between 1873 and 1915, see Ballard C. Campbell, American Disasters: 201 Calamities that Shook the Nation (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), 134–138, 168–171, 202–206; Ballard C. Campbell, “Depressions and Taxes in the United States, 1873–1915,” in Taxation, State, and Civil Society in Germany and the United States in the 18th to the 20th Century, ed. Christoph Strupp and Alexander Nutzenadel (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlag, 2007), 67–81; Ballard C. Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (January 2005): 7–22. For 1920–1922, see George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917–1929 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), chs. 5, 9; Derek H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), chs. 2–4. A suggestive timeline of depression severity is provided in Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic History, 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1960), 641. For an overview of economic fluctuations during the Gilded Age, see Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age, ch. 1.
A word of caution is in order concerning generalizations about economic depressions between 1873 and 1922. First, modern data series used to track economic fluctuations are scarce before 1900, especially with regard to local conditions. Second, depressions during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are understudied, particularly the links between economic fluctuations and sociopolitical reactions. Important exceptions are Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, ch. 6.
35. Charles Z. Lincoln, ed., Messages of the Governors: State of New York (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyons, 1909), 7:5. The political repercussions of depressions are discussed in chapters 10 and 11.
36. Kerry A. Odell and Marc D. Weidenmier, “Real Shock, Monetary Aftershock: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the Panic of 1907,” Journal of Economic History 64 (December 2004): 1002–1027; Ron Chernow, House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), ch. 7; Levy, Freaks of Fortune, ch. 8; Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr, The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). See also the works cited in note 34.
37. The literature that describes economic regionalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is huge. My favorites include Meinig, Transcontinental America; John Brinckerhoff Jackson, American Space: The Centennial Years, 1865–1876 (New York: Norton, 1972); Peter Temin, ed., Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Diana Muir, Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation of the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Howard W. Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Paul, Far West. The complexity of localized and regional economics complicates the tracking of the effects of depression. This subject deserves more study.
38. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, ch. 8; David B. Robertson, Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), chs. 1–4; Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 6; Keyssar, Out of Work; David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 4 (February 1980): 81–104; Gerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 164–165; David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
39. Gallman, Cambridge Economic History, 2:21–26; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 29–30, pt. I generally.
40. Gallman, Cambridge Economic History, chs. 3, 17; John McClymer, “Late Nineteenth-Century Working Class Living Standards,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (Autumn 1986): 379–398; Harold U. Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 1897–1917 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951), 415 (table); Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 60–67, 271.
41. Robert G. Barrows, “Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban Housing, 1870–1930,” Journal of Urban History 9 (August 1983): 395–420; Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 299; Oliver Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), ch. 6; Lebergott, American Economy, 251–281; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, chs. 2, 4, 8. In the Gilded Age, many workers built their own homes.
42. Julie A. Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers: The Woman’s Page and the Transformation of American Newspapers, 1895–1935,” Journal of American History 103 (December 2016): 606–628; Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School”; Barron, Mixed Harvest, ch. 5.
43. Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 304.
9. Nationalism, Parties, and the Coercive State, 1870–1917
1. Edmund S. Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), chs. 4, 5, 7, 8.
2. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1893), 15, 404; D. W. Meinig, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 293.
3. Raymond H. Robinson, “The Making of an Icon,” in George Washington: American Symbol, ed. Barbara J. Mitnick (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 109–121; Barry Schwartz, “George Washington: A New Man for a New Century,” in Mitnick, George Washington, 123–139; Bryan F. LeBeau, Currier and Ives: America Imagined (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 36–47; Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 5.
4. Merle E. Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), ch. 7; John Pettigrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn of the Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History 31 (January 1996): 49–73; Mary R. Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), ch. 12; Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), chs. 1–3; David Tyack, Thomas James, and Aaron Benavot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), table 6.3; Cecilla E. O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chs. 9, 10.
5. William M. Landes and Lewis C. Solomon, “Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 54–89; Tyack, James, and Benavot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, table 6.3; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of North Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 80–86; Joel Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele, A Brief History of the United States (1871; reprint, New York: American Book Co., 1912), 1–2; Michael Krause and Davis D. Joyce, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1985), ch. 10; John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 9–16, 20, 148–157, 158–159; Merle Curti, “The Democratic Theme in American Historical Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (June 1952): 4–14; Hazel Whitman Hertzberg, “The Teaching of History,” in The Past before Us, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 474–504; Thomas Cochran, “The ‘Presidential Synthesis’ in American History,” American Historical Review 53 (July 1948): 748–759. Cochran emphasizes the “enormous burden on the historian” to synthesize the record of the states and the elitist bent of nineteenth-century historians.
Even Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who popularized the study of sections in America around the turn of the century, wrote from a nationalist perspective; his “frontier thesis” epitomized the viewpoint that differences between the United States and Europe made the former “exceptional.” See Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 113, 352, 380. On the connection between exceptionalism and nationalism, see Ian Tyrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, 4 (1991): 1031–1050; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 636–658. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 497, notes the capacity of history to nurture distinctive features of American national identity.
6. Susan Schulten, The Geographic Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chs. 1–3, 5; Ballard C. Campbell, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 28, 92, 114–116. For a sample of midwestern opinion supporting a patriotic agenda in public schools, see Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1893; Milwaukee Journal, March 24, 1893; Iowa State Register, January 5, 1888; John W. Meyer et al., “Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucracy in the American States, 1870–1930,” American Journal of Sociology 85 (November 1979): 591–613.
7. Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876–1915 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 19, 216–217; Hugh DeSantis, “The Democratization of Travel: The Agent in History,” Journal of American Culture 1 (April 1978): 1–19; Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), chs. 3–6; Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargain: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 45, 51–62; Albert J. Churella, The Pennsylvania Railroad, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 448–450.
8. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 4–5; John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 172–177; Hyde, American Vision, 301, 304; William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), 190; Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ch. 1.
9. See, for example, New Unrivaled Atlas of the World (Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, 1898), esp. 4–5; William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), esp. 179–182; Schulten, Geographic Imagination in America, ch. 3.
10. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire,1875–1914 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), ch. 3; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), ch. 5; Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 240–264; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 187; Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural address, in James D. Richardson, comp., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 10 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the National Literature and Art, 1910), 7060.
11. Nina Silber, “Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 103 (June 2016): 59–83; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:844.
12. O’Leary, To Die For, chs. 3, 4, 8–10; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), chs. 6–8.
13. O’Leary, To Die For, chs. 5–6; Philip N. Cohen, “Nationalism and Suffrage: Gender Struggles in Nation-Building America,” Signs 21 (Spring 1996): 707–727; Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 4; Barbara Finkelstein, “Dollars and Dreams: Classrooms as Fictitious Message Systems, 1790–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 34 (Winter 1991): 472–473, 480–481. In some localities, women gained the vote in school and municipal elections prior to the adoption of statewide female suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919). Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xv–xvi, maintains that women’s political identity was less a function of gender than of their “social, political, and economic structures and values.” Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (March 1980): 810–831, contends that designating Native Americans as “subject peoples” in the nineteenth century set a precedent for the treatment of Puerto Ricans and Philippine residents after the Spanish-American War. Also see chapter 10.
14. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), esp. chs. 4, 7. Ethnic conflict was a staple of political life in the Midwest during the Gilded Age. See Harman J. Deutsch, “Yankee-Teuton Rivalry in Wisconsin Politics of the Seventies,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 14 (March and June 1931): 262–282, 403–318; Campbell, Representative Democracy, ch. 2. National identity among ethnic groups is reviewed in Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 31–58; Mona Harrington, “Loyalties: Dual and Divided,” in Thernstrom, Harvard Encyclopedia, 676–686; Read Ueda, “Naturalization and Citizenship,” in Thernstrom, Harvard Encyclopedia, 734–748.
15. James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1800–1930,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 996–1020. On the American “core” culture, see Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), esp. 72–74.
16. Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2000), ch. 5; Marion T. Bennett, American Immigration Policies: A History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1963), 21–22, 127–134, 326–327; Ueda, “Naturalization and Citizenship”; Edward G. Hartmann, “The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1948), chs. 1–3. Also see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chs. 5, 6; Smith, Civic Ideals, ch. 11, 441–442.
17. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:844, thought that children of immigrants were eager to become Americans. Marcus Lee Hansen expanded this observation into the third-generation hypothesis: “what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” Marcus Lee Hansen, The Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant (Rock Island, IL: Augustana Historical Society Publications, 1938), 9. On the model of middle-class norms, see Alexander B. Callow Jr., The Tweed Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 62; Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), ch. 4; Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), ch. 3; Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up.” Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 531–588, indicates that little was known about the “consciousness” of workers in various ethnic subcultures (565, 585) but implies that worker protests grew out of traditional responses to “injustice” rather than antagonistic attitudes toward the American state (567–583). One assumes that most immigrants went along with American norms to get along (i.e., to gain employment and social acceptance), yet there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups, such as conservative German Catholics, saw Americanization as a threat to their religious culture. See Philip Gleason, The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), ch. 2.
18. David Brian Robertson, Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Howard L. Hurwitz, Theodore Roosevelt and Labor in New York State, 1880–1900 (New York: Columbia University Studies in Social Science, 1943); David Montgomery, “Strikes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Science History 4 (February 1980): 81–104. On Republicans and nativism in the 1890s, see editorials in the Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1891; Usher to E. C. Wall, September 11, 1893, Letterbook 11, Ellis B. Usher Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society. Usher cites the GAR and the Sons of Veterans in Wisconsin as instigators of anti-Catholicism. Also see Higham, Strangers in the Land, 165–175.
19. Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, esp. chs. 1–3; Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Robert H. Wiebe, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 139–140, among other authors, sees political parties as cultural conduits in American society. Voter fraud was commonplace during the Gilded Age, which may have inflated some election returns. See Peter H. Argersinger, “New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age,” Political Science Quarterly 100 (Winter 1985–1986): 669–687; Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3 (Bensel’s position on election issue orientation is based on a review of state political party platforms between 1877 and 1900); Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
20. Jerry M. Cooper, The Army and Civil Disorder: The Federal Military Intervention in Labor Disputes, 1877–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), ch. 5; Jerry M. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard: The Evolution of the American Militia, 1865–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ch. 3. See Ballard C. Campbell, American Disasters: 201 Calamities that Shook the Nation (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), for an overview of the Pullman strike.
21. Hurwitz, Theodore Roosevelt and Labor, 247–253; John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 110–123; Daniel R. Fusfield, “Government and the Suppression of Radical Labor, 1877–1918,” in Statemaking and Social Movements, ed. Charles Bright and Susan Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 346–352; James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 236–239; Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 293–295. Robert Wiebe titled his widely read book on the industrial transition period The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967).
22. Herbert G. Gutman, “The Tompkins Square ‘Riot’ in New York City on January 13, 1874: A Re-examination of Its Causes and Its Aftermath,” Labor History 6 (Winter 1965): 44–70; Campbell, American Disasters, 151–153; Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior, Chicago, 1890–1925,” Law and Society Review 10, 2 (1976): 303–324; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “The Conflict between Blacks and the Police in the Urban South, 1865–1900,” Historian 39 (November 1976): 62–76. See David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 2, for a review of the expansion of “the coercive capacity of government,” which was forged largely to “discipline” workers (114).
23. Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (1936; reprint, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1974), ch. 7, esp. 178, 179–180, 192–194. Census data recorded 32,901 inmates in state prisons in 1870 and 57,070 in 1904; by 1923 the figure had risen to 76,000 in ninety-nine state facilities. In 1910 at least 40,000 persons were held in county and municipal jails and 25,000 in juvenile facilities. See Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1987), tables 3-1, 8-2, 8-6, 8-8; Howard Gill, “State Prisons in America: 1787–1937,” in US Department of Justice, The Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939–1940), 1–39.
24. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 154–158; Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South (New York: Appleton, 1910), chs. 14, 15, esp. 184, 197; Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 242, 262–269; Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 208–220, 313 (for reference to a data set that recorded 19,248 executions before 1930, the year the Justice Department began its tabulation). Michael A. Trotti, “What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South,” Journal of American History 100 (September 2013): 375–400, argues that lynchings of blacks in the South have been undercounted.
25. Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1998); Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1938), 161; Amy Dru Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1265–1293; Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 200–211; Higham, Strangers in the Land, ch. 4; Walter Thompson, Federal Centralization: A Study and Criticism of the Expanding Scope of Congressional Legislation (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923), 106–121.
26. Smith, Civic Ideals, chs. 11, 12; Leonard D. White, The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 116–117; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 2:852.
27. Good overviews of Gilded Age politics are Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1997); Charles W. Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010).
28. In the 1874 House elections, Democrats took seats from Republicans in big-city, small-town, and rural districts. My analysis of House election returns is based on US census data and Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998); Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of Congressional Districts (New York: Macmillan, 1982); Stanley B. Parsons et al., United States Congressional Districts and Data, 1843–1881 (New York: Greenwood, 1986).
29. My comparison of Republican seats in Congress and GOP victories in state assemblies is based on my file of election returns, taken from state legislative manuals (“bluebooks”), legislative directories, and “Partisan Division of American State Governments, 1834–1985” (ICPSR data set 16 [Walter D. Burnham state data set], University of Michigan). On the Illinois system of minority representation, see Campbell, Representative Democracy, 9–10, 19–24.
30. Paula Baker, “The Culture of Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Community and Political Behavior in Rural New York,” Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 167–193, illustrates the influence of local conditions on voting behavior. For partisan outcomes in state elections, see Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties and Government in American History (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980), esp. ch. 6. No comprehensive analysis of partisan outcomes in American cities during the Gilded Age exists. For suggestions of urban partisanship, see Terrence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 242–243; Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), esp. chs. 6–8, 14; and histories of specific cities during the Gilded Age, some of which are cited in the appendix.
31. Cherny, American Politics; Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Paul Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893–1928 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987). On independent Republicans, see Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), chs. 2–4.
32. Walter Dean Burnham, “The System of 1896: An Analysis,” in The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Paul Kleppner et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981), 147–202; Kleppner, Continuity and Change, table 2; Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, chs. 4, 5; McCormick, From Realignment to Reform.
33. Ballard C. Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, 1 (January 2005): 7–17; Paolo E. Coletta, “Election of 1908,” in History of Presidential Elections, vol. 3, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 2089; Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), ch. 1; David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), ch. 4.
10. The Federal State during the Gilded Age
1. Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, The Formative Years, 1858–1886 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), ch. 15, esp. 254.
2. Ballard C. Campbell, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 31–32, 44–45, 228; Philip R. VanderMeer, The Hoosier Politician: Officeholding and Political Culture in Indiana, 1896–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), table 36; Joseph F. Mahoney, “The Impact of Industrialization on the New Jersey Legislature, 1870–1900,” in New Jersey since 1860, ed. William C. Wright (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1972), 69; David Henry Ray, “Membership Stability in Nine State Legislatures, 1891–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1979), tables I.1, I.2. L. Ray Gunn, “Political Recruitment and Career Patterns in the New York State Legislature, 1850–1890” (paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting, April 1985), reported that 80 percent of legislators were first-term members in 1850, 60 percent in 1875, and 48 percent in 1890. Belle Zeller, Pressure Politics in New York: A Study of Group Representation before the Legislature (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1937), 292, indicated that 59 percent of representatives and senators in the 1882 session had no previous legislative experience, which averaged 1.1 years for all members.
3. On Roosevelt’s assembly career, see Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, chs. 15, 16, 19, 21; Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), chs. 6, 7, 9.
4. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1893), ch. 44; Roosevelt’s “Phases of State Legislation,” Century (January 1885), is quoted on 540–541. Bryce also quoted Roosevelt’s “Machine Politics in New York City,” Century (November 1886), in chs. 63 and 68. Also see C. Deming, “The Blight on Legislatures,” Nation 54 (June 23, 1892): 460–461; James Eckels, “The Menace of Legislation,” North American Review 165 (August 1897): 241–244.
For a sampling of the indictment thesis, see Matthew Josephson, The Politicos, 1865–1896 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1938), 102, 344–345, 409; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), ch. 7; Ray Ginger, Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914 (1965; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1975), esp. ch. 6. The indictment literature of the Gilded Age identified one feature of politics that has persisted: corporate money.
5. On the New York legislature, see “Report of the Commission to Recommend Changes in Methods of Legislation” (November 30, 1895), in New York Assembly Documents (Albany, NY, 1896), document 20; Robert Luce, Legislative Assemblies (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1924), 423–431, 461 (on improvements); Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932), 110–111; Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), chs. 1–3.
6. Theodore Roosevelt, “Phases of State Legislation,” Century (January 1885), reprinted in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923–1926), 15:81. Roosevelt also wrote that the New York legislature, “taken as a whole, is by no means as bad a body as we would be led to believe” by the metropolitan newspapers (84).
7. See the appendix for the sources of state action in New York.
8. Editorial, Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1889. For a sketch of the unhealthiness of urban environments, see Lawrence H. Larsen, “Urban Services in Gilded Age Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 71 (Winter 1987): 83–117; Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), ch. 10; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), ch. 6. On major city fires, see Ballard C. Campbell, American Disasters: 201 Calamities that Shook the Nation (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008), including Chicago (1871), Boston (1872), Iroquois Theater (1903), San Francisco (1906), and Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (1911).
9. Barbara G. Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1842–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916); Martha H. Bowers and Jane Carola, The Water Supply System of Metropolitan Boston, 1845–1947 (Boston: Metropolitan District Commission, 1985), esp. appendix C.
10. Ira Cohen and Ann Elder, “Major Cities and Disease: A Comparative Perspective,” Social Science History 13 (Spring 1989): 25–63; John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 10: Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), chs. 7, 8; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 9; Joel A. Tarr, “The Evolution of Urban Infrastructure in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure, ed. Royce Hansen (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1984), 22–23.
11. Melosi, Sanitary City, 175–197; Stanley K. Schultz and Clay McShane, “To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American History 65 (September 1978): 389–411; Jon C. Teaford, Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 210–213, 246–250; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, chs. 2, 7; Judith W. Leavitt, “Politics and Public Heath: Smallpox in Milwaukee, 1894–95,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50 (Winter 1976): 553–568.
12. Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 7; Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, 166–171, 275–279, 199–204, 240–245.
13. Carter Goodrich, “The Revulsion against Internal Improvements,” Journal of Economic History 10 (November 1950): 145–169; Eric H. Monkkonen, The Local State: Public Money and American Cities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 9; Horace Secrist, An Economic Analysis of the Constitutional Restrictions upon Pubic Indebtedness in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1914), 54–60; Peter J. Galie, Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 145–146, 148–152; Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, ch. 10; Clifton K. Yearley, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), ch. 1, 179–182, on academic and intellectual reformers who were “keenly aware of the expansion of government.” Also see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 7.
14. Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, esp. chs. 8, 9.
15. The remaining ten state legislatures, six located in the South, convened biennially; there was no time limit on sessions, and lawmakers were paid by the day. The classification of state legislatures is based on my review of state manuals and legislative documents; Roscoe L. Ashley, The American Federal State: A Text-Book in Civics for High Schools and Academics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), table II, 585; William G. Shade, “State Legislatures in the Nineteenth Century,” in Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, ed. Joel H. Silbey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 1:195–214; Philip R. VanderMeer, “Congress and Other Legislatures,” in Silbey, Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, 3:1547–1567. Numerous grievances, including the fiscal consequences of economic depressions, fed support for restricting state legislative meetings. See Ballard C. Campbell, “Tax Revolts and Political Change,” Journal of Policy History 10 (1998): 153–178.
16. VanderMeer, “Congress and Other Legislatures,” 1549–1550; James Q. Dealey, Growth of American State Constitutions (Boston: Ginn, 1915), ch. 16; Campbell, Representative Democracy, 9–10; John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Norton, 1973), 13–16; Peter H. Argersinger, “The Value of the Vote: Political Representation in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 59–90. Argersinger cites various inequalities in legislative representation (e.g., gerrymandered districts) that inhibit effective policymaking. With regard to the broader political system, he argues that “institutional inequities,” “fraud and corruption,” and narrow partisanship “constrained” effective governance, especially the regulation of private business, during the Gilded Age. Peter H. Argersinger, “The Transformation of the American Politics: Political Institutions and Public Policies, 1856–1910,” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000, ed. Bryan E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 117–147.
17. See Campbell, Representative Democracy, esp. chs. 5, 10; Peter H. Argersinger, “Populists in Power: Public Policy and Legislative Behavior,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Summer 1987): 81–105; A. Lawrence Lowell, “The Influence of Party upon Legislation in England and America,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1901, vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 1902), 321–542; Allen W. Trelease, “The Fusion Legislatures of 1895 and 1897: A Roll-Call Analysis of the North Carolina House of Representatives,” North Carolina Historical Review 57 (July 1980): 280–309; James E. Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); James E. Wright, The Progressive Yankees: Republican Reformers in New Hampshire, 1906–1916 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987).
The evidence I reviewed suggests that the large majority of legislators in most states, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, did not engage in illegal activities, such as accepting payments for a vote. However, there is no question that some law-makers accepted bribes on certain issues, especially concerning private businesses, most notably urban transit and utility franchises. It was well known that railroads provided free passes to state lawmakers until the practice was prohibited in the early twentieth century. Corruption is discussed in the section on administration in this chapter.
On the significance of states and state legislatures in the expansion of governance in the Gilded Age, see Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit Redux: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 199; Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 141, 353–354.
18. The survey of state policy actions in the next several paragraphs is based on secondary literature and a database of “important” statutes enacted by eight sample states (see table A.3 in the appendix). On Massachusetts, see Ballard C. Campbell, “Public Policy and State Governments,” in Origins of Modern America: Essays on the Late Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed., ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 353–371.
Some readers may question whether a tabulation of session laws indicates much about governance without an examination of the statutes’ content and administration. I agree, up to a point, with Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11, that “legislation cannot hardwire administrative outcomes.” Nonetheless, the adoption of a statute is an expression of governmental authority; collectively, a survey of laws (including city ordinances and court decisions) identifies subjects garnering policy attention. But it is also true that the design of a statute bears on its implementation.
19. On the linkages between tensions over labor activities and an enhanced police presence, see Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). See also data on incarceration facilities and inmates in chapter 9.
20. Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), has popularized the idea of “distributive policy,” which I think has greater veracity for Congress than for states and cities.
21. Allan G. Bogue et al., “Members of the House of Representatives and the Process of Modernization, 1789–1960,” Journal of American History 58 (September 1976): 284, 289; Nelson W. Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 57 (March 1968): 144. Also see Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider’s Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Congressional Quarterly Guide to Congress, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1982), 404, 477, 580–581. The Legislative Reference Service, a unit of the Library of Congress, provided research and compilations of laws for congressional committees. A Legislative Drafting Service was created in 1918.
22. Nelson W. Polsby, “The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 57 (September 1969): 787–807.
23. Garrison Nelson, “The Modernizing Congress, 1870–1930,” in Silbey, Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, 1:131–156; Carl V. Harris, “Right Fork or Left Fork? The Section-Party Alignment of Southern Democrats in Congress, 1873–1897,” Journal of Southern History 42 (November 1976): 471–506; David W. Brady, Congressional Voting in a Partisan Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973); William G. Shade et al., “Partisanship in the United States Senate, 1869–1901,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (Autumn 1973): 185–206.
