On October 1, 1898, twenty-year-old laborer Peter Dumbrowski married Lettie, a girl from his Detroit neighborhood. Both of their Polish immigrant families had left their new Canadian homes in 1881, joining thousands of other families who had already moved south for the promise of good wages in an emerging city. The following summer, at the age of seventeen, Lettie gave birth to their first daughter and would soon be pregnant with a son. Peter earned enough as a metalworker to support the small family as well as make a down payment toward the purchase of a six-room home on the west side. By Peter's fortieth birthday, he could claim that he made thirty dollars a week at one of Detroit's most important employers of men, Timken Detroit Axle. His eldest son, now sixteen, contributed to the family economy most of his salary (twenty dollars per week) from another key operation, Insulated Wire Works.

The state of Texas' determined effort to keep African-Americans performing plantation labor was at the heart of its prison farm system, from Reconstruction through the 1920s. State and penitentiary officials followed a practice of racialized labor control, demanding that African-American convicts perform plantation gang labor, not only to make the prison system profitable but also keep them involved in extractive agriculture. As the prison population grew, so did the abuse of convicts. The story of Texas’ penitentiary system shows the continuing tie between African-Americans, plantation labor, and racism in Texas, as well as other southern states. The sprawling farm system that developed in Texas made it unique in the South. When Progressive Era reformers confronted abuses in the Texas prison system, they had to contend with an overwhelming profit motive that made reform difficult, and warped reform measures they managed to push through the legislature. Among the initial goals of Texas prison reformers were an end to convict leasing and a ban on the use of the whip as punishment. The agenda of reformers collided with the goals of the Texas prison system, with unexpected results. Looking at reform measures after they passed the legislature illustrates how prison managers tried to circumvent regulations that hindered profitability.

In his 1906 Annual Message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt urged support for a bill to mandate the government investigation of labor disputes before allowing workers to strike. In an “age of great corporate and labor combinations,” the president insisted “the public has itself an interest which can not wisely be disregarded; an interest not merely of general convenience, for the question of a just and proper public policy must also be considered.” Congress at the time was unmoved. Yet Roosevelt's proposal signaled a growing movement to compel the investigation and arbitration of major labor conflicts. This movement peaked in the years soon after World War I. Advocates for government mediation insisted that an impartial commission of experts could peacefully negotiate workplace disputes and spare the consuming public the contests of will and force associated with major strikes. The Progressive Era arbitration of railroad and mining conflicts established important precedents and have received significant attention from scholars. National mediation boards, however, rarely assumed the power to order participation. Such efforts were more prominent at die state level. In 1915 Colorado legislators largely implemented Roosevelt's proposal, creating the first government board with powers to ban strikes and lockouts pending an investigation in industries affected with a public interest. Soon after the war, Kansas expanded upon the Colorado precedent with a compulsory arbitration board to regulate a host of indus-tries deemed essential to the public. Programs for state mediation of labor conflicts in the postwar period were particularly bound up with questions of compulsion in the public interest.

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a succession of popular books decried the impact that “new” immigrants were having on the United States. Fearing that the racial quality of the American people was being eroded by the large number of immigrants that had been arriving in the previous decades, the books clamored for radical restrictions on the number of immigrants the country should admit. These books reflect the pervasiveness of the belief that new immigrants were biologically inferior to older immigrants and native-born Anglo-Saxons. This belief, in turn, was rooted in a theory of permanently fixed racial identities that had been circulating throughout Europe and the United States for decades, despite cautions of professional scientists who argued that these theories were not “proven.” Yet non-scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were the ones who enjoyed widespread public authority on such complex scientific theories as heredity, genetics, and eugenics because they explained these difficult subjects in easily understandable terms–despite the fact that they grossly over-simplified the theories. Simultaneously, they raised shrill cries that these new arrivals thus threatened the “superior” racial stock of America. The anti-immigrant wave that Grant, Stoddard, and others fanned was based on what Grant described as “the science of race,” which he claimed proved “the immutability of somatological or bodily characters.”