In the January 2022 issue of the journal, Gilded Age and Progressive Era political historians came together to challenge us to continue finding new ways “to think historically about political power.” The five articles in this issue take up that challenge.
Richard Ellis and Joshua Kluever revisit socialist politics to argue that socialists have had greater, and longer, impact on American politics than they are credited for. Ellis locates the origins of the initiative and referendum in the 1877 Socialist Labor Party (SLP) platform, fifteen years before the People’s Party called for these reforms at its Omaha convention. Returning the SLP to the center of successful GAPE political reform suggests that international socialism was far more important in shaping twentieth-century politics than we have acknowledged. Kluever turns to the end of the long GAPE, usually seen as a low point of political socialism, to show that the Socialist Party in Wisconsin, in fact, flourished. Working with Republicans, the Socialists were instrumental in passing progressive legislation into the 1930s.
Nathan Finney and Mazie Hough examine the shifting relationships between women and state. Finney, winner of the 2021 SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Prize, shows how North Carolinian women’s organizations leveraged their work in the First World War’s homefront mobilization to claim a role in governance and to push women’s concerns forward in politics. When the war emergency ended, though, women found themselves once more excluded from formal politics, highlighting the volatile relationship between women and formal government. Hough examines the state’s growing control of women’s behavior in Maine between 1877 and 1917. Looking at sentences of women accused of infanticide, Hough finds that the state increasingly ignored local women’s explanatory testimony, pushed aside local preference for leniency, and marshalled urban professional opinion to dictate the parameters of women’s lives.
Finally, Benjamin Wetzel shows how a Unionist memory of the Civil War proved a durable and effective tool into the twentieth century. As both historian and politician, Theodore Roosevelt eschewed the reconcilliationist narrative. He held firm to the Unionist narrative of the war, and he used the Unionists’ narrative to promote the political causes with which he is most closely associated: American empire, New Nationalism, and American entry into World War I. We conclude the issue, as always, with a wide-ranging collection of book reviews.
