During the Gilded Age, constitutional issues pervaded the discussion of nearly all matters of public policy, including regulation of railroads, suppressing unsafe and fraudulent products, labor issues, and combating trusts and monopolies. The Democratic and Republican parties differed in their conceptions of federal power and state rights as well as on matters related to social order and personal liberty. They articulated these differences in political platforms and manifested them in their approach to public policy. The obsession with constitutional issues was not confined to the halls of Congress or the chambers of the Supreme Court. Constitutional discourse ran up from ordinary people and interest groups to public policy makers and down from policy makers seeking support based on fidelity to constitutional principles. Ordinary people influenced constitutional policymaking not only through voting but through various means of making their views known. Advocates used all types of media to make constitutional issues clear to the American people. These ranged from formal treatises aimed at the intellectual elite to cartoons, caricatures, songs, and screeds. Politicians articulated constitutional positions in political platforms, congressional addresses, pamphlets, political and commemorative addresses, and stump speeches. Justices of the Supreme Court eschewed technical and abstract language in constitutional opinions, addressing them to a more general public than they did in other areas of law. In the end, constitutional policy was not determined through legal determinations of the Supreme Court but by the political decisions of the American people.

Like many midwestern cities in the nineteenth century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was home to large numbers of German immigrant musicians, among them the founders of the Cincinnati Grand Orchestra in 1872. Their model of musician-based organization eventually ran counter to the prestige-building potential of Western art music, which made it attractive to local civic leaders determined to earn respect for their city at a national level. The successful Cincinnati May festivals beginning in 1873 under the artistic leadership of conductor Theodore Thomas brought the city the desired renown. But the musical monumentality needed for large festival performances could not be obtained locally, leaving Cincinnati's players with opportunities to perform at a high level but without a way to define their performance as a significant achievement in the world of high art. Although their orchestra was ultimately unsuccessful, however, these musicians demonstrated an agency that transcends their historical obscurity and helps incorporate aesthetic and practical aspects of institution-building into the social arguments common to discussions of Western art music in the United States.

Historians have interpreted the rise of the wilderness holiday movement in the late nineteenth century as a middle-class response to the belief that modern urban life was leading to social degeneracy. The increasingly popular boys' camps, in particular, are said to represent a conservative reaction against the feminization of society. But the summer camp established by the Barrows family on the Canadian shores of Lake Memphremagog does not fit this mold. Rather, it was a semi-utopian environment in which prominent American social reformers felt free to apply their progressive ideals, with increased gender equality being at the forefront.

Native American communities met the many challenges of the early twentieth century in ways that defy easy categories of “progressive” or “traditional.” Indian people used many different outlets, including cultural appeals to non-Indian audiences, to craft survival strategies. Natalie Curtis's The Indians' Book (1907), a collection of Native music, art, and folklore, became one of these outlets. Through an examination of the contributions made by two Native leaders, Lololomai (Hopi) and High Chief (Southern Cheyenne), this essay considers the ways in which local Native American leaders sought to shape popular representations of their tribes. Additionally, it explores how these leaders used Curtis's work to address local political and social issues in their communities. Their efforts to influence the themes of The Indians' Book represents an attempt to, as historian Frederick Hoxie terms it, “talk back to civilization.”

This article examines the origins of state-level regulations controlling the practice of pharmacy and the manufacture and consumption of dangerous drugs in the Gilded Age. The passage of laws regulating the market in pharmaceuticals grew out of both the precarious economic position of practicing pharmacists and widespread concern for the suffering of individual consumers. As a result, pharmacy laws and other regulations controlling the buying, selling, and use of dangerous drugs during this period should be understood as part of the effort by pharmacists to establish a professional identity for themselves. At the same time, these laws should also be understood as part of the process through which reformers sought to rationalize society toward the goal of protecting the individual consumer. Ironically, however, such efforts were intertwined with the bifurcation of consumer culture into legitimate and illegitimate realms, and with it the creation of the economic and social conditions in which new stories of individual suffering took place.

This paper explores the role of race in the construction of tribal rolls for the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory under the Dawes Act. Examination of two examples, enrollment of Choctaws in Mississippi and arguments presented in the 1907 hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the status of Choctaws of Indian and African American heritage, demonstrates that policymakers' primary concern in deciding the fate of mixedrace individuals was not the determination of Indian blood, so as to enroll them, but of African American blood, so as to exclude them. With this approach, members of the Dawes Commission used Indian policy to uphold the color line. The Choctaw Nation also drew sharp racial lines. Their concern, however, was not racial purity, but citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Attorneys for the mixed-blood claimants proffered a definition which they believed to be biological—they focused on their clients' percentage of Indian blood—while the Choctaw Nation's lawyers held to a political and legal definition embedded in notions of children's legitimacy, as granted through marriages sanctioned by the Choctaw state. Thus the same racial enrollment policy—exclusion of blacks—served two different functions in the implementation of allotment.