24. Annexation of the Philippines was not on the national agenda until after the US Navy defeated the Spanish in the Pacific. Richard Hofstadter expertly tells this story in “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), ch. 5.
25. US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series H526; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 11, esp. 391; David Tyack et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 59. By 1900 twenty-eight states had boards of education, seventeen had qualifications for teacher certification, and thirty-seven had compulsory education laws. Jim B. Pearson and Edgar Fuller, eds., Education in the States, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1969), 29, 391–392.
26. Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 192–198, 202; James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 152, 173–175; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:616; Mitrani, Rise of the Chicago Police Department; Kermit L. Hall and Peter Karsten, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 9. The decline in arrest rates during the Gilded Age suggests that policing in the bigger cities improved. See Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, ch. 2, 144, 147. Larsen, “Urban Services in Gilded Age Wisconsin,” found that small cities lagged in the modernization of police and other functions, while Mark H. Haller, “Historical Roots of Police Behavior, Chicago, 1890–1925,” Law and Society Review 10 (1976): 303–324, reported that policing changed only minimally in the Windy City before World War I.
27. On city and rural public employment, see Solomon Fabricant, The Trend of Governmental Activity in the United States since 1900 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952), 29, tables B1, B9, B13; Steven P. Erie, “Politics, the Public Sector, and Irish Social Mobility: San Francisco, 1870–1900,” Western Political Quarterly 31 (June 1978): tables 2, 6; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 1:637, 526; Rebecca Menes, “Limiting the Reach of the Grabbing Hand,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from American Economic History, ed. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 2; Charles A. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), ch. 10. Also see notes 28–31.
28. Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, 62, reported that New York City’s Law Department employed more lawyers than the US Justice Department. Also see David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 90, 96; Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 24–25; Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture, 187–191. Teaford, Unheralded Triumph; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992),145; and Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, “Corruption and Reform: An Introduction,” NBER Working Paper 10775 (September 2004), are some of the recent scholars who have disputed the traditional charge of rampant political corruption in public affairs during the late nineteenth century.
29. A key work on state administration in the Gilded Age is William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Also see Albert Bushnell Hart, Actual Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1903); Leonard D. White, Trends in Public Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933); Yearley, Money Machines; William R. Doezema, “Railroad Management and the Interplay of Federal and State Regulation, 1885–1916,” Business History Review 50 (Summer 1976): 153–178.
Studies of individual states provide valuable glimpses into their administration. See, for example, Gerald D. Nash, State Government and Economic Development: A History of Administrative Policies in California, 1849–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), esp. 352–357; William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), ch. 1; Robert C. Nesbit, The History of Wisconsin: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873–1893 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1985), ch. 12. On the Massachusetts Railroad Commission, see Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), ch. 1. Interstate, interlevel, and gender influences in enacting and enforcing factory regulations are examined in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelly and the Nation’s Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), ch. 9. The Illinois Supreme Court struck down the state’s eight-hour law. Courts played an ongoing role in state and local administration, as discussed later in this chapter.
30. See, for example, Rudy Higgens-Evenson, “From Industrial Police to Workmen’s Compensation: Public Policy and Industrial Accidents in New York, 1880–1910,” Labor History 39 (November 1998): 365–380. He documents the New York Factory Board’s woeful record on the prosecution and fining of factory operators for workplace accidents. Also see Donald F. Tingley, The Structuring of a State: The History of the Illinois, 1899–1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), ch. 4; Mansel G. Blackford, The Politics of Business in California, 1890–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), ch. 5; William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
31. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility, 44–57, 227; Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, ch. 6; White, Trends in Public Administration, table C1 (291–298).
32. Leonard D. White, The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan, 1958); Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, ch. 2; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chs. 2–5.
33. Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1977 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), table 6.5; Fabricant, Trend of Governmental Activity, table B13; White, Trends in Public Administration, 243–244; US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series Y241, 242, 247. To put the increase in federal employees in perspective, New York City had a payroll of 30,000 in 1900; local and state governments hired three and a half times more staffers than the federal government did that year.
34. Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, ch. 2; James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896), 234, 282–283, 325, 430–431; Constance M. Green, Washington, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962–1963), 316, 328–329; Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 441, 574, 585. Roosevelt took advantage of his boss’s vacation to prepare Admiral George Dewey for an attack on the Spanish fleet in the Philippines once war was declared.
35. Nicholas R. Parillo, Against the Profit-Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Paul P. Van Riper, “American Administrative State: Wilson and the Founders,” in A Centennial History of the Administrative State, ed. Ralph C. Chandler (New York: Free Press, 1987), 14–21; White, Republican Era, ch. 4; Skowronek, Building a New American State, ch. 5. University appointments to chairs of public administration began in the 1920s. See White, Trends in Public Administration, 311–326.
36. Oscar Kraines, “The Cockrell Committee, 1887–1889: First Comprehensive Congressional Investigation into Administration,” Western Political Quarterly 4 (December 1951): 596–599; Margery Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), ch. 3; Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 86–89, 94; Richard E. Welch, The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 49; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 118, 141, 298; White, Republican Era, 101–103, 203; Stanley Lebergott, The American Economy: Income, Wealth, and Want (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 248–298, on household facilities in the Gilded Age.
37. Beniger, Control Revolution, 282–283; Kraines, “Cockrell Committee,” 590, 596–598. The committee recommended financial retrenchment and more efficient work habits, not more staff, as the solution for administrative backlogs, but it also suggested the use of duplicating machines and the installation of modern plumbing. The United States published The Statistical Abstract of the United States annually between 1878 and 2012; private publishers have continued the series.
38. Herbert Kaufman, “The Growth of the Federal Personnel System,” in The Federal Government Service, ed. N. Wallace Sayre (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 41–43. By 1916, 62 percent of federal employees were part of the civil service. On the creation of administrative units in the USDA, see Carroll H. Wooddy, The Growth of the Federal Government, 1915–1932 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), ch. 12.
39. See table A.3 in the appendix for a more complete list of state actions. Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, ch. 6; Wooddy, Growth of the Federal Government, ch. 12; Hart, Actual Government, 438; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, table 3, ch. 2, esp. 128–129, 134.
40. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 302; A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 189, 192; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 205, chs. 4, 6; White, Republican Era, 244, 246, 256; Ari Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), ch. 5, esp. 114–120, 105; Michael J. Lacey, “The World of Bureaus: Government and the Positivist Project in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States, ed. Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993), 157–163.
Political scientists who point to administrative capacity as a criterion of American statebuilding have emphasized the development of semiautonomous bureaucrats, defined as officials who gained policymaking discretion. See Skowronek, Building a New American State; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy. I use the term “administrative capacity” in a broader sense; functionally oriented administrative units can exercise real power even if bureau heads lack wide “autonomous” policy authority.
41. Josephson, Politicos, 344.
42. Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron, The American Republic, vol. 2 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 95.
43. Fine, Laissez Faire, chs. 3–5; Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5, 96–97, 204, 330, 347; John G. Sproat, The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), chs. 1, 8; Michael Les Benedict, “Laissez Faire and Liberty: A Re-evaluation of the Meaning and Origins of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism,” Law and History Review 3 (Fall 1985): 293–331. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), ch. 25, provides an incisive exposition on these points.
44. The cases are Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois (1886), Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (1895), U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895), Interstate Commerce Commission v. Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific Railway Co. (1897), In Re. Debs (1895), and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Summaries of the decisions appear in Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chs. 22–24; Michael Kammen, A Machine that Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1986), ch. 7.
45. Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 356–357; Brock, Investigation and Responsibility, ch. 3; Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lockner Era Police Powers Jurisdiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 87–94; Keller, Affairs of State, 336, 362, 401–408; G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 8; Margaret Virginia Nelson, Judicial Review in Virginia, 1789–1928 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), ch. 4; Ernest L. Bogart and John M. Matthews, The Modern Commonwealth, 1893–1918 (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1920), ch. 15; Melvin I. Urofsky, “State Courts and Protective Legislation during the Progressive Era: A Re-evaluation,” Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 75, 88.
46. Michael L. Benedict, “Law and Regulation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in Law as Culture and Culture as Law, ed. Hendrick Hartog and William E. Nelson (Madison, WI: Madison House, 2000), 227–263; Charles W. McCurdy, “The Knight Sugar Decision of 1895 and the Modernization of American Corporate Law, 1869–1903,” Business History Review 53 (1979): 304–342; Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 123; Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, appendix A; Fine, Laissez Faire, 127, 132, 154; Alan Jones, “Thomas M. Cooley and ‘Laissez Faire Constitutionalism’: A Reconsideration,” Journal of American History 53 (March 1967): 763–766. Also see notes 44 and 45.
47. Bryce, American Commonwealth (1888 ed., rev. 1890), 2:422. The table on governmental actions was omitted from the 1893 edition. Robert H. Wiebe, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 149, 165–166, agrees with Bryce that Americans venerated the Constitution as a template of national ideals, a sentiment that conveyed authority to the Supreme Court’s resolution of conflicts.
48. Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), chs. 23, 27; Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930), ch. 10, esp. 214–215; Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 164.
I am not arguing that liberal historians deliberately used history to advance a political agenda; rather, their value systems disposed them to emphasize the negative dimensions of the Gilded Age. State governments’ inability to remedy the problems of the Great Depression of the 1930s reinforced progressives’ support for national action. On the political orientation of historians, see Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968), 25–41, 182–196, 220, 256, 265, 298–299; John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pt. I, chs. 1, 2, pt. II, ch. 3; Clyde E. Barrow, “Beyond Progressivism: Charles A. Beard’s Social Democratic Theory of American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 8, 2 (1994): 236–253; David Thelen, “The Practice of History,” Journal of American History 81 (December 1994): 933–960. The 1,047 historians included in Thelen’s survey considered Eugene Debs and Jane Addams the most admired people in the Gilded Age (table 3, 952).
For the political orientation of historians and humanists during the middle decades of the twentieth century, see Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), 337–338, 365; Everett C. Ladd and Seymour M. Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 20, 27, 29–30, 368–369; Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner W. Thielens Jr., The Academic Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 16–17, 150–152. Elements of laissez-faire minimalism concerning the proper scope of government in the United States remained vibrant through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first; see Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present, updated ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), ch. 11.
11. The Progressive State
1. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), ch. 7; J. Lawrence Broz, The International Origin of the Federal Reserve System (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 175–178; James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. 173; Robert Bruner and Sean D. Carr, The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 151; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 44–51; Ballard C. Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (January 2005): 7–22.
2. Richard A. Greenwald, The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace, and Industrial Democracy in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), esp. chs. 6, 7; John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 48–50.
3. On economic crises as triggers of political change, see Ballard C. Campbell, “Tax Revolts and Political Change,” Journal of Policy History 10 (1998): 153–178; Ballard C. Campbell, introduction to American Disasters: 201 Calamities that Shook the Nation (New York: Checkmark Books, 2008). On windows of opportunity for policymaking, see John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (N.p.: HarperCollins, 1984), 99–105, 177–178.
4. “Inaugural Address of Governor Eugene N. Foss,” January 5, 1911, Journal of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1911); William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 428; Theodore Roosevelt, “Annual Message, Dec. 5, 1905,” in James D. Richardson, comp., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 10 (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art), 7355 (Roosevelt referred to “problems” three times in his very short inaugural address); Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913), 281.
Influential interpretations of progressivism include Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random House, 1955), 16 (“Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life”); Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967); Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform; Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivism, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and James J. Connolly, An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), provide extensive citations to pertinent literature.
5. David Montgomery, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the Transformation of Workers’ Consciousness in America, 1909–1922,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 509–529, esp. table 1 on strikes and unemployment.
6. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), ch. 9; James J. Flink, America Adopts the Auto, 1895–1910 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1970). See motor vehicle registration in table A.3 in the appendix.
7. John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 15; Gerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: The History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 8; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), chs. 6–9.
8. Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business Historical Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–493; James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technology and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experience (Washington, DC: Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1990). W. Brooke Graves, Uniform State Action: A Possible Substitute for Centralization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 293–294, counted forty-three national organizations of civic professionals created between 1878 and 1916; eleven were formed before 1900.
9. For intellectual challenges to conservative political beliefs, see Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), chs. 6–8.
10. Wiebe, Search for Order, 166. Also see Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 141–157; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), ch. 2. Robert D. Johnson, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), ch. 1, explores the imprecision in the concept of middle class and suggests that the term “middling” classes best fits some situations.
11. Maureen Flanagan, “Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1032–1050; Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52, 457, chs. 6–8; Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly, What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), esp. ch. 6; Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 134–140. The adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment (women’s suffrage) is discussed in chapter 12.
12. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform. Also see Kenneth Fine-gold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mansel G. Blackford, “Reform Politics in Seattle during the Progressive Era, 1902–1916,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (October 1968): 177–185; Michael P. Rogin and John L. Shover, Political Change in California: Critical Elections and Social Movements, 1890–1966 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970), chs. 2, 3. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American States, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), argues that southerners spearheaded progressivism in Congress. Also see Robert Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 9.
Key actions of Congress in the Progressive Era:
1906Hepburn Railroad Regulation Act (Interstate Commerce Commission rate powers); Pure Food and Drug Act
1909Income tax amendment passed by Congress; Payne Aldrich tariff; corporate excise tax
1910 Mann-Elkins Act (physical evaluation of railroads)
1912Adoption of Seventeenth Amendment (popular election of US senators); Pujo Commission; immigration literacy test (Taft veto)
1913Income tax law; Underwood tariff; Federal Reserve Act
1914Clayton Act; Federal Trade Commission
1916Child Labor Act (overturned by Supreme Court); Federal Highway Act
1917Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) adopted (ratified 1919)
13. Roger E. Wyman, “Middle-Class Voters and Progressive Reformers: The Conflict of Class and Culture,” American Political Science Review 68 (June 1974): 488–504; James Wright, The Progressive Yankees: Republican Reformers in New Hampshire, 1906–1916 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), esp. chs. 4, 5; J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919–1933 (New York: Athenaeum, 1959), ch. 1. Also see Paul Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893–1928 (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 131–136, 191–197; Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 148–151, 209, ch. 5; Laurence James Holt, Congressional Insurgents and the Party System, 1909–1916 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Congressional policymaking during the Progressive Era, including voting alignments by policy domains, is an area that needs further analysis.
14. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), ch. 5; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, esp. chs. 2, 4, 6; Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 18. Also see Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Future at Work: Anglo-American Progressivism, 1890–1917,” in Contrast and Connection: Bicentennial Essays in Anglo-American History, ed. H. C. Allen and Roger Thompson (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1976), 245–271; Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “‘Women Duties’: Materialist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1076–1108.
15. Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 1987), 10; Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 246–259; David Morgan, “Woman Suffrage in Britain and America in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Allen and Thompson, Contrast and Connection, 279–288; Ida Husted Harper, “The World Movement for Woman Suffrage,” American Review of Reviews (December 1911): 725–729.
16. David P. Thelen, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972); Clifton K. Yearley, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970); Bender, Nation among Nations, 250–253; John Higham, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), ch. 4. James L. Huston, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765–1900,” American Historical Review 98 (October 1993): 1079–1105, dates the transition from republican-era assumptions about the creation of wealth, which hinged on political control of public policy, to the Progressive Era emphasis on private capitalism to the last years of the nineteenth century.
17. Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism.”
18. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), ch. 5; Jonathan Kahn, Budgeting Democracy: State Building and Citizenship in America, 1890–1928 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
19. Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism”; John D. Buenker, The Income Tax and the Progressive Era (New York: Garland, 1985).
20. Link and McCormick, Progressivism, 117.
21. Table A.3 in the appendix lists major statutes and ordinances adopted in eight states. Each policy adoption in the United States has its own story, for three primary reasons. First, the structure of governance under American federalism grants policymaking authority to thousands of governing units that contain many thousands of policy actors. Second, policy proposals engage diverse subjects, which differ in content and connection to constituent groups. The literature demonstrates that differences in policy content can produce different policymaking scenarios. Third, the socioeconomic environment varies between places and changes over time, which alters the context of policymaking. These dimensions of lawmaking form an interactive matrix that produces a wide variety of influences on policy actions.
Academic disciplines have approached this subject from different angles. Historians tend to see a variety of causal determinants behind policy innovations, while political scientists and economists seek to identify dominant causal factors. Both approaches have merit. A model of policy diversity in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era appears in Ballard C. Campbell, “Federalism, State Action, and ‘Critical Episodes’ in the Growth of American Government,” Social Science History 16, 4 (Winter 1992): 561–577.
22. Campbell, “Federalism, State Action, and ‘Critical Episodes,’” table 2; Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism, 1976–1977 Edition, vol. 2, Revenue and Debt (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), table 66; John C. Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 68 (December 1961): 435–459.
23. David Brian Robertson, Federalism and the Making of America (New York: Routledge, 2012), 77, 99, 105; David Brian Robertson, Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 17; William Graebner, “Federalism in the Progressive Era: A Structural Interpretation of Reform,” Journal of American History 64 (September 1977): 311–357.
24. On the South, see Link, Paradox of Southern Progressivism; C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 15. Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), ch. 11, traces how utility companies pushed for a state regulatory commission in Alabama to avoid political fights with city officials in Birmingham.
Important studies of policy diffusion in the states by political scientists include Jack L. Walker, “The Diffusion of Innovations among the American States,” American Political Science Review 63 (September 1969): 880–899; Jack L. Walker, “Communication,” American Political Science Review 63 (September 1969): 900–903 (about the South’s anomalous relation to state innovations); Virginia Gray, “Innovation in the States: A Diffusion Study,” American Political Science Review 67 (December 1973): 1174–1185; Robert L. Savage, “Patterns of Multi-linear Evolution in the American States,” Publius 3 (Spring 1973): 75–108.
25. Yearley, Money Machines; Kahn, Budgeting Democracy; Campbell, “Economic Causes of Progressivism.” Evidence of budget deficits and debt defaults in cities and states is based on financial studies listed in the appendix, other local sources, and Ballard C. Campbell, “Depressions and Taxes in the United States, 1873–1915,” in Taxation, State, and Civil Society in Germany and the United States from the 18th to the 20th Century, ed. Alexander Nutzenadel and Christoph Strupp (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2007), 67–81. Also see Eric Monkkonen, The Local State: Public Money and American Cities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26 (for Illinois); Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, tables A1, A2.
26. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 109–120, 272–281; James H. Potts, “The Evolution of Municipal Accounting in the United States, 1900–1935,” Business History Review 52 (Winter 1978): 518–536. The American Association of Public Accountants was established in 1886.
27. Kahn, Budgeting Democracy, chs. 1–4; Leonard D. White, Trends in Public Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 221; Schiesl, Politics of Efficiency, 4, 90–94, chs. 5, 6.
28. Charles Phillips Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 231–233; James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 94–109; Report of the City Auditor, Boston (Boston: Auditor’s Office, 1906–1915); Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, Statistics of Municipal Finance (Boston, 1912).
29. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, The Price of Progress: Public Services, Taxation and the American Corporate State, 1877–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 93–101, ch. 7; Thomas R. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interests and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 194–199; Massachusetts Auditor’s Report for 1910 (Boston, 1911), esp. viii–ix; Massachusetts Auditor’s Report for 1912 (Boston, 1913), viii; White, Trends in Public Administration, 189; William F. Willoughby, The Movement for Budgetary Reform in the States (New York: Appleton, 1918); sources for table A.3 in the appendix. Also see Thomas Schick, The New York State Constitutional Convention of 1915 and the Modern State Governor (Lebanon, PA: National Municipal League, 1978), chs. 4, 5. Massachusetts established a Commission on Efficiency and Economy in 1912, New York and Illinois established theirs in 1913, and Virginia established one in 1916.
30. On legislative voting in the states, see Wright, Progressive Yankees, 76, 108, 118; John M. Wegner, “Partisanship in the Ohio House of Representatives, 1900–1911,” Ohio History Journal 106 (Summer–Autumn 1997): 146–170; John D. Buenker, “Progressivism in Connecticut: The Thrust of the Urban, New Stock Democrats,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 35 (October 1970): 97–109; Buenker, Income Tax, 35–37, 108–115, 154–155, 168, 179–180, 273, 276, 285, 289, 316–317; my analysis of sixty-two votes in the Illinois house (1907–1913) and eleven votes in the Massachusetts house (1909–1913). Also see David Sarasohn, Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 112–118; Pegram, Partisans and Progressives, 7–15, 191–211; Robert Stanley, Dimensions of Law in Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), table 5.8, 233. State legislative behavior in the Progressive Era remains understudied.
31. For example, a wide variety of educational matters, including professional certifications, were put under the supervision of the New York Board of Regents, the state’s chief educational administration. Edger Fuller and Jim B. Pearson, eds., Education in the States, vol. 1, Historical Development and Outlook (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1969), appendix C, 895–896.
32. Schick, New York State Constitutional Convention; Ernest L. Bogart and John M. Mathews, The Modern Commonwealth, 1893–1918 (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1920), chs. 10, 11; W. Brooke Graves, American State Government, 3rd ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1946), 406–436, esp. 419.
33. White, Trends in Public Administration, 243–245; Solomon Fabricant, The Trend of Government Activity in the U.S. since 1900 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952), 188–197.
34. US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics on Governmental Finances and Employment (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 10–11, tables 2, 4–6; Campbell, “Federalism, State Action, and ‘Critical Episodes’”; Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2015), table 2.2; Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Reform, Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism, 1976–77, vol. 2, Revenue (Washington, DC, 1977), 99–101; Yearley, Money Machines, 195–207; Jon C. Teaford, The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), ch. 3.
35. Elizabeth Brandeis, “Labor Legislation,” in History of Labor in the United States, vol. 3, ed. John R. Commons et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 636–637, 649–654; Carl Gersuny, Work Hazards and Industrial Conflict (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1981), ch. 2; Gerald N. Grob, The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 164–165; Link, Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 304–308; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 287–289.
36. Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), ch. 4, esp. 88–93; Marc T. Law and Gary D. Libecap, “The Determinants of Progressive Era Reform: The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, ed. Edwin L. Glaeser and Claudia D. Goldin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), ch. 10.
37. Eileen L. McDonagh, “Representative Democracy and State Building in the Progressive Era,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 938–950.
38. William Howard Taft’s inaugural address, Congressional Record, 61st Congress, March 4 and 16, 1909, 3, 49. The complex politics behind the adoption of the income tax amendment is traced in Buenker, Income Tax, 37–43, 90–136. Also see James D. Savage, Balanced Budgets and American Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 141–144; Sarasohn, Party of Reform, ch. 3; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 224.
39. Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 76, 79; Holt, Congressional Insurgents, ch. 6; Sanders, Roots of Reform, 228–229.
40. Joseph A. Pechman, Federal Tax Policy: Revised (New York: Norton, 1971), 255, table A-1; Stanley, Dimensions of Law, 201, 215–225.