William Vandever (1817–1893) served as a U.S. Indian inspector from 1873 until early 1878. A lawyer by profession, Vandever had been a Republican congressman from Iowa and a Civil War officer. (Later, he would return to Congress, representing California.). While serving with the Indian Office, he became a critic of the militarization of federal Indian policy, so much so as to be reprimanded and not reappointed. His experience enables a reconsideration of President U.S. Grant's peace policy in at least two areas. First, as one of a new group of Office of Indian Affairs officials, Vandever provides a view of federal Indian policy from the middle level of the federal bureaucracy during the 1870s. His case especially illustrates his bureau's attempts to centralize civilian management of Indian reservations. Second, Vandever's policy criticisms, though they assumed white American “civilization” as normative, more immediately arose from his religious perspective. Although he lost his post, Vandever serves to highlight the privileged role of white Protestantism during Grant's peace policy. He exemplified a set of racialized religious sensibilities that were important at the time and that could be termed Protestant whiteness.

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.

The largest organization of capitalists during the Progressive Era was one that most American historians have never heard of. Motivated primarily by overproduction and ruthless competition, many of the nation's largest manufacturers, distributors, and commercial banks formed the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 to reduce the supply of credit available to retailers and consumers. The story of the Credit Men confirms many standard assumptions regarding the rise of corporate America to economic power and cultural legitimacy while challenging others. Advances in technology and salaried organization made possible their mobilization, yet more important was the significant lag in the development of mass retail institutions and consequently mass consumerism behind mass production and distribution. The NACM deployed standardized methods and hungered for administrative efficiency but used these modern tools to instill order and ethical discipline in the nation's business, not to secularize the economy and culture of the new century. America's corporate capitalists seized power by promising moral regulation for unbridled individualism.

Congress founded the Agricultural Extension Service (AES) in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to disseminate agricultural research to individual farmers. In some states the AES also worked to encourage Native Americans to adopt sedentary intensive agriculture and all aspects of assimilation connected with that occupation. J. F. Wojta, AES administrator in Wisconsin from 1914 to 1940, took a deep interest in Indian farmers and used the power and resources of his office to instruct Native Americans. Ho-Chunks, Menominees, Ojibwes, and Oneidas in Wisconsin adopted or rejected these social, economic, and political assimilation efforts during the Progressive Era according to their own circumstances and goals. The experience of Wisconsin tribes with the state's agricultural extension programs illustrates different ways that Native peoples tried to benefit from modern government services while maintaining their own culture and kinship ties.

In the late nineteenth century, cycling posed numerous problems for Protestant churches and other religious organizations that sought to reform the behavior of athletes and the tone of sporting events. A wide range of improper behavior, including desecration of the Sabbath, was attributed to the “cycling craze” of the 1890s, the danger of which was heightened by the privacy and anonymity that the bicycle offered as well as it popularity among women. While censuring it on the one hand, moral crusaders also adopted the bicycle for their own evangelistic purposes, recognizing its potential as a means of transport as well as its appeal to young audiences. Some argued that it would restore the health of church congregations. Others saw it as an agent of temperance reform. Missionary organizations, including the Salvation Army, used bicycles to distribute religious and social reform literature in rural areas. A symbol of the Good Roads movement, the bicycle also promised to create a mutually beneficial moral bond between town and country.

On September 6, 1901, at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, Leon Czolgosz, the son of immigrants and an avowed anarchist, shot President William McKinley. As McKinley clung to life for several days before succumbing, praise was heaped upon James B. “Big Jim” Parker, an African American Exposition employee who was credited with saving McKinley's life by subduing and disarming Czolgosz. By the time of Czolgosz's execution, government officials and the mainstream press were characterizing Parker as a glory-seeker who had played no role in capturing Czolgosz. African American spokespersons vigorously defended Parker, contrasting the brave, patriotic black hero with the treacherous foreign radical whose murderous act struck symbolically at the heart of the nation. These black commentators constructed a framework for understanding the assassination as a cultural critique of an American society that was paying the price for its acquiescence to extralegal violence against blacks. At the same time, black spokespersons used the assassination to create a narrative in support of African Americans’ claims to American citizenship and national belonging.