41. Oscar Anderson, The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 10; Johnson, Governing the American State, 107–110.
42. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chs. 2, 3, 9; Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chs. 3, 4; Gabrial Kolko, The Triumph of Conservativism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967); Hofstadter, Age of Reform, ch. 6, esp. 254n8 on enforcement capacity.
43. See table A.5 in the appendix. Herbert Kaufman counted fifty-six new administrative units between 1900 and 1916; cited in Advisory Commission on Inter-governmental Relations, A Crisis of Confidence and Competence (Washington, DC, 1980), 115, table A-6.
44. Herbert Kaufman, “The Growth of Federal Personnel System,” in The Federal Government Service, ed. N. Wallace Sayre (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 41–43; John M. Gaus and Leon O. Wolcott, Public Administration in the United States Department of Agriculture (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940); Wayne F. Fuller, RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 34–77; Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chs. 4, 7. On the conflicted history of reconstructing administrative government, see Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacity, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 6.
45. Per capita federal expenditures shrank from $7.52 in 1903 to $6.92 in 1913 (in 1913 inflation-adjusted dollars), according to calculations of the National Industrial Conference Board, Cost of Government in the United States, 1929–1930 (New York, 1932), 85.
46. Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 264, 299; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 109–110, 113–114; A. Hunter Depree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 169–182.
47. Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, ch. 6; Gaus and Wolcott, Public Administration in the United States Department of Agriculture, 5–6, 2, 278; Anderson, Health of a Nation, chs. 7–9.
48. Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), ch. 2, 202–204; Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), chs. 1–3; Bruce E. Seely, “Logan W. Page,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, ch. 4; McCraw, Prophets of Regulation, 63; Kahn, Budgeting Democracy, ch. 6.
49. Campbell, Growth of American Government, 223–229.
50. John Kincaid, “From Cooperation to Coercion in American Federalism: Housing, Fragmentation and Preemption, 1780–1992,” Journal of Law and Politics 9 (Winter 1993): 356–367; Clifford L. Staten, “Theodore Roosevelt: Dual and Cooperative Federalism,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 23 (Winter 1993): 129–143; David B. Robertson, “The Bias of American Federalism: Political Structure and the Development of America’s Exceptional Welfare State in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Policy History 1 (1989): 261–291; Johnson, Governing the American State, ch. 1; W. Brooke Graves, American Intergovernmental Relations: Their Origins, Historical Development, and Current Status (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1964), esp. chs. 14, 15, 798–799 (Elihu Root on changes in federalism); Graves, Uniform State Action; Graebner, “Federalism in the Progressive Era.” James Q. Dealey, The Growth of American State Constitutions, 1776–1914 (Boston: Ginn, 1915), 295–296, illustrates the alarm over national centralization.
51. George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900–1912 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962), 220–224; Kathleen M. Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Vintage, 2004); Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), ch. 11. Newspapers published pictures of William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson throwing the first pitch to open the professional baseball season, a tradition that began in 1910. This symbolized the dawning of the presidential persona in American civic life.
52. Jonathan Lurie, William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: Putnam, 2012). On presidential references to classic dual federalism, see Campbell, Growth of American Government, 15–16; Skowronek, Building a New American State, ch. 6; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 13.
12. The Wartime State
1. Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chs. 23–26; Frank Freidel, Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990); Michael Adas, “Ambivalent Ally: American Military Intervention and the Legacy of World War I,” in Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War, ed. Thomas W. Zeiler, D. Ekbladh, and B. Montoya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), ch. 5.
2. Thomas G. Patterson, J. Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. Hagan, American Foreign Relations: A History, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), chs. 1, 2; Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Seapower (New York: Free Press, 1991), chs. 6–8, 239.
3. See Patterson et al., American Foreign Relations, ch. 3, for details about the route to war and a comprehensive bibliography. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 20–25.
4. The unemployment rate was 9 percent in 1915 and 1.24 percent in 1918. Susan B. Carter, Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ba475.
5. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), ch. 15; Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (1956; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 211–238.
6. Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1935), 23, 236.
7. A brief but insightful analysis of Wilson’s position on the war and the peace settlement is Richard Hofstader, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), 272–282.
8. Kennedy, Over Here, 93, 144, 151, 168–191; Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chs. 1, 6; Howard Zinn, LaGuardia in Congress (New York: Norton, 1969), 17n1; Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918,” Journal of American History 87, 4 (March 2001): 1335–1361; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1994), 349–352.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of conscription in Arver v. United States, 245 U.S. 366 (1918), stating that a draft was an implied component of Congress’s power to maintain an army and declare war and that it was a citizen’s duty to serve.
9. Freidel, Over There, 30–31.
10. Paul A. C. Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War: Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), chs. 8–13; Hugh Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. ch. 5; Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), chs. 2, 3; Edward M. Coffman, “The Battle against Red Tape: Business Methods in the War Department General Staff, 1917–1918,” Military Affairs 26 (Spring 1962): 1–10; Kennedy, Over Here, ch. 2, 254–255.
11. Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), ch. 23; Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War, 111–125; John F. Witte, The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), ch. 4.
12. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, The Condition of Contemporary Federalism: Conflicting Theories and Collapsing Constraints (Washington, DC, 1981), 224–226. The commission noted dissenting opinions on the hypothesis that a portion of wartime spending became institutionalized in the financial system. Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chs. 2, 4; Ballard C. Campbell, “Federalism, State Action, and ‘Critical Episodes’ in the Growth of American Government,” Social Science History 16 (Winter 1992): 561–577.
13. Weigley, History of the United States Army, 368; Jonathan Kahn, Budgeting Democracy: State Building and Citizenship in America, 1890–1928 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 176–181.
14. Theda Skocpol et al., “Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished American Civil Voluntarism,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 154–169.
15. K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Richard F. Hamm, Shaping the 18th Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 311–320; Carroll H. Wooddy, The Growth of the Federal Government, 1915–1932 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), 81, 93–106.
16. Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York: City University of New York, 1987); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 216–298.
17. Kennedy, Over Here, 87–89; Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: Norton, 1979), chs. 3, 4; H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).
18. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties, 228–229, 266–267; Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 276–277; William Preston Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), chs. 3, 4; Kennedy, Over Here, 75–83.
The Espionage Act was upheld in Schenck v. United States (1919), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes held that the conviction of an individual who had distributed antidraft leaflets was not an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights because his action presented a “clear and present danger.” In Abrams v. United States (1919) the Supreme Court upheld the Sedition Act, under which the author of a pamphlet calling for a general strike had been convicted. The court said that the First Amendment did not protect the right to excite disaffection, riot, or revolution. In this case Justice Holmes dissented, finding that “no clear and present danger” existed.
19. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties, ch. 4. Also see David Williams, “The Bureau of Investigation and Its Critics, 1919–1921: The Origins of Federal Political Surveillance,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 560–579; Eldridge F. Dowell, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), esp. appendix I; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), chs. 8, 9; Donald F. Tingley, The Structuring of a State: The History of Illinois, 1899–1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 199, 210–221.
20. Paul Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893–1928 (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 141–154, 186–187, 208–210; Alan Ware, The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877–1962 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), tables 4.6, 4.7; Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War, 262–263; George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917–1919 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1947), chs. 1–4, 9. Henry Cabot Lodge, the dean of Senate Republicans, interpreted 1918 as “a country-wide revolt against dictatorship . . . and constitutional limitations.” Kennedy, Over Here, 244.
21. A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: Putnam, 2013), 558, 572, 586, 616, suggests that Wilson’s increased resistance to alterations in his League of Nations plan, coupled with his willingness to appease European leaders to gain their consent, may have been the result of minor strokes suffered in the spring of 1919, exacerbated by a case of influenza. His doctor and others had noticed a mental decline by summer.
Philip Bobbit, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New York: Anchor, 2002), ch. 14, esp. 391, argues that the League of Nations failed because Europeans did not share Americans’ democratic conception of the state, a conflict that forced Wilson to barter away his Fourteen Points to win European acceptance of a league. Wilson’s break with his political mentor Colonel Edward House in the latter stages of the treaty negotiations, Bobbit contends, removed the one person who might have persuaded Wilson to adopt a more politically realistic strategy. On the economic effects of the war, see Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War, 136–154.
22. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987), chs. 2–4; Williams, “Bureau of Investigation”; Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, ch. 8.
23. Kleppner, Continuity and Change, 124, 152–154, 186–187, 208; David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932 (New York: Norton, 1967), ch. 2, esp. 43–44, 234–241; Ware, Democratic Party Heads North, tables 4.6, 4.7; John M. Allswang, A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890–1936 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), 42, 78, 129, 186; Donald R. McCoy, “Election of 1920,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), 2349–2385; J. Joseph Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919–1933 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), ch. 2.
The stagflation rate (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) totaled 24.5 percent in 1920. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidential election over Jimmy Carter, stagflation registered 20.6 percent. Franklin Roosevelt won the 1932 election when the unemployment rate hit 23 percent but deflation prevailed. Economic indicators suggest that most voters suffered real income declines between 1919 and 1920. Soule, Prosperity Decade, chs. 4, 5, 9. On the link between depressions and elections, see Ballard C. Campbell, “Depression and Politics in American History,” Long Term View 4 (Spring 1998): 13–21.
24. Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You, esp. ch. 6; Edward G. Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), chs. 7, 8; Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties, 116–126.
25. Powers, Secrecy and Power, 68; Wooddy, Growth of the Federal Government, 92.
26. Information about collecting data on individuals was obtained from the references concerning administration cited in chapters 6 and 10 and the sources for tables A.2, A.3, and A.6 in the appendix. Also see Michael Haines, “The Population of the United States,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, ed. Susan Carter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 147–149; Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social Survey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 6; Dorothy Ross, The Origins of Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chs. 7, 8.
27. John Torpey, “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 256–270.
28. Anderson, American Census, ch. 5.
13. The End of the Long Nineteenth Century
1. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), ch. 24.
2. Charles A. Beard, American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 3–5, 476; Walter F. Dodd, State Government (New York: Century, 1923), 42–47, 143; Leonard D. White, Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 78–79, 466; Leonard D. White, Trends in Public Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933); Carroll H. Wooddy, The Growth of the Federal Government, 1915–1932 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934); Dodd, State Government, chs. 1, 2; William B. Munro, Municipal Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 15, 155–157; E. P. Buford, “Federal Encroachment on State Sovereignty,” American Law Review 57 (December 1923): 801–827; Walter Thompson, Federal Centralization: A Study and Criticism of the Expanding Scope of Congressional Legislation (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923), 325–326; Arthur N. Holcombe, State Government in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 10; Pendleton Herring, Group Representation before Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929), esp. chs. 2, 3, appendix 2. Many organizations with offices in Washington had “National” as the first word in their names. Although perceptions of Washington as the political nerve center of America rose after World War I, the city still fell short of being a commercial or cultural capital similar to London or Paris, as James Bryce remarked in The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1893), ch. 113. Modern scholars have affirmed these contemporary observations. See James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), ch. 1; John Kincaid, “From Cooperation to Coercion in American Federalism: Housing, Fragmentation and Preemption, 1780–1992,” Journal of Law and Politics 9 (Winter 1993): 353–368; Randall G. Holcombe, “The Growth of the Federal Government in the 1920s,” Cato Journal 16 (Fall 1996): 175–199; Kimberley S. Johnson, Governing the American State: The New Federalism, 1877–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
3. Susan B. Carter, Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, pt. A. Fifty-six percent of white males in the United States were younger than thirty years old in 1920; another 15 percent were in their thirties. On generational succession as an agent of political change, see Alan B. Spitzer, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78 (December 1973): 1353–1385; Allan R. Bass, “Generational Analysis: Description, Explanation, and Theory,” Journal of Social Issues 30, 2 (1974): 55–72; Amanda Cox, “How Birth Years Influence Political Views,” New York Times, July 7, 2014.
4. Julie A. Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers: The Woman’s Page and the Transformation of the American Newspaper, 1895–1935,” Journal of American History 103 (December 2016): 606–628; Claudia Goldia, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Education,” Journal of Economic History 58 (June 1998): 345–374. High school curriculum changed substantially between 1890 and the early 1920s, with less time spent learning Latin and increased attention to vocational arts, history, and civics. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 191–199.
5. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955), 166–167; Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981), ch. 5, 76–77; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American Politics (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1986), 27–30; David R. Mayhew, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946–1990 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 162, 179; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 77–92; Leonard D. White, States and the Nation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), 47.
Mood shifts are sometimes linked to long waves (cycles). See Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 5–8, ch. 7; David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29, 132, 297–300; Andrew Tylecote, The Long Wave in the World Economy: The Current Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1993); Robert W. Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the long cycles and crises, see Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
6. To underscore this point, virtually everyone my age has a vivid recollection of the assassination of President John Kennedy (1963), including where they were and what they did in the immediate aftermath. Younger adults probably have similar experiences concerning the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001), while the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) was seared in the memory of adults alive at that time.
7. Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), analyzes the impact of war mobilization on the political economy in the 1920s and 1930s. On the salience of “focusing events” and crises, see John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 99–108.
8. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), xiii–xiv.
9. A notable constancy in the structural framework of national politics is equal state representation in the US Senate. In 1920 New York had 10,385,277 residents, 134 times more than Nevada; both were allotted two Senate seats.
10. Jack L. Walker, “The Diffusion of Innovations among the American States,” American Political Science Review 63 (September 1969): 880–899; Virginia Gray, Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1999). For policy diffusion among the industrializing states, see Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 473.
11. Grover Cleveland served as mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York prior to his election as president. Benjamin Harrison, elected president in 1888, had run unsuccessfully for governor of Indiana. William Howard Taft, elected president in 1908, had been appointed governor of the Philippines (1900–1904), an American colony.
12. Imperialists and naval enthusiasts such as Theodore Roosevelt, who favored the expansion of American influence internationally, were partial exceptions. The Bellamy nationalists, socialists, and the Communist Party of America proposed major political reformulations that were rejected.
13. This conclusion does not contradict the truism that groups seek to shape policy in their own interest; nor does it deny that public policy can favor some individuals more than others.
14. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 198, 484–493; Theda Skocpol, “Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished Civic Voluntarism,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), ch. 6.
15. National Industrial Conference Board, Cost of Government 1929–30 (New York, 1932), 17; US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics on Governmental Finances and Employment (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 30, 43, 51, 55.
16. Jack L. Walker, “Origin and Maintenance of Interest Groups in America,” American Political Science Review 77 (June 1983): 390–406. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), documents the success of women’s organizations in enacting early social welfare programs. On legislator and administrator careerism, see Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), ch. 9.
17. See Wooddy, Growth of the Federal Government, for details on federal activities in 1915–1930, esp. 94–95 on federal prisons. Wooddy attributes roughly one-half the increase in federal activity to “increased demand” for programs in place before World War I (549). Also see Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: Norton, 2015).
18. On the expansion of state and local activities, see White, Trends in Public Administration, 143; Munro, Municipal Administration, 15; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 413; Margaret W. Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1987), tables 3-1, 8-4, 8-6, appendix table 7. For the extent of paved roads in Maine in 1926, see Stephen J. Horsnby and Richard Judd, Historical Atlas of Maine (Orono: University of Maine Press, 2015), plate 64. Robert Moses, famed builder of parks and highways, got his start in the 1920s under Al Smith, governor of New York. See Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1974), chs. 7–17.
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, abridged ed. (New York: New American Library, 1956), 163